Issue 22 • OCT. 2014

Grants Awards :Malin Pinsky. Genetic monitoring to im-prove fish stock assessments. NJ Sea Grant $68,875

David Bushek. REU: Development of a theoretical basis for modeling disease processes in marine ivertebrates. $6,454

Oscar Schofield. Palmer Antarctic LTER:Land-shelf-ocean connectivity, ecosystems resilience and transformation. Columbia University $106,750

Scott Glenn. An advanced atmospheric/ocean assessment program- Analytical modeling and predictions. SNJ-BPU $450,789

Enrique Curchister. Collaborative research:EaSM-3 regional and decadal predictions of coupled climate-human systems. NSF $800,000

Scott Glenn. OOI Education and public engagement implementing organization/OOI EPE Operations and Maintenance. COL $2,857,500

John Kerfoot. Design and Development of Slocum Glider Fleet Mission Control Piloting Application. Teledyne Technolo-gies $118,470

Scott Glenn. OOI Education and Public Engagement Implementing Organization/OOI EPE- Oper. & Maintenance Est Mod 21. $563,251

Scott Glenn. Integrated Rapid - Response Observations and Ocean. $410,587

Karl Nordstrom. Project NY ERFO FIIS 2013-1(5), 2014 Channel and Marina Dredging/Restoration of Bayside Sediment. US Dept. Trans. $34,729

Grace Saba. Physiological ecology and habitat suitability combining experiments and surveys to inform stock. WHOI $37,683

Rutgers Oceanography

Rutgers Honored By Al Giddings Generous Gift. Rich Lutz secured for Rutgers this past summer a major donation from Al Giddings of his $10 million vid-eo library which is arguably the finest collection of underwater footage in the world. The photographic and film footage will be managed jointly between Marine Scienc-es and Rutgers Library services. This is an extreme honor. Al Giddings has been an innovator and leader. He has lead the world in the design of innovative camera, lighting and optical systems in film and video formats, from IMAX to high definition.Giddings is known for his underwater directing and shooting of such high-ly-acclaimed films as The Deep, the James Bond classics For Your eyes Only & Never say Never Again, and The Abyss, 20th Century Fox’s blockbust-er. Giddings served as co-producer/director of underwater photography on Jim Cameron’s 1997 Oscar-winning spectacular, Titanic. His IMAX produc-tion, Whales, is garnering national attention and setting attendance records.Giddings’ work in television has earned him several emmys, including work on ANDReA DORIA; the 1996 co-production of Galapagos: Beyond Darwin, for the Discovery Channel; and Blue Whale: Largest Animal On earth for the Amer-ican Broadcasting Company’s World of Discovery. Three television specials, Blue Whale, shark Chronicles and Mysteries Of The sea, each earned emmy Awards.Numerous music videos and television commercials have also won emmy Awards; gold medals at the New York Film Festival; the American Film Institute’s Best Video of the Year, and a Grierson Award. A deep heart felt thank you for Al Giddings’s generosity and trust.

Diving along coral in the Banda Sea. Rutgers has a growing presence in Indoensia.

CONGRATULATIONS TO AN AMAZING SET OF NEW GRADUATES FROM THE MARINE SCIENCES IN 2014. Arguably the most important commodity of our pro-gram is the graduate students. LETS CELEBRATE OUR GRADUATES WHO INCLUDE:

Nicole Waite completes her Masters thesis. successful Master’s thesis defense on the “The Role of sedimenta-ry sulfide in seagrass Decline in Barnegat Bay-Little egg Harbor, NJ.” upon graduation she joined the Antarctic field efforts and is currently the Rutgers team leader at Palmer station.

Kevin Crum successfully completed his Masters thesis. His work focused on the development of ecological models and understanding the way that marine organisms inter-act with their environment.

Travis Miles successfully finished his PhD thesis. His thesis

“surface and water-column response to extreme storms in the coastal ocean: observations on the Mid-Atlantic Bight” focused on how storms drive sediment resuspen-sion and transport on continental shelves.

Congratulations to Mansha Seth-Pasricha who success-fully defended her Ph.D. thesis. Her work focused on a detailed biochemical and physiological characterization of caspase activity in Haloarchaea.

Also we salute the graduate students who successfully completed their dissertation proposal defenses. We look forward to the great research that will come from their efforts. A toast to Ana Filipa Carvalho, Kaycee Coleman, Nicole Couto, and Christian Laber.

Please welcome Timonthy Shaw to our academic family. Hello everyone, I moved to work in the sea-level re-search lab with Professor Horton and his team this sum-mer following my PhD at the university of Liverpool, uK, reconstructing sea-level in the Adriatic sea. My new position follows a similar path where we are currently

Rutgers Oceanography

marine.rutgers.edu

working towards producing high resolution long-term sea-level records from sites in the Chesapeake Bay re-gion using microfossils contained within salt-marsh sediment cores. The primary goal of this research is to assess the timing of modern era sea-level rise, validating the reconstructions against local tide-gauge stations, but also to extend the records as far back into the Holocene as the sediments allow.

Congratulations to Paul Falkowski’s completion of his new-est book. For almost four billion years, microbes had the primordial oceans all to themselves. The stewards of earth, these organisms transformed the chemistry of our planet to make it habitable for plants, animals, and us. Life’s engines takes readers deep into the microscopic world to explore how these marvelous creatures made life on Earth possible—and how human life today would cease to exist without them.

Paul Falkowski looks “under the hood” of microbes to find the engines of life, the actual working parts that do the biochemical heavy lifting for every living organism on earth. With insight and humor, he explains how these miniature engines are built—and how they have been ap-propriated by and assembled like Lego sets within every creature that walks, swims, or flies. Falkowski shows how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life, and how we and other animals are veritable conglomer-ations of microbes.

A vibrantly entertaining book about the microbes that support our very existence, Life’s engines will inspire wonder about these elegantly complex nanomachines that have driven life since its origin. It also issues a timely warning about the dangers of tinkering with that machinery to make it more “efficient” at meeting the ev-er-growing demands of humans in the coming century.

The 2014 international gliderpalooza effort completed. In 2013 Rutgers began a grass roots effort to collaborative-ly leverage the growing international glider community through coordinated field efforts termed “gliderpalooza”. In 2014 the gliderpalooza consisted of 18 partners from academic insitutions and federal agencies flying over 36 glider missions spanning from the Gulf of Mexico to Bermuda to st. Johns Canada.

New PublicationsVan De Plassche, O., Wright, A. J., Horton, B. J., Engelharrt, S. E., Kemp, A. C., Mallinson, D., Kopp, R. E. 2014. Estimating tectonic uplift of the Cape

Fear Arch (south-eastern United States) using reconstructions of Holocene relative sea level . Journal of Quanternary Science 29(8): 749-759. DOI: 10.1002/jqs.2746

Woodward, S. C., Rosenthal, Y., Miller, K. G., Wright, J. D., Chiu, B. K., Lawrence, K. T. 2014. Antarctic role in Northern Hemisphere glaciation . Sciencex-press.doi.org/10.1126/science.1255586

Xu, G., Jackson, D. R., Bemis, K. G., Rona, P. A. 2014. Time-series measurement of hydrothermal heat flux at the Grotto mound, Endeavour Segment, Juan de Fuca Ridge. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 404: 220-231. doi.org./10.1016/j.epsl.2014.07.040

Pasotti, F., Manini, E., Giovannelli, D., Wolfl, A., Monien, D., Verleyen, E., Braeckman, U., Abele, D., Vanreusel, A. 2014. Antarctic shallow water benthos in an area of recent rapid glacier retreat . Marine Ecology. doi: 10.1111/maec.12179

Narvaez, D. A., Munroe, D. M., Hofmann, E. E., Klinck, J. M., Powell, E. N., Mann, R., Curchitser, E. 2014. Long-term dynamics in Atlantic surfclam (Spisula solidissima) populations: The role of bottom water temperature . Journal of Marine Systems. doi.org/10.1016/j.jmarsys.2014.08.007

GET YOUR RU OCEAN SWAG!!!!Rutgers Oceanography tea-shirts have arrived for the winter. Proudly wear the Rutgers Oceanography tea-shirts with funds being raised to host science socials for the undergraduate and graduate students. Tea-shirts go for $15 and will make you look atheltic, smart, and dashing. Such a great deal for a great cause. Contact Sarah Kasule if interested (kasule@marine.rutgers.edu). To see the quality people your contribution would sup-port check out our featured graduate students at http://marine.rutgers.edu/main/Featured-Student/.

Please help us enable Rutgers oceanogra-phy to support the next generation!

Rutgers oceanography needs your support to meet the environmental and educational challenges facing the world today. Your support is critical to enabling high risk and high reward research, developing students to be the leaders of tomorrow and bringing the public with our scientists into the ocean. Your private gifts will cre-ate new laboratories, student fellowships, endowments and feed ambitious new programs. Come join us!