The Petronius Rig in the Gulf of Mexico, operated by Chevron and Marathon Oil. Photo: Extra Zebra

Shell plans to drill more than two miles underwater in the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of new sources of oil and gas. If successful, the Guardian reports, the project will rank as the world’s deepest offshore facility.

The move is being viewed in the oil industry as a demonstration of Shell’s confidence that its technology can deliver returns on expensive and risky offshore projects, despite a recent downturn in oil prices.

Although BP recently put its Gulf of Mexico project—called “Mad Dog Phase 2″—on hold, Shell is not alone in its endeavors in the Gulf. ExxonMobil is planning a $4 billion project in the region, as well.

Shell’s executive vice president, John Hollowell, told the Guardian that the new project demonstrates the company’s ongoing commitment to meet U.S. energy demands. “We will continue our leadership in safe, innovative deepwater operations,” he said. The Guardian:

The move comes despite ongoing controversy over offshore exploration – especially in the Gulf of Mexico, where in April 2010 a fire and explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and started a leak that took three months to cap. Last month BP said it had paid $25bn (£16bn) of the $42bn it has set aside to cover the damage caused by the spill.

Shell expects its new well to produce 50,000 barrels of oil per day once it reaches peak production. It estimates that the well, located in an oil field discovered eight years ago about 200 miles southwest of New Orleans, contains around 250 million barrels of recoverable oil total—just over three percent of the 6.9 billion barrels of oil the U.S. currently burns through each year.

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A modern day foraminiferan species. Photo: Scott Fay

Researchers have discovered a jackpot of ancient DNA buried under 5,000 meters of Atlantic water and the sea floor, ScienceNOW reports. The genetic material once belonged to single-celled sea animals that lived around 32,500 years ago. This is the first time ancient DNA has been recovered from such oceanic depths.

The researchers uncovered the samples from silt and clay deposits. They analyzed their samples for traces of DNA specific to two groups of single-celled organisms—foraminifera and radiolarians—using genetic sequences from modern, related organisms to identify the DNA they were after. Their analysis turned up 169 foraminifera and 21 radiolarian species, ScienceNOW reports, many of which are new to science.

Where there is some DNA, the researchers reason, there must be more.  If they’re correct, the deep sea could constitute a treasure trove of long-buried DNA waiting to be discovered. Such DNA, the team told ScienceNOW, expands scientists’ ability to study ancient biodiversity.

Significantly, the existence of some of these newly discovered species isn’t well documented in the fossil record. Since fossils only preserve animals with hard structures—bones, shells, exoskeletons—DNA preserved in the vast stretches of the ocean floor could provide a unique view of animals otherwise lost to the millennia.

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In February 2013 Cassandra Brooks, a marine scientist with Stanford University, landed at McMurdo Station, a U.S. research station on the shores of Antarctica’s Ross Sea. For two months she worked on a ship, the icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer, cruising through the Antarctic sea. Brooks documented her life on the ship for National Geographic, and now she’s compiled two months of travels into a gorgeous time-lapse video. It gives a rare look at the onset of the fall season in one of the most remote places on Earth.

Don’t miss the end, where Brooks’ camera caught the ebb and flow of penguins going out to fish—a odd scene to watch in time-lapse.

Brooks’ cruise was intended to track what happens to all the phytoplankton that grow in the Ross Sea during the summer as the sun sets for the long polar winter.

This isn’t the only time-lapse that Brooks has put together, either. Here she shows what its like to do science from the ship as they cruise the Ross Sea.

H/T Deep Sea News via BoingBoing

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The brighter colored and thicker lines indicate a higher bio-invasion risk. Photo: Michael Gastner, University of Bristol

As the global shipping industry has grown over the past two decades, so has the number of invasive species being transported from through cargo ship ballast. Invasive marine species like barnacles and mollusks can also hitch a ride by clinging to ship hulls. And a new study published in the journal Ecology Letters mapped the routes of such invasives by examining the movements of cargo ships around the world, the BBC reports.

The model showed that Singapore, Honk Kong, New York, Long Beach, CA, and the Panama and Suez canals are the areas most at risk from invasive species. These warm and temperate waters are friendly to life forms, even if those organisms made the journey from half a world away. On the other hand, colder climates are less likely to be invaded by alien species—unless the ship arrived from a part of the world with similarly harsh temperatures. Very long journeys, too, are less likely to accidentally deliver invasive species since animals can only live for so long within the cut off environment of a ship’s ballast water.

Overall, the researchers say, the probability of any one animal becoming an invader is very small. But with so many more ships criss crossing the world’s oceans these days, that probability is only increasing, as San Francisco and the Chesapeake Bay, where dozens of invasive species have recently invaded, well know.

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Image: Nathan Rupert

If you had to pick the toughest animal in the sea, you’d probably go for the great white shark. Or maybe the giant squid. You probably wouldn’t pick the seahorse—a delicate, awkward little creature that clings to the seafloor. But the seahorse is exactly where armor designers are looking for new insights into building robots.

This video, from UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, explains:

Specifically, the engineers are looking at the tail plates on the little sea creature. Seahorses use their tails to hold on to objects like stalks and stems on the ocean floor. The plates that line their tails have to be both flexible enough to grasp and rigid enough to defend themselves from predators. Here’s the UCSD press release:

Most of the seahorse’s predators, including sea turtles, crabs and birds, capture the animals by crushing them. Engineers wanted to see if the plates in the tail act as an armor. Researchers took segments from seahorses’ tails and compressed them from different angles. They found that the tail could be compressed by nearly 50 percent of its original width before permanent damage occurred. That’s because the connective tissue between the tail’s bony plates and the tail muscles bore most of the load from the displacement. Even when the tail was compressed by as much as 60 percent, the seahorse’s spinal column was protected from permanent damage.

The researchers didn’t start with seahorses when they tried to think of armor to study. First, they looked at armadillos, alligators and other fish. But the flexibility of the seahorse tail is what was interesting to them. Here’s how that tail comes together:

Of course, this isn’t the first unlikely animal that robot and armor designers have looked at for insight. Abalone shells are in the running, too. In fact, the same lab is looking at abalone shells to figure out how they get so hard. LiveScience reports:

Abalones create a highly ordered brick-like tiled structure for their shells that is the toughest arrangement of tiles theoretically possible, says Marc A. Meyers of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The tiles are comprised of calcium carbonate, or chalk, sandwiches coated top and bottom with a thin protein.

They’re not limiting themselves to sea creatures, either. The lab also wants to see if toucan beaks—extremely strong but also very light—could be useful. The lab explains:

The beak’s interior is a highly organized matrix of stiff cancellous bone fibers that looks as if it was dipped into a soapy solution and dried, generating drum-like membranes that interconnect the fibers. The result is a solid “foam” of air-tight cells that gives the beak additional rigidity.

Which apparently looks a lot like a banana:

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A bone-munching worm eating a fish bone. Photo: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

In nature, nothing goes to waste. The relatively recently discovered so-called “bone-eating zombie sea worms” feast their way through thick whale bones and reduce the final remains of the once massive animals into dust. The BBC reported last year on what we knew about this mysterious, slightly terrifying genus of creature, called Osedax:

The unusual group’s name Osedax is Latin for “bone devourer”, and the worms have no mouth, gut or anus yet are still able to remove nutrients from bones.

Previous studies have revealed that symbiotic bacteria inside the worms digest the fats and oils extracted, but the question of how the worms physically bore into the bones had been a mystery.

Close analysis of the worms failed to find any abrasive structures the worms could use to mechanically “drill” into bone.

As it turns out, however, these worms don’t just eat whale bones. They eat fish bones, too. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, are narrowing in on just how the tiny worms pull off their bone-disintegrating feats on these various deceased species.

To conduct their study, the team used remotely operated vehicles to deposit tuna, wahoo and shark remains inside cages off the coast of California. Five months later, they retrieved the remains and found the worms living inside. The shark cartilage, however, had already been picked apart by other mystery animals.

The worms use what the researchers call a “bone-melting acid” that frees up the nutrients within whale and fish bones. The acid releases and absorbs collagen and lipids within the bones. The researchers continue:

Because they lack mouths, bone worms must use an alternative method of consuming nutrients from whale bones. Bacteria that live symbiotically within the worms are involved in this process, however, the exact mechanism is not yet fully understood. Some evidence suggests that the symbiotic bacteria metabolize bone-derived collagen into other diverse organic compounds, and that the worms subsequently digest the bacteria for their own nutrition.

The worms mostly turn up in whale bones, but this study confirms that they sometimes occur in fish bones, too. This finding makes researchers suspect that the genus might have evolved millions of years ago, before marine mammals existed. So far, 17 species of the strange worms have been found in oceans around the world.

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Image: Richard Herrmann

California authorities are trying to crack down on smugglers shipping fish bladders across the border. That’s right, fish bladders are a thing that people smuggle.

In fact, they’re worth a ton of money. One bladder from the Totoaba macdonaldi fish can garner $5,000 in the United States and over $10,000 in Asia. The bladders are mainly used in Chinese food, like soups. Often the fish are simply stripped of their bladders and left on the beach, meat and all, since the traders don’t care about the meat, and being caught with it would be a liability.

Now, we’re not talking about the same kind of bladder that a human has. The prized organ on the totoaba isn’t full of urine. It’s the fish’s swim bladder, an organ that fills with gas to change the buoyancy of the fish, allowing it to ascend and descend in the water.

From the outside, the Totoaba macdonaldi isn’t a particularly striking fish. They’re big, weighing up to 220 pounds and getting up to 6.5 feet long. The species is endangered throughout its range, which spans the California coast, says NOAA, mostly because of fishing for this prized bladder. And the Chinese species of the same fish was eaten to extinction, which is why suppliers are turning to the U.S. population.

Scientific American reports that trade in U.S. totoaba bladders is heating up:

In the latest case that led to criminal charges, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer inspecting a car at the Calexico-Mexicali port of entry, about 130 miles east of San Diego, found 27 totoaba bladders hidden under floor mats in the back seat of a car, U.S. prosecutors said in a statement.

The Washington Post chronicles several other cases:

Jason Xie, 49, of Sacramento was accused of taking delivery of 169 bladders on March 30 in a hotel parking lot in Calexico, about 120 miles east of San Diego. Xie told investigators he was paid $1,500 to $1,800 for each of 100 bladders in February.

Anthony Sanchez Bueno, 34, of Imperial was charged with the same crime after authorities said he drove the 169 bladders across the downtown Calexico border crossing in three coolers. He told investigators he was to be paid $700.

Song Zhen, 73, was accused of storing 214 dried totoaba bladders in his Calexico home.

“These were rooms that didn’t have furnishings,” U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said. “In every room, fish bladders were dried out over cardboard and papers.”

The bladders found in Zhen’s house could be worth over $3.6 million on the black market.

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Soviet Russia’s Dneprostroy dam in the Ukraine is really, really big. A dam across the Pacific Ocean, though, would have been much, much bigger. Photo circa 1941: Smithsonian Science Service

The Cold War was a strange time. Fresh off the Manhattan Project and steeped in the race for space, Big Science—or rather, Big Engineering—was in full swing, and Derek Mead is doing an excellent job of documenting, for Motherboard, the weird results. With nothing to do with their stockpiled nukes, for instance, America turned to Project Plowshare, a plan to use nuclear explosions to dig tunnels and dredge ports and do anything else you can think of where making a really big hole would come in handy. And on the other side of the Pacific, Mead writes, the Soviets had their own wacky scheme—a plan so big, so expensive and so replete with likely devastating consequences for the entire planet that it makes it all the more awesome to hear that people were taking the plan quite seriously.

The Russians, says Mead, wanted to melt the Arctic.

You might laugh, but while Soviet Russia was blessed with the largest land mass of any nation on Earth, much of it resource rich, putting that land to use was stunningly difficult.

…Russia was already spending an enormous amount of money combating the ice. Exploiting the vast petroleum reserves of the Arctic and Siberia was crucial to the growth of the Soviet economy, but every well pitted far-flung men against frozen earth and wind.

So, to exploit their trove of resources and beat the Americans, Russia needed Siberia to thaw. And their plan to do so was completely and absolutely ridiculous. The Soviets wanted to build a dam. A really, really, really big dam. A dam from Russia to Alaska, choking off the Pacific Ocean’s access to the Arctic Ocean. They thought that by doing so they could redirect the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean (which brings warm water from Florida up to Europe) to flow into the northern reaches, bringing warm salty water that would nullify the Arctic’s chill.

The plan isn’t necessarily ridiculous from a scientific standpoint. Changing the ocean currents would certainly have consequences. Indeed, 50 million years ago, when Antarctica was still connected to Australia with a long land bridge and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current didn’t exist, Antarctica had palm trees. So consequences, yes. Controlled consequences, probably not. Unintended consequences that could devastate the rest of the world? Certainly.

From pretty much every perspective other than “this might potentially work,” the Russian’s plan was crazy. Which makes it all the more suprising that America were almost on-board.

Borisov dreamed of enlisting the US, Canada, Japan, and Northern Europe in the plan, as all would theoretically benefit from a warmer climate. Surprisingly, the US was intrigued by the idea. In fact, in a response to a series of questions sent in 1960 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, Senator Kennedy noted, as part of a larger point about the value of innovation in fostering cooperation, that the Siberia-Alaska dam was “certainly worth exploring.”

Big Science of today is big, but it is also certainly much more careful. Mead’s story explores a time when engineering dreams quite nearly ran ahead of engineering caution.

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Baby sea turtles are an impressive example of nature’s engineering prowess. (Also, they are adorable.) The beaches on which they are born are plagued with predators looking to snatch up a quick turtle snack, and when the tiny turtles scramble out of their underground nests, their ability to hustle across the sand to the relative safety of the ocean determines if they live or die.

But anyone who has ever tried jogging through sand knows that moving on the shifting ground can be challenging. To make their way, sea turtles evolved a flexible flipper wrist that allows them to skim along without displacing too much sand. Not all of the turtles are expert crawlers, however. Some get stuck in ruts or tracks made by turtles before them.

Inspired by this ability and curious about why some turtles perform better than others, researchers from Georgia Tech and Northwestern University have built the FlipperBot, a bio-inspired robot that can navigate through granular surfaces like sand. ScienceNOW details the robot:

Based on footage of hatchlings collected on the Georgia coast, FBot reveals how the creatures exert a force that will propel them forward, without simply causing their limbs to sink into the sand. The flexible “wrist” of a turtle helps reduce such slipping, and prevents the creature from winding up with a snootful of sand.

Here, you can see the robot in action:

The researchers hope the robot may lend hints about beach restoration and conservation efforts. Discover details this idea from physicist Paul Umbanhowar:

Umbanhowar said understanding beach surfaces and how turtles move is important because many beaches in the United States are often subject to beach nourishment programs, where sand is dredged and dumped to prevent erosion.

“If you are restoring a beach, it might be the wrong kind of sand or deposited in a way that is unnatural,” Umbanhoward said. “In order for this turtle to advance, it has to generate these kind of thrust forces and it may be unable to get their flippers into it. We could say something about that given our models.”

Plus, the robot help explain how our distant ancestors managed to crawl out of the ocean and onto the land. The researchers hope to expand upon the FlipperBot to build a new robot that resembles our distant ancestor, the fish-amphibian hybrid Ichthyostega, ScienceNow reports.

“To understand the mechanics of how the first terrestrial animals moved, you have to understand how their flipper-like limbs interacted with complex, yielding substrates like mud flats,” the researchers said in a statement. “We don’t have solid results on the evolutionary questions yet, but this certainly points to a way that we could address these issues.”

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If there are things in this world we can all agree are bad, hangnails, world hunger and oil spills might be a few of them. But invasive species are up there, too. Now consider the lionfish—the beautiful, poisonous and ravenous fish that is making its invasive way across the Atlantic ocean like a slow-crawling, devastating oil spill.

The comparison is apt in a few ways, says NPR:

They reproduce every few days and eat anything that fits into their mouths. And nothing eats them because they’re covered with venomous spines.

Since it was first sighted in 1985, the lionfish has expanded its turf from Florida, all the way up to New York City and down to Venezuela, some 10,000 miles away from its native habitat in the South Pacific Ocean.

There are tons of myths about how the lionfish “spill” started. Some say that Hurricane Andrew destroyed a collector’s tanks, releasing the spiny demons into the ocean. Others claim that they were released maliciously. More likely, they came in ballast water on ships, or escaped from an aquarium shipment. But in reality, nobody knows.

Researchers who study lionfish genetics say that the current invaders are all very similar, genetically, which indicate that the current population came from just a few rogue individuals. One study puts the number at about eight original females. Others say it only requires three. Smithsonian reported on the invasion in 2009:

But soon those lionfish began to breed a dynasty. They laid hundreds of gelatinous eggs that released microscopic lionfish larvae. The larvae drifted on the current. They grew into adults, capable of reproducing every 55 days and during all seasons of the year. The fish, unknown in the Americas 30 years ago, settled on reefs, wrecks and ledges. And that’s when scientists, divers and fishermen began to notice.

Everywhere the lionfish arrives, it begins to slowly nibble away at the local flora and fauna. And since nothing eats it, it creeps along, much like an oil spill, until some sort of external force comes in to clean up. For oil spills, we have all sorts of ways to scoop and sponge and remove the offending sticky substance. But for lionfish, there’s really just one option: kill them. Kill them in large numbers, preferably. To encourage people to do so, several places have come up with recipes for cooking and eating the colorful, poisonous critters.

“The flesh is actually very light and delicate,” REEF’s Lad Adkins told NPR. “It’s not strong flavored. So you can season it many different ways. It’s a great eating fish.”

So, like oil spills, lionfish are creep into an area, kill everything and stick around until we humans decide to do something about it. The only difference is you can’t make tasty tacos out of oil spills.

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If all goes to plan, a new deal inked by two of the world’s biggest companies could give rise to a sustainability advocate’s paradise: a resort near the South China Sea that gets all of its power from the heat of the water nearby through a new type of renewable energy.

The deal, says a news release issued by Lockheed Martin, will see the defense giant partner with the Reignwood Group—a massive company that does everything from selling Red Bull in China to operate hotels and golf courses, managing properties and operating a private aircraft service—to develop the first commercial plant for a new type of renewable energy generation system known as ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC).

Ocean thermal energy conversion draws on the natural temperature gradient that forms in tropical oceans worldwide. The surface of the ocean, heated by the Sun, is much warmer than the water deeper down. OTEC plants use the warm surface water to boil a liquid with a really low boiling point in a low-pressure container to form steam. This steam then drives a turbine, generating electricity. Colder water from deeper down is pulled up in a pipe, and by having this cold water pass by the pipe containing the steam, the steam is condensed back into a liquid. The liquid flows around, is heated by the warm surface water, and turns into steam once more—on and on, generating electricity from the temperature gradient in the ocean.

The idea for ocean thermal energy conversaion has been around for a really, really long time. “The concept of deriving energy from ocean thermal gradients was a French idea, suggested in 1881 by Jacques d’Arsonval, and French engineers have been active in developing the requisite technology,” says Marine Energy Times.

According to energy reporter Tyler Hamilton, famed engineer Nikola Tesla even tried his hands at making it work.

While Lockheed has been working on this for four decades, one of the first in-depth discussions of the concept came from Nikola Tesla, who at the age of 75 outlined how such a plant might be built in the December 1931 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics journal. Tesla spent considerable time devising a way to improve the efficiencies of such a power plant, but he determined that it was too great an engineering challenge at the time. “I have studied this plan of power production from all angles and have devised apparatus for bringing down all losses to what I might call the irreducible minimum and still I find the performance too small to enable successful competition with the present methods,” he wrote, though still expressing hope that new methods would eventually make it possible to economically tap the thermal energy in oceans.

So the idea is old, but recent technological developments have driven ocean thermal energy conversion into the realm of possibility. Interestingly, some of the most troubling issues facing OTEC were solved by the oil industry, says the Marine Energy Times:

Ocean thermal is the only remaining vast, untapped source of renewable energy, and is now ripe for commercialization.  The near market-readiness of this technology is largely attributable to the remarkable ocean-engineering innovations and successful experience of the offshore oil industry during the past thirty years in developing, investing in, and  introducing mammoth floating platforms.  That achievement has inadvertently satisfied ocean thermal’s key operational requirement, for a large, stable, reliable ocean platform capable of operating in storms, hurricanes and typhoons.

Consequently, adaptations of those offshore-ocean-platform designs can be spun-off  to supply the proven ocean-engineering framework on which to mount the specialized ocean thermal plant and plantship heat exchangers, turbomachinery, cold water pipe (CWP) system, and other components and subsystems.Those offshore engineering achievements have greatly reduced the real and perceived risks of investing in ocean thermal plants.

Lockheed Martin has been working on the technology behind OTEC, too, and the deal with the Reignwood Group will see them build a test plant. If they manage to pull it off, the work could open the door to increased investment in this new form of renewable energy.

According to Green Tech Media, there are some potential environmental issues to look out for: if the cold water brought up from depth is pumped out into the surface waters, you could trigger a huge algae bloom that is really bad for the local ecosystem. But, if you release the cold water further down, around 70 meters depth, you should be able to avoid this dilemma. Having a small-scale test plant will give researchers a way to learn about any other unforeseen issues before moves are made to implement this new type of renewable energy on a larger scale.

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Nothing like a coral reef in need of repair, and a robot ready to get to work, to get people to pull out their wallets. A team of Scottish scientists who submitted their reef-repairing robot to Kickstarter raised $3,000 in less than a week with the help of 80 backers, the BBC reports. (Since that report, that total has risen to 245 backers, kicking in $8,000.) The campaign has a ways to go yet, however. The team hopes to raise a total of $107,000 before the Kickstarter deadline in June.

The coral-bots, as the team is calling them, work by transplanting damaged coral with pieces of healthy coral, much like a gardener pruning and sowing a plot of flowers. Coral-bots have already succeeded in sea tests, but the researchers still need to hone the machines’ ability to detect healthy coral. The team also needs to design and create robot arms for plucking and putting down appropriate bits of coral. The Kickstarter campaign will directly fund these efforts, and, upon success, the team plans to conduct a live demonstration in a public aquarium. If successful, they would then move on to the first on-the-ground mission in Belize.

The Scottish team aren’t the only ones turning to crowdfunding to support their work in science. Recently, crowds have help raise funds for projects ranging from space exploration to studying rare lizards to reinstating science education in third-grade classrooms.

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Ocean-loving director James Cameron is supporting future deep sea exploration by donating the $10 million submersible that he used to venture into the sea’s deepest spot last year. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will inherit the vehicle, and according to the New York Times, the undersea craft will help in designing more advanced vehicles and technologies.

Cameron timed the announcement to coincide with the anniversary of his seven-mile solo dive last year into the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the Challenger Deep. Unfortunately, Cameron didn’t find much. As PCMag reported last year, Cameron said the landscape was an almost “completely featureless … almost gelatinous flat plain.” But Cameron’s submersible—the only one currently capable of carrying a person seven miles deep—was a notable proof of concept.

According to the Times, Woods Hole should receive the vehicle sometime in June.

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Europeans, Brits and North Americans snowed in this spring can thank quickly melting Arctic sea ice for the tumultuous weather, climate scientists say. As the Guardian writes, last autumn sea ice levels on the North Pole fell to all-time lows. As the Artic ice loss escalates, it changes the ocean’s temperature  which in turn shifts the jet stream that governs much of the northern hemisphere’s weather patterns.

National Geographic further explains:

It’s a tough thing to understand. Less ice at the top of the world, often considered the planet’s thermostat, might normally signal warmer global temperatures, not colder ones.

But the way weather works isn’t so simple. Without a substantial ice cover, Arctic wind is less constrained. The jet stream—the belt of cool air that regulates weather around most of the Northern Hemisphere—then dips farther and farther south, bringing cold air from the Arctic closer to the Equator.

The result is much colder weather dipping into the spring much longer, and more forcefully, than normal.

According to the Guardian, scientists warned in September 2012 that Europe and North America should brace for an extra icy winter, thanks to increase sea ice melt. This problem may also explain last year’s unusually warm winter. The Guardian elaborates:

The hypothesis that wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere would explain both the extremes of heat and cold, say the scientists.

National Geographic warns that seemingly freak weather patterns are likely only to become more and more of the norm in the future.

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Map of Florida, circa 1823. Photo: Library of Congress

Nearly 20 years before the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León set foot on the eastern coast of Florida, he embarked on a legendary journey to the New World with an experienced and decorated explorer by the name of Christopher Columbus.

Born the “illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman,” says Sam Turner, Director of Archaeology at the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum, Juan Ponce de León grew up during a time of war. As a child, “possibly between the ages of 8 and 10,” says Turner, “Ponce de Leon became the page of a Spanish knight.” At 18, Juan Ponce went to war, helping in “the historic capture of the Moorish Kingdom.”

At 19, Juan Ponce de León, future discoverer of Florida, set sail with Christopher Columbus on a 1493 journey to the New World. “This was Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the New World and it resulted in the founding of La Isabella on the Island of Española discovered the previous year. Consequently, Ponce witnessed and participated in the founding of Spanish civilization in the New World.”

Over time, Juan Ponce’s role in the Spanish fleet grew. Based out of Española, he went on to command a company of soldiers, founded cities and went on a quest for gold in nearby Peurto Rico, then known as San Juan Bautista.

“All was going well until the arrival of Diego Columbus, the new governor of the Indies in August 1509. Diego Columbus was the eldest son and heir of Christopher Columbus. Diego was incensed that King Ferdinand had essentially violated the contract that was drawn up between Christopher Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs at Santa Fe previous to his father’s voyage in 1492,” says Turner, with Columbus displeased at Juan Ponce’s growing political clout within the region.

Forced out by Christopher Columbus’ heirs, Juan Ponce de León was granted by the Spanish king “a license to explore and discover the lands reputed to lie to the north and in particular the Island of Bimini.” Turner:

Always competitive and jealous of the King’s efforts on Juan Ponce’s behalf, the Columbus faction made a counter proposal for the same voyage of exploration and discovery. They proposed that Bartolomé Columbus, Diego’s uncle and one of Christopher Columbus’ younger brothers, undertake the voyage on terms more financially favorable to the King. However, preferring to support Juan Ponce rather than facilitate the agenda of his problematic governor of the New World, the King declined the offer.

And so, on March 27, 1513, the first sighting of Florida by Juan Ponce and his fleet. A continued northward voyage and a bout of bad weather later, Juan Ponce and his crew went ashore on April 3 somewhere north of present-day St. Augustine.

Though Juan Ponce was the first to “officially” discover Florida—the first with approval by the Spanish king for such a quest—says Turner, he was not, of course, the first to actually do so. Slave runners had been traveling around the Bahamas for years.

During the course of one of these slaving voyages by a mariner named Diego de Miruelo, a large land to the north had been accidentally discovered when his vessel was driven north in a storm. There he traded with those he encounters but took no captives. Shortly thereafter, slavers went directly to this new land in search of slaves. Thus the initial discovery in the north became common knowledge that ultimately led to Juan Ponce’s licensed voyage of discovery in 1513.

H/T to Slate‘s Matthew J. X. Malady for the story suggestion

More from Smithsonian.com:

In Search of Florida’s Little Europe
In Search of St. Augustine