This May Look Like A Beautiful Flower Blooming Beneath The Waves, But It’s Actually An Animal! 

#4—Fun Facts for World Whale Day

Whales are the biggest creatures to ever live on the earth. The largest whale, the blue whale, can be over 90 feet long. The sperm whale, on the other hand, may not be the biggest whale, but it has the biggest brain to have ever existed on Earth.

Learn more about how whales grew to such massive sizes here.

Photo: Smithsonian Institution

Trump’s War on Science continues

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Editorial: Censoring the scientific enterprise, one grant at a time

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It may be winter in the Northern Hemisphere, but down in Antarctica, it’s currently summertime. This humpback whale migrated south to feast on the plentiful krill along the West Antarctic Peninsula.

Credit:  © Ari Friedlaender

EXPLAINED WHY WHALE SHARKS CONGREGATE IN JUST 20 LOCALITIES WORLDWIDE

We know whale sharks (Rhincodon typus), the biggest fish in the world, aggregate at just 20 coastal locations globally.  Why these animals, which can reach more than 18 m in length, choose these specific places, has perplexed researchers and conservationists. Although whale-shark aggregations had been recorded near tropics, including Mozambique, the Maldives, Honduras, Australia and others places, what causes these aggregations remain unknow.

Aggregations typically occur in the fore reef and lagoon areas, leading out to the reef slope, reef wall or continental slope, which has a steeper slope, leading whale sharks to deep-sea environment. Researchers sugests whale shark can filter food at greath depths, where the water is cold, and then bask in the sun at shallow depths, warming their cold-blooded bodies, as they depend on external sources of body heat.

-  Location of aggregation and non-aggregation sites. Hotspots are in red.

These places are very productive, where plankton and small crustaceans abound. However, sharks swimming in shallow waters near the surface are vulnerable to accidents caused by vessels, as tourist boats which approaches them. The whale shark is considered Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, these findings increase our understanding of whale shark behaviour and may help guide the identification and conservation of further aggregation sites.

Photo by  Abe Khao Lak

Copping et al., 2018.  Does bathymetry drive coastal whale shark (Rhincodon typus) aggregations?  Aquatic Biology section

Common Dolphin, West Ireland

Next month will be the one year anniversary of the PACE launch!

Sharpening Our View of Climate Change with the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem Satellite

As our planet warms, Earth’s ocean and atmosphere are changing.

Climate change has a lot of impact on the ocean, from sea level rise to marine heat waves to a loss of biodiversity. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide continue to warm our atmosphere.

NASA’s upcoming satellite, PACE, is soon to be on the case!

Set to launch on Feb. 6, 2024, the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission will help us better understand the complex systems driving the global changes that come with a warming climate.

Earth’s ocean is becoming greener due to climate change. PACE will see the ocean in more hues than ever before.

While a single phytoplankton typically can’t be seen with the naked eye, communities of trillions of phytoplankton, called blooms, can be seen from space. Blooms often take on a greenish tinge due to the pigments that phytoplankton (similar to plants on land) use to make energy through photosynthesis.

In a 2023 study, scientists found that portions of the ocean had turned greener because there were more chlorophyll-carrying phytoplankton. PACE has a hyperspectral sensor, the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), that will be able to discern subtle shifts in hue. This will allow scientists to monitor changes in phytoplankton communities and ocean health overall due to climate change.

Phytoplankton play a key role in helping the ocean absorb carbon from the atmosphere. PACE will identify different phytoplankton species from space.

With PACE, scientists will be able to tell what phytoplankton communities are present – from space! Before, this could only be done by analyzing a sample of seawater.

Telling “who’s who” in a phytoplankton bloom is key because different phytoplankton play vastly different roles in aquatic ecosystems. They can fuel the food chain and draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to photosynthesize. Some phytoplankton populations capture carbon as they die and sink to the deep ocean; others release the gas back into the atmosphere as they decay near the surface.

Studying these teeny tiny critters from space will help scientists learn how and where phytoplankton are affected by climate change, and how changes in these communities may affect other creatures and ocean ecosystems.

Climate models are one of our most powerful tools to understand how Earth is changing. PACE data will improve the data these models rely on.

The PACE mission will offer important insights on airborne particles of sea salt, smoke, human-made pollutants, and dust – collectively called aerosols – by observing how they interact with light.

With two instruments called polarimeters, SPEXone and HARP2, PACE will allow scientists to measure the size, composition, and abundance of these microscopic particles in our atmosphere. This information is crucial to figuring out how climate and air quality are changing.

PACE data will help scientists answer key climate questions, like how aerosols affect cloud formation or how ice clouds and liquid clouds differ.

It will also enable scientists to examine one of the trickiest components of climate change to model: how clouds and aerosols interact. Once PACE is operational, scientists can replace the estimates currently used to fill data gaps in climate models with measurements from the new satellite.

With a view of the whole planet every two days, PACE will track both microscopic organisms in the ocean and microscopic particles in the atmosphere. PACE’s unique view will help us learn more about the ways climate change is impacting our planet’s ocean and atmosphere.

Stay up to date on the NASA PACE blog, and make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of sPACE!

When wood turns into glitter

Many moons ago, in the area that is now Nevada ancient woodlands were living through events that would result in some stunning pieces that grace museums around the world. Some 14 million years ago in the Miocene, the area was thickly forested rather than displaying the arid environment of today. It was also much closer to sea level, since the area has been extensively uplifted since then, due to tectonic stresses caused by the subduction of the Pacific and Farallon plates under the North American one. The area also saw intense subduction related volcanism (ongoing along the USA’s west coast to this day), which periodically covered the forests in silica rich ash. As groundwater interacted with the magma below, weathering the layers of ash into clays, it dissolved silica, precipitating it when conditions such as temperature and pressure changed, replacing the ash covered trees with opal, sometimes so clearly that every cell is visible. While not really suitable for jewellery use due to its tendency to crack as it dries out (called crazing in the trade), these rare logs from the Virgin Valley of Nevada make for stunning collector’s specimens

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