Deep Sea News-I hit marine science blog pay dirt! http://deepseanews.com/
Thanks to Southern Fried Scientists, a trio of graduate students who have aggregated an outstanding list of credible oil spill blogs and twitter sites found at http://www.southernfriedscience.com/ I found Deep Sea News.
Hosted by Craig McClain National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the blog is a finalist in the "Funniest Blog" category for the 2010 Research Blogging Awards given by Seed Media Group. But these awards were made in February before the spill. I doubt that Deep Sea News would be entered in the same category next year.
McClain, or Dr. M as he is identified, launched his blog with the intent to post abstracts of recently published papers. But as he began to add more news, Dr. M realized that his blog could be a channel to deliver deep-sea science to the public. Today’s post offers a link to Scientific American’s story on the “mass murder” (blogger’s characterization) of sea cucumbers near the oil leak site. There are two photos, one aerial in which you can see an expanse of water dotted with floaters and another close up of the sea cucumber. Thousands of these sea-bottom feeding creatures died and floated to the surface of the Gulf. The team of researchers who reported this huge fish kill was actually in the Gulf to measure methane levels, estimate the size of the spill and come up with ways to remove the methane from the water. The Deep Sea News blog cited this story as another of the “ecological disaster manifesting itself.”
The next post for June 22, proclaims that is has been “64 magical days and 160 million gallons (or so) since the Deepwater Horizon smack down,” and then follows with a long list of links to the most arresting stories to “make you feel nauseous.” Reading these recent posts written by scientists who know all too well what is being lost, you are exposed to their feelings as well as their knowledge. They don’t need to express their feelings in sensational terms, the facts they choose to highlight and explain along with random sarcasm convey their discouragement.
No comments:
Post a Comment