Tag Archives: water

Scientists With Lots of Monitors Onboard Ship

photo of computer monitors onboard ship

Fun blog by Linds, a geophysicist, with fun name and tagline: PhD = Pretty huge Dork There’s no crying in grad school! I enjoy including some posts on scientists at work (and plan on trying to intentionally do more of that). The photo shows her office onboard ship – pretty impressive. I thought this monitor was cool.

The boat is a steel monster about 400 feet long. There’s three decks, with cabins, the galley and mess hall, a few different labs, a movie room, reading room and a weight room with white padded walls. It’s all very “Life Aquatic“, if you get the reference. [those that don’t follow the link its a crazy movie – John]
…
We have been in transit for the past three days, getting our computers and systems up and running. We arrive at our first deployment spot tomorrow morning at 5:30 am. That is when we’ll put our first ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) down. The OBS itself is a sphere about 16 inches in diameter made of inch thick glass–these suckers are heavy! It’s vacuum sealed with the instrumentation inside and attached to an anchor. When we are done with the survey, the sphere is timed to detach from the anchor and it’ll float to the surface of the water. Our boat will pull up alongside it and we’ll scoop it out with a net and crane.
…
woke up today at 3am to get ready for my first watch. We definitely have the worst seas that we have had so far. We are definitely pitching and rolling out here! We deployed our first OBS at 5am and are doing about 1 instrument/hr for the next 24 hours.

Those snippets are from various posts on the blog. Another from earlier:

But there is recent good news: that lone female professor (who is an amazing researcher and is highly respected in the field, chairs many committees both nationally and within the department and was president of the Geological Society of America in the 90’s) has been named the new department chair. I think this move is important in encouraging talented women scientists to apply for positions within the department and shows dedication on the part of the higher-ups to highlighting ‘diversity’ as a priority.

Friday Fun: Octopus Juggling Fellow Aquarium Occupants

photo of Otto the Octopus

Otto the octopus wreaks havoc

Otto is constantly craving for attention and always comes up with new stunts so we have realised we will have to keep more careful eye on him – and also perhaps give him a few more toys to play with.

“Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better – much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants.”

Staff believe that the octopus called Otto had been annoyed by the bright light shining into his aquarium and had discovered he could extinguish it by climbing onto the rim of his tank and squirting a jet of water in its direction. The short-circuit had baffled electricians as well as staff at the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, who decided to take shifts sleeping on the floor to find out what caused the mysterious blackouts.

Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel

photo of Hampton Roads Virginia Bridge-Tunnel

Now that is some cool engineering: a bridge that becomes a tunnel. The Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel is a 4.6 miles (7.4 km) crossing for Interstate 664 in Hampton Roads, Virginia, USA. It is a four-lane bridge-tunnel composed of bridges, trestles, man-made islands, and tunnels under a portion of the Hampton Roads harbor where the James, Nansemond, and Elizabeth Rivers come together in the southeastern portion of Virginia.

If you like this post, please look at our other popular posts, and consider adding our blog feed to your blog reader. Posts such as: Bacteriophages: The Most Common Life-Like Form on Earth, Robot Finds Lost Shoppers and Provides Directions and The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer

It was completed in 1992, after 7 years of construction, at a cost $400 million, and it includes a four-lane tunnel that is 4,800 feet (1,463 m) long, two man-made portal islands, and 3.2 miles (5.1 km) of twin trestle.

Photos by Virginia Department of Transportation. Details from wikipedia. Google satellite view of the bridge-tunnel.

Milestones on the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Dive! Dive! Dive!

0 FEET: EPIPELAGIC ZONE
Ample sunlight penetrates down to 650 feet, making photosynthesis possible. With abundant plant life (read: food), this zone is the most densely populated with fish.
…
656 FEET: MESOPELAGIC ZONE
Too deep to support photosynthesis: The fish that survive here are sit-and-wait predators that tend to have large mouths and specialized retinas to increase light reception.
…
1,640 feet: Maximum diving depth of the blue whale.
1,969 feet: The Deep Sound Channel, a layer in which acoustic signals travel far and fast.
1,969 feet: Maximum diving depth of nuclear-powered attack subs.

3281 FEET: BATHYPELAGIC ZONE
The ocean is dark at this level; the only glow is from bioluminescent animals. There are no living plants, and creatures subsist by eating the debris that falls from the levels above, including dead or dying fish and plankton.

3,281 feet: Maximum diving depth of the sperm whale. To navigate in the darkness, these whales emit high pitched sounds and use echoes to determine the location of prey.
3,937 feet: Maximum diving depth of the leatherback sea turtle.
4,000 feet: The domain of the Pacific sleeper shark, the largest toothed shark ever photographed. It can reach lengths of 28 feet.
…
5,187 feet: Maximum diving depth of the elephant seal.
…
13,123 FEET: ABYSSOPELAGIC ZONE
In the pitch-dark of the abyss, there is no light at all, the water temperature is near freezing. Of the few creatures found at these crushing depths, most are blind and have long tentacles – tiny invertebrates such as shrimp, basket stars, and small squids.
…
19,685 FEET: HADOLPELAGIC ZONE
Despite the intense pressure and frigid temperature in the deepwater trenches and canyons, life still exists here, especially near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. Invertebrates such as starfish actually thrive.

Tidal Turbine Farms to Power 40,000 Homes

Scotland Plans World’s First Tidal Turbine Farms

Scottish Power Renewables will apply for planning permission next year to build the two farms in Northern Ireland’s seabed. The turbines will be manufactured in Scotland in an intentional boost to the country’s green-collar job market. The 98-foot structures have been tested to operate in water as deep as 328 feet, and they spin slow enough to allow marine life to avoid the 66-foot blades.
…
New York City installed its first turbine for their tidal power farm earlier this month, but the Scottish plan differs in that the farms will be located in the open sea, not a river or straight.

Project aims to harness sea power

Projects on the firth could be operational by 2020… The Scottish and Irish sites would host up to 60 of the turbines – 20 at each site – generating 60 megawatts of power for up to 40,000 homes.

North American Fish Threatened

North American Fish Under Threat

Nearly 40 percent of fish species in North America are imperiled, according to a new survey by fish experts, the U. S. Geological Survey, and the American Fisheries Society, up 92 percent from the last survey done in 1989.
…
No single cause explains the ongoing fish losses, Taylor and others agree. Habitat loss, invasive species, diseases, dams, and water contaminants all contribute.

“Fish are kind of canaries in the coal mine,” said Howard Jelks of the USGS and lead author of the report, published in Fisheries. “If you change the water to something that’s not able to support these fish, it’s also not going to be as high quality for recreating, for eating the fish out of these streams, for drawing water that’s ultimately used for drinking, or for other things.”

Do Dolphins Sleep?

Do dolphins sleep?, MIT:

Dolphins do sleep, but not quite in the same way that people do. They sleep with one half of the brain at a time and with one eye closed. Dolphins rest this way on and off throughout the day, switching which side of the brain they shut down. During these periods, everything inside the dolphin slows down, and the mammal moves very little.

Robot Fish

Pretty cool swimming fish robot from Essex University.

Life in a bubble

Hundreds of insect species spend much of their time underwater, where food may be more plentiful. MIT mathematicians have now figured out exactly how those insects breathe underwater.

By virtue of their rough, water-repellent coat, when submerged these insects trap a thin layer of air on their bodies. These bubbles not only serve as a finite oxygen store, but also allow the insects to absorb oxygen from the surrounding water.

“Some insects have adapted to life underwater by using this bubble as an external lung,” said John Bush, associate professor of applied mathematics, a co-author of the recent study.

Thanks to those air bubbles, insects can stay below the surface indefinitely and dive as deep as about 30 meters, according to the study co-authored by Bush and Morris Flynn, former applied mathematics instructor. Some species, such as Neoplea striola, which are native to New England, hibernate underwater all winter long.

Dolphin Kick Gives Swimmers Edge

photo of Michael Phelps diving

Dolphin Kick Gives Swimmers Edge

Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the George Washington University, was studying dolphins for the U.S. Navy five years ago. “We were asked to understand how fish swim so efficiently,” Mittal says, “and it seemed like a natural extension to apply this to human swimming.”
…
They decided to “essentially compare these swimmers to the dolphin, assuming that the dolphin is the ultimate swimmer,” Mittal says. “And the thing that we found is that Michael [Phelps] is able to use his body in a way that is very, very different from the other athletes, and also seems to be much closer to dolphins than we have seen for any other swimmer.”

The dolphin kick first hit Olympic swimming big-time 20 years ago, after Harvard backstroker David Berkoff figured out something fundamental. “It seemed pretty obvious to me that kicking underwater seemed to be a lot faster than swimming on the surface,” Berkoff says.

That’s because there’s turbulence and air on the surface of the water, and they create resistance. The “Berkoff Blastoff,” as it was called, was used at the start and after turns, with long stretches of that underwater undulating kick.

Follow the link for a video of Michael Phelps demonstrating the technique and more interesting details. Photo by A. Dawson shows Michael Phelps diving into the water at the 2008 U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials.