oceanlove

  Antarctic sea-ice at 'mind-blowing' low alarms experts By Georgina Rannard, Becky Dale and Erwan Rivault BBC News Climate & Science and Data Journalism Team   The sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is well below any previous recorded winter level, satellite data shows, a worrying new benchmark for a region that once seemed resistant to global warming.   "It's so far outside anything we've seen, it's almost mind-blowing," says Walter Meier, who monitors sea-ice with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.   An unstable Antarctica could have far-reaching consequences, polar experts warn.   Antarctica's huge ice expanse regulates the planet's temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun's energy back into the atmosphere and also cools the water beneath and near it.   Without its ice cooling the planet, Antarctica could transform from Earth's refrigerator to a radiator, experts say.   The ice that floats on the An...

  By Sundip R. Desai, Lockheed Martin Associate Fellow and Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Engineer at Lockheed Martin Space     The use of data-driven modeling to represent complex systems has become prevalent due to the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which we primarily attribute to the advancements in hardware acceleration, better end-to-end software pipelining, and open-sourced architectures. With these advancements in mind, engineers and scientists can now take massive amounts of data collected from a physical device and create a somewhat usable digital twin in a day. We say “somewhat” because the model is not complete, just a mere reflection of the data organizations provided. Data-driven modeling, or ‘surrogate’ modeling, only captures the structural artifacts of the data that organizations present. The model does not contain innate knowledge, reasoning capability, or perception of the world.     A “World Model” ...

A red tide near a Del Mar mooring was spotted quickly moving landward earlier this week. 👀  🔺 What exactly does this mean? The ruddy-looking waters are a result of the phytoplankton 𝘓𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘭𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘺𝘦𝘥𝘳𝘢 forming dense blooms, and when this is happening, you can see pigments that give off a reddish color. Researchers at Scripps Oceanography and Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System said this also means that there's a chance for bioluminescence in the evening! 🌊  📸: Quinn Montgomery @sccoos_org