In the past, we’ve done a little write up whenever some exaggerated of fabricated piece of ocean news crosses our desk. This year, we’re going to try something new. A one-stop, periodically updated clearinghouse for all the things that did not happen in the ocean this year.
A shark did not impregnate a stingray
Some elasmobranchs can reproduce via parthenogenesis. Sharks, however, cannot get stingrays pregnant. David wrote a whole thing about it.
The Gulf Stream is not shutting down.
An extremely concerning paper came out this February which shows that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is on a tipping course which could lead to collapse of the current. That would have huge, profound impacts on the climate of northern countries. That’s all real, and it is real bad news.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, however, is not the Gulf Stream. These two oceanographic features get so frequently confused that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to put out their own FAQ about it:
“The Gulf Stream is part of two circulation patterns in the North Atlantic: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. Based on models and theory, scientific studies indicate that, while the AMOC is expected to slow in a warming climate, the Gulf Stream will not change much and would not shut down totally, even if the AMOC did.”
IPCC Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)
There’s no evidence that Amelia Earhart’s plane was found.
An ocean surveying company announced this January that they had found the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane on the bottom of the Pacific. What they actually produced is a SONAR image of a relatively plane-shaped object that sort of, but not entirely, looks like the plane Earhart was flying in 1937. The Pacific is pretty famously littered with planes from that era. There’s no evidence that this is Earhart’s plane. Deep Sea News has more.
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