More coccolithophores!

This follows up on yesterday's post. Only this time, the photo is a little closer to home.

(from Emiliania Huxleyi's home page)

When scientists follow cobblers

On the Wikipedia site for goodness of fit

Goodness-of-fit actually refers to the degree to which a shoe conforms to the wearers foot. The term was co-opted by academicians in the early twentieth century, and is used to describe the the degree to which you can force your preconcieved notions to be upheld by the results of your statistical tests (aka. the anti apriori approach).

A world within a world

This shot was taken by a NASA satellite.

It, along with probably thousands of fascinating images, are available at NASA's EarthObservatory site. Each shot has a great explanation of what it is you're looking at.

Personally, I love the ones like this. Swirls within the ocean visualized by phytoplankton. Undersatnding the dynamics is complicated because the lifespan of the eddies is different from the lifespan of the phytoplankton that make them dramatically visible. Nonetheless, you can see the ocean being "stirred" (I can trace lines in and around the swirls) as well as the ocean being "mixed" (where did that swirl go, anyway?) You will see the same thing if you stir your coffee and then put milk in it.

Incidently, these phytoplankton are probably a specific kind called coccolithophores and more specifically, Emeliania Huxleyi. This is what they look like under the microscope:

Now here is where things get kind of fascinating, I think. The top figure has a scale bar 10 kilometres. The bottom one has a scale of microns. There are 1 billion microns in a kilometre.
--
1 billion! To put that number in perspective, if you had 1 billion pennies, you'd need more than forty 40-foot containers to store them. So think of how many of these little guys must be in that picture.

Also, those little plates on the the coccoloilthophore are called coccoliths. They are made of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) and, to make a long story short, it is thought that the export of the their shells into the sediments is a way to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. So if the ocean is going to be the vector by which carbon dioxide is removed from our atmosphere, it is possible that we'll need to count on our friends in the satellite photo to do the dirty work.

busy

Sorry it's been quiet for the last few days...it'll probably stay like that this week. I'm hunkered down for a little while. After another realization, it looks like I'm now turning this into a review paper and a methods paper (but still one paper).

Translation: Too much work, too little time.

(picture borrowed from PhD Comics)

Monolithic actions

This is too funny. An emeritus scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada was apparently dismissed (but quickly reinstated) because he felt it was stupid that "Canada’s New Government" should replace "Government of Canada" in official correspondence. Somewhat embarrassing that something this ridiculous has been published in Harper's.

(Via Rick Mercer's Blog.)

A stirring thought

So, after that last post, I thought I should give something a little lighter.

I can't remember where exactly I found this image (somewhere on the NASA site, I think), but it is absolutely phenomenal.
There are a lot of neat things to point out:

First off, what are all those colours in the ocean?
That's an estimate of how much chlorophyll (and kind of how much phytoplankton) are present. Based on the colour of the ocean viewed from space, some smart people have come up with ways to estimate the ocean's chlorophyll content.

See that yellowish oval south of the Bay of Fundy and east of Cape Cod?
That's Georges Bank. Due to some very neat physics that I won't get into, the waters there get well mixed and trapped over the bank. This results in a productive hot spot seen in this image.

See those grey swirls just off the Labrador coast?
I'm not positive on that one but I think that's ice! Ice being stirred and sheared. If you zoom in, it looks amazingly similar to those colours in the ocean. (I remember once I got an exam question that said nothing more than "Ice is a metamorphic rock. Explain." I wish I had this picture.)

See that donut-looking lake in the middle of Quebec?
If I remember correctly, that's from a meteor impact. The middle rebounded but edges were depressed enough to make that lake.

See the clouds making a ring just east of Newfoundland?
That's a low pressure system. You can tell because the "spinning" is in a counter-clockwise direction which, in the northern hemisphere, means a low pressure system.

Okay, I could keep going here, and maybe I will later on, but that's it for now. I just think this image is very cool.

An uncertain future

I'm not going to write too much about this, because it can easily become too emotional of a topic. But to keep things short, here's what's been occupying my thoughts.
The NY Times
The Daily Star
Rampurple
From Beirut to the Beltway

And to think that less than two years ago, the country felt more hope than it probably has in the last 30 years. It saddens me to think that it went from this

to this


Well, I guess it's time for me to instead start thinking about this: