Imagine starting to build a house by first deciding where to put the kitchen sink, suggests scientist Benjamin Halpern. The placement is first class — for a sink — and helps the next project on your list, determining a good place for the downstairs bathroom. Over time, each addition of a room or a feature slowly completes the structure. In the end, this sink-centric home might turn out to be a perfect house, but that seems a stretch and, as Halpern insists, no one would approach the project that way. Instead of a house, let’s say you wanted to place some windmills offshore to generate ... Read More
Profile: Reddy Stayed Steady During Gulf Oil Spill
August 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last November, a half year after the BP oil spill, as Christopher Reddy sat in a Mobile, Ala., restaurant, he overheard a customer at a nearby table ask a friend if he would order fish. "The other customer said, 'No, thanks, I don't like my fish with a side order of cancer.'" Reddy, a marine chemist, pondered telling them that scientific data from the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies indicate that eating fish from the Gulf of Mexico after the April 20, 2010, spill wasn't dangerous. "But I had a failure of nerve. I wish I had spoken to them." He increasingly ... Read More
Riddles of an Acerbic Sea
April 13, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
Just a quarter of the carbon dioxide generated by burning fuels ends up being recycled through the biological processes of terrestrial plants and animals, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Another quarter of this man-generated carbon dioxide floats aloft in the atmosphere, and the rest, NOAA says, ends up in the drink. That amounts to 260 billion tons of carbon dioxide dissolved into the sea since the beginning of the industrial era — a good thing when it comes to reducing greenhouse gasses that warm the planet. But, it also lowers the pH of the normally ... Read More
Teach a Man to Share a Fish, and He’ll Fish Forever
September 18, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
By the early 1990s, Alaska's halibut stocks had dwindled to the point that the commercial season lasted just two days. Fishermen were forced to frantically haul in as much halibut as they could over that time, flooding the market and sending prices plummeting. What wasn't sold fresh was frozen into an even less lucrative product. During those same years, Canada's commercial halibut season lasted at least six months. The difference was that in 1991 Canada switched from the conventional fisheries management system, which set a limit on the total halibut haul, but let fishermen fight it out ... Read More
Re-reefing the Florida Keys
May 19, 2008 • By • 3 Comments
A mile off Florida's Big Pine Key and 30 feet under water, sunlight streams down onto lumps of brain coral. Scarlet grouper, white hogfish and electric-blue angelfish dart about. It seems the kind of underwater scene that made the Keys a diver's paradise, unless you know the current reality, which Ken Nedimyer does. Hovering over the bottom in scuba gear, Nedimyer buries his hand in sand and exhumes what look like small white bones but are actually dead pieces of once-ubiquitous staghorn coral. Then he makes a sweeping motion with his arm, the pantomimed message clear: There used to be a lot ... Read More
Good News — and Bad — for Coral Reefs
December 22, 2007 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the most troubling warning signs of environmental degradation in general, and climate change in particular, is the gradual destruction of the world's coral reefs. A 2004 World Wildlife Fund report found that 20 percent of the world's coral reefs have been effectively destroyed, 24 percent are at imminent threat of collapse and 26 percent face a long-term threat of destruction. Coral bleaching — which essentially turns these icons of biodiversity into lifeless skeletons — has been linked to elevated sea-surface temperatures, a likely result of global warming. Two new studies offer ... Read More
