Latest Sargasso Sea Stories
Brett Smith for RedOrbit.com Plastic trash has been accumulating in the Pacific Ocean at an alarming rate and its effects are reverberating throughout the ecosystem, according to a new study by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. The study, published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters, found that plastic trash in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years. Experts disagree over the...
After a three-year rehabilitation in Portugal, a juvenile endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtle nicknamed Johnny Vasco de Gama was returned to familiar waters in the Gulf of Mexico, reports Stephanie Pappas for LiveScience. Johnny is believed to have beeen caught in cold currents in 2008 and was “cold-stunned,” a condition that shuts down internal organs and can kill sea turtles. The sea turtle was found by staff members of the Rotterdam Zoo, along the Netherlands coast, 4,600 miles...
According to four French explorers just back from eight months at sea, the North Atlantic Ocean is looking more like a rubbish bin, with plastic and polystyrene flotsam spreading far and wide. The researchers found at least four to five pieces of trash a day once out of the Britanny port of Trinite-sur-Mer in October. In April they found a floating dump in the Sargasso Sea around Bermuda. "In 15 minutes we saw more garbage than at any time during our journey," naval engineer...
Team will sail to Baltic, Black and Mediterranean Seas, sampling water and cataloguing microbial diversity Expedition funded by local San Diego supporters Beyster Family Foundation Fund and matching grants from Life Technologies and others SAN DIEGO, March 18, /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) today announced the launch of a new Sorcerer II Expedition--the J. Robert Beyster and Life Technologies 2009-2010 Research Voyage. This two year sailing voyage will...
Get ready to send the biology textbooks back to the printer. In a new paper published in Nature, Benjamin Van Mooy, a geochemist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and his colleagues report that microscopic plants growing in the Sargasso Sea have come up with a completely unexpected way of building their cells. Until now, it was thought that all cells are surrounded by membranes containing molecules called phospholipids "“ oily compounds that contain phosphorus, as...
Sargassum seaweed, famous in nautical lore for entangling ships in its dense floating vegetation, has been detected from space for the first time thanks to an instrument aboard ESA's environmental satellite, Envisat. The ability to monitor Sargassum globally will allow researchers to understand better the primary productivity of the ocean and better predict climate change.Using optical radiance data from the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) aboard Envisat, Dr Jim Gower and...
LONDON (Reuters) - East is East and West is West and never the twain will meet -- at least as far as the world's freshwater eels are concerned. It has long been established that the freshwater eels of the United States and Europe originate in the Sargasso Sea off Bermuda. But the origin of their eastern cousins, the Japanese freshwater eels, has remained a mystery -- until now. Writing in the science journal Nature, researchers from Tokyo University's Ocean Research Institute say they...
