Hundreds of millions of tons of mineral dust are transported thousands of miles through the atmosphere from the Sahara and Sahel of Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas every year.
This video discusses whether African dust is playing a role in coral reef declines throughout the Caribbean region, and if African dust has a negative effect on human health. If so, what processes are involved?
Stay tuned for a related post about iron fertilisation experiments to trigger phytoplankton blooms in the North Pacific, where sands of the Sahara are not present.
Oceanographer Paul Snelgrove shares the results of a ten-year project with one goal: to take a census of all the life in the oceans. He shares amazing photos of some of the surprising finds of the Census of Marine Life.
New videography techniques have opened up the oceans’ microscopic ecosystem, revealing it to be both mesmerizingly beautiful and astoundingly complex. Marine biologist Tierney Thys teamed with Christian Sardet (CNRS/Tara Oceans), Noé Sardet and Sharif Mirshak to use footage from the Plankton Chronicles project to create a film designed to ignite wonder and curiosity about this hidden world that underpins our own food chain.
Stay tuned as Dr. Tierney Thys is going to be giving a talk at the Ryan Institute, Galway, this week. See also the website Plankton Chronicles for amazing videos of plankton.
Tide pools are important to hundreds of plants and animals, especially young organisms. Learn about nudibranches, sea stars, shore birds and some of the historical characters that first studied these rocky pools.
Seamounts are common topographic features in the EEZ of the Azores. The archipelago of the Azores is composed of 9 volcanic islands distributed in 3 groups in the north-eastern Atlantic. The size of the Azores EEZ is about 1 000 000 km2, with an average depth of about 3,000 meters. The large occurrence of seamounts is imputable to the volcanic and tectonically active seafloor, typical of this region.
A total of 63 large (height exceeding 1000 meters) and 398 small (height comprised between 200 and 1000 meters) seamounts have been described in the Azorean EEZ, with a density of 3.3 peaks per 1000 km2 and a mean abundance of 0.42 and 0.07 small and large seamounts, respectively, per 1000 km2. Most of the seamounts have deep summits, between 800 to 1500m.
The Azorean seamounts ecosystems are of considerable biological interest and are extremely important also at the economic and, indirectly, social level.
They are hotspots of marine life: shallow seamounts act as aggregating sites for some marine predators.
The fish skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis), bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus), the common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and the Cory’s shearwater (Calonectris diomedea borealis) have been recorded to be more abundant close to some shallow water seamount summits (shallower than 400 m depth).
