Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow
Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow avatar

Oh the dark deep sea is frightful, But the food not so delightful, But since we’ve got no place to go, Let It Marine Snow! Let It Marine Snow! Let It Marine Snow! The deep-sea floor is a patch mosaic of habitats In the late 1960’s, two marine biologists, Howard Sanders and Robert Hessler, . . . → Read More: Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

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Scientist In Residence: Danny Richter on the To Humble Diatom
Scientist In Residence: Danny Richter on the To Humble Diatom avatar

Dear Diatoms, You are pretty, and I like you. Haeckel liked you too, so did Gaudi. Obviously, they appreciated the little things in life. While you still make appearances now and again in modern life, let’s face it: being microscopic and aquatic, recognition is an up-current battle, and you can’t swim. Perhaps obscurity suits you? . . . → Read More: Scientist In Residence: Danny Richter on the To Humble Diatom

Scientist In Residence: Danny Richter on the To Humble Diatom avatar

I Like Sills But Not A Fan Of The Popular Or My Friend’s Ex
I Like Sills But Not A Fan Of The Popular Or My Friend’s Ex avatar

I’m a contrarian. Majority consensus makes me shudder. I just like rooting for underdogs*. Those undersea ridges at the boundaries of tectonic plates, spewing molten magma to form new crust are o’ so popular these days. Spreading plate boundaries…meh. What I do like is new research basically stating, and I am paraphrasing here, that spreading . . . → Read More: I Like Sills But Not A Fan Of The Popular Or My Friend’s Ex

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The Tide Pool: Loss of Phytoplankton, War Gods and Corals, and Gulf of Mexico Biodiversity
The Tide Pool: Loss of Phytoplankton, War Gods and Corals, and Gulf of Mexico Biodiversity avatar

An occasional series where we briefly report 3 new studies and tell you why they are cool! A new paper by Boyce, Lewis, and Worm from Dalhousie University, provides clear evidence of decreasing phytoplankton biomass over the last century. The researchers used a blended dataset of ~450,000 measurements of chlorophyll consisting of field measurements of . . . → Read More: The Tide Pool: Loss of Phytoplankton, War Gods and Corals, and Gulf of Mexico Biodiversity

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Determining the Fate of Carbon in a Mixotrophic Anemone
Determining the Fate of Carbon in a Mixotrophic Anemone avatar

It has been known for a long time that some anemones form symbiotic relationships with Zooxanthellae. For a while it was assumed that the anemones mainly persisted by utilizing carbon translocated from its symbionts, called autotrophy, but they can may supplement this by heterotrophic feeding on plankton. A study by Bachar and colleagues followed . . . → Read More: Determining the Fate of Carbon in a Mixotrophic Anemone

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Won’t They Think of the Poor Bone-Eating Worms?
Won’t They Think of the Poor Bone-Eating Worms? avatar

There is a disturbing trend in this BBC news article about the relationship between whaling and carbon. The report comes from a talk at The Ocean Science meeting in Portland last week discussing some calculations presented by Dr. Andrew Pershing on how whaling is putting “locked up” carbon back into the atmosphere. “Whales, like any . . . → Read More: Won’t They Think of the Poor Bone-Eating Worms?

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Dispatches from Antarctica – Sampling the Inverted Benthos
Dispatches from Antarctica – Sampling the Inverted Benthos avatar

David Honig is a graduate student in marine science at Duke University in the lab of Dr. Cindy Van Dover. He is participating in LARISSA, a 2 month multinational expedition to study the causes and consequences of the ice shelf collapse. He will be posting regular updates on the expedition exclusively for Deep Sea News . . . → Read More: Dispatches from Antarctica – Sampling the Inverted Benthos

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Repost: Deep-Sea Corals and Methane Seeps
Repost: Deep-Sea Corals and Methane Seeps avatar

This is a repost of KZ’s winning post for Open Laboratory 2009: The Best Science Writing on the Web. Congrats to KZ! ———————————————————————————————————— This is a tale of cause and effect in the deep sea woven by threads of hypotheses held together by the loom of targeted sampling efforts and multiple lines of evidence. You . . . → Read More: Repost: Deep-Sea Corals and Methane Seeps

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Deep Sea Corals and Methane Seeps
Deep Sea Corals and Methane Seeps avatar

This is a tale of cause and effect in the deep sea woven by threads of hypotheses held together by the loom of targeted sampling efforts and multiple lines of evidence. You see, dear readers, once upon a time existed an observation. Hovland (1989) noticed along the Norwegian coastline that carbonate reefs occurred in . . . → Read More: Deep Sea Corals and Methane Seeps

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