Corals in Motion! Time-lapse video of tropical corals

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by Matthew Wagstaff

To the untrained observer, it is quite easy to confuse a coral with other structures on the sea floor. It can be surprising at first to learn that corals are, in fact, animals just like you and me. Similar to most benthic organisms, corals move very little, and when they do, they often move very slowly. As a result, it is sometimes hard for us to grasp an understanding of the lives that they lead.

Dr. Pim Bongaerts, at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, is attempting to do just that. As part of the ‘Catlin Seaview Survey’ of the Great Barrier Reef, Dr. Bongaerts has been capturing awesome time lapse footage of the reef and posting it to his website at: www.coraltimelapse.com. This footage has been sped up by 300-1800x, and is a great way to clearly see just how active corals actually are!

Here is some footage that his team recently shared with the BBC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbYA6uZFJ-w

Nature break: Elephant seals rushing ashore in California

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by Simon Donner

Northern elephant seals come ashore in late fall every year in California’s Año Nuevo State Park to mate and to do battle. The videos below were taken in mid-December, after the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting.

Here’s a video of an seal coming ashore, slowly.

These are no ordinary seals. They are built more like whales or, as my nephews might say, Jabba the Hut. A bull elephant seal can weigh up to 2500 kg and be four to five meters long.

They can move surprisingly fast on land too, up to 10 km/hr, but only in short bursts. An elephant seal wouldn’t beat you in a 100 m sprint, but it would certainly commit a lane violation and crush you, and probably the rest of the runners, before anyone got out of the starting blocks.

Here’s a little scuffle between two bulls, one making the signature guttural grunt.

Finally, here are some young males “rushing” up the beach to avoid an adult male. This clip needs narration from John Cleese.

Shifting Baselines: Has our idea of winter cold snaps changed?

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Temperatures will return to well above normal by the weekend

by Simon Donner

The quote of vortex week comes from Weather Underground climate historian Christopher Burt:

The only significant thing about the cold wave is how long it has been since a cold wave of this force has hit for some portions of the country–18 years, to be specific. Prior to 1996, cold waves of this intensity occurred pretty much every 5-10 years. In the 19th century, they occurred every year or two (since 1835). Something that, unlike the cold wave, is a truly unprecedented is the dry spell in California and Oregon, which is causing unprecedented winter wildfires in Northern California.

This week was extremely cold across much of North America, thanks to a dip in the jet stream bringing cold Arctic air far south into the United States. Many minimum temperature records were broken.

Broken records are a normal thing in a stable climate. The dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans means that low and high surface air temperature records are broken in some locations every year.

What’s abnormal is that the climate is warming, due to human activity. The average weather is warming and record cold snaps, like this week’s, are becoming less common. Thanks to that, our psychological baseline for weather has shifted. What today seems remarkable and unprecedented was actually not that unusual in past winters. We just have short memories.

Climate change is a challenge for current generations

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The average Canadian born in our shiny new year is expected to live until the final decade of the century.

Twin girls born minutes apart with different birthdays: Dec 31, 2013 and Jan 1, 2014 (Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, Ontario)

According to the World Health Organization, the life expectancy of Canadians is 82 years, which technically means a child born in 2014 will live, on average, until 2096, provided there is no change in mortality rates.

Predictions from climate models that you see on the news typically extend out to the end of the century. When scientists say that the planet may warm by 2-4 degrees C by the “end of the century”, they are typically describing the average of the years 2091 through 2100, though sometimes the average of the years 2081 through 2100.

In other words,  the climate predictions and the newborns have about the same lifespan.

A child born today will experience all the widely discussed impacts of climate change — the rise in temperature, the rise in the oceans, the change in heat extremes, the melting of sea ice, the decline of coral reefs, you name it.

We need to stop describing climate change as a problem for “future generations”. Those generations are here now.

Is climate change choking our oceans?

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by Matthew Wagstaff

Hiding away in the ocean section of the new IPCC report is a lesser known result of global climate change, ocean deoxygenation.  Many effects of climate change such as increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels and ocean acidification are already well-known and somewhat in the public eye, however there are many other effects that are less well-known and less understood. Deoxygenation of the oceans is one of these lesser-known effects and is being caused by a number of factors. While the acidification of the ocean is caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the deoxygenation of the ocean is mainly due to the increasing temperatures of the surface waters, which has two effects: the solubility effect and the stratification effect. From the IPCC report:

  “It is very likely that global warming will lead to [further] declines in dissolved O2 in the ocean interior through warming-induced reduction in O2 solubility and increased ocean stratification. This will have implications for nutrient and carbon cycling, ocean productivity and marine habitats (Keeling et al., 2010).” Continue reading →