Ocean On Hold During Road Trip

This just in: the road trip is still in progress and gradually getting sillier. In our whoosh across the Northwest, we’ve walked a weimeraner in the pouring rain, watched five-year-olds on a backyard zipline, stood in the sopping updraft of a Cascades waterfall, glissaded on the shoulders of Mt. Rainier, flown over Mt. St. Helens [...]

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Paleoceanographer Crosses Paleocean

The Scribbler is helping a certain paleoceanographer drive across the country toward the esteemed paleoceanography department at University of California, Santa Cruz.

This special update comes to you from Bozeman, Montana. There’s a lot of geology out here, much of it kindly heaved into view, thousands of feet into the sky, by some ancient but obliging [...]

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Ocean Burps Less Radioactive Than Yours or Mine

OK, so with any luck you’ve read yesterday’s post and you’re up – sort of – on the tools oceanographers use to look into the past. So what did Tom Marchitto and friends see?
They saw evidence of two distinct, massive burps of carbon dioxide, one lasting 3,000 years and beginning about 18,000 years ago; [...]

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Tools for the Trail of a 3,000 Year Long Burp

 
A paper last week in Science reached back 38,000 years to trace how the ocean dumped heaps of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just as the last glaciation was starting its decline. Tom Marchitto and colleagues discovered that around 18,000 years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide began its steady rise from 180 ppm to the oft-quoted [...]

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Backpocket Guide to Global Non-Warming Myths

Cheers to New Scientist for their set of interrelated stories addressing myths and misconceptions about climate change science. They start by acknowledging how hard it is to keep straight the complex actions, interactions and feedbacks that shape Earth’s climate, even without some “other side of the debate” throwing up roadblocks.
Contorted evidence and factoids can [...]

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Wiggling into Science Part II: Wiggling on the Farm

Way back when the Scribbler was a feisty young field biologist staking out nests of strange Neotropical antpittas, I often chewed grass stems to keep myself awake. Occasionally, I would panic to find that a seed head was working itself stubbornly down my throat, pointy end first. When I tried to spit it out, little [...]

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Wiggling into Science Part I: Oceanic Wiggling

Longtime readers may remember a cool story about very small ocean creatures mixing the water column with their daily, en masse commutes. A Canadian study had calculated the amount of power exerted by all those millions of tiny, simultaneous wiggles and it was roughly equal to the amount supplied by winds or tides. This was [...]

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Walden Pond in a Costa Rican Toilet

 
A great photo and some charming natural history on milk frogs in a new blog called Cantos. Returning to field research in Costa Rica after a year’s absence, the blogger finds frogs have invaded her shower, sink, toilet and water pipes. The last location is a favored spot for male frogs to show off their [...]

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Funny Sign Alert #2

On the side of a Waste Management garbage truck. (Taken at 65 mph on Highway 1. Sorry to the white minivan behind me.)
I can vouch that the whole rest of the truck is the same color green as visible on the margins of the sign. Among the many ways of describing such a paint job, [...]

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