I am willing to bet most people have never heard of paleotempestology before. I hadn’t heard of it before I took a marine geology course. In a course I am taking this semester, we decided to reexamine the topic because a lot of individual studies are debatable. So, if the title of this post didn’t already give it …
Have you ever noticed a rip current at the beach? If you or someone you know was caught in a rip current, would you know what to do? If you’ve been paying attention to the coastal news along North Carolina recently, you may have noticed recent stories about rip currents and rip current safety. Dr. …
Having no publications to my name and only nebulous drafts of several (hopefully) publishable papers, I am not an expert on how to get published. This is why I attended a student workshop on this very topic at the 2018 ASLO summer meeting in Victoria, BC. In this workshop a panel of editors in chief …
Martín Benavides is a PhD student in Marine Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the variability of coastal shark communities in both time and space. He is also interested in the movement ecology of sharks in estuarine systems. Martín is a proud father of two boys and provides a unique prospective to …
Applications have been submitted. Recruitment weekends are near (or have already come and gone). Funding source notification dates are coming up. And most exciting of all–graduate school acceptances are around the corner. It is an exciting time to see your hard work pay off. But wait. Hold your horses. Here are some things you should …
The ocean is home to some strange and mysterious critters – including some that could give the Justice League a run for their money. From immortal invertebrates to flying fish, here are four super powered ocean animals. The one that can walk on land While there are a number of amphibious fish out there, …
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP) application season is here. I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship for my application is 2017 after an unsuccessful one in 2016. From one rejected and one accepted, here is a list of resources that helped get me through it, a bit of my personal …
Most productivity gurus say that when you hit a wall, you should switch tasks. This is how I ended up reading a paper about beavers who managed to hijack a wetland restoration for their benefit. So congratulations! You’re in the right place to learn some fancy philosophy terms and think about wetlands from a whooole …
As modern marine scientists, we spend a lot of time learning to effectively communicate science to various audiences. That’s mostly so we can make friends at parties, but has some nice side benefits like educating the general public, whatever. Sometimes though, and I’m probably admitting to a cardinal sin of outreach here, there’s a certain …
This June I was fortunate to be selected to spend two weeks in Washington, D.C. at the American Meteorological Society’s Summer Policy Colloquium (AMS SPC). The colloquium was an opportunity for participants to immerse themselves in science policy through discussions with working professionals and hands-on exercises. The goal of the program is to arm scientists … Continue reading
Taylor Asher is a PhD student in Marine Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill. Taylor works in Rick Luettich’s lab where his research focuses on hydrodynamics and statistical and physical flood hazards. As IMS gets back on its feet and Carolina rivers’ waters finally fall, a familiar narrative arises: If Hurricane Florence, which made landfall … Continue reading
Ok, so polynyas aren’t exactly crop circles, but they are open water areas in the Artic where you would normally find ice. You might think that it’s weird that I am just talking about holes in the ice, but the underlying physical processes keeping these holes open is fascinating, and they are biologically important. There … Continue reading
I wish I were talking about the delicious dessert today, but alas, I am talking about something more alarming. Or fortuitous, I guess it depends on if you are a glass half full or glass half empty person. So, what is Jubilee? It is a weird phenomenon that my volunteer, Sam, told me about. Basically, fish just swim … Continue reading
Satellites hovering hundreds of miles above earth; underwater autonomous vehicles traveling through the ocean; drones collecting snot above whales; and robots that move like fish; what do all of these things have in common (other than sounding like some futuristic world where robots and computers have completely taken over)?? Turns out, all of these things … Continue reading
By this point, most of our readers are probably pretty well versed in ocean acidification (just type ‘coral reef’ in the UNdertheC search box and you’ll come up with lots of interesting tidbits about ocean acidification). We know that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (from human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels) is … Continue reading
This guest post is by Rachel Canty. Rachel is a Master’s student at UNC Institute of Marine Sciences. Her research focuses on coastal microbial ecology, specifically on competing different strains of the human pathogenic bacterium, Vibrio vulnificus, against one another. Rachel’s claim to fame is that she once swam on a relay with Katie Ledecky (5-time … Continue reading
This guest post was written by UNC-CH sophomore, Lily Olmo (@lilyMolmo). Lily participated in the UNC Institute of the Environment Field Site, study abroad program at the UNC-CH Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, NC, this past Fall 2017. As soon as I could walk, I was meandering through nature preserves and aquariums. I … Continue reading
Top down and bottom up: two ideas often discussed in biology. Specifically, the idea that an organisms population is controlled by both bottom up controls (things like the amount of food around, temperature, freshwater availability) and top down controls (i.e., predation). But today, I’ll be thinking about ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ in a widely … Continue reading
I have recently returned to coastal NC after attending the 2017 Biennial Coastal Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) conference in Providence, Rhode Island. It was an extremely productive conference that allowed me the opportunity to present my research, network with leading experts in my field, get out of the UNC bubble, and see lots and lots … Continue reading
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