Search Results for: Ocean

Work in an MIT lab may help energy companies withdraw millions of additional barrels of oil from beneath the sea floor. Typically, companies recover only 30 percent to 40 percent of the oil in a given reservoir. Since a single reservoir may contain a billion barrels total, increasing that “recovery efficiency” by even a single percentage point would mean a lot of additional oil. Toward that end, Assistant Professor David Mohrig of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences

Ecologists have at last got a view of sperm whales’ behaviour during their long, deep dives, thanks to the use of recently developed electronic “dtags”. According to new research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology, sperm whales – like bats – use echolocation consistently to track down their prey at depth.

Working in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Ligurian Sea, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Universit

Giant tubeworms found near hydrothermal vents more than a mile below the ocean surface do not bother to eat: lacking mouth and stomach, they stand rooted to one spot. For nourishment, they rely completely on symbiotic bacteria that live within their bodies to metabolize the sulphurous volcanic soup in which they both thrive.

But the microscopic larvae of these giants are born bacteria-free, with a complete digestive system. Juveniles swim, hunt, and eat before permanently settl

It’s designed to explore the depths of large bodies of water—and one recent weekend, that’s exactly where it was found: searching the depths of the deep end of Judson Pool in Rochester Institute of Technology’s Gordon Field House and Activities Center. (As the adage goes, every journey begins with a single step.)

A team of RIT engineering majors built the explorer, an underwater remote-operated vehicle, or ROV—and it has been described as one of the most ambitious student project

Halfway to the center of the Earth, at the boundary between the core and the mantle, lies a massive folded slab of rock that once formed the ocean floor and sank beneath North America some 50 million years ago. A team of seismologists led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, detected the slab by analyzing seismic waves reflected from the deepest layer of the mantle beneath an area off the west coast of Central America.

“If you imagine cold honey pouring onto a plat

Pile driving and industrial noise may adversely affect dolphin behaviour, communication and breeding, according to a scientific paper in CIWEM’s Water and Environment Journal.

Bottlenose dolphins that reside in designated Special Areas of Conservation throughout the UK, including Dorset, Anglesey and Cornwall, might be at risk from pile driving. The frequency range of pile driving noise could interfere with their ability to communicate, find food and avoid predators. This has the