Skiff festival

49ers are without doubt the fastest and probably the most temperamental Olympic class sailboat, particularly now that the Tornado catamarans have been shut out of the 2012 London games.

These planing dinghies carry a lot of canvas, and their crews are engaged in a constant, high-speed balancing act as the tippy craft rocket around at speeds many power boats can't match.

iPhone app helped find lost boat

From BBC News

A vessel in distress on the Ireland waterways between Kesh and Enniskillen owes its happy ending to an iPhone application.

Motor cruiser, the Wee Rascal, called 999 in the early hours of Sunday morning asking for assistance as the weather worsened.

However, an extensive search of the area around its reported position by Enniskillen RNLI and the Erne Coastguard Rescue team was fruitless.

With no flares, flash lights or VHF radio onboard, the Wee Rascal was unable to signal its position to rescuers.

It was then that the Belfast Coastguard resorted to mobile phone technology a locator iPhone app was able to give rescuers the vital latitude and longitude they needed.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency said the cruiser was finally located 25 miles away from its reported position, dangerously amongst the rocky shoreline off Eagle Point ("Gubnagole Point").

It was brought away from the rocks by Enniskillen and taken to the safety of Belleek marina.

Coastguard Watch Manager Steven Carson said it was a "combination of luck and technology" that saved those onboard.

"They had charts on board but obviously no real idea of how to get to their destination or how to report their position in an emergency," he continued.

"Vital hours were wasted eliminating one possible location after another, time that we wouldn't have had if the vessel had struck the rocks and sunk."

"I hope that this experience will help the crew to realize why navigation training is essential for all mariners, whether you're on a lough or the open sea."

Links :

• Northern Ireland News : Dramatic boat rescues in high winds

Pioneers of modern ocean science meet to launch book

From Hydro International

Today, almost one hundred ocean scientists who once worked at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) near Godalming, UK, are to meet at Southampton's National Oceanography Centre to launch of a book "Of Seas and Ships and Scientists".
The event will be co-hosted by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) and by the book's publishers, Lutterworth Press.
It will feature photographs and material of the NIO era held in the NOC archives.

The book describes the origins of NIO in the inter-war years and during World War II, and its development under the charismatic leadership of the late Sir George Deacon.
The book's chapters are all written by former NIO scientists and are filled with personal anecdotes, descriptions of doing science at sea and of the groundbreaking discoveries made in the 1950s, 60s and 70s that underpin present day marine science.

The book shows how the institute's science changed our understanding of the world's oceans.
This book captures the excitement of a formative phase of UK science during and immediately following WWII.
It links back to scientists working at Antarctic whaling stations and the complimentary voyages of Captain Scott's Discovery that explored the vast icy Southern Ocean, funded by a tax on whale oil.
In the depths of WWII a small group of young scientists were brought together under the inspirational leadership of Dr (later Sir) George Deacon, and shortly after the end of the war, the UK's first National Institute of Oceanography was formed.
The discoveries from 50 years ago underpin our modern-day science.
The book's chapters are all written and edited by NIO scientists and convey the atmosphere of work at sea in a bygone age before small computers, satellite navigation and easy communication.
The book is A useful introduction for students of marine and/or environmental science.
It will appeal to many scientists and the general public, to those interested in science and innovation during and after WWII and of course to many living in the Surrey who always wondered what went on in the leafy lanes that were home to NIO and its successors for almost 50 years.

The book was the idea of Dr John Gould of the NOC who also worked at NIO.
His co-editors are :
• Sir Anthony Laughton a geophysicist, who from 1978 to 1988 was Director of the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, NIO's successor.
• Professor Howard Roe, a biologist who later became Director of the Southampton Oceanography Centre (1999 - 2005) and,
• "Tom" Tucker, an expert of ocean instrumentation who in 1944 at the age of 19 joined the Admiralty's Group "W" (for waves) that became part of NIO.

Despite being more 30 miles from the sea, the NIO was Britain's first truly national laboratory for studying the oceans and was the forerunner of the National Oceanography Centre.

It's amazing what a duck can teach you

Mapping ocean currents with rubber toys

From Robert Fulford, National Post

In 1992, thousands of rubber duckies and other bathtub toys fell from a ship during a storm in the Pacific and began to circle the Earth on a voyage that lasted more than 16 years.
Their arrival on beaches from Australia to England delivered to oceanographers fresh data about currents and gave the world yet another metaphor for global interconnection.
That metaphor went to work most recently in Water (MIT Press), a thick paperback that's part of Alphabet City, a series of anthologies edited in Toronto by John Knechtel.

Route taken by the Friendly Floatees initially lost in the Pacific Ocean in 1992.

Timothy Stock, a philosophy professor in Britain, uses that famous shipment in an essay, The Waters of Metaphysics.
After quoting Plato ( "all things are the offspring of flow and motion"), he writes about the ancient Greek idea that the ocean was the birthplace of the gods and the modern conviction that all elements eventually move through the ocean, thereby through the food chain.
And, as he says, evolution reminds us that it was in the oceans that the first signs of life appeared.

The message of Water seems especially striking in this tragic summer, shadowed by the BP explosion and vast pollution in the Gulf of Mexico.
Knechtel and his contributors set out to explore the hazards afflicting the oceans and also bring their readers alive to the poetry inherent in water.
Humans have always regarded water with awe but not necessarily respect.
We know that without the oceans we are lost but we also seem to believe that we can mistreat them without risk.
Perhaps the summer of 2010 will change the place we give to water in our collective imagination.

Water, in the eccentric tradition of Alphabet City, contains a visual study of the 1997 Manitoba flood, interpretations of Niagara Falls, an examination of the branding of bottled waters, some Arnaud Maggs pictures of mould formations staining the pages of a water-damaged ledger from the days of Yukon gold prospecting and a short story about a woman in her bath living through a depression while brooding about Pierre Bonnard's gorgeous bath paintings of his wife and mistress.
Knechtel also includes the score of a piece of music written by Melissa Grey as accompaniment to the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, complete with stills from the film and cues connecting music to the pictures (SHOWER CURTAIN OPEN ... KNIFE).

Ravine City, by Chris Hardwicke, is an eloquent piece about a way to rebuild Toronto by opening up the city's many buried streams and rivers.
Hardwicke would restore the city's natural water cycle and line the ravines with terraced housing and gardens working in symbiosis with the city's watersheds.

Water, just by mentioning the case of the rubber duckies, sent me scurrying off in search of the definitive work on that subject and its implications, Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science (Smithsonian Books: Harper Collins), by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano, published last year.

When I first heard the outlines of this story the phrase "urban myth" danced through my head. It seemed too good to be true. Ebbesmeyer persuaded me otherwise.

It began Jan. 10, 1992, when a container ship, en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Wash., ran into a hurricane near the international dateline.
The waves were so powerful that they broke some of the steel cables holding the huge containers, releasing 12 of them over the side.
One that was lost held 28,800 Friendly Floatee bathtub toys, made in China for The First Years Inc. of Avon, Mass.
They were red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and, of course, yellow ducks.

We might expect that elaborate wrapping around the toys would have dragged them straight to the bottom.
But they managed to escape five levels of packing, from the heavy steel containers (violent waves opened the door latches) to the plastic and paper boxes (water pulped the cardboard) before finally floating free.

It took 10 months for the first 10 Floatees to reach shore near Sitka, Alaska, having been swept along by the Subpolar Gyre, the ocean current in the Bering Sea.
By then they had covered about 3,200 km and two oceanographers in Seattle, Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, were tracking their progress.
(Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham were already studying 61,000 Nike running shoes that had fallen in the ocean two years earlier. -see 'Hansa Carrier' below-)

A few months later another 20 toys reached Alaska.
By August 1993, 400 more had been found along the shores of the Gulf of Alaska. Ingraham logged them in his OSCURS (Ocean Surface Currents Simulation), a program that calculates the course of wind and currents.
Other toys, after following a circuitous route to Washington state, began arriving there in 1996.

The oceanographers predicted that some toys would drift north, get locked in Arctic ice, then eventually be released.
In a few years they could move across the Pole to the Atlantic. Then where would they go? Eventually they arrived in Maine, Iceland, Newfoundland, the U.K. and Germany.

The last of the survivors continued to float, Ebbesmeyer says, "bleached and battered but still recognizable after 16 years." Well, the manufacturer said they were designed to survive 52 dishwasher cycles.

Ebbesmeyer approaches this narrative with a cheerful buoyancy: "These high-seas drifters offer a new way of looking at the seas. Call it 'flotsametrics.'
It's led me to a world of beauty, order and peril I could not have imagined even after decades as a working oceanographer."
He loves his status as flotsam headquarters for data sent back by the world's 1,000 or so dedicated beachcombers.

It's a joyful story of discoveries he tells in his book.
But he brings the reader back to Earth, and starts us thinking again about BP, when he describes the seabed slowly filling with bits of plastic that poison the fish and eventually the humans who eat them.
Thousands of containers fall into the sea every year, creating an oceanic junkyard.

And the junk never disappears.
These days beachcombers keep coming across flotsam antiques, like a plastic ball decorated with 40-year-old cartoon characters or Japanese glass buoys for fishing nets that haven't been used in half a century.
These relics are fascinating bits of the past, but when it comes to the fate of the oceans, perhaps beachcombers have stumbled upon the melancholy truth.

Links :

• DailyMail : Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey
• Hansa Carrier : map
• Of shoes and ships and rubber ducks and a message in a bottle (Keith C. Heidorn)

Route duplication fixed

We discovered a naughty bug that plagued the map performance.

Under some (hopefully) quite rare circumstances some routes happened to be duplicated over and over, and up to several dozen times for worst cases.
The consequences were not immediately visible, but this affected the routes and way points listings, and also it made the map page run very slowly.

This issue has been fixed tonight, feel free to report any unexpected behavior through the feedback service (middle right of the page).

Sorry for any inconveniences you might have suffered.

Canada searches for Sir John Franklin’s rescue ship

Franklin Expedition Map (hi-res) Based on British Admiralty Chart of 1927
Showing the Various Positions in Which Relics Have Been Found [map]. Scale not given.
In: North West Territories and Yukon Branch of Dept. of the Interior.
Canada's Western Arctic Report on Investigations in 1925-26, 1928-29, and 1930. Ottawa: 1931.

From Mary Ormsby, TheStar

The HMS Investigator never found the doomed Franklin expedition and sank, as did Franklin’s Terror and Erebus

It was 1850, and Sir John Franklin, a famed, seafaring explorer, was overdue in England by three years. He was lost in the Arctic with 128 crewmen and two cutting-edge, steam-propelled vessels, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, and the government wanted answers.

The Royal Navy ordered Robert McClure to try and find them.

As a rescuer, McClure failed spectacularly. He never spotted the Franklin expedition. The ship he commanded, HMS Investigator, was ice-bound in Mercy Bay for two years. And amid questionable leadership, McClure abandoned ship.

Yet McClure, who was himself rescued by another British ship, ultimately sailed up the Thames a hero for doing what Franklin could not: he charted and then traversed (by ship and sledge over ice) the Northwest Passage.

Though their lives diverged dramatically — Franklin and his men died on frozen tundra while McClure was knighted and showered with cash — the legacies of both are bound by a watery historical note: their ships lie on the ocean floor beneath Canada’s Arctic Archipelago.

But maybe not for long.

For the first time in 160 years, a search party will look for the sunken Investigator, which a team of Canadian scientists, archeologists and surveyors believe might be easier to spot than Franklin’s elusive tandem.

If the Investigator is found, Inuvialuit oral history will be validated for knowing where the intact ship sank, says Parks Canada marine archeologist Ryan Harris.

“We believe the HMS Investigator is still in Mercy Bay, (and) I’m more sanguine that we are going to find Investigator than I am about Erebus and Terror.”

Harris will be leading the underwater search off Banks Island in late July.

“We have more specific information to go on,” continues Harris, referring to Inuvialuit testimony and a large, on-shore trove of artifacts coined “McClure’s Cache.”

The exploration is part of a two-pronged Parks Canada plan. A team will spend 12 days looking for Investigator in Mercy Bay at the northern tip of Aulavik National Park, and then they will resume an ongoing Canadian quest to locate Terror and Erebus further south, off O’Reilly Island, for three weeks in August.

Franklin’s missing ships are designated a national historic site wherever it is, exactly, they rest — and they may not be near each other.

The Franklin expedition virtually disappeared into Canada’s unforgiving north during its 1845 quest to find the Northwest Passage, a Victorian horror story that’s haunted imaginations ever since. A trail of skeletons, a handful of relics, notes in a cairn and Inuit tales of starving, desperate men staggering to their doom are the only clues to the maritime mystery.

For both Parks Canada expeditions, side-scan sonar systems will be used to find objects superimposed on the ocean floor. If something merits a closer look, a small, remote-operated vehicle will be dropped in the water to shoot video — no human divers are going in. Canadian Hydrographic Service personnel will be on hand, too, using sonar waves to map the ocean floor which, at Mercy Bay and O’Reilly Island, is virtually uncharted.

That mapping of virgin ocean floor may also bolster Canada’s push to assert sovereignty over its Arctic waters, a politically charged area with claims from countries including Russia and the United States.

Harris’s optimism about Investigator is also buoyed by survivor accounts of their entrapment in the ice, accounts that include detailed journals kept by McClure and his ship’s surgeon, along with detailed sketches drawn on site by naval officer Samuel Gurney Cresswell.

Meanwhile, the Inuvialuit recollection of the Investigator’s sinking is promising because ships tend to drop straight down and stay put, Harris says. However, the depth of the bay is critical: deep is good, shallow is not. Heaving, rafting ice can destroy a vessel if it’s too close to the surface and scour it clean of historical clues.

The second part of the Investigator project is to study “McClure’s Cache” — the emergency provisions left behind, a common Royal Navy practice at the time to assist ships in distress. However, this cache functioned as a valuable supply depot for the Inuvialuit, the indigenous people of the area.

Banks Island is home to 40,000 musk oxen — the largest isolated population in Canada — along with wolves, Arctic foxes, lemmings, endangered Peary caribou and polar bears. Trees are absent and plant life is scarce, with the tallest stems only a few centimetres high, said Ifan Thomas, Parks Canada’s superintendent for the western Arctic and lead archeologist in the cache study.

So when rare materials such as wood, extra rigging, barrels, small boats and rope were piled up on shore, Inuvialuit used some of it: the cache “became a forest where there wasn’t a forest,” says Thomas, lead archeologist in the land study.

Thomas notes that for about 50 years, local hunters and trappers made annual journeys to McClure’s store of goods. Though its existence has long been known, it hasn’t been thoroughly or scientifically examined. Thomas hopes material salvaged from the ship might have been stored at the cache and may provide more information regarding the whereabouts and condition of Investigator.

There are also at least two grave sites near the cache, possibly three.

All three ships are in desolate, inhospitable regions heavily encased by ice and difficult to reach even with modern technology and transportation — and, to date, lightly studied and mapped. Harris says it’s unlikely anyone has tried to find Investigator because, until recent years, Mercy Bay has “almost never thawed” — it’s 74 degrees north and carved into Canada’s westernmost archipelago island — with towering, frozen cliffs for much of the year and floes so thick icebreakers don’t often challenge nearby McClure Strait for access.

Just getting to Mercy Bay will be a logistical feat. The Investigator party will fly in with all supplies on a Twin Otter equipped with tundra tires (to land on permafrost and not get stuck). It’s nearly a five-hour flight from Inuvik to a park spot called Polar Bear Cabin, then a 30-minute helicopter ride to the search site.

Besides fresh water and food, all equipment will be flown in: Zodiac boats, fuel, generators, tents, cooking gear, scientific gizmos and electric fencing to keep curious polar bears away from the campsite. But all that is for naught if the thick ice prevents the Zodiacs from manoeuvring.

“It’s the most ephemeral window of just a couple of weeks a year where it might open up enough to survey,” says Harris, who adds that the forecast for this summer is good, with ice breaking up earlier than usual.

As to the location of the Erebus and Terror, their resting places are just part of the puzzle shrouding the fate of Franklin’s men, none of whom were found alive.

Does Harris have any inkling of where the Erebus and Terror are — or how far apart they might be?

“I only wish we did,” says the marine scientist, a member of Parks Canada’s first search party in 2008. In 2009, the second of three-planned expeditions was scrapped when no icebreaker was available.

“We’re fairly confident we’re looking in the right direction, but it’s a big ocean. A discovery could happen at any point (or) it could be years before we’re lucky enough to find it.”

The Parks Canada team will use Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier for three weeks in August for their Franklin research around O’Reilly Island, south of King William Island where the lost captain died in 1847.

Like the Inuvialuit helping the Investigator project, Inuit testimony has shaped the O’Reilly Island operation, with information that one ship drifted further south than previously believed.

“Various Inuit stories are full of rich detail of actually coming on board one of the ships as it was trapped in ice,” Harris says, noting that the Inuit reported seeing a sailor dead in his bunk. “There was some evidence it had been re-manned by at least a small skeleton crew and it was probably abandoned again.”

Harris said the locals saw this ship — it’s unknown if it was Erebus or Terror — after crews fled it and likely encountered the starving sailors somewhere along their final, fatal march. That ship later sank with the Inuit recalling its masts projecting above the ice-choked water.

The Canadian team, like many other Franklin searchers before it, hope to uncover more clues about the 1845 expedition. A cairn note stated the captain was among two dozen who’d died by 1848 but nothing is known about the 100 or so who trekked south, presumably to horrific deaths, without food, heat, water or much sunlight.

There’s an international interest in finding Franklin’s wrecks as a way to track climate change.

English polar expert Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at Cambridge, said if ship journals sank with Erebus and Terror, the impeccable record-keeping of British sailors would likely provide reams of Arctic weather and navigational data.

“Amazingly, printed paper seems to survive being in the ocean,” Wadhams says in an email, noting that newspapers recovered from the Titanic are still readable. (Harris says paper cartridges for gunpowder and musket balls were recovered in excellent shape from a 17th century wreck in the St. Lawrence.)

“If the ships are found and their logs contain weather information, this will be valuable for understanding climate change in the Arctic over the interval of 160-plus years,” Wadhams continues, noting pencil entries would be hardier than ink on paper.

A century and a half ago, the English climate was good for McClure.

He was given a perfunctory court martial upon his 1854 return, then pardoned, and then rewarded with 10,000 British pounds — a fortune shared among him and his crew. Though McClure’s decisions during his failed rescue of the Franklin team were criticized — it was suggested he wanted sick crew members to die in order to save dwindling food supplies for the healthy — he was promoted to vice admiral and sought other adventures abroad.

But he never returned to the Canadian Arctic, the place of his greatest triumph and, possibly, his greatest dread.

Links :

• Canadian GeoGraphic : Sir John Franckin Expedition
• CBC News : Search for Franklin's lost ships to resume
• Marine GeoGarage geolocalization (no CHS chart)
  

Gender-bending fish problem in Colorado Creek mitigated by treatment plant upgrade

Researchers study the health of fish

exposed to endocrine-disrupting chemicals polluting the waterway
that can cause male fish to be feminized and decline in numbers.

From University of Colorado

Male fish are taking longer to be "feminized" by chemical contaminants that act as hormone disrupters in Colorado's Boulder Creek following the upgrade of a wastewater treatment plant in Boulder in 2008, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

But the problem of fish feminization -- which causes males to develop characteristics of females and to decline in numbers -- is a global one that is growing as a result of increasing chemicals like natural human reproductive steroids, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, shampoos and soaps making their way into waterways, said CU-Boulder Professor David Norris, who led the study.

Norris, a professor of integrative physiology at CU-Boulder, said the multimillion-dollar general upgrade of the Boulder Wastewater Treatment plant northeast of Boulder, Colo., designed to solve multiple problems has had a dramatic effect on delaying symptoms of male fish feminization. The team compared fish populations below the wastewater treatment plant on Boulder Creek in 2006 before it had upgraded and again after the upgrade had been completed.

Norris participated in a press briefing at the Endocrine Society's 92nd annual meeting held June 19-22 in San Diego. Other team members included Alan Vajda of the University of Colorado Denver, Ashley Bolden and John Woodling of CU-Boulder, Larry Barber of the U.S. Geological Survey's Water Resource Division in Boulder and Heiko Schoenfuss of St. Cloud University in Minnesota.

In the 2006 study Norris and his colleagues used a mobile fish exposure facility situated on Boulder Creek northeast of Boulder that collected both water from upstream of the plant and effluent water directly from the treatment plant. After exposure to equal parts of effluent and upstream water for only seven days, adult male fathead minnows became feminized, looking and acting like females and showing elevated levels of a protein known as vitellogenin that is normally produced by females.

Contaminants identified in Boulder Creek included ethinylestradiol -- a chemical used in most contraceptives -- as well as other reproductive steroids produced naturally by humans. Estrogen-related chemicals found in the water included bisphenyl A and phthalates associated with plastic, nonylphenols associated with detergents, and pesticides. Most of the compounds came from products flushed down toilets and drains, according to Norris.

In the new study following the treatment plant upgrade, the team studied adult male fathead minnows in 100 percent effluent water, those in a mixture of half effluent and half upstream water, and those in tanks containing all upstream water. Norris and his team saw no effects on male sex characteristics of the minnows in the tank containing 100 percent effluent water directly from the treatment plant until 28 days after exposure.

As part of the study, Norris and his colleagues also analyzed reproductive organs from preserved fish specimens from CU's Museum of Natural History that had been collected from Boulder Creek between 50 and 100 years ago. The researchers and found no evidence of feminized or intersex fish in the museum specimens, he said.

The CU research team also tested brown trout populations below a wastewater treatment in Vail, Colo., said Norris. The trout showed no increases in vitellogenin.

In addition to chemicals that trigger fish feminization, biologists are finding increased concentrations of fluoxetine, a common antidepressant taken by millions of Americans, in waterways across the nation, said Norris. Fluoxetine has been shown to enter the brains of fish and affect fish behavior, said Norris.

Between 2000 and 2002, Norris and his group were among the first in the nation to document the problem of intersex fish following their stream surveys of Boulder Creek, the South Platte River near Denver and Fountain Creek near Colorado Springs in 2000. The researchers found feminized fish at all of the sites and as well as skewed sex ratios showing there were more females than males. Since that time biologists have been reporting feminized male fish and intersex fish in waterways across the globe.

"I look at the problem of fish feminization in waterways as a canary in a mine shaft," said Norris. "This is not the problem of water treatment plants, it's our problem as human beings. We excrete natural and synthetic estrogens and use shampoos, detergents and cosmetics containing a variety of hormone disrupters that wind up in waterways. All of these different chemicals we are putting into the environment have the potential to alter the biology of animals and to affect ecosystems."

It boils down to a growing human population problem, he said. Ways to mitigate effects of chemicals include using reduced amounts of detergents and shampoos. Another way people can lessen the problem is to avoid antibacterial soaps, which can disrupt thyroid function in fish.

"People have shown they can consciously mitigate some of these issues," said Norris. "One example is the refusal of some to buy milk from cattle that contain growth hormones."

He said the bulk of all pharmaceuticals people ingest generally wind up in urine and feces within 24 hours and are flushed or drained into treatment plants. In addition, chemicals from plastics and canned food can pass through humans and travel into waterways, affecting fish populations as well as the health of people. "Our bodies are being exposed every day to a variety of chemicals capable of altering our physiological development, including impacts on sensitive human fetuses."

The research was supported by grants from the Environmental Protection Agency and the city of Boulder. The next step of the team will be to re-survey some of Colorado waterways using a grant from the National Science Foundation.

UPDATE : Marine GeoGarage mobile apps & IOS4

Version 1.0.1 compatible with IOS4 is available online right now.

Get updates :

Marine NZ
Marine US

Image of the week : swirling cloud art

This is not art, but it looks like

This false-colour Envisat image (credits : ESA), acquired on 6 June 2010, highlights a unique cloud formation south of the Canary Island archipelago, some 95 km from the northwest coast of Africa (right) in the Atlantic Ocean.

Seven larger islands and a few smaller ones make up the Canaries; the larger islands are (left to right): El Hierro, La Palma, La Gomera, Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, off the coast of North West Africa.

We can see, in particular, von Karman vortices formed by the cloud over the Canary Islands, colliding with the islands in their movement as the clouds form these beautiful swirls whose theoretical description is due to the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Karman.

Links :

• Other Von Karman vortices image from Landsat (2002)
• Clouds Streets and von Karman votices, Greenland Sea (2009) from NASA