All posts tagged "Oceanography"

MIAMI -- The nation’s military has been working on a new weapon: Creating a "perfect," self-healing coral reef that can withstand disease, warming temperatures and sea rise. Many U.S. military bases along the coasts are feeling the effects of climate change, and their current methods of defense — like sea walls — aren’t working against flooding and erosion. A reef would break up waves before they crash against the base. So for the past 14 months, the Department of Defense has been working with three international teams of scientists, including from the University of Miami, to build a hybrid re......

“Mummified” mice were recently discovered atop towering volcanoes in Peru where the Incas once performed ritual sacrifices. Thirteen of the whiskered rodents were found across three peaks in the Andes, where archaeologists first began encountering mysterious rodent remains in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, it was presumed that the animals — known as leaf-eared mice — had traveled with the Incas, and had perhaps fallen victim to their sacrifices (The Incan Empire lasted from 1400 to 1532, and it covered a large swath of South America, according to the British Museum). But new research indica......

MIAMI — Jimmy Buffett branded Key West as a destination and lifestyle from South Florida to the “Far Side of the World,” to quote one of his compositions. And his work will endure long after Saturday’s announcement of his death. The Mississippi-born troubadour created a fictional “Margaritaville” paradise in song that became a global destination. But even through the 1980s when he’d already written the songs that made him world famous, he appeared the regular Joe sauntering up the stairs into his office atop an old Key West building on Duval Street to pick up his own mail. By 1985, he’d opened......

You might think Jimmy Buffett has already been immortalized through his five decades of popular music and the business empire he has built since emerging from the Key West scene of the early-1970s. But a team of scientists, including a group from the University of Miami, has found another way to implant his name in Florida, where the Mississippi-born Buffett calls home. The team just named a newly discovered species they found in the watery depths of the Keys after the 76-year-old singer-songwriter. Meet Gnathia jimmybuffetti. That’s the new crustacean discovered and named by the international......

PHILADELPHIA — Each year, Philadelphia’s waterways are forced to swallow a dirty mix containing 15 billion gallons of untreated sewage and rainwater during storms because of an antiquated city system, according to a report released Thursday by PennEnvironment. The waterways include the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, as well as Cobbs, Frankford, Tacony, and Pennypack Creeks. The outflow is no threat to drinking water because river water gets treated before residents drink it, but it does create health threats for aquatic life and recreational users, said the study by the nonprofit advocacy gro......

LAKE TAHOE, Nev. – At midnight, researchers aboard the vessel John Le Conte — an old 37-foot diesel-powered salmon trawler — dropped a net into icy cold waters. What was surprising wasn’t what they caught. It’s what they didn’t: Invasive shrimp, which have long held sway over America’s most famous alpine lake, upsetting its balanced ecosystem. In a rare piece of environmental good news, the harmful predators are almost gone. In their place are helpful creatures who are safely returning to eat algae and other fine particles. Scientists say this mysterious shift may be restoring the lake’s legen......