The fifth event in the Future of Ice Speaker Series featured Dee Boersma, a UW scientist who has spent her career studying the ecology of our world’s penguins. Much of her time is spent in Punto Tombo, Argentina, focused on a large population of Magellanic penguins. She and her team have collected an impressive time-series of data on these birds–over 30 years–which has proved instrumental in understanding penguin ecology and the pressures that affect them.
Read more »Longtime Aquatic and Fishery Sciences professor Robert L. “Bud” Burgner, a pioneer in Alaska fisheries research, passed away in January. A leader in the aquatic sciences, Burgner helped establish and served as Director of the Fisheries Research Institute from which the Alaska Salmon Program was born. Burgner also shepherded the development of the High Seas Salmon program with his extensive international connections with Japanese and Canadian scientists.
Read more »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 »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.
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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.
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