Reefs keep you and the people/places you care about safe. They also provide you and many others globally with food and money. Reefs are vital for life on this planet. Losing them would be a serious blow to global health and economics. Protecting them on a global scale is hard, but you can do your part with small lifestyle changes (eat sustainable seafood, lower your carbon footprint, and ditch single use items for reusable alternatives. Continue reading
Does your blog seem a little sluggish? Wishing you could ditch the coal-burning furnace keeping the internet connection blinking? Worried that your blog’s carbon footprint is embarrassingly large considering it doesn’t even have feet? My fellow blogger, you need some renewable energy, which means it’s probably time to call on Megan Schutt. Megan has been … Continue reading
By now you’ve probably seen one of the many articles we have posted about plastics, recycling, and the garbage problem that plagues the world’s oceans (if not, check them out 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Ocean pollution is obviously an issue that we here are UNdertheC are concerned about. Luckily, we aren’t the … Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, I presented at my first big conference in Washington D.C.! It was aptly named Oceans but was a great departure from a lot of the ocean themed academia I see every day. There was a theme this year of “marine energy” but -I’m told- the conference is typically ocean engineering … Continue reading
Pope Francis released an encyclical on the environment in June, and your first thought was probably, “Should I care?” Your second may have been, to quote 1920s presidential candidate Al Smith, “What the hell is an encyclical?” Quick answers: 1) yes, no matter who you are, and 2) read on. Let’s start with the basics, … Continue reading
Oceanographic field work has to take place in – you guessed it – the ocean. Most of the time, I sit at my computer and play with Matlab scripts and gigantic stores of data, but every so often one of my fellow Seim lab graduate students (and researcher at the Coastal Studies Institute) Mike Muglia … Continue reading
It seemed the South remained the last holdout, but with the news that its first industrial scale wind project* will also be producing electricity by 2016 in North Carolina, America’s embrace of the industry seems to be growing. Continue reading
Remember that Indiegogo campaign last year to raise money for solar roads? We do (because we blogged about it). You can check out the ad for the US solar roadway campaign below: This project is still in testing and thanks to crowd funding (of over $2 million) is still in the works. However, across the … Continue reading
As those of you who follow myself (@jbaumann3), the blog (@underthecblog), or my lab (@castillocorals) on social media may know, our lab has spent the better part of our summer in field collecting coral cores. The coral cores in the image above were extracted from various reefs across the Florida Keys. Before I tell you … Continue reading
I’ve written before about America’s struggle with accepting offshore wind energy development, specifically the controversy surrounding the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts. The process has been fraught with opposition since somebody first though, “Hey, could we get an offshore wind farm here in America.” As a result, it has been sitting in ‘renewable energy project … Continue reading
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