Hurricanes, Sharks, Mining the Deep Sea, and the Great American Outdoors – What’s up with the Ocean this week?

August 5, 2020

Holy Mola we are back! Bass my flounder for I have finned. It has been Half A Year since I last posted anything on Southern Fried Science. Granted, that year is 2020, so I think we can all give each other all the slack we need. I have missed this place, my weekly ocean news round ups, and my less frequent deep dives into ocean science, conservation, and exploration. So let’s get back to it: What the heck is up with the ocean this week?

Hurricane Isaias. Hurricane Isaias ripped across the eastern seaboard, striking the Bahamas as a category 1 hurricane before slowing as it approached the United States. It briefly ramped back up to a category 1 storm as it strafed the North Carolina coastline. Isaias spun off hundreds of tornadoes as far north as Delaware as it crawled towards Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. It is the ninth named storm of 2020, the earliest ninth storm to form on record, and the second consecutive hurricane of the season. 2020 is projected to be an exceptionally intense year for Atlantic hurricanes, because of course it is.  

An osprey braces itself against the wind as Isaias passes over the Maryland Eastern Shore. Photo by Andrew Thaler.

Woman killed by Great White Shark. A woman was killed by a Great White Shark last week in Maine’s first recorded lethal shark encounter. Though Great Whites are uncommon, they are not unheard of in northern waters and the recovery of shark populations in the north Atlantic is in general regarded as a success story. With rebounding populations, interactions between humans and wildlife will increase, although such tragic outcomes are still rare. In a strange twist, the victim in this case was an acquaintance of our own resident shark specialist

We still don’t know how to assess the impacts of deep-sea mining. In Deep-Sea Misconceptions Cause Underestimation of Seabed-Mining Impacts, Smith and friends outline the numerous potential misconceptions that may dramatically affect our estimations of the impact of deep-sea mining. These misconceptions include the scale of the operation, the rate of recovery, and the compounding impacts of other human-induced insults to the seafloor. 

Upwelling (the part where Andrew gets on his soapbox)

Yesterday, the President signed the Great American Outdoors Act, a largely bipartisan effort to dramatically increase funding for land conservation across the US; an act that was necessary following decades of Republican leadership gutting funding for the National Parks Service and deferring essential repairs. The $9 billion in funding for deferred maintenance will go towards offsetting over $12 billion in critical repairs that have accumulated since the 1980s, the last decade in which the Park Service budget was significantly increased. It also guarantees almost $1 billion per year for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is predominantly funded though royalty payments from offshore oil and gas. 

It’s a great law made necessary by decades of leadership failure. 

Saltiness aside, it comes at a time when access to the outdoors could not be more essential. With the country in the midst of an historic pandemic and travel significantly curtailed, access to green space is at a premium. And, unsurprisingly, nature deficit disproportionately affects historically marginalized communities, particularly those within urban areas where vast green spaces come in the form of literal walled gardens. 

Even with the Great American Outdoors Act, this administration has done more to destroy the environment than any modern presidency, and we can only hope that this will help lay the groundwork for the next president’s Green (and Blue) Awakening.

Youth v Gov, thinking about oysters, how to talk climate change to radicalized conservatives, delightful dumbo octopuses, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: October 29, 2018.

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

A lava flow detected in the Mariana back-arc that’s evidence for the deepest historic eruption ever detected. Photo: Courtesy Bill Chadwick

A lava flow detected in the Mariana back-arc that’s evidence for the deepest historic eruption ever detected. Photo: Courtesy Bill Chadwick.

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SeaWorld versus OSHA versus Brett Kavanaugh, sea lions and sucker punches, this dumpster whale is all of us, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: October 1, 2018.

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

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High octopuses don’t love you back, sextants in space, protect our ocean monuments, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: September 24, 2018

Logo for Monday Morning Salvage.

Foghorn (a call to action)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

  • Gulper Eels are amazing. Amazing.

There are approximately 30 vaquitas left in the world Illustration: Mona Chalabi

There are approximately 30 vaquitas left in the world
Illustration: Mona Chalabi

  • There are sextants on the International Space Station and I can’t stop thinking about it.

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A year of brutal hurricanes, the wonderful resilience of limpets, talking about meat consumption, and more! The Monday Morning Salvage: December 4, 2017.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

  • ‘Extremely Active’ 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Comes to a Close – Here’s the Full Season in One Four-Minute Video:

The Argentine military submarine ARA San Juan and crew are seen leaving the port of Buenos Aires, Argentina June 2, 2014. Picture taken on June 2, 2014. Armada Argentina/Handout via REUTERS

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Surviving a Double Hurricane (a first person report of the Puerto Rico disaster by Heather Cooke)

Heather Cooke graduated with an environmental science degree from George Mason University and studied marine biology. She is now a dive instructor and runs Culebra Divers on Culebra Island. This article was written during brief moments of power on Culebra Island.


As General Manager of Culebra Divers in Culebra, Puerto Rico for the last 2.5 years, I have enjoyed our semi-arid island with its brief storms. Known for one of the safer harbors in the Caribbean, my husband and I watched tropical storm after tropical storm and hurricane after hurricane pass us by. What I am writing is based on our experiences and what others around me have experienced or shared from their families on our sister islands.

Culebra the smallest of 3 islands that make up what you know as Puerto Rico (the “mainland”, Vieques, and us) and we’re 17 miles from the mainland itself.  To get here you fly from San Juan or take a ferry from the mainland’s east coast. We get all our food and fuel via that same ferry system. Our water and power travel under the ocean from the mainland through Vieques and then to us so if anything happens to either of those islands, we are screwed.  The island has a rag tag rental generator and no desalination plant.

As I write this, it has been 34 days since Maria and 48 since Irma and we still lack non-generator power, reliable daily water, and cell service not provided by some other island.

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See a Great White Shark from the inside with OpenROV, Vaquita, Narwhals, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: November 6, 2017

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

  • Yes, that is the esophagus of a great white shark, in the wild. No, you should not attempt to replicate this experience.

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Deep-sea mining, octopus cities, a world without ozone, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: October 2, 2017

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

The first successful mining tool.

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How to help our island colleagues in the wake of total devastation.

After three brutal hurricanes, the islands of the Caribbean are hurting. It can be hard, in the wake of catastrophe, to know where your donations can be best spent. We’ve contacted several of our colleagues on the ground to find out who’s doing the work and which aid organizations and groups need help now.

Puerto Rico

Hi, my name is [your name], resident of District [your disctrict], zip code [your zip code] and I don’t need a response.

I’m calling to ask the [Senator/Congressman/Congresswoman] to join the efforts of some of his colleagues in Congress–like Congressman José Serrano, Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, Senator Marco Rubio, Resident Commissioner Jennifer González, and others–to put pressure on the federal government to provide more assistance to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands after being hit by Hurricane Maria, and on Congress to allocate the necessary funds/resources to do so. Also, to please join some of these representatives on calling for at least one year exemption from the Jones Act or US Cabotage laws to Puerto Rico.

Thank you!

source.

US Virgin Islands

Antigua and Barbuda

Dominica

Turks and Caicos

British Virgin Islands

Feel free to recommend your favorite organizations providing aid on the ground in the comments below. We would prefer to focus on ground efforts driven by affected communities, rather than large, international aid organizations.

What can we do with an OpenCTD – high resolution hurricane monitoring

Last Friday we launched Oceanography for Everyone–The OpenCTD, a crowdfunding project to develop a low-cost, open-source CTD. This project won’t succeed without your help. To demonstrate how valuable a device like the OpenCTD is, for the next several weeks I’ll be presenting various projects that could be accomplished with access to low-cost CTD’s. First up on the docket is an array of volunteer nodes to measure the effects of hurricanes.

Imagine a category 2 hurricane barreling down the eastern seaboard. As the swirling air mass builds strength, it absorbs heat from the ocean. The powerful winds alter local currents, mixing layers of seawater, and depositing freshwater on the surface in the form of rain. The effects of a hurricane reach far beyond the eye of the storm and changes may take several months to return to the status quo.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a group of enthusiastic (and safety minded) volunteers taking ocean measurements before* and after the hurricane passed? And not just on the regional scale like we do now, but at an extremely high resolution, charting changes in local estuaries, sounds, and dozens or hundreds (or, dare I dream, thousands) of points along the coast? Enthusiastic volunteers with access to their own local waterways and a low-cost CTD could monitor these water bodies for months following the storm, documenting changing sea conditions. Uploaded to a shared database like Marinexplore, this kind of data would provide a massive baseline for assessing hurricane impacts, anticipating recovery, and informing management of affected marine populations.

A low-cost, open-source CTD could help make this kind of large-scale monitoring project possible. With your help, we can make the OpenCTD a reality.

Please visit our Rockethub project page and consider donating (even a few dollars helps!). You can also follow us on our Google+ page–Oceanography for Everyone for project updates and additional media.


*While, of course, maintaining a conservative window of time to evacuate ahead of the storm.