COSEE NOW

Written by Maria Osiadacz, Marine Advanced Technology Education Center, Monterey, CA This is Wally’s Story. In May of 2007, Wally, the 12 year-old Basenji pictured on the right, ate dead sand crabs on Del Monte Beach and almost died from what is believed to be acute domoic acid toxicity. Wally suffered from symptoms associated with vertigo (loss [...]

College of the RedwoodsNews : Mendocino Coast May 17, 2010 – 4:02:19 PM Students in the Marine Science Technology Program (MST) have recently built and deployed an ocean drifter designed to study California coastal currents. The drifter is a four-and-one-half foot tall by four foot wide structure made of PVC pipe, vinyl “sails” and a package…[Read more]

Except from Podcast: Kara La Lomia is part of a team at Southern Maine Community College (SMCC) that’s designing, constructing and using drifters. These floating instruments track the currents, and are engaging everyone from students to lobstermen.  To listen go to http://coseenow.net/podcast/2010/02/drifter/

In an effort to plug gaps in knowledge about key ocean processes, the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s division of ocean sciences has awarded nearly $1 million to scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. The Scripps marine scientists will develop a new breed of ocean-probing instruments. Jules Jaffe and Peter…[Read more]

Our Vice president of Academic Affairs asked me the other day if the tsunami affected the motion of the drifters here in Monterey Bay. “Voile!” I thought, what a great idea for a lab. If our vice president thinks that the tsunami might have affected the drifters, then our students must have the same question. [...]

The MPC Drifters are back in the water this week as our MBARI collaboration continues for a second week. The data on the image above represents about 27 hours of data, from the afternoon of October 5 to about 6 pm local time of October 6. It illustrates quite nicely the 24-hour periodicity that is evident [...]

A couple of MPC Oceanography students accompanied the MBARI team to recover the drifters yesterday. They quickly found both of them and brought them back on board. They were out for almost exactly 48 hours. After drifting south for the first 12 hours or so, perhaps due to strong NW winds that day, they turned and [...]

Sometimes it seems like articles in newspapers are published as if they were planned to coincide with my syllabus. This was one such week. We set the drifters adrift on Tuesday and only two days earlier, on Sunday, the New York Times published a piece on surface currents in Monterey Bay, Finding Order in the Apparent Chaos [...]

This is what the path of one of the drifters looks like today, approximately 24 hours after deployment. Remember yesterday, the drifter was taking a southerly route. Today, the drifters have turned northwards. Today is not as windy as yesterday. This is what the other drifter path looks like today. It has also turned north [...]

Well, the drifters are adrift here in Monterey Bay. They were deployed mid day today, local time by a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and three Oceanography students from Monterey Peninsula College. The study is part of an intensive effort to look at the physical oceanography associated with harmful algal blooms (HABs) [...]