Category: Earth

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Earth Healthy Planet

Hard-rock story

Oregon State University Professor Anthony Koppers and Toshitsugu Yamazaki of the Geological Society of Japan were co-leaders of the latest cruise conducted under the auspices of the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). Their target:  the Louisville Seamount Trail — a 2,600-mile-long line of underwater mountains in the South Pacific — where they hoped to learn more about the geophysical processes that produce such features as the Hawaiian Islands or the stretch of ancient volcanoes between the Oregon Cascades and Yellowstone National Park.

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Earth Healthy Economy Healthy Planet Marine Studies Initiative Student Research

Lines in the Water

As fishermen, scientists and coastal communities spar over Oregon’s system of marine reserves, OSU researchers and their partners are developing the science. One of their first testing grounds is Port Orford’s Redfish Rocks.

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Earth Healthy Planet Stewardship

Shellfish on Acid

Whether or not you’re a fan of gulping down raw oysters doused with Tabasco, recent declines in the succulent Northwest shellfish are cause for alarm. That’s because the chemical changes in seawater that are harming oysters could have far-reaching effects on other ocean species as well.

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Earth Healthy Planet Marine Studies Initiative

Winter Storms Lead to Spring Bloom

(Photo: Kimberly Kenny)

If you separate predators from their prey, you get more prey. Now that simple relationship has been used to explain one of the most important annual events in the ocean: the North Atlantic spring phytoplankton bloom.

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Earth Healthy Planet

Surprise in the Sargasso

In some of Earth’s most extreme environments — Antarc- tica’s frigid ice fields, Yellowstone’s sulfuric hot springs, Crater Lake’s lightless depths, the oceans’ deep-sea basalts — Stephen Giovannoni has discovered thriving communities of bacteria. As the holder of the Emile F. Pernot Distinguished Professorship in Microbiology, he has discovered some of the most abundant life forms on the planet.

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Earth Healthy Planet

Run Silent, Run Deep

For more than half a century, oceanographers have ventured out of Newport to measure, probe and monitor the Pacific Ocean off the central Oregon Coast. And since the 1950s, these seafaring researchers have recorded about 4,000 “profiles” of the near-shore waters — surface to bottom measurements of temperature, salinity and oxygen levels that begin to tell us how the world’s largest ocean influences everything from our weather to fisheries.