Tag Archives: Gulf Stream

Warming Waters Heat Summer’s Feast Well Before It Gets to the Kitchen

An ever-warming planet is playing havoc with the intricately interconnected web of marine life. Just as climate has long stressed human populations and driven migration, marine populations are stressed and in search of survivable climates too. In New England, scientists and lobstermen alike are studying and living the impacts. Tim Alley has been lobstering in Maine’s coastal waters for 40 years. “There’s been a trend in recent years related to temperatures,” he says. Alley is steeped in the traditions of his home state’s biggest industry and recently dusted off a short film from 1972 in which he starred at age 12, “Alone in My Lobster Boat,” filmed in South Bristol and New Harbor, Maine. Like most lobstermen, he would call himself an environmentalist: they live on the water, they live from the water, they thrive on the water. But they reject the notion that a species – the right whale – is failing because of them. Over 40 years, he says, he has seen exactly one right whale. Photos, Video, more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 14:50

Evidence Bolsters Classification Of A Major Spawning Ground For Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Off The Northeast U.S.

The prevailing understanding has been that Atlantic bluefin tuna comprise two populations with strong natal homing to spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean Sea. However, there has long been speculation that spawning may occur in other regions, and a 2016 paper demonstrated a bluefin tuna spawning ground in the Slope Sea. The Slope Sea is a wedge of ocean that is bounded by the U.S. shelf break and the Gulf Stream as it moves away from the U.S. east coast. >click to read< 15:38

How much like the eel are we?

“The Book of Eels” is as much about origins and meaning as it is about eels. Once people comprehend the eel’s astonishing life journey, it’s difficult not to identify, seek metaphors of association and anthropomorphize. The eels’ mysteries are ours as well. After millennia of study and conjecture, we now know that American and European eels get their start in the Sargasso Sea northeast of Cuba. We also know that the nascent eels – tiny, transparent, flat larvae that are shaped like willow leaves – float off on currents either to America or Europe. Upon arriving at a predestined coast, their transformed little bodies smoothly transition from salt to freshwater. They choose a brook or stream and eventually settle down at some spot – random or not is unknown >click to read< 15:22

Canadian fishing buoy found in Norway

After Lars Framvik and a friend found a fishing balloon on the shore of Andenes, Norway, in November 2015, Framvik wanted to find its owner, but there were a few challenges. While there was a phone number on the balloon, it didn’t have an area or country code, so phoning the owner wasn’t an option. While it was marked with the vessel name, Blaine + Hayden, Framvik thought that was the place it was from. But the balloon did have another hint: the name Terry Saulnier appeared on it. click here to read the buoy story 09:00

Benjamin Franklin Was the First to Chart the Gulf Stream

Benjamin Franklin is known for shaping the Constitution, writing letters as a woman, chowing down on native foods and hosting an anatomy school in his home. What doesn’t often get mentioned is that he was also the first to chart the Gulf Stream. He completed the first scientific study of the current on this day in 1775, according to Today in Science History.,,  In true Franklin fashion, he came to study the Gulf Stream because of a question, writes Laura Bliss for City Lab. It was 1768, when he was working in London as deputy postmaster general for mail to and from the American colonies. Franklin was talking to his cousin, Timothy Folger, who was the captain of a merchant ship. He asked why it took ships like Folger’s so much less time to reach America than it took official mail ships. “It struck Folger that the British mail captains must not know about the Gulf Stream, with which he had become well-acquainted in his earlier years as a Nantucket whaler,” writes Bliss. Folger told Franklin that whalers knew about the “warm, strong current”and used it to help their ships track and kill whales. click here to read the article 14:03

Gulf Stream ring water intrudes onto continental shelf like ‘Pinocchio’s nose’

Ocean robots installed off the coast of Massachusetts have helped scientists understand a previously unknown process by which warm Gulf Stream water and colder waters of the continental shelf exchange. The process occurs when offshore waters, originating in the tropics, intrude onto the Mid-Atlantic Bight shelf and meet the waters originating in regions near the Arctic. This process can greatly affect shelf circulation, biogeochemistry and fisheries. “I showed the glider data to a group of commercial fisherman back in April, in Rhode Island, and they were very surprised,” Read the rest here 11:05