Hurricane Dolly caused plenty of misfortune, as downpours and flooding forced hundreds of people from their homes in Texas and New Mexico. But if there’s any kind of positive side to a natural disaster, it could be that Dolly might have decreased the size of the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone.
The dead zone starts near the Mississippi River delta and extends toward the Texas coast. Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus wash into the river via runoff and are carried to the gulf, where their decomposition uses up oxygen. Also, the river’s freshwater and the gulf’s saltwater don’t mix well and tend to form layers, which can keep oxygen from getting to the bottom of the gulf. That creates the dead zone—an area of low-oxygen water where most marine creatures can’t live.
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Earlier this month, DISCOVER covered the North Pacific Gyre, a vast dump of plastic and garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the researchers who sailed to the middle of the ocean aboard the Alguita to study it. Now, to further publicize this eco-disaster, three scientists are sailing back to the gyre, but this time aboard a slightly less luxurious boat—a raft built of 15,000 plastic bottles, and part of a Cessna.
The JUNK raft set sail from Southern California on June 1, bound for Hawaii, carrying Marcus Eriksen and two colleagues. You can watch their progress here or read about it on their blog. Making a pace of about 50 miles a day, they hope to reach Hawaii by mid-to-late August.
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Perhaps Lonesome George should now be called Curious George.
The giant Galapagos tortoise earned his moniker by keeping to himself for most of his 36 years of captivity at the Charles Darwin Research Station. Now, all of the sudden, George appears to have broken out of his solitude and mated with one of the two females at the station that come from a similar species of Galapagos tortoise.
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When we wrote about the rash of dolphin deaths in Cornwall, England last month, it seemed like a sad aberration. But now British scientists are saying that dolphins and other cetaceans like porpoises have been dying at a dramatically higher rate this decade, and they are pointing the finger at trawler fishing as the main culprit.
According to the British study, only about 50 cetaceans washed up in Cornwall per year during the 1980s, but in the 2000s that number has risen to between 100 and 250. Brendan Godley from the University of Exeter says that at least 61 percent of the cetaceans found in Cornwall had been caught in fishing trawler nets and died.
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Humans, for the most part, are either right-handed or left handed. But how do you find out if an eight-armed creature has a preferred limb? You give it a Rubik’s Cube.
Today, marine biologists from Sea Life Centres, a group of aquatic attractions scattered across Europe, will begin a month-long observation of the octopus’ grabbing habits. By throwing toys—including Rubik’s Cubes—and food into the tank, the researchers hope to see whether octopuses favor one arm or one side of their body when reaching for things, or whether they are in fact “octidextrous” and have no preference.
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Another month, another peculiar dolphin story.
In June we wrote about the 26 dolphins that died after washing up on the shore in Southwestern England; some scientists called the event a mass suicide, and British newspapers wondered if there was a connection to the war games the Royal Navy had been playing in the area. Now, the U.S. has its own dolphin weirdness—nobody can figure out how to make them leave New Jersey.
Three weeks ago, 15 bottlenose dolphins decided to hang out in the Shrewsbury River near the Jersey shore. They haven’t left yet, and crowds have been gathering to see the marine creatures. But with Independence Day celebrations coming, officials are worried that people boating on the river to watch fireworks displays could scare or hurt the dolphins, and they’ve been trying to decide how to get rid of them.
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Call it a happy accident: Phytoplankton in tropical areas of the Atlantic Ocean may be helping to break down greenhouse gases.
After analyzing data gathered by airplane and in a lab at Cape Verde, a chain of Atlantic islands not far from West Africa, a team of British researchers was pleased but puzzled to find that ozone in the atmosphere near the islands had decreased 50 percent more than climate modelers had predicted. The reason, they think, is that phytoplankton produce chemicals like bromine monoxide and iodine monoxide that get pulled up into the atmosphere by all the water vapor that evaporates in a hot climate like Cape Verde. Once aloft in the low atmosphere, these chemicals can break apart ozone molecules. Not only that, says Alastair Lewis, of the U.K.’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science, but the byproducts of that first chemical reaction then broke down methane, a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, into non-harmful components.
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More than two dozen dolphins bit the dust in the U.K. on Monday by intentionally beaching themselves, and possible explanations for this bizarre behavior have been flying around ever since.
The morbid scene happened in Cornwall, the far southwestern tip of England. One of the leading researchers, Vic Simpson of the nearby Wildlife Veterinary Investigation Centre, said the dolphin disaster could have been a mass suicide, reminiscent of some kind of cryptic cult. According to the Daily Mail, some Cornwall residents helped a few of the 26 dolphins back into the water, only to see the suicidal marine mammals intentionally beach themselves again. The dolphins had inhaled mud that clogged their lungs and stomachs, but Simpson could offer no reason why they would do this, other than some kind of crazed panic.
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It can be annoying to emerge from a nice dip in the ocean just to reapply your sunscreen after it washed away in the surf. But according to a team of Italian scientists led by Roberto Danovaro, a mere annoyance for us could be a sign of doom for coral reefs.
Corals exist in symbiosis with a kind of algae called zooxanthellae; the two organisms can’t live without each other. The algae, however, don’t take well to sunscreen, since they need UV light—without it, a virus that’s normally latent in the unicellular organisms starts to go wild and kill them. Without the algae, corals have nothing to eat and no means of maintaining their vibrant color. They become “bleached,” an obvious visual sign that the reef is in trouble.
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The earth’s average temperature rose steadily throughout the 20th century, with only a few short blasts of cooling recorded in the climate data. But if a team of scientists led by David Thompson at Colorado State University is correct, one of the largest recorded cool-downs ever documented might have never happened. How did the mistake occur? According to Thompson, through a bucket blunder.
Scientists had always struggled to find a physical cause of the 0.3 °C drop in global temperature around 1945, right at the end of World War II. But according to Thompson, the measured cooling happened because of cross-cultural confusion. During the war, Americans sailors measured the sea surface temperatures by testing water their ship took in to cool its engines. But when the British retook most of the recording responsibility in 1945, they simply drew buckets of ocean water and tested them outside. The difference between the warm engine room where the Americans tested and the non-insulated British buckets accounts for temperature drop in the record, Thompson says.
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