A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
When a whale dies and its corpse falls to the bottom of the ocean, entire ecosystems rapidly develop around eating every part of it due to how scarce resources are in the deep ocean. This phenomenon is called a "whale fall" and it's a major source of energy for deep ocean ecosystems.
Whale whale whale, what do we have here? - deep ocean crabs
Life is worth living today thanks to this comment
Sometimes I wonder if a shipping container full of billionaires would have a similar effect.
There are lakes in the ocean called brine lakes/pools. Brine is essentially concentrated saltwater; its high salinity means it's denser than water. On rare occasions, brine doesn't mix enough with the existing saltwater around it, sinking to the bottom of the ocean and forming these lakes. The lake itself is usually devoid of life; brine itself is so salty that animals go into toxic shock if exposed for too long. However, the edges usually are full of life, where usually things like mussels and other extremophile organisms thrive.
Side note, subnautica's lost river is based off of this. No big leviathans in real life though, at least none observed yet...
Video for fun: https://youtu.be/ZwuVpNYrKPY
Similarly, SpongeBobs Goo Lagoon is a brine pool.
It was never stated but I always assumed the "goo" referred to industrial waste. But SpongeBob creator Steve Hillenburg was an actual marine biologist and would have been well aware of brine pools, so that's probably right.
Brine can be from industrial waste
Technically, brine just means a high concentration of salt in a fluid. It doesn't necessarily have to be sodium chloride like we know, it can be other salts, like calcium chloride. Though the most common case for industrial brine is just desalination plants, other industries can still create brine, like mining/oil drilling. It also depends on how it's released. Large amounts dumped at once is the reason for manmade brine pools.
Whales suffocate to death; they don’t drown.
Human breathing is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. We have to hold our breath on purpose to stop ourselves from automatically breathing. This makes us passive breathers. Whales, however, are active breathers. They must choose to inhale which is why they can sleep without sucking in air. When they get too old, sick, or weak to surface, they suffocate.
Bonus fact: whales can’t breathe through their mouths; it goes straight to the stomach. The blowhole is the only respiratory tract.
Bonus bonus: a blue whale’s throat is so small it could choke to death on a grapefruit.
Bonus bonus: a blue whale’s throat is so small it could choke to death on a grapefruit.
I'm sure their throat can be blocked that way; but if they can't breathe through their mouth anyway, is it actually choking? Or just terminally blocked?
Norwegian fjords are freaking deep. When you're on the shore of Sognefjord, you're standing in front of a 1300m deep canyon filled with ocean water.
What I like to think about is that fjords were carved out by glaciers and the sea level has certainly been lower that it was now in the past... but 1300m deep what????
....so how did Glaciers cut rock BELOW sea level? Like wayyyyyy below sea level?
It is the weight of the entire glacier bearing down and carving wayyyyyy below a depth that a chunk of ice would make sense being at, the entire glacier basically serves as a trench digging machine and as you pointed out these fjords are REALLY deep.
They were carved by Slartibartfast, not glaciers.
where is your proof? If Slartibartfast did it you would be able to find his signature somewhere in the work.
The mouse's design specifically excluded any artists' signatures.
Typical mice nonsense, did they even thank us for all the cheese?
No but the dolphins said "thanks for all the fish" before they leave.
fun fact: we kill 3 TRILLION animals a year, most of which are sea animals.
fun fact: animals, exluding humans, kill about 1 MILLION of us humans a year, most of which are not sea animals.
Wow that’s 0.0000003% as much, which is conveniently exactly the same ratio as my balls to your mom.
It's also accounted for almost 100% by mosquitos, specifically the diseases they carry...so not really the mosquitos at all. Quick searching shows snakes following mosquitos with 100,000 deaths caused per year. In any case, the scale is prodigiously unbalanced. Human animals kill trillions of non-human animals, almost entirely for their own pleasure. Non-human animals kill a few hundred thousand human animals (or a bit over a million if you count mosquito-borne disease) in self defense or by accident.
Weird mathematical fact about that,
That works out to almost exactly every person on Earth killing exactly one animal every day.
The Blue Whale is so large, that if you laid one out on a standard NBA basketball court, the game would be postponed.
We are killing the ocean by increasingly acidifying it. This has been known by scientists for decades.
Ocean acidification occurs because the ocean serves as a carbon sink. Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forms weak carbonic acid in ocean water. The ocean has historically been slightly basic, and as it inches towards a neutral pH, it makes it impossible for things like oysters to form their shells.
One big problem is that it’s one of the biggest carbon sinks. It’s keeping that greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. However - as you might notice if you leave a can of Coke out on a hot day - the solubility of gases in liquids decreases when it’s hotter. The world heats up because of greenhouse gasses, less greenhouse gasses can be stored in the ocean and re-enter the atmosphere, which heats the world up more…
Then we also have the lovely “ice albedo” positive feedback loop - dark ocean water absorbs more of the suns radiation, sea ice reflects more of it. Sea ice melts as earth heats up, exposing dark ocean which absorbs more heat and melts more ice….
Fun Fact: Dolphins fart.
I mean everything farts, right? What about a snail?
It's a delicacy in France. Escargot de poopoo
A teaspoon of seawater typically contains about fifty million viruses
Well yeah our water companies keep dumping raw sewage into them
goes to moon
Sea of Tranquility
Nooooooo!
Thalassaphobia is a real thing
I, for one, think it’s completely fucking reasonable to afraid of deep, dark water. Phobia my ass.
what if we finally get to the moon and there’s another ocean there waiting for us
Earth's atmosphere is an ocean of gas. The ocean is an atmosphere of liquid. Words are made up.
Yea, for a reason.