A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region’s future.

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Marine biologist and blogger "WhySharksMatter" has created a list of four things everyone needs to know about sharks. Full of  thought-provoking facts and cool pictures of sharks, this post will be interesting to the ocean lover in all of us.

“Human beings are better off with sharks than we are without sharks, and we are in danger of losing them forever… but you can help!”

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whysharksmatter.

Scientists discovered a particularly interesting "ambush feeding" technique dubbed the Lucky Luke effect:

“So far, we know of four ways in which zooplankters tackle the engineering feat of finding food in water which appears as thick as syrup. Our contribution has been to describe the mechanism at work for the last of these: How some copepods perform spectacularly precise and rapid surprise attacks on their single-cell prey after first having registered the prey by means of hydrodynamic signals,” explains Professor Thomas Kiørboe, DTU Aqua.

The solution for the ambush-feeding copepods builds on what Thomas Kiørboe calls the Lucky Luke effect:

“Our recordings show that the sub-mm copepods accelerate to a speed of 100 mm per second in a few milliseconds, while at the same time rotating perhaps 180 degrees. Like Lucky Luke who is faster than his shadow, the copepods jump forward so rapidly and with such precision that they, so to speak, shake the viscous boundary layer off, in that way getting close enough to their prey to capture it with their feeding limbs.”

The viscous boundary layer is the layer of water which the copepods pull with them when moving their bodies through the syrupy water. The larger the animals are and the faster they swim, the thinner it seems.

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At approximately four hours into their descent–several thousand feet above the sea floor–a sharp clang sounded through the pressure sphere and the vehicle shuddered violently. Once their wincing subsided, the men did what they could to inspect the craft and its condition. It seemed that the water pressure at this never-before-encountered depth–six tons per square inch–had cracked the outer pane of the lucite window. For the moment the vehicle itself remained watertight, but the damage was worrisome. The Trieste was outfitted with a few safety systems; for instance, the ballast doors were held closed by electromagnets, so in the event of electrical failure the doors would fall open and drop the ballast, causing the vehicle to rise to the surface. But such systems would be of no help to the men inside if the 1,000 atmospheres of pressure crushed their delicate passenger compartment. Moreover, no other vehicle in existence was capable of reaching such depths, which meant that if her float tank became compromised there was no chance of rescue. Nevertheless, the stalwart scientists opted to press on.

It was also the last time anyone dived that deep. Like the space race, once it had been done, no one saw the use in continuing to pay for such risky adventures. Read the entire story at Damn Interesting. Link

So how did we get here anyway? Call it evolution, call it luck, but really the best and brightest creatures above and below the waves found powerful allies. In some cases these are completely unexpected – predator and prey, friend and foe – but the ones that stuck it out and stayed friends through the toughest of times managed to make it to today’s oceans and seas.

Evolution alone is an amazing thing – but species that evolve together can be all the more spectacular, protecting, feeding and cleaning one another in incredible ways. Sharks pair with fish, fish with shrimp and shrimp with sea cucumbers and much much more. From boxing crabs that wield poisonous anemones as weapons to shrimp that scour the mouths of electric eels, here are seven of the most radical symbiotic relationships from the shallowest to the deepest waters of our world.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.

They told rescuers they were forced to crew a 10m-long Thai fishing boat that broke up about 200 nautical miles north of Australia, sources told The Courier-Mail.

As the wooden boat splintered into the ocean, the crew sent out distress signals but were ignored, the men told authorities.

The two survivors climbed into the icebox as other crew searched desperately for something to grab from the wreck.

They saw a Thai man floating past them in the ocean but were unable to help, they said.

It is understood the men managed to survive by drinking rain water that gathered at the bottom of the box and by eating pieces of fish that were also in the container.

Link -Thanks, Vit Peyr!

(image credit: Channel 7)

Apparently it’s called a frogfish, and while it looks sort of cute from afar, this thing is ugly… and fascinating. DarkRoastedBlend has a whole gallery of different types of frogfish, from the fluffy to the warty.

Link via DarkRoastedBlend