Whale watching: you’re out there on the water with salt spray in your face and wind in your hair, waiting for a gigantic sea mammal to surface and do something splashy. It seems like a touristy thing to do, but scientists actually track whale populations from that very same vantage point. Sea level’s cool and all, but wouldn’t it be awesome to monitor whales—FROM SPACE?? You’re damn right it would, and now it’s actually happening.
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Sure, we all know pollution destroys ecosystems, but, for better or for worse, pollution can create ecosystems, too. The billions of tiny pieces of plastic that are now floating in our oceans are exactly that: a novel ecosystem humans have unwittingly made by throwing away too much plastic. Microbes and insects that might have no business thriving in the middle of the ocean suddenly have found a new home amidst all that drifting plastic.
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In 1960, scientists did one of those experiments that just aren’t allowed anymore. For the sake of science, they blew up three 3oo-lb anti-submarine bombs off the coast of Australia. A listening station 10,000 miles away in Bermuda—on the exact other side of the planet—waited. And waited. And, about three and a half hours later, they saw the blip that confirmed their hypothesis: Yes, sound in the ocean really can travel across the world.
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As earth’s population surges, mankind faces an increasingly limited supply of fresh water. Thankfully, Australian scientists report this week that they’ve found vast new fresh water supplies. Unfortunately, it’s in one of earth’s least accessible places: under the ocean floor
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This is a really super fun question. I only wish that Randall Munroe, not me, were answering, so he could draw cool pictures.
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While winds may die and clouds may obscure the sun, nothing can stop the rhythmic lapping of ocean waves. Now, an Australian company hopes to harness that power and covert it to usable electricity with the most powerful wave-energy generator ever created. And this is just their small-scale prototype.
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Space may be the final frontier of exploration, but there’s plenty of Earth left unmapped, too—from the giant canyon recently discovered beneath Greenland
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The biggest volcano ever found on Earth—one of the biggest we know of in the solar system—has been hidden for ages. But now scientists have found it, just chillin’ beneath the sea. It’s a monster.
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One problem with conventional ROVs is that while their propellers are plenty strong enough to kick up columns of silt from the sea floor, they typically lack the power to effectively navigate in strong currents, which limits where and how well they can survey a given area. But this new underwater explorer sidesteps both of these problems by skittering around the sea floor like a crab.
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