Life at OSU

Lisa Ballance, an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, has been named director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University.

A tidepool crustacean’s ability to survive oxygen deprivation though it lacks a key set of genes raises the possibility that animals might have more ways of dealing with hypoxic environments than had been thought.

A combination of sea water temperatures and iron from dust helps explain variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during ice ages.

The vast subtropical “gyres” – large systems of rotating currents in the middle of the oceans – cover 40 percent of the Earth’s surface and have long been considered biological deserts with stratified waters that contain very little nutrients to sustain life.

Angee Doerr, an interdisciplinary marine scientist, has joined Oregon Sea Grant and the Oregon State University Extension Service to work with the fishing industry on the central Oregon coast.

Researchers at Oregon State University have developed a new methodology for building computer models that paves the way to better understanding the flood risks faced by coastal communities.

Scientists for the first time have tracked how much energy from plants and animals at the surface of the open ocean survives as particles drop to the seafloor more than two miles below, where they say a surprisingly robust ecosystem eagerly awaits.

Far beneath the surface of the ocean off the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States – and nearly a quarter-mile below the seafloor – lives a community of hydrogen-consuming microbes that scientists say are like those in Earth’s early history.