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A Blue New Deal for a Blue Marble Planet

By David Helvarg

Sylvia Earle likes to say ‘No Blue, No Green’ in explaining the role of the ocean as the incubator and cradle of life on earth, also the driver of climate, weather and rain, the generator of over half the oxygen we air breathers consume and the salty home of some of the deepest, widest, weirdest habitats and marine critters from eel grasses to methane seeps, sarcastic fringeheads to narwhales.
Incredibly, after four billion years of ocean evolution, all of this has now been put at risk by our own species’ thoughtless and greedy actions over the last fifteen decades or so.  We’ve been ignorant about the impacts of many of our activities failing to adopt the precautionary principle, “First, do no harm.” …

Posted in .Homepage, Dr. Sylvia Earle, Featured, mission blue, Partner Stories, Uncategorized |

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Oil Spill in Bangladesh! (Why Do Mangroves Matter?)

by Brett Garling
A month ago, an oil tanker spilled hundreds of thousands of liters of oil into the largest mangrove forest in the world, called The Sundarbans. This immense brackish estuary on the border of India and Bangladesh is also a bengal tiger sanctuary and home to countless other flora and fauna. While the story hasn’t gotten much media attention, what coverage it did receive focused more on the area’s status as an endangered dolphin sanctuary. (Yes unfortunately it’s one of those, too. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.) However, a disaster like this should also alarm us with regards to climate change: healthy mangroves play a crucial role in the delicate dance of carbon into and out of our atmosphere.…

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Literally Looking Through Waves

Did you know NASA has developed breathtaking technology that allows us to literally look through waves? Far from being distorted by the waves, the resulting image is actually more defined and 3D. To get the full scoop, Dr. Sylvia Earle led a Mission Blue envoy to NASA Ames Research Center this past summer. What we learned was nothing short of remarkable: NASA is poised to use this technology to map the shallow reefs of the world in unprecedented detail and give scientists the clearest picture yet of what we are losing where. With this information, we hope that an even stronger case can be made for conservation.
As part of our trip to NASA, Mission Blue’s Brett Garling produced the following video in which you’ll learn all about this amazing new technology — called fluid lensing — and what hope it holds for the world’s oceans.…

Posted in mission blue, Partner Stories |

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Perpetual Ocean: An Animated Scientific Visualization

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has garnered lots of media attention for the successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars earlier this week. However, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is involved in many other projects in addition to the Curiosity mission to Mars, including many that deal with space and that directly impact the world’s ocean. One such undertaking is an ambitious project jointly overseen by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The joint project is called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO). Using advanced mathematical tools and satellite images, the ground-breaking research initiative seeks to figure out how ocean currents evolve over time.
The scientific applications of the model systems being used in the ECCO project are numerous.…

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