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Monday, March 24, 2014

Malaysian PM: Missing airliner crashed in the Indian Ocean

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Malaysian PM: Missing airliner crashed in the Indian Ocean

Malaysia says missing plane crashed in Indian Ocean

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Malaysia says missing plane crashed in Indian Ocean

Monday, March 17, 2014

New Scientific Evidence Suggests There’s An Ocean The Size Of All Oceans Combined Deep Inside The Earth

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New Scientific Evidence Suggests There’s An Ocean The Size Of All Oceans Combined Deep Inside The Earth

Share Your Love for the Ocean

Thursday, March 13, 2014

US: ‘Indications’ exist that Malaysian aircraft may have crashed in Indian Ocean

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US: ‘Indications’ exist that Malaysian aircraft may have crashed in Indian Ocean

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Study finds global warming ‘pause’ comes from unusual Pacific Ocean trade winds

By The Guardian
Sunday, February 9, 2014 19:43 EST

A serene beach in Kiribati, which may soon vanish beneath the waves due to rising ocean levels. Screenshot via YouTube.

GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE

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Oliver Milman, The Guardian

The contentious “pause” in global warming over the past decade is largely due to unusually strong trade winds in the Pacific ocean that have buried surface heat deep underwater, new research has found.

A joint Australian and US study analysed why the rise in the Earth’s global average surface temperature has slowed since 2001, after rapidly increasing from the 1970s.

The research shows that sharply accelerating trade winds in central and eastern areas of the Pacific have driven warm surface water to the ocean’s depths, reducing the amount of heat that flows into the atmosphere.

In turn, the lowering of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific triggers further cooling in other regions.

The study, which is published in the journal Nature Climate Change, calculated the net cooling effect on global average surface temperatures as between 0.1C and 0.2C (32.2F and 32.4F), accounting for much of the hiatus in surface warming. The study’s authors said there has been a 0.2C gap between models used to predict warming and actual observed warming since 2001.

The findings should provide fresh certainty about the reasons behind the warming hiatus, which has been claimed by critics of mainstream climate science as evidence that the models are flawed and predictions of rising temperatures have been exaggerated.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) addressed the warming pause issue in its 2013 climate report, pointing out that the Earth is going through a solar minimum and that more than 90% of the world’s extra heat is being soaked up by the oceans, rather than lingering on the surface.

Matthew England, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and leader of the research, said that while the solar minimum and aerosol particles have contributed to the slowdown, strong trade winds are the significant factor.

“Temperature models have an envelope of uncertainty but it is clear that the last decade has seen a much flatter temperature change compared to the 1980s and 1990s, when the increase was rapid,” he said.

“We found that the wind acceleration has been strong enough in the past 20 years to pump a lot of the heat into the ocean. Winds accelerated in this period more than at any time in the past century; it really is unprecedented and the models haven’t captured it all.”

The acceleration of Pacific trade winds has been twice as strong in the past 20 years compared with the prior 80 years, cooling the east Pacific and propagating the trend to other parts of the world.

The study suggests the warming hiatus could continue for much of the present decade if the trade winds continue; however, should the winds return to their long-term average speeds, rapid warming will resume.

“Even if the winds accelerate even further, sooner or later the impact of greenhouse gases will overwhelm the effect,” England said. “And if the winds relax, the heat will come out quickly. As we go through the 21st century, we are less and less likely to have a cooler decade. Greenhouse gases will certainly win out in the end.”

England said it was unclear what has caused the increase in Pacific trade winds, although warming in the Indian Ocean has been cited as a potential trigger.

Dr Steve Rintoul, research team leader at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, said the research shows that pauses in the rate of global warming are to be expected.

“The oceans have continued to warm unabated, even during the recent hiatus in warming of surface temperature,” he said.

“Natural variations of the climate system also mean that climate trends estimated over a short period are unlikely to reflect long-term changes. A decade or two of slower or faster warming does not tell us anything about long-term climate change.”

Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said it is likely the current warming slowdown is only a temporary reprieve from brisk increases in global temperatures.

“This new research suggests that when the trade winds weaken again, the planet can expect rapid warming of the surface to resume, as greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise,” he said.

“We don’t know what is causing these unprecedented changes, but the implications could be substantial.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014

The Raw Story

Study finds global warming ‘pause’ comes from unusual Pacific Ocean trade winds

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Pure Nature Specials - Ocean Voyager

See the majestic humpback whale as you’ve never seen it before. See this creature care for its young, ward off predators, and hunt for food in the most uniqu…
Video Rating: 5 / 5

Pure Nature Specials - Ocean Voyager

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Feds attempt to close ocean...

by Mike Flynn 5 Oct 2013, 7:08 AM PDT post a comment

The Park Service will also have rangers on duty to police the ban. Of access to an ocean. The government will probably use more personnel and spend more resources to attempt to close the ocean, than it would in its normal course of business.

This is governing by temper-tantrum. It is on par with the government’s ham-fisted attempts to close the DC WWII Memorial, an open-air public monument that is normally accessible 24 hours a day. By accessible I mean, you walk up to it. When you have finished reflecting, you then walk away for it.

At least that Memorial is an actual structure, with some kind of perimeter that can be fenced off. Florida Bay is the ocean. How, pray tell, do you “close” 1,100 square miles of ocean? Why would one even need to do so?

Apparently, according to an anonymous Park Service ranger, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

Centuries ago, King Canute famously failed to command the ocean tide to stop. His display was actually a means to educate his subjects on the limits of royal power. Today, however, our President actually believes he has the power to control the oceans.

Drudge Report Feed

Feds attempt to close ocean...

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Jonathan Trappe"s daring bid to cross the Atlantic Ocean using helium balloons

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Jonathan Trappe and his balloons prepare for take off on Wednesday morning. The IT manager began his attempt cross the Atlantic in a lifeboat attached to a balloon cluster this morning in heavy fog from Caribou, Maine in the United States.Picture: BARCROFT MEDIA

Weird News – Funny and strange news – How About That

Jonathan Trappe"s daring bid to cross the Atlantic Ocean using helium balloons

Is the ocean the real Final Frontier?

By Katherine Mangu-Ward | Reason

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of our exploring
shall be to return where we started
and know the place for the first time

That tidbit of T.S. Eliot is stolen from Graham Hawkes, a submarine designer who really, really loves the ocean. Hawkes is famous for hollering, “Your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction!” at anyone who suggests that space is the Final Frontier.

The deep sea, he contends, is where we should be headed: The unexplored oceans hold mysteries more compelling, environments more challenging, and life-forms more bizarre than anything the vacuum of space has to offer. Plus, it’s cheaper to go down than up. (You can watch his appealingly arrogant TED talk on the subject here.)

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Is the Ocean the Real Final Frontier?

White smokers at the Champagne vent in the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument.

Photo courtesy of the NOAA

We’ve been to the moon and just about everywhere on Earth. So what’s left to discover? In September, Future Tense is publishing a series of articles in response to the question, “Is exploration dead?” Read more about modern-day exploration of the sea, space, land, and more unexpected areas.

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of our exploring
shall be to return where we started
and know the place for the first time

That tidbit of T.S. Eliot is stolen from Graham Hawkes, a submarine designer who really, really loves the ocean. Hawkes is famous for hollering, “Your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction!” at anyone who suggests that space is the Final Frontier. The deep sea, he contends, is where we should be headed: The unexplored oceans hold mysteries more compelling, environments more challenging, and life-forms more bizarre than anything the vacuum of space has to offer. Plus, it’s cheaper to go down than up. (You can watch his appealingly arrogant TED talk on the subject here.

Is Hawkes right? Should we all be crawling back into the seas from which we came? Ocean exploration is certainly the underdog, so to speak, in the sea vs. space face-off. There’s no doubt that the general public considers space the sexier realm. The occasional James Cameron joint aside, there’s much more cultural celebration of space travel, exploration, and colonization than there is of equivalent underwater adventures. In a celebrity death match between Captain Kirk and Jacques Cousteau, Kirk is going to kick butt every time.

In fact, the rivalry can feel a bit lopsided—the chess club may consider the football program a competitor for funds and attention, but the jocks aren’t losing much sleep over the price of pawns and cheerleaders rarely turn out for chess tournaments. But somehow the debate rages on in dorm rooms, congressional committee rooms, and Internet chat rooms.

Damp ocean boosters often aim to borrow from the rocket-fueled glamour of space. Submersible entrepreneur Marin Beck talks a big game when he says, “We can go to Mars, but the deep ocean really is our final frontier,” but he giggles when a reporter calls him the “Elon Musk of the deep sea,” an allusion to the founder of the for-profit company Space X who is rumored to be the real-life model for Iron Man’s Tony Stark.

Even Hawkes admits that he “grew up dreaming of aircraft”—though he means planes, not spaceships—but “then I got to look at this subsea stuff and I saw this is where aviation was all those years ago. The whole field was completely backwards, and that’s why I jumped in.”

35,802 ft (10,912 m) At the deepest point of the trench (and the deepest point on earth) the pressure is over 8 tons per square inch, or the equivalent of an average-sized woman holding up 48 jumbo jets.

At 35,802 feet, the deepest point of the trench (and the deepest point on earth), the pressure is more than 8 tons per square inch, or the equivalent of an average-sized woman holding up 48 jumbo jets.

Image courtesy of NASA

While many of the technologies for space and sky are the similar, right down to the goofy suits with bubble heads—the main difference is that in space, you’re looking to keep pressure inside your vehicle and underwater you’re looking to keep pressure out—there’s often a sense that that sea and space are competitors rather than compadres.

They needn’t be, says Guillermo Söhnlein, a man who straddles both realms. Söhnlein is a serial space entrepreneur and the founder of the Space Angels Network. (Disclosure: My husband’s a member.) The network funds startups aimed for the stars, but his most recent venture is Blue Marble Exploration, which organizes expeditions in manned submersibles to exotic underwater locales. (Further disclosure: I have made a very small investment in Blue Marble, but am fiscally neutral in the sea vs. space fight, since I have a similar amount riding on a space company, Planetary Resources.)

As usual, the fight probably comes down to money. The typical American believes that NASA is eating up a significant portion of the federal budget (one 2007 poll found that respondents pinned that figure at one-quarter of the federal budget), but the space agency is actually nibbling at a Jenny Craig–sized portion of the pie. At about $ 17 billion, government-funded space exploration accounts for about 0.5 percent of the federal budget. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—NASA’s soggy counterpart—gets much less, a bit more than $ 5 billion for a portfolio that, as the name suggests, is more diverse.

But the way Söhnlein tells the story, this zero sum mind-set is the result of a relatively recent historical quirk: For most of the history of human exploration, private funding was the order of the day. Even some of the most famous examples of state-backed exploration—Christopher Columbus’ long petitioning of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, for instance, or Sir Edmund Hillary’s quest to climb to the top of Everest—were actually funded primarily by private investors or nonprofits.

But that changed with the Cold War, when the race to the moon was fueled by government money and gushers of defense spending wound up channeled into submarine development and other oceangoing tech.

“That does lead to an either/or mentality. That federal money is taxpayer money which has to be accounted for, and it is a finite pool that you have to draw from against competing needs, against health care, science, welfare,” says Söhnlein. “In the last 10 to 15 years, we are seeing a renaissance of private finding of exploration ventures. On the space side we call it New Space, on the ocean side we have similar ventures.” And the austerity of the current moment doesn’t hurt. “The private sector is stepping up as public falls down. We’re really returning to the way it always was.”

And when it’s private dough, the whole thing stops being a competition. Instead, it depends on what individuals with deep pockets are pumped about—or what makes for a good sell on a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter.

Looking for alien life forms? You probably think you’re a natural space nerd, but you’re wrong. If the eternal popularity of “Is There Life on Mars?” stories is any indication, an awful lot of people are just hoping for some company. We really have no idea what’s hanging out at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but there are solid reasons to think the prospects for biological novelty (and perhaps even companionship for humanity) are better down there than they are in Mars’ Valles Marineris.

Want a fallback plan for when that final environmental catastrophe occurs? Underwater or floating habitats may offer fewer challenges than space colonies if you’re looking to quickly build a self-sustaining place to live when things cool down, warm up, dry out, or otherwise return to fitness for human habitation.

If you’re just looking for wide open spaces, the vastness of space may ultimately prove your final frontier, but Söhnlein has a very human take on the question: “For myself,” he says, “I’d probably go with the oceans. Humanity has millennia to explore the cosmos. But I have only decades or—depending on who you believe—centuries. And there’s plenty to discover down there to fill my lifetime.”

This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.

MySlate is a new tool that lets you track your favorite parts of Slate. You can follow authors and sections, track comment threads you’re interested in, and more.

Slate Articles

Is the Ocean the Real Final Frontier?

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Fukushima: Since 2011, 300 Tons of contaminated Water Daily into Ocean

Global Research – by Russia Today

Contaminated groundwater accumulating under the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has risen 60cm above the protective barrier, and is now freely leaking into the Pacific Ocean, the plant’s operator TEPCO has admitted.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which is responsible for decommissioning the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, on Saturday said the protective barriers that were installed to prevent the flow of toxic water into the ocean are no longer coping with the groundwater levels, Itar-Tass reports.

An aerial view shows workers wearing protective suits and masks work at a construction site (C) of the shore barrier to stop radioactive water from leaking into the sea at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on August 9, 2013. (Reuters/Kyodo)

The contaminated groundwater, which mixes with radioactive leaks seeping out of the plant, has already risen to 60cm above the barriers – the fact which TEPCO calls a major cause of the massive daily leak of toxic substances.

Earlier on Friday, the company announced it started pumping out contaminated groundwater from under Fukushima, and managed to pump out 13 tons of water in six hours on Friday. TEPCO also said it plans to boost the pumped-out amount to some 100 tons a day with the help of a special system, which will be completed by mid-August. This will be enough to seal off most of the ongoing ocean contamination, according to TEPCO’s estimates.

However, Japan’s Ministry of Industry has recently estimated that some 300 tons of contaminated groundwater have been flowing into the ocean daily ever since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the disaster.

TEPCO also promised it will urgently reinforce the protective shields to keep radioactive leaks at bay. The company has repeatedly complained it is running out of space and has had to resort to pumping water into hastily-built tanks of questionable reliability, as more than 20,000 tons of water with high levels of radioactive substances has accumulated in the plant’s drainage system.

Water samples recently taken at an underground passage below the Fukushima nuclear plantshowed extreme levels of radiation comparable to those taken immediately after the March 2011 catastrophe. The tested water, which had been mixing with ground water and flowing into the ocean, contained 2.35 billion Becquerels of cesium per liter – some 16 million times above the limit.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-since-2011-300-tons-of-contaminated-water-daily-into-ocean/5345640

Fukushima: Since 2011, 300 Tons of contaminated Water Daily into Ocean

Saturday, June 15, 2013

The Week In Numbers: Saturn"s Moon Hides An Ocean, New Human Body Part Discovered, And More

By Rose Pastore Posted 06.14.2013 at 6:00 pm

Saturnian moon Dione Icy Dione in front of Saturn. The horizontal stripes near the bottom of the image are Saturn’s rings. Images taken on Oct. 11, 2005, with blue, green and infrared spectral filters were used to create this color view, which approximates the scene as it would appear to the human eye. NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

700 miles: the diameter of Dione, an icy moon of Saturn that may be home to a subterranean ocean—and “astrobiological potential”

13 million light-years: the distance from Earth to this perplexing black hole, which appears to have recently gone quiet at the center of the Sculptor galaxy

Sleeping Black Hole: Click here to see this amazing image even larger! NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHU

1975: the year Lego added human figures to its toy sets. Since then, the figures have featured increasingly angry facial expressions, according to a new study

Angry Lego: Bartneck et al.

75: the average number of Lego bricks for every person on Earth

95 percent: the portion of people who fail to wash their hands properly after using a public restroom, a new bathroom-spying study has found

Wash your hands with soap, people: Seymour Nydorf via Wikimedia Commons

70,000 metric tons: the amount of commercial spent fuel stored in U.S. nuclear reactors. A start-up called Transatomic Power says it has designed a reactor that could use this fuel stockpile to power the U.S. for 70 years.

15 microns: the thickness of a newly discovered human body part (can you guess where it is?)

The human eye, now slightly less mysterious: Petr Novák via Wikimedia Commons

$ 399: the price of the just-announced PlayStation 4, which will feature streaming gaming, new titles, and no restrictions on on used games

Sony PlayStation 4 Hardware: Sony

78 percent: the portion of Iceland’s energy production that comes from volcanoes. (An ambitious experiment aims to use a volcano in Oregon to power the U.S.—but there’s a pesky earthquake problem.)

Obsidian Flow At Newberry Volcano: Joshua Schreiner

30,000: the population of Songdo, South Korea, one of the world’s most successful eco-cities. A pneumatic waste-collection system transports garbage by tube instead of by truck, and Songdo’s parking garages come with charging stations for electric cars.

Big Dreams : Songdo in South Korea already has 30,000 residents. SJ. Kim/Getty Images

40 percent: the portion of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 that have at least one tattoo. Ever wonder what makes tattoos permanent?

The Week In Numbers: Saturn"s Moon Hides An Ocean, New Human Body Part Discovered, And More