Brinicles: Icicles of Death

In the frozen seas of the Arctic and Antarctic, winter brings one of the ocean’s strangest and most beautiful sights—the brinicle, sometimes called an “ice finger of death”. These delicate, glassy tubes form beneath the sea ice, descending toward the seafloor like slow, shimmering icicles. But unlike normal ice, they bring deadly cold to everything they touch.

A brinicle
Ecology & Science

The birth of a brinicle

When seawater begins to freeze at the surface, pure ice crystals form and push out the salt, leaving behind pockets of extremely cold, salty brine. This dense brine seeps downward through cracks in the ice. Because it is much colder and heavier than the seawater around it, it sinks—freezing the water it touches as it falls.

Rogue Waves: The Ocean’s Mysterious Giants

For centuries, sailors have whispered tales of monstrous waves—towering walls of water that rise from the sea without warning, swallowing ships whole and leaving nothing but legends in their wake. These are rogue waves, the ocean’s most unpredictable and terrifying phenomena. Long dismissed as maritime folklore, science now confirms their existence, and researchers are piecing together what makes these giants tick. So, what causes rogue waves, and why do they strike with such stealth? Let’s dive into the mystery.

Rogue wave
Ecology & Science

The legend of the rogue wave

Ocean oxygen loss may ultimately reverse

A worldwide study led by Rutgers University offers an unexpected bright spot in a time when climate change news is frequently doom and gloom. The scientists have found evidence that suggests the current oxygen depletion in the world's oceans may eventually reverse.

Ocean
Ecology & Science

Ocean deoxygenation has detrimental repercussions. Fish, crabs and other significant species of marine life that are unable to flee these low oxygen zones may perish as a result. People who depend on them for food and employment may be subsequently impacted by their absence as many of these species are economically significant.

Additionally, there is a negative feedback loop at play: as ocean oxygen levels decline, so does its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. This may cause global warming to accelerate even further.

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Water - A Unique Solvent

Water is obviously important as a basic necessity for maintaining life. Quite simply, if you don’t regularly take in water you can die within a few days.

Words:
Michael Symes
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Ecology & Science

Water is obviously important as a basic necessity for maintaining life. Quite simply, if you don’t regularly take in water you can die within a few days.

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Temperature

We have previously looked at the various properties of water which have an effect on aquatic fauna, some of them a bit out of the ordinary, such as surface tension. However, one of the most important

Words:
Michael Symes
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Ecology & Science

As pure water is only a liquid between 0ºC and 100ºC, it is not surprising that life, at least as we know it, which depends on water, is to be found on earth where this condition obtains, though most life on Earth lives at temperatures of less than about 50ºC.

In general, poikilotherms do not use their metabolisms to heat or cool themselves although the swimming muscles of the Tuna fish are warmed by a heat exchanger, with a network of fine veins, the rete mirabile, providing a thermal barrier against loss of heat. One obvious means of temperature control for poikilotherms such as fish is to change depth in the water column to find a suitable temperature.

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Coloured Water

No! I am not talking about American beer but about ordinary clean water, water that should come out of your tap. From the air, shallow coastal sea-waters above white sands often appear to be blue or green, most of this colouring being due to either reflection from the sky or from organic growths such as chlorophyll containing algae. A glass of tap water, on the other hand, seems to be colourless, yet divers know that water has a definite blue tinge below the surface. Water is, in fact, blue in colour, albeit a very pale blue.

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Michael Symes
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Ecology & Science

This colour arises from very weak absorptions at the yellow-red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. The visible part of this spectrum stretches from the UV region, starting at a wavelength of about 380 nm, to the start of the infra-red region, at about 770 nm. These are the wavelengths that can stimulate the retinal cells of the eye and which give rise to the perception of colour.

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Subsurface Noise

How the snapping shrimp makes itself heard. You might expect the oceans below the surface to be a quiet and still place, they are far from being so.

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Michael Symes
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Ecology & Science

If we ignore the anthropogenic noises such as those made by ships and oil-rigs, and the natural noises made by waves and surf, earthquakes, calving icebergs, etc, there is still a considerable amount of noise, which emanates from the aquatic invertebrates and fishes.

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Osmosis

We have written much here in this magazine about the different properties of water. Some of them, such as surface tension, are of importance to the ability of aquatic fauna to function in their given environment. For example, surface tension permits water skaters to skate on the surface of the water where its habitat is neither the water below the surface nor the air above.

However, more than a purely physical phenomenon, osmosis is of importance for life itself, for no physical phenomenon has any greater importance in biology than does osmosis. Without osmosis neither animal cells nor plant cells could function. Not only this, osmosis also appears in many different guises in our everyday existence. So, what is this strange phenomenon?

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Ecology & Science

We have written much here in this magazine about the different properties of water. Some of them, such as surface tension, are of importance to the ability of aquatic fauna to function in their given environment. For example, surface tension permits water skaters to skate on the surface of the water where its habitat is neither the water below the surface nor the air above.

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Noise

Aquatic animals, like their land-based relatives, can communicate in a number of ways. For example, in one form of communication, organisms can emit and detect certain organic molecules which can function as the pheromones of land based creatures. This is a sexual communication.

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Ecology & Science

Sound transmission in the Ocean

Sound, as most people will know, consists of varying longitudinal pressure waves transmitted by a medium. Sound can be described by four parameters:

            unit

c - Speed            ms-1

λ - Wavelength    m

ν - Frequency      Hz

I  - Intensity         Wm-2 .

1 Hz is one cycle per second.

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