Ginormous wave pic for your wallpapering enjoyment.
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Archive for the 'Ocean' Category Page 4 of 6
Contrary to popular belief, the sailors of Columbus’s day did not think they would sail right off the edge of the earth. They were, however, apprehensive about what they would find in their travels. Mistakes about marine life have ranged from inaccurate assumptions about the behavior of known species to fanciful depictions of animals that “might” exist.
Year: 1802
Scientist/artist: Pierre Denys de Montfort
Originally published in: Historie Naturalle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques
Now appears in: Sketches of Creation by Alexander Winchell and Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
[full article: Strange Science] via Neatorama
Large, wallpaper-worthy image of sea state, as used in the header image from this blog’s new theme. How do you like it? I got some feedback that a less-generic look might improve readership.
Living in Alaska provides plenty of opportunities for new experiences: Hiking through old-growth rainforests; viewing grizzlies in the wild; walking across ancient rivers of glacial ice. But it is only on rare occasion - even for Alaskans - that one gets the chance to behead a beached whale. When I was invited along on this gruesome expedition it was like winning the wildlife lottery from hell.
[full story] via Boing Boing
The Great Barrier Reef on the northeast coast of Australia is a spectacular sight from the air, stretching over a distance of some 2000 kilometres. From its southernmost parts among the coral cays of the Capricorn Group to its northern limit near the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait, this giant among organic structures is a changeable creature. In places there are widely scattered reefs, about 2500 in all; elsewhere it grows as a nearly continuous wall of coral. The reef builders, mostly colonial corals and their millions of animal and plant neighbours, have slowly fashioned the bioengineering marvel we see today.
But if we could travel 160 million years back in time, we would see another reef in an area that occupied most of what is now Europe. At first sight this reef and its communities have striking similarities to the Great Barrier Reef. But this ancient reef structure is unique; its main architects were not corals, but multicellular marine sponges, many of which have no match today. And this reef was even bigger than the Great Barrier Reef. Its fossil remains stretch about 2900 kilometeres from southern Spain to eastern Romania, making it one of the largest living structures ever to have existed on Earth.
This reef is exposed today in a vast area of central and southern Spain, southwest Germany, central Poland, southeastern France, Switzerland and as far as eastern Romania, near the Black Sea. Despite the scale of this buried structure, until recently researchers knew surprisingly little about it. Individual workers had seen only glimpses of reef structures that formed parts of the whole complex. They viewed each area separately rather than putting them together to make one huge structure. The problem was compounded by the lack of scientific cooperation mand exchange of information between European adversaries during and after the First and Second World Wars. The geological technology was certainly available to assemble the pieces of this palaeontological puzzle into one, but knowledge was lagging behind.
Links: New Scientist, BLDGBLOG, Sponge reefs of Canada
The Discovery Channel is using Sharkrunners, an online game, to teach people what it’s like to be a marine biologist who is tracking sharks. The game play is easy to play, but original.
Players are given a virtual boat and virtual crew. They use it to track real-life sharks that have been tagged with a GPS recievers. When a boat encounters a shark the player is alerted via email and/or SMS. The player has three hours to select how to try to collect data about the shark and its behavior. The goal is to gather as much data about sharks as possible.
[via Boing Boing]
A beached whale is a whale which has become stranded on land, usually on a beach. Beaching is often fatal for whales, as they become dehydrated and die. Some die when their lungs are suffocated under their own weight or drown when high tides cover their blowholes. Humans sometimes try to save beached whales; however, such efforts are not always successful.
[Wiki]
[from Wikipedia]
The Great Blue Hole is a large underwater sinkhole off of the coast of Belize. It lies near the center of Lighthouse Reef, a small atoll 60 miles from the mainland and Belize City. The hole is almost perfectly circular, over 1,000 feet across and 400 feet deep. It was formed as a limestone cave system during the last ice age when sea levels were much lower. As the ocean began to rise again the caves flooded, and the roof collapsed.
This site was made famous by Jacques-Yves Cousteau who declared it one of the top ten scuba diving sites in the world. In 1971 he brought his ship, the Calypso to the hole to chart its depths.
It looked like a fine day for a sail. On Sunday, January 28, 2007, Microsoft researcher Jim Gray woke up on his boat, a red 40-foot fiberglass cruiser called Tenacious. The water in Gashouse Cove, a cozy marina in San Francisco Bay, was nearly flat. The 63-year-old programmer phoned his wife, Donna Carnes, who was on an annual vacation with friends in Wisconsin. He said he was heading out to the Farallon Islands, a wildlife refuge 27 miles offshore, to scatter the ashes of his mother, Ann, who died in October.
As Gray steered out through the Golden Gate to the open ocean, both tide and wind were in his favor. At 10:30 am, he called Carnes again and said that he was approaching a channel marker buoy 15 miles out. She asked him if he was wearing his harness; single-handed sailors can drown if a wave pitches them overboard and the ship sails on. “Yes, dear,” he replied, saying that he would get in touch as soon as Tenacious came back into range.
As we’ve all learned in school, 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, only 30% is solid ground. What if everything was reversed? What if every land mass was a body of water, and vice versa?
This map explores that question, and it is fantastic in at least three definitions of that word: fanciful, implausible and marvelous. The interior of China is marked by a spouting whale, a sailboat ploughs the waves of the Brazilian Ocean, a school of fish traverse the watery wastes of Siberia, large cities dominate places rarely frequented by people in this universe…
The oceans in this inverted world are the Great Asian Ocean (the world’s largest), the African, Brazilian, United and Antarctica Oceans. These are punctuated by islands that in our world are lakes
- Baikal Island: surely a mountainous place, as in our world it is the deepest, most voluminous fresh water lake on the planet, containing 20% of the world’s liquid fresh surface water.
- To the west of this vast ocean, close to the Mediterranean land mass, lies the unnamed Caspian Island – to the east thereof is the tiny (and if the reversal is symmetrical, rapidly sinking… or should that be emerging? Can’t work that one out) Aral Island.
- A similar island, unnamed in the map, perforates Africa; this must be Lake Victoria, or rather Victoria Island.
- Other similar land masses are the Great Islands, substituting for the Great Lakes… In this map, perhaps intentionally, they look like a dolphin doing a show jump.
- The Gulfstream Mountains form the backbone of the North Atlantic States (I’m not sure whether the Eiffel Tower close to the African shore is part of them).
- ….
[found at Strange Maps]
[Link to artist Vlad Gerasimov]
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) — Researchers predict that the recurring oxygen-depleted “dead zone” off the Louisiana coast will grow this summer to 8,543 square miles — its largest in at least 22 years.
The forecast, released Monday by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, is based on a federal estimate of nitrogen from the Mississippi River watershed to the Gulf of Mexico. It discounts the effect storms might have.
The “dead zone” in the northern Gulf, at the end of the Mississippi River system, is one of the largest areas of oxygen-depleted coastal waters in the world. Low oxygen, or hypoxia, can be caused by pollution from farm fertilizer, soil erosion and discharge from sewage treatment plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The pollution is carried downstream by the Mississippi and comes from throughout the United States.
A British explorer has braved sub-zero temperatures to become the first person to swim at the North Pole.
Lewis Gordon Pugh took to the freezing waters on Sunday to highlight the devastating impact of climate change on the natural world.
It took him 18 minutes and 50 seconds to swim 0.6 miles in waters created by melted sea ice at temperatures of 29-degree F — the coldest a human has swum in.
Link to Mr. Pugh’s website. He has also conducted the “Talisker Trek” across the Island of Skye to raise funds for the Woodland Trust. Anyone who can help landscape preservation with a single-malt tie-in is OK in my book.
[full story at the Daily Mail]
Scabby’s ship was broken
They had to dock to steal some parts
From unsuspecting clippers in the dark
Scabby’s soul was open
He left the comfort of the ship
For the first time in three long years for a walk
As his boots sunk in the sand
The sinking feeling in his heart
Confirmed he hated land…
from the song “Pirate Jenny”, album Once Upon a Wave by Pirate Jenny
You know the feeling. You step ashore, onto solid ground, but it still feels like you are on a moving boat. For most, this feeling dissipates in a few hours, but for some, with severe “Mal de debarquement” or land sickness, it can last for years, even though they were only on a cruise ship for a week. It is as if a week at sea causes some permanent neurological damage. Not fun! Strangely, no articles I have found state if returning aboard can cure this ill. Perhaps like our pirate friend Scabby in the song, they should just gouge out their girlfriend’s eyes and return to their now-native element.
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