Oceanography
UPDATED: The World's Worst Oil Spills
I've been thinking a lot lately about oil spills. At the beginning of the month, a Chinese freighter ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, grinding a couple miles coral into dust and leaking oil along the way. A couple of weeks ago came news of a new study showing that o...
April 27, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Smithsonian's Amazing Natural History Collections
Last week I got to look behind the scenes of the entomology collection at the National Museum of Natural History. I learned how the collection of insects and spiders, one of the world's largest, is used by Smithsonian and Department of Agriculture scientists to help port inspectors identify potenti...
April 12, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Have You Seen a Jellyfish Lately?
Marine biologists need your help. The next time you go to the beach, keep a lookout for the creatures that have washed up onto the sand. And if you find a jellyfish, squid or other kind of unusual marine life, including a red tide bloom, please, please report your sighting to Jellywatch.Jellywatch ...
March 25, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Photo Contest Finalist—A Chorus of Mackerel
Can fish sing? Yes, they can, though I'm not sure about mackerel like the ones above. And they probably don't sound like anything you'd put on your iPod. But that wasn't what Alex Tattersall of Charminster, England, was searching for when we went on a dive last September in the Red Sea off Egypt. H...
March 19, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Titanic vs. Lusitania: Who Survived and Why?
The tragic voyages provided several economists with an an opportunity to compare how people behave under extreme conditions
March 02, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Riled up About Geoengineering
One of the most contentious sessions at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting this past weekend in San Diego was on geoengineering, the study of ways to engineer the planet to manipulate climate. Intentional ways to do so, I should say—as many of the speakers pointed out, ...
February 23, 2010 |
By Laura Helmuth
Underwater Antarctica
This time-lapse video, from the BBC/Discovery program Life, shows three-foot-long worms and carnivorous starfish as they chow down on a dead seal at the bottom of the ocean near Antarctica. Kind of gross, but beautiful at the same time, don't you think?The 11-part series will air on the Discovery C...
December 07, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Coral Reef's Mass Spawning
Understanding how corals reproduce is critical to their survival; Smithsonian's Nancy Knowlton investigates the annual event
December 2009 |
By Megan Gambino
Picture of the Week—Portuguese Man o'War
What is it? A beaded necklace? Red blood cells? No, it's the Portuguese Man o'War (Physalia physalis), magnified 30 times. Though it resembles a jellyfish, the Portuguese Man o'War is a siphonophore, a colony of organisms that work together. The sting of the venom in the tentacles' nematocysysts is...
November 20, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Watching Coral Sex
My colleague Megan Gambino visited the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute earlier this year to watch coral spawn. A report appears in the December issue of the magazine, and she also blogged about the experience over at Around the Mall. We asked her if anything interesting got left out of her ...
November 19, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—Young Fish Dart by a Jellyfish
Thomas Vignaud of Marseille, France took this photograph, labeled Young fish dart by a jellyfish in the sea, in the Mediterranean Sea in September 2007. With it, he won the Natural World Category of Smithsonian magazine's 5th Annual Photo Contest.Have you taken an amazing photograph? Hurry up and e...
November 06, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Tiny Cameras Show Albatrosses on the Hunt
Scientists from Britain and Japan used sophisticated techniques to study the feeding behavior of the black-browed albatross (Thalassarche melanophrys) at sea. A lot of useful information came out of this study, but the single item you will likely hear most about is a really cool photograph, taken ...
October 07, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
The Eastern Pacific Black Ghost Shark
I'm Greg Laden, and I usually blog at here at Scienceblogs.com and Quiche Moraine. I'm a biological anthropologist interested in human evolution, the biologies of race and gender, human hunter-gatherers, science education and African prehistory. I've been asked to fill in here at Surprising Scien...
September 28, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
Picture of the Week—Art and the Environment Meet
Humans have a huge impact on our environment, but visualizing the extent of that impact is rarely easy. Artist Chris Jordan, though, has attempted to depict it by creating beautiful images out of specific quantities of ordinary things, such as thirty seconds' worth of U.S. aluminum can consumption ...
September 18, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Swim Through the Ocean's Future
Can a remote, geologically weird island in the South Pacific forecast the fate of coral reefs?
September 17, 2009 |
By Christopher Pala
Picture of the Week—Project Pebble
The University of Cambridge Department of Engineering hosted a photography contest earlier this year, and the winners have just been announced. The photo above, Project Pebble, won first prize. Two engineering students, Ben Sheppard and Robbie Howshall, set out to design a low-cost, deep-sea photog...
August 14, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—Jellyfish
Most of the organisms living in the oceans are tiny, but they have a big effect on ocean mixing, according to a new study in Nature. Bioengineers from CalTech investigated this effect in Palau by adding a fluorescent dye to water near jellyfish to see what would happen when the jellies swam through...
July 31, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Seas of Plastic
Earlier this year, I read Flotsametrics and the Floating World, by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano, about ocean currents, how they have influenced history, and human impacts on the vast seas. (We published an excerpt, "Borne on a Black Current," earlier this year.)Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer,...
July 29, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Science News From the Smithsonian
The tourists visiting the Smithsonian museums may not realize it, but there is a ton of fascinating research going on, sometimes within just a few feet of where they are standing. And in addition to the museums and the zoo, there are researchers at the astrophysical observatory in Massachusetts, th...
July 15, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Borne on a Black Current
For thousands of years, the Pacific Ocean’s strong currents have swept shipwrecked Japanese sailors onto American shores
June 16, 2009 |
By Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano
