In the News
Siberian erosion, river runoff speed up Arctic Ocean acidification
As Siberian permafrost thaws, crumbling Russian coastlines and big rivers flowing north along eroding banks are dumping vast loads of organic carbon into marine waters there, causing much quicker acidification than had been anticipated and signaling future danger for the entire Arctic Ocean.
Childhood Fantasy launches Life at Sea
Dr. Kevin Wood, with book that captured his imagination as a child, went on to a career at sea.
Most of us abandon our childhood dreams, and Kevin Wood was no different. As a boy he’d been enchanted by ships and he wanted desperately to sail the seven seas. Then he did the sensible thing and went to college on a normal career path. But one summer on a visit to Key West, he encountered a docked tall ship. The next thing he knew he was training to sail, dropping out of college, and beginning a life at sea.
Record-breaking temperatures 'have robbed the Arctic of its winter'
Fort Yukon has recorded Alaska’s coldest ever temperatures but this winter temperatures have been much warmer than usual, leading to dangerously thin ice.
19th Century Whaling Logs A Boon To Climate Scientists
Whaling was a booming business in the 1800s. By some estimates, the dangerous trade was more lucrative than the gold rush. Today, the most valuable harvest from the whaling years might be the ship’s logbooks.
A team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the University of Washington and the U.K. Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre are enlisting 22,000 volunteers from around the world to comb through hundreds of thousands of pages of old ships’ logs.
What Do Long-Dead Whalers Have To Do With Climate Change?
When the steamship Belvedere left San Francisco in the spring of 1897, its crew members couldn’t have known what a treacherous voyage awaited them.
Their life-and-death experiences would all be captured in the ship’s log, which started out with this unassuming entry: