I am willing to bet most people have never heard of paleotempestology before. I hadn’t heard of it before I took a marine geology course. In a course I am taking this semester, we decided to reexamine the topic because a lot of individual studies are debatable. So, if the title of this post didn’t already give it away, what exactly is paleotempestology? Paleotempestology is the study of past storms using the geologic record to identify deposits left by storms. Personally, I think this field is pretty awesome and it is a fairly new, up and coming field of ..read more

Taylor Asher is a PhD student in Marine Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill. Taylor works in Rick Luettich’s lab where his research focuses on hydrodynamics and statistical and physical flood hazards.      As IMS gets back on its feet and Carolina rivers’ waters finally fall, a familiar narrative arises:  If Hurricane Florence, which made landfall as a measly Category 1 storm after weakening from its original Cat. 4 might, can bring such devastation, then it is time to fix or replace the hurricane scale.  But this imperative conflates two related, but distinct problems ..read more

Ok, so polynyas aren’t exactly crop circles, but they are open water areas in the Artic where you would normally find ice. You might think that it’s weird that I am just talking about holes in the ice, but the underlying physical processes keeping these holes open is fascinating, and they are biologically important. Image from here. There are 2 types of polynyas that you should know about: Sensible heat (or Open-Ocean) polynyas and Latent-heat (or Coastal) polynyas. Really, they are categorized based on how ice is removed from the system. Sensible-heat polynyas occur similarly to what drives ..read more

Photo from here I wish I were talking about the delicious dessert today, but alas, I am talking about something more alarming. Or fortuitous, I guess it depends on if you are a glass half full or glass half empty person. So, what is Jubilee? It is a weird phenomenon that my volunteer, Sam, told me about. Basically, fish just swim into your hand and then you have dinner for the next week. I’m really not kidding about this, you can walk along the beach and pick up handfuls of shrimp, flounder, crab, etc. To give you some perspective on how many fish you can actually ac ..read more

Have you ever noticed a rip current at the beach? If you or someone you know was caught in a rip current, would you know what to do? If you’ve been paying attention to the coastal news along North Carolina recently, you may have noticed recent stories about rip currents and rip current safety. Dr. Greg Dusek, a UNC Chapel Hill Marine Sciences Alumni, works for the NOAA National Ocean Service and is one of the leading experts on rip current research. Check out this Q&A session with him to learn everything you need to know about rip currents. One of the projects from Dr. Greg Dusek where gr ..read more

This June I was fortunate to be selected to spend two weeks in Washington, D.C. at the American Meteorological Society’s Summer Policy Colloquium (AMS SPC). The colloquium was an opportunity for participants to immerse themselves in science policy through discussions with working professionals and hands-on exercises. The goal of the program is to arm scientists with expertise in the policy process and to help the scientific community engage with decision makers. I think it’s important for scientists to have a seat at the table when policy decisions are made to ensure available scientific knowl ..read more

Having no publications to my name and only nebulous drafts of several (hopefully) publishable papers, I am not an expert on how to get published. This is why I attended a student workshop on this very topic at the 2018 ASLO summer meeting in Victoria, BC. In this workshop a panel of editors in chief of several L&O publications shared what they look for in a well-crafted scientific article. Before you start writing The first piece of advice from the experts was consulting two publications – “Writing Science” by Joshua Schimel and “The Science of Scientific Writing” by George D. Gopen and Ju ..read more

Martín Benavides is a PhD student in Marine Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the variability of coastal shark communities in both time and space.  He is also interested in the movement ecology of sharks in estuarine systems. Martín is a proud father of two boys and provides a unique prospective to navigating graduate school with 2 children under the age of 5.    It isn’t often that I have the opportunity to socialize with other graduate students (or other adults for that matter), and when I do, it can be short-lived as the demands of parenting don’t quite all ..read more

Satellites hovering hundreds of miles above earth; underwater autonomous vehicles traveling through the ocean; drones collecting snot above whales; and robots that move like fish; what do all of these things have in common (other than sounding like some futuristic world where robots and computers have completely taken over)?? Turns out, all of these things are tools scientists use, today, to help measure the health of our oceans, take samples in remote and often inaccessible places, or observe animal and fish behavior in as un-obtrusive way as possible. They are ways that technology merges wit ..read more

Applications have been submitted. Recruitment weekends are near (or have already come and gone). Funding source notification dates are coming up. And most exciting of all–graduate school acceptances are around the corner. It is an exciting time to see your hard work pay off. But wait. Hold your horses. Here are some things you should consider before accepting a graduate school offer: Some of you may already know these suggstions but it never hurts to get a refresher when a decision about the next 2-6+ years of your life is on the line. 1. What do you want to get out of you graduate program? Ju ..read more