December 21, 2018 Friday
Bedtime Story
Craig Venter and the Sargasso Sea
Thus unlike our distant cousins terrestrial
plants and oceanic planktons we have been not comprehensively successful in
making solar energy as our prime energy provider.
These oceanic planktons and other microbes
and their genetic variety were what Venter got going.
Craig Venter before launching onto the
world wide navigation very wisely first tried out a pilot project locally.
The local place that he tested his pilot
project was the Sargasso Sea of the North Atlantic Ocean just off the east
coast of North America.
Its name comes from the Sargassum seaweed
which is a brown macroalgae (seaweed is the common man term for macroalgae) that
was found floating by the Portuguese sailors and explorers in the 15th
century on this sea.
This brown seaweed has a tendency of
floating en mass on the surface of the sea sometimes extending for miles and
hence are distinctly visible to sailors.
I happened to see these brown seaweeds
around the waters of the Florida Keys that I was very fortunate to have driven
through.
One very interesting thing about the
Sargasso Sea is its quite peculiar location within the North Atlantic Ocean of
being encircled by four currents that form a clock wise circulation.
This very unique clockwise currents
comprising of four water currents (Gulf Stream, North Atlantic Current, Canary
Current and North Atlantic Equatorial Current) bringing and depositing in all
marine plants and refuse they carry along with them.
This set of four encircling currents
greatly enhances the microbial diversity in this very queer stretch of the North
Atlantic Ocean.
This peculiar and unique system of four
currents revolving around the sea sets up an effect similar to whirlpool effect
you get when your full sink gets emptied quickly on pulling out suddenly its
stopcock.
Maybe not as dramatic but certainly to that
effect of generating an inwards drag.
For this reason one would also expect lot
of pollution and human garbage and debris sucked into Sargasso Sea.
Yet contrary to the expectations the water
of this sea is of surprisingly deep blue coloration with exceptional underwater
clarity with visibility reaching up to 61 meters.
The range of underwater visibility in a
bright sunny day is directly dependent on its turbidity.
Water’s transparency or turbidity is
measured by a white circular disc of 30 cm in diameter with two pie quadrants
of the four being marked as black.
Such discs are known as Secchi discs named
after an Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi who was one of the first to say
positively that sun is a star based upon his spectroscopic findings.
So the visibility of waters is defined in
terms of Secchi depth which simply is the depth of water beyond which the disc
is no more visible.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer
and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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