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 …
As a coral biologist/physiologist, the ethics of specimen collection for scientific research has been on my mind since day one. We do a lot of destructive sampling in this field. In order to make physiological measurements on a coral, the organism most often be sacrificed. I have seen many a freezer full of collected coral … Continue reading
This past week, I was lucky enough to attend ComSciCon 2014 in Boston. ComSciCon stands for the “Communicating Science Conference” and is basically a workshop run by graduate students, for graduate students, so we can get together, share ideas, and ultimately become better science communicators. The workshop was a whirlwind of panel discussions, writing sessions, 1 … Continue reading
A really informative imagination of what developing a tidal energy farm would look like. The concept in this video is actually a little revolutionary when compared with their cousins, wind turbines. These tidal turbines are capable of harvesting the energy from tidal currents in both directions as they ebb and flood, in a fairly linear … Continue reading
If you’re reading these words right now, chances are you’re a human (if you’re not, shoot me an email–I have a LOT of questions for you). As humans, our tendency is to organize–to tease meaning out of data. Humans are wired to look for patterns; this is one of the traits that’s propelled our species … Continue reading
We just hit 100 posts here at UndertheCblog and we couldn’t have done it without you! Thank you all very much for reading and for supporting us on Twitter and Facebook. We started this blog about 9 months ago with the goal of learning how to effectively communicate science to broader audiences. We spend so … Continue reading
Coral reefs are more than “just a pretty face.” Why should we care about coral reefs? If you don’t often interact with coral reefs, or even if you do, you might have trouble answering that question. You probably know that coal reefs are beautiful marine ecosystems. But they only really matter to people who want to … Continue reading
By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the new Clean Power Plan put forth by the EPA (through the direction of President Obama) on Monday. If not, you should check out the press release and do some digging of your own. As with all issues discussed in my posts, I encourage you, the reader, to … Continue reading
Unlike many other environmental concerns, threats to the Great Barrier Reef are widely acknowledged beyond the scientific community. The average person may not be able to articulate exactly why the reef is at risk, but he has an idea that survival of the colorful, otherworldly seascape he remembers from so many documentaries is far from … Continue reading
Today I have for you the second part of our inaugural podcast, all about the wonderful world of diatoms! In this half of our podcast, I talk with Natalie Cohen and Carly Moreno, two of the other graduate students in my lab at UNC-Chapel Hill. Topics range from what it’s like to go on a … Continue reading
One of the most effective arguments against offshore energy developments (of many types – not just offshore wind) is the negative impact to the local viewshed. In North Carolina in particular, the Outer Banks are dominated by land designated as ‘National Seashore,’ and therefore under much greater effective protection from any sort of development than … Continue reading
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