Search Results for: Ocean

Diseases May be Early Warning Sign for Humans Say Scientists

St. Louis, MO (AAAS Annual Meeting, Press Conference: Saturday, Feb. 18th, 9 am Central Time) – Leading scientists, physicians, and veterinarians are uncovering new links between land-based pollution and diseases in marine mammals, with implications for human health.

“Marine mammals are providing early clues of our unseen impact on the sea,” says Paul Sandifer, Chief Scientist for the new Oceans and Human Health

We’re on the brink of the era of deep ocean mining, says a global pioneer in the study of sea floor mineral deposits. Dr. Steven Scott, a geologist at the University of Toronto, in Toronto, Canada says that advances in marine geology and deep ocean technology have combined to make it realistic to go more than two kilometres underwater for gold and other mineral treasures.

It’s a transformation that he says has evoked a knee-jerk reaction over the possible environmental impacts

Whether it’s monkeys and AIDS or mosquitoes and the West Nile Virus, we’re used to thinking of wildlife as reservoirs for emerging infectious human diseases. But a Canadian mathematical biologist says that it’s time that we turned the tables – as often as not, it’s humans that are making the wildlife sick, often to our own detriment.

It’s a 180-degree turn in perspective that Dr. Mark Lewis says is critical to our understanding of emerging infectious diseases of both wildlife and h

The co-dependence of mortality risk and poverty

The Indian Ocean tsunami, the Katrina hurricane catastrophe and the Pakistan earthquake in late 2005 bear disquieting similarities in their consequences on human populations. The tsunami took 300,000 lives with more than 100,000 still missing. Although many of the missing may well be displaced rather than casualties, the death toll will likely remain in excess of 300,000. Early images from the catastrophe would have lead one to bel

Linking mitigation to regional economic development

The unprecedented scale and complexity of the relief and reconstruction efforts following the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman Island earthquake and Indian Ocean tsunami have motivated scientists, policy-makers, and development aid organizations to rethink the relationship between natural disaster mitigation and economic development. Two recent reports by the World Bank and the United Nations quantify the global exposure of populations and e

The long journey of particles near the ocean floor and its relevance for carbon burial

German and British scientists have studied the ocean off south-western Africa and have discovered that particles are transported to the deep ocean over thousands of years before being deposited on the seabed. This discovery may increase our understanding of how the oceans act as carbon dioxide sinks and how oil deposits form.

Areas of extremely high marine productivity are confined t