I remember to this day how that card made me feel. The information and stories I ingested from Cousteau’s updates in the mailbox. I have always wanted DSN to do that for our readers, that sense of awe, passion, novelty, and most of all participation in exploration. Kevin, Peter, and I have worked hard to ensure that our “look and feel” and writing work toward this goal. Now I just need to get stocking hats, speedos, and membership cards for our readers!

In 2005, I started DSN with little concept of what a blog was. Originally DSN was a mere website where I posted abstracts of recent papers. My intended audience was my fellow scientists in the field. Over the next months I began to add more news of the latest expeditions and colleague’s papers that had made it to the big time in the popular press. However, I soon realized I could provide something more meaningful and that I was in a unique position to relay science directly to the public. There would be no middleman. I would deliver deep-sea science as it was occurring through the eyes of scientist. Perhaps, along the way I could educate and convey my passion for this unique environment. Maybe I could get a few laughs along the way. But more importantly, I felt as the anthropogenic effect of humans on the deep sea continued to grow, I might provide a voice of protection and conservation.

I met Peter a year into this journey and Kevin a year or so after that. I wasn’t necessarily looking for co-travelers but upon meeting Peter and Kevin, I believed their enthusiasm and knowledge would prove an asset. I haven’t been wrong. Peter and Kevin have been powerful allies in realizing my original goals for DSN and I cannot imagine being here without them. In 2006, we made the big time and Scienceblogs invited us to join their ranks. At the time I bragged we would be bigger, better, stronger, and overall definitely more kicka$$. Our readership grew from just 50 a day to now over 2,000 a day.

On the rollercoaster that is being a burgeoning professional academic, DSN is my daily reminder of why I do this. I enjoy the part of the day I set down at my computer and share with the readers the wonderment that is the environment that I have dedicated my life to. The readers reaffirm how blessed I am to be in this field. I am continually flattered by the positive reviews we get from other bloggers and readership. Indeed, the idea that I can use a term like readership in itself provides a metric of success. Of course, we wouldn’t be here if wasn’t for our readers.

A few months, Discovery Channel approached us about moving DSN to their website. I asked myself what more could we accomplish with Discovery Channel behind us? Is this the Zooillogix stooges playing with us? Will Discovery help get a Scuba Craig action figure on the market? Of course, the move would mean leaving behind my wonderful online family here at Sb. They have helped us along our journey and Seed has overall been a wonderful home. Sb gave DSN more exposure and many of you discovered us first here. It is thus with both excitement and heavy heart we leave our home here. Our new collaboration with Discovery Channel allows us to broaden our message and further realize our goals. The next year will no doubt be exhilarating as we work with our new family. We will still be same DSN but with a new paint job and perhaps a new stereo.

So I end my last post at Sb with thanks to the Sb staff, all the fantastic bloggers here, Discovery Channel for the chance to try something new, and most importantly the readers.

Now where do I go to order personalized speedos?

To ScienceBlogs, thank you for inviting us and nurturing us here. This is a unique gathering. The community taught me alot about science, and scientists, and community itself, and I am thankful. I learned about the battle we face, and about our new place in society, and how we need to be ready to fight for science, and frame things. Seriously, we’re redefining a new medium together. ScienceBlogs is a great place to be.

Before we sail I want to give a shout out to the awesome staff. They really are the best at what they do, pioneering a new, more informed media with the power to change and to grow. Thank you Ginny, Katherine, Tim, and Adam. You keep the lights on. It was wonderful to be a part of this. Thanks to DSN readers and co-bloggers. You lift us up. Craig and Kevin, you drive us deeper. Rock on. I’ll see you on the other side.

Please, everyone, join us as we seek a new adventure at Discovery Earth.

Seed Media Group has been a wonderful organization to work with and I am sad to leave the excellent blogging community here. Bloggers and overlords alike have helped me personally in more ways than anyone else will know and have become good friends. Seed Magazine has taken up an exciting niche by publishing articles that make science and technology relevant to our lives. It has been a pleasure to be a part of Seed’s mission and has made me appreciate the interconnectedness of people to science even more.

It with great excitement though that I follow Peter and Craig to the Discovery Channel, where we hope to broaden our audience and message further. Speaking for myself at least, it was television programs that got me interested in our natural world. In our little midwestern home as a kid, we were “that” family which never had cable TV. But I waited anxiously for Wild America on Sunday nights, as well as Scientific American Frontiers and Nova on PBS.

Media such as Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Discover Magazine, Scientific American, Seed and even NPR have a special place in my own heart. Religiously subscribing to, reading and watching programs from these outlets were my initial forays into the scientific world. While you may disagree with some of the presentation style and content, the world is much better off for their efforts to energize and educate a general audience.

So please, with no further adieu please bookmark our new homepage, subscribe to the new RSS feed, come over to the new house and comment often! See you there!

If art is the universal language, how do you say “don’t eat orange roughy”? We’ll have to ask electronic artist Don Relyea, who generated the image above. “Orange Roughy” was inspired by his wife’s cooking, which, unfortunately, includes the fish formerly known as “slimehead”.

Orange roughy are long lived and quickly depleted. They come from seamounts around New Zealand, generally. The fishery works like a clear cutting operation. Take it all and move on. It’s not sustainable. On the bright side, the New Zealand government is one of 69 countries to take part in a new international agreement on high-seas and deep-sea fisheries.

As the agreement states, deep-sea areas need to be rigorously managed to identify and protect vulnerable ecosystems.

I trolled a “maori-style” sailfish image that could make a nice tattoo. It’s shown here on a t-shirt from Google images.

Sailfish are “oceanodromous”, which means they occur widely throughout the world’s oceans, live and migrate wholly in the sea. As opposed to anadromous fish, like salmon, which migrate to freshwater to spawn; or catadromous eels, like Anguilla sp., which migrate to saltwater to spawn.

Naturally, one of the favorite pastimes here in the Cone of Probability is to monitor as many websites as possible for different forecasts and projections of Hurricane Ike. The more the models stray away from Corpus Christi the less anxious you feel. Currently three models veer to the north before landfall, so CC has a small chance of escaping the storm.

The image above is from my favorite hurricane web interface so far, called Stormpulse. It’s full screen, and very interactive, almost like a video game. If you’re looking for in-depth analysis, grab a cup a’ joe and dig in to Jeff Masters WunderBlog. It’s a great resource from a PhD storm chaser. Jeff predicted a chain of atmospheric disturbances following Gustav two weeks ago. For Ike, he overlays the trajectory on maps of heat potential, which is very cool.

Corpus Christi is in the center of Hurricane Ike’s projected trajectory. He’s coming at us like a fastball over home plate. This is a bit scarier than being on the periphery of the strike zone. TAMU-CC started issuing updates yesterday. One scientific expedition is recalled.

If there’s anything good that came out of Katrina it’s better hurricane preparedness in the Gulf of Mexico. Should the storm bear down on us, we’ll shutter up the house, pack up the car, and head for hill country in Austin, TX. My wife can drive while I crunch data and the kids fall asleep in the back. Right. I wonder what happened to Kevin and his family?

Image from Free Geography Tools

There is a nice write-up on the latest and greatest thought-exercise on global warming and sea level rise (SLR) at Scientific American online, complete with links to stunning pictures of glacier flows. The basic premise of the story is that Greenland, the world’s largest island, holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 7 meters. That’s enough to sink parts of Manhattan. Try it yourself. But the thrust of the research is that Greenland’s ice melt won’t sink Manhattan because the glaciers are moving too slowly for a global SLR of more than 2 little ol’ meters. Low range scenarios predict SLR < 1 m by year 2100, including thermal expansion.

Global warming denialists may claim that the results of the study downplay the effects of sea level rise, but they do not. One to two meters is a significant rise for low-lying coastal communities. Furthermore, the new estimate is higher than the high-end IPCC estimate of 0.16- 0.60 m SLR by 2100. Coastal communities, beware of this state of denial. Seawalls will not help you. They’ll just drain your municipal budget. Focus instead on outbound highways and bridges.

Now, I am no expert on global warming. I am skeptical of Doomsday scenarios (the world was supposed end 25 years ago). But, I study oceanography, listen to my professors, and choose to defer to experts when possible. Now that so many climate scientists agree that Earth is warming and the ice is melting, the pressing question for coastal communities like mine becomes not “if or if not” but “how, when, and where” will sea level rise?

At its core, the research by Pfeffer et al. (2008) studies the question “what is a glacial pace?”, finding it’s not enough raise global sea level more than 2m. However, the global warming model is complicated. Subarctic glaciers in Alaska, Argentina, Canada and Russia contribute 60 percent of sea level rise from glacial melt. And, sudden movements of large Antarctic ice sheets could, shall we say, overcompensate for Greenland’s glacial pace. If the relatively fresh meltwater is buoyant, it will travel in a wave, with peaks and troughs, in the surface layer across the ocean basin until the energy balance is restored. So, as I see it, “average sea level rise” is less important than wave amplitude. One 7 m wave will flood Manhattan, as illustrated above.

However, if the meltwater is cold and relatively dense, it will sink or “downwell” to become part of the North Atlantic bottom water, and begin to travel along the global conveyor belt of thermohaline circulation. In this scenario, the effect of meltwater would be delayed as bottom water travels the globe to upwellings zones in other parts of the world. But warm water expands, too, and there are feedback mechanisms, so really, it all just makes my head hurt.

To me, the real problem is that the trend in SLR estimates is increasing, and the uncertainty, aka the known unknowns are also increasing. One big question remains. What is the glacial pace where it matters the most?

Reference:

Pfeffer, W.T., J. T. Harper, S. O’Neel. 2008. Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise. Science Vol. 321. no. 5894, pp. 1340 – 1343. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159099

Diane’s best known for sinking her own shrimp boat in protest of toxic discharge at a Formosa Plastic industrial plant here in South Texas, but she’s taken on Union Carbide and others like a One Woman Army. She is the author of An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas . Environmental organizations like Truthout.org call her an American hero. Read her book. It’ll make your mercury rise.

Speaking of which, Diane says mercury contamination in seafood is widely under reported in the Coastal Bend region. She spoke of 1,000,000 pounds of mercury that “went missing” from an Alcoa aluminum plant near LaVaca Bay, Texas. Local fish, crabs, and people were contaminated. This is now a Superfund site, but in her day toxic discharge was business as usual. I wonder, how much have things improved?

Methyl-mercury in seafood is in the news a lot lately, particularly at Mother Jones, which covers the story of canned tuna in some detail, asking “Why is mercury tuna still legal”? Mercury in seafood. You just can’t avoid it anymore.