Social for science: Using smartphone photos for research

Digital and cellphone cameras are now so ubiquitous that millions of images are captured around the world every day. These photographs have the potential to achieve more than just wowing our friends on social media, however. They may also contain important ecological clues about our rapidly changing planet.

Katarzyna Nowak and Don Reid recently used hundreds of photos taken by amateur and professional photographers to help answer questions about mountain goats and phenology — the timing of periodic events like the shedding of winter coats. When it comes to mountain goats’ coats, they wanted to see what factors affect when and how quickly the goats shed their coats in the face of climate heating.

Read the blog here.

Moonless Oasis: new documentary illuminates the world of B.C.’s glass sponges

It’s difficult to protect an ecosystem you can’t see. Especially when that ecosystem is deep underwater, was only discovered in the 80s and the charismatic animal in question is a sea sponge. With towering delicate structures composed of living silica growing on the darkness of the seafloor, glass sponges are notoriously difficult to study — and convince people to care about.

When the glass sponge reefs of B.C. were discovered in 1987, it was the spongiology equivalent of realizing that T. rex wasn’t extinct. But because of how deep they were underwater, researchers couldn’t show them to the world. Now, this fragile invertebrate has found itself a champion in a ragtag group of citizen scientist scuba divers, who have made it their mission not just to document the sponge — but protect it. These sponge defenders are the stars of a new documentary that shows the underwater world of glass sponges in high resolution for the first time.

Canadian Geographic sat down virtually with filmmakers Nate Slaco (director) and Bryce Zimmerman (cinematographer) to see how their film Moonless Oasis came together to show the world of glass sponges — and the glass sponge people — in a whole new light.

Read the Q&A by assistant editor Abi Hayward here.

What’s all the fuss about water on the Moon?

Our understanding of water on the Moon has changed dramatically during the first two decades of the 21st century. It had actually been theorized in the early 1960s, but a series of missions and other scientific studies have confirmed that there are places on the Moon that essentially never see the Sun — mostly in meteorite impact craters, which formed steep-sided depressions, close to the lunar poles. These are referred to as permanently shadowed regions or cold traps, and the temperatures in these areas have been measured to be as low as minus 238 oC! The idea is that any water, however minuscule in abundance, would be trapped in these cold traps and slowly accumulate over billions of years.

Find out what all the fuss is about from researcher Gordon Osinski here.
Photo: Chris Cullen/Can Geo Photo Club

Iconic Rock

Mount Assiniboine is hard to miss. Known as “the Matterhorn of the Rockies” because of its resemblance to the pyramidal European peak in the Alps, Assiniboine is also the highest peak (3,618 metres) in the southern continental ranges of the Canadian Rockies. It’s on the border between British Columbia and Alberta, on the edge of both Banff National Park and Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park.

Thanks to the urging of the Alpine Club of Canada, B.C. set aside more than 5,000 hectares of land at the base of the mountain in 1922 to protect the area from development. In 1973, the footprint of protected land expanded to its present-day 38,600 hectares.

Learn more about this iconic rock with our interactive map.

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