Facebook ditches drilling gear, Mauritius copes with a crisis, and a new giant rises from the deep – What’s up with the Ocean this week?
August 19, 2020
Facebook is a hardware company. This week Oregonian revealed that Facebook quietly abandoned drilling equipment off of the Oregon coast. Fifty feet below the seafloor, heavy drilling equipment designed to lay fiber optic cable was damaged and abandoned by the social media company’s subsidiary. Facebook has no plans to recover the abandoned 1,100 feet of pipe and 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid.
The Crisis in Mauritius. The bulk carrier the ran aground in Mauritius split in two. Though authorities were able to pump out much of the stored fuel oil, the tanker still leaked over 1,900 metric tons into the Indian Ocean. This is projected to be among the worst ecologic disasters in the nation’s history. The captain of the MV Wakashio has been arrested.
New giant deep-sea isopod. Bathynomus raksasa is a newly described species of giant deep-sea isopod found in the water of Indonesia. at 33 centimetres, it doesn’t quite match up with the one true king of giant deep-sea isopods Bathynomous giganteus, but it is a solid contender. And, for your situational awareness, you can catch giant isopods in Animal Crossing.
Upwelling.
Politics aside, just watch the amazing Roll Call Across America from last night’s Democratic National Convention. An absolutely amazing tour of the 50 states and seven territories of the United States.
Southern Fried Science loves giant isopods. There are few deep-sea animals more iconic, more charismatic, more weird and wonderful, than the deep-sea isopod. The biggest of the deep-sea isopods, the giant deep-sea isopod, Bathynomus giganteus, is a quintessentially American beast. It dwells in the deep Gulf of Mexico. The bulk of its known range falls within the United States Exclusive Economic Zone. It was first collected by American scientist Alexander Agassiz (though it was formally described by his colleague and collaborator French zoologist Alphonse Milne-Edwards). Tough on the outside, soft on the inside, fiercely independent yet able to work in massive aggregations to consume the bloated carcass of a whale, alternately terrifying and adorable, I can think of no better animal to represent the deep water of the United States better than our own Bathynomous giganteus.