Author Archives: Chris Jury

 Imagine a wave, a giant wave, rushing inland toward you. Imagine it keeps coming, and coming without any end in sight. You’re thinking of a tsunami. Now imagine the wave is more than 1000 ft high (300 m), enough to engulf the bottom 2/3 of the Empire State Building. This is a megatsunami. Speaking at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Dr. Gary McMurty (a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and co-instructor for a couple of geology courses I took as a grad student here UHM) reported his recent work showing that over the last 4 million years the Hawaiian Islands have experienced at least 15 megatsunamis. Unlike typical tsunamis, which are usually driven by earthquakes, Hawaiian megatsunamis are driven by catastrophic landslides as large sections of the volcanoes that build the islands cleave off and cavitate the ocean. Surprisingly, these landslides are… More:

 Check out this incredible snow sculpture by Fran Volz. You can see more of his work here.… More:

The Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology (where I perform much of my research as a graduate student) is located on Coconut Island–or Moku o Loe, in the Hawaiian–in Kāne’ohe Bay on the island of O’ahu, HI. The island is surrounded by a wonderful fringing reef with a well developed reef flat. A major feature of the oceans is the tidal cycle. The tides are driven primarily by the gravity of the moon, and secondarily by the gravity of the sun. When the gravity of the moon and the sun pull on the ocean at approximately a right angle to each other we get the so-called neap tides, which have the smallest tidal range (the difference between high tide and low tide) for the month. We get neap tides around during the first quarter and the third quarter of the lunar cycle (i.e., twice per month). When the gravity of the moon and sun pull… More:

A few weeks ago the Hawaiian Islands were hit with a series of major storms. These caused substantial flooding in many parts of the state. For example, Lihue on the island of Kauai set a new rainfall record on May 5th of 8.64 in., obliterating the old record of 1.14 in. and topping the all-time record of 6.7 in. Over the course of a few days most parts of the state received at least 3″ of rain with the rainest parts getting on the order of 12-36″ of rain. We also had crazy lightning and hail in a few locations. In fact, a hailstone collected from here in Kaneohe, where I live and where the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) is located, was measured at 4.25 in. across, setting a new record for the state. It was a crazy week, let me tell ya. For a few days, the inner portion of Kaneohe Bay (HIMB is located on Coconut Island in Kaneohe Bay, and the Bay is full of coral reefs) looked like a mud muddle. I happened to be working on the island… More:

 I’m a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and my dissertation work asks questions about how corals react to lower pH (associated with ocean acidification, OA) and higher temperature (associated with climate change). I’m one of several people here doing OA research and as a result I have access to fancy gadgets like the one pictured above. The device is an infrared CO2 analyzer which very accurately measures the concentration of CO2 in air pumped through it. We use it in conjunction with a variety of other fancy equipment (fancy = expensive…and nifty)  to produce air with precisely controlled concentrations of CO2, which we can then use to aerate aquaria to achieve desired levels of CO2. Very often in captivity we end up coping with low pH issues in our aquaria, almost always because of high CO2 concentrations in the air in our homes which comes from our own breathing, as well as other sources. This problem is most significant when our homes are closed up for summer air conditioning or winter heating and our CO2 analyzer recently reminded me how significant this issue can be. The average aquarist certainly can’t afford to buy a CO2 analyzer like this one (it runs about $2,450 whereas the entire CO2 control system cost close to $50,000) but I hope my experience below is at least food for thought. Our system of aquaria for OA work is in a room roughly 30×20 ft with about 15 ft ceilings. It is air conditioned and modestly venilated. Recently I was curious what the CO2 concentration is in the room air so when I arrived at the lab I switched the analyzer on, let it warm up, and used an aquarium pump to deliver room air to the analyzer. Up came the reading: 395 ppm. That’s right about what normal, outdoor air is nowadays so I was satisfied, but I left the air pump and CO2 analyzer going as I began other work in that room. A few minutes later I looked and saw that the analyzer now read 410 ppm. “That’s strange,” I thought, “perhaps the analyzer just wasn’t warmed up.” A short while later: 455 ppm. Hmmm. As I sat and worked in that room, the CO2 concentration in the air climbed higher and higher until it finally reached a plateau after a few hours of my working (and breathing) in the room: 1170 ppm–about three times the concentration of outdoor air!… More: