Sea Education Association Research Articles

CAREER PROFILES • OPTIONS AND INSIGHTS: Scott Loranger

I received a Bachelor of Science in biological sciences with a focus on ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University in 2009. I also spent a semester with SEA Education Association out of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and that experience solidified my interest in oceanography. As I delved deeper into marine science, I became interested in ecological resilience and response to change. Following my undergraduate education, I worked with a group at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science – Chesapeake Biological Labora­tory studying technology to treat ballast water to deter transport of invasive species, and technology to measure oil concentrations in the ocean to respond to oil spills. This was my first foray into applied science and emerging technologies. My interest in technology and oil spill response led me to the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, where I obtained a PhD in oceanography, graduating in 2019. At UNH, I studied the use of broadband acoustic echo sounders to map, characterize, and quantify oil spills. For my thesis, I studied the 2004 Taylor Energy oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the longest-running oil spill in US history.

Relationship between floating marine debris accumulation and coastal fronts in the Northeast coast of the USA

Floating marine debris (FMD) is one of the world's most concerning issues due to its potential impact on biodiversity, communities, and ecosystem services. FMD transport and concentrations are driven by fronts, generated by oceanographic processes, and the accumulation of FMD has been reported in gyres, eddies, tidal fronts, salinity fronts, and coastal fronts. This study explores the relationship between fronts and FMD accumulation in the Gulf of Maine (GoM) and the surrounding coastal areas (USA). Frontal edge detection algorithms were applied to sea surface temperature (SST) imagery from the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) between 2002 and 2012. Frontal location is spatially correlated with FMD concentrations collected by the Sea Education Association. Higher concentrations of FMD are associated with frontal frequencies (FF) of 5–10 %. FMD is trapped between fronts and the coastline in accumulation zones. These results highlight the need to consider coastal FMD hotspots, given these are areas of high biodiversity value.

US called a leading contributor to ocean plastics

The US is the third-largest contributor to plastic pollution in coastal environments, according to a new paper in Science Advances (2020, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd0288 ). The paper builds on work published in 2015 in Science by Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia estimating that 8 million metric tons (t) of plastic waste ends up in the ocean every year because of bad waste management practices. The 2015 paper pointed to China and Southeast Asian nations like Thailand and Malaysia as leading sources of the waste. It ranked the US 20th. The new study, led by Kara Lavender Law, professor of oceanography at the Sea Education Association, and coauthored by Jambeck, takes into account US exports of waste plastic, ostensibly for recycling, to countries with leaky waste management systems. It estimates, based on 2016 data, that up to 1 million t of waste plastics might have ended up in the ocean

Exploring the human-nature dynamics of Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai, Earth's newest landmass

This paper examines the human-nature dynamics of volcanic eruptions through a multidisciplinary exploration of the recently-formed Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha‘apai (HTHH) landmass in the Kingdom of Tonga. HTHH was formed in early 2015 in the Ha‘apai island group in southwestern Tonga. This landmass has persisted longer than expected, providing a rare opportunity to examine pathways of erosion and biological colonization, and offering a glimpse into the cultural dynamics of a continuously changing Polynesian seascape. In 2018 and 2019, a collaborative partnership between the Kingdom of Tonga, Sea Education Association (SEA), and the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) ran expeditions to HTHH to calibrate satellite observations via field, ship, and drone-based measurements. In accessing HTHH via SEA's sailing school vessel (SSV) the Robert C. Seamans, a team of scientists and students combined fieldwork in anthropology, oceanography, and physical volcanology to study micro- and macro-scale dynamics of this classical surtseyan eruption site. In this pathfinding paper, we discuss the value of involving students in the process of real-time scientific discovery with on-the-fly adaptive hypothesis testing; this collaborative project provided mutual benefit to initiatives in science and education by offering robust data collection, while expanding environmental and cultural literacy. Additionally, we integrate collaborative research on HTHH with ethnographic research to understand how this ever changing “sea of islands” or intimately interconnected island spaces impact social-cultural relations within Oceania. We emphasize the importance of such multidisciplinary research in understanding the complexity of human-nature relations in a rapidly changing world.

Powerful learning at SEA

The Sea Education Association (SEA) has an international reputation for creating powerful learning experiences in semester-long programs that involve conducting scientific research while sailing tall ships. To what extent, how and why these experiences occur was studied through interviews, extant data analysis, and participant observation of the SEA Semester program Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Themes consistent with past studies of powerful learning emerged, for example, authenticity, openness, relationships with others, and intense engagement, while outcomes continued to be highly individual. Relationships among these themes point toward complexity, design, and systemic design and suggest seeds of a theory of powerful learning systems.

The Equatorial Undercurrent and TAO Sampling Bias from a Decade at SEA

Abstract The NOAA Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) moored array has, for three decades, been a valuable resource for monitoring and forecasting El Niño–Southern Oscillation and understanding physical oceanographic as well as coupled processes in the tropical Pacific influencing global climate. Acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) measurements by TAO moorings provide benchmarks for evaluating numerical simulations of subsurface circulation including the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC). Meanwhile, the Sea Education Association (SEA) has been collecting data during repeat cruises to the central equatorial Pacific Ocean (160°–126°W) throughout the past decade that provide useful cross validation and quantitative insight into the potential for stationary observing platforms such as TAO to incur sampling biases related to the strength of the EUC. This paper describes some essential sampling characteristics of the SEA dataset, compares SEA and TAO velocity measurements in the vicinity of the EUC, shares new insight into EUC characteristics and behavior only observable in repeat cross-equatorial sections, and estimates the sampling bias incurred by equatorial TAO moorings in their estimates of the velocity and transport of the EUC. The SEA high-resolution ADCP dataset compares well with concurrent TAO measurements (RMSE = 0.05 m s−1; R2 = 0.98), suggests that the EUC core meanders sinusoidally about the equator between ±0.4° latitude, and reveals a mean sampling bias of equatorial measurements (e.g., TAO) of the EUC’s zonal velocity of −0.14 ± 0.03 m s−1 as well as a ~10% underestimation of EUC volume transport. A bias-corrected monthly record and climatology of EUC strength at 140°W for 1990–2010 is presented.

Seasonal and decadal changes in distribution patterns of Halobates (Hemiptera: Gerridae) populations in the eastern tropical Pacific

Five species of the marine insect Halobates share similar ecology but have distinct biogeographic ranges in the eastern tropical Pacific, a region from approximately 75°W–160°W and 10°S–35°N. Between 2001 and 2010, the Sea Education Association collected Halobates from 682 neuston tows (surface net 1 m × 0.5 m, 335-μm mesh) during fifteen cruises between San Diego, USA, Mexico and Tahiti. Total Halobates spp. densities varied substantially from year to year, but our data do not show a sustained change from a data set collected 40 years earlier from 1967 to 1968 (Cheng and Shulenberger in Fish Bull 78(3):579–591, 1980). Halobates are sensitive to sea surface temperature and we observed significant differences in species distributions over time, but these were not due to differences in water temperature or climate change. Our analyses show that the patterns observed are attributable to substantial but previously undescribed seasonal shifts that occur each year in the ranges for both Halobates sobrinus and Halobates micans. There is substantial overlap in ranges during seasonal shifts, but very little co-occurrence of H. sobrinus and H. micans in individual net tows, suggesting biological mechanisms rather than physical factors are restricting distribution and co-occurrence of these two species.

The Design of A Brigantine Rigged Sailing School Research Vessel For The Sea Education Association (Woods Hole Massachusetts)

The Design of A Brigantine Rigged Sailing School Research Vessel For The Sea Education Association (Woods Hole Massachusetts)

The Design of A Brigantine Rigged Sailing School Research Vessel For The Sea Education Association (Woods Hole Massachusetts)

The Design of A Brigantine Rigged Sailing School Research Vessel For The Sea Education Association (Woods Hole Massachusetts)

Students at sea [on R/V Westward of Sea Education Association, Woods Hole] : Lowrance, Christie, 1985. Oceans, 18(2):10–15

Students at sea [on R/V Westward of Sea Education Association, Woods Hole] : Lowrance, Christie, 1985. Oceans, 18(2):10–15