Geology of Hawaiian Coral Reefs

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HAWAIIAN CORAL REEFS
Cortney Cameron
EOS 402S, Duke University

I. Introduction

He pūko‘a kani ‘āina.
A coral reef grows into an island (from small beginnings come great things).

Part animal, part plant, and part mineral, corals sit at the crossroads of biology and geology. In the Hawaiian Islands, geographic isolation and hot spot volcanism have created a uniquely trying environment for coral reef development. This paper will summarize the biology and ecology of Hawaiian corals, as well as their economic and cultural importance, in order to understand the geologic contributions that corals make in producing carbonate and aiding the interpretation of igneous features. Read more →

Structure and formation of recent limestone (Miami & Key Largo) of Southern Florida

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This post provides a brief overview of the formation and characteristics of recent limestone deposits in Southern Florida, the Miami Limestone and Key Largo Limestone. Most of this material was collected as part of a presentation for EOS 404S: Geology of Tropical Marine Environments in Spring 2013, but has been expanded and re-formatted here. Read more →

Why Gastropods (snails & slugs) are awesome

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Snails. They're slow and boring. We regularly use "snail-like" as an adjective to diss something for being so slow - hardly a positive connotation. What could be so exciting about snails? For starters, what about the fact that they're basically moving fortresses? Okay, maybe this doesn't impress you. Turtles have the same thing going for them, after all. Read more →

Why Poriferans (sponges) are awesome

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I've talked about why despite their slow rap, snails are actually awesome -- but if there's a creature more seemingly boring than a snail, it's the sponge. Evolutionarily, sponges are among the oldest, most basal multi-cellular animals, and as such, they're very simple, lacking organs and the ability to move -- but despite this, they've come up with some clever body engineering. Read more →

Influence of tropical storms on turbidity in Chesapeake Bay, USA

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INFLUENCE OF TROPICAL STORMS
ON TURBIDITY IN CHESAPEAKE BAY, USA

Cortney Cameron
EOS 321S, Duke University – Durham, NC

Introduction

The Chesapeake Bay, located in the mid-Atlantic costal region of Maryland and Virginia, is a partially mixed estuary and the largest in the United States, with a length of 300 km and area of 6,500 km2 [Willard et al., 2003]. With an average depth of 6.5 m, the Bay is broad and shallow, cut by a 20-30 m deep by 1-4 km wide central channel; depths greater than 10 m constitute just 24% of the Bay’s surface area [Kemp et al., 2005]. The Bay is interconnected with its 165,000 km2 watershed by a 18,000 km dendritic shoreline [Kemp et al., 2005; Willard et al., 2003] and exhibits a strong north-south salinity gradient; fluvial freshwater drives stratification, overlying denser seawater from the Atlantic Ocean to the south and driving stratification, which suppresses vertical exchange and traps sediments [Sanford, Suttles, & Halka, 2001]. Episodic storm events serve to destratify Bay waters and stir sediments, playing key roles in both erosion and deposition, depending on storm dynamics [Stevenson, Kearney, & Pendleton, 1985; Kemp et al., 2005; Palinkas et al., 2013]. Read more →

The chocolate Fairy (Angelicae theobromae)

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The chocolate fairy forms from maturing cocoa plants; the leaves morph into her wings and the stem into her body. Her skin takes often on a creamy hue, very similar to truffle filling. The green swirls in her brown wings smell of mint and her skin smells of chocolate. Legend holds that her veins carry sugar and that icing composes her insides. Needless to say, the chocolate fairy has more attempts on her life than most other fairies, as many animals and even people (however unwittingly) try to eat her. Understandably, then, the chocolate fairy avoids all other species as much as possible. Still, a human can attract her by leaving out a small piece of chocolate; if she knows a visitor poses no threat, she will be more willing to show herself. These fairies can transform any inanimate object into chocolate, so they are certainly worth having around, unless the object in question was valuable; some even say that she can turn living beings into chocolate, but no reliable records exist to support the claim. Read more →

Perpetual Ocean: hypnotic video of ocean surface currents

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The Perpetual Ocean video by NASA is absolutely hypnotic, and lets the viewer appreciate large-scale and smaller-scale surface circulation patterns. The visualization was created using a model crunching satellite and in-situ data collected from June 2005 to December 2007. You can download the full-version at NASA's website.

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