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How Much Is Too Much?

At the Offshore Technology Conference that opened Monday in Houston, a presentation focused on a plan to drill the deepest offshore well ever — a scientific project set for 2017 that will break into the seafloor under more than two miles of water.

While the well, which is aimed at retrieving a core of the Earth's mantle, will not produce oil, it will break the record for offshore drilling with a riser — a pipe used in oil drilling that reaches from the rig to the seafloor.

If successful, the accompanying innovations in drilling also could bring energy companies into contact with life and ecosystems even more obscure and less understood than the frontiers they already explore.

So when is it too much?

Pushing deeper underwater could endanger little-understood creatures such as the deep-water corals that were damaged after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill two years ago.

How sad would it be that these oil companies are going to be the first ones maybe to get anywhere near new species of corals and as of yet undiscovered marine life. Ultimately if they're not careful, they may also be the last.

For years the offshore industry's pursuit of oil has pushed drillers farther into the deep, bringing heavy machinery and remote-operated vehicles into some of the most alien reaches of the globe.

Already, oil companies have been scientific observers during deep-water operations. During Shell's development of its Perdido project 200 miles south of Freeport, a camera on an unmanned submarine captured the first images of an obscure creature in its natural habitat: a big-fin squid at a depth of about 6,399 feet below the surface. The Perdido project, which contains the world's deepest producing well at 9,267 feet, was also where workers operating another unmanned submarine spotted a Greenland sleeper shark 8,530 feet under water. The shark previously was thought to stay within 2,000 feet of the surface.

Source: mysanantonio.com/

Marine biologist turned game designer ‘World of Warcraft’

Life as a marine biologist was not quite the splash Greg Street thought it would be. In the late 1990s, he spent years going through school only to find that studying the environment at times meant spending little of it in nature. Bored by the administrative side of his career, Street looked to video games instead.

“I ultimately [decided] if I was going to spend so much of my time in front of a computer, I may as well be playing computer games instead of writing grant proposals.”

Street managed to arrange an interview with Ensemble Studios, which was planning to release the real-time strategy game “Age of Empires.” Although a gamer at heart, Street had little knowledge of the intricacies of design.

“They wanted a sample of my work and I had never made anything, so I stayed up all night making levels for the game they were working on and they really liked it,” Street says.

On Monday, Street will speak at McDaniel College as part of its SmartTALK series, which brings accomplished alumni back to campus for a public chat with president Roger Casey. Street will discuss how his liberal arts education served him.

Street graduated from the school in 1991 with degrees in biology and philosophy, and then earned his doctorate at the University of Texas. McDaniel became Street’s number one pick on a lark. His original pick was Columbia, but Street’s grandfather was a McDaniel alumnus, who asked him to apply. Street did apply and the more he learned about the school, the more he was enticed by the notion of attending.

“I just got this sense that they really wanted me and they would be excited about my being there and, ultimately, that was where I wanted to be,” Street says.

He says the school prepared him not only for graduate school, but also how to approach and interact with his professors without apprehension.

“I feel like there’s a real quality of learning that could occur in that environment that you just couldn’t get in a larger state school. And I feel like interactions like that gave me a lot of self-confidence that when I went to graduate school [I could] try to talk to professors ... as people,” Street says.

After working at Ensemble for a decade, Street joined Blizzard Entertainment in 2008. In addition to “World of Warcraft,” the company is known for its massive franchises “StarCraft” and “Diablo.” Street says a business toss-up at Ensemble and the studio’s impending closing prompted his decision to leave.

“I worked at Ensemble for almost 10 years. About halfway through that, the studio was acquired outright by Microsoft, which was super exciting at the time,” Street says. “But it seemed to me that over the years Microsoft was placing less emphasis on PC gaming.”

Once Street joined Blizzard, he became lead systems designer for the massive multiplayer online role-playing game hit “World of Warcraft.” As Street says he tells new employees, he enjoys working at the company.

“This would be a fantastic place to work even if we made light bulbs or batteries,” Street says. “The fact that we make games is icing on the cake.”

At Blizzard, Street says he emphasizes more overlap between developers and designers.
“Blizzard tries to avoid what we call ‘the grand reveal," Street says. That’s where a designer sits and works on something and says, ‘A-ha, there it is.

Science itself also plays a role in Street’s work. He says he regularly interacts with fans on forums or at conventions for feedback. They also test complaints, create statistics and rely on numbers as much as possible.

For Street, science and video games share some of the same philosophies, a lesson he began to appreciate while studying at McDaniel College.

“Scientists learn early on how to fail,” Street says. “You make a ton of mistakes. You set up an experiment and the experiment fails or you have a theory and you’re totally wrong.”

Source: gazzette.net

Mysterious Life Forms in the Extreme Deep Sea

Dropcam' and other deep-sea instruments reveal strange creatures of the dark deep during expedition to Mariana Trench.

A summer research expedition organized by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has led to the identification of gigantic amoebas at one of the deepest locations on Earth.

During a July 2011 voyage to the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, the deepest region on the planet, Scripps researchers and National Geographic engineers deployed untethered free-falling/ascending landers equipped with digital video and lights to search the largely unexplored region. The team documented the deepest known existence of xenophyophores, single-celled animals exclusively found in deep-sea environments. Xenophyophores are noteworthy for their size, with individual cells often exceeding 10 centimeters (4 inches), their extreme abundance on the seafloor and their role as hosts for a variety of organisms.

The researchers spotted the life forms at depths up to 10,641 meters (6.6 miles) within the Sirena Deep of the Mariana Trench. The previous depth record for xenophyophores was approximately 7,500 meters (4.7 miles) in the New Hebrides Trench, although sightings in the deepest portion of the Mariana Trench have been reported. Scientists say xenophyophores are the largest individual cells in existence. Recent studies indicate that by trapping particles from the water, xenophyophores can concentrate high levels of lead, uranium and mercury and are thus likely highly resistant to large doses of heavy metals. They also are well suited to a life of darkness, low temperature and high pressure in the deep sea.

"The research of Scripps Professor Lisa Levin (deep-sea biologist) has demonstrated that these organisms play host to diverse multicellular organisms," said Doug Bartlett, the Scripps marine microbiologist who organized the Mariana Trench expedition. "Thus the identification of these gigantic cells in one of the deepest marine environments on the planet opens up a whole new habitat for further study of biodiversity, biotechnological potential and extreme environment adaptation."
The xenophyophores are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to considerations of the nature and diversity of life at extreme depths. For example, according to Dhugal Lindsay (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, or JAMSTEC), the Dropcam movie also depicts the deepest jellyfish observed to date.

The instruments used to spot the mysterious animals were "Dropcams" developed and used by National Geographic Society Remote Imaging engineers Eric Berkenpas and Graham Wilhelm, participants in the July voyage.

"The 'Dropcams' are versatile autonomous underwater cameras containing an HD camera and lighting inside of a glass bubble," said Berkenpas. "They were created by National Geographic engineers to allow scientists and filmmakers to capture high-quality footage from any depth in the ocean. The devices were baited and used 'camera-traps' to capture imagery of approaching marine life."

Dropcams utilize a thick-wall glass sphere capable of withstanding more than eight tons per-square-inch pressure at extreme depth.
"Seafloor animals are lured to the camera with bait, a technique first developed by Scripps Professor John Isaacs in the 1960s," said Kevin Hardy, a Scripps ocean engineer and cruise participant. Hardy advanced the ultra-deep glass sphere design used on 'Dropcams' more than a decade ago. "Scripps researchers hope to one day capture and return novel living animals to the laboratory for study in high pressure aquariums that replicate the trench environment."

Also during the expedition, Scripps researchers successfully tested an advanced seafloor Deep Ocean Vehicle (DOV) design, using similar spheres to recover microbes and test other advanced system components.

The xenophyophore sightings were positively identified by Scripps' Levin, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, and confirmed by Andrew Gooday of the UK National Oceanography Center.

"As one of very few taxa found exclusively in the deep sea, the xenophyophores are emblematic of what the deep sea offers. They are fascinating giants that are highly adapted to extreme conditions but at the same time are very fragile and poorly studied," said Levin. "These and many other structurally important organisms in the deep sea need our stewardship as human activities move to deeper waters."

This project was funded by NASA, the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council, Joanie Nasher, Patty and Rick Elkus.

Photo credit: Lisa Levin (all except upper right, credit David Checkley)


Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego

An Ocean Short of Oxygen

As average global temperatures rise, larger parts of the world's oceans could become anoxic dead zones. This is shown by an analysis of the oxygen conditions during the past 20,000 years

Every summer, a few places in the north-east Pacific now see vast numbers of dead marine animals including fish, shrimp or molluscs being washed up on the beach by the waves. It is a financial catastrophe for the local fishing industry and an ecological one for the sea. These mass mortalities are caused by the animals suffocating because their water contains too little oxygen, or even none at all.

Although this phenomenon is still localised, that could change in the future, as revealed by a new publication in “Nature Geoscience”.

The two authors, Samuel Jaccard from the Geological Institute at ETH Zurich and Eric Galbraith from McGill University, Canada, have evaluated oxygen data from seafloor sediment cores. Based on this data, they have reconstructed how the oxygen content in the oceans throughout the world has changed in the past 20,000 years, focusing particularly on the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

When temperature rises, oxygen vanishes

Their analyses show that the marked average global temperature rise of around two degrees centigrade occurring between the peak and the end of the last ice age, i.e. 20,000 to 10,000 years ago, had a massive effect on the oxygen content of seawater. The oxygen content of many oceans fell dramatically as a result of the temperature increase, and oxygen-depleted marine zones expanded more than during the cold period.

Expansion of the dead zones

These dead zones are particularly critical because they are situated in areas of the ocean that are home to the largest quantity of life. This means a shrinkage of habitat especially for the large fish of the open ocean. Entire food chains are threatened with deprivation. Biodiversity in the oceans will probably decrease, which will also pose serious problems for the fishing industry.

Poor mixing

The oxygen in seawater originates mainly from gas exchange between the sea surface and the atmosphere. Algae and other green life-forms also produce the vital gas. However, oxygen is consumed when dead organic material sinks down towards the sea bed and is degraded in the process by various organisms, mostly microbes. Warmer temperatures in the uppermost layers of water disturb this delicate equilibrium, because for physical reasons warm water is able to absorb less oxygen than colder water.

Furthermore, more stable layers form when seawater warms up. Warm, lower-density water lies on top of cold, denser water. These layers scarcely intermix, reducing the efficiency of the gas exchange with the atmosphere and between the various bodies of water.

Reference: Jaccard SL & Galbraith ED. Large climate-driven changes of oceanic oxygen concentrations during the last deglaciation. Nature Geoscience (2011). Published online 18 December 2011. DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1352

Source: ETH Zürich

Hagfish Anti-Shark Slime Weapon

The hagfish found in New Zealand’s deepest waters is grotesque enough, thanks to its scary protruding teeth straight from a horror film. Now, scientists have witnessed the full power of its other gruesome feature – a built-in slime weapon to deter predators such as sharks, making it one of the planet’s ultimate survivors.

Researchers from Massey University and Te Papa have just released graphic underwater footage showing for the first time how the primitive hagfish – also known as the snot-eel – defends itself by emitting a choking, gill-clogging slime that might be the envy of any surfer under attack from a shark.

The footage, part of a study of New Zealand’s deep-sea animal diversity, is from special cameras that captured images of various fish attacking hagfish off Three Kings and Great Barrier Islands as they feed on bait attached to the camera. As soon as it is attacked, the hagfish releases a gooey mucus-like substance from its battery of slime glands and up to 200 slime pores, causing predators to gag before hastily retreating.

The video footage in New Zealand waters has proven that hagfish secrete slime at an incredibly fast speed when under attack by predators such as large sharks or bony fishes.

A paper on the findings just published online in Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) titled Hagfish predatory behaviour and slime defence mechanism describes the effectiveness of the “copious slime” in choking would-be predators without apparently poisoning or killing them. This in turn allows the hagfish to carry on feeding or to make an escape, clearly a success as an evolutionary strategy.

Other new findings include the discovery that the hagfish is not only an ocean scavenger but is also a predator – with a twist. Footage reveals its bizarre method of burrowing into sand in pursuit of a red bandfish by knotting its tail for additional leverage as it grabs its hidden prey before unknotting and emerging from the sand.

Since 2009, the scientists have deployed cameras at depths ranging from 50 to 1500 metres around New Zealand. So far, over 1000 hours of footage has been collected off the Kermadec Islands, Three Kings Islands, Great Barrier Island, White Island and Kaikoura, with surveys to extend in 2012 to the sea off the Otago Peninsula and down as far as the Auckland Islands.

This research was funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund Grant to Dr Roberts and Professor Anderson, a Te Papa Collection Development Grant as well as support by the Ministry of Science and Innovation via NIWA and the University of Western Australia.

Watch a video of the hagfish in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bta18FdkVcA&feature=player_embedded

Source: Massey University

Swim Little Fishes, Swim if You Can

Fish and other sea creatures will have to travel large distances to survive climate change, international marine scientists have warned.

Sea life, particularly in the Indian Ocean, the Western and Eastern Pacific and the subarctic oceans will face growing pressures to adapt or relocate to escape extinction, according to a new study by an international team of scientists published in the journal Science.

The current research shows that species which cannot adapt to the increasingly warm waters they will encounter under climate change will have to swim farther and faster to find a new home.

Using 50 years’ data of global temperature changes since the 1960s, the researchers analysed the shifting climates and seasonal patterns on land and in the oceans to understand how this will affect life in both over the coming century.

The velocity of climate change (the geographic shifts of temperature bands over time) and the shift in seasonal temperatures for both land and sea found both measures were higher for the ocean at certain latitudes than on land, despite the fact that the oceans tend to warm more slowly than air over the land.

The findings have serious implications especially for marine biodiversity hotspots – such as the famous Coral Triangle and reefs that flourish in equatorial seas, and for life in polar seas, which will come under rising pressure from other species moving in.

Unlike land-dwelling animals, which can just move up a mountain to find a cooler place to live, a sea creature may have to migrate several hundred kilometres to find a new home where the water temperature, seasonal conditions and food supply all suit it.

Under current global warming, land animals and plants are migrating polewards at a rate of about 6 kilometres a decade – but sea creatures may have to move several times faster to keep in touch with the water temperature and conditions that best suit them.

There  are also a complex mosaic of responses globally, related to local warming and cooling. For example, analysis suggests that life in many areas in the Southern Ocean could move northward, however, as a rule, they are likely to be as great or greater in the sea than on land, as a result of its more uniform temperature distribution.

The migration is likely to be particularly pronounced among marine species living at or near the sea surface, or subsisting on marine plants and plankton that require sunlight – and less so in the deep oceans.

At the same time, sea life living close to the poles could find itself overwhelmed by marine migrants moving in from warmer regions, in search of cool water.

Future research will focus on how different ocean species respond to climate change and they are compiling a database on this for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The paper “The Pace of Shifting Climate in Marine and Terrestrial Ecosystems” by Michael T. Burrows, David S. Schoeman, Lauren B. Buckley, Pippa Moore, Elvira S.Poloczanska, Keith M. Brander, Chris Brown, John F. Bruno, Carlos M. Duarte, Benjamin S. Halpern, Johnna Holding, Carrie V. Kappel, Wolfgang Kiessling, Mary I.O’Connor, John M. Pandolfi, Camille Parmesan, Franklin B. Schwing, William J. Sydeman and Anthony J. Richardson, appears in today’s issue of Science.

Source: The ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies