Waves in the Ocean - redone

A photo of waves taken from the safety of the shore

Some time back, I wrote about how, once you are out of sight of the shore, waves in the ocean look the same at different heights (original post is here). I reworked the post, removing the helicopter scariness for the UVic Ocean Student Society's blog - find the post here.

Something on glass sponges...

Here I am building a mooring

For my masters work I looked at flow over a local glass sponge reef. It turns out that how the tides interact with a sub-surface ridge may influence the conditions the sponge reef lives in. I wrote a little about it for the UVic Ocean Student Society here.

Examples of iridescence from the fall fair

I caught these two beauties showing off their iridescent plumage at the fall fair. It always amazes me that such a range of colours can be produced from an optical trick.

Glass Frogs

My collection of frogs some day needs one of these.

Getting tangled in jargon

A crab drawing of mine - completely unrelated to the text

Since I spend most my days with people in ocean science and people who have been around ocean scientists long enough to understand what they say, I often don’t notice ocean science specific jargon as such. I got caught out the other day using ‘water column’ when asked what I do - I didn’t even realize I was using jargon until she said she didn’t know what that meant.

Imagine you are out on the ocean on a rubber raft. If you looked straight down over the side, from the surface of the water all the way down to the bottom would be considered the water column.

On another note - a blog post I wrote about how we measure temperature in the ocean has been posted here.

An interesting take on blues and greens

I stumbled across this today. Colours and how we perceive them never ceases to fascinate me.

As a tangent: I realize it has been more than two months since I've written anything, work on another project has left me exhausted.

Floating Trees

A tree in the forest near my home

Years ago I read C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy since I had enjoyed his The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe series as a kid. The Space Trilogy books were too weird for me and I can’t remember if I finished all three. What does stick in my memory is one of the settings (on Venus I think, but I could be wrong). The main character ran across surreal floating islands coated in trees and surrounded by water. The movie ‘Avatar’ also brought us tree covered floating islands (this time floating in the air due to a ‘flux vortex’), but the strangest trees I’ve come across are floating on glaciers and they’re real.

A while back, I went to a talk by Hig about his trek with his wife, toddler and baby across Malaspina Glacier (find their blog here). They lived in the wild for two months. Clearly they are somewhat crazy - in a fantastic way, I wish more people took their kids into nature that way. From the video and photos clearly the kids had an awesome time.

Malaspina Glacier sits by the ocean on the southern reaches of Alaska reaching 600m thick in places and covering an area of 3,900 square km. Like many glaciers, this one is shrinking however the most striking feature to my mind is that in places trees grow on it. Trees growing on top of ice - how fabulous is that! Even assuming there is some sort of soil layer buffering the roots from the ice.

Are there other glaciers out there with trees growing on them?

a porpoise for a trip

The picture of the turtle I took was
blurry - so here's my lunch instead

This morning I went on a short road trip to drop off a harbour porpoise and pick up an olive ridley sea turtle from the Pacific Biological Centre - a trip that took two hours one way. Both animals had been found dead, frozen and put into scientists hands.

Olive ridley’s are the most abundant of the sea turtles. Unfortunately, their numbers are declining putting them at risk of extinction like all the other sea turtles. Years ago, I saw a live one on a beach in Costa Rica that came ashore to lay eggs - we moved along quickly to avoid disturbing her. It was night and to me she seemed huge as she hauled her mass up the sandy beach, however, they’re small compared to other sea turtles.

The sea turtle we picked up today ventured too far north as they normally live in tropical waters - in fact, turtle was the first olive ridley ever found here. Cold blood in cold water meant the animal probably was moving pretty slow. It was found on a beach in Toffino after it was too late to help. Why it came this far north we don’t know.

I’ll write more about the turtle shortly, as I’ll be helping at the museum to preserve it.

How deep is it?

Once a lead line was the only way to figure out how much water was beneath your ship. Now, there are all sorts of options for determining ocean depths from echosounders to satellite images. I suppose one could even venture out with reel of line and a weight, but not me as spooling in kilometres of line is quite tiring.

I wrote about how our technology evolved for determining ocean depths here.

a bit about a beach sceine

Willow's Beach at high tide

I've expanded on my Friday night beach sceine from a few months back. The article can be found here. Take a look.

As a tangent, this came out of my Christmas cracker this year:

What do you get when you cross a snowman and a vampire?

- Frostbite (terrible, I know)

on a snowy day ...

Snow is falling on my island in the Pacific - and more snow is threatening to dump on us. The lyrics from Paul Simon's 'Slip Sliding Away' come to mind when I think about venturing out onto a snowy road. If I don't have to go anywhere, I don't mind the snow and enjoy the change to the landscape it brings. From my window or backyard, watching snow falling is fascinating. There's something about the silence when snow falls that I find quite compelling. If you have ever wondered about a snowflake's shape and how it relates to the temperature outside, check out this.

Winter colour - or gratuitous ducks

I went out for a walk yesterday to a near by pond. The day was grey - the iridescence in these feathers provided the only natural colour around. All these ducks were hanging out hoping for food. Their wait paid off as many walkers (us included) brought duck snacks.

A wood duck (male)

A bufflehead (male)

A ringneck duck

A pair of American wigeons

A usual duck pond suspect - a male mallard

A duck-alanch (they thought we had food)

nature at the back door

The monster-from-a-horror-flick stage 

of a lady bug's life

In my office, I've arranged it so that from my desk I look out into the backyard. My husband and I have removed most of the lawn and whats left contains more clover than grass – which the neighbour's bees love when it's blooming. Raised garden beds now dominate the space. In the spring, I'll plant them with veggies. Right now, they contain remnants of last summer's garden – kale, parsnips and turnips ready for harvest. Plus, one bed is currently home to our crazy chickens (crazy because as soon as one catches sight of me, they all come running). We also have berry bushes and herbs waiting for spring.

Now that there is a variety of landscape, nature has moved in (we don't apply any nasty chemicals in our yard). I've observed the full cycle of a ladybug's life from it's monster-from-a-horror-flick larvae stage to its glossy-red-poka-dotted adult stage. Jumping spiders and bee flies visit, neither of them stay still long enough for me to get a good photo. A hummingbird has taken up residence in the holly behind the fence. A Bewick's wren raised a family in a pile of cedar branches which we almost carted off to the dump (we noticed the birds just in time). I'm looking forward to the day I see a garter snake move in to help with the slugs. Someday, frogs would be nice too.

Producing tasty fruit and veggies is my goal for the backyard, but, it's nice to see creatures finding a home in my yard. Even in winter, lots of creatures are making use of the yard.

Ready for take off

The barn swallows from last year returned to nest on the light fixture beside our front door. The light is in our carport, so perhaps they should be called carport swallows instead. Last year they raised three chicks. This year five chicks are crammed into the little nest - ever since they hatched we've been afraid one would fall out. Now, they're ready to fledge any day. It's been fun to watch them grow up but, we'll be changing the light fixture to discourage them coming back next year as they make a mess.

Time-scales

Working on my final thesis draft has me thinking about time-scales. From our point-of-view time is linear, marching at a constant rate from past to future (unless you are stuck in an extremely dull lecture or on an overcrowded bus crammed beside someone with bad BO – then time seems to slow down to a snail's pace). So, when the conditions are right for something to happen, how long until it does? This isn't so easy to figure out, however, it's relatively easy to figure out the minimum time when that 'something' can happen. For example, my favorite, and apparently everyone else's favorite, coffee goes massively on sale once in a while. When I see the sale in the flier, the conditions are right for cheap coffee. However, I'm at home and the coffee is a short walk away. So, even though the conditions are right, the minimum time I can actually get the coffee is about 15 min later (I've learned this cheap coffee sells out quickly, so I need to go right away). So the coffee time-scale is about 15 min – which is the minimum amount of time until I have the coffee.

fabrics with a fishy twist

Since I love the effect of structural colours, when I came across a story that could have me wearing them a few years from now, I had to share. Check out this.

A bit of space

Let's go on a rocket trip to the moon!
We take out own air and water.
We need special suits, too.
In the sunlight, the moon is hotter than boiling water.
In the shade, it is very cold.
From the moon, the sky looks black.
We cannon hear any sound.
The mountains stand sharp and clear.
There are no plants or animals.
Jumping on the moon is fun.
We can jump six times as far as on earth!

- from Sun, Moon and Stars, 1950 by Jeanette Smith

How our understanding of things change with time is always interesting. It was once believed (before telescopes) that the moon as a perfectly smooth heavenly body. By 1609, Galileo Galilei looked through one of his homemade telescopes at the moon and saw that it was not smooth. Over the next century the craters were mapped and named.

One of the motivations for William Herschel (1738-1822) for making bigger, better telescopes was to observe life on the moon - at one point he believed the moon teemed with life. Eventually, with one of his better telescopes, he discovered the moon wasn't inhabited - at least no cities were to be seen.

The above poem is from a children's book written back in 1950, before anyone set foot on the moon. This poem got it right. Within twenty years of its publication astronauts landed on the moon and found it to be a dusty airless place.

Insect wings

I'm fascinated by iridescence - I wrote about it here and here. A recent study of the iridescence of insect wings when viewed against dark backgrounds was conducted and the resulting pictures are fantastic. Check it out here or here.

Here is a photo I took yesterday of my jar experiment (I started it here). I'm now eleven days in and the water inside the jar still looks slightly yellow. I don't think there has been any change so far. Perhaps the jar should be moved into direct sunlight (which isn't possible in my office).

A new year and an experiment

When I woke up this morning there was a heavy frost on the ground. This photo is of the frost on the last of my kale – the same kale as this picture (I haven't eaten it yet, but will soon).

I've decided to conduct an experiment directly out of 'how to be an explorer of the world' by Keri Smith. It's exploration #52 – miniature ecosystem. What I've done is collect a jar of water out of my aquarium (I was doing a water change) and set it on my desk. I'm going to watch it to see if things grow. I'll post photos along the way.

On day two, all I have is slightly yellowed water.

Red moon, blue moon

Based on my recent discussion of blues (colours, not moods), I though I should describe what a blue moon is. 'Once in a blue moon' is a common phrase for an uncommon event. However, the moon is never blue (unless there are smoke or dust particles in the atmosphere, then the moon can appear bluish).

I've seen the moon turn a blood red – a frightening event if I didn't know why it changed colour. On that night it was a lunar eclipse. The earth had moved between the moon and sun, casting the moon into its shadow. Normally, the moon reflects sunlight directly from the sun making it a bright feature in the night sky. When the earth is in the way, the only sunlight to reach the moon is refracted around the earth and as a result the moon takes on a blood red colour (at least it did on the night I watched).

A blue moon is a completly different event, more of a bookkeeping phenomenon. A calander month is on average 30.5 days long, while the time between full moons is 29.3 days. Normally, there is one full moon a month but, on a rare occasion, a month can have two full moons. There are different ways of determining which of the full moons is the blue one. Typically, a season has three full moons, however when one of the months has an extra full moon, the third full moon is condidered a blue moon. This is so rare, a blue moon will occur only seven times in 19 years, which works out to one every two to three years. Mark your calenders as the next one will occur on August 21, 2013.

Been reading 'The Field Guide to Natural Phenomena' by Keith Heidorn and Ian Whitelaw – so far it promises lots of interesting tidbits.