Slideshow: 2012's top underwater shots

Ximena Olds

Click through the best pictures from the University of Miami's 2012 Annual Underwater Photography Contest, hosted by the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Launch slideshow

Even a humble sea slug can be stylish, if you find the right slug in the right place. That's what photographer Ximena Olds did when she snapped a picture of an orange headshield sea slug amid the green seagrass in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Her contrasting-color picture took the top prize in this year's Underwater Photography Contest, hosted by the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

More than 700 images were submitted for the 2012 contest, showing scenes from 20 countries. Awards were given in several categories, including Macro, Wide Angle, and Fish or Marine Mammal Portrait. Another category was set aside for University of Miami students. Olds' photo was submitted in the Macro category but was singled out for the "Best Overall" prize.

The judges included University of Miami lecturer Myron Wang, underwater photographer Nicole Wang and Michael Schmale, a professor at the Rosenstiel School.

"The quality of photos keeps getting better each year," Myron Wang, who has been judging the contest since its inception in 2005, said in today's announcement of the winners. "Judging becomes more difficult when you have so many wonderful pictures to choose from. For me, there were excellent entries in every category, but this year’s standout was the great picture of the juvenile sperm whale taken by Douglas Kahle in Dominica — it is spectacular!”

This year, for the first time, a "Fan Favorite" category was created for Internet voting. More than 1,200 ballots were cast in the poll, with Todd Aki's shot of a silhouetted jellyfish taking the prize.

The underwater photography contest is held annually, and is open to all amateur photographers who earn no more than 20 percent of their income from their photography. Click through the slideshow above, or check out the Rosenstiel School's website for more about the winners.

More underwater beauties:

• Flip through this year's candidates for fan favorite
• Bellyflop! Amazing photos of underwater dogs
• 2011: Cameras capture underwater wonders
• Photo exhibit displayed on artificial reef

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

It may not be a $500 million golden hoard, but underwater archaeologists are nevertheless excited about finding what they believe are traces of the five ships that British privateer Henry Morgan lost off the coast of Panama in 1671.

The discovery was made at the mouth of Panama's Chagres River, near another underwater site where six iron cannons were found. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the three-century-old story of Captain Morgan's lost fleet is finally near its conclusion.

The story begins with Morgan, a Welsh sea captain who was given the British crown's official sanction to prey on Spanish sea trade. Some would call Morgan a pirate, others a buccaneer, but "privateer" is the more charitable term.

In 1671, Morgan aimed to weaken Spain's control of the Caribbean by sacking Panama City, and the first step was to capture Castillo de San Lorenzo, a Spanish fort on the cliff overlooking the entrance to the Chagres River. That river served as the only water passageway between the Caribbean and the capital.

Morgan and his pirates of the Caribbean took over the fort and went on to overwhelm the city's defenders. But in the process, he lost his flagship and four other ships to the rough seas and shallow reef surrounding the fort.

From there on, the story takes some dark twists and turns. Morgan had to move on to Panama City, abandoning the sinking ships. When the British buccaneers finally took over the city, they discovered that Spanish authorities had moved much of their treasure out to sea, beyond their reach. That made Morgan's men angry. Their mistreatment of the local citizenry in the wake of the "Sack of Panama" added to Morgan's disreputable image.

By the time he died in 1688, Morgan was seen as one of the most bloodthirsty (and most successful) pirates in the Americas. His exploits inspired enough pirate tales to fill a dead man's chest, including the Errol Flynn movie "Captain Blood" and the James Bond novel "Live and Let Die."

Any riches that may have been on Morgan's ships are thought to be long gone, thanks to treasure hunters who have plucked gold coins and other booty from the shallow waters of the Lajas Reef. But a team of U.S. archaeologists has been working to locate Morgan's ships and help the Panamanian government preserve the remaining artifacts.

'The story is the treasure'
"To us, the ship is the treasure — the story is the treasure," said Fritz Hanselman, an archaeologist with the River Systems Institute and the Center for Archaeological Studies at Texas State University. "And you don't have a much better story than Captain Henry Morgan's Sack of Panama City and the loss of his five ships."

Captain Morgan / Chris Bickford

A team of underwater archaeologists study the wreckage of a ship they believe to be part of Captain Henry Morgan's lost fleet.  The dive team discovered part of the starboard side of a 17th-century wooden ship hull and a series of unopened cargo boxes and chests encrusted in coral.

Volunteers from the National Park Service's Submerged Resources Center and the NOAA/UNC-W Aquarius Reef Base are working alongside Hanselman and other archaeologists and divers from Texas State University.

They knew they were on the right track last year when they discovered the 17th-century cannons. The experts widened their search, using a magnetometer that could pick up the signatures of objects buried beneath the sand and mud on the river bottom. Eventually, divers came upon a 52-by-22-foot section from the starboard side of a wooden ship's hull, along with unopened cargo boxes and chests encrusted in coral.

"We got really excited," Hanselman said in a video recounting the find.

Bert Ho, a survey archaeologist at the National Park Service, said the story behind the shipwrecks is being uncovered slowly through a series of dives. "Each dive tells us a little bit more, each archaeological drawing, each measurement — it all adds up," he said. "It's telling us the story of the wreck, the origin of the wreck, and hopefully the name of the wreck."

Captain Morgan / Chris Bickford

Bert Ho, an underwater project survey archaeologist with the National Park Service's Submerged Resources Center, based in Denver, maps the shipwreck with drawings using synthetic calque paper and plastic lead pencils. 

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
The extended search has been supported by a grant from the makers of Captain Morgan Rum, which was named after the 17th-century privateer.

"Captain Henry Morgan was a natural-born leader with a sense of adventure and an industrious spirit that the brand embraces today,” Tom Herbst, brand director for Captain Morgan USA, said in a statement. "When the opportunity arose for us to help make this discovery mission possible, it was a natural fit for us to get involved. The artifacts uncovered during this mission will help bring Henry Morgan and his adventures to life in a way never thought possible."

Herbst's company may win a share of the publicity for its role in the search for Captain Morgan's fleet, but it won't get any of the booty: Any artifacts excavated by the dive team belong the Panamanian government, to be preserved and displayed by the Patronato Panama Viejo.

More pirate lore:

• Artifacts reveal Blackbeard's terror tactics
• Blackbeard's anchor found off N.C. coast
• 10 shipwrecks that capture the imagination
• 12 pirate flicks worth digging up
• Yo ho ho: 10 pirate islands

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA

An artist's conception shows astronauts practicing for asteroid exploration on an underwater rock wall.

A NASA team is going underwater this week in the Florida Keys to lay the groundwork for the space agency's first simulated journey to an asteroid.

Sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid ranks as one of the top goals for NASA's retooled vision for space exploration. A year ago, President Barack Obama told NASA to gear up to take on such a mission by the year 2025. Up to that time, NASA had been focusing on a return to the moon — which means that the agency had to retool its mission plans. This week's engineering tests, organized by NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO, will help NASA get ready to set off for its new target.

"Even experts don't know what the surface of an asteroid is going to be like," NEEMO project manager Bill Todd said today in a news release. "There may be asteroids that we don't even know about that we'll be visiting. So we're figuring out the best way to do that."

The center of this week's operations is the Aquarius Underwater Laboratory near Key Largo, Fla. "We are now trying to understand the nuts and bolts of what it might take to do a spacewalk on an asteroid or on the moons of Mars," NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, a member of the NEEMO team, told me today.

The underwater team isn't working from the Aquarius habitat itself. That part of the simulation will come later. Instead, Gernhardt and his NEEMO teammates are jumping off the deck of a ship, heading down to depths of about 60 feet in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and practicing their spacewalking skills on an assortment of boulders and rock walls.

"We've created our own mini-asteroid under the water," Gernhardt said.

The aim is to determine which tools and techniques work best for asteroid exploration. NASA has gotten quite familiar with microgravity operations on the International Space Station, and traveling around the moon or Mars doesn't pose all that much of a challenge, gravity-wise. In a sense, making your way around an asteroid combines the worst of both worlds: Most asteroids are so small, it's virtually like working in zero-G. But unlike the space station, there are no built-in handholds or railings. "We have no control over what this asteroid looks like," Gernhardt said.

NASA

In this illustration, astronauts on a Space Exploration Vehicle nestle up against an asteroid and use jetpacks to move around the surface.

NASA

In this artist's conception, an astronaut uses a network of anchors and tethers to move across an asteroid.

Should astronauts hammer in anchors as they make their way across an asteroid's surface? Should they be anchored to a boom stretching out from their spaceship? Or should they use jetpacks to fly freely just a few inches away from the asteroid? Gernhardt and his colleagues will be trying out all three techniques.

"What we're trying to do is fill in the thousand bits of knowledge to bring this from the artist's concepts to reality," he said.

Here are some of the tools the NEEMO team is testing:

• A 27-foot-long, 300-pound boom that could telescope out from a spaceship (or, for the purposes of the simulation, from a piloted submersible) and lock onto a rocky surface.
• A smaller, 20-pound boom that can be anchored at either end, to be used like a handrail to help get around the surface being explored.
• A dual-thruster backpack that can be used underwater to simulate how a jetpack like NASA's current SAFER system would work in outer space.
• Soil-sampling aids, such as a clamshell grabbag that can scoop up samples, and a large plastic bag that can be stretched over rock outcroppings to keep chipped-off samples from floating away.

"Some of the tools that we developed probably won't work very well at all, but as we work down there we'll probably get ideas for better ways to do things," Gernhardt said.

The knowledge gained during this week's tests will be applied to the planning for a full-up mission simulation in October. That's when NASA's "aquanauts" will take up residence in the Aquarius habitat and practice going out in submersibles to explore underwater asteroids. Mission planners will apply the lessons learned in the Florida Keys in other training environments, including NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, Air Bearing Floor and virtual-reality lab as well as the International Space Station.

"It's a bittersweet moment as we wind down the shuttle and the space program as we've known it for the past 30 years," Gernhardt said. But he takes some consolation in the fact that the effort being devoted to NEEMO will pay off on the space station and on other worlds, ranging from near-Earth asteroids to the moon and Mars.

"It's exciting to be working with this great team that we've put together here to develop the tools for future space exploration," Gernhardt said. To keep up with this week's activities, check in with this NEEMO webcast as well as the @NASA_NEEMO Twitter account and the NEEMO Facebook page.

More about asteroids and aquanauts:

• Asteroid goal is riskier than the moon
• Gallery: Seven out-of-this-world destinations
• First step for asteroid mission: Pick the right rock
• Undersea lab serves as inner-space station

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

An expedition to document the Titanic shipwreck site in 3-D has been brought to a quick end due to the approach of yet another hurricane.

The RV Jean Charcot headed back from the site in the North Atlantic at midnight and is due back in port at St. John's, Newfoundland, on Friday.

"Safety first," the Expedition Titanic team declared in a Facebook update. "The accelerated movement of Hurricane Igor means that we are leaving the wreck site earlier than expected. ... Even though we're leaving early, we still have plenty of great photos and videos to share over the coming weeks and months."

Some of those images document areas of the debris field that have been little-seen since the 98-year-old wreck of the luxury liner was rediscovered in 1985.

Anyone who's watched the movie "Titanic" is familiar with the ship's jutting bow  — which was the site of Leonardo DiCaprio's "King of the World" scene and now serves as the shipwreck's signature image. The bow was most recently featured in NBC News' reports from the expedition, aired last month before Hurricane Danielle forced a weeklong break in the action.

You can almost imagine the ghosts of the Titanic's 1,517 victims wafting along nearly intact decks and rusted-out staterooms. Not so with the stern, however. The area around the ship's backside, which has been the focus of the expedition's underwater survey for the past week, reveals the full violence of the Titanic's clash with an iceberg and its resulting breakup.

In the video above, which is being made available to the public here for the first time, you can see the steel of the hull broken off and peeled away like the skin of an orange. Whole sections of the hull are stacked on the seafloor, with portholes staring up like the eyes of dead fish.

You can also see a ship propeller lying amid the debris, and there's a close-up look at the conical top of a high-pressure cylinder from the Titanic's main engines. With a diameter of 54 inches and a stroke of more than 6 feet, this cylinder produced about 3,750 horsepower when the Titanic was moving full steam ahead.

Another video, shown for the first time below, surveys the debris field around the stern: a splayed-out section of the hull here, a porcelain basin there, the intricately wrought side piece from a bench sitting atop mangled metal, a brass grate gleaming dully in the deep.

Even though the expedition is winding down, there's lots more to see: The Expedition Titanic website provides a great overview of the effort, and you can count on RMS Titanic Inc.'s Facebook page, Twitter feed, Flickr photo site and YouTube video channel to point you to the latest imagery. The Waitt Institute and WHOI's Dave Gallo are filing updates as well. If you haven't seen Kerry Sanders' reports on the expedition, check 'em out now. And stay tuned for more pictures and first-run video in a follow-up Cosmic Log posting.

 For something completely different, you can tune in at 9 p.m. ET tonight (6 p.m. PT/SLT) and hear me chat with Jay Ackroyd on "Virtually Speaking" about the future of NASA. The show is being simulcast on Second Life and BlogTalkRadio. If you miss it, don't worry: The show will be archived. Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Researchers have returned to the site of the Titanic shipwreck, after a break that was forced by Hurricane Danielle. Now they're turning their attention from the well-known hulk's bow to its stern, to take a look at areas of the debris field that haven't been studied since the Titanic was rediscovered in 1986.

The research vessel Jean Charcot began its high-definition, 3-D survey of the underwater site last month, with the aim of documenting the historic wreck in unprecedented detail before it disintegrates. NBC News' Kerry Sanders was in on the adventure when the first pictures were beamed up from robot vehicles operating two and a half miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic. (In comparison, the remotely operated vehicles involved in the response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill were a mere mile down.)

Unfortunately, Hurricane Danielle's storm track came a little too close for comfort, and the Jean Charcot had to head back to port in Newfoundland at the end of August. This week, the team sailed back to resume their survey.

Expedition Titanic's two autonomous underwater vehicles (nicknamed Ginger and Mary Ann, after the "Gilligan's Island" women) and its camera-laden remotely operated vehicle have been back in the water already, although the seas were too choppy for remote operations today. Among the shots that have shown up on the expedition's Facebook page are eerie pictures of the officers' cabins and the first-class promenade deck.

In a video clip, research specialist Bill Lange (who was involved in the 1986 rediscovery expedition) discusses the shift in operations from the ship's bow to its stern. The plan laid out by Lange calls for spiraling out from the stern section and checking a list of high-interest targets. "We hit this one, we're covering new ground, because no one's looked at this since '86," Lange said.

It's been 98 years since the Titanic ran into an iceberg and sank, causing more than 1,500 deaths. The ship is slowly disintegrating into scrap, and yet it retains a powerful grip on the popular imagination — in part because the wreck was lost for so long, and in part because the sinking of an unsinkable ocean liner serves as "the world's largest symbol of man's mortality and vulnerability," as The Onion put it in a famous parody.

The difficulties that Expedition Titanic has had to weather so far simply reinforce the metaphor's message: Never assume you can beat Mother Nature.

I've been in touch with a couple of folks on the expedition and will keep you posted as it proceeds. But communication is spotty. "We are dealing with a very low bandwidth satellite dish out here," team member Bob Sitrick told me via e-mail. You can also check these resources for updates:

• Expedition Titanic on the Web (check "The Feed")
• Waitt Institute's Expedition Blog
• RMS Titanic Inc. on Facebook 
• @RMS_Titanic_Inc on Twitter
• Expedition Titanic channel on YouTube
• WHOI returns to the Titanic ... and tweets

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."