When I first read this paper about microplastics, it was both horrible and great.

Horrible: There’s lots of microplastic. It’s deep, in squat lobsters and in the squishy bits of giant larvaceans. And highest concentrations of microplastic are below the surface.

Great: These are some sweet subsurface observations of microplastic, which we have very little of. Subsurface microplastic suspended in the water column has been suspected for a long time. As far as I know, this is the first research that definitely shows that. They used an ROV with a cool robotic arm/vacuum cleaner to make the samples.

I got to the conclusions, mulled over the joy and pain of the methods and the results, after which it hit me. DUH!!!! THE REASON WHY WE SEE PLASTICS BENEATH THE SURFACE IS BECAUSE THIS IS MONTEREY CANYON AND THAT TOTALLY JIVES WITH EVERYTHING WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT IT!!

(Can you see my arms flapping, cause they are)

Let me explain. The truth is that it’s not only biologists that love Monterey Canyon, physical and geological oceanographers do too.

PEOPLE, THE WELL-KNOWN PROCESSES THAT TRANSPORT COASTAL SEDIMENT INTO THE INTERIOR OCEAN ARE PROBABLY DOING THE SAME THING TO MICROPLASTICS!!!

(at this point I may have either a) whacked something off a table, b) myself in the face, or c) both)

Monterey Canyon is a smorgasboard of physical and geological processes. There is a steep submarine canyon that winds its way from the shallow continental slope down the continental slope to the deep sea floor. Submarine waves break on its slopes that can create swash that washed up like white water on a beach. Oceanic avalanches laden with sediment instead of snow called turbidity currents scream down its spine. Strong coastal currents meander onto the precipice of the continental shelf. All these processes scour the slope, lifting the sediment that lies there into thin sheets that spread out far from the coast, suspended above the seafloor.

And that microplastic maximum, it’s at the same depth where you would expect to find one of these sediment layers.

Because this is a non-traditional blog, let’s have a non-traditional discussion section. I will barf some ideas at you like you are a tiny science baby bird, after which you will slowly digest them and then gain the knowledges.

DISCUSSION.

Microplastics could be flowing into the deep ocean along the same pathways that sediment is.

If we are finding microplastics where we are finding suspended sediment, that means the same processes are probably driving their transport. And they are complex.

What sinks at the coast doesn’t stay at the coast.

Sediment doesn’t, so microplastics won’t either. Even if dense microplastics sink when they first enter the ocean, they will eventually get swept up and moved away from shore.

Boundary layer mixing is important for sediment and now perhaps microplastic transport away from coasts.

Slopes, shelf breaks, canyons, ridges, bumps and even corrugations: these are all places where you find boundary layer mixing. This is probably where dense microplastics are getting mixed into the ocean.

END DISCUSSION.

Of course, this discussion session is speculative as most discussion sections are, and could be proven or disproven at any time. But, it’s fun and jives with what we already know about coastal processes. In any case, this is some provocative research that shows that plastics are getting into the deep ocean through a variety of pathways: physical and biological. And we need to keep working together to stop that.

The post Don’t be shallow. A tale of subsurface microplastics and the processes that transport them. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Marine scientists, we have made a mistake. Eunice aphroditois, is a fearsome aquatic polychaete. Unfortunately, we chose to name it after a domestic abuser. And that needs to be changed.

How did this happen you might ask? In the early 90’s the media was awash with the story of Lorena Bobbitt, the woman who cut off her husband’s penis. She was portrayed as that crazy wife and he as the poor, dismembered husband. I remember it being joked about on SNL. Regrettably, I probably laughed along with it.

Around the same time, scientists discovered Eunice aphroditois. It is a worm that buries itself in the sand waiting for prey, often cutting the victim in half with a fearsome jaw when it strikes. Of course it seemed clever to name it the “Bobbitt Worm”.

But the reality of Lorena Bobbitt’s infamous night was not as it was portrayed in the news (as detailed in an upcoming upcoming Amazon Docuseries and this NY Times article). After years of sexual abuse at the hands of her husband, and after being raped yet again one night, Lorena Bobbitt had enough and cut off her husband’s penis.

Since then, Lorena’s ex-husband, has been in jail for repeatedly assaulting and raping two other women and has otherwise gone on to live a comfortable life profiting from the experience.

Since then, Lorena Gallo, has started a non-profit, Lorena’s Red Wagon, that helps survivors of domestic violence. She is a strong survivor that has turned a terrible night into good.

Let’s do the same. Bobbitt is the last name of a rapist and domestic abuser that should not be immortalized anywhere, not the least being scientific literature. Have we been guilty of that here at DSN? Yes. Can we change the future? Yes. By the time this article is to be published, I will have gone through all posts with the words “Bobbitt Worm” and replace name with Sand Striker, and linking back to this article. I encourage others to do the same.

Because that name needs to be buried in the sand like Eunice aphroditois last snack.

Want to do more? You can donate to an organization that works to end domestic violence and support survivors. Find your local list here at https://nnedv.org/content/state-u-s-territory-coalitions/

The post This marine worm is called the Sand Striker 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.

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.

Using computer art magic, Armand Dijcks has turned the still photographs of Ray Collins into wonderful kinetic images of waves. Turn on full screen. Press play. Be soothed. Calm out.

The post Morning Zen: The infinite waves of Ray Collins first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Rebecca marched in Falmouth

Jarrett marched in BostonCraig marched in New Orleans

Douglas marched in Berkeley*

* Douglas’s sign is a quote from the Life Aquatic

Holly marched in Riverside

Kim marched in Seattle

Alex marched in spirit

And if you didn’t march? This.

In case anyone needs to hear this: you're don't fail in your support of science if you didn't go to a Science March today.

— Matthew R Francis (@DrMRFrancis) April 22, 2017

The post We all Marched for Science first appeared on Deep Sea News.

#Landsat8 saw fine, bright filaments on shallow, super salty #Garabogazkol yesterday.
Bands of foam perhaps? This tweeter does not know. pic.twitter.com/ugSzIS5IGB

— NASA Ocean (@NASAOcean) April 5, 2017

This is the point in class where I raise my hand, jump up and down in my seat, and yell “ME! ME! I KNOW THE ANSWER!” Yes, the filaments contain foam. They also contain flotsam, jetsam, and all sorts of other floaty sea bits. But lines of buoyant sea stuff isn’t the only story. The lines have a greater tale to tell about about the water underneath them.

If you have two people run into each other, they hurt. If you have two surface currents run into each other, they dive. This is what is happening along each of these lines. Waters meet up, have no where to go, then get pushed downward. Unfortunately for the floaty bits, they are just too floaty to descend and accumulate at the surface where the water converges. Come to think of it, this process might also be forming the dust bunnies under my bed. But I digress….

There are all sorts of dynamic ocean processes that forces water to downwell and form these foamy filaments. Traveling waves can overtake slower water and push it downward. Rotating, wind-driven Langmuir cells can push water together in long sets of lines that are parallel to the wind. Lighter water overrides denser water at fronts between different water masses forming lines at there interface. ALL OF THIS COULD BE HAPPENING IN THIS LAGOON ADJACENT TO THE CASPIAN SEA RIGHT NOW!

But foamy streaks aren’t just for satellite imagery. You can see them in your very own local ocean or lake! Plus you get the added bonus of seeing all the other non-foam they contain like seaweed, algae, driftwood, sea ice and all the sea life clumps of floaty stuff attract. Like a college student who has maybe had one too many, go forth and streak ocean, go forth.

The post If you love geophysical fluid dynamics, then you will love these foamy streaks in a lagoon first appeared on Deep Sea News.

No shit, Sherlock. A staggering achievement – fishing for a 2m thing in 5000m water with a 10,000m line … very, very well done. https://t.co/gvKiU23H9B

— Sheldon Bacon (@sheldonbacon) March 10, 2017

I could not have said it better myself. Last weekend the wire cable from which the CTD is suspended on the RRS James Cook snapped, sending the entire thing to the bottom of the sea. Even worse, the crew had strapped 32 additional instruments onto the cage to calibrate them for the upcoming mooring deployment! I have no doubt the language onboard was extraordinary in that moment. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed in the 55 hours that followed and the entire cage was recovered. THE ENTIRE THING.

This is just an incredible story that demonstrates the resourcefulness of the people who work on oceanographic research ships. Read the whole story (and more about the RAPID expedition) at  https://rapidexpedition2017.blogspot.co.uk/

The post How to recover when something goes very, very wrong at sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Do you eat salmon, shellfish or even McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish? NOAA works with fisheries to manage these resources so you can eat safe seafood tonight and tomorrow too.

Did you turn on the light in your house? NOAA provides the information so that the 15% of power that comes from renewable resources gets to customers.

Was your last vacation on a cruise ship? NOAA provided the data so you had a vacation not a re-creation of Titanic.

You are not alone. Both the general public and private business use NOAA products to help make our way of life better, RIGHT NOW. That includes nearly 1/3 OF THE US GDP. And let’s not forget how the military uses this information to keep troops safe and their operations effective.

The proposed 17% budget cut to NOAA will affect all these resources. If you like having these services in you life, then make sure you let your congress person know you use them, you need them, and you want them before they vote on the budget. (UPDATE: Links and script to call your representative with at the bottom of the page)

Additional reading

Four ways NOAA benefits your life today

White House proposes steep budget cut to leading climate science agency

2016 NOAA Chief Scientist Annual Report

Matthew Garcia explains how NOAA makes a 1000:1 return on investment

Southern Fried Science: Monday Morning Salvage Call your representative

Two Surprising Facts about NOAA

UPDATE: How to contact your Representative and tell them you care (thanks @southernfriedscience)

1. Find out who YOUR representatives are here http://www.house.gov/htbin/findrep and https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
2. Call them with this script.

Hello,

My name is [NAME] and I am a constituent of [CONGRESSPERSON/SENATOR].

I’m calling to ask [CONGRESSPERSON/SENATOR] to oppose any reduction in the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA provides essential services to the American people, including weather services, coastal resilience, hurricane monitoring, and fisheries management. Programs like SeaGrant are the lifeblood of coastal communities, providing education, job training, and research grants to fund local development. NOAA’s Hurricane Center is critical for tracking hurricanes. One-third of the US economy relies upon services provided by NOAA. Any reduction in NOAA’s budget would be catastrophic to the United States’ coastal economy.

Thank you.

If your livelihood depends on NOAA, consider adding “I am a [FISHERMAN/BUSINESS OWNER/AQUACULTURIST/ETC] in [CONGRESSPERSON/SENATOR]’s district and my livelihood and family depend on the services that NOAA provides.”

Kim Martini was a postdoctoral fellow from 2013-2016 at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO), a NOAA Cooperative Institute at the University of Washington. Kim currently is a Senior Oceanographer at Sea-Bird Scientific providing oceanographic sensors and systems to NOAA.

The post The importance of being NOAA first appeared on Deep Sea News.