A new article in Journal of Geophysical Research by Gouretski and Koltermann shows global warming estimates since the 1950's are positively biased 0.2 - 0.4 °C due to discrepencies between temperature readings from the expendable bathythermograph (XBT) device and Conductivity-Temperature-Depth (CTD) sensors.

The Ocean FilmFest begins its fourth year in San Francisco January 20-21. My second resolution is to make this the last year I miss it. At least one of these films features the deep. Aquanauts, Jerome Scemla , 53 min, France The real Captain Nemo: exploration of the deep ocean from William Beebe's bathysphere in the 1930s, through the deep dive in the Mariana Trench of Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960, to the recent dives of Robert Ballard in Alvin and the robot Jason to hydrothermal vents along the mid-oceanic rifts. (subtitled) -- KH

ATMOCEAN, a firm based in Santa Fe, NM with Philip W. Kithil at the helm, is according to their website the company is "at the forefront of the emerging Hurricane and Global Warming Mitigation Industry." What is that you ask? In their own words... Our patents-pending Atmocean technology is based on a wave-activated pump that brings cold water from the deep ocean to the surface, to cool sea surface temperatures and potentially reduce hurricane damage to onshore and offshore property and infrastructure, and save lives. For each 0.5 degree Celsius drop in surface water temperature, hurricane…

If you missed the book Meg, which is probably for the best, I just heard through the grapevine that a movie is in developmental hell. Luckily the book was given to me, so as I trudged through the 400 some odd pages of it, I didn't have one more thing to upset me. The only thing that is deep in the story is the setting. If you like multi-million dollar moves with great effects and little plot this may be the book for you. The whole pretense, in a King Kong/Godzilla sense, is absurd and the dialgoue is predictable. The main protagonist is Jonas Taylor a Navy deep sea diver working in the…

Slate recycled an old story about Giant Squid just before Christmas. Daniel Engber's review provides lots of interesting links and factoids about ammonium and bouyancy control in Architeuthis . He also touches on their potential vulnerability to sesimic surveys, citing a New Scientist article about a 'mass' stranding of 5 giant squid following seismic surveys off the coast of Spain back in 2004.

New York Times is running a nice article called "Old Men and The Sea" about two remarkable marine biologists that passed this year, Drs. Cadet Hand and Joel Hedgpeth. Hand was partial to sea anemones and Hedgepeth preferred sea spiders. We provide these links to share our mutual admiration, and to pay our respects to the inspiring lives of these two great men.

I don't know if you guys caught the comment below from Bruce Strickrott, Chief Pilot of the DSV Alvin. We have been trying to get this guy to write something for Deep Sea News for about a year now. Why? Because Alvin pilots Bruce, Anthony, Gavin, Pat, and Duncan (among others) have gone where no humans have gone before, time and time again. And that's BEFORE they get to work. They are also hilarious fun to hang out with. We're going to be writing lots more about the new Alvin replacement in the coming months. Hopefully Bruce and the guys will chip in with stories from "Nine North" and other…

Will be gone to the Canary Islands for a conference until the 15th to give my spiel. You will be in the very capable and 'hand'some hands of Peter. Enjoy and use the thread to post comments on anything you want (as long it is deep sea related!).

Natural Resources Defense Council is leading the fight to make the Pacific Ocean off California a more peaceful place for migrating whales. So far, they have strong support from the California Coastal Commission, who denied the US Navy sonar training exercises once before. A review is due on January 10. NRDC is asking for your support in an email campaign below. Dear California NRDC BioGems Defender, We won the first round in our local fight against deadly sonar. But round two starts today -- and we really need you to make your voice heard! Last month, NRDC Members and activists sent…

The recent welcome of Attleboro H.S. has me reflecting on time spent in Boston as a graduate student. Boston is a wonderful town with great latke, Guinness, and tobaccionist. In the words of Fred Allen"I have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there." Boston also provides numerous opportunities to increase your deep-sea knowledge. The MIT Museum currently is running an exhibit in the Hart Nautical Gallery titled Deep Frontiers: Ocean Engineering at MIT. The exhibits includes multimedia and several autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) for…

From The Daily Review... It is amazing what you find lying around the bottom of the ocean, as St. Mary's College professor Douglas Long has discovered. Long was part of a team of researchers who this year identified two new species of deep-sea fishes, unusual-looking sharks that broke off on their own evolutionary path more than 320 million years ago. The creatures -- named the Galapagos and whitespot ghost sharks -- were found more than 1,200 feet underwater near the Galapagos Islands in 1995, sucked through a vacuum tube into a research submarine. Long and his team spent more than a decade…

Fox News discusses the years best in science. I was excited because two of these are deep-sea related, the Yeti Crab and the recent capture of the Architeuthis. DSN was there when these stories cracked bringing you "a fair and balanced coverage". Most of these findings are old news and were diligently covered by blogosphere. Below the fold I list all these finding and link to a blogger who covered them. Stay tuned for the BEST OF DSN 2006 from Peter. Invasive Species Strange dog-like creature in Maine Yeti crab Giant hungry snails overran the Caribbean island of Barbados A grizzly-polar…

Biochemcial adaptations to temperature and pressure are essential for organisms to exploit the deep sea. The prominent physiologist, George Somero, whose work has repetitively inspired and defined several sub-disciplines of biology, published a review of these adaptations in 1992. Here I largely translate his work and provide the necessary background material for you to digest the modifications exhibited by denizens of the deep. As you may remember from high school or college biology, a cellular membrane consists of lipid bilayer. The major membrane lipid is a phospholipid. One end of…

I was worried that 2006 might pass without a sea change for deep-sea research until I ran across an article by Grasmueck et al in Journal of Geophysical Research that made my paradigm shift. Recent deep surveys by the researchers from Rostenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at University of Miami used an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to reveal more than 200 coral reefs in waters 600-800m deep off Grand Bahama Banks in the Straits of Florida. Following that, they used a drop camera to identify living scleractinian assemblages. These findings support the case that deep…

An article called "Science 2006" (SEED Magazine, November 2006) discusses a group called Science and Engineers for America that is making important headway in Washington. Please check it out. This kind of advocacy in Washington is mission critical. Important federal agencies responsible for global ocean health and human welfare (e.g. NOAA and NASA) are currently sitting in budgetary limbo under a continuing resolution because Congress scheduled wartime funding first. It doesn't seem fair to spend so much on governments overseas, and so little on our own.

Go welcome Aardvarckology Ardvoloyg Arrdvarkeology Aardvarchaeology. Try not to let the eating of our cephalopod brethren upset you.

Frank A. brought my attention to this video on Marie Tharpe at the New York Times. Other scientists dismissed her work as "girl talk," but she refused to back down -- and changed the way we see the planet. You can also read more about her here. In the words of the late James Brown, "This is a man's world, this is a man's world, But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl."

A big welcome to Attleboro High School's AP Biology (I presume MA). There instructor, Mr. Lemire, linked to DSN from the course blog. Students please feel free to post comments and ask questions. Peter and I (and the other bloggers here at Sb) will be happy to answer your questions. For Peter and I, you may want to keep them ocean or biology related otherwise you will never know what kind of answer you wil get!

Urged by a reader and previous buzz, I finally managed to watch the Calamari Wrestler. The movie is an over-the-top satire of Rocky with a Star Wars twist finish. Fortunately it is much better than the festering heap of movie, Rocky XXXIV. The plot is the tale of a wrestler and son of a geisha, Kan-Ichi Iwata, reincarnated as a squid who fights for more than a wrestling title. The Calamari Wrestler is from the hills of Pakistan and may be related to the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. Kan-Ichi easily defeats his first opponent due to the fact "joint locks don't work on an invertebrate,…

The first new 25 Things at Sb! So grab a cup-o-joe and read on! The extremes of the physical deep-sea environment (temperature, pressure, and lack of light, low food) are more than a challenge for deep-sea organisms. Unfortunately, there is one more-disturbance. In ecology, hypotheses for how biodiversity is maintained generally fall into two categories, equilibrium and nonequilibrium. Equilibrium hypotheses typically focus on processes that promote partitioning of the environment that lowers species competition and coexistence (the competitive exclusion principle). These hypotheses…