I need your stories about the ocean by next Friday, 6 November! We’re teaming up with sound artist Halsey Burgund for the next episode of the Ocean Gazing podcast. He’s using the stories for a music composition, and I’ll feature them in the podcast. To submit your story, visit www.oceanvoices.org.
Here’s the current episode of Ocean Gazing. Imagine this same podcast, but featuring you!
We had our monthly sonic soiree (potluck gathering + radio listening party) tonight in the Cambridge part of Inman Square, MA. It was a great evening that included 8 radio peeps, the daughter of one of our radio peeps and a cat. In addition to gourmet pizza and homemade: salad, ratatouille, frozen yogurt and cookies, we listened to a variety of engaging radio pieces. Check ‘em out below. And if you want to come to next month’s, send me an email! We’ll share our audio editing sessions!
Predicting how an entire body of water circulates is no easy task. To do it in Prince William Sound up in Alaska, it took 3 ships, teams deployed in the field and in the lab, and a real balance between work and play. Check out the second segment of this 2-part Ocean Gazing podcast.
Twenty years ago, an environmental disaster rocked Prince William Sound in Alaska. Today, a team assembled from science, government and beyond is trying to help make sure it never happens again. Check out the first segment of this 2-part Ocean Gazing podcast.
I just attended a most remarkable meeting at the Media Lab at MIT about HEMBI, which stands for Human-Environment Mobile-Based Interactions. Researchers and artists met for 2 days to discuss how they use mobile devices to create interactive and meaningful engagements with the natural world. We heard about the ideas and technologies that are taking the invisible world around us, rendering it sensate (I mean, visual, auditory, experiential), and placing all that information in the palm of your hand. You can learn more on the HEMBI website.
One of the presenters told us about wordles, beautiful arrangements and piles of words. I made the one below using all the text from my dissertation. To make one yourself, click here!
Singapore’s laying the foundation for a future economy based on science, harvesting young talent from other Asian countries and buying first-class education from American and European universities. This might be a good strategy for Singapore, but for the young scientists forming this new workforce, the situation is a bit more complicated. I traveled to Singapore and filed this story with The World.
Aired on The World: Thurs, 27 August 2009.
I just returned to Boston yesterday. All told, we tagged 16 killer whales over the last few weeks! We really depended on Graeme Ellis’ skilled boat driving and Mike deRoos’ talent at tagging!
I did get seasick twice, once at the beginning of the trip (which I slept off) and once at the end of the trip (which I tried to sleep off, but then ate 2 salmon sandwiches, which I later got to view again as I deposited them back in Johnstone Strait). Otherwise, the trip was a delight with wonderful food, terrific company, good stories and great science.
I’ll keep you posted on what we find out from the data we gathered.
Volker Deecke took this photo just before I left. It’s a fitting depiction of my email list, [ari air]!
We’ve been up here off the northern tip of Vancouver Island for about a week now. After a few days of setting up, we were ready to find the killer whales. But there were no residents (that is, the fish-eating ones) to be found. We looked and we waited. And then yesterday we heard blows in the thick fog. And we heard underwater calls when we listened with a hydrophone. After finding them, we managed to get a tag on at noon! It stayed on for 7.5 hours and it was our first successful deployment. The animal is G52 by the local Canadian researcher vernacular, though in our books this 16-year-old female is oo09_231a.
Tomorrow we leave God’s Pocket where we’ve been staying and transfer aboard a boat called the Achiever. And if all goes well we’ll continue to find resident killer whales and — hopefully — tag them!
For the next 3 weeks, I’ll be based out of Port Hardy, British Columbia, Canada, helping a friend of mine do some field work on fish-eating killer whales. In fact, this is the same friend, Volker Deecke, who appears in the radio piece on killer whales that aired earlier this year on Weekend Edition Sunday. We’ll be tagging these animals with instruments that record their vocalizations and movements. I’ll try to keep this blog updated with what’s happening in the field. Tomorrow we drive from Nanaimo up to Port Hardy to get everything set up!
Mangroves were once widespread throughout the world’s warm coastal areas, but over the past few decades, they’ve been disappearing. Now there’s growing recognition of their importance, and renewed efforts to restore them. I visited one such project in Indonesia, and filed this report for The World.
Aired on The World: Tues, 4 August 2009.
Read more about mangrove conservation on the Seacology Island Environment Blog.
