Tag: ocean floor
Fossils Could Help Prepare for an Uncertain Climate
This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine.
Conservationists seeking to restore shark populations off the Atlantic coast of Panama were facing a problem all too familiar to biologists: No records existed to document what pristine shark communities looked like before overfishing decimated the animals over the past few decades. Without that information, how could the restoration workers know what they should be aiming for?
Erin Dillon, a paleoecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, thought she had
What We Can Learn From Rachel Carson’s Sea Writings
When the marine biologist Rachel Carson was a young girl, she discovered a fossilized shell while hiking around her family’s hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Those who knew her then would later contend that this relic sparked such intense reverie in her that she instantly felt a tug toward the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what was the world it had known?
Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its study. She
The Next Clean-Energy Fight Is in the Ocean
Alla Weinstein did not invent the floating wind turbine. This is something she wanted to make clear early in our Zoom call, as if she were worried I’d give her too much credit. “I don’t need to invent. There are plenty of inventions,” she said. “But a lot of inventions die on the grapevine if they aren’t carried through.” What Weinstein does is carry them through.
For that, she does want credit. When I asked if she’d put the