« To the past
Page 1 of 17
May 31, 2012
72 notes
72 notes
May 28, 2012
48 notes
48 notes
May 5, 2012
718 notes
718 notes
May 5, 2012
57 notes
57 notes
Best Underwater Pictures: Winners of 2012 Amateur Contest
- Second Place: Macro Photography - Perhaps only a half inch (1.3 centimeters) long, according to Schmale, a porcelain crab perches on a feathery sea pen in Komodo National Park, Indonesia.
- Overall Winner - A headshield sea slug pauses on a blade of grass in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the winning image of the University of Miami’s 2012 amateur Underwater Photography Contest, whose results were announced this month.
- First Place: Macro Photography - Two yellownose gobies peek out of a brain coral off the Caribbean island of Bonaire (map) in a macro, or close-up, picture.
- First Place: Wide-Angle - Lionfish swim among smaller fish in Israel’s Red Sea.”What they’ll often do is use their pectoral fins like fans and gently herd a school of little fish in front of them … and then inhale them once the fish is in front of their mouth,” Schmale said.
- Second Place: Student Photography - Harlequin shrimp—such as the one in this winning picture taken in Thailand’s Similan Islands—mate for life, and the pairs work together to capture and kill their favorite prey: starfish. One of the shrimp locates a starfish, flips it over, and drags the prey into the shrimp’s lair. The couple then devours the starfish’s internal organs, starting from the tips of its arms down to its central disk—keeping their victim alive for as long as possible.
- Third Place: Marine Life Portrait - Nudibranchs—such as this Cratena peregrina caught on camera off Greece—are roughly finger-size sea slugs whose 3,000-odd species thrive in seas cold and warm, shallow and deep. Whereas their ancient ancestors slipped across the seafloor in defensive shells, these gastropods come armed with toxic secretions and stinging cells.
- Third Place: Macro Photography - Emperor shrimp hitchhike on the back of a sea cucumber in Ambon, Indonesia. The tiny shrimp—each eye is only a millimeter wide—use the sea cucumbers as dining cars, eating whatever passes by. The “picture captures that environment—they’re riding on top of the train,” Schmale said.
- Third Place: Wide-Angle - Orange anthias fish swim amid soft corals in the Fiji Islands. Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean floor but support about 25 percent of all marine creatures, according to the Coral Reef Alliance.
- Fan Favorite - Backlighted by the rising sun, a sea nettle jellyfish pulses across California’s Monterey Bay in the Rosenstiel School contest’s first “fan favorite” picture, chosen via online poll. Its trailing appendages covered in stinging cells, a sea nettle typically transfers captured prey from the jelly’s slender tentacles to its ruffled mouth-arms to its mouth, hidden inside the sea nettle’s bell. (See pictures of giant jellyfish off Japan.)
(via oceanconsciousness)
Apr 6, 2012
9 notes
9 notes
Apr 6, 2012
52 notes
52 notes
Apr 6, 2012
14 notes
14 notes
Apr 1, 2012
13 notes
13 notes
Apr 1, 2012
304 notes
304 notes
Apr 1, 2012
0 notes
0 notes
A Win-Win Solution
Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance explains the effects of tourism on coastal waters and coral reefs. The good news is that there are clear remedies: treating waste water and recycling nutrients from sewage and runoffs. Benefits include fertilizers for farmers and golf courses, healthier coral reefs, and healthier waters for swimming.
Mar 31, 2012
0 notes
0 notes
Free diving Dean’s Blue Hole, Bahamas. Great video! Wish I could hold my breath this long.
Mar 29, 2012
0 notes
0 notes
Mar 29, 2012
5 notes
5 notes
Ocean acidification is a huge problem that’s been called climate change’s ‘evil twin’, but gets nowhere near as much publicity. It’s at its worst levels in 300 million years, and so many people don’t even realise it’s happening.
Watch this video and let Sigourney Weaver tell you all about it and why it’s such a huge threat.
(via oceansickness)
Mar 29, 2012
3,602 notes
3,602 notes
(via oceanconsciousness)
Mar 29, 2012
115 notes
115 notes
'Unprecedented Rapidity of CO2' Causing Worst Ocean Acidification in 300 Million Years
“We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change;” ocean acidification called “evil twin” of climate change.The Earth’s oceans are becoming more acidic at a faster rate than at any time in the past 300 million years due to increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, a new study shows.The study, published in the journal Science, details the work of 21 scientists from the U.S. and Europe.
“The geological record suggests that the current acidification is potentially unparalleled in at least the last 300 million years of Earth history, and raises the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change,” said co-author Andy Ridgwell of Bristol University.
The Albany Times Union explains:
Ocean acidification works like this: Burning of fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, There, the gas keeps more of the heat from the sun from radiating back into space, a process that an international scientific consensus says is gradually raising the planet’s temperature.
At the same time, about a quarter of the increasing CO2 is being absorbed by the oceans, where it is converted into carbonic acid. This is steadily making the ocean more acidic, which among other things can harm the ability of sea creatures to thrive, or make hard shells or skeletons. Rising acidification can also affect marine organisms by causing slower growth, fewer offspring, muscle wastage and dwarfism.
Some scientists have called this gradual process the “evil twin” of climate change.
The study “raises the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change,” said Andy Ridgwell, a professor of planetary modeling at the University of Bristol who took part in the study.
Agence France-Presse reports on the study:
The acidification may be worse than during four major mass extinctions in history when natural pulses of carbon from asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions caused global temperatures to soar, said the study in the journal Science. […]
They found only one time in history that came close to what scientists are seeing today in terms of ocean life die-off — a mysterious period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 56 million years ago.
Though the reason for the carbon upsurge back then remains a source of debate, scientists believe that the doubling of harmful emissions drove up global temperatures by about six degrees Celsius and caused big losses of ocean life. […]
“We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out — new species evolved to replace those that died off,” said lead author Barbel Honisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about — coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”
Honish and colleagues said the current rate of ocean acidification is at least 10 times faster than it was 56 million years ago.
Ars Technica adds:
While the authors frequently point out the difficulty in teasing apart the effects of ocean acidification and climate change, they argue that this is really an academic exercise. It’s more useful to consider the witches’ brew with all the ingredients—acidification, temperature change, and changes in dissolved oxygen—since, historically, those have come together. That combination produces unequivocally bad news.
The authors conclude, “[T]he current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 [million years] of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.”
Ocean acidification is something I’ve talked about quite a bit on this blog and it’s an extremely important issue. You can read my posts on the topic here, here, here, here, and here.
Navigate
About
