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
Category Archives: and Climate
Ecological monitoring and research project at marine corps base concludes after 10 years
Funding for scientific research can come from all sorts of seemingly unlikely sources. Recently, a ten-year ecological research and monitoring program funded by the US Department of Defense (DoD) came to a close. I was lucky enough to attend the final symposium where researchers from across the East Coast presented their findings. When I first … Continue reading
Parasites Share our Love of Oysters
http://college.unc.edu/2014/06/03/oysters/ Perhaps you’ve eaten an oyster – if so, you are far braver than me, but have you even taken the time to ask an oyster how it’s feeling? I hadn’t until I started working on a class project looking at the relationship between oyster health and climate. For over two decades, NOAA (National Oceanic … Continue reading
An ode to our “science president”
Every year scientists from around the world visit Antarctica to study a variety of aspects of the world’s southern sea. On President Obama’s inauguration day in 2009, scientists from the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research Station first visited their new sampling location on the West Antarctic Peninsula. In honor of the new president they named the station … Continue reading
Move over corals, phytoplankton are also impacted by climate change
When most people think about the impacts of climate change on the world’s oceans, they’re first thoughts are things like ‘corals’ and ‘ocean acidification’. And while these are both excellent examples of how climate change affects the oceans, they’re not the only ones. Science magazine recently published a great article by Hunter-Cevera et al., 2016 … Continue reading
Ice Ice Baby: what in the world is going on with Antarctica’s ice?
A couple of weeks ago a new study came out from NASA indicating that the Antarctica land mass is gaining ice. This study by Zwally and colleagues, indicates ice accumulation in East Antarctic continent exceeds the loss of ice from the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). This study is contradictory to many studies that have been published on … Continue reading
What comes around, goes around
“Drought occurred in 7th year of the Emperor Jiajing period, Ming Dynasty (the traditional Chinese calendar). Gui Jiang and Sishan Jiang came to Da’an town (the town where Dayu Cave is located) to acknowledge the Dragon Lake inside in Dayu Cave.” Quotation from Dayu Cave, 1528 A.D. (Tan et al., 2015) Working in science is … Continue reading
El Niño 101
By this point, most folks are aware of the drought that currently has California (and Texas, too, for that matter) in it’s grips (and if you haven’t heard, then check out our post The California Drought). What’s new to this story is the strengthening of El Niño in the Pacific. And while El Niño first … Continue reading
Mo’ Energy, Mo’ Problems
With the generation of energy at the top of everyone’s minds, it might be easy to forget how and where all that energy is stored and transported to the populations that need it. Even in a world bereft of renewable energy sources (I am not advocating this in any shape or form), energy storage can … Continue reading