Jon Copley
Professor of Ocean Exploration & Science Communication,
University of Southampton
Author of "Ask an Ocean Explorer", 2019: http://bit.ly/oceanxplr
Science advisor for BBC Blue Planet II
Location Southampton, UK
Activity
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Jon Copley replied to David R
Hi David - the Marine Conservation Society's annual beach clean found facemasks as widepsread litter items in 2020, although they didn't outnumber cigarette butts as individual items - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/06/face-masks-and-gloves-found-on-30-of-uk-beaches-in-clean-up
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Jon Copley replied to Jeannie Wolfenden
Hi Jeannie - they are animals; you can think of a sea anemone as a bit like an upside-down jellyfish, living on a rock rather than floating around in the ocean.
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Jon Copley replied to William Doyle
Hi William - the vast majority of marine viruses are not harmful to us. But some infectious viruses can be transmitted in seawater, and in particular those are "enteric viruses" that come from human sewage (such as Norovirus). Here's a review paper about disease-causing viruses in coastal waters - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC145303/
Because...
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Jon Copley replied to Jeannie Wolfenden
"The dark oceans were the womb of life: from the protecting oceans life emerged. We still bear in our bodies - in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears - the marks of this remote past. Retracing the past, Man, the present dominator of the emerged Earth, is now returning to the ocean depths. His penetration of the deep could mark the beginning of the...
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Jon Copley replied to Jeannie Wolfenden
Our blood has a salinity of about 9, compared with about 35 for seawater, so it's just under one-third as salty as the sea.
Unfortunately that's one of the reasons we can't drink seawater to survive (e.g. as a castaway). Our kidneys can only make urine that is more dilute than seawater, so if you were drinking seawater, you would end up producing more urine...
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Jon Copley replied to Jesse Russo
Hi Jesse - the variations that we see in salinity between oceans result from variations in freshwater input (e.g. lower salinities where there is lots of run-off from rivers, or from melting ice, or from rainfall) and evaporation or freezing (which increase salinity). There's some useful further info in this free online textbook here -...
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(...part 2 of 2...)
So it's not just about rotating and non-rotating frames of reference, as roundabout demonstrations show - that's one-half of Coriolis. The other half involves gravity (the balance between centrifugal force and gravity), and a full demonstration of Coriolis requires a spinning turntable that is also a parabolic dish (dipping towards its...
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Hi Dee - the Coriolis force (which is an "apparent" force, resulting from a change in the balance between two other forces) is zero at the equator, and increases towards the poles.
If you're standing on the equator, the centrifugal force from the Earth's rotation is in a vertical direction, up through your head (because at the Equator, you're standing at 90...
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Jon Copley replied to Lee Scott
There are consequences even beyond that, Lee: the overturning circulation also carries oxygen into the deep ocean from the atmosphere in polar regions.
As it weakens (which it has been doing), the amount of oxygen reaching the deep ocean declines - but that change can take centuries to work through the global circulation.
A recent study shows that even...
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Jon Copley made a comment
For more on the Messinian Salinity Crisis when the Med dried up (and the astonishing Zanclean Megaflood that refilled it), this is a great thread by Mike Sowden (with some links to further info): https://twitter.com/Mikeachim/status/1491080740586782720?s=20&t=2gK_MHH-WfLB3FKUraDp8w
(and you don't need to be on Twitter to read it).
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Jon Copley replied to Lee Scott
Hi Lee - there's a lot of research investigating how animals perceive cycles such as tides to respond to them. In some cases, they can sense tidal variations in water temperature (e.g. to detect tides at hydrothermal vents) or water pressure (to detect tides in shallow water). Detecting those variations in their environment can then trigger the animal...
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Jon Copley made a comment
If you are in the UK, there was an episode of Radio 4's "In Our Time" all about the Challenger expedition yesterday, now available online on BBC iPlayer at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fcvd (with apologies to those outside the UK, where I don't think you can listen to it unfortunately).
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Jon Copley replied to William Doyle
We've sort-of had underwater colonies already; there were quite a few experiments in the 1960s and 1970s involving people living and working in "undersea habitats".
One of those was the US Navy's Sealab II experiment in 1965, where people lived in a series of chambers at 62 metres deep - and astronaut Scott Carpenter stayed longest there for 30 days. They...
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Jon Copley replied to Ken McLeod
It's a good question Ken, and we may find out: as it's the 150th anniversary of the Challenger expedition setting out, there's now a "Challenger 150" international programme that will help to coordinate deep-sea research expeditions over UN Decade for Ocean Science. Rather than a single expedition, lots of expeditions will be part of "Challenger 150", adopting...
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Jon Copley replied to Dee W.
If you like the Kraken, Dee, you might like to look for it in this - https://archive.org/details/naturalhistoryNc2Pont/page/n6/mode/2up - a compendium of the natural history of Norway, published by Erich Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen and natural historian, in 1752. In it, he describes marine life of the region, including many species we know today, but also...
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Welcome back Lee! It's great to have you aboard for another run of "Ocean".
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Some recent positive news in coordination of Marine Protected Areas - Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama and Colombia have committed to "joining up" their Marine Protected Areas, so that the "corridors" used by migrating species such as whale sharks between them will also be...
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Jon Copley replied to Sue S
Hi Sue - in a sense, river water is slightly "salty", because it carries dissolved minerals from the continental rocks, taking those dissolved minerals out to sea. But the water then evaporates from the ocean (leaving the minerals behind there) to repeat that cycle, which means the sea becomes much saltier than rivers.
So the big question is then "why...
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Jon Copley made a comment
The several species of deep-sea anglerfishes that have "parasitic" males are even more amazing when it comes to their immune systems.
One of the potential challenges for having a parasitic mate attached to you, with their circulation system fused to yours etc, is that they would normally be "rejected" by the vertebrate immune system (similar to the...
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Jon Copley made a comment
According to a recent research paper, some large whales may undertake long migrations to maintain healthy skin - it may be beneficial for them to molt their skin in warmer tropical waters, even though there is less food for them there:
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/why-do-whales-migrate-they-return-tropics-shed-their-skin-scientists-say -
Jon Copley replied to Seren Irwin
Hi Seren - the situation in the Arctic differs in the oceanographic changes taking place in the region.
In the Antarctic, the "invasion" of crabs is enabled by relatively warmer "circumpolar deep water" now flowing up onto the Antarctic continental shelf of the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas, channeled through underwater canyons ("glacial troughs") in the...
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Jon Copley made a comment
As a quick update on deep-sea mining developments:
In July this year, the Republic of Nauru made waves by triggering a clause in the regulations of the International Seabed Authority that require the regulations for mining of manganese nodules to be finalised within two years - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57687129
Nauru is the...
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Jon Copley made a comment
The numbers of microbes in seawater that we have been talking about here are for uncontaminated surface seawater (and that normal abundance and diversity of microbes is important for the health of the ocean).
But in the UK at the moment, there is a lot of concern about discharges of sewage into our coastal waters, e.g....
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Jon Copley replied to Maarten de Nijs
Hi Maarten - the Ocean Cleanup project does attract a lot of media attention, and of course its overall aim is admirable. But what has attracted less attention is the detailed critiquing of the project by many specialists, with backgrounds from ocean engineering, marine ecology, and those working to tackle plastic pollution more widely.
Here's a recent...
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Jon Copley replied to Sue S
Hi Sue - marker buoys are indeed fixed in place, to indicate hazards etc; but in this case the buoys are drifter buoys, designed to go with the ocean currents to track them.
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Jon Copley made a comment
Welcome to Week 2! This week we will be dipping our toes into how ocean circulation works, and what makes the sea salty.
On Tuesday evening this week (26th October, 6 pm to 7 pm UK time), the University of Southampton is hosting a free online event discussing "Is it too late to save our oceans?" -...
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Jon Copley replied to Mike Brettle
Yes! Here's a research paper that compared HMS Challenger temperature measurements with measurements in 2004-2010 by the global fleet of Argo floats - https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1461 - showing a global average approx 0.6 deg C warming of the surface ocean over 135 years.
That might not sound like much, but the specific heat capacity of water -...
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Jon Copley replied to Maria Fitzpatrick
Hi Maria - for more on the uses of bioluminescence, both in nature and by us, I think this is a very nice article: https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/secret-history-bioluminescence/
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Jon Copley made a comment
On Tuesday next week (26th October), the University of Southampton is hosting a free online event discussing "Is it too late to save our oceans?" (6 pm to 7 pm UK time) - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/is-it-too-late-to-save-our-oceans-tickets-174205402047
Three speakers will talk about how the ocean is changing, some of the technological advances that may...
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Jon Copley made a comment
Another medieval map that amazes me is the world map compiled by monk Fra Mauro, who lived in Venice in the 15th century - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fra-mauro-map
In addition to being decorated with creatures, Fra Mauro's map was annotated with other information that he collected from travellers, and included details of the Indian Ocean, showed...
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Welcome Lee! It's great to have you join us for another run of the course - it wouldn't be Exploring Our Ocean without you, and thank you for continuing to share your perspective.
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Jon Copley made a comment
Welcome to Exploring Our Ocean! I hope you enjoy the next four weeks exploring the ocean and its vital role in our future, as we begin the United Nations Ocean Decade and governments meet for the COP15 biodiversity and COP26 climate summits.
We have a great team of early-career scientists (who you will meet in the next "step") to answer your questions and...
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Jon Copley replied to Janine Kelley
Hi Janine - some billionaires have / are philanthropically funding ocean exploration: Eric Schmidt (co-founder of Google) established the Schmidt Ocean Institute ( https://schmidtocean.org/ ), currently live-streaming ROV video from their research ship expedition exploring deep-sea corals in the Pacific.
David Packard (co-founder of Hewlett Packard) funded...
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Jon Copley replied to Laurie Hinks
@LaurieHinks Yes - during the Cold War, contour maps of the ocean floor were considered classified information by the US Navy (as potentially useful for submarine navigation by other nations).
That's why Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen teamed up with artist Henrich Berann to produce their "Floor of the Ocean" maps during that time (e.g....
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Jon Copley replied to Lee Scott
@PaulKamill Thank you Paul! I also enjoyed The Big Blue.
Here's a short film about the person who set the >200 metre free-diving record - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCpJST_c2Ko
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Jon Copley replied to Marie G
There are other forms of sinking food, e.g. the discarded mucus feeding webs of larvaceans (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/09/20/giant-larvaceans-make-their-houses-from-mucus). And of course, carcarsses of dead animals sink as well, so it's not just faeces.
In terms of "live" food, there's the vertical migration of zooplankton...
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Jon Copley replied to Marie G
Much of it is "dead food", i.e. remains of marine life - and much of that is packaged up as faecal pellets, e.g. those produced by copepods containing remanants of phytoplankton algae that they eat, or those produced by predators eating animals like copepods and so on. All those faeces still contain "undigested" organic matter that is food for life...
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Yes, "observable" is the key. As a mind-bender: the "observable universe" is a sphere of radius ~46 billion light years around us.
The Universe is ~13.8 billion years old, and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Putting those two facts together, you might think that the maximum distance to which we can "see" (i.e. from which any light, or...
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Jon Copley replied to Hershey VanDam
@JohnHewitt Methane hydrate is still being explored / pursued as a fuel source; Japan in particular is a leader in this area, e.g. with successful test wells for methane production from hydrate beds - https://www.japex.co.jp/english/business/innovate/methanehydrate.html
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Jon Copley replied to Lee Scott
You're right Lee - in anglerfish species where the male fuses permanently with the female, death of his "host" means death of the "parasitic" male as well.
There are lots of different species of deep-sea anglerfishes, and they fall into three broad categories when it comes to mating: some have males that only attach temporarily to females (avoiding the...
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Jon Copley replied to Hershey VanDam
Baikal was explored by the Mir submersibles (the same minisubs that featured in the movie Titanic) in 2009; at the bottom they found methane hydrate beds (a form of methane-water "ice" formed in cold, high-pressure conditions) and hydrocarbon seeps. There's a report, with some pictures, here -...
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Jon Copley replied to Victoria Billings
There's actually a seafloor spreading centre running north-south across the bottom of the Cayman Trough (which trends largely E-W).
The "Mid-Cayman Spreading Centre" is very short (about 110 km long) and "ultraslow" spreading (about 15-17 mm per year), forming the boundary between the North American plate (to the west) and the Gonâve Microplate (to the...
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Jon Copley made a comment
For some more on life at hydrothermal vents, BBC Earth have produced an online "mini-episode" to accompany David Attenborough's new series "A Perfect Planet" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibC5LT3CSyI
(If you watch closely, it includes a glimpse of the shrimp at the Beebe Vent Field in the Cayman Trough - along with great footage of other animals at...
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Jon Copley replied to Paul Kamill
@PaulKamill The potential problem with dissolved gases, at saturation levels under pressure, is if pressure is suddenly reduced (like opening the top of a fizzy drink bottle). Normally for deep-sea animals, that's not a problem - they don't move vertically so dramatically as to "degas" the solution.
It can be a problem for breath-hold diving animals,...
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Jon Copley replied to Paul Kamill
@PaulKamill Sperm whales are indeed phenomenal breath-hold divers, but the deepest dive recorded by any whale wearing a tag that measures depth is a Cuvier's beaked whale that reached 2992 metres:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0092633
Some whales might even go even deeper (just haven't been tagged doing so yet). There...
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Jon Copley made a comment
Purely as an optional extra, if you would like some more about the adaptations of deep-sea species (such as hatchetfish and "zombie" worms) and the different environments in the deep sea (e.g. the twilight and midnight zones of midwater, and hydrothermal vents, whalefalls and woodfalls on the ocean floor)...
...I recently recorded a three-part podcast...
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Jon Copley replied to Janet Bedford
Hi Janet - the rift valley runs along the centre of the ridge (so it looks like a "notch" in the top of it, if viewed as a cross-section - here's a diagram of that: http://www.eeescience.utoledo.edu/Faculty/Krantz/Oceanography/Exercises/Pacific%20transect.MOR.jpg )
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Jon Copley replied to Lee Scott
Hi Lee - it's in their genes (and ours), as explored in this brilliant article "The oysters that knew what time it was" by Jo Marchant: https://www.wired.com/story/oysters-that-knew-what-time-it-was/
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Jon Copley made a comment
Edmund Halley was one of the first people to theorise about "where does the salt come from?" and publish a paper about it. Although famous as an astronomer (remembered for the comet later named after him), he was also an early marine scientist, and you can read his 1715 Royal Society paper about the saltiness of the ocean here -...
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Jon Copley made a comment
If you would like more about the history of ocean exploration, then purely as an "optional extra" (as there is a lot of information there!), I have prepared a timeline of exploring the deep from ~600 BCE to 2019, which you can browse at:
http://www.joncopley.com/timeline.html
We celebrate the scientific achievements of the Challenger expedition in laying...
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Jon Copley replied to Steve Brewer
A recent survey of the different types of viruses in the ocean revealed more "species" than previously thought - and some patterns in their distribution (with the Arctic being one of the "hotspots" for ocean virus diversity):
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01329-w -
Where space and time get mixed up certainly is complicated; the "observable" Universe is actually about 46 billion light years in radius, because of space itself stretching, on a large scale, during the ~13.7 billion years since the Big Bang (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/07/14/ask-ethan-how-large-is-the-entire-unobservable-universe/). So...
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Jon Copley replied to Lee Scott
You're absolutely right Lee; so the "royalty" payments scheme of the ISA is designed to tackle that, for "non-living marine resources" in the "High Seas", by providing funds to support landlocked & developing countries to become involved the "blue economy".
Access-for-all was a founding principle of UNCLOS; here's some of the text of the bold speech by...
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Jon Copley made a comment
Another spin-off from ocean life that's in the news at the moment: the anti-viral drug Remdevisir has been approved for treating Covid-19 by the EU and US, and is based on a compound originally found in a sea...
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Jon Copley made a comment
A quick update on the story of potential deep-sea vent mining in the Exclusive Economic Zone of Papua New Guinea:
In November 2019, the mining company Nautilus Minerals went into bankruptcy (https://www.pwc.com/ca/en/services/insolvency-assignments/nautilus-minerals-inc.html), having been delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange in April 2019...
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Jon Copley replied to Andre Prasetyo
Since 2017, the UN has convened an Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (https://www.un.org/bbnj/), which is seeking to define the details for a new treaty under UNCLOS to protect marine biodiversity of the "High Seas".
One of the drivers for the new "BBNJ" treaty is to make sure there is a joined-up and...
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That's a very interesting question, James; and I think there are several factors at work in the "lag" at the start of the curve:
(1) It takes time to describe new species after specimens have been collected. Traditionally they have to go to someone specialising in that particular animal group, who then carries out the work for the species description, and...
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As it happens, I had a chat with Brian Cox about it - and the sums involved - in this episode of Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage a few years ago (about 23 mins 30 secs into the show): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08crt6c
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A reminder that if you enjoyed the history of HMS Challenger in Week 1 (and Project FAMOUS, above), and would like more about the history of ocean exploration, then purely as an "optional extra" (as there's a lot of material and further links...), I've recently created a timeline of ocean exploration, from ~600 BCE to 2019, for people to browse...
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Jon Copley replied to Fred Foster
@FredFoster There is a further link between the Challenger expedition and the Indian Ocean: John Murray of the Challenger later became independently wealthy as a co-founder of the Christmas Island Phosphate Company (created to mine deposits of phosphate, in demand for fertiliser, found there by HMS Egeria in 1887 - Murray analysed the Egeria's samples while...
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Jon Copley made a comment
If you have enjoyed finding out about the history of HMS Challenger, and would like to find out more about the history of ocean exploration, I have prepared a timeline that runs from ~600 BCE to 2019, available here:
http://www.joncopley.com/timeline.html
As we've seen here, the Challenger expedition was important in laying foundations of modern...
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Jon Copley made a comment
If you are home-schooling during the current lockdown, and might like ocean-related material for 4-11 year-olds, including some experiments and lots of things to make at home, this week's episodes of "Let's Go Live!" by Maddie Moate (presenter of CBeebies's "Do You Know?") and Greg Foot have been about the ocean, and are all available...
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Several learners said how much they enjoyed finding out about some of the history of ocean exploration (HMS Challenger) in Week 1, so as a bonus for anyone in "lockdown" who might like to find out even more, here is a timeline of exploring the deep ocean (from ancient Greece to the latest dives into the Mariana Trench - and covering threads such as deep-sea...
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Hi Hugh - the perhaps surprising reality is that most of them don't need to withstand pressure; the pressure inside their bodies is the same as the pressure surrounding them, *unlike* a submarine.
Most deep-sea animals don't have any gas-filled spaces inside them - their bodies are made of solid tissues and liquids. Both of those are pretty much...
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Jon Copley made a comment
As well as its decoration with sea beasts, the map by Olaus Magnus does have some ocean features on it - in particular, note the whorls in the sea between Iceland, the Faroes, and Norway.
That decoration doesn't appear elsewhere, and it corresponds with where there are eddies from the Iceland-Faroes Front, a region where warmer Atlantic surface waters mix...
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Jon Copley made a comment
Here is the Abstract and Highlights of recent research paper describing a method to extract cobalt (needed for electric car batteries) directly from seawater, without mining deep-ocean environments, using abandoned oil rigs:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032119300838 -
If you boil a saucepan of water with some peas in it, you can watch the peas circulate, carried to the surface by the water heated at the bottom of the pan, then floating across the surface a little bit as that hot water spreads out and cools, and then sinking again with the slightly cooled water, before starting that circulation again as the water is heated...
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Hi Anne - it was a statue of a rhino; part of a charity art trail for conservation, and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of nearby Marwell wildlife park: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-23268301
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Just in case anyone is interested (and has considerably more time!), there's also a more recent but much longer talk that I gave available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWoYj5K794g
(for info, that talk above, from January 2019, was a lecture for Gresham College - http://www.gresham.ac.uk/ - which is the UK's oldest public lecture series,...
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Thank you Karen, and in a way I hope that future generations will be appalled by the plunder of the ocean from the late 19th to early 21st centuries. But I hope they will also see the signs of a change in our relationship with the ocean, where human choices and actions began to turn fate around for biodiversity in the ocean.
A couple of examples would be:...
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Jon Copley made a comment
I recently put together an updated blog post, examining how we got from the "common heritage of mankind" to the current situation with deep-sea mining - and who is likely to benefit most from the ISA's procedures: http://www.joncopley.com/blog_aug18.html
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If you are interested in more about how communities are being affected by the changes that are taking place in the oceans, the BBC World Service has produced a mini-series of radio programmes called The Compass: Ocean Stories, which should be available for anyone anywhere to listen to via https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w27vpyb8
Each of the 4 episodes...
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More recently, I had the opportunity to take part in the first dives by human-occupied vehicles to reach 1 km deep in the Antarctic, for the filming of the Blue Planet II series.
The two subs we used (one doing the filming, one scouting for things to film) were a little different to the Shinkai6500: rather than a hollow metal ball for a hull, they had an...
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There are some commercial operators offering that - back in the 1990s there was a company that chartered the Russian Mir subs for tourist dives to the wreck of the Titanic, and a new company has developed a new sub called Titan to do the same in future - http://www.oceangate.com/expeditions/titanic-survey-expedition.html
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Safety is definitely an advantage of ROVs, though statistically, human-occupied vehicles are a very safe form of transport - they have carried tens of thousands of people into the deep sea (defined as more than 200 metres deep) with very few incidents. The Alvin sub, for example, has completed more than 4600 dives since 1964, carrying more than 14000 people...
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About ten times the cost, for vehicles with deeper (e.g. >3000 m) capability.
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The main limitation is battery power. Running the lights etc and particularly the thrusters can drain the batteries pretty quickly. Most submersibles that carry people still use lead-acid batteries - although they're not as capable as newer lithium-ion batteries that power most of our personal electronic devices, they are safer in terms of fire risk. But...
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Jon Copley replied to Tosca Zraikat
Hi Tosca - there's a short video from the Antarctic deep-diving expedition here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YXlg0qdUKg (though its beautiful images were shot by the BBC professionals, not by me!)
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Recently I also had the opportunity to take part in the first dives by human-occupied vehicles to 1000 metres deep in the Antarctic, as "scientific guide" for some filming of the BBC Natural History Unit's new Blue Planet II series.
As we had two subs on those dives (one for filming), here's a short film that gives a view of what it was like, with...
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Thank you for posting that link, Lidia! And there will be a new series of programmes about "oceans" on BBC World Service radio this autumn (starting late October), weaving together some science, history, how the oceans are intertwined with our lives, and how we can help to choose their future (I've just enjoyed the opportunity to record a few clips for it).
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Jon Copley replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
Costa Rica has just announced that it plans to ban all single-use plastics (e.g. forks, lids, stirrers, straws) by 2021 - http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/blog/2017/7/14/Costa-Rica-abre-el-camino-hacia-el-fin-de-los-pl-sticos-de-un-solo-uso.html
Since we started running this course in 2014, we've been able to flag some progress on plastic waste,...
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Jon Copley replied to Mirsya Ekarina Mulyani
Hi Mirsya - I didn't think I'd be able to take part this time, but in the end was able to post a few things in a couple of discussions for the final two weeks. Glad to hear you enjoyed the course a second time!
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The tyre manufacterer Michelin recently publicised a new "vision" / "concept" for biodegradable 3D-printed tyres (to replace the whole car wheel) - http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/technology/news/a27086/vision-the-organic-airless-tire-of-the-future/
Perhaps more of a marketing tool to investors to publicise different areas of R&D that Michelin is...
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The UK's recent ban on "microbeads" in some cosmetics and "personal care" products will help to reduce microplastic pollution, but one of the major sources of microplastics is actually vehicle tyre wear ("synthetic rubber", which forms about 60% of a tyre, is a form of plastic, which means the "dust" from tyre wear contains a lot of microplastic particles) -...
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It'll be something along those lines that's needed, Sue!
There's a current EU consultation (open to any members of the public) about awareness of microplastics, and ways to reduce them getting into the ocean - https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/public-consultation-investigating-options-reducing-releases-environment-microplastics_en
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Jon Copley made a comment
As it's the end of Week 3, here are the numbers I came up with to compare ocean microbes with stars in the observable Universe (Step 2).
As many of you found, microbes "win" by several orders of magnitude. But estimates for both have changed over time.
When I started thinking about the comparison 15 years ago, it was ~100 million times more cells than...
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Hi Mirsya - most life in the deep sea (and the twilight zone) still depends on solar energy; most deep-sea animals either eat "phytodetritus" (algal matter that has sunk from the euphotic zone) or animals / remains of animals that similarly feed on organic matter of photosynthetic origin.
Chemosynthetic environments, while very special (and close to my...
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Yes - although extremely low frequency (ELF) radio can penetrate seawater, the big problem is the size of antenna needed to broadcast such long wavelengths. The US Navy's ELF broadcasting station ashore (in Michigan) used more than 50 km of cable between two buried electrodes to transmit its ELF messages to submarines at operational depths (Wikipedia has some...
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Yes - each "vent field" (set of vent chimneys sharing the same "plumbing" in the seafloor, and separated from the next vent field by 10s to 100s of km) is ephemeral - eventually, its venting will shut down, for example when the plumbing is interrupted by an earthquake, or becomes clogged by mineral deposits forming in the crust, or is covered over by an...
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Hi Mirsya - on land and in "non-chemosynthetic" ocean habitats, latitude often affects the number of species ("latitudinal species diversity gradients"), with more species usually found near the equator compared with the poles.
Those common patterns are most likely because lower latitudes, nearer the equator, ultimately receive more energy, in the form of...
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As coms are limited (and might be completely cut off in an incident), everyone aboard is briefed on emergency procedures (in case everyone else is incapacitated). Those vary from sub to sub, but usually involve a mechanical (so no electric power required) means of either ditching ballast (e.g. jettisoning manipulator arms, batteries etc) or boosting buoyancy...
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Hi Ian - these days it is possible to connect a human-occupied vehicle to the surface ship for live video etc, using a monofilament fibre-optic.
However, you need to detach it before ascent, to avoid getting tangled up in it - and you need to "tidy up" those kilometres of fibre afterwards, rather than just cutting them loose to drift and litter the ocean....
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Hi Anne - a good question / point. We don't think any individual worms are making that epic journey, even as larvae carried on currents. Instead, what we are seeing are populations of the same species that are not directly connected to each other.
They may well be connected via a chain of populations at intervening vents, for example via vents dotted...
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Hi Anthony - each "vent field" (a cluster of "chimneys" occurring together in an area usually the size of a couple of football pitches, separated from the next "vent field" by 10s or even 100s of km) doesn't last forever. Earthquakes can disrupt their plumbing, or the vents might get covered by a lava flow, so each "vent field" is only active from a few...
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Jon Copley made a comment
For an up-to-the-minute addition, here's a BBC business radio show from last week (hopefully available those outside the UK as a downloadable podcast) about the increasing demand for other metals - in this case cobalt, needed for electric car batteries: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0597stc
The UK has just announced that it will ban the sale of new...
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Yes; here's a recent summary of effects of the 2010 "Deepwater Horizon" oil spill on deep-sea life in the Gulf of Mexico - https://tos.org/oceanography/assets/docs/29-3_fisher.pdf
This year is also the 50th anniversary of the Torrey Canyon oil spill -...
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Hi Sue - the short answer is that fibre-optic cables can carry much, much more information than radio waves beamed to/from satellites.
For radio waves to do the same, they'd need to use much higher frequencies than in the days of our overseas phone calls bouncing off satellites. But those higher frequencies (microwave or shorter wavelength) get blocked by...
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Hi Peter - astronomers and cosmologists have a particular definition for "observable Universe" (Wikipedia is pretty good on it here - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe ).
As that space.com article mentions in passing, because the Universe is about 13.8 billion years old, it would seem to follow that light (or any other electromagnetic...
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Jon Copley replied to Maureen Kelly
Here's some media coverage of the launch of "UK Seabed Resources Plc":
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/mar/14/david-cameron-seabed-mining-worth-40bn
The company now has UK-sponsored exploration licences for two areas of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone manganese nodule province in the Pacific, and they are also the Contractor for Singapore's...
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Yes; here are some recent papers:
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep30492
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171750
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39158
...and some accompanying news...
