I’m not sure when this happened, but NOAA thinks they’ve finally identified the mysterious underwater sound known as ‘The Bloop’:
The broad spectrum sounds recorded in the summer of 1997 are consistent with icequakes generated by large icebergs as they crack and fracture. NOAA hydrophones deployed in the Scotia Sea detected numerous icequakes with spectrograms very similar to “Bloop”.
You [...]
The Atlantic reports on a record-breaking experiment that is reaching a conclusion nearly a century after it started… when a Scottish fisherman found a message in a bottle tossed into the North Atlantic in 1914:
It is 98 years old, and was cast into the ocean by Captain C. Hunter Brown, a scientist at the Glasgow School of Navigation, [...]
You might have heard the phrase “acceptable losses” being tossed around in corporate contexts, but Singularity Hub’s taken a closer look at a shipping phenomenon that’s really going overboard:
It’s estimated that 10,000 of these large containers are lost at sea each year, and our understanding of what happens to them afterwards is scant at best. But that’s changing. [...]
The US Navy, Nature reports, is taking some time out to give scientists a look at what goes on beneath the Arctic Circle:
Nature talked to two of the researchers involved in the next phase of the project, biologist Raymond Sambrotto and chemist Bill Smethie, both of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.
Was it [...]
Science News reports on an Antarctic project that’s been hiring a crew of oceanographers who *really* feel at home in the water:
Seals, walruses, whales and other large marine creatures have moonlighted as oceanographers before. Scientists typically glue sensors to the animals’ bodies that measures factors like temperature and salinity. Researchers have used this information to study water temperatures [...]
Unfortunately, as NPR reveals, we’re not talking about the kind that’s still safely underground:
The NASA Earth Observatory explains that since ocean waters are never perfectly smooth, the sun’s reflection gets scattered off the surface in many directions. This yields a broad stripe of sunlight across the ocean in most satellite photographs.
But things change when you add oil to [...]
Slate (yeah, not the first place I look for science news, but hey) unearths the sad truth about beaches that aren’t going to be beaches much longer:
[Jim] Titus, the Environmental Protection Agency’s resident expert on sea-level rise, first happened on Maryland’s disappearing beaches 15 years ago while looking for a place to windsurf. “Having the name ‘beach,’ ” he [...]
New Scientist is ready to weigh anchor in the Sahara, now that it looks like Ethiopia is getting its very own brand new ocean:
“The ferocity of what we saw during this episode stunned everyone,” says Cynthia Ebinger, a team member at the University of Rochester in New York.
While the Mount Dabbahu rift is still hundreds of kilometres [...]
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