Category Archives: Oregon Sea Grant

Largest ocean science project in history to launch off Oregon coast

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Benthic testNEWPORT – News these days from the Oregon State University seems to have taken its cue from Jules Verne. There’s talk of underwater gliders, ocean observatory platforms and coastal profilers. This, however, is no sci-fi plotline, but the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the largest ocean science project ever funded by the U.S. government – and a big chunk of it is happening right here off our coast.

Scientists from the country’s leading oceanography institutions are at work on a five-year construction project that, when finished, will give instant access to anyone able to click a mouse to information from the surface waters to the very depths of the sea.

“It’s a huge deal,” said Bob Collier, OSU’s program manager. “It’s not going to replace the old way of going out to sea and making measurements, but it is going to add to them so we can better understand the ocean. It’s not only happening here. There are installations going on around the U.S. and around the globe. We’ve gotten to the point across the nation where we need to have eyes on the ocean 24/7 in order to answer some of the most important questions.”

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John Byrne to headline Heceta conference

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Dr. John Byrne at recent NOAA dedication in NewportDr. John Byrne, president emeritus of Oregon State University and former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will tie together themes that emerge at the seventh annual Heceta Head Coastal Conference in a presentation called “Discovery, Learning and Engagement for Tomorrow’s World.”

Dr. Byrne is a late addition to this year’s conference, which takes place Oct. 28-29 at the Florence Events Center in Florence, and will speak at 3:15 on Saturday. He will link together the themes raised by other presenters, and explore the kind of research needed in a future with a changing climate and more than seven billion people, with an emphasis on engaging society to apply the knowledge gained through research.

For more information, and to register for the conference, visit http://www.hecetaheadconference.org.

Marine educator blogs from shipboard

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Bill Hanshumaker, Sea Grant’s marine educator at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, is blogging from sea off the Pacific coast this week as he travels with scientists seeking to learn more about seafloor geology and earthquakes.

The team is traveling aboard OSU’s R/V Wecoma with a crew from the Cascadia Initiative, an onshore/offshore seismic and geodetic experiment that studies questions ranging from megathrust earthquakes to volcanic arc structure to the formation, deformation and hydration of the Juan De Fuca and Gorda plates.

The team takes advantage of an Amphibious Array of 60 ocean-bottom sensors installed with funding from the 2009 US Recovery Act to improve undersea earthquake monitoring and advance our understanding of geologic processes in the seismically active region off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and Northern California. The system also includes onshore GPS stations and earthquake monitoring instruments. Participating institutions include Columbia University, IRIS, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and UNAVCO, a nonprofit consortium of universities supporting geoscience research and education.

This is the third major research cruise over the past decade for Dr. Hanshumaker, who has been educating the public about science for 16 years at the HMSC Visitor Center, and before that, at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.  In 2005 and 2006, he joined  the Sounds From the Southern Ocean cruises with a team led by NOAA/OSU researcher Bob Dziak, who is also one of the principle investigators on the current project.

As he’s done on previous research voyages, Bill is blogging about the voyage, the research and the research team, this time from http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/billgoestosea.

Shipboard blogging can be a challenge, thanks to a hectic research schedule and unpredictable Internet access, but Bill is posting as time and conditions permit, and also plans to share the experience with Visitor Center audiences on his return to Newport.

Register for the Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning Science Workshop

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Registration is now open for the OSU Marine Council and Oregon Sea Grant sponsored Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning Science Workshop. The workshop will be held November 29-30 at the OSU Alumni Center, and is open to all Oregon academic faculty. You can find out more information, register for the workshop, and register to give a brief presentation about your research at the following website:

http://oregonstate.edu/conferences/event/cmspworkshop

YouTube: Putting on a Survival Suit

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Clip from survival suit video Immersion suits, also called survival suits, have helped saved hundreds of lives, largely because they provide protection from hypothermia. However, the protection of a survival suit is only good if it’s on; and during at-sea emergencies, there may be only seconds to put the bulky items  on. This video shows the proper techniques for donning immersion suits and entering the water.

This video is one of a growing number of short explanatory or information videos on the Oregon Sea Grant YouTube Channel.

Oregon Sea Grant receives $2.6 million NSF grant for learning research

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Oregon Sea Grant director Stephen Brandt announced the award of a $2.6 million, five-year, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to support the creation of a free-choice learning lab at the Hatfield Marine Science Center Visitor Center in Newport. The grant is the largest single research award to Oregon Sea Grant in its 40-year history and among the largest ever awarded to a Sea Grant program nationwide.  Free-choice learning is the study of how people learn across the lifespan and across contexts where they have choice and control over that learning.

“Studying how people learn is critical to Sea Grant because it can help us to understand how best to communicate with the diverse public audiences who rely on us for research and education related to ocean and aquatic issues,” Brandt said.

The research project will be led by Shawn Rowe, a faculty member in both Sea Grant and the OSU College of Education.

Read the entire OSU news release.

Oregon Sea Grant free-choice learning researcher, Shawn Rowe, is leader of the new NSF research grant that will spawn new learning innovations at the Hatfield Marine Science Center (pictured), where 150,000 visit each year.

 

Sea Grant-funded historian’s book on fisheries management published

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Carmel Finley, an instructor in the OSU History Department, is receiving positive attention for her new book published by University of Chicago Press, All the Fish in the Sea – Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management. One reviewer commented that the book “explodes the myths around MSY” (maximum sustainable yield) — a significant consideration since MSY is at the heart of modern American fisheries management. Another reviewer noted that “fisheries science and management are ripe for study by professional historians” and praised Finley’s book.

Locally, public radio station KLCC interviewed her, which was a role reversal for Finley, who was the Oregonian’s coastal correspondent for  years prior to graduate school and her doctorate at UC San Diego (where she received support from Sea Grant). Back in Oregon, OSG supported her to develop the Pacific Fishery History Project web site. She also contributed an article in OSG’s new salmon book, Pathways to Resilience, on “The Social Construction of Fishing, 1949.”

Register now for Heceta Head Coastal Conference

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Registrations are being accepted now for the Heceta Head Coastal Conference, October 28 & 29 at the Florence Events Center.

The theme of this year’s conference  is “Oregon’s Ocean: Catching the Next Wave of Discoveries.”

Angela Haseltine Pozzi of the Washed Ashore Project will talk at Friday’s dinner about her work of turning marine debris into art.  Saturday’s program features opening remarks by Representative Jean Cowan (Chair of the Coastal Caucus), current research in Oregon’s ocean, a panel on the Role of Research, Student Posters and the keynote speaker, Dr. Robert Costanza, the new Director of PSU’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions and a leader in the field of environmental economics, will share his vision for Oregon’s ocean.

The conference is co-sponsored by Oregon Sea Grant. Full program and registration information is available from http://www.hecetaheadconference.org/index.php

Volcanic vents offer peek at acidic future

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The underwater volcanoes off a tiny Italian island are helping scientists peer into the future of a world altered by increasing amounts of carbon dioxide emitted into the air and absorbed into the oceans.

The waters just off the island of Ischia mirror the projected conditions of the Earth’s oceans at the beginning of the next century because the volcanic vents found there infuse the water with large helpings of carbon dioxide, or CO2, which turns seawater acidic.

Research has shown that the growing acidic conditions are harmful to some sea creatures — those that build their protective shells with calcium are increasingly prevented from doing so the more acidic waters become.

The fates of these creatures and the stability of the ocean food chain are a major concern over the next century and beyond because of the carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere by humans, as the oceans absorb about 30 percent of this carbon dioxide.

“One part of climate change that is indisputable is that CO2 is rising in the atmosphere — it’s easy to measure,” said Bill Chadwick, an Oregon State University geologist. “And it’s indisputable that it is making the oceans more acidic — we can measure it.”

(Oregon Sea Grant has supported previous deep-sea research projects by Dr. Chadwick).