Sunday, June 28, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
The Return
Ok, it's been a year....more than a year...I know. I'm sorry. It's been a busy year. The super-fast version of the last 12-14 months: there was this road trip to Moab with the boys and Zeibers followed by a crazy summer of test cruises then three quarters of classes, programming, filter weighing, rock climbing, a wedding (obviously not mine), and....life.
Which leads to today. Today I'm in Portland visiting the parents before they fly off to Mexico... again. You know, it's just not fair when I come back from a cruise and say "I got to see a humpack whale!!!" and the response from my mother is "only one? That's too bad." I'm not sure why today is particularly special, but I flipped back to my St George blog to reread some of my posts and realized that I've rather missed writing on occasion, and its high time I get back in the habit.
The next logical step would be to write about the aforementioned cruise, but given that a) there's already a blog on the topic, albeit not written by me, and b) I think anyone reading this has already heard all about it, I think I'll just leave that piece be, except to say visit http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/wecoma0905b to read about it. And I suppose I should mention that the experience reminded me quite poignantly just how much I love being at sea.
Which leads to today. Today I'm in Portland visiting the parents before they fly off to Mexico... again. You know, it's just not fair when I come back from a cruise and say "I got to see a humpack whale!!!" and the response from my mother is "only one? That's too bad." I'm not sure why today is particularly special, but I flipped back to my St George blog to reread some of my posts and realized that I've rather missed writing on occasion, and its high time I get back in the habit.
The next logical step would be to write about the aforementioned cruise, but given that a) there's already a blog on the topic, albeit not written by me, and b) I think anyone reading this has already heard all about it, I think I'll just leave that piece be, except to say visit http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/wecoma0905b to read about it. And I suppose I should mention that the experience reminded me quite poignantly just how much I love being at sea.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Disapparation
Sorry, I have been rather negligent in my blogging. I'm in the process of developing a site on my own domain at the moment, and eventually this blog will be moved over there. At the moment, however, I'm working on getting the layout and design of the site all neat and tidy the way I'd like it. Plus, spring break happened. Sooooo.....my apologies for the lack of lifebloginess, as Zeibers put it. I'll try to get back to getting one up every day (or at least every other) again.
Oh, but some good news! My new laptop came home! And it is working beautifully. They only had to replace a few things...you know, the logic board, the hard drive, the RAM, and the connection cables...yeah, so basically I have a new computer in the old case.
Oh, but some good news! My new laptop came home! And it is working beautifully. They only had to replace a few things...you know, the logic board, the hard drive, the RAM, and the connection cables...yeah, so basically I have a new computer in the old case.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Carbon or bust!
I thought you folks might be excited to hear about what I'm doing research on in my grad school research. Ok, considering words like "organic," "particulates," and "degradation rates" are involved, excited might be the wrong word....interested? mildly curious? Ok, fine, maybe you don't care at all, but that's just too bad. I'm going to attempt to make my research topic mildly interesting to all you people who don't think studying ocean mud is the be-all and end-all of coolness.
The first thing to understand is that when fancy phrases like "degradation of phytoplankton-derived organic matter" (title of the paper I'm currently reading) get thrown around, what we're really saying is "CARBON!!! We're studying carbon over here!!" Now, with all the human sources of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the question of where that carbon may or may not be going is a very important one. Scientists think that the oceans serve as a giant carbon sink, absorbing a lot of the carbon being released into the atmosphere. (At the moment they can only account for 50% of the carbon we humans have released. The other half has to be going somewhere....) Understanding if the ocean is in fact a giant carbon sponge, and how it might go about doing that sponging are huge areas of research in oceanography these days.
Now, some definitions:
organic - We're not talking organic food here. Think chemistry. Organic molecules are those which contain carbon and hydrogen (along with all kinds of other things like nitrogen, phosphorous, and other stuff). Organic compounds are often created by living creatures - fats, sugars, proteins, etc.
particulates - anything bigger than .45 micrometers (that's really really small). Anything smaller than that is considered to be dissolved. Now, by anything bigger, I do mean anything. Yes, even whales can be considered particulates. Not typically the type of particle I'll catch in my filtration system, but that's beside the point.
Now, a lot of carbon absorption happens through biology - through photosynthesis, specifically. That good old story about CO2 getting turned into sugars by plants. For that reason, we're generally most interested in organic carbon, because that is the type that is being readily drawn out of the atmosphere and stored in other forms. Now, when our friendly plant cells (algae) or the things that eat them (animals of various types) die, their cells drift down to the bottom of the ocean. And if we're lucky, those cells and all the organic carbon they contain get buried before something wanders along and eats them, effectively removing them from the current carbon cycle. Fast forward several million years, and poof! Those buried cells have become fossil fuels.
Ironic, isn't it?
So, what are scientists trying to understand? Well, since we really know hardly anything, there's lots left to ask: How quickly does the process I just described happen in today's ocean? Are there areas where it happens more quickly? How do different species of algae and animals affect the system? Are there other factors (like the presence of nutrients) that can speed up/slow down the process? How much of the organic carbon formed actually gets buried instead of eaten and re-released to the atmosphere?
Basically, to try and get anything remotely resembling an accurate carbon budget for the planet, we need a much better grasp on all of those questions, and many questions that we haven't even thought to ask yet. Hence why I'm trying to contribute my two cents to the effort.
The first thing to understand is that when fancy phrases like "degradation of phytoplankton-derived organic matter" (title of the paper I'm currently reading) get thrown around, what we're really saying is "CARBON!!! We're studying carbon over here!!" Now, with all the human sources of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the question of where that carbon may or may not be going is a very important one. Scientists think that the oceans serve as a giant carbon sink, absorbing a lot of the carbon being released into the atmosphere. (At the moment they can only account for 50% of the carbon we humans have released. The other half has to be going somewhere....) Understanding if the ocean is in fact a giant carbon sponge, and how it might go about doing that sponging are huge areas of research in oceanography these days.
Now, some definitions:
organic - We're not talking organic food here. Think chemistry. Organic molecules are those which contain carbon and hydrogen (along with all kinds of other things like nitrogen, phosphorous, and other stuff). Organic compounds are often created by living creatures - fats, sugars, proteins, etc.
particulates - anything bigger than .45 micrometers (that's really really small). Anything smaller than that is considered to be dissolved. Now, by anything bigger, I do mean anything. Yes, even whales can be considered particulates. Not typically the type of particle I'll catch in my filtration system, but that's beside the point.
Now, a lot of carbon absorption happens through biology - through photosynthesis, specifically. That good old story about CO2 getting turned into sugars by plants. For that reason, we're generally most interested in organic carbon, because that is the type that is being readily drawn out of the atmosphere and stored in other forms. Now, when our friendly plant cells (algae) or the things that eat them (animals of various types) die, their cells drift down to the bottom of the ocean. And if we're lucky, those cells and all the organic carbon they contain get buried before something wanders along and eats them, effectively removing them from the current carbon cycle. Fast forward several million years, and poof! Those buried cells have become fossil fuels.
Ironic, isn't it?
So, what are scientists trying to understand? Well, since we really know hardly anything, there's lots left to ask: How quickly does the process I just described happen in today's ocean? Are there areas where it happens more quickly? How do different species of algae and animals affect the system? Are there other factors (like the presence of nutrients) that can speed up/slow down the process? How much of the organic carbon formed actually gets buried instead of eaten and re-released to the atmosphere?
Basically, to try and get anything remotely resembling an accurate carbon budget for the planet, we need a much better grasp on all of those questions, and many questions that we haven't even thought to ask yet. Hence why I'm trying to contribute my two cents to the effort.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Bone Eating Snot Flowers
Whales are huge. (That's a scientific fact.) So have you ever wondered what happens when a whale dies (of natural causes)? That's a lot of meat to just be floating out in the ocean somewhere. Well, first of all they don't float. Whale carcasses sink quickly to the deep ocean floor, and provide a veritable feast for anything that comes along. Initially, large organisms like hagfish and sleeper sharks scavenge the carcass, but some of the more interesting critters come later.
Once the whale is stripped to the bones other, more inventive organisms come along to take advantage of the windfall. One of those is Osedax mucofloris, the bone eating snot flower. It's actually a worm, not a flower, but it doesn't have any form of gut. Instead it has a symbiotic bacteria that digests the lipids in whale bone after the worms themselves have buried into the skeleton. I know, it's all sort of morbid, but tell me that isn't cool. Really.
Once the whale is stripped to the bones other, more inventive organisms come along to take advantage of the windfall. One of those is Osedax mucofloris, the bone eating snot flower. It's actually a worm, not a flower, but it doesn't have any form of gut. Instead it has a symbiotic bacteria that digests the lipids in whale bone after the worms themselves have buried into the skeleton. I know, it's all sort of morbid, but tell me that isn't cool. Really.
Monday, March 17, 2008
/sigh....why me?
Having not heard anything from the Mac store on the status of the new computer, I decided to stop in and see what was going on. It turns out that Apple had the wrong information connected with the serial number of my computer. So they thought it was a giant tower instead of a laptop, and said they couldn't fix the problem 'cause that type of machine doesn't have the problem being described by the store techs... After several days of back and forth arguing, Apple was convinced that my laptop was in fact a laptop, and they can fix it. Sadly, all this delay means it won't be back in Corvallis until the beginning of next week. /Sigh.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Seafood Rant
There appears to be some confusion regarding the contents of my last post, and the implication that I said there's unlimited amounts of seafood for certain midwestern boys to eat. /Glares at Jason and Eli with the fury of a thousand suns. I thought I'd take this opportunity to clarify that YOU MAY NOT EAT ANY SHRIMP!!! I've become rather famous for my rant regarding shrimp. Don't get me wrong, I love shrimp. They're nummy. But there are too many problems surrounding their raising and/or capture for me to be comfortable eating your average grocery store/restaurant shrimp.
I am not actually going to go into the shrimp rant at the moment. Rather, I want to point out what some of the bigger issues are that surround seafood as a whole. There are a number of things to take into account. Here are a few main ones:
1. Overall sustainability of the fishery (ie - are we taking more fish than are being replaced?)
2. Bycatch - in some industries (/coughshrimping /cough), well over 50% of the stuff being caught is not the target species. All that extra goes to waste.
3. Habitat destruction - bottom trawlers absolutely destroy habitats (hmm....shrimp again)
Farming seafood also has it's own set of problems, including additional habitat destruction, waste management, and diseases. Really, it's all a lot to keep track of. Fortunately for we innocent bystanders who just want to eat some fish, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has put together lists of seafood do's an don't's based on the region of the country you live in. I HIGHLY recommend you check it out: http://www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp
In all seriousness, the world's fisheries are in bad shape. There is a substantial amount of evidence that ALL of the world's fisheries may collapse within the next 40 years, do largely to a combination of poor management practices and other pressures, like pollution. I really really hope that doesn't happen. In the meanwhile, we can contribute by supporting those fisheries who are doing it "right"...or at least more right (wild caught Alaskan salmon and halibut, for example), and choosing not to support those who are unnecessarily damaging (orange roughy, shrimp, swordfish, etc). Alright, I'm done being on my soapbox now.
I am not actually going to go into the shrimp rant at the moment. Rather, I want to point out what some of the bigger issues are that surround seafood as a whole. There are a number of things to take into account. Here are a few main ones:
1. Overall sustainability of the fishery (ie - are we taking more fish than are being replaced?)
2. Bycatch - in some industries (/cough
3. Habitat destruction - bottom trawlers absolutely destroy habitats (hmm....shrimp again)
Farming seafood also has it's own set of problems, including additional habitat destruction, waste management, and diseases. Really, it's all a lot to keep track of. Fortunately for we innocent bystanders who just want to eat some fish, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has put together lists of seafood do's an don't's based on the region of the country you live in. I HIGHLY recommend you check it out: http://www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp
In all seriousness, the world's fisheries are in bad shape. There is a substantial amount of evidence that ALL of the world's fisheries may collapse within the next 40 years, do largely to a combination of poor management practices and other pressures, like pollution. I really really hope that doesn't happen. In the meanwhile, we can contribute by supporting those fisheries who are doing it "right"...or at least more right (wild caught Alaskan salmon and halibut, for example), and choosing not to support those who are unnecessarily damaging (orange roughy, shrimp, swordfish, etc). Alright, I'm done being on my soapbox now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
