Those categories, the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale, were introduced by the National Hurricane Center in the 1970s. Originally the scale was meant to convey both wind and water destruction but was simplified in 2010 to focus solely on wind hazards, while storm surge and precipitation risks are now communicated separately.

The scale is open-ended with Category 5 storms being the top with sustained winds greater than 157 miles per hour (70 m/s).  This open-endedness originated from the belief that the cumulative impact of wind, surge, and rainfall in a Category 5 event could utterly destroy any structure. But Category 5 may no longer be enough.

A new study suggest that we need a Category 6 that categorizes storms greater than 192 miles per hour (86 m/s).  Numerous storms have already reached wind speeds comparable to those in in the Category 6 range. In the past nine years, five storms have surpassed the hypothetical Category 6 threshold. Notably, the most intense of these, Hurricane Patricia, struck Jalisco, Mexico while the others occurred in the Western Pacific, including Haiyan and Goni which hit heavily populated areas of the Philippines. Haiyan, considered by some as deserving of a Category 6 designation, caused extensive damage and casualties in the Philippines. Another storm, Meranti, caused damage in the Philippines and Taiwan before making landfall in eastern China, resulting in severe flooding.

In addition, increases in Emanuel’s Potential Intensity (PI) index indicate that human influence on the climate system has elevated the risk of such storms reaching Category 6 levels. You can think of hurricane as engine that transport that energy, i.e. heat, from the ocean surface to an outflow at the boundary between the troposphere from the stratosphere.  The PI measures the strength of this hurricane engine. Looking at data from 1979 to 2018, the authors found that the likelihood of storms reaching Category 6 strength has increased significantly due to global warming. Comparing the periods from 1999 to 2018 and 1979 to 1998, almost three times more instances of storms exceeding the Category 6 threshold occurred. The authors note, “Overall, the chances of PI exceeding the category 6 threshold have more than doubled since 1979.”

Additionally, climate model simulations conducted by the authors predict further increases of these Category 6 hurricanes. The authors demonstrate that when they run long-term simulations using three advanced global climate models, they all predict the greater occurrence of Category 6 storms in conditions hotter than what we have today. Even if we manage to meet the relatively modest global warming goals outlined in the Paris Agreement, these simulations still show a significant rise in the likelihood of Category 6 storms happening.

The post The Rise of Category 6 Storms in a Warming World first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post 2023: More Days at Highest Temperatures first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Introduction

The Ocean Cleanup, brainchild of Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, was in the news again this past week after announcing that in addition to the fact that their system is unable to collect plastic as intended, it suffered a mechanical failure. “Wilson” is currently being towed to Hawaii, where it will undergo repairs and upgrades, presumably to be towed back out to the garbage patch for a second trial.

I am not a mechanical engineer, so I don’t intend to comment on the details of their mechanical failure. I am, however, a sea-going oceanographer. Which means that I am used to the sorts of situations with scientific research equipment that was so succinctly paraphrased by Dr. Miriam Goldstein:

Designing for physics

But beyond the engineering, there are the questions of what the *physics* are that TOC are relying on for their system to be successful. Some of you may recall that the original design was to moor (i.e. *anchor*) their device in 6000m (20000 feet) of water, and let existing ocean currents sweep garbage into the U-shaped structure. Thankfully, they realized the challenges associated with deep-ocean moorings, and abandoned that idea.

The latest design iteration (misleadingly called “System 001”, as though they haven’t built and tested any other previous to it), is to have a freely-drifting system, avoiding the use of anchors. TOC claim that under the influence of current, wind, and waves, their design will drift *faster* than the plastic — causing it to accumulate in the U, making for easy pickup. They summarize the concept with a little explainer video on their website, with a representative screen shot below:

Based on a quick Twitter rant that I had after thinking about all this for a few minutes (see here), I wanted to explain out the various points that have either a) been missed by TOC design team, or b) deliberately excluded from their rosy assessment of how they expect their system to actually collect garbage. What follows is a “first stab” at a physical oceanographic assessment of the basic idea behind “System001”, and what TOC would need to address to convince the community (i.e. scientists, conservationists, etc) that their system is actually worth the millions of dollars going into development and testing.

The premise

As outlined in the video, the premise of System001 as a garbage collection system is that through the combined action of wind, waves, and currents, the U-shaped boom will travel faster through the water than the floating plastic, thereby collecting and concentrating it for eventual removal. This appears to be based on the idea that while both the boom and the plastic will drift with the current, because the boom protrudes from the water (like a sail), it will actually move faster than the surface water by catching wind.

There are some issues with this premise. Or, at least, there are some real aspects of oceanography that have either been ignored or missed in thinking that such a system will behave in the predictable way described by TOC. I’ll try and outline them here.

Stokes drift

Any of you who may have had an introduction to ocean waves may have heard that during the passage of a wave, the water particles move in little circles (often called wave orbital motion). While not a bad “first-order” description, it turns out that for real ocean waves there is also some drift in the direction of wave propagation. This drift is named after Gabriel Stokes, who first described it mathematically in 1847 (see wikipedia article here).

The amount of drift depends nonlinearly on both the amplitude and the wavelength of the wave. For example, for a 0.5m amplitude wave with a wavelength of 10m and period of 10s (something like typical ocean swell), the drift velocity is about 10 cm/s right at the surface.

Of course, the Stokes’ solution describes the motion of the water parcels being moved by the wave. For those water parcels to then have an effect on anything in the water, one would need to consider the various components of force/impulse/momentum (i.e. our buddy Sir Isaac Newton). Needless to say, it seems obvious that a smallish piece of neutrally buoyant plastic will respond to the Stokes drift much more readily than a 600m long floating cylinder with a large mass (and therefore large inertia).

This alone could be enough to quash the idea of a passive propagating collection system. Mr Slat?

Ekman currents

While we’re talking about long-dead European fluid mechanics pioneers, any study of the effect of winds and currents wouldn’t be complete without a foray into the theories proposed by Swedish oceanographer Vagn Walfrid Ekman in 1905. What Ekman found was that when the wind blew over the surface of the ocean, the resulting current (forced by friction between the air and the water) didn’t actually move in the same direction as the wind. The reason for this is because of the so-called “Coriolis effect”, whereby objects moving on the surface of the Earth experience an “acceleration” orthogonal to their direction of motion that appears to make them follow a curved path (for those who want to go down the rabbit hole, the Coriolis acceleration is essentially a “fix” for the fact that the surface of the Earth is non-inertial reference frame, and therefore doesn’t satisfy the conditions for Newton’s laws to apply without modification).

Anyway — the consequence is that in an ideal ocean, with a steady wind blowing over the surface, the surface currents actually move at an angle of 45 degrees to the wind direction! Whether it’s to the left or right of the wind depends on which hemisphere you are in — I’ll leave it as an exercise to determine which is which. And what’s cooler, is that the surface current then acts like a frictional layer to the water just below it, causing it to move at an angle, and so on, with the effect being that the wind-forced flow actually makes a SPIRAL that gets smaller with depth. This is known as the Ekman spiral.

The actual depth that the spiral penetrates to depends on a mysterious ocean parameter called Az, which describes the vertical mixing of momentum between the layers — kind of like the friction between them. What is clear though, is that a small particle of plastic floating close to the surface and a 3m deep floating structure will likely not experience the same wind-forced current, and therefore won’t move in the same direction. Hmmm … that’s going to make it hard to pick up pieces of plastic.

What is a “Gyre” anyway?

The final point I wanted to make in this article (I have more, which I’ll summarize at the end for a possible future article), is to try and give a sense of what currents in the ocean (including in the “gyre” or in the region often referred to as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”) actually look like. The conception that there is a great swirling current 1000’s of km across is true only when the currents are averaged for a very long time. At any given instant, however, the ocean current field is a mess of flows at various space and time scales. An appropriate term for describing typical ocean flow fields is “turbulent”, as in an oft-viewed video made by NASA from satellite ocean current data.

To illustrate this, I took some screenshots of current conditions from the wonderful atmosphere/ocean visualization tool at earth.nullschool.net showing: ocean currents, surface waves, and wind.

These images illustrate the potential problem with TOC idea, by highlighting the fact that the wind, wave, and current fields of the ocean (including even in the “quiet” garbage patch) are highly variable spatially and temporally, and are almost never aligned at the same period in time. What’s more, is that the currents and waves at a given time and location are not always a result of the wind at that location. Eddies in the ocean are generated through all kinds of different processes, and can propagate across ocean basins before finally dissipating.

Similarly, surface waves have been measured to cross oceans (i.e. the famous “Waves across the Pacific” study pioneered by the transformative oceanographer Walter Munk).

Other issues

Following the “rule of three”, I tried to hit what I consider to be the biggest concerns with TOC system design and principle, from my perspective as a physical oceanographer. However, there are other issues that should be addressed, if the system as designed is really believed by the TOC team to be capable of doing what they say. And really, it seems like a crazy waste of time on behalf of everyone involved to have spent this much time on something if they aren’t sure it will even work theoretically … not to mention the money spent thus far. So, part of me *has* to believe that all the dozens of people involved care deeply about making something that might actually work, and they have studied and considered all the effects and potential issues I (and others) have raised.

Anyway, the other issues are:

• What is the actual response of the system to a rapid change in wind/wave direction? Wind can change direction pretty quickly, especially compared to ocean currents. What’s to prevent a bunch of accumulated plastic getting blown out the open end of the U after a 180 degree shift in wind but before the system can re-orient?
• What about wave reflection from the boom structure itself? It is a well-known fact that objects (even floating ones) can reflect and “scatter” waves (scattering is when the reflected waves have a shorter wavelength than the original ones), and it seems like this could create a wave field in the U that might actually causes drift *out* of the system.
• The idea that all wildlife can just “swim under” the skirt (because it’s impermeable) is not supported by anything that I consider to be rigorous fluid mechanics, aside from the fact that much of what actually lives in the open ocean are non-motile or “planktonic” species. There are a lot of communities in the open ocean that float and drift at the surface, and I see no way that if the System collects floating plastic as it is designed that it won’t just sweep up all those species too. The latest EIA brushed off the effect of the System on planktonic organisms by stating that they “are ubiquitous in the world’s oceans and any deaths that occur as a result of the plastic extraction process will not have any population level effects”. But that doesn’t take into account that the stated mission is to deploy 60 such systems, which are estimated to clean the garbage patch of surface material at a rate of 50% reduction every 5 years. It stands to reason that they would also clean the Pacific of its planktonic communities by the same amount.

The post The (ocean) physics of The Ocean Cleanup’s System 001 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Everyone gets into science communication for different reasons, but to date this might be my favorite:

“Some senators were being dicks and criticizing physiology science as wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars.”

Garfield Kwan, of the dynamic duo behind the ocean comic Squidtoons, was working in a physiology lab at the time when Senator Tom Coburn’s scaling 2011 critique of “wasteful” NSF funding was released. Little did the Senator know that putting on blast the epic physiological research that involved running shrimp on treadmills would inspire Kwan to explore connecting a larger audience to science in his own unique way.

Thus, Squidtoons was born. In collaboration with scientific illustrator Dana Song, Squidtoons is an ocean comic dedicated to translating scientific research into engaging infographics to educate the pubic about science, provide educators with teaching tools, and support scientists with compelling illustrations. Infused with a significant dose of humor and pop culture, each comic is the product of an extensive amount of research and expert scientific review. The illustrations are as accurate as they are dazzling. We here at DSN were fans of Squidtoons before it was cool.

This year Kwan and Song expanded their inky, scicom-ic empire by publishing their first ever Squidtoons book “illustrating science with farts, burps, and giggles.” Containing 120 pages of the Squidtoons “best of” playlist, the book is a fun romp for both kids and adults alike. Garfield reflects on his hopes for the book, “Squidtoons has the potential to be a great outreach tool for researchers around the world, as well as a great platform for the public to understand science by researchers from around the world.”

Get yours today just in time to dazzle your relatives for the holidays with all of your ocean science nerd jokes- courtesy of Squidtoons!

The post Writings on the SeaWall: Squidtoons first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Ocean science and conservation, like any human enterprise, is subject to its fair share of internal messiness from time to time.  As someone whose expertise and experience intersects several discrete domains (coral reefs, sharks, marine protected areas, and policy), I’ve witnessed plenty of dust-ups, arguments, and spats over the years.  And this week’s flurry of discussion instigated by a New York Times editorial on ocean protected areas is just the latest kerfuffle. In his op-ed, Bigger Is Not Better for Conservation, coral reef scientist and California Academy of Sciences curator, Dr Luiz Rocha, argues that large-scale, remote marine reserves are a disservice to ocean conservation.  It’s Dr Rocha’s perspectives, however, that seem more damaging.

Rocha’s argument hinges on four key points:

1. The current tally of big, remote marine reserves is in low-conflict, easy to protect (ie, low-hanging fruit) areas of the ocean where human reliance upon them is negligible and therefore government willingness to protect is strong;
2. There’s nothing worth protecting in these big, remote areas;
3. More important, smaller, near-shore ocean areas with high levels of human use are in dire need of protection;
4. Marine protected areas should be science-based (eg, protected zones should be guided by “sustainable catch limits” of commercially targeted species).

Let’s go one-by-one to see if any of these points hold water. [Note: For the sake of brevity, I’ll be using the acronym MPA frequently in this piece for “marine protected area,” but it will also serve as shorthand for “marine reserve,” “protected area,” “locally managed marine area,” or “marine managed area.”  I recognize that an MPA may not be managed or enforced, but let’s forego that technicality for the moment.]

POINT 1: “Big MPAs are easy and less consequential.”
As of today, there are approximately 20 large-scale protected areas across the ocean (ranging from tens-of-thousands to millions of square kilometers in protected area).  This includes a range from the Marianas Marine National Monument’s 16,400 square kilometers to the 1.15 million square kilometers of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawai’i.  These MPAs may consist of fully-protected, no-take (no fishing/extraction) designation to protection that still allows multiple uses.  According to the folks at MPA Atlas, there are approximately 15,000 small, coastal MPAs around the world.  Some of these, like Cordelia Banks off the island of Roatan in the Bay of Honduras, encompass only 17 square kilometers.  Many are even smaller.  Totaling all of the massive/remote and small/near-shore MPAs together gets us to approximately 2% of the ocean under some form of protection.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress, held in Hawai’i in September 2016, called for member nations to set aside “30% of each marine habitat” in “highly protected MPAs and other effective area-based conservation measures” by 2030, with the ultimate aim being ”a fully sustainable ocean, at least 30% of which has no extractive activities.”

For rhetorical effect, I’ll reiterate that as of March 23, 2018, only 2% of our global oceans is protected, and 2030 is only twelve years away.

As someone in the MPA biz, I can testify that there are at present a small handful of big, deep-pocketed, international NGOs working on big international MPAs: The Pew Charitable Trusts, Conservation International, Oceana, and National Geographic. These folks have the gravitas, influence, and resources to capture heads of state attention and convene forums necessary to get things done.  You can bitch all you want about the pros and cons, but this is the reality.  Alongside the big NGOs, there are tens-to-hundreds of small to medium-sized NGOs that are working simultaneously on everything from big/remote MPAs to smaller/near-shore MPAs.  Sometimes the big NGOs work in concert with the smaller ones.  Sometime not.  It’s all site dependent.

Having worked on everything from massive MPAs to tiny MPAs over my career, I can say that none of them were “easy wins.”  So-called “low hanging fruit” may represent a unique opportunity in time.  You may have a receptive government or local community that welcomes the process.  It’s always easier to work with the willing than the resistant.  But every MPA effort in which I’ve participated involved strategy, identifying champions, public consultations, negotiations, community organizing, building political will, battling nefarious characters, rebooting strategy, sweating-out votes, and of course finding funds to support all of this.  If there are “easy wins” out there, big or small, I sure would appreciate someone pointing me in that direction.

Protecting big/remote areas or smaller/near-shore areas is not an either/or game.  This is not a binary proposition of doing one or the other.  It’s a yes/also.  We need to protect small, not so small, medium, larger, big, bigger, and massive tracts of the ocean.  We need to protect what is easy to protect, and what is harder to protect.  We must gather every bit of low-hanging fruit, and plan to reach the currently out-of-reach fruit.  MPAs occupy a spectrum or continuum, and we need to be prepared to work with everything along that spectrum.  Some NGOs will have a mandate (and talent) for pursuing big swaths of ocean.  Others are more tuned to work on local needs.  But there is a lot of real estate between the biggest and smallest MPAs for organizations, individuals, and yes, even FUNDERS to find their niche.

POINT 2: “There’s nothing worth protecting.”
This is just wholesale wrong.  What is Rocha considering as “worth” protection?  Certainly, there are species whose entire life cycle may be captured by the boundaries of an MPA.  Other species may only spend a portion of their lives within the boundaries of protection.  Protected areas are designed to factor in these variables.  But not all MPAs are envisioned around biological significance alone.  The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary in North Carolina, the very first marine national monument designated by the United States in 1975, honors the historic significance of the shipwreck of the famed Civil War ironclad, USS Monitor.  Similarly, the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument and the entire Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, including the 110 seamounts, open waters, and all life in that area are considered biocultural resources and linked to the Hawaiian people through environmental kinship.

The ocean as a cultural seascape is vital to Hawaiian identity, their being, and essential dimension to their cognitive understanding of the world.  The ocean waters in Papahānaumokuākea were an ancient pathway for a voyaging sphere that occurred between this region and the main Hawaiian islands for over 400-500 years (ca. AD 1300-1800).  The practice of traditional wayfinding and voyaging—recently popularized in the film Moana and which is one of the most unique living traditions of the world—requires protection of the entire marine environment and open waters, not just the islands and reefs, because it relies on biological signs and natural phenomenon, such as winds, waves, currents, and the presence of marine life and birds at key moments and locations.

At the same time as Papahānaumokuākea was successfully expanded in 2016 by President Obama, the State of Hawai’i also supporting the establishment of small, coastal community-managed makai areas, driven by and for the community.  Yes, both can happen at the same time and using the same human capital, as many of the same people fought for both the small makai areas and the big Papahānaumokuākea effort.

POINT 3: “There are more important, smaller places to protect.”
Importance is relative and subjective.  It is place-driven and context-heavy.  What is important to someone in Brazil, might be less so to someone in Hawai’i.  So instead of casting stones at our neighbors, perhaps we should recognize that there are seriously limited resources, conservation bandwidth, and political will, and try to triage our priorities.  I recognize that the reality is that not all NGOs/organizations like to play-well together.  Furthermore, some places and approaches are simply not tenable due to practical considerations and political and social realities.  Again, this is a reality of modern conservation.  But as I mention above, effective MPAs do not occupy one half of a binary state.  It’s not either small or large.  Remote or near-shore.  Fully managed/enforced or paper parks/un-enforced.  Every single MPA in existence occupies a position somewhere along a continuum of effectiveness.  Even an un-managed, unfunded, and unenforced MPA is a work in progress along that continuum.

POINT 4: “They’re not science-based.”
Science should help inform MPA zoning and designation.  No questions or arguments here.  But the science needed may at times be incomplete or lacking.  Many decisions around the world, particularly in developing nations, on “sustainable catch limits” are not acted upon because data is deficient.  Should we be expected to wait for the science to be decided and settled (whatever that might mean) before action/conservation measures can be activated?  And science is but one arrow in our quiver that we should use to scope, establish, and manage MPAs.  The social sciences and economics are also driving MPA priorities and planning.

Finally…
I find an editorial like Rocha’s to be, quite frankly, dangerous.  Staking-out a claim on one side of a false dichotomy or constructing straw man arguments is the purview of graduate school.  I get it… Rocha would like to see more love shown to near shore/coral reef areas (including where he has worked in Brazil).  But what is the benefit to conservation as a whole to publish these half-baked propositions that large, remote MPAs are a waste of time in the pages of The New York Times and under the banner of an august and internationally recognized organization like the California Academy of Sciences?  We are not currently living in normal times, and this sort of rhetoric plays right into the hands of those keen to see less ocean protection, not more.

For the first time in US history, an administration is rolling back protections on national monuments, both land and sea.  Australia just this week has announced the possibility of cutting in half the protections for the Coral Seas MPA.  Conservation in one place in the ocean is not the enemy of conservation in another place.  And MPAs are not a binary switch of either big or small…  Local or remote…  Fully protected or not.  If we are going to get to the IUCN recommended target of 30% of our oceans under strong protection by 2030, we need to ramp up protections everywhere along the MPA continuum.  Yes/Also should become our mantra!  We must embrace a process of continuous improvement in our MPA work, not display a reflex of undercutting other conservation efforts.  And we need to keep our focus and attention on the real threats to a healthy ocean: over-fishing, illegal fishing, pollution, climate change, and lack of political will for action.

The post Embracing Yes/Also: Marine Protected Areas Are Not An Either/Or Proposition first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Drawing Connections first appeared on Deep Sea News.

OMG Irma. It is going through the Caribbean and slamming everything in its path. I’ve been getting updates from friends in the Virgin Islands and it sounds like it was harrowing. Thankfully they made it through which is the most important part (even though their stuff may not have). Other islands have not been so lucky.

This is a monster hurricane, fueled by warm waters in the Atlantic. Just to get a sense of how insane it got in Barbuda, here is the atmospheric data from a water level station there. The eye of the hurricane passed right overhead, which is why you see the insane drop in air pressure.

The wind speeds got up to 100 knots before the anemometer conked out. These winds are no joke, reports indicate that nearly every building on the island suffered damage, if not completely destroyed.

Update: The anemometer was completely destroyed.

Just saw highest wind speed I've ever seen on a WX ob. Anemometer at #Barbuda blew away after recording gust to 155 mph. #Irma pic.twitter.com/aNwT5i04gf

— Dan Satterfield (@wildweatherdan) September 6, 2017

Another problem for this tiny island with wide areas of low elevation, storm surge. Preliminary data shows it got up to 8 feet.

There’s also some oceanographic data from a buoy located south of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands that’s part of the Caribbean Integrated Coastal Ocean Observing System (CarICOOS) . Strong winds with gusts over 60 km/h accompany the pressure drop. 

The water temperature data is intermittent, but you can definitely see seawater getting colder. Wave and wind mixing churns up cold water from the deep ocean, causing surface water temperatures to drop. 

This buoy also has salinity data, and you can also see the effect of the mixing in the increase in salinity, as deeper saltier water is mixed to the surface. There is also a drop in salinity right before the hurricane hits which could be caused by rain freshening the sea surface or just fresher water being pushed past the buoy. From this data, you can’t distinguish the two causes.

Lastly, let’s take a look at the wave data. Wave heights got up to nearly 19 feet at the peak of the storm. Some waves might have been larger as this plot shows averaged values.

Another fascinating plot is the wave direction which shows how waves emanating from the center of the hurricane. The wave are coming steadily from the East (90 degrees on the compass rose) until the eye passes overhead, at which point the wave direction turns 180 degrees completely to the West (270 degrees on the compass rose).

That was my oceanographic quick look. I’m hunting around for some ocean robot data, as NOAA AOML deploys their gliders into hurricanes, but haven’t found any yet. I’ll post when I do. For another take on the storm, take a look at my friend Jyotika’s Tropical Storm Blog.  It’s got good science and a good rundown of where Irma has been and where it’s going.

For those of you in Irma’s path, make sure you are prepared and take the necessary precautions to stay safe. Here are tips from NOAA’s Hurricane Preparedness site.

The post A quick look at the data from inside Hurricane Irma first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Sort of.

On August 21 2017, the moon passed in front of the sun, the sky darkened, the temperatures dropped, and the zooplankton thought it was night. This triggered their daily migratory response and they headed to the surface of the sea. And data from oceanographic buoys off the Oregon Coast recorded all the drama! Leave it to marine scientists to so conveniently deploy OOI, a permanent, highly instrumented, cabled oceanographic observatory, directly in the path of the eclipse.

Bio-acoustic sonars detect particles and zooplankton floating in the water. Like mechanical dolphins, sonars send out a beam of sound that bounces off all the little bits of stuff floating in the water. When the sound returns to the sonar, the signal is decoded and shaped into a vertical map of sound-reflecting stuff in the water. And sound-reflecting zooplankton are part of that map.

In sonar imagery, zooplankton are easily identified as the bright reflecting bands. When the eclipse happened, you can see that band start to rise, just like it does every dusk. Of course an eclipse isn’t night. Within an hour the zooplankton mob realized they had made a terrible, terrible mistake and descended again.

Kudos to Jonathan Fram at Oregon State University for setting up the sonar to watch this awesome migratory spectacle. Was it truly an oceanographic calamity? Only if you were one of the thousands stuck in traffic after the eclipse.

Source:

August 21 Eclipse-Related Data from the Endurance Array

The post What actually happened in the sea during the solar eclipse! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On July 20th, 1963, three scientists sat on a research ship 200 miles south of Woods Hole, MA, waiting for something remarkable. They were nearly 4000m above the seafloor, and using a sounder (similar to sonar), they could ‘see’ a line of creatures resting in the deep. By this time, biologists were beginning to unravel the mystery of this ‘false bottom’–a layer in the ocean that looks the the sea floor on the sounder but isn’t–which covered much of the ocean. This false bottom rises in up at night and sinks down during the day. This rising and falling is in fact caused by the largest migration of animal on Earth–everything from fish, shrimp and jellyfish, moving hundreds of meters in unison up and down each day. But how and why these animals rose in fell in the ocean wasn’t clear. As the scientists watched their instruments, the light began to fade. Not from the setting sun, but from something else.

The scientists were trying to answer a question that could be answered literally no other way. Some experts suggested that this massive migration was due to each animal’s own biological rhythm; the same rhythm that causes you to feel jet lag after a long trip. But others thought that the sun itself was driving this massive shift from shallow to deep and back again: as the sun set, animals saw the dimming light and rose to the surface. As the sun rose, they sank again into the deep. How could the scientists test between these two different hypotheses? They can’t exactly alter the sunrise…

Luckily, Earth’s view of the sun is altered once a year thanks to a cosmic twist–when the moon blocks it from view. A solar eclipse on land can be an eerie phenomenon. Nighttime crickets and frogs begin to sing, birds fall silent, even bees return to their hives. But until recently, what happened in the ocean depths was a mystery.

Back on the research ship in 1963, the moon moved into its place in front of the sun, daylight rapidly faded, and the scientists solved the migration mystery: the deep layer of animals began to rise. Bioluminescent creatures started to shine, and nocturnal creatures started a frantic upward thrust. As the world grew darker, they swam upward nearly 80 meters. But this frantic migration didn’t last long. As the moon receded and the sun revealed itself, the massive animal layer did an about-face, scrambling back into the safety of the darkness. One can only imagine the frenzy as millions upon millions of creatures clambered towards the surface and then, just as quickly, rushed back to the deep.

On the boat the scientists could only observe this massive movement with sounder. But it was enough to answer their question. Thanks to the solar eclipse, we now know that animals hiding in the deep are governed in part by the external ebb and flow of light from the sun.

Ancient humans considered eclipses ominous signs. Now, modern humans adopt a more spectator role in this celestial occurrence. There’s even a citizen scientist initiative to understand how creatures on land responds during the upcoming eclipse. But for millions of creatures living in the open ocean, a solar eclipse, at least for a short time, may really spell calamity.

Work cited

RH Backus, RC Clark, AS Wing. (1965) Behaviour of certain marine organisms during the solar eclipse of July 20, 1963. Nature. 4975. pp 989-991

The post What happens in the sea during a solar eclipse? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Frequent readers will recall that I’ve talked about being queer in ocean science in this space before.  And there has been a growing body of research and writing since my early ruminations, by smart colleagues and friends (especially by Jeremy Yoder & Allison Mattheis, Maria Broadfoot, and others), who have been investigating a variety of realities and issues related to queers in STEM.

I don’t have anything new to add.  Not a lot of my perceptions or thoughts regarding being queer in ocean sciences has shifted much since I first put pen to paper several years ago.  There are still precious few exemplars of LGBT leaders in our field.  The rise of Trump and Pence has had, for these eyes, a chilling effect on the ease and safety of LGBT Americans to be more open in the public, academic, or employment space.  And quite frankly America appears to be embracing a conservatism that has me remembering the early Reagan years.

Since I am fresh from fieldwork, I thought for this Pride I’d share some of my perceptions of what it’s like for me to be a queer ocean scientist doing work internationally.  It goes without saying that these are not EVERY queer’s experiences or perceptions.  These are mine, and they are personal.  But perhaps by sharing what it’s like to go about my job, while also being an out, queer man, I can share a slice of reality that many of my cis, straight colleagues may take for granted.

Anyone who travels outside of the US will recognize that our culturally accepted personal boundaries dissolve once we set foot in a new country.  For sure there is a spectrum, but from nearly 30 years of international field work in mostly developing countries I’ve grown accustomed to the usual onslaught of interrogatives from strangers which almost always arrives on two primary subjects:

• “Are you married?” and,
• “Do you have children?’

It’s not hard to understand these sorts of interrogations.  First of all, English is often limited, and this is simply an easy way to make some conversation.  Fair enough.  On another level, as I have been reminded by very wise colleagues, this is a first salvo to ensure that I (the stranger) am “one of them.”  “One of them,” for immediate purposes, meaning someone whom they can relate to.  This older, strange man in their village has a wife.  He has kids.  He is like them.  It is a normalizing exchange designed more to set my hosts at ease than it is to set me at ease.  And that is absolutely fine.

However it creates, for this queer man, an often difficult dilemma.  I want to be transparent and open and honest with my hosts or my colleagues or my stakeholders in the field.  I want them to trust me as an individual.  As a person.  But at the same time, I have a job to accomplish.  And that job takes precedence to my personal needs or feelings.  Most of the regions where I work (the Caribbean, Pacific, IndoPacific, Indian Ocean), have abysmal LGBT policy.  Homosexuality (mostly defined as same sex relations between men) is still a punishable offense throughout most of the countries in which I work.  And while I understand that a gay American won’t necessarily receive the same social penalties as a gay local in my field sites, I have to calculate whether I want to be “that gay American” rather than just “that American” in almost every setting.

Obviously, the more time I spend in a destination, and the closer I get to stakeholders, the more comfort and safety I feel in opening up to my colleagues and friends.  I’ve shared that I’m gay, and married, with quite a few field colleagues over the years.  But it is extremely site and situation specific.  Being “out” with colleagues in Turks and Caicos is VERY different than considering such a proposition in Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, or Indonesia.

Each of the countries in which I’ve conducted field work is positioned somewhere along a continuum of acceptance of the existence of LGBT people, and subsequently their rights and value to that country.  I’ve commented before that while on field work in Fiji, I was reminded by one of my Fijian staff that, “Fiji does not have gay people.”  This in contrast to the reality that you can fire up Grindr and find dozens of local listings or walk through the Fijian capital of Suva on most any night and find trans women in many of the bars.

My personal reality as a gay man trying to conduct ocean science or conservation in developing parts of the world is that I am choosing to focus upon my work and my professional priorities over my personal identity politics.  Others may make a different decision, and that is their prerogative.  But I have limited time, funding, and limited attention span.  I choose to have my stakeholders focus upon the work at hand.  If I have the luxury of extra time in a destination, certainly this equation can be adjusted.

Unfortunately, the net result to me is often a feeling of regret or sadness that I “can’t entirely be myself.”  Straight colleagues have sometimes chided me that I should not care about this as much.  But I think that’s their privilege talking.  I don’t want to be, “Rick, the gay scientist,” or, “Rick, the gay conservationist.”  I just want to be Rick.

So, it all makes me feel a bit like Mark, the best man in the film Love Actually, played by The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln, who is in love with his best friend’s fiance.  He spends the entire film putting on a charade of indifference to the now-married Keira Knightley, but finally finds a way to let her know his true feelings (through the ridiculous use of cue cards and a boombox). Not a perfect metaphor for my situation, but it nonetheless underscores a wish that I have that I didn’t need the identity acrobatics in order to do good work.

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