The Crossing Of The Andes
By Daniel de la Calle You can fool and distract yourself in the days leading to a trip, go through the motions of packing, closing doors and taking cabs in hypnotic discipline, behave in such a drowsy way during the flight that the experience nears teletransportation, but when the captain’s voice comes in the speaker […]
All Sorts Of News
By Daniel de la Calle »When the media loves something it just takes over the internet. News came out yesterday about the new study by the Stockholm Environment Institute titled “Valuing the Ocean” where marine experts analyzed the most severe threats facing the world’s marine environment and estimated the cost of damage a year coming […]
THE FUTURE WE WANT and THE FUTURE WE DON’T WANT
By Daniel de la Calle I am sure you have seen this image all over the media these days. I took it on my way to the airport, the night I was leaving Rio: Fish made out of plastic bottles, illuminated at night. They were placed on Botafogo beach, the nearest beach to downtown Rio […]
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
By Daniel de la Calle Two news, one good and one bad. Then the ugly: THE GOOD: NASA claims to have developed an innovative method called OMEGA (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae), that grows algae, cleans waste-water, captures carbon dioxide and ultimately generates biofuel without competing with agriculture for water, fertilizer or land. Wow. […]
Ocean Acidification and Education
By Daniel de la Calle Inspired by our upcoming screenings for students this Thursday and Friday in the Southern Chilean town of Puerto Montt we want to post information for and about students and Ocean Acidification: »Students from the Ridgeway School (Plymouth, UK) were commissioned by the European Project on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA) and the […]
Seeing Ghosts
By Daniel de la Calle Over the past few days you might have read about a Japanese “ghost ship”, a victim of last year’s tsunami, that just reached British Columbia. Experts expected most of the 20 million tons of debris from the natural disaster (about the size of California!) to arrive to the other side […]
Shepherd Dolphins
By Daniel de la Calle If we finished the month of May with our classic news, photo and video update I thought it is only fair to also begin June in the same fashion and color. Here they are, a few more news items as we slowly catch up with the latest on the oceans […]
Learning & Working Around OA
By Daniel de la Calle One learns and then works, and sometimes one’s work is learning. A few opportunities to do both: ≈A month-long research voyage in Scotland is using the latest robotic submersible technology to study the risks of Ocean Acidification to their deep coral colonies. The Mingulay coral reefs were only discovered ten […]
SINK, a Shell Dissolving Objet d’art
By Daniel de la Calle Artist Julian Priest has created SINK, “a model of anthropogenic ocean acidification”. The materials used are a scallop shell, an internal combustion engine, glass walls, aluminum framing, copper piping, brine and methanol. How it works: “Fuel is burnt by an internal combustion engine to turn a propeller. The carbon dioxide […]
“O Rio De Janeiro Continua Lindo”
By Daniel de la Calle After the visit to Southern and Central Chile in early May we are catching up with some of the latest news on Ocean Acidification while preparing as well for the +20 summit at the end of June in “lindo” Rio de Janeiro. Here are some news sifted through the web […]
Summer News
By Daniel de la Calle Children in Rio de Janeiro were on vacation for the three Rio+20 summit days. Schools organized activities that involved the environment, sustainability, recycling, awareness; like this sculpture made out of used plastic bottles. ≈Science Magazine recently published an article on Ocean Acidification and the results coming from a new high […]
Pizza Vs. Sushi
By Daniel de la Calle Researchers believe we should prepare ourselves for a world with more anchovies and less tuna: Various recent studies indicate a constant decrease in the number of marine predators; from sharks to tuna, our “lions and tigers of the seas” are becoming less and less abundant. If certain key elements […]
Weekend Material
By Daniel de la Calle ¤Marine Spacial Planning presents a rational approach to ocean management. The system tries to “allocate space in the ocean allowing compatible uses to coexist, separating incompatible ones, all while protecting the environment”. This video presentation with Philippe Cousteau explains things in more detail: “The ocean economy in the USA […]
News and a Rumor
By Daniel de la Calle Distilled from the World Wide Web for you: -The Plymouth Marine Laboratory has launched a new short film on Ocean Acidification. Its title is “Ocean acidification: Connecting science, industry, policy and public”. Here it is -Folks at United By Blue are organizing a cleanup on Saturday June 11th […]
Reconsider Your Shrimp
By Daniel de la Calle » Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass. is hosting an Oceans Symposium and next Monday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m., Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer at The New Yorker, will lead a discussion following a showing of A Sea Change, Imagine a World Without Fish. » Beautiful new documentary on the oceans […]
A List of Lists
By Daniel de la Calle We are still in January, the month of lists and resolutions for the remaining 11 months or the rest of our lives. Here I list of some of those lists: •The Center for Biological Diversity announced their Top Ten priorities for 2012. Here is the list: 1 Save the […]
Research News and Job Opportunities
By Daniel de la Calle I bring you some research news and job opportunities to start the week: •The University of Alaska Fairbanks placed its first Ocean Acidification buoy in Alaskan waters last April. “This is the first dedicated ocean acidification mooring to be deployed in a high-latitude coastal sea,” said Jeremy Mathis, principal […]
That Elusive Golden Past
By Daniel de la Calle The screening at Maloka and the countless interviews in Bogotá couldn’t have gone any better. Some sort of miracle, some magic must have turned my pumpkin backpack into the Ocean Acidification ambassador’s golden chariot (caught up in the worst traffic jams ever, though!) and I was welcomed like royalty, asked […]
Saint Nicholas Post
By Daniel de la Calle As advanced celebration of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker tomorrow, here are a few links, photos, videos and news for you all, stuffed inside the shoes you are putting out tonight: •A team of scientists at Santa Cruz’s University of California have spent the past three years studying the submarine […]
Sanctuary
By Daniel de la Calle Islands make for miniature universes, like snow globes: they transform a few miles distance into the crossing of a continent, produce insular dwarfism (where even the animals try to scale down and look only into the restricted cosmos) and remarkable adaptation from its species. I know what it […]
Autumn News
By Daniel de la Calle •Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute scientists have launched a sophisticated, unique tool to study the effects of Ocean Acidification on deep-sea animals in their native habitat, using free-flowing water. The idea behind Free-Ocean Carbon Enrichment (FOCE) is to create a test area on the seafloor where seawater pH […]
Interview with Sven
By Daniel de la Calle On this rainy morning I had the chance to meet with Sven for a cup of tea and a half hour chat in his kitchen. We had not done an official interview for the blog since May of last year, so an update on A Sea Change and the […]
Ocean Acidification News on the Web
By Daniel de la Calle Some Ocean Acidification news for this beginning of May: ¤Symposium on Ocean Acidification to be held in Canberra, Australia from the 15th to the 17th of June 2011. The event is titled Ocean Acidification and Implications for Living Marine Resources in the Southern Hemisphere and aims to: “enhance the […]
The Hook that Caught the Fish that Saves the Corals that Inspired the Artist
By Daniel de la Calle Here are a few Ocean and Ocean Acidification news bits found while surfing the web over the past week. I hope some are news to you: •How long has man been catching fish from the open ocean? 42,000 years at the very least. Archeologists from the Australian National […]
Building Things Up For RIO+20
By Daniel de la Calle As we get slowly closer to the month of June and RIO+20 we begin to see more online information linking the summit and Ocean Acidification, which is encouraging. I have also included some related news items to our usual list: »In an article on RTCC (a Non-Governmental Organization and […]