Free Republic

KT Boundary and Iridium Ever dreamt of hiking over the landscape and finding a mineral vein rich with ores, perhaps even silver or gold glittering in the sunshine, like in the Hand of Faith vein in Australia? How about joining the gold rush fever—without trekking up the Chilkoot Pass as thousands of prospectors did well over 100 years ago? The chances of finding a “mother lode” are slim, even when trying hard. They are similar to winning the jackpot in a big lottery. But don’t give up just yet; there is a new “horizon” for your exploration activity—the new frontiers...

Marine researchers have discovered a strange alien-like creature while exploring the underwater world found in the deepest ocean trench on Earth. A team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spotted the hydromedusa jellyfish during an expedition to the Mariana Trench in the Pacific. The sea creature was captured on film after it swam close to the surface of the ocean near the agency's research ship, the "Okeanos Explorer." Based on the team's observations, this new jellyfish species shares similar features with those of Crossota genus, which are known to spend the majority of their existence gliding...

The oceans are rising faster than at any point in the last 28 centuries, and human emissions of greenhouse gases are primarily responsible, scientists reported Monday. They added that the flooding that is starting to make life miserable in many coastal towns - like Miami Beach; Norfolk, Va.; and Charleston, S.C. - was largely a consequence of those emissions, and that it is likely to grow worse in coming years. The ocean could rise as much as three or four feet by 2100, as ocean water expands and the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica begin to collapse. Experts...

Guest Post by Willis EschenbachI’ve spent a good chunk of my life around, on, and under the ocean. I worked seasonally for many years as a commercial fisherman off of the western coast of the US. I’ve frozen off my begonias setting nets in driving sleet up in the Bering Sea. I’m also a blue-water sailor with a Pacific crossing under my belt, and a surfer, and both a sport and a commercial diver.Plus I’m eternally curious, so I have read about and studied the ocean all my life.Based on both my experience and my knowledge, I have written...

Man-made heat put into the world's oceans has DOUBLED since 1997: Energy absorbed equivalent to Hiroshima bomb being exploded every second for 75 years The amount of man-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a new study has revealed. Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world's oceans instead of the ground. Researchers have now tracked how much man-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.

It is, for our home planet, an extremely warm year. Indeed, last week we learned from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the first eight months of 2015 were the hottest such stretch yet recorded for the globe’s surface land and oceans, based on temperature records going back to 1880. It’s just the latest evidence that we are, indeed, on course for a record-breaking warm year in 2015. Yet, if you look closely, there’s one part of the planet that is bucking the trend. In the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and Iceland, the ocean surface has seen...

“Is the number of volcanic eruptions worldwide increasing? “Yes,” answers Michael Snyder in this startling article.“ During the 20th century, there were a total of 3,542 volcanic eruptions globally. That works out to approximately 35 eruptions per year. That may sound like a lot, but according to Volcano Discovery there are 36 volcanoes erupting around the world right now. In other words, the number of volcanoes erupting as you read this article is greater than the 20th century’s yearly average.“ And all of this is part of a larger trend. In 2013, we witnessed the most volcanic eruptions worldwide that...

<p>AP) -- Scientists say they have identified an ocean sponge living in the darkness of the deep sea that grows thin glass fibers capable of transmitting light better than industrial fiber optic cables used for telecommunication.</p> <p>The natural glass fibers also are much more flexible than manufactured fiber optic cable that can crack if bent too far.</p>

The creatures hail from a rarely before explored region of the ocean's water column.Shallow waters can be easily explored by divers and the deep sea is now starting to be scanned by robotic submersibles. But there’s an in between part of the ocean where its too dark for divers to see and too shallow for bots to bother with. The area 150 to 500 feet deep is called the Twilight Zone, at the California Academy of Sciences. And recent expedition to those mysterious waters just off the coast of the Philippines revealed more than 100 new species, reports Grace Singer...

When lifeguards at a popular Southern California surfing spot decided to use a high-tech drone to keep swimmers safe from shark attacks, they got a chilling eyeful. The drone flies up about a 100 feet, looks down at a wide area and when they see shadows they can focus on them. In a matter of minutes the lifeguards can see just how many sharks may be lurking just yards from the shoreline. “This morning, we launched it and 10 minutes later, we knew there were 10 to 12 sharks in the Surfside [Beach] area,” said Chief Joe Bailey, a Seal...

By June 16, 2014 (NASA) (Source: NASA) In the remote and forested terrain of Juina in western Brazil, an ugly rock with an uglier name surfaced months ago inside a diamond mine. It was a tiny green crystal, all scars and bumps. It “literally look[ed] like [it had] been to hell and back,” one scientist said in March. But despite the provenance, the ringwoodite stone wasn’t scorched — it was, in fact, sopping wet. Providing an unparalleled glimpse into the our planet’s innards, the stone rode a violent volcanic eruption to the surface from 325 miles inside the Earth’s mantle....

The one common element in recent weather has been oddness. The West Coast has been warm and parched; the East Coast has been cold and snowed under. Fish are swimming into new waters, and hungry seals are washing up on California beaches. A long-lived patch of warm water off the West Coast, about 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, is part of what’s wreaking much of this mayhem, according to two University of Washington papers to appear in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. “In the fall of 2013 and...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release) — On Wednesday, U.S. Congresswoman Aumua Amata participated in a House Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs hearing entitled: “Funding Priorities for and the United States’ Responsibilities concerning Indians, Alaska Natives, and Insular Areas in the President’s FY 2016 Budget Request for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, Office of Insular Affairs, and Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians.” Amata, a Republican who serves as the vice chairwoman of the subcommittee, addressed Esther P. Kia’aina, the assistant secretary for insular areas, Department of the Interior on many of...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Scientists have raised concerns about a large, rapidly thinning glacier in Antarctica, warning it could contribute significantly to rising sea levels. They say they've discovered two openings that could channel warm seawater to the base of the huge Totten Glacier and bring the threat of potentially disastrous melting. The glacier is bigger and thinning faster than all the others in East Antarctica. It contains enough ice to raise the global sea level by at least 11 feet (3.4 meters), according to researchers from the University of Texas at Austin who were among the authors of a new study published...

Team calls for more scepticism in marine research.___ The state of the world's seas is often painted as verging on catastrophe. But although some challenges are very real, others have been vastly overstated, researchers claim in a review paper. The team writes that scientists, journals and the media have fallen into a mode of groupthink that can damage the credibility of the ocean sciences. The controversial study exposes fault lines in the marine-science community. Carlos Duarte, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and his colleagues say that gloomy media reports about ocean issues such as...

Co-authored James Doogue and JoNovaEmpirical data withheld by key scientists shows that since 1910 ocean pH levels have not decreased in our oceans as carbon dioxide levels increased. Overall the trend is messy but more up than down, becoming less acidic. So much for those terrifying oceans of acid that were coming our way.What happened to those graphs? Scientists have had pH meters and measurements of the oceans for one hundred years. But experts decided that computer simulations in 2014 were better at measuring the pH in 1910 than the pH meters were. The red line (below) is the models...

The world’s oceans are now rising far faster than they did in the past, a new study says. The study found that for much of the 20th century — until about 1990 — sea level was about 30 percent less than earlier research had figured. But that’s not good news, scientists say, because about 25 years ago the seas started rising faster and the acceleration in 1990 turns out to be more dramatic than previously calculated.

Guest Post by Willis EschenbachFollowing up on my previous investigations into the oceanic pH dataset, I’ve taken a deeper look at what the 2.5 million pH data points from the oceanographic data can tell us. Let me start with an overview of oceanic pH (the measure of alkalinity/acidity, with neutral being a pH of 7.0). Many people think that the ocean has only one pH  everywhere. Other people think that the oceanic pH is different in different places, but is constant over time. Neither view is correct.First, here is a view of a transect of the north Pacific ocean...

The story of millions of Lego pieces washing up on beaches attracted huge interest when first told by the Magazine. The list of places where the toys have been spotted is still growing. Beachcomber Tracey Williams has been picking up Lego along the Cornish coastline ever since a container spill dumped millions of the toy pieces into the sea in 1997. Since the curious tale was reported by the Magazine, dozens of people have contacted Williams to say they, too, have found parts of the much-loved toy scattered on shores. Snip Most of the people who've contacted her found Lego...

A startling discovery by a graduate student has uncovered what looks like a fraud remarkably parallel to the infamous “Hockey stick” graph of Michael Mann that purported to show global temperatures skyrocketing when atmospheric CO2 rose, but only did so because “hide the decline” was the operating principle in selecting data. For those who have not been keeping up with the alarmist follies, alleged ocean acidification has joined and supplemented the rapidly-fading alleged global warming threat as an urgent reason to stop emitting CO2, and hand money and power over to regulators who would control the production of energy, the...