Spotlight is an ongoing series that will introduce you to the many members that make up the College community. Flipping through the channels on TV, Bob Burns, retired oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, came across a show detailing the marvels of ocean gliders that traverse the world’s oceans. Resembling a slender yellow rocket with fixed wings, this particular automaton travels from New Jersey to Spain through watery space and time, beaming scads of oceanographic information to waiting computers and scientists back on shore.
Read more »Vitamin water: Measuring essential nutrients in the ocean
The phrase, ‘Eat your vitamins,’ applies to marine animals just like humans. Many vitamins are elusive in the ocean environment. University of Washington researchers used new tools to measure and track B-12 vitamins in the ocean. Once believed to be manufactured only by marine bacteria, the new results show that a whole different class of organism, archaea, can supply this essential vitamin.
Read more »Oceanographers out to study giant waves and to shrink styrofoam heads
Oceanographers from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory are in Samoa for six weeks. Before leaving shore last week the researchers blogged about an outreach event in which they helped Samoan children decorate foam busts that they will send 3 miles below the ocean’s surface and bring back as shrunken heads.
Read more »DNA detectives able to ‘count’ thousands of fish using as little as a glass of water
A mere glass full of water from Monterey Bay Aquarium’s 1.2 million-gallon Open Sea tank, among the 10 largest aquariums in the world, is all scientists really needed to identify the Pacific Bluefin tuna, dolphinfish and most of the other 13,000 fish swimming there. Researchers also for the first time used DNA from water samples to discern which of the species were most plentiful in the tank.
Read more »El Nino tied to melting of Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier
Many glaciers flowing from the land to the coast eventually float over the ocean and melt. The speed at which that melting occurs can depend on many factors, including the warmth of the water beneath it. In Antarctica the Pine Island Glacier drives large amounts of ice into the ocean, and for decades the glacier’s tip has been thinning. College of the Environment scientists and their partners have connected the dots behind the complex drivers that explain why we are seeing this phenomenon occur.
Read more »