S 34° 50’ 20.6″ E 27° 32’ 18.8″ – The first working day of this leg of the Malaspina expedition began with the splash of a Neuston net into the black water on the starboard side of the Hespérides before dawn on Sunday. The bosun, another operations officer, and a handful of technicians and scientists wearing life vests and helmets stood watch with arms folded under the warm yellow running lights of the ship. They were waiting in the rich wet air for a fine mesh net, hanging behind the two metal pontoons of the skate, to fill with creatures of the night. Continue reading Malaspina expedition: Starting with a splash
Category Archives: Nature
Malaspina Expedition: Shipping out
Cape Town was filled with chattering Spanish researchers this week, on shore between legs of a circumnavigation that will take them from Cádiz to Sydney and back, by way of the Panama Canal. They chewed on biltong and rode the cable car to the top of Table Mountain. Now they are loading water sampling tubes and unpacking their laboratory equipment on the B.I.O. Hespérides, docked here in Cape Town until this afternoon, when we head for Perth. Continue reading Malaspina Expedition: Shipping out
Peruvian biologist’s defamation conviction overturned
A defamation case that hinges on a dispute over the presence of genetic modification in Peruvian maize crops, and that has attracted international attention, has moved back to square one — with a twist.
Biologist Ernesto Bustamante Donayre was last April found guilty of defamation — a criminal offence in Peru — for publicly criticizing a report published by a fellow biologist. Last month, however, the conviction was overturned: the appeal judge found that a lower court had not demonstrated that Bustamante had sufficient motivation to harm or defame his alleged victim. A recent government study of the crops in question may shape the outcome of any subsequent proceedings, Bustamante says.
Continue reading Peruvian biologist’s defamation conviction overturned
Narwhals transmit climate data from Arctic seas
The cold water beneath the winter pack ice in Baffin Bay is getting warmer, according to measurements taken by thermometer-wearing narwhals. The data collected from the diving mammals fill in a geographical and seasonal gap in the region’s climate records, as no winter temperatures were previously available from the area. The data also confirm that a warming trend measured during earlier summer-only studies of the West Greenland Current continued in the three years to 2007.
“We basically knew nothing about winters up in Baffin Bay,” says physical oceanographer Mike Steele at the University of Washington in Seattle, who co-authored the study, which appeared last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “But there is a lot of interest in the flow of seawater around Greenland.”
Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf].