Check out our on-campus newsletter!

We produce a monthly (mostly) newsletter that is intended for our campus community. From time to time it has some interesting tid-bits. You can check it out here.

Raising docks to new heights

Our campus “mock docks” grew a little taller today.

The purpose behind this project is to measure the effects different dock designs have on the underlying salt marsh. Earlier research indicated that the shadow cast by docks have a negative effect on the plant growth in the marsh surface in the dock’s “footprint.” Recently, dock designers have developed new designs and materials to help alleviate this problem. The questions are – do they work and how well?

As a part of this project, a Skidaway Institute team headed by professor Clark Alexander built a four  “mock docks” on our campus.

Three of the mock docks

One is constructed with traditional material and in a traditional design. The remaining three are of different design and materials. The docks are equipped with light meters to measure the light difference between the top of the dock and the footprint below. Over the past year or so, they have been adjusted to various orientations to capture the sun and shadow at different points of the compass and throughout the year. The next step is to obtain data for docks at varying heights.

Harry raises the platform with the fork lift as Lee Ann watches.

This afternoon research assistant Lee Ann DeLeo and fork-lift driver Harry Carter raised the existing dock models roughly two feet.

Lee Ann removes an old, shorter leg.

They lifted the deck structure off their bottom legs and replaced the legs with slightly longer ones.

Lee Ann checks the fit as the platform structure is lowered onto the new leg.

Skidaway Institute mourns loss of Professor Peter Verity

Skidaway Institute Professor Peter G. Verity died unexpectedly at his home on Thursday, December 31.

Verity was a Professor of Biological Oceanography at Skidaway Institute.  He received his B.A. in 1975 from Dartmouth College, and his M.S. in 1979 and Ph.D. in 1984, both from the University of Rhode Island. He joined the faculty of Skidaway Institute in 1986.

Verity was the author or co-author of more than 100 scientific articles and papers. He was a frequent speaker at professional conferences. His research interests include microzooplankton ecology, feeding interactions among plankton; gelatinous plankton, invasive jellyfish, the role of life cycles in ecosystem function; and the status and future of ocean ecosystems as they respond to increasing climate variability and human perturbations.

Verity was well known in the environmental community for his work on the impact of coastal land use and development upon the environmental quality and ecosystem health of Georgia estuaries. He was a frequent speaker to local civic and environmental groups. He was recently awarded the prestigious Nick Williams Award for Coastal Sustainability by the Center for a Sustainable Coast.

Verity was also a dedicated and passionate teacher who believed that perhaps the most important contribution of his professional career would be the legacy of his teaching and outreach efforts. Verity served on the graduate faculties of Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah State University, University of Georgia, and Georgia Institute of Technology, where he taught, advised and mentored graduate and undergraduate students. Verity also served on numerous advisory groups and committees responsible for the development and implementation of science curriculum in the public school system and for the preparation of future teachers. Among his many responsibilities at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, Verity was the Institute’s Education Coordinator.

As a person, Peter was uniquely gifted in his ability to inspire and motivate those around him to examine their priorities and to reach valuable realizations about what matters most. He was fun and funny, serious and superfluous, comforting and irritating. He was someone worth knowing and who impacted his family, friends, students, teachers, and colleagues profoundly.

Peter Verity is survived by his loving wife of 21 years, Melanie Elizabeth Mirande, his step-mother, Martha Verity; one sister, Diane Verity, and four half-brothers, Mark Verity, Todd Verity, Bruce Verity and Craig Verity. He will also be missed by many cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, and colleagues.

He was 56 years old.

A memorial service will be held on Saturday, January 9, at 11 a.m.

Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church

1008 East Henry Street

Savannah, GA 31401-7128

(912) 233-4351

A reception will follow.

To make a tax deductible donation in memory of Peter, send gifts to the Peter G. Verity Memorial Fund for Ocean and Environmental Research, Education and Scholarship.

Make checks out to “Skidaway Marine Science Foundation” and indicate “Verity Fund” on the memo line.

Mail to:

Skidaway Marine Science Foundation—Verity Fund

10 Ocean Science Circle

Savannah, GA 31411

To view or leave comments for the family, visit this site.

Skidaway Institute researcher maps armored shorelines

Skidaway Institute of Oceanography researcher Karrie Brinkley has spent a lot of time in recent months traveling up and down Georgia’s coastal waterways in boats and canoes with maps and binoculars in hand. Brinkley is working on a project to identify and map all the armored shorelines in the state’s six coastal counties.

Brinkley has been looking for bulkheads, causeways and rip-rap – the piles or rock or concrete frequently used to stabilize a shore or river bank. The purpose of the study is to establish a baseline set of data to help understand and project the effect of rising sea level on the Georgia coast.

Karrie Brinkley examines a bulkhead armored shoreline on Skidaway Island.

“The shorelines are going to act differently as the sea level rises, depending on whether they are armored or not,” said Brinkley. “In this project, we want to see how much of the coast is armored and what type of armory is being used for individual sections as well as the entire coast.”

Brinkley is working under the guidance of Skidaway Institute professor Clark Alexander. He says that currently the oceans are rising at approximately three millimeters per year, or roughly a foot per century, however many scientists project that rate could double, triple or quadruple in coming decades. This could have a tremendous impact on coastal areas.

“One environmental area of concern is the salt marshes,” said Alexander. “If the sea level gradually rises along a natural coast, the salt marshes that thrive in the intertidal zone will gradually migrate to the upland.

“However, if a section is armored, the intertidal zone may become completely submerged, and we would lose the function of the salt marsh in that area.”

The study is funded by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, under the umbrella of a larger Environmental Protection Agency project. Geographically, Brinkley is studying all the coastal shores, from the beaches westward to either Interstate 95 or US Highway 17, which ever is further to the west.

For the first ten months of the project, Brinkley spent her time in front of a computer, studying aerial photographs of the coastal counties. Using a Geographical Information System program, she electronically marked the photos to indicate causeways, bulkheads, rip-rap and other shoreline armor.

An aerial photo of Wilmington Island showing causeways in purple and shoreline armor in yellow.

“Depending on the resolution of the photography, you can identify a lot from the photos,” Brinkley said. “Bulkheads show up as straight lines, and the bright stones of concrete rip-rap are fairly obvious as well.”

There are still many areas that Brinkley cannot characterize from the aerial photographs due to poor resolution, foliage overhangs or other reasons. Even the tide cycle when the aerial photography was shot can affect how much information can be gleaned from the photos. “A high tide may cover some rip-rap and make it invisible in the aerial photograph,” Brinkley said.

For those sections, she gets in a car, a boat or a canoe and visits the sites personally.

Once completed, the project will be shared with officials in Georgia’s coastal counties. Brinkley expects to have the project completed early in 2010.

Skidaway Institute scientists study Arctic climate change

Climate change will have profound effects on the Arctic ecosystem, and those effects may be felt around the world. Skidaway Institute of Oceanography professor Marc Frischer is launching a three-year project to examine the effects of rising temperatures in the Arctic and how those changes will impact the marine food web.

The project is funded by a $356,139 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“We know global climate change is impacting the fragile Arctic environment,” said Frischer. “Atmospheric concentrations of heat absorbing greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide are rising; the Arctic sea ice and permafrost are melting; and models are predicting significant changes in precipitation patterns in the Arctic.

“What we don’t know is how living systems will respond or adapt to those changes and how, ultimately we as humans will have to adapt to those changes.”

The work will be conducted in Point Barrow, the northernmost location in the US, at a NSF supported research station operated by the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium.

Pt. Barrow, Alaska, in winter

The landscape at Point Barrow is tundra that sits on top of as much as 1,300 feet of permanently frozen soil called “permafrost.” The concern is that with climate warming this permafrost will begin to melt and release an enormous amount of organic material into the coastal ocean.

“What you have now is have is up to 1,300 ft deep frozen soils consisting of ancient forest peat locked in the permafrost,” said Frischer. “What will happen when the permafrost starts to melt and that material, called humic acid, is released into groundwater, streams, rivers and ultimately into the ocean? That is what we want to know.”

Frischer’s focus will be on the microscopic organisms that comprise the very bottom of the Arctic Ocean food web. They include a wide variety of tiny organisms. On one end are the autotrophs, organisms that consume inorganic material and produce energy through photosynthesis, like plants. At the other end are the heterotrophs that consume organic material and obtain their energy from what they eat, like animals.

The humic acid material is rich in carbon, but lacks nitrogen, a key element that both autotrophs and heterotrophs need to make use of the carbon in the humic material. For every carbon molecule an organism uses, it will also need nitrogen.

“If you are going to grow more things, then that nitrogen has to come from somewhere,” said Frischer. “Our hypothesis is that as this humic material enters the coastal Arctic, there will be a greater demand for nitrogen at the base of the food web.”

Whoever gets that nitrogen, whether it will be the plant-like autotrophs or the animal-like heterotrophs, will determine how much organic production ends up farther up the food web in larger marine animals and eventually humans.

“This will all be set by whoever wins the war for nitrogen,” said Frischer.

Over the course of the project, Frischer and his team will travel to the Arctic several times a year. While in the Arctic, Frischer’s team will focus on making observations of the system and conducing experiments to determine what organisms are growing, which organisms are using the humic material, and determining where they are getting their nitrogen from and how they are doing it.

“We will manipulate the nutrients in the water samples and see how the different micro-organisms react,” said Frischer. “From that we should be able to project how the natural environment will react and ultimately contribute new data that help us understand and predict the biological effects of climate warming in the Arctic.”

Frischer will be working with two collaborators on the project, Patricia Yager from the University of Georgia, and Deborah Bronk from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Both Yager and Bronk received independent grants from NSF to participate in the study.

Nice newspaper article

Mike Sullivan writes:

Several of us spent most of last Friday taking a boat trip to one of Georgia’s undeveloped coastal islands

Capt. Jay Fripp and Claudia Venherm

and stomping around looking for archaeological sites that may be threatened by erosion.

Claudia Venherm using a precise GPS to map the shoreline.

It is a joint project with Chris McCabe, the Georgia DNR archaeologist who is stationed on our campus.

Chris and Mary

Mary Landers from the Savannah Morning News came along and wrote a very nice story on the excursion, which can be seen here.

Winner of Annual Environmental Award Announced

This news reached us this morning from the Center for a Sustainable Coast. Congratulations to Dr. Verity!

The staff and board of directors of the Center for a Sustainable Coast are pleased to announce that Dr. Peter Verity of the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography has been selected as the latest recipient of the prestigious Nick Williams Award for Coastal Sustainability.

The annual award is intended to recognize achievements in the advancement of science, advocacy, and policy supporting responsible conservation of coastal Georgia’s natural, cultural and historic resources. Dr. Verity is being honored with the award both because of the relevance of his environmental research and for making it accessible to the public through news articles, lectures, and published papers.

According to Center board member and fellow coastal scientist, Dr. Jim Henry, “Peter Verity has been among the most outspoken scientists on coastal Georgia’s water quality issues. Peter’s evaluations and predictions of the present and future degradation of estuarine water quality are based on his scientific observations and analysis of relevant data.”

Dr. Verity’s work includes study of trends in coastal water quality in the Chatham County area, which led him to conclude that there are growing risks of environmental damage as coastal development continues. In 2006 Dr. Verity published a paper on this topic entitled “Human Impacts on Water Quality, Food Webs, and Implications for the Future of Georgia Estuaries,” which received wide recognition. This work found that unless development methods are improved, coastal Georgia is likely to face a serious reduction in the diversity and health of inter-tidal ecosystems, similar to problems incurred in the Chesapeake Bay area.

In a 2007 article published in the Center’s newsletter about Dr. Verity’s research, Center staff concluded,

“Such outcomes would be tragic for several reasons, including the loss of property value and quality of life due to decline in fish population and environmentally-related recreational opportunities.  Moreover, it would be very expensive, complicated, and time-consuming to restore damaged aquatic and marine habitat, if that would be even possible.  The longer we delay in getting this problem under control, the more difficult and costly it will be to solve.”

Dr. Verity is a Professor of Biological Oceanography at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah, GA, and also serves as the institutional Education Coordinator.  He received his B.A. in 1975 from Dartmouth College, and his M.S. in 1979 and Ph.D. in 1984, both from the University of Rhode Island. He has served on numerous USA and international science panels and steering committees, and is a science editor for three top-tier aquatic science journals.  Peter also serves on the graduate faculties of Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah State University, University of Georgia, and Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches and advises graduate and undergraduate students.

The award, created in the memory of coastal conservationist and Center board president, Nick Williams, will be presented on December 5^th at an open public event hosted by the Center at the Armstrong Atlantic State University Conference Center on Abercorn Street in Savannah.  Dr. Verity will be making a presentation entitled, “Global Climate Change and Other Human Impacts on Oceans, Earth and Ecosystems.”  Members of the public are encouraged to attend the talk, which will begin at 4:00 p.m.

Students grow bacteria gardens

Often students grow vegetable gardens for a science project, but some local students took on an entirely different task. They grew bacteria cultures. It was one of several educational activities at Skidaway Institute of Oceanography’s annual open house — Skidaway Marine Science Day — on Saturday, October 10.

The bacteria project was the brainchild of Skidaway Institute scientist Marc Frischer and student assistant LaGina Frazier.

Marc Frischer (right) and LaGina Frazier at their Skidaway Marine Science Day exhibit

“Microbes get a bad rap,” said Frazier, who is also a biology student at Savannah State University. “We wanted to show the students that bacteria are all around them, and most bacteria are beneficial.”

Visitors to the Frischer lab exhibit at Skidaway Marine Science Day were given a cotton swab and told to wipe it anything they wanted to collect some bacteria. A total of 98 students participated. They roamed the campus, swabbing plants, trees, buildings and each other.

After a quick demonstration, Frazier and the Frischer lab volunteers let the students “streak” (spread) their sample onto a culture dish. Each dish had an ID number which was given to the student. Following the collection, Frazier grew the bacteria cultures in Skidaway Institute’s microbiology lab. After a week, the cultures were photographed and posted on Skidaway Institute’s Web site. The participants used their ID number to view their dish and compare their results with the other participants.

One student's fast-growing bacteria culture

“The great thing about using our Web site is the students don’t have to come back out here to see the results of their exercise,” said Frazier. “They can see the results of their microbe collection by visiting our Web site.”

Frazier said she could tell the students obtained a wide variety of different microbes just from a visual inspection. There are no plans to test the cultures any further and specifically indentify each one.

“We hope this exercise taught the students a little about a part of their world they can’t usually see with the naked eye,” said Frazier. “Maybe some of them may be inspired to study science seriously as they advance in school.”

The results of the project can be seen here.

Skidaway campus open house a success!

We had a great open house on Saturday. Close to 2,000 braved the 88 degree heat and threatening rain to visit the campus  for Skidaway Marine Science Day.

The event featured exhibits, programs and activities sponsored by the campus partners, including the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, the University of Georgia (UGA)Marine Extension Service Aquarium, the UGA Marine Extension Service Shellfish Laboratory, the Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary and WSVH Georgia Public Radio.

This year, a number of outside environmental organizations also participated.

Below is a sample of some of our photos. Look here to see the entire collection.

Visitors build their model plankto for the Plankton Sink Off Race

Tours of the Research Vessel Savannah are always popular.

Young visitors get up close and personal with marine life at the Aquarium touch tanks.

The horseshoe crabs attracted interest.

Skidaway Institute scientists, like Clark Alexander shown here, explained their research to visitors.

"Put 'em to work!" Young visitors bag oyster shells for future use restoring an oyster reef.

Plankton World was busy all afternoon.

Skidaway Institute receives research grant to study ocean currents

Skidaway Institute of Oceanography professor Dana Savidge has been awarded a research grant from the National Science Foundation for $207,450 to study ocean currents called Langmuir Supercells.

Langmuir circulation cells occur during strong winds and waves, and appear as long lines of bubbles or floating material aligned with the wind on the ocean surface.

“These lines are the surface expression of currents beneath the surface,” said Savidge. “The Langmuir cells are like huge counter-rotating jelly-rolls, aligned longways with the wind, with currents spiraling from the ocean surface into the deep and back up, while also moving downwind.”

Savidge has been observing Langmuir circulation on the Georgia shelf using a custom built acoustic Doppler profiler, which uses sound waves to monitor the movement of the ocean water. When Langmuir cells reach the sea floor, the so-called ‘supercells’ can pick up sediment and organic material, transport it high up into the water and carry it long distances horizontally. While Langmuir currents have been studied for years, they have only recently been observed reaching the sea floor.

“Our measurements suggest this process may affect sediments all across Georgia’s shelf, from the shallow near-shore environments out to the shelf edge in 50 meters of water,” Savidge said.

Savidge will use the new grant to define how these cells interact with strong tides and surface heating in Georgia’s ocean waters. She will be working closely with scientists and computer modelers from Old Dominion University (Virginia) and the University of South Florida to develop ways of including these turbulent processes in models used to predict ocean circulation and horizontal transport of the material it contains.