Comments on: The Power of The Sea

By: Jesse

Jesse — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:19:28 +0000

Are there any studies of how prone people are to sea sickness and what triggers it? I know the mechanism — your semicircular canals give signals that conflict with what your eyes tell you and people get nauseous. But I am still cuious about some things.

When I go on boats I never get particularly seasick. I’ve been in rough seas before, and I might have felt a bit queasy, but after eating I felt better. So I am nit sure if it was the motion or just wanting to eat.

I’m one of those people who can read on a bus, though. I thank the NYT crossword puzzle for making many a ride pleasant.

So I wonder if anyone ever did a detailed study of what makes people seasick or more prone to it or not. Is there some mechanism or structure in the semicircular canals that in some people is just more sensitive? Is there a correlation between balancing ability and how prone you are to seasickness?

How fast you get your “sea legs” would, intuitively, say to me that your brain is more or less plastic in that particular area).

And why do people get motion sick in cars and buses, but not on the NYC subway, which rocks back and forth a lot? (That motion seems to put people to sleep if you are lucky enough to sit at rush hour!) Is it the frequency of the motion? Or some relation between amplitude and frequency that falls in a certain range?

By: Jim Thomerson

Jim Thomerson — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:45:03 +0000

I am prone to sea sickness, which is why I study freshwater fish which live in shallow water. On a couple of occasions, out in the ocean in a small boat, I have started to get sea sick. I put on mask, snorkel, and flippers and went over the side. My feelings of sea sickness immediately went away, although I was being bounced around floating at the surface.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:27:50 +0000

Richard, and thanks to those U-boats, we got to “crack” Enigma for a while, by capturing one or two of them when they came up to take readings and transmit data.

By: Joseph A. Marcus

Joseph A. Marcus — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:11:57 +0000

During the Second World War, my father served in the Army Air Corps as an aerial photographer on bombing and reconnaissance missions. When he received his shipping orders, transferring him from a naval port in the northeastern U.S. to the The Firth of Clyde in Scotland, he begged and manipulated the system in order to procure hoped-for air transport across the Atlantic; he was much more frightened of being sunk by a U-Boat than of being shot down. Naturally his efforts failed, and so he endured 2 weeks of pure hell on choppy North Atlantic seas. (Ordinarily the voyage would last 4 days, but his convoy zigged and zagged precisely in order to reduce risk of attack by the German subs.) By the end of the first week he was SO sea-sick that he would lie in his bunk, between non-stop severe vomiting bouts, praying for that erstwhile dreaded torpedo to end his misery!

As for me, my only (puny) experience with “the power of the sea” occurred when hitch-hiking passage on a medium-size Taiwanese boat from Tai-tung to Lan-yu (Orchid Island) while on a malacological collecting trip [think Darwin or Wallace writ very, VERY small]. Whereas the mostly Japanese tourists traveling with me spent their 6 scenic hours projecting their stomach contents over the deck rails, I prided myself — as the stalwart young scientist I imagined myself to be — on mastering my seasickness just enough to hold in my puke, never mind my heartburn and reflux. Much to my pride I managed to succeed.

Nice book review, Greg.

By: Richard Chapman

Richard Chapman — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 16:04:09 +0000

The Germans had to rely on their U-Boats to get weather forecasts coming in from the North Atlantic. We had much better coverage. They missed the small high pressure system (I think) that gave the Allies that small window of relatively good weather to make the assault on June 6th. That was one reason they weren’t expecting an attack on that day.