molluscs – Southern Fried Science

I’ve been away for 2 weeks, so it’s a super-massive edition of the Monday Morning Salvage!

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

There’s still an unimaginable amount of work to do in Dominica and across the Caribbean. Support the Rebuild Dominica Hurricane Relief fund or any of the other funds from our list: How to help our island colleagues in the wake of total devastation.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

This is such a cool story: A Trail of Rocks Traces Historical Steamship Routes. We can track old steamship routes from rocks scraped out of the furnaces and tossed overboard.
Former Papua New Guinea Attorney General attacks deep sea mining project. They always pick pictures for these articles that don’t show how much life is right around the vents.

Sampling SMS under the sea Photo: Nautilus Minerals

Whose ecological footprint is bigger: Medics, economists, or environmentalists? Spoilers: conservationists still have an impact, but they sure ain’t number 1.

Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)

There’s a fresh oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s pretty darn huge:
Some fun from Deep Sea News: When real-life marine biologist and mom goes to sea, she takes the octonauts with her.

This is fine: Report on U.S. Marine Sanctuary Oil Drilling Sent to White House, Not Released to Public. This is totally fine: Trump Administration Proposes Largest Oil and Gas Lease Sale in U.S. History.
Alaska’s Oyster Farmers Are Filling an Acidification-Driven Void. The state’s oyster farming industry is gaining ground as growers elsewhere struggle. From Hakai Magazine, which is great.
Nature is one of the most under-appreciated tools for reigning in carbon. From Anthropocene, which is fast becoming my favorite environmental print magazine. Sorry, Orion.
Thousands of penguin chicks starve in Antarctica.

Hey, Andrew, how about you give us at least *some* good news today? Ok, fine.

New and noteworthy publications in deep-sea science for the week of January 21, 2013.

Geobiology: Did life originate from a global chemical reactor?

Many decades of experimental and theoretical research on the origin of life have yielded important discoveries regarding the chemical and physical conditions under which organic compounds can be synthesized and polymerized. However, such conditions often seem mutually exclusive, because they are rarely encountered in a single environmental setting. As such, no convincing models explain how living cells formed from abiotic constituents. Here, we propose a new approach that considers the origin of life within the global context of the Hadean Earth. We review previous ideas and synthesize them in four central hypotheses: (i) Multiple microenvironments contributed to the building blocks of life, and these niches were not necessarily inhabitable by the first organisms; (ii) Mineral catalysts were the backbone of prebiotic reaction networks that led to modern metabolism; (iii) Multiple local and global transport processes were essential for linking reactions occurring in separate locations; (iv) Global diversity and local selection of reactants and products provided mechanisms for the generation of most of the diverse building blocks necessary for life. We conclude that no single environmental setting can offer enough chemical and physical diversity for life to originate. Instead, any plausible model for the origin of life must acknowledge the geological complexity and diversity of the Hadean Earth. Future research may therefore benefit from identifying further linkages between organic precursors, minerals, and fluids in various environmental contexts.

Read More “This Week in the Deep” »

Tag: molluscs

A new Gulf oil spill, opposition to deep-sea mining, DIY drop cameras, and more! Massive Monday Morning Salvage: October 30, 2017

This Week in the Deep