Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) data for the last 420 million years (My) show long-term fluctuations related to supercontinent cycles as well as shorter cycles at 26 to 32 My whose origin is unknown. Periodicities of 26 to 30 My occur in diverse geological phenomena including mass extinctions, flood basalt volcanism, ocean anoxic events, deposition of massive evaporites, sequence boundaries, a...

The nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution predicts that small population size is essential for non-adaptive evolution. Evolution of whole-body left-right reversal in snails is generally a compelling example of non-adaptive speciation, because variants with reversed chirality would suffer from reduced mating opportunities within a population. Despite this reproductive disadvantage, sinist...

To resolve the capacity of Marine Protected Areas (MPA) to enhance fish productivity it is first necessary to understand how environmental conditions affect the distribution and abundance of fishes independent of potential reserve effects. Baseline fish production was examined from 2002-2004 through ichthyoplankton sampling in a large (10,878 km(2)) Southern Californian oceanic marine reserve, ...

Human exploitation of marine ecosystems is more recent in oceanic than near shore regions, yet our understanding of human impacts on oceanic food webs is comparatively poor. Few records of species that live beyond the continental shelves date back more than 60 y, and the sheer size of oceanic regions makes their food webs difficult to study, even in modern times. Here, we use stable carbon and ...

CAVERNsoft is an architecture for creating Tele-Immersive applications, with the goal of making synchronous and asynchronous trans-oceanic collaboration a routine matter. This paper briefly discusses CAVERNsoft and then discusses several applications that have been built using CAVERNsoft with a focus on those with trans-oceanic concepts.

Decadal-scale climate variations in the Pacific Ocean wield a strong influence on the oceanic ecosystem. Two dominant patterns of large-scale SST variability and one dominant pattern of large-scale thermocline variability can be explained as a forced oceanic response to large-scale changes in the Aleutian Low. The physical mechanisms that generate this decadal variability are still unclear, but...

Dietary studies in marine mammals are traditionally performed by stomach contents analyses, which may be insufficient to determine long-term dietary preferences of these upper level predators. Our primary objective was to test the efficiency of trace metal measurements as complementary tools in dietary studies. Variations in cadmium (Cd) exposure through the diet and its effective renal levels ...

[1] We simulate the oceanic and atmospheric distribution of methyl iodide (CH3I) with a global 3-D model driven by assimilated meteorological observations from the Goddard Earth Observing System of the NASA Data Assimilation Office and coupled to an oceanic mixed layer model. A global compilation of atmospheric and oceanic observations is used to constrain and evaluate the simulation. Seawater ...

Periods of oceanic anoxia have had a major influence on the evolutionary history of Earth and are often contemporaneous with mass extinction events. Changes in global (as opposed to local) redox conditions can be potentially evaluated using U system proxies. The intensity and timing of oceanic redox changes associated with the end-Permian extinction horizon (EH) were assessed from variations in...

Evolutionary processes in marine plankton have been assumed to be dependent on the oceanic circulation system, which transports plankton between populations in marine surface waters. Gene flow facilitated by oceanic currents along longitudinal gradients may efficiently impede genetic differentiation of pelagic populations in the absence of confounding marine environmental effects. However, how ...