Southern Fried Science

The Glomar Explorer: what we can confirm and deny about “vast government conspiracies” from Project Azorian.

The following is the transcript of a talk I gave at DC Nerd Nite on September 16, 2023. Enjoy!

I need to begin with a disclaimer: It is impossible to talk about Project Azorian and the Glomar Explorer without sounding like you’ve gone deep into Dale Gribble territory. Azorian has everything a conspiracy theorist could ever want: Cold War espionage, a government coverup, a shady partnership with a celebrity entrepreneur, military contractors with their own plots for profiteering, and, in the middle of it all, there is a very big boat.

You’re going to get some cameos from Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, as well as the guy who stole J. Edgar Hoover’s underwear.

Azorian was the OG Vast Government Conspiracy.

*Slide showing a page from the Azorian report*.

Even if you’ve never heard of the Glomar Explorer, these story beats are going to feel very familiar to you. There’s a good reason for that. Project Azorian was, and likely still is, the largest and most expensive covert operation in US history, but in its declassification, it also became the model for a generation of paranoid storytellers, from the X-files to Alex Jones.

Because of that, we can learn a little bit about how conspiracy theories work by looking at the foundation upon which many of them were built.

I have a link for you: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005301269.pdf

It’s the declassified report from the CIA describing the broad strokes of the operation (you can also find it by just searching for project azorian pdf). It is heavily redacted, but this was cleared for release in 2010 and you are allowed to read it and share it and store this document in your bathroom until your valet accidentally drains your pool into it.

It is entirely possible that there are parts of this mission that remain completely classified, and that some of the narrative has been changed to hide other objectives, so the only assurance I can give you tonight is that everything about this story that is true, is true.

Oh Hell No: Ten Years of SharkNado

Posted on August 16 by David Shiffman

Summer 2023 marks an important cultural milestone. That’s right, it has now been ten years since the release of SharkNado, which became a full-blown franchise with six movies, tens of millions in ad revenue and merchandise sales, real-world references in the floor of Congress, and near-universal awareness- all things that are otherwise unheard of for made-for-tv SyFy channel movies.

Me attending the tenth anniversary theaterical re-release, August 2023

“It’s been incredible gift to be able to share something this fun and silly with so many people over all this time,” Thunder Levin, the writer of the SharkNado franchise, told me in an interview. “It’s been extraordinary how many different people seem to have embraced it. I get to interact with fans who come from all walks of life, I even get to argue with shark scientists!”

SharkNado has always had it’s thumb on the pulse of pop culture

The Bad Shark Movies genre is rich and storied, but none of the others have had anywhere near the cultural impact or legacy of SharkNado. I’d like to try and explain what made the SharkNado movies special, and explore what that means for cinema, for sharks, and for me.

My comments on New York’s proposed new shark fishing regulations

Posted on August 14 by David Shiffman

Following a growing problem of mishandling of species of conservation concern, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation is proposing some new shark fishing regulations. Here is the text of the letter I sent them supporting some of those proposed regulations, and proposing additional regulations.

A dead sand tiger shark washed up on a New York beach with recreational fishing gear in its mouth. Photo Vincent Cavaleri, via the DEC website.

Dear Commissioner Seggos, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation,

As a marine biologist with expertise in the conservation impacts of recreational fisheries on threatened shark species, I write in support of several proposed changes to New York State’s land-based shark fishing regulations. Additionally, while I am not a New York resident, I and my family have vacationed in your beautiful state every summer of my life. I learned to fish in New York from my grandfather, and those experiences contributed to my lifelong love of underwater life.

I studied Florida’s recreational shark fishery and its conservation impacts as part of my Ph.D. at the University of Miami’s Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. That work contributed to Florida changing their land-based fishing regulations.

An oral history of Ocean Science Twitter

Posted on August 10 by Andrew Thaler

I created my Twitter account in the spring of 2009. Back then, science blogging was new and we all though that using pseudonyms for anonymity was the pragmatic and cool thing to do. Southern Friend Science had been cooking for over a year at that point, and we were excited about the near-limitless potential of the social web.

Blogs were still king, with Deep Sea News, and Oyster’s Garter, and Malaria, Bedbugs, Sealice, and Sunsets and myriad others speaking up for the oceans, online. But this isn’t a history of ocean science bloggers, this is a history of Ocean Science Twitter.

Those early days were, more than anything, fun. We were still finding our voices and finding our communities. David joined soon after and the rest of the core Ocean’s Online crew arrived soon after. We were live-tweeting experiments, sharing hypotheses, planning research projects, starting collaborations, forming communities.

Twitter is gone now, replaced by the impersonal X, not just a new brand name, but a reminder that you should close that tab. Since its acquisition by Elon Musk, the once-vibrant site has been slowly gutted, transformed into a desperate grab for cash from subscribers and an endless sea of paid content. But if this last year has been a tale of slow decline, this last few weeks have been the final death roll. The rebrand to X was bad, but far, far worse was the protection, promotion, and financial compensation of a user who posted explicit child sexual abuse material. There’s nothing left of the Twitter that was.

Everything changed for Ocean Science Twitter on April 20, 2010, when the Macondo oil well rupture, setting the Deepwater Horizon aflame. Eleven oil rig workers died and 200 million gallon of crude oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico. The community mobilized quickly to provide critical context and public outreach as the disaster stretched from days to months. Ocean scientists on Twitter were positioned to respond to media queries and act as expert sources, but beyond the communications push, scientific collaborations emerged from these very large, very public discussions. As one example, we determined that I had some of the most recent pre-spill sediment samples from the areas near the disasters and identified the right researchers to work up those samples and provide a necessary baseline for understand the scope and scale of the spill.

The research rundown: an abbreviated list of my current ocean science, policy, education, and conservation technology efforts.

Posted on July 27 by Andrew Thaler

OpenCTD and Oceanography for Everyone

Ten years ago, Kersey, Russell, and I set of on a quixotic quest to make the tools of ocean science more accessible to more knowledge seekers at a price the reflects the reality of research budgets. The OpenCTD, a low-cost, open-source, oceanographic instrument was born. Since that first ambitious announcement, we have made tremendous strides in the quality and capabilities of the OpenCTD. With funding from BOEM, NOAA, the Open Science Hardware Foundation, and others, we’ve been able to transform our kludgey little DIY instrument into a serious piece of oceanographic kit, able to compete with handheld commercial alternatives. And the OpenCTD can be built by the user, with no prior electronics experience, over a long weekend, for a fraction of the cost of commercial alternatives.

So where are we going next? The first OpenCTD validation paper was submitted earlier this year. We are in the process of revising and updating the construction and operation manual to streamline the workshop process for educators and ocean knowledge seekers. We released a standalone manual that guides users through the calibration process and are preparing to release a new guide for deployment and maintenance.

And we were a finalist for the Hackaday Prize, which is pretty neat.

The Oceanography Lab in a Box

Through my work with the OpenCTD, I partnered with the CoLab team to develop an a la carte Oceanography Lab in a Box: a low-cost tool set of open-source and accessible tools to allow ocean knowledge seekers from around the world to access the tools of ocean science. This includes the OpenCTD, as well as a host of other tools, both analog and digital, along with training and support.

One of my collaborators is currently crowdfunding a project in Ghana to bring some of these tools to a training workshop: Tools and training for coastal oceanography in under-resourced countries

One Mining Code to Rule Them All: The poison pill at the heart of the Deep-Sea Mining negotiations.

Posted on July 19 by Andrew Thaler

The International Seabed Authority is once again gathered in Kingston, Jamaica to continue negotiations on a set of rules and regulations to govern seafloor mining in the high seas, beyond any nation’s borders.

At stake is access to vast fields of polymetallic nodules spread across the abyssal plains. These nodules are rich in nickel and cobalt, essential elements in the current batteries needed to electrify the world’s automotive fleets. Deep-sea mining for polymetallic nodules is presented as a means of breaking the world free of fossil fuel production that has the potential to be less harmful to the environment than current terrestrial cobalt and nickel mines.

And that might be right. As I said in the last talk I gave on deep-sea mining:

“I remain undecided. I do believe that there is a version of polymetallic nodule mining that has the potential to produce the metals we need for the electrification of the world’s automotive fleet in a way that represents a responsible compromise between the direct impacts of nodule extraction and the existential threat of failing to get emissions under control before the worst predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change become inevitable. I think it’s very hard to argue that polymetallic nodule mining is worse for the world than strip mining Indonesia’s remaining rainforests for nickel or having the children of Congo dig for cobalt.”
Deep-Sea Mining: A whirlwind tour of the state of the industry and current policy regimes

Polymetallic nodule mining is not the only form of deep-sea mining. The ISA is tasked with governing mineral resources on the deep-seabed. This includes nodules, but also cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts (seamounts containing cobalt ore) and seafloor massive sulphides (deep-sea hydrothermal vents). These three deposits are mined in wildly different ways and come with dramatically different environmental risks. I frequently argue that they comprise three entirely different industries.

New paper: What happened to the world’s first certified sustainable shark fishery?

Posted on June 26 by David Shiffman

In 2011, the world’s first fishery for sharks was certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council*. The British Columbia spiny dogfish fishery made major news in fisheries management and ocean conservation world, where the possible existence of sustainable shark fisheries has been debated intensely. A few years later, the fishery voluntarily withdrew their certification, and never publicly said why.

I wanted to know what happened with this scientific mystery. So, with the help of Chuck Bangley and Catherine Macdonald and funding support from the Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellowship program, I organized a research expedition to find out. The results of our expedition can be found in our new paper (LINK,) (OPEN ACCESS AUTHOR COPY) but in this blog post, I’d like to explain what we did, what we found, and why we think it’s important.

A decade after #DrownYourTown, I’m still making sea level rise personal.

Posted on May 25 by Andrew Thaler

Ten years ago, I launched a strange little project called Drown Your Town. The premise behind Drown Your Town was simple: I created a little macro in Google Maps that allowed you to superimpose a floodwater layer on top of 3D renders of communities. It was a quick and dirty way to demonstrate sea level rise in an era where those kinds of bespoke models were hard to generate. With #DrownYourTown, anyone, anywhere could simulate sea level rise in their own back yard.

It wasn’t originally going to be an outreach tool. I was writing a science fiction novel about life in a post-climate change world and needed an easy way to visualize places in the stories might look like. The book is still available, on Amazon, along with two other novellas that I wrote, though I warn you, none of them are very good (in my defense, it was the high water mark for self-publishing ebooks and I was still trying to figuring out what my post-academic career would be).

We pushed out the app, launched a successful tumblr page where folks could request sea level rise models, initiated what remains to this day my most successful Twitter campaign of all time, and spent the next year helping people visualize sea level rise in their communities.

We learned a lot about climate change outreach from DrownYourTown.

One year of “Why Sharks Matter:” What’s different in shark science and conservation now?

Posted on May 24 by David Shiffman

One year ago today, my book “Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator” was released. Science moves (relatively) rapidly and changes often, with new discoveries every day, and the conservation landscape is similar. This means that it is impossible for anything written about these topics at a discrete moment in time to remain accurate forever.

So, in the interest of accountability, in the interest of continuing to make my book useful for public education about shark science and conservation even as the science and policy landscape changes, and in the interest of keeping notes for myself for any future updated versions of the book, I have been keeping track of things that I wrote at the time that are no longer true, or weren’t quite right at the time. (Please note that some of these facts and figures were already out of date at the time the book was pubished, but that was well after the final text was turned in).

Five Experiment ocean campaigns that need your support.

Posted on April 24 by Andrew Thaler

Hi, it’s me, Andrew. And right now I’m crowdfunding an effort to develop an environmental baseline for microplastics in the deep sea using a historic sample archive. You can read more about it here: We need to know more about microplastics in the deep sea.

What is Experiment? Experiment is a crowdfunding platform that connects scientists with small-scale funders. It allows people to discover, fund, and disseminate scientific research and it is especially good at funding small pilot studies that are difficult to fund through traditional grant-making agencies but could lead to much more significant funding down the road. And right now, they have a campaign to fund ocean research.

You can check out my campaign: Establishing a baseline for microplastic accumulation in deep-sea animals using an historical sample archive but you should also check out some of the other ocean science projects currently running on Experiment.

Establishing the first technological network for long term ocean observations in Costa Rica

Costa Rica lacks extended time series of oceanographic data. To address this issue, our goal is to deploy and maintain an array of smart mooring devices that will provide real-time data of temperature, waves and wind. We aim to describe how these variables associate to coastal erosion/coral bleaching in the Caribbean and coastal upwelling/ENSO coupling in the Pacific. Our mission is to provide open-access data to improve management of Marine Protected Areas and blue economy projects.

Are deep-sea metals powering bioelectrical eco-evolution?

The deep sea is enriched with metals and amazing life forms. Electroactive microbes can get energy from metals, creating conditions that could sustain high animal diversity in the abyss. With genomic data to expand a large, public diversity dataset, we can use multi-omics and phylogenetics to reveal the electrobiogeochemical basis of biodiversity maintenance. It is urgent to know the role that metals play in such eco-evolutionary mechanisms before they are removed by the deep-sea mining rush.

Measuring CO2 mineralization rates in a simulated ocean environment for the characterization of low-cost sensors

Direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 is a technology for low-cost and scalable carbon dioxide removal (CDR). These systems will collect and concentrate CO2 from around 400ppm to approximately 20% CO2 by volume. The use of ocean based mineralization and enhanced weathering processes present a huge opportunity for gigaton sequestration of CO2. This project will explore low-cost sensors to quantify the mineralization and reaction rate of CO2 in a simulated ocean environment.

Improving the Knowledge of Skates and Rays in Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago is home to many species of skates and rays but exactly how many and their locations are still unknown. There is a lack of knowledge on skate and ray biodiversity, life-history and ecology, however at least a third are thought to be on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. They are commonly caught as bycatch, and increasingly being kept for commercial sale. It is important to close these gaps in support of conservation and management.