I’ve been raising the call on twitter, but recently I noticed that the image resolution of the image in question, downloaded from The Ocean Cleanup’s website, has changed. The image I downloaded yesterday was a higher resolution than the image I downloaded this morning. To help people better understand the issue, below I have provided the original high res image from The Ocean Cleanup (note it was not originally a PDF, but that’s the only file format I could export it to that wouldn’t be automatically compressed by WordPress. Happy to email the original jpg to anyone interested).

The Ocean Cleanup’s original high-resolution image as PDF: full_res_ocean_cleanup

The post The Ocean Cleanup and Floating Marine Life first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On Thursday, The Ocean Cleanup published a blog post in reply to my concerns. I was incredibly hopeful up until this point that they would listen. After all, my efforts to raise awareness have been met with tremendous support from fellow scientists and the general public.

I’m not going to lie, the frustration I felt when reading their response was real and heavy. I love this ecosystem, I wouldn’t be putting myself out there if I didn’t. But their response felt profoundly dismissive, not only of me, but of the scientific evidence. So this is my second attempt at explaining to The Ocean Cleanup, and to its funders, why it’s logic is flawed, and why it is putting entire species and whole ecosystems at risk as a result.

1) Boyan Slat and The Ocean Cleanup claim floating animals are ubiquitous.

Here are the exact words of their blog post reply, with the exact studies they reference, and what those exact studies actually say.

The studies they reference almost immediately prove them wrong. The third sentence of the first study says, “Analyses of neustonic concentration and population structure showed regional and temporal differences in the fauna.” And the second study states: “The present study represents an original insight into the structure of the neuston community in the Mediterranean Sea, providing strong evidence of the spatial variability of its diversity patterns.”

Perhaps The Ocean Cleanup and Boyan Slat meant to point out that some species are mentioned in both papers. But species identification for poorly-known invertebrates is notoriously difficult. Often biologists will unknowingly use the same species name for many similar species. Only when we study them more do we realize our oversight. In fact, two newly discovered blue sea dragons were only described in 2014, before this time they were all called by one name. Even worse, these two species are only found in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, exactly where The Ocean Cleanup plans to launch their massive fleet.

To sum it all up? No matter how you look at it, neuston are not ubiquitous.

Now, let’s go a step further.

Why has The Ocean Cleanup been so obsessed with documenting the distribution of plastics in the ocean? Because they know floating objects are not ubiquitous. Why they understand this fact for plastic, yet fail to grasp it for floating animals, is beyond me.

2) Boyan Slat and The Ocean Cleanup claim they will be in only one small spot in the ocean, so they will not have a big impact on floating animals.

But wait, are they admitting they will only clean this small spot of the ocean? No. They are not.

They’re not just working in a small spot of the ocean. They’re working in very special small spots. These spots in the ocean are akin to giant whirlpools, called gyres. Just like the whirlpool in your kitchen sink, gyres spin on a massive scale, concentrating objects at the surface, just like soap bubbles going down the drain. The Ocean Cleanup is focusing on these gyres because floating objects collect in them.

So let’s look at their logic again: The Ocean Cleanup is intentionally working where floating objects are most concentrated. They claim they that they will remove 90% of ocean plastic by 2040, even while working in these tiny spots, because much of the ocean’s surface plastics are funneled into these regions at some point.

If you are collecting plastic that is continually entering the ocean by using these spots, you will also be collecting neuston even if they are continuously reproducing.

Some animals, like the two new species of blue sea dragon, have only been found in the gyres. Harvest plastic from one gyre, potentially harvest two newly discovered species.

3) Boyan Slat and The Ocean Cleanup claim that floating life likely multiplies quickly, so it’ll be ok.

They justify this by talking about bacteria. It’s true: Some floating bacteria do reproduce quickly. Animals are not bacteria. We do not know how long it takes floating animals to reproduce. But let’s say they do reproduce quickly. Does that mean there is no problem? No.

Quick reproduction may help floating animals overcome destructive storms, which can kill floating life. But storms pass. The Ocean Cleanup’s proposed fleet of 60 systems in the open ocean are not storms. They are intended to be at sea for years. They will not pass.

4) Boyan Slat and The Ocean Cleanup claim they are collecting lots of data on these issues.

But who are the biologists performing this work? I offered to speak with biologists at The Ocean Cleanup nearly a month ago, and was placed in touch with the person who conducted the Environmental Impact Assessment. We had a thoughtful exchange, but he informed me that he’s not part of the actual Ocean Cleanup team, and doesn’t work for them. If The Ocean Cleanup is so open to feedback, why aren’t they actually talking to people with the greatest concerns for the ecosystem?

5) Boyan Slat and The Ocean Cleanup claims also reveal something else:

They knew about floating animals, and they know we need more data, yet they still argue that there is no scientific basis for environmental concern. In his blog post Boyan Slat defends his Environmental Impact Assessment by saying “all species that have previously been observed near the deployment site of our cleanup system are referenced [in a table of the Environmental Impact Assessment].” Of course, this is not true: nowhere in his EIA or in his post does he mention the two species of blue sea dragon found only in his deployment area. Further, the fact that some floating animals were in a table only proves that they have known about the issue of floating surface life for some time.

He also attempts to brush aside some of the best information we have: a massive ocean survey of floating animals conducted by USSR scientist Savilov, which shows 7 distinct floating ecosystems, including one unique ecosystem found right where The Ocean Cleanup intends to work. Yet Boyan Slat says that “the validity of using a single, 51-year-old source could be questioned,” before going on to justify why it’s not worth worrying about anyway (because neuston are “ubiquitous”). But this is exactly my point: we don’t have good modern data. Why does The Ocean Cleanup brush off the data we do have?

In summary: The Ocean Cleanup’s claims only reiterate what we already know: neuston are not ubiquitous. Neuston may be concentrated where The Ocean Cleanup wants to work, due to the same physical forces that concentrate plastic. The life cycles of floating animals are poorly understood and The Ocean Cleanup may have major negative consequences on this ecosystem.

Far from alleviating my concerns, Boyan Slat’s reply to my article only increases my alarm. The Ocean Cleanup underestimates the negative impacts they will have and are not looking at the scientific evidence to the contrary.

The concerns of myself and others are very well-founded, Mr. Slat. You may be putting whole ecosystems at risk, and threatening species that were only recently discovered. Any attempt to suggest a “lack of scientific basis” for our claims only serves to prove what we’re already suggesting: that you’re not listening to scientists, and that you may be endangering an entire ecosystem as a result.

The post The Ocean Cleanup struggles to prove it will not harm sea life first appeared on Deep Sea News.

https://youtu.be/FuMxVu9F7XU?t=10s

Check out this incredible video of jellyfishing (aka ‘jellyballing’). The first part of the video, with the brown-colored jellyfish, is from the US state of Georgia, where jellyfishing is one of the state’s largest fisheries. The second part of the video, with the blue jellyfish, is from the Gulf of California, Mexico. And the third video, with the man and the net…well I’m not actually sure where that’s from. Possibly South America.

In all three cases the species being harvested is supposedly the ‘cannonball jellyfish’ Stomolophus meleagris. However, recent work done scientist Dr. Liza Gómez Daglio is shaking this idea up a bit: using DNA, she discovered there are at least six undescribed species of cannonball jelly, possibly more (paper).

We don’t actually know the species boundaries for all these different cannonball jellies, so it’s hard to say if some species are being fished more than others. Though the blue ones vs brown ones are clearly very different.

Regardless of species or color, nearly all of the jellyfish caught in the US are shipped overseas to Asian markets, where people enjoy jellyfish in a variety of different dishes. Personally, I find jellyfish to be a bit like eating chicken cartilage crossed with rubber bands. While it may be an acquired taste, clearly many people have it: a recent paper reports that “Japan has imported 5400–10000 tons of jellyfish products per year, valued at about 25.5 million US dollars, annually from the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Myanmar” (paper).

Thousands of tons of jellyfish is a lot by any measure. But how many tons of jelly are caught in the Americas is harder to say. Scientists have no idea what impact, if any, jellyfishing has on jelly populations here in the US, particularly for undescribed cannonball species. In China, fisheries experts bump up the jelly population by ‘seeding’ wild jelly stocks with hundreds of millions of baby jellies each year. That’s right: China actually adds hundreds of millions of jellyfish to their coastal waters annually. Good jelly harvesting and culturing practices may help make their jellyfishery sustainable over the long term, while feeding demand for these crunchy, rubber band-esq invertebrates. With more information on the US cannonball species, perhaps we could develop similar conservation measures to help preserve and protect our local species, while also supporting local fisherman.

Regardless of how we protect our local species, I doubt jellyfish will become a popular snack here in the US anytime soon. While I’d love to catch jellyfish by the boatload, when it comes to eating jellyfish, my personal favorite is still the Swedish kind.

The post Jellyfish fishing: A multi-million dollar industry first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For more updates on my research, follow along at jellybiologist.com, or on twitter @RebeccaRHelm

As a scientist, I love jellyfish, and I suffer for it. Up until a few years ago, I had no way of knowing exactly where or when the jellyfish I study would appear. So I traveled to Washington and France and Florida looking for them, and more often than not, came up empty handed. The most frustrating part of all this travel was that I had all the species I needed right at home, but couldn’t use them. That’s because jellyfish, like butterflies, are the last stage in a complicated life cycle. Jellyfish have a stage that’s analogous to a caterpillar, termed a ‘polyp’, which lives happily in the lab. So imagine studying butterflies, and having all the caterpillar you need, expect none of them will metamorphose. No matter how hard you try to convince them, they just sit there eating leaves, and so you travel all around the world to find and study the actual butterflies. That is the exact position researchers and aquarists have been in with jellyfish.

This is why I’m so excited to share with you a paper I just published in PLOS ONE on a simple method for triggering metamorphosis in a huge variety of jellyfish species. Now, rather than traveling halfway around the globe, scientists can add a couple drops of a special compound to their polyp tank, and have jellyfish to study in under a week! I hope this work will be helpful to many different kinds of jelly-lovers, form biologists to aquarists and beyond.

This research started out of frustration. I’d been traveling for over two years looking for the best species to study, and was consistently coming up short. I wanted to better understand the process of metamorphosis, called ‘strobilation’, but I needed to find a species that would easily strobilate in captivity. No luck. And so one day, rather than going out to look for jellies,  I decided it was time to spend a couple months indoors, to test out a hair-brained idea that was all together different.

Throughout the decades, a handful of scientist have recorded that this-or-that chemical, when added to water with this-or-that polyps species, will trigger strobilation. Most of these papers stretch back to the 70’s and earlier, and most have been largely forgotten. But I decided it was time to revisit those old studies, and test out different chemicals. The experiments were messy and quirky–I had a bunch of chemicals, jars, and polyps all soaking in different substances for different lengths of time–but I remember the exact moment when I got my first breakthrough.

I carried a small dish of polyps, which had been soaking in a type of chemical called an ‘indole’, to the microscope. I was working alone in the lab, and I was feeling pretty discouraged. It’d been two weeks of stirring up different chemical solutions, doling them out in precise proportions, and checking every single day for signs that the little polyps had begun metamorphosis. Nothing. But when I looked down at the polyps soaking in indoles…well, I think my lab notebook can express it better than I can (there was, um…some language):

Each polyp had formed a small ring below the tentacles. This ring was the first sign of metamorphosis. Each ring would eventually grow to be a tiny jellyfish (the pictures at the top of this post are the same animals I saw that day!) This species is the Pacific sea nettle, but the same compound also worked for species from the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Almost every species I tried would dutifully metamorphose into a tiny jellyfish.

Not only did this open up a whole new research avenue for me, it has become the foundation for my career. Now we can have tiny jellyfish of almost any species in under a week. Even box jellies!

But here’s a result that’s got me head scratching: one type of polyp, from a crown jellyfish, didn’t strobilate with the indoles. I tried all sorts of different combinations of conditions, nothing worked. But there are a couple really cool things about crown jellies that may explain why they didn’t respond. First, the polyp lives in a small tube, unlike any other species. So it’s possible the compound didn’t work because the polyp is mostly tucked away behind a barrier. But the second cool thing about this species is that it’s a very distant cousin of most of the species that I studied. So it is possible that over evolutionary time it evolved a slightly different biochemistry, which makes it insensitive to indoles. Similar to the way catnip gets cats high, but doesn’t have the same impact on people. Indoles works well on many related species of jellies, but not so well on a distant relative.

I’m now working on figuring out the reason why indoles works so well for some species. What genes might this compound help turn on and off? By studying metamorphosis in jellyfish, I hope to better understand how metamorphosis evolved over long time scales. For example, are there genetic similarities of metamorphosis between frogs, butterflies, and jellies?

Those results are still pending. For now, I’m enjoying all the new jellies we have growing in the lab. And I hope these results can be helpful to all those seeking to learn more about jellyfish in this coming new year!

Paper:

Rebecca R. Helm & Casey W. Dunn (2017). Indoles induce metamorphosis in a broad diversity of jellyfish, but not in a crown jelly (Coronatae). PLOS ONE 12(12): e0188601. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0188601

The post New Research Reveals How to Easily Grow Jellyfish In Captivity first appeared on Deep Sea News.

And luckily for us, Roxanne posts all of her adventures as they happen on her Istagram and Twitter feeds. Even better—Roxanne is currently on an expedition to explore the deep-sea Gulf of California with Nautilus Live, which is live broadcasting all of its dives for the world to watch. So you too can follow Roxanne and the octonaut crew on their real-life mission of discovery. As they say on the show: Octonauts, let’s do this!

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The #octonauts are back at it! Join us with @nautiluslive as we explore new vent and seep sites off the coast of Mexico. Dives will start in a few days!

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 19, 2017 at 5:10am PDT

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Arrived at the ship and getting settled into the snazzy top bunk

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 19, 2017 at 5:06pm PDT

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The #octonauts are steaming to station with @nautiluslive

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 20, 2017 at 4:57pm PDT

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Working hard, processing samples with @nautiluslive

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 22, 2017 at 2:30pm PDT

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#octonauts #roxbscience

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 8, 2016 at 2:37pm PDT

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Look closely at the boxing glove. The #octonauts are psyched about this gup! #roxbscience

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 8, 2016 at 10:38am PDT

The post When real-life marine biologist and mom goes to sea, she takes the octonauts with her first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Giant squid are the sea’s best monsters, tentacles down. For evidence we need look no further than the logo of this very website. But did you know that our beloved Architeuthis descends from a venerable line of sea monsters—that Archy’s ancestors, in fact, may have been the first animals ever to merit the name “monster”?

The phrase “prehistoric sea monster” might summon to mind an ichthyosaur or megalodon, but these are johnny-come-latelies to the underwater scene. Megalodon showed up a mere 23 million years ago. Ichthyosaurs evolved closer to 250 million years ago, which may seem pretty old (okay, it is) until you consider the age of the first cephalopod: 450 million years.

I’ll admit that initially cephalopods were no monsters. Snail-like, they lived inside shells that measured a few centimeters at most. But these shells contained a remarkable evolutionary innovation: sealed-off chambers that could be drained of fluid and filled with buoyant gas.

This buoyancy freed cephalopods from the constraints of their heavy shells, allowing them to reach stupendous sizes. No matter how big the shell grew, its weight was automatically offset by more gas-filled chambers.

Endoceras giganteum, for example, grew up to 3.5 meters, longer than a basketball hoop is tall. It was the biggest animal the world had yet seen. I feel confident calling this 450-million-year-old beast one of the planet’s first monsters.

But how did we get from Endoceras to Architeuthis? Is one a direct ancestor of the other, or are they distant cousins n-times-removed? And what became of that fantastic shell?

We need a family tree for Endoceras, Architeuthis, and everything in between—in other words, a cephalopod phylogeny. For over a century, scientists have been working to reconstruct such a phylogeny with evidence from fossils, embryos, DNA and more. I made an attempt to synthesize the most recent work into a single drawing, with lots of advice from paleontologists and the helping hand of an artist who polished my messy sketchwork (and put in those friendly eyes).

Endoceras was one of the Orthocerida, which you can find down in the Ordovician, in the lower right. Today’s giant squid take pride of place—with their smaller siblings—top and center. As for the rest…

From Cambrian through Silurian times, cephalopods all wore their shells on the outside of their bodies, just like every other self-respecting mollusk. The nautiloids continued that decorous habit to the present day. Another externally-shelled group, the ammonoids, explored every bizarre baroque extreme of shell coiling and ornamentation before getting mass-extincted alongside the dinosaurs.

What remains are the coleoids—the only group of cephalopods in which evolution sheathed the shell, burying hard structure inside a soft body.

At first, this internal shell was still massive and still full of buoyant chambers, as in the early coleoid Hematites. But over time natural selection (carried out by hungry fish, for the most part) favored smaller, simpler shells.

Now, cuttlefish and ram’s horn squid are the only modern coleoids to retain the hard calcium and buoyant chambers of their ancestors. The internal shells of octopuses have evolved into mere vestiges.

And squid? Well, the shell remnant of a squid has no chambers and no calcium. But it runs the full length of the body, from head to fin-tip, and it offers support to the powerful muscles that carry these modern monsters through the sea. Though unarmored, Architeuthis is most likely faster and far more agile than Endoceras could ever have dreamed of being.

So which one would you rather meet in a dark alley?

The post How the Squid Lost Its Shell 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.

Imagine you are a Janthina snail, living on the surface of the open ocean, clinging to the edge of a raft. Miles of emptiness all around. In the day, rays of sunlight spear through the water, coming to a point so far below you can no longer see where they end. At night everything is black, you can almost feel the emptiness like a pressure, tingling on your skin. You cling to your raft as if your life depended on it, and it does. You don’t know how to swim.

You created the life raft you cling to—a collection of bubbles that keep you afloat. Your thin purple shell is heavy, and your body stout, if you let go you will will sink: first through the warm surface waters, and then the ocean will grow rapidly cold, light will fade and the pressure grow, it will take over two hours for your corps to hit the seafloor with a soft thud and a puff of muddy water. And so you hold on, and you build.

Your snail body is especially equipped to handle this strange world your ancestors somehow found themselves floating into. When you can, and when there’s need, you dip your head and upper body into the air. You curl your slimy underbelly into a ball, trapping a bubble and wrapping it in a layer of thick mucous. Carefully, you uncurl and stick this new bubble to your raft. Your snail slime hardens to a stiff rubbery texture, not easily popped. Sometimes your raft bumps into your prey— blue button jellies or Portuguese man-of-war— but you can’t steer or choose your direction out here in the open ocean, so much of the time, you simply wait. But you did not always live this way.

When you were young you lived below the surface, in the gentle embrace of the sea. You were free to move and hunt as you pleased. Your body was different, tender and round with a miniscule cup-shaped shell that covered your frame, and two small ‘wings’ that you used to swim. But it didn’t last. First, your vision went dim. Then you eyes began to break down, and blindness overtook you. Next, your ability to sense direction faltered, up and down became indistinguishable. No one knows quite how you made it to the surface. Some say you made a parachute of mucous that you used to sail slowly upwards. In the most poetic telling, you built yourself a minute bouquet of bubbles, clustered together at the end of a long string, like a handful of balloons. Blind and disoriented, you floated up into the unknown.

And then you hit something. The first boundary you’d ever felt—the soft rolling surface of the sea. Here you would complete your transformation into a young violet snail. Floating, unable to steer, you would have no need for eyes, no need for a sense of direction. This is where you would spend the rest of your life: at the mercy of the elements, suspended above the abyss.

Reading about the violet snail on that dark winter night, its life felt so precarious, so sad. But my friend Steve Haddock proposed another way of looking at things: one completely flipped around, literally. What if Janthina isn’t hanging over the abyss at all? There’s this scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where the ship flips upside down, and instead of sailing on the ocean, the ship sails on the sky. Perhaps to Janthina, the world is just like this. Instead of clinging to a raft, one mistake away from sinking, Janthina has a different view. Maybe to this snail, so perfectly adapted to life on the water’s surface, it’s not hanging upside down over the abyss, but instead resting right-side up on the top of the sky

Bibliography
Dan Laursen (1953) The Genus Ianthina: A Monograph.

Carol M. Lalli, Ronald W. Gilmer (1989). Pelagic Snails: The Biology of Holoplanktonic Gastropod Mollusks.

The post The harrowing life of the violet snail first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The Bakken Sea was unlike any ecosystem that exists today. Now, instead of the dry plains of North Dakota, imagine floating on the surface of this sea about 380 million years ago. The evening air is moist and musty, the sinking sun is dipping low, the sunset a wash of muted colors gleaming off crumpled black waves. Algae near the surface collect the last rays of sunlight, combining light with water and carbon dioxide to make organic matter. A strange collection of prehistoric animals feed on these algae (and each other) here at the sea’s surface, but to truly understand the Bakken, we must go underneath.

Standing underwater, on the Bakken seabed, there is no visible life. There is almost no oxygen in the water around you, transforming the seabed into a “dead zone.” You are at the bottom of a large basin—a bowl in the ocean floor nearly 400 miles wide . As the struggles of life play out in the waters above, the old, sick and defeated sink to their graves on the seabed. But without oxygen, they do not fully decompose, and nothing ventures this deep to scavenge upon their carcasses. Instead, billions upon billions of bodies–mostly algae but some larger creatures, too–slowly amass on the seafloor, forming a layer of organic matter known as the ‘lower Bakken.’

Fast forward through geologic time several million of years into the future: the sea level rapidly drops, and the basin becomes shallow with quick-moving currents. Sediment tumbles in from the surrounding mountain ranges. A layer of sandy, porous rock that covers and buries the layer of bodies. This sandy layer is knows as the ‘middle Bakken.’ Fast forward one more time: the sea rises again, and the first stage repeats, blanketing the seabed once more in dead remains, this is the ‘upper Bakken.’

These three layers—the lower, middle and upper Bakken—are then covered by sand and rock, compressed, and heated in a perfect combination of conditions that geologists refer to as an ‘Oil Kitchen.’ Slowly, this kitchen converts the Bakken carcasses into a diverse collection of gases and complex molecules called hydrocarbons–the fossils that make our fuel [2].

The lower and upper Bakken layers are sludgy and dense, difficult to drill into. But as the remains in these layers liquify, their old resting places crack open under the extreme weight and pressure . The bodies of these ancient dead sea creatures, long immobilized in their graves, now move again: the liquids of the lower and upper Bakken layers seep into the spongy middle Bakken layer. It is from this middle layer that, millions of years later, that they will be exhumed.

To harvest fossil fuels from the Bakken reserve, we drill wells thousands of feet down into the middle layer, and then extend them an additional two miles horizontally, maximizing the amount of oil we can harvest (Continental Resources, PDF). A high pressure mix of sand and water, called ‘proppant,’ is pumped in, fracturing the rock and opening small pockets of oil, which ooze through the cracks and are captured in the well.

Before the beginning of this month, this ‘crude oil’ was pumped into trucks or trains, destined for refineries. But as of June 1st, it instead enters the Dakota Access Pipeline–traversing multiple states, eventually destined for national or international refineries. At refineries, the ancient ocean remains of the Bakken Sea will be processed into the oil in your car, gas in your tank, and plastic lid on your morning coffee cup. Transporting oil via pipeline will potentially reduce the risks and costs associated with overland transport. But the 1,172  miles of pipeline raise a suite of new humanitarian and environmental concerns, including possible spills at important water sources like Lake Oahe, and destruction of sacred sites associated with the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Protesters tried to stop the pipe’s construction, or have it move it to a new location. Just today, a federal judge ruled that proper environmental procedures were not followed before the pipeline was approved. But for now at least, this long stretch of pipe will be the primary way these remains march across the plains.

Back in in Williston, North Dakota, business is booming; this small community is undergoing an oil-fueled renaissance. After one last look around at the dry grassy expanse, you get back in your car, turn the key–the gas ignites, the combustion moves the oily gears, and drive away.

Additional information

[1] Depositional Facies And Petrophysical Analysis Of The Bakken Formation, Parshall Field, Mountrail County, North Dakota (http://geology.mines.edu/Bakken/NETL_DOE/DOE-Student_theses/Andrea_Simenson_THESIS.pdf)

[2] http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/Terms/o/oil_kitchen.aspx

The post The Ancient Ocean of the Dakota Access Pipeline first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Walking into Richard Harbison’s office was like walking into a wizard’s house. There were jars upon jars of strange, beautiful, and grotesque creatures, big and small, floating in different colored liquids, packed all around the room. And the books! Oh my gosh the books. Towers of them. Teetering on the flimsy foundations of old manuscripts and monographs–all olive green and crumbling around the corners. It was 2010, and I was nervous. I was nervous when my PhD advisor asked me to meet Richard and bring back some specimens. I was nervous on the drive over in my grad school’s big, white, smelly, mud-covered van. I was nervous wandering lost and anxious around the maze of a building Richard worked in. But now, peering into a blood-red jar with some thin-skinned dead thing inside, I was really nervous. For the record, when Richard walked in he also looked like a wizard. And of course, that look made sense, because he IS a legend of the open ocean research community. One of the founders of the field. But far from turning me into an owl, Richard took me in, under his wing, and taught me about the open ocean he studied.

And it is a truly remarkable place. Richard was a connoisseur of the beautiful and bizarre. As a pioneering expert on open ocean comb jellies, he traveled from pole to pole, open ocean to deep sea. He once spent a year of near perpetual daylight and snow, living in the Arctic during the Northern Hemisphere summer, and the Antarctic during the Southern Hemisphere summer. He also came up with the hare-brained idea of jumping off Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s (WHOI) perfectly good ship in the middle of the open ocean to see what lived out there. Along with his colleagues, he ushered in an age of open-ocean discovery at WHOI. Did I mention he’s one of the original discoverers of the “placenta/trash-bag jellyfish” Deepstaria reticulum?

Years ago, after he showed me around his lab, grumbling about being downsized to a smaller office, he took me out for sandwiches. All along the walk, he sung the praises of this particular pulled pork sandwich that I simply had to try, before I finally broke it to him that I didn’t eat meat. There was shock and dismay! Yet he still insisted on buying me a veggie burger while we talked about the life of an open ocean specialist. He seemed legitimately concerned that my lunch was, in fact, awful, and wouldn’t let the conversation go for too long before checking in on the state of my sandwich, asking if I’d changed my mind yet about the pulled pork. And you know what? I bet that pulled pork sandwich really was a thousand times better than my veggie burger…

After lunch we spent another couple of hours in his office, surrounded by all those jars and books, like monarchs surrounded by treasure. Even though I’d just started grad school, I felt like a colleague that day. I even remember disagreeing with him, and being so proud of that. I don’t remember exactly what we disagreed about, but he seemed genuinely amused by it. Like he’d finally succeeded in cracking my polite reserve and now the real fun would begin. He seemed to come alive with a good debate. It also says a lot about a senior scientist who can coax a new trainee into speaking their mind. It’s not easy, and it’s a rare gift that Richard possessed.

When it was time for me to leave, Richard loaded me up elbow to shoulder with old, invaluable monographs. Things that I could take home as I started my new career.

This is why the last few weeks have been full of reflection and joy and sadness. Richard passed away on March 22nd from cancer, and with him the world lost an amazing man, scientist, comb jelly lover, polyglot, chef extraordinaire, and sandwich connoisseur, in addition to husband, father of three, and devout Christian. He was a kind, cantankerous, adventurous soul. He helped me on my own scientific journey, not only by giving me the old crumbly monographs that still line my shelves, but by inspiring in me both wonder and courage. Thank you Richard, for the joy and awe you shared with me and the world.

You can read more about Richard’s amazing life and adventures at WHOI’s memorial site, here:

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7735&tid=7802&id=252449

Donations in his name can be made to John Wesley United Methodist Church, 270 Gifford Street, Falmouth, MA 02540.

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