Tag: "oceanographers" at biology news

Growth in the sea comes down to a struggle for iron

...ing iron into the ocean. For more than a century, oceanographers puzzled over the low abundance of phytoplankton in some ocean waters that seemed to hold all the basic nutrients for life. Speculation that iron provided part of the answer goes back to the 1930s. However, it wasn't until 1989 in the journal Nature t...

Scripps scientists find potential for catastrophic shifts in Pacific ecosystems

...ngoing debate between some physical and biological oceanographers on the nature of long-term change in the North Pacific Ocean. "Classical fisheries management theory using fixed production functions (fixed growth rules) and fixed harvest targets is no longer supportable," says Sugihara. "The beguilingly simple st...

Census of Marine Life explorers surprised by diversity, density of Arctic creatures

... the vast Southern Ocean has been a closed book to oceanographers until recently. Now, through smaller research studies using modern technology, they have identified the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a powerful force flowing from west to east moving 145 million cubic meters of water per second, more than the combi...

Scientists discover global pattern of big fish diversity in open oceans

...rns of diversity, the scientists collaborated with oceanographers to examine different open ocean "habitat" features. Sea surface temperature and the level of oxygen in the water were the most important factors in determining where the big fish in the open ocean congregate. These hotspots were mostly in subtropical...

'Sinkers' provide missing piece in deep-sea puzzle

...detritus) that drifts down from above. For decades oceanographers have used funnel-like collectors called sediment t...ortant carbon sources, we went around asking other oceanographers if they had seen these things [sinkers] in their sediment traps. It turns out that, although sinkers...

Scientists discover interplay between genes and viruses in tiny ocean plankton

...k in the journal Science. Conducted by biological oceanographers Sallie Chisholm and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the research is uncovering a new facet of evolution and helping scientists see how microbes exploit changing conditions, such as altered light, temperature and nutrients...

High-tech tags on marine animals yield valuable data for biologists and oceanographers

...n this area of the world and working with physical oceanographers to incorporate these data into oceanographic models," he said. Researchers can use these Antarctic seal species to obtain oceanographic data for a region of the ocean and times of the year for which there are no good sources of data, Costa said. Th...

MIT: Oceans are a major gene swap-meet for plankton

...th System Initiative, explained that as biological oceanographers she and her colleagues are trying to understand the bio-geo-chemistry of the oceans. That is, they're trying to learn "how these microbes function as a system in which they have not only co-evolved with each other, but also with the chemistry and phy...

Giant deep-sea tubeworm's meal ticket comes in as a skin infection

...orms'tiny spawn from traps laid on the oceanfloor, oceanographers have shown that thesulfur-eating bacteria infect the larvaethrough their skin. Andrea Nussbaumer and Monika Bright of theUniversity of Vienna, and Charles Fisher,professor of biology at Penn State, reporttheir findings this week in the Britishjourna...

Sandia research to focus on early detection of harmful algal blooms

...mall, lightweight devices that could be fielded by oceanographers and marine biologists as part of their regular monitoring systems. In addition to Sandia's Lane and VanderNoot, collaborators include Donald M. Anderson, a senior scientist and director of the Coastal Ocean Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Insti...

Satellites shed light on global warming

...advent of the satellite-borne radar altimeter that oceanographers were able to offer proof of their existence by mapping the sea surface height and seeing them move by following the measurements of the surface. Radar altimeters work by sending thousands of separate radar pulses down to Earth per second then rec...

Ocean's 'twilight zone' may be a key to understanding climate change

...s of meters per day. To collect sinking particles, oceanographers use cones or tubes that hang beneath buoys or float up from sea floor. That, Buesseler said, "is like putting out a rain gauge in a hurricane." While many studies have investigated the surface of the ocean, little research has been conducted on th...

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