As I travelled back from Southampton to my own university flanking the Indian Ocean (Nelson Mandela University) I came to appreciate and respect much better the global value of the NOC and the Ocean and Earth Centre of the University of Southampton.

Looking across the Indian Ocean from here, the content of the 4^th week feels staggering and full of wisdom; and excellent science (& advice). My present thoughts go back to the early comments of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (and in this course particularly that of the oceans), about which the ocean debate can and should learn from what has and is happening on land. Hunting in Africa to try and safe extinction of Rhinos and Elephants; selecting large areas as natural reserves (the greatest rhino killings happen on such reserves; how will it be for whales and other species in ocean reserves?). Harvesting (Mining for example) across Africa has left nothing but more inequality and environmental disasters (and advances towards the 6^th extinction), despite UN rules and regulations. And there are no signs of deceleration.

Why would it be any different/better or worse across the oceans; across Antarctica and surrounding seas? Controlling harvesting of whales is proving difficult enough. The oceans contain resources that many nations want or think they need. There are so many good and worrying examples pointed out in this week’s comments. ‘Man’kind (I note at least one woman and many a man used this term in the discussion sections) – Humankind needs to come up with many better solutions to preserve the global commons and, for this course, the oceans. The tensions between science and politics (Craig Ventor’s video is a great one to watch in this respect); and between science and profits (Jon Copley’s blog very insightful), all engulfed in perceived needs, require ‘constructive critique’ and implementation of ‘precautionary principles’ (as Jon Copley calls for in his blog, and David Billet refers to in his video).

I would love to see some constructive critique from the participants in this course – can any of you come up with better solutions based on good science and data? For example, I do not agree with the statements that we will necessary need more minerals from the oceans to satisfy (future) demand. There is plenty of it on land (although these need to be extracted with greater care) if we learn how to share better and more efficiently. Why go to the oceans? Is it related to the need for nations and/or companies to control resources (many examples were mentioned in the course of exploration of metals in the central Indian Ocean by the Chinese and or by private mining/shipping etc. companies). Most mining companies cannot be trusted on-land to stick to UN ‘rules’ and environmental protection; why should they be trusted do so in the oceans? What are the most important scientific answers we need to address these common problems and common heritage? We need a new generation to come up with much better plans. Across Africa it is especially useful to reflect on this – but the reality is that the next generation of African people (and in many other parts of the world) need better and smarter communications with you to resolve these issues together (have a look at: www.PopulationSpeakOut.org). How can we/you achieve that?

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Welcome to the fifth run of the University of Southampton MOOC “Exploring our Oceans”. The course starts on the 23rd January, 2017 and the team is looking forward to welcoming a new group of learners. We have collated the feedback from previous runs of this course into the image above, and hope that this run of the MOOC will help answer some questions about the ocean, and develop your understanding of the complex issues affecting our oceans.

This course runs for four weeks, and covers a broad range of topics relating to the oceans. We start  by exploring how well we know the oceans, how much has been mapped, and a history of mapping the ocean floor. The Ocean floor contains a wide variety of features, more diverse than the surface, and you can explore some of them through this video, which shows the surface of the earth with no water.

During week two we will cover how cariations in temperature and salinity govern the circulation of the oceans, and discuss why the sea is salty, and how tides affect our daily lives. Here is a great video form NASA to illustrate how dynamic the ocean currents are.

Week three introduces you to some of the inhabitants of the ocean and how we develop further understanding of their lifestyles and what happens when we discover a new species. Many people are fascinated by the Bathynomus giganteus we use as a course image, you can see footage of live isopods here.

Week four is a discussion on how we interact with the oceans, the resources they hold and future challenges associated with mining. We have several facilitators who work in this area and it should be a fascinating week, look out for their blog posts detailing the ongoing work at Southampton to ensure development is sustainable.

Are you joining us for the MOOC? Is there anything you are particularly interested in learning more about? If you have not enrolled yet, it is not too late, you can join at any time, active discussions are hosted within each week, we are excited to meet the new cohort of learners next week!

Millie

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Tsunamis are unlike other natural hazards, they have the ability to impact a wide area, the entire coastline of a country, and large events generated waves that are observed worldwide. This map from the NOAA shows wave heights globally following the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami:

Tsunamis produce global perturbations in the sea surface, and the tsunami in Japan resulted in the death of a man in Oregon, and the disturbance of several Fjords in Norway through the creation of seiches, or standing waves. In addition, this event triggered the release of a “Manhatten-sized iceberg” from Antarctica.

In addition to earthquakes, there are several other ways to generate a tsunami. The least frequent, but potentially the most devastating would be a repeat of the 65 million year old asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico. Volcanic Islands are the ideal combination of rapid sedimentation, steep slopes and earthquakes, and there are numerous examples of these islands collapsing and generating waves. This can happen either as the result of an eruption, such as the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, or as the catastrophic collapse of the side of a volcano such as Cumbre Vieja. This particular example is a popular news story, as it may generate a massive tsunami that could reach the UK, however research at NOC shows that instead of one giant collapse, a series of smaller (<350 km3 material) is more likely, and seriously questions the “mega-tsunami” hypothesis. This article from the Landslide Blog run by Dave Petley has an excellent overview.

A further cause of these devastating events are large submarine landslides. You can read more about my work on the giant Storegga Slide that occurred 8200 years ago in the North Atlantic, generating a wave that was 5m high in Scotland.

Given the potential for tsunamis to impact on almost any section of coastline, how prepared are we? This is the fundamental question for this years World Tsunami Awareness day. This website highlights the international efforts in education and preparedness. A prepared and education population is the best defense against a tsunami, and these efforts include tsunami drills in the Indian Ocean, where 24 countries co-ordinate a drill for disaster response and evacuation. Europe is also involved, with significant improvements in early warning and research into the risk of regional tsunamis.

If you do live in a tsunami prone region, there is a wealth of information available through organizations such as the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program who have a series of information resources available.

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At the end of the MOOC, we thought it would be a good idea to end on a positive note, and hope that by learning more about the oceans, you will join us in wanting to protect them.

At the moment, the future of the oceans is big news. Drilling in the Arctic, mining the seafloor, they are big topics, you can join the debate through a number of organisations, but we can also all make simple changes to our daily lives that have a positive impact on the oceans.

For me the biggest issue is climate change, it has such a varied set of impacts on the oceans, and one that we are still trying to understand. The current levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere are 397 parts per million. You can follow the daily readings here. This is higher than at any point over the last 800 000 years, and is still rising. This is not a new issue, it has been well covered by many documentaries and articles. If you are unfamiliar with the science there are a number of ways to learn more, either through MOOCs or films such as “An Inconvenient Truth”, “Thin Ice“, “Chasing Ice” etc.

What we can all do is reduce the amount of carbon we use. This is easy to achieve at home by considering a few key issues:

1. Travel: can you make the same trip on public transport or by walking – unnecessary car use drives the demand for fuel and can often be cut back. You don’t need to do it every day, and there are times when the car is the best option, but consider car sharing or moving to a more sustainable form of transport where possible.
2. Heating at home: trying to keep heat in by closing windows and doors, drawing the curtains, wearing more clothes. Try to keep the thermostat at 21° and minimise the amount of heat you need.
3. Food: we often don’t consider the food miles behind our daily diet. We have grown accustomed to having foods like strawberries and asparagus year round, soft fruits out of season, farmed fish flown in fresh from the tropics. This is a significant contribution to unnecessary transport and something that is so simple to change. The UK has a fantastic range of foods, and a network of farmers markets that bring you local produce, in season that has often travelled less than 20 miles, as opposed to several thousand by plane or by sea. Whilst many see farmers markets as an indulgence, they are not all about expensive organic food, they are about connecting the consumer to the producer, and making use of the changing seasons and the changing food that brings. By cutting out imported fresh foods, you can make a real difference to the amount of carbon dioxide released through food transport. Many regions have weekly markets with a range of local butchers, fishmongers and grocers, and they are always willing to suggest recipes for their produce. Check out your local market and see if you can reduce your food miles.

Here are a few suggestions to get started on eating local:

A guardian article about eating only UK produce for a month

A guide for local eating around the national parks

A link to Hampshire Farmers Markets – a market every week around Hampshire 

A guide to seasonal British Food – recipe suggestions and links to what is in season at the moment

Big Barn Guide to local food

Do you have any other suggestions or links that are useful??

The post How to help the oceans appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

This Centre is the hub for telepresence-based systematic ocean exploration and primarily supports two ships, the E/V Nautilus (http://www.nautiluslive.org/ev-nautilus) and the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer (http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/welcome.html). For the past six years, the ISC has supported multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, students, and educators who take part in the live exploration remotely from our Mission Control facility (Figure 2). From this facility, the live video and data streams from the ships’ ROVs and other systems are received and redistributed onto Internet2 and the commodity Internet through various web sites that host the feeds. Audio communication to the ships is also facilitated through equipment in the hub. This facility has revolutionized the way we conduct ocean exploration operations via telepresence.

If you have a question for Dwight,, please leave it in the comments below and we will cover it on thursday. The session goes live at 5pm (BST) and can be found here. 

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On Thursday the 1st of October, we will be hosting a live Google Hangout with Dwight Coleman, director of the Inner Space Centre. Dwight has participated in over 25 research cruises, and the Inner Space Centre plays an active role in the Nautilus Live Program, which broadcasts oceanographic research cruises in real time.

The Nautilus just ended their season last week when they finished up work with Ocean Networks Canada on their ocean observing arrays. The other ship that works closely with the Inner Space Centre is the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer. They are currently conducting dive operations on and around Johnston Atoll in the Central Equatorial Pacific. The live feeds can be viewed here. The Okeanos is wrapping up their field season at the end of the month. Both ships will then be preparing for a very active 2016 season.

You can explore the project here, where there are some fantastic videos from ROV dives, and summaries of recent work.

This event will go live at 5pm (BST), on Thursday 1st October.

Link to the Google + event page is here, but you can also follow the hangout using the video stream below on thursday.

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If you are in the area, our stand can be found at stand A134 just inside the main entrance in the Quays carpark. We have an exciting display, including a rock pool tank, which represents species typically found on the south coast. This tank features several species of crabs, including these tiny spider crabs:

in addition to the familiar edible brown crab, seem here with several species of anenomes:

We also have dozens of Seastars, who are very active using their tube feet to move around the tank. The windows on the side allow you to see how they move, and study their interesting anatomy: The anenomes pictured below were collated from the Isle of Wight and are housed in the fluorescent room in our tent. The room is dark, and when the blue light is shone on the anemones, they fluoresce, be sure to have a look through the yellow glasses which removes the glare from the blue light and shows off their amazing colours:We also have some examples of corals which fluoresce, these are species from the Indo-Pacific. We have a fluorescence aquarium in the entrance of the NOC, and a dedicated coral lab who you can follow on Twitter (@thecoralreeflab):

Let us know in the comments if you spotted our stand at the Boat Show, many of these displays will be available at our many outreach and engagement events throughout the year. You can also learn more about the coral lab in this short video:

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Fortunately these events are very rare, the last major event was the Storegga Slide (8170 years ago), which generated a wave over 25m high in the Shetland Islands, and over 5m high around the northern coastlines. A similar event today is probably the most serious geohazard we could experience in the UK. The movie below is a simulation of the event showing where the wave would impact. (For further details see previous posts)

At the moment, I am working on dating some older landslide events from across the Nordic Seas. Many of these have not yet been dated, and the way in which I am hoping to obtain dates is through the use of tephrochronology. This involves searching the mud within sediment cores for tephra grains. You will probably recall the issues associated with tephra during the 2009 Eyjafjallajokull eruption, during which ash spread across Europe, forcing our planes out of the sky, and prompting significant  transport problems.

The reason as to why these subglacial eruptions cause problems like this, is due to the unique location of Iceland, and the fact that the lava erupts at the base of the ice sheets. This forces lava to cool rapidly, and turns the ice to steam, which rises taking with it the tiny particles of volcanic glass that form from this process. This process is particularly useful to geologists, especially if you are working within the last 125 000 years. The reason being, that ash travels widely, but it eventually falls to ground and settles in lakes, peat bogs, ice caps and marine sediments, thus forming a unique layer that can be traced across continents.

This simple diagram shows how some eruptions leave a trace across the the Northern Hemisphere. These particles are so important, because the ice cores from Greenland contain layers that can be counted back to 128 000 years ago. Each eruption centre on Iceland has a unique geochemistry or composition. Therefore, if you can match the tephra you find in marine sediments, to the tephras from a known and dated ice core deposits, you can find the exact age of your marine muds.

This is what I am currently working on, it is quite a slow process, but I have selected key parts of my marine cores where I want to apply a date, and I am scanning them for tephras. This will allow me to accurately date older landslide deposits, and contribute to a chapter of my PhD. So at the moment I have been sampling my cores:

Washing the muds through increasingly fin sieves (6 different mesh sizes…):

Separating the tephra using heavy density liquids in a centrifuge, then mounting them onto glass slides:

Drying the water off the samples and mounting them in Canada Balsalm:
I am now searching all of them for tephra grains and counting each slide (72/400 done…)
Sadly the fieldwork for my PhD was last year, we gathered 88 new sediment cores from across the Nordic Seas during a month long project cruise. Once the tephras have been isolated, they will be mounted in blocks and analysed at a dedicated tephra lab at Edinburgh University, but this is some way off.

Why is this important? Because until we know when landslides like Storegga happened, we won’t be able to understand why, and one the concerns is that they seem to happen during periods of significant change. This data will be used to assess whether this statement is true, and what the timing of the event will tell us about the cause.

Questions welcome!

@GeoMillie

The post Millie Watts: My research appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Having written a similar post for the previous runs of the MOOC, I thought I would show a few photos of what the ocean means to me at the moment. My research group recently took part in some exciting fieldwork in Canada. I am part of the Sedimentology and Marine Geohazards research group, and we focus on studying the record left behind in marine sediments of natural disasters. A few of us took some time to explore what this means in Western Canada, we are specifically interested in studying the past history of tsunamis, which can be generated not only by earthquakes, but also by large submarine landslides. This is a very real risk in Canada, and well managed through information signs and guided evacuation routes. Part of my PhD is looking at how frequently we have had tsunami waves in the UK, and how likely it is to happen again:

The Pacific Coast is also truly beatiful, rugged coastlines, crashing waves, fog rolling in:

Whilst we were working in Canada, I was part of the sediment filtering team, which gave me a new perspective on ocean research. We collected water samples periodically to calibrate our equipment and to look at how concentration of sediment changes throughout the day. We had to improvise a lab on shore, for which we needed running water, a sink and power, so we put together an improvised lab in one of the hotel bathrooms!

My favourite thoughts of the ocean is invariably from many holidays spent at the beach, and the briefest of summer days this year when it has been sunny enough to walk the Dorset coastline with my dog:

What does the ocean mean to you? The MOOC mentors are looking forward to seeing your photos on the padlet wall!

The post Millie Watts: What does the ocean mean to me? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Welcome to “Exploring our Oceans”!

Although we still have a few days before we get started on the course, this is a brief welcome to the MOOC, and a taste of some of the topics we have coming up over the next six weeks. This blog site will be home to your mentors and educators for the course, all of us PhD students and academics at NOC who will be guiding you through the material and sharing a little bit about our daily lives here at the National Oceanography Centre.

Very soon each of us will upload a post with some details on our work, and why we have chosen to study the oceans. Our first activity for our learners, is to share a photo that summarises what the ocean means to you, and we have some exciting and unexpected contributions from our course team that will be published early next week here.

We will be covering a broad range of topics, from how the currents and tides work, to the vast array of life hidden beneath the sea, a little bit of the maths behind our understanding of ocean circulation, and spending a little time discussing the planning and preparation that goes into ocean research. In the meantime, here are a couple of photos of some recent field work and activities here at NOC that will be covered on the course!

There is still time to sign up, the material goes live on monday but before then you can explore the previous blog posts here and the website for the National Oceanography Centre, where there are details of our current expeditions and where our research vessels are at the moment. Do also have a look at our undergraduate and postgraduate courses on offer in Southampton.

Enjoy the course and we all look forward to chatting with you in the forums over the next few weeks!

The British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility, home to the UK’s largest collection of marine sediment cores, vital in understanding the past climate and circulation, in addition to aiding our understanding of marine geohazards.

Giant mussels on the Pacific coast of Canada, taking some time out from fieldwork to explore Vancouver Island…

Some very exciting sand beds, explanations to follow!

Watching the fog roll in after exploring the tsunami management scheme in place in Vancouver.

A beautiful scene from this years 2nd year undergraduate field course in the South of Spain, a training ground for all future geologists!

A natural travertine fountain in Spain, this is related to one of the weeks when we discuss salt, and its importance in the global circulation system. Spain is one of the few regions in the world an ocean dried up in the Messinian (c. 5.9 million years ago) and left behind over 1 km thick of salt and gypsum deposits. It is a classic site for geologists, and a very unusual deposit. More in week 2!

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