Recent Scientific Discoveries

This month, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary teamed up with partners to assess damage to the coral reef from Hurricane Irma. 

Preliminary reports from the team found extensive shifting of sand and heavy sediment accumulation, which can smother and prevent corals from getting enough sunlight, as well as some structural damage to individual corals and the reef itself. This effort is the first step in a longer recovery process. Here, a science diver notes reef conditions. 

Learn more about the assessment here and see more images here.

(Photo: Brenda Altmeier/NOAA)

Campbell River teen missing for almost a month

Campbell River RCMP is investigating and say the disappearance is out of character for Holling.

A Campbell River family is growing increasingly desperate to find a teen who has been missing for almost a month.

Jordan Holling hasn’t been seen since the early morning of Oct. 16, when he left a friend’s house on 16th Avenue in Campbell River to walk the few blocks home. He never arrived at his mother’s house on 17th Avenue and failed to show up for work later that day.

Continue Reading.

More good news from this nightmare in which we are living…

Trump Poised to Shrink Two National Monuments

Trump is expected to eliminate nearly 85 percent of Bear Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, cutting more than 1 million acres from its current boundaries. He’s also set to halve the nearly 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (E&E News PM, Nov. 30).

The move is being praised by Republicans who have long argued that the Antiquities Act—the 1906 law that allows presidents to set aside public land—is being used unlawfully to lock up tracts of federal land. On the other side, Democratic allies have vowed to take any monument reductions to court.

Scientists who have studied the region, especially Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, say redrawing its boundaries could be detrimental to scientific research and discoveries.

“The monument has been demonstrably a very, very important scientific laboratory to learning and understanding on many realms,” said Mike Scott, a retired U.S. Geological Survey researcher.

Scott and his colleagues have spent time in Grand Staircase-Escalante studying how different management policies and activities on rangelands—there are many different kinds across the ecologically diverse monument—affect the health of those ecosystems. Rangeland activities include anything from how grazing affects soil quality to the health of different soil types.

As climate change brings warmer, drier conditions, understanding how to keep soils and grassland ecosystems healthy in arid landscapes is crucial to avoid desertification, Scott said. Grand Staircase-Escalante has been “a really critical living laboratory,” he said.

A paper published this week confirmed a piece of speculation going all the way back to Darwin.

I did not know that either. That is one HUGE sea turtle.

Sand Dollar: It’s Alive!

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Dark Matter

Huge Magma Bubble May Be Rising Under New England

If the findings hold up, the northeastern U.S. may be more geologically active than anyone realized.

The findings, recently published in the journal Geology, suggest that New England may not be so immune to abrupt geological change.