The current administration is proposing yet another reckless way of grinding up our planet and turning it into money. As I perused the 1600+ comments submitted by the public, businesses, and organizations, and it doesn’t seem like anybody thinks this is a good idea.
Zooplankton Mandala Day two of the OCEANOISE-2026 conference was every bit as rich as Day 1. The “sessions” were “Polar,” “Sensitivity and Pathology,” and “Behavior.” “Polar” largely examined the complex assumptions we make about things like masking, and the limits…
I “laid an egg” (intentionally) by stating that 40% of the ships at sea are transporting fossil fuel, so the most direct way of accomplishing the stated goal would be to use less fossil fuel.
One of the virtues of OCEANOISE is that while it includes many academics, it also includes people in ocean policy, marine conservation, and ocean industries. So a lot of work gets done – not just through the presentations, key notes, and poster sessions, but also through the long lunches and social events that orbit around the many discussions stimulated by the programming.
When Barrack Obama was elected in 2008, and seated in 2009, he appointed Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI). This brought an end to eight years of the DOI being run at the convenience of the extraction industries.
Aside from the continuation of our dependence on fossil fuel, the “Macondo Deepwater Horizon” blowout was probably the worst fossil-fueled environmental disaster ever.
Standard metrics and vocabulary assures us that scientific and technical research is clearly understood, and repeatable. But it also can confer commercial advantages if the “Standard” conforms to already-developed, proprietary technologies.
If this approach was employed in the Underwater Internet of Things – establishing communication channels predicated on unique frequency-shift sequences specific to the particular communication channels, it might go far in allaying our concerns about turning the entire ocean into a digital-communications mosh pit.
Under the auspices of the International Standards Organization (ISO), we’re working on the “Underwater Internet of Things” (UIoT). Our task is to make sure that it wreaks the least amount of havoc on marine life.
New pile-driving technologies promise to tame the unruly noise of installing shallow-water windfarms.