Team of International Marine Scientists Call for Ban on Deep Sea Fishing

Fishing restriction have been placed in costal lines for many years in order to maintain stable fishing population but as the demand of fish went up, many corporal companies have gone to the deep seas in order to harvest fish which are less regulated by governments . Unlike costal lines, the vast deep seas are patches of wildlife isolated. With new technologies fishers can search deeper depts for fish and catch an entire population destroying the coral reefs. Coral reefs can survive for 4000 years but now are dying instantly. Also from 1964 to 2004 harvesting fishes has increased sevenfold. If fishes are depleted than many coral reefs will be destroyed. However some countries like France, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain in the European Union might resist because they have a long Martine traditions and a major part in their economies.

This a an example of discovery science because scientist recorded data and then made a hypotheses that which states that all the coral reefs are disappearing because the fishes are being depleted by industrial fishing which has increase sevenfold. This is important to humans because their will be less Eco diversity and removing fishes can affect other parts of the oceans and eventually humans. In addition if fishing is not regulated then when most fishes are extinct countries that rely on fish for their diets might have change staples

http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/43226
From: David A Gabel, ENN

Published September 9, 2011 09:29 AM

The Great Barrier Reef

One of the most important and most beautiful ecosystems in the world, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, is in grave danger. Scientific groups like the WWF have predicted the almost complete destruction of this ecosystem by 2050, due to the increase of sea temperature, caused by climate change. They believe that the high thermal levels caused by global warming will psychologically stress the corals and lead to “bleach” or lose their symbiotic algae. If short-term, this bleaching process can be recovered from but if prolonged, it can lead to damage and death. Dr. Arnold Dekker, an Australian scientist said, “an increase in frequency of coral bleaching may be one of the first tangible effects of global warming.” Other reasons that coral reefs may soon be extinct are many; changes in sea level, elevated storm frequency and intensity, altered ocean circulation, variation in precipitation and land runoff, and increasing ocean acidification.

This article is an example of hypothesis-based science. The part that is hypothesis-based science is the research that led to the specific facts about the coral reefs, like the bleaching. They pose the question “if bleaching continues, then The Great Barrier Reef will be dead by 2050. This discovery has had an impact on humans because “the degradation and loss of coral ecosystems in will likely have a wide-ranging impact on the world economy.” How? Because more than 500 million people live very close to the coral reefs, and they rely on them as buffers from storms, and as services for daily subsistence.

Source: http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1117-corals.html

Ice In Motion

Jason Box, a glaciologist at Ohio State University in Columbus has been studying the glacial breakup of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. He spent two months on a ship observing the glacier but on August 4, 2010, a piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke off the glacier. In the past few years, many of these pieces of ice have been breaking off glaciers and falling into the oceans of the world. Scientists assume that if the glaciers keep moving faster and faster and breaking off at the rate their going, in the next few centuries, the water level may raise by 67 meters. Scientists are trying to better understand the movement of these glaciers and are setting up the glaciers with cameras, instruments, and underwater submersibles to learn what drives and moves the ice toward the ocean. One of the fastest flowing glaciers is the Jakobshavn Isbrae on Greenland’s west coast. In 2008 Albert Behar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, dropped 90 rubber ducks into water tunnels and try to follow them through the glacier. However the ducks have not appeared on the other side of the glacier. Since this iceberg has been emitting ice pieces into the ocean for years, many believe it could have been part of the Titanic incident in 1912.

This is discovery based science because the scientists are discovering how the glaciers move towards the ocean and how the melting of the ice could raise the sea levels.

This is important because if the glaciers melt in the polar ice caps, the sea levels could rise dramatically and affect millions of people living on the coast.

Author: Alexandra Witze

Title: Ice in Motion

Date Published: March 26, 2011

Pages: 23-24

Things You Didn't Know About...Water

The human body is made up of around 78 % of water. The amount of water the human body needs in its system to function is around 6 to 7 liters daily. These calculations make the worldly water demand a very high one. It puts water on the top scale of importance in daily life. There are 332,500,000 cubic miles of water (all kinds) in the world. Water makes up approximately 73% of the Earth’s globe. Out of that solid 73% only 1% of it is drinkable for humans (including bottled water). So what’s going to happen? Humans need to learn how to value the little things in order to appreciate the big ones. Water needs to be appreciated or else one day (could be soon) there might not be any left.

This research was done through discovery science. It was a discovery in which scientists observed the several patterns of water need, plentitude and contamination in order to get to the conclusion: “Water is plenty, yet drinkable water is not”.

Author: Rebecca Coffey

Title: Things You Didn't Know About...Water

Journal: Discover Magazine

Date: August 10, 2010

Page: 20

Water on the Moon?

Water is composed of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. It can also be formed when hydrogen combines with a hydroxyl molecule (OHˉ). The different spacecrafts (Cassini, Deep Impact, and Chandrayaan) saw the sign of water in the moon. Hydroxyl molecules and water love to eat the 2.8 micron light, so eventually they absorb it. Then as the astronauts take a spectrum of the moon they saw a big dip at that wavelength. The spacecraft showed that there is 1% water in the lunar surface by weight. This water may come from comets that hit the moon and deposit water, and over the past billions of years may have also dumped as ten trillion liters of water in the surface. The water amount detected changed over the month-lunar day. There was more in the morning and less at noon a week later. It clearly shows that the Sun is involved in this process. Scientists say that the solar wind is thick with hydrogen may slam into the lunar rock freezes oxygen, which then combines to form H₂O. This shows that the Sun affects the water levels. An amazingly finding is that the water levels appear to be only in the surface.

This article is an example of hypothesis based science, because they did many experiments on the moon. They send the three spacecrafts Cassini, Deep Impact, and Chandrayaan to see if there was water. Cassini and Deep Impact swung by the Moon and Chandrayaan orbited the Moon. This article is important because maybe the Moon may be hiding what scientists are finding the most, and the Moon is the nearest astronomical object in the sky, and there are many researches involved in the Moon.

author : Phil Plait

title of article: Water on the Moon...? Yup. It's real

journal: DISCOVERY MAGAZINE

pages of article: 1

One Beetle's Way of Getting Water from Fog

The long legged Namib beetle from the Namib desert faces towards the wind. Its outer wings are against it. There, drops of water form from the fog, collecting to form bigger drops that can counter the force of adhesion and roll to the beetles mouth. It usually drinks at dawn. The timing is crucial for the beetle's survival, because later during the day the sun evaporates the fog, and all that is left is the intense heat of the desert. Fog is made up of many water droplets that are so small that they are carried by the wind and air. It is very hard to collect this water. They need to be brought together so gravity can bring them down.

Andrew R. Parker, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, and Chris R. Lawrence, an investigator at a defense research firm, discovered that the beetles' wings have bumps that attract water and small valleys that repel it. The bumps collect drops of water until they can get big enough to fall into the small valleys, which repel water, so the drops roll down to the beetles mouth because of the angle of the beetle's body. Parker and Lawrence were able to develop a surface similar to the beetle's wings. They put glass spheres in a small layer of wax. They conducted experiments and found that if these spheres were arranged and ordered, more water was collected. Other materials similar to the glass and the wax could be used later.

This article is an example of hypothesis science. The scientists observed a beetle that collected water, and tried to find ways to imitate the beetle's surface through experimentation. They came up with that the best solution was an ordered array of glass spheres in a small layer of wax, and that other ways were not so efficient.

This is important for humans because Parker and Lawrence hope to someday use this to clear fog in airports and as a new way of obtaining drinking water, especially in very dry places where people have very little.

Author: Adam Summers
Title of Article: Like Water Off a Beetle's Back
Journal: Natural History
Date Published: February 2004
Pages: 1

Scour power: Big storms shift coastal erosion into overdrive

Resculpting of shorelines by storms has become a popular research topic. A fact that has greatly befuddled scientists is that Louisiana lose on average a land area equal to about two football fields each hour to subsidence and sea level rises. What this is saying is that every hour, 200 yards of land are either covered by water or eroded on the coast of Louisiana. After hurricane Ike passed through Louisiana, it flushed away 3-meter tall ridges of shells and loose gravel 40-50 meters seaward and scoured as much as two-thirds of the ridges’ height. Fresh deposits of sand and mud stretched up to 15 kilometers offshore. The piles included about 300,000 cubic meters of sand from each kilometer of coastline. Previous studies of the seafloor in this area have suggested that material at water depths greater than 5 meters typically stays put under normal conditions, much of that sand probably won’t be coming back to shore. Along the Atlantic Coast, the shore erodes inland, on average, between 60 centimeters and a meter each year; annual rates of erosion along the Gulf Coast are double that. In southern Louisiana, a long term sinking, or subsidence-a phenomenon resulting from reduced deliveries of river sediment and the ongoing withdrawal of oil and gas from underground reservoirs-makes barrier islands unusually susceptible to storms.

This article is important to humans because the more coastal erosion that occur across the United States means less land for human beings to be able to live on which in thus means that more people will be cramped into smaller places. These discoveries are discovery based because the scientists that wrote this article used data from over the years and many different hurricanes to produce their thesis.

Heat Waves

Waves are speeding up thanks to global warming. This could affect weather patterns around the world. The waves are constantly generated by surface winds and pushed westward by the Earth's eastward rotation. They advance by between four and ten inches a second in the tropics, more slowly toward the poles. But that's about 10 percent faster than oceanic planetary waves traveled at the start of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, according to John C. Fyfe and Oleg A. Saenko. Global climate models point to the temperature increase in the upper ocean- a consequence of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. By 2100, the investigators add, if carbon dioxide levels rise as predicted, the waves will travel 35 percent faster than they did in preindustrial times. Oceanic planetary waves affect ocean currents, which strongly influence continental weather and climate. As the waves speed up, Fyfe and Saenko forecast big changes that may include more frequent El Niño events and heat waves across western North America and Europe.

The article I selected is hypothesis based. They make an assumption that due to global warming, waves are speeding up and due to that there will be more frequent El Niño events and heat waves across western North America and Europe. This research is important to humans, because we can prevent global warming which would prevent these frequent heat waves.

Author: Harvey Leifert

Title of Article: Heat Waves

Journal: Natural History Magazine

Date Published: September 2007

Page: http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/samplings/141347/heat-waves

Thirst

According to a man named George H. Smith from the United States Navy, sea water could be drunk in crucial positions. Smith was stranded in the ocean questioned himself why birds could drink the seawater and he could not so he decided to investigate. He cut the bird open and followed the trace of the water and found that around the intestines of the bird there was a handful of fat. He used the fat and spread it around his mouth and drank a pint of seawater each day for five days until he was picked up which he was in fairly good condition. Scientist mention that the reason he was not affected by the seawater was because he was not dehydrated before he began to drink the water and that on the fifth day it rained and he was given all the fresh water he wanted. Dr. Alain Bombard proved that a man could survive for six days on drinking sea water but he must drink it in very small quantities (one tenth of a pint.

The article is an example of hypothesis based science. The reason it is hypothesis-based is because the French Navy soldier Dr. Alain Bombard did an experiment where he actually drank sea water for five days to come to a conclusion. This article or research is an importance for humans because for centuries there have been reports of men dying of drinking sea water and there is finally an article explaining a way to be able to drink sea water.

Author: William H. Allen
Title of Article: Thirst
Journal: Natural History Magazine
Date: December, 1956
Pages: 1

Churning water by the numbers

Scientists have discovered that the movement of jellyfish mixes the ocean water. The jellyfish (Mastigias) drag the water as they swim; combining the cold water and mixing it with warmer water higher above. These specific jellyfish drag water because of their thickness in body mass. Even though they are small creatures, jellyfish carry more water with them than large creatures do. Scientist John Dabiri calculated the power generated from this movement to be as much as a trillion watts. These small movements can influence the cycling of heat and carbon in oceans, which are important factors for the global climate. Oceanographer William Dewar of Florida State University in Tallahassee states that the analysis “doesn’t leave a lot of doubt- it’s very convincing.”

This article is an example of hypothesis-based science because the researchers performed an experiment to track the flow of water moving with the jellyfish to prove their findings. They also made calculations and did tests to confirm their research. This article also shows the importance of the global climate and the ecosystems which can have an effect on humans since water is a necessity for life.

By: Rachel Ehrenberg

"Churning water by the numbers: small swimmers may affect ocean mixing and climate"

Science News

August 29,2009

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