Ponyo

A new ocean movie, Ponyo, by Hayao Miyazaki (he of Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle fame) comes out this weekend.

This is a big deal, people. Miyazaki is pretty much an immortal in the anime industry, and ocean folks haven’t had a good ocean movie since Life Aquatic came out in 2004.

I’ll attend as soon as the movie hits an independent theater in town, but if you have no qualms about selling your soul to AMC, Regal or the other large corporations, there are worse ways to spend your weekend.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Tuna

Alain de Botton’s new book (definitely worth a read), The Pleasures and Sorrow of Work, has a photo essay on tuna. While not oceanography, per se, it’s definitely interesting, and the essay involves the clubbing of tuna, which is always a splendid story for oceanography parties.

Also, a small tuna-eating child takes a swipe at marine biologists:

“He [the small tuna-eating child] also makes the ancillary suggestion, less often remarked upon by marine biologists, that our perpetual killing of the fish has left the seas choked with an array of pallid oceanic ghosts who will one day gather together to exact terrible revenge on humanity for shortening their lives and transporting their corpses around the earth for supper in Bristol.”

Heck yes, people. Fish ghosts are going to kill us all.

Fascinating TED presentation

So completely worth 15 minutes of your time: lecture on bacteria.

When the super rich grow bored: oceanography

The super rich must be growing bored with drugs, ponzi schemes and their highly inefficient charities, because now they’re building giant recycled boats and sailing around the world (from Earth911.com):

David de Rothschild, heir to one of the most famous fortunes in banking, is taking the same perspective on plastic waste and setting an example for ecologically minded sea-farers: He’s building a 60-foot, rudderless catamaran out of used two-liter plastic bottles, even though he gets “seasick in the bathtub.”

Scripps got in on the deal somehow:

At the berths along the route,  scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who will publish a paper on their findings at the end of the trip, will study topics like ocean acidification, coral bleaching and marine debris.

On a side note, Rothschild looks like a he could have been an elf in the Lord of the Rings series, or perhaps a suicidal character in a Wes Anderson movie. Also, he’s an eco-hero in Europe and is dating Camerson Diaz.

God bless the copepods: stimulating the phytoplankton

I doubt many of the experimenters  believe this is viable solution to climate change, but much of the media describe the dumping of iron into the ocean as a panacea for “global warming.” Not surprisingly, the highly controversial and irregular experiment didn’t go as hypothesized (via The Economist).

MESSING around with ecosystems is an unpredictable business. That proved true again this week when a group of Indian and German researchers gave their first report from the biggest ever experiment in geo-engineering: an expedition to pour iron into the Southern Ocean, a vast area that encircles Antarctica, to stimulate a giant bloom of phytoplankton.

. . .

Those researchers, led by Wajih Naqvi and Victor Smetacek, created a bloom of phytoplankton by fertilising an area of 300 square kilometres with six tonnes of iron sulphate, which dissolves in water. In two weeks the bloom’s mass doubled. But it also proved to be extremely tasty for small crustaceans called copepods, which gobbled the phytoplankton up so quickly that even with further iron fertilisation the bloom stopped growing. As a result, only a small amount of CO2 was dispatched to the ocean floor.

Since the hypothesis wasn’t actually tested, we can’t actually draw conclusions from the experiment except that ecologies are complex and that human intervention in ecological systems results in strange ecologies. These are truths we already knew.

Copepods are pretty amazing little devils, by the way. They’re almost as cool as diatoms. (Sorry, copepod researchers. It’s scientifically proven: diatoms are cooler than copepods. Four out of five oceanographers agree.)

Submersible Porn

I’m not going to lie: deep sea submersibles are hot. Super hot. Once you’ve seen Alvin and Nautile (a French submersible) in the same cargo bay, your mind will be warped forever, that’s how hot submersibles are.

Anyway, there’s a blurb about Autosub 6000 (quite possible the worst submersible name ever; oh, those crazy Brits) over at Planet Earth:

Autosub 6000 was developed by British engineers at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and is an example of an AUV or automomous underwater vehicle. The submarine is pre-programmed before each mission and isn’t controlled from the surface – once Autosub 6000 is in the water it’s on its own.

Able to dive to a depth of 6000 metres, Autosub 6000 allows scientists to access more than 90 per cent of the Earth’s ocean floors. Science writer and broadcaster Richard Hollingham finds out more about what’s in store for this robot submarine.

After reading about autonomous fish robots, Autosub 6000 (which is still a really lame name no matter how hard I pretend it’s not the name of an egregiously bad movie) is bound to disappoint. Anything less than a autonomous deep-sea whale robot is simply ordinary.

How to get rich as an oceanographer

So it turns out you don’t want to be a Steve Zissou. Cornflower blue track suits and red stocking caps aside, you desire more than than a dilapidated Belafonte and footage of the tiger shark. You want to be an Alistair Hennessey. You want oceans of money and lakes of cash. You want a T-shirt that reads, “I’m a pepper.” You want intensively trained research turtles. You may even want to be “half gay.” (It’s a quote from the movie, fyi. The BOBE attempts to avoid prejudice of all kinds, unless we’re talking about saving whales, in which case I’ll need to run to the back room to grab my harpoon.)

So what is the enterprising young oceanographer to do if they care more about money than science?

1. Enroll in the new CEO course at Scripps. This is a gimme now that they’ve announced their new courses. Next year executives from AIG and Bear Stearns will be on Scripps’ staph in order to teach students the skills necessary to suck the joy and goodness from everything, including, but not limited to, ecology, green technology, immortal jellyfish and your grandmother’s 401K.
2. Seek deep sea treasure. It’s out there. You have ships with high tech gadgetry. All you need to do is violate international laws. Trust me, it’s worth it. At the very least you’ll get a good story.
3. Consider piracy. And I don’t mean the run-of-the-mill, screw-the-system piracy that you engage in when you burn a DVD (using your high tech gadgetry, no doubt). I mean full on, grenade launcher piracy.
4. Rubber ducks. Seriously. Ebbesmeyer gets more media play that a Britney Spears upskirt or a Barack Obama swimming photo. A couple more years of this and this is the only oceanography that the average person will know. I can see it now. You walk into a party, inform someone that you’re an oceanographer, and the response: “Oh my god. Do you know Al Gore? Do you study rubber ducks.” It’s going to happen.
5. Become independently wealthy. If you’re currently wondering if you’re independently wealthy, you’re not. But you can always kill your parents and take the inheritance (granted that your parents wrote you into their will, which they probably didn’t if you’re actively plotting their murder). Just wait for 2010: no estate taxes! Go Bush legacy!
6. Go over to the dark side. There are actually numerous dark sides to oceanography, and if it seems that you’re making a lot of money, you’re on one of them.

For the rest of you, toil on, heroic oceanographer. Toil on.

The worst jobs in science: oceanographer?

So Popular Science, which is sort of like Cosmopolitan but with more gadgets and fewer sex tips (and you don’t want sex tips from Popular Science, trust me), listed “oceanographer” as the second worst job in science in 2007:

Number 2: Oceanographer
Nothing but bad news, day in and day out

Scientists estimate that overfishing will end wild-seafood harvests by 2048 and that Earth´s coral reefs will be rubble within decades. About 200 deoxygenated “dead zones” dot the world´s coasts, up from 149 in 2004. Meanwhile, a vortex of plastic the size of Texas clogs the North Pacific, choking fish and birds; construction is destroying coastal habitats; and countless key marine species are nearly extinct. To top it all off, if global warming goes the way scientists predict, the uptick of carbon dioxide levels in the seas will acidify the water until little more than jellyfish can live there.

With so much going on, there´s plenty of work for oceangoing scientists-if they can stomach bad news. Carl Safina, the founder of the nonprofit Blue Ocean Institute, is proud of the work he´s done to battle overfishing in the U.S., where some species are actually on the mend. Nevertheless, he says, humans are “poised to remake the ocean into a new kind of environment”-one that might require a toxic-containment suit. Recently, Ron Johnstone, an Australian marine biologist, broke out in boils while studying sediment. He was poisoned by fireweed, a toxic cyanobacteria exploding across the globe in response to pollution.

If it’s any consolation, “oceanographer” didn’t make the list in 2009. But I feel kind of hurt by that exclusion. If it was bad two years ago, shouldn’t it be worse now?

Why it’s sometimes best to be skeptical

Remember that comment I made about CEOs and Scripps? Turns out Scripps is going into the CEO business:

The University of California, San Diego, a world leader in climate change research, has announced it will offer an innovative program on climate change and its impact on business. “The ROI for Going Green” will provide participants with a basic understanding of climate change, and what strategies businesses and investors can employ to increase their bottom line.

In response to the increasing interest in climate change, Scripps Institution of Oceanography has partnered with the Rady School of Management to present the second installment in an executive development series teaching business leaders basic science behind climate change, empowering them to compute the return on investment (ROI) for going green.

How to get rich + climate change. Talk about noble scientific pursuits.

In all fairness, of course, I’d rather have individuals grow rich by preying on our fears of environmental catastrophe than on our fears about ethnicity, race, gender and class. Still, Scripps’ move seems less about science and more about profit.

Build a squid

In case you’re one of those oceanographers whose job doesn’t involve genetic engineering, you now have an alternative method to play “god,” or, as we used to say in my family, to play “old bearded white man who lives in the sky and watches you poop, which is rather creepy once you start to think about it”: build a squid.