News clips of forests burning in California, conflagrations on hillsides, black smoke billowing into communities, got me thinking about alternatives to the merits of planting trees to fight climate change. Trees store carbon that photosynthesis has pulled from the air as carbon dioxide. Plants take energy from the sun to break CO2 molecules into carbon…
Tasiilaq on Amassalit Island was our first encounter in East Greenland, having crossed the Denmark Strait in a following sea from Iceland. With a population of about 1,000 people – one of the largest in East Greenland – Tasiilaq rises steeply out of the water. Red, yellow, green, and blue wooden houses pop like dice…
The air here is so clear that it is incomprehensible, friend. We are sailing on the vessel Tecla, with the swirled gray gneiss and black granites of Greenland rising vertically before us. A whale surfaces, blows, black back wheels revealing a sickle fin before sliding back beneath the waves. It looks like a minke whale,…
I recently returned from a research sail through the Denmark Straits and I couldn’t be more in awe of mother nature. We sailed aboard the gaft-rigged ketch Tecla out of Isafjordur, Iceland, bound for Greenland. We were thirteen women and men on a hundred-foot steel-hulled sailing vessel. As we cleared the steep-sided fjord and sailed…
An ice cube in a pint glass demonstrates how the shrinking polar ice cap gives more flow to a stronger Gulf Stream, while an ice cube in the adjacent pint glass demonstrates why Gulf of Maine seawater is not warming faster than any other water body. On the hot bricks of Boston’s City Plaza at…
Video: Rob’s kitchen demonstration of the wine-dark sea in a pint glass. We all know communities that believe their children are better than average. Lately, I’ve been startled to hear conservation colleagues down by the Gulf of Maine, in Boston, Portsmouth and Portland, say their ocean water is special because it’s warming faster due…
The Gulf of Maine is astonishing. Captain John Smith, Rachel Carson with her nephew Roger, and many others have found it wondrous. Many of the marine life connections beneath the waves remain a mystery. Efforts to look at the inner-clock workings, the causal gearing of ecosystems, are frustrated by changes in wind, weather, currents and…
Yale E360 recently published an excellent article by Rebecca Kessler on how fish and other marine animals are responding to changing conditions in the Gulf of Maine. Particularly good news are reports of black sea bass moving into waters north of Cape Cod. Marissa McMahan, a doctoral student at Northeastern University in Boston. . .…
