Today@Dal

From Wednesday's Chronicle Herald:

Dalhousie University used Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s visit to Israel this week as its chance to announce a new partnership with a university there.

Halifax students will be able to study the Red Sea through a new ocean studies centre at Ben-Gurion University, while Israeli students will get the chance to learn about the North Atlantic.

Dalhousie oceanographer Marlon Lewis visited Israel as part of a Nova Scotia delegation in 2011. He saw the site of the planned centre in the town of Eilat, on a gulf that lies over a deep rift valley.

“It’s a marvellous laboratory for oceanography because it has one of the most beautiful and fantastic coral reefs on the planet,” said Lewis.

“Just next to the shore you can go out and it’s positively amazing. Water that’s no deeper than your waist, and it’s just teeming, teeming with life.”

Just a few hundred metres from shore, the ocean floor drops to a depth of almost 2,000 metres, he said. That allows easy access to deepwater corals and other locations that are harder to get to from Halifax.

“We’re interested in the physics of deepwater mixing, how the surface waters exchange properties with the deeper waters,” Lewis said.

Read the rest of this article at the Chronicle Herald website.