Residents of the San Francisco Bay region have long suspected that its waters might be contaminated with copper, particularly when the native fish populations in the north bay began declining two decades ago. Such declines can typically be attributed to changes in water temperature; however – in this case – such changes weren’t observed, leading some to believe that copper toxicity might be to blame. Adding to their suspicions is the fact that copper levels in the waters periodically exceed the U.S. EPA water quality guidelines.
Earlier this year, the BIOS Board of Trustees unanimously voted to award Captain John Moore with the Richard Gorham Award for “his long and valued support and extraordinary service to BIOS.”
After the successful inaugural episode of Ocean Diaries—a virtual education program and collaboration that aired as a Facebook Live event on the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum, and Zoo (BAMZ) Facebook page last month to over 2,000 views—the team of educators at BAMZ, the Bermuda Zoological Society (BZS), BIOS, and the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) quickly remobilized to begin working on episode 2.
While the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted summer internship plans for many university students, Amber Wolffe, an undergraduate student in meteorology and mathematics at Metropolitan State University in Denver (Colorado, USA), overcame these challenges to complete an eight-week Bermuda Program internship with the Bermuda Weather Service (BWS, a section of the Bermuda Airport Authority). Since 1976, the BIOS Bermuda Program has selected a handful of budding scientists each year to receive paid fellowships that allow them to work on specific projects of interest alongside BIOS scientists in both field and laboratory settings.
Earlier this year, BIOS associate scientist and zooplankton ecologist Leocadio Blanco-Bercial published a paper in the scientific journal Frontiers in Marine Science that sheds light on zooplankton communities in the Sargasso Sea, where zooplankton diversity is among the highest in the world’s ocean.
Every hurricane season, from June 1 through November 30, we’re reminded that hurricanes are a force to be reckoned with, particularly when they make landfall in densely populated areas like Bermuda. In the wake of such a storm, local governments, businesses, homeowners and—of course—insurance companies are left trying to assess the damage and assign a final price tag to recovery and rebuilding efforts. Rick Murnane, Risk Prediction Initiative (RPI) Project Manager and Senior Research Scientist at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), recently published a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that may serve as an important tool in streamlining these efforts.
For many years scientists have operated on the belief—backed by extensive calculations and climate models—that the global ocean absorbs approximately 30% of the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by human activities. However, in a recent paper published in the journal Biogeosciences, Dr. Nicholas Bates, Senior Scientist and Associate Director of Research at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), discovered this might not always be true.
In a nod to the value of crowdsourcing as an effective forecasting method, the Risk Prediction Initiative (RPI2.0) announces the start of its seasonal forecast competition, in which participants can win up to $5000.