Jo Chandler considers 'The Grave Barrier Reef'

Professor Justin Marshall.

Many of today’s marine scientists blame Jacques Cousteau, who surfaced in their lounge rooms during their formative years, for luring them into the water. Others were hooked by the psychedelic barrage of coral gardens and sea creatures in National Geographic. Through the ’60s and ’70s, the co-evolution of scuba technology, underwater photography and colour television took millions of earthlings on their first beguiling voyage into the deep.

Until then, the submarine world was, for most people, as remote as the just-trodden Moon. For the University of Queensland’s Professor Justin Marshall, however, terrestrial life was never really on the cards. His father was Dr Norman Bertram “Freddy” Marshall, “curator of Her Majesty’s fishes” at the British Museum (Natural History), and his mother, Olga, was a scientific illustrator who captured her husband’s discoveries in ink and watercolour. Young Justin was the marine-science equivalent of an army brat, floating around research bases in the Bahamas and Florida between stints at an Essex house where pickled specimens from the world’s oceans were collected, lifeless and eternal, in jars. “I was a nerdy little bugger,” Marshall recalls, “correcting graduate students at age seven on the Latin names of fish.”

Marshall grew up to become a neuro-ecologist investigating how residents of coral reefs and the deeper ocean perceive their environment. “As arrogant humans we tend to assume we are the pinnacle of evolution; however, certainly in sensory terms, this is far from true,” he explains in his professional profile. He tells me he works with these creatures “because I love them”. And, as it happens, they have much to teach. “The animals I’m working on at the moment are helping us detect cancer, increase data storage on computers and improve satellite design. All coming directly from mantis-shrimp vision.”

Read Jo Chandler’s piece in The Monthly - “GRAVE BARRIER REEF - The coral bleaching signals a defining environmental shift.”

"Made in England" an omen of Antarctica disaster

The soldiers at Matienzo Base in Antarctica made an odd discovery in January 1995—an antique dog sled, unlike any they had ever seen, bound together by leather straps, with a label reading “Made in England.”

Matienzo was an Argentine research base on a small island 30 miles off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. It was surrounded by a vast plain of white—a slab of glacial ice, 700 feet (215 meters) thick, that floated on the ocean. That floating slab, called Larsen A Ice Shelf, covered an area of water the size of San Francisco Bay. It had existed for a thousand years or more. But this hot summer it looked strange. The men had to go onto the ice shelf to collect snow for drinking water, and it made them uneasy.

The ice shelf was crisscrossed with narrow cracks—which the men nervously jumped over—and dotted with deep blue melt ponds. It was there, protruding from a melt pond, that they found the sled. It must have been discarded by a British expedition that passed through decades before.

That old sled turned out to be an omen of disaster, like a long-buried coffin that resurfaces when a city is ravaged by floods. It showed that Larsen A had been quietly deteriorating for years.

Read the National Geographic story - “Scientists Are Watching in Horror as Ice Collapses.”

The evidence is irrefutable and the dashboard lights are flashing red

The evidence is irrefutable – climate change is real and it is here now.

National Geographic points what is obvious to climate activist and asks: “Earth's Dashboard Is Flashing Red—Are Enough People Listening?”

It seems more and more people are listening, but the answers given are simply not palatable enough, forcing upon us decisions that unsettle even the most committed activists.

So the challenge falls back into the lap of the climate change activists and now they must articulate a solution to this global dilemma that in some way doesn’t disrupt too much life as we know it.

Articulating the needed change is just the first step and with the popular embrace of that idea its then implementation and application.

'Elegant and important' paper warns of worse to come

A new paper described as “elegant and important” warns that the world is bound for temperature increases at the high end of past global warming estimates.

Penn State University climate scientist, Michael Mann, who wrote the book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines” praised the new report.

In its story headed: “Climate: Cloud mixing means extra global warming”, National Geographic explains that global warming will mix growing amounts of higher, drier air with ocean clouds over the course of the century, thinning out the clouds and reducing their cooling effect.