all oceans stories

Deep-sea sediments could safely store man-made carbon dioxide

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:13:59 -0400

An innovative solution for the man-made carbon dioxide fouling our skies could rest far beneath the surface of the ocean, say scientists at Harvard University. They've found that deep-sea sediments could provide a virtually unlimited and permanent reservoir for this gas that has been a primary driver of global climate change in recent decades, and estimate that seafloor sediments within U.S. territory are vast enough to store the nation's carbon dioxide emissions for thousands of years to come.

Looking for the meaning of life at the bottom of the sea

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:29:39 -0400

Charles Langmuir, Harvard professor of geochemistry, loves going to sea. "It's tremendously stimulating, wonderful, exciting, and eye-opening," he says enthusiastically. "Every time I've gone since 1984, I've seen things I've never seen before. Sometimes, they're things nobody has ever seen before. Teams of people keep the work going seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Their level of output and discovery is unmatched by anything that takes place in laboratories on land. There are no committee meetings; you don't have to drive anywhere. The sunrises, sunsets, and star-filled nights are fabulous, so are the animals you see, from jellyfish to whales." Langmuir has explored volcanic ridges and rifts on the floors of four oceans.

Oceans key to global warming

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:19:55 -0400

One of the largest unknowns about global warming is, How much of an overload of man-made carbon dioxide can the Earth take?

Marine science expert monitoring Boston Harbor pollution

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:04:59 -0400

Harvard researcher James Shine is currently researching pollutants in the sediment of Boston Harbor and other harbors. He is crafting criteria for the Environmental Protection Agency that would measure pollution by amounts in sediment, not just in the water itself, giving a more accurate picture of the ecosystem. When he was in graduate school, "nobody really knew how Boston Harbor or Massachusetts Bay functioned," said Shine, now an assistant professor of aquatic chemistry in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health "Scientists were needed, and I was interested in learning how science is used to make decisions about the environment." Today Shine is an expert on the harbor that sparked his academic career, and his knowledge is in demand now more than ever as the Boston Harbor cleanup project enters a new and somewhat controversial stage that could affect the entire Massachusetts Bay.

Ocean weather prediction system developed

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:05:03 -0400

Allan Robinson has been working on a system to predict weather within the oceans since the early 1980s. Computers in his laboratory at Harvard University are crammed with maps and models of the flows, temperatures, chemistry, and biology of watery depths and shallows around the globe. The year before the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, for instance, Robinson and his colleagues had thoroughly explored coastal waters off Massachusetts in an effort to forecast the best places for commercial fishing. That information enabled the professor to help search teams locate crash victims. Robinson sees searches for victims of airplane and ship crashes as only one "product" tailored from a generic cloth that covers the global ocean from its tidal shallows to its cold, dark depths.

Archaeology team helps find oldest deep-sea shipwrecks

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:10:31 -0400

About 2,700 years ago, two Phoenician ships sank to the Mediterranean's muddy bottom, where they lay upright, preserved in the relative stillness and tremendous pressure of the deep, dark waters. They were found 1,000 feet down in June 1999 by a team made up of Harvard archaeologists led by Lawrence Stager, Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel, and a crew from the Connecticut-based Institute for Exploration, headed by oceanographer Robert Ballard. Because many shallow-water wrecks have been found, historians and archaeologists believed that ancient sailors preferred routes that hugged the coastline. Modern technology, however, is opening a new field of deep-water archaeology, which is showing that ancient sailors did indeed venture far from shore.

El Nino found to be 124,000 years old

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:11:27 -0400

Records preserved in corals from Indonesia reveal that El Niño was causing severe weather even before the last ice age began, when the climate apparently was like it was for most of the 20th century. "No question about it; there were El Niños that long ago," says Daniel Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences. "The finding suggests that El Niños are much more stable than we ever thought." Evidence of droughts and unusually wet weather, chemically etched into ancient reefs, show changes every three to seven years, a pattern that Schrag finds "remarkably similar" to those of El Niños from 1856 to 1976. After that, a sudden change occurred. Since 1976, the pattern looks completely different, with El Niño events appearing faster and stronger.