MUMBAIKARS won’t see any more sea links, at least for now. After the successful run of the five-kilometre road over the sea, linking Bandra to Worli in South Mumbai, the Maharashtra government was planning its extension to Haji Ali via another sea link. But now that plan has been shelved. …
HealthDirty truth If you stop your children from eating mud, read this. Craving for earth—geophagy—can be one of the natural ways to protect stomach against pathogens. After studying 480 reports and analysing theories that geophagy is driven by hunger and for nutrients in the soil like iron, zinc or calcium …
IT is a neurotoxin that accumulates in marine organisms and can have serious implications on human health. The toxin, monomethylmercury, is of particular concern to people whose traditional diet consists of seafood. But the source of monomethylmercury in oceans has remained uncertain. It was till now suspected that industries were …
For surfers who like high waves, time holds promise. Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, collated satellite data of 23 years and found the wind speed over the ocean has increased substantially. They found that between 1985 and 2008, increased wind speed led to an increased wave height. The …
TOWARDS the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000-20,000 years ago, the global ocean circulation underwent a lot of changes. This circulation, called meridional overturning circulation (MOC), carries warm, saline surface water north to cooler regions. Now researchers from Cardiff University in the UK have revealed how the MOC in …
IN WHAT could have ramifications on the ocean food web, scientists have found that rising acidity of seawaters slows down marine nitrogen cycle. Ocean acidification is the result of CO2 dissolving in seawater and lowering its pH. Scientists know that a drop in ocean pH affects carbon cycle, reducing carbonate …
In the late 1980s, US scientists discovered an organism in the Atlantic Ocean. Later research revealed the organism, christened prochlorococcus, as amongst the most plentiful on the earth. It’s also a veritable trove of oxygen. In recent times, scientists have made attempts to stimulate the growth of prochlorococcus but their …
In 2000, the British research ship Discovery was caught in a fearsome storm. As the battered vessel struggled into the dock, scientists discovered that the ship’s research devices were working. The data confirmed waves more than 60 feet high. Scientists had earlier scoffed at seafarers’ stories about rogue waves: their …
Now it is possible to experience life beneath the ocean on your computers. A team of researchers from the James Cook University (JCU) has developed ocean mapping technology which makes it possible to view the underwater landscape. The team devoted three years to produce a three dimensional, high resolution map …
The sea evokes awe in most of us. It inspires some to poetry and literature. This artistic imagination is showcased in an exhibition at Washington’s Folger Shakespeare Library. Its subtitle, The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550- 1750, might suggest a lulling drone of academic solemnity, but its main title, …
Humans have reduced the abundance of many large marine vertebrates, including whales, large fish, and sharks, to only a small percentage of their pre-exploitation levels. Industrial fishing and whaling also tended to preferentially harvest the largest species and largest individuals within a population. We consider the consequences of removing these …
HUMAN activities are affecting the ocean, altering its composition and damaging it bit by bit. Several researchers have documented this, but as isolated cases. Scott Doney, marine scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in USA, recently reviewed researches in the past six years and evaluated the total impact of rising …
Increased erosion associated with the rise of the world's great mountain ranges has been held to be the cause of a prolonged episode of past climate cooling. That connection is now brought into doubt.
“Wasteland” conjures up visions of dusty desolation where life is fleeting and harsh—if it exists at all. Oceans, too, have their inhospitable pockets. Scientists are discovering that climate change—and not just fertilizer from farm use—may be spurring the emergence of barren underwater landscapes in coastal waters. Expanding dead zones not …
Oxygen-poor waters occupy large volumes of the intermediate-depth eastern tropical oceans. Oxygen-poor conditions have far-reaching impacts on ecosystems because important mobile microorganisms avoid or cannot survive in hypoxic zones. Climate models predict declines in oceanic dissolved oxygen produced by global warming. The researchers constructed a 50-year time series of dissolved-oxygen …
The Gulf Stream transports large amounts of heat from the tropics to middle and high latitudes, and thereby affects weather phenomena such as cyclogenesis and low cloud formation. Here the researchers consider the Gulf Stream's influence on the troposphere, using a combination of operational weather analyses, satellite observations and an …
Anthropogenic addition of bioavailable nitrogen to the biosphere is increasing and terrestrial ecosystems are becoming increasingly nitrogen-saturated, causing more bioavailable nitrogen to enter groundwater and surface waters. Large-scale nitrogen budgets show that an average of about 20
Denitrifying bacteria and hungry plants do sterling work in disposing of the nitrates that we pump into rivers and streams. But as the excess influx goes up and up, the efficiency of removal goes down and down.
There is no shortage of scientific studies documenting the degradation of the world's oceans, the decline of marine ecosystems and the collapse of important fish species. Several have appeared in the last month. What is in short supply is a sustained effort by world governments and other institutions to do …
On Board Sagar Nidhi: It's an acquisition that would make India's deep-sea research scale new heights and the grit of scientists from National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) indicates they are raring to put the Rs 232-crore
