This is Part II of Blue Ocean Research Scientist Dr. Alan Duckworth’s blog as he oversees a coral reef study in Jamaica. Days 5 – 8 The past few days have been mostly spent attaching settlement plates to the reef. Each plate, 11 x 11 cm in size, is made of terracotta, which is a [...]
I’m in Palau for two weeks researching a couple of things for the book I’m working on. I was in Palau in 1995 while researching Song for the Blue Ocean. It seemed like nearly untouched paradise then. It’s more crowded now in the main town, and some of the most popular dive sites are in [...]
The following is a guest blog from Dr. Alan Duckworth, Blue Ocean Institute’s Research Scientist. Days 1 and 2 On Monday I left the cold climes of New York for the considerably warmer and more pleasant tropical weather of Jamaica. I’m here in Jamaica to co-supervise Amber Stubler, a Stony Brook University graduate student, with [...]
I’ve been enjoying the changing season and, on the birding front, I’ve especially enjoyed seeing the loons coming in for winter, populating the water along the beach just beyond the surf, breathing life into what would otherwise look like a pretty bleak and chilly winter beach. But this week I received a disturbing photo and [...]
Remarks delivered at Blue Ocean Institute’s Gala and Fifth Anniversary Celebration, October 1, 2008 I’d like to pose this question: what do the ocean and the mortgage crisis have in common? Not in parallel. I mean: what exact same thing has created overfishing, declining coral reefs, pollution, global warming—and has also created the mortgage crisis? [...]
Just when you thought nature was completely on the ropes, here’s a sight of the kind of abundance the world is supposed to contain. It survives to the present day, remarkably. In a world of overfishing, where bears are killed for their gall bladders, here is a different kind of place. It’s a place where bears [...]
Ahoy, On July 11, 2008, about 100 participants arrived in Svalbard in the high Norwegian arctic and boarded the Lindblad Expeditions ship National Geographic Endeavor for a Climate Action Summit. We came to take ourselves out of the daily rhythm of our lives and work, to experience the spare and elemental place near the top of [...]
To Pemba Our commercial flight got us as far as the island of Unguja. A charter flight took us the last leg of our trip, to Pemba Island. We’re off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa. Collectively called Zanzibar, these islands are part of the “Swahili Coast.” The mainly Muslim sub-culture here has been deeply [...]
As Andy Revkin reports in the New York Times, even though whale meat is unpopular in Japan, government officials have decided to expand their whale-hunting. This year they will kill 1,400 whales, and a new species will be openly on the menu: endangered Humpback Whales. Read his excellent article for the facts at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25revkin.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin. He [...]
I’ve just returned from perhaps the most unusual trip of my life. I was part of a small delegation of scientists and leading Christian evangelicals traveling to Alaska to gain, together, first-hand looks at the ongoing effects and implications of climate change (see footnotes for more background on how these people of faith and science [...]
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