The Plymouth capsize club

Race day two at the America's Cup World Series in Plymouth saw some blustery conditions, leading to three boats in the afternoon fleet race capsizing... spectacularly

New hi-tech boat swims like a killer whaler

Killer whale Seabreacher watercraft

From TechNewsDaily

A new watercraft is giving wealthy adventure-seekers a taste of what it’s like to zip through the water like a killer whale.

Innespace's Seabreacher Y vessel — which resembles a killer whale and is similar in size and dimension — is part submarine, part speedboat and can even leap out of the water.

With a 260-horsepower supercharged engine that propels the vessel 55 mph on the surface and 20 mph underwater, the custom-made two-seater can be launched 16 feet into the air when it breaches.
A snorkel-mounted video camera transmits live video to LCD screens for the pilot and passenger during dives, and it also comes with GPS navigation and an on-board stereo system with iPod docking.

The vessels cost about $86,000 each.
Since Seabreacher boats are built to order and no two are alike due to owner customization, they aren't immediately available for purchase.
About 30 requests are on back-order, according to the company.

"Most of those who buy our vessels are wealthy eccentric people that love obscure toys and adrenaline sports," Innespace co-owner Rob Innes told TechNewsDaily.
"Many aren't even boat enthusiasts. However, we make sure all pilots are trained so they know how to operate the vessel."

"It doesn't seem scary from the outside, but it's completely different on the inside as you are submerged underwater and then propel high above the surface — there’s nothing like it," Innes said.

This isn't the first time Innespace launched a boat line that looks like mammals.
In previous years, the company introduced shark and dolphin-shaped vessels, which are still available for purchase.

Links :

• YouTube : Discovery Channel's "Next World" featuring the Innespace Seabreacher
• Soundings : Seabreacher has amazing capabilities
  

Europe's Galileo sat-nav spacecraft ready to fly

From BBC

Europe's first two Galileo satellite-navigation spacecraft are ready for launch.

The platforms passed a key technical review at the weekend, paving the way for their flight to orbit on a Russian Soyuz rocket on 20 October.
One satellite has already made the journey to the launch complex in French Guiana; the second will ship this week.

The European Commission is investing billions of euros in its own version of the American GPS system.
It expects Galileo to bring significant returns to the 27-nation bloc's economies in the form of new businesses that can exploit precise timing and location data delivered from space.

The first two satellites are pathfinders for the system as a whole.
Together with another pair of spacecraft to be lofted next year, they will validate the entire Galileo system, proving that it works as designed.
Consumers should begin using Galileo alongside GPS in 2015.

On Saturday, the EC's technical agent, the European Space Agency (Esa), formally took delivery of the first satellites from industry in the shape of a paper exercise known as a qualification acceptance review.

"Qualification means the satellites have successfully passed all tests and are considered ready to fly and support the intended mission in orbit over the 12-year lifetime," Esa's Galileo project manager Javier Benedicto told BBC News.

Both satellites are being transferred to the brand new Sinamary spaceport in French Guiana, the new home for commercial Soyuz launches.
In the coming weeks, the Galileo pair will undergo final checks, which will see their flight software loaded and their propulsion sub-systems being fuelled.
The last task will be to mate the duo to their Soyuz ST-B rocket.
The launcher will put the satellies in a medium-altitude orbit some 23,000km above the planet.

The In-Orbit Validation (IOV) spacecraft have been built by a consortium, including Europe's two heavyweight space companies - Astrium and Thales Alenia Space.
Astrium's role, at its UK centre in Portsmouth, was to integrate all the payload components, including hydrogen-maser atomic clocks, the ultra-precise time-pieces on which Galileo's performance depends.
Astrium satellites CEO Evert Dudok told BBC News: "With the qualification acceptance review done, it means the satellites are now in Esa's hands - although of course we will be supporting the launch preparation.

"This, if you like, finishes the development programme of Galileo; and with the launch next year of the third and fourth satellites, the in-orbit verification will start.
"With these satellites, Europe masters navigation technologies, at least to the level of the US - and since Galileo has a more modern signal structure, I personally think we are a little bit ahead of the US."

Galileo should have been operational by now but the project has run into myriad technical, commercial and political obstacles, including early objections from the US, who thought a rival system to GPS might be used to attack its armed forces.

The venture came very close to being abandoned in 2007 when the public-private partnership put in place to build and run the project collapsed.
To keep Galileo alive, EU member-states had to agree to fund the entire project from the public purse.
What should have cost European taxpayers no more than 1.8bn euros will now probably cost them in excess of 5bn euros.
The EU's continued commitment to the project despite severe budgetary and management failings is based on the belief that huge returns to the European economy will accrue from the investment.

Already, GPS is said to have spawned global markets that are worth several tens of billions of euros annually.

The new European constellation is expected to deepen and extend those markets as sat-nav functionality becomes ubiquitous in consumer devices such as mobile phones.

Links :

• ESA : First Galileo stellite touches down in French Guiana
• BBC : Q&A : Europe's Galileo project
• Defense Industry Daily : Galileo GPS project faces more ceratin future
  

Major threats foreseen due to Europe's changing marine environments

"Climate Change and The Global Ocean"
is the first episode in the six-part NASA series "Tides of Change"

From Eurekalert

Sea levels, erosion top public concerns

Europeans face greater risk of illness, property damage and job losses because of the impacts of climate change on the seas around them.

Worried citizens, whose biggest related top-of-mind concerns are sea level rise and coastal erosion, are taking personal actions to reduce carbon emissions.
However, they largely blame climate change on other groups of people or nations and assign governments and industry responsibility for mitigating the problem (though they perceive government and industry as ineffective on the issue).

Those are among the conclusions after scientists synthesized an extensive collection of academic papers published since 1998 on climate change and Europe's marine environments, combined with a groundbreaking companion poll of Europeans on the issues, commissioned as part of Project CLAMER, a collaboration of 17 European marine institutes.

The 200-page synthesis of more than 100 EU-funded projects, the public survey, a new book based on the scientific findings, and a major new documentary film will be featured at CLAMER's wrap-up meeting Sept. 14-15 in Brussels.

The research distillation captures a suite of documented and forecast physical, chemical and biological marine changes with far-reaching consequences, including sea-level rise, coastal erosion, melting ice, storm frequency and intensity, physical changes including the North Atlantic circulation system, chemical changes such as acidification and deoxygenation, changes in marine life patterns, and the ultimate impacts of all this on humans - both social and economic.

"We have amassed convincing and disturbing scientific evidence," says CLAMER co-ordinator Carlo Heip, Director of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.
"We need to communicate it much better than we have. We must all heed the clear warnings of the hazards we face from what amounts to an uncontrolled experiment on the marine environment."

Co-ordinated by the Marine Board of the European Science Foundation, with contributions from more than 20 scientists, the CLAMER synthesis and related book, both available to the public Sept. 13 at www.clamer.eu, examine the environments of the North Sea, Baltic Sea, Arctic Ocean, North-East Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.

The synthesis notes that it is difficult to predict precisely the impacts of climate change or attach cost estimates to them. As well, some impacts will be widespread while others will vary from place to place.

That said, the societal impacts forecast include:

Rising illness risk

Says the CLAMER synthesis: "Millions of euros in health costs may result from human consumption of contaminated seafood, ingestion of water-borne pathogens, and, to a lesser degree, through direct occupational or recreational exposure to marine diseases. Climatic conditions are playing an increasingly important role in the transmission of these diseases."

More specifically, a team of researchers from Italy, the UK, Germany and the USA recently found, for example, that warmer ocean water is causing a proliferation of bacteria from a genus known as Vibrio, among the most dangerous of all bacterial pathogens, which can produce serious gastroenteritis, septicemia and cholera.

Some types of the bacteria and micro-algae are linked to shellfish-associated food poisoning deaths.
Others harm marine animals, including mollusks and fish, "with major economic and environmental impacts," the researchers say.

Published in July in the Journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology, the paper reports "an unprecedented increase in the number of bathing infections that have been associated with warm-water Vibrio species in Northwest Europe," and a "globally-increasing trend in their associated diseases."

While the study was based on seawater samples taken near the mouth of Europe's Rhine River and Britain's Humber River, "the increasing dominance of marine Vibrios, including pathogenic bacterial species, may very likely occur in other areas around the world."

Says the paper: "We provide evidence that Vibrios, including the (cholera) species, increased in dominance within the plankton-associated bacterial community of the North Sea during the past 44 years and that this increase is correlated significantly with climate induced sea surface warming during the same period. ... Ocean warming is favouring the spread of Vibrios."

Property damage

Sea level rise, combined with higher waves being recorded in the North Atlantic and more frequent and severe storms, threaten up to 1 trillion Euros worth of Europe's physical assets within 500 m of the shore.
And some 35% of Europe's GDP is generated within 50 km, the synthesis notes.

"Sea-level rise of 80 to 200 cm could wipe out entire countries ... causing sea floods, massive economic damage, large movements of populations from inundated areas, salinity intrusion and loss of wetlands including the ecosystem services that they provide."

More frequent and intense storms, meanwhile, are projected for Northern Europe, especially in a band running from the south of England through northern France, Denmark, northern Germany and Eastern Europe.
Annual damages are expected to rise 21% in the UK, 37% in Germany and 44% across Europe as a whole, with a 104% rise in losses from 1-in-100 year storms.

Smaller fisheries and northward fish migrations

The CLAMER synthesis suggests the need for Europe's commercial fishery to reduce catches in places and make adjustments in others due to warming water, ocean acidification, and altered salinity and oxygen content.

"Some of the biggest [changes] will be required in Europe's seas, where temperatures are rising faster than the open North Atlantic," according to one research paper in the CLAMER collection.

Another warns of possible extinction of cod stocks in the Baltic Sea and calls for "a strategy ... to ensure the persistence of Baltic cod into the twenty-second century."

In the Mediterranean Sea, the catch of Aristeus antennatus, a valuable shrimp, may experience "a true collapse" as changes in sea temperatures dramatically reduce, or even stop, the transfer of nutrients to deep waters.

Ominously, the biggest reductions in fish populations are forecast for low-latitude regions, many of which are already impoverished and face the greatest loss of agricultural production due to increased drought and storms.
Researchers say the northern migration of some fish species poses a serious food security threat for poorer tropical countries where fish often constitute the largest source of protein.

The global pattern will apply to Europe, with the southern fisheries generally losing productivity while those in the north such as Greenland, Iceland and Norway are expected to gain.

With respect to the northward shift of fish species, the CLAMER synthesis notes one of the largest ever observed: the dramatic spread of the snake pipefish (Entelurus aequoreus ).
Prior to 2003, the fish was confined to the south and west of the British Isles.
It now extends as far north as the Barents Sea and Spitzbergen, about 3,000 km to the north.

European attitudes toward climate change and the marine environment

The online survey of 10,000 residents of 10 European countries -- 1,000 from each of Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Norway and Estonia -- reveals widespread concern about climate change, led by worries about sea level rise and coastal erosion.

Conducted in January by Brussels-based TNS Opinion, the survey is the first of its kind to focus on public perceptions of climate change impacts at the coast or in the sea.
The poll findings are further explained by in-depth research, carried out by UEA, that involved UK public participants in group discussions.

Highlights:

• Asked to select from a list the single most serious problem facing the world, 18% of respondents chose climate change, the second highest choice. By comparison, poverty and lack of food and drinking water was chosen by 31%, international terrorism by 16%, and a global economic downturn by 12%.

• Concern about climate change is undiminished since a Sept. 2009 "Euro-Barometer" survey conducted for the European Union, despite the cool winter of 2010 in Northern Europe and "climategate" attacks on the IPCC and climate scientists.

• Some 86% of respondents said climate change is caused entirely, mainly or in part by human activities. Only 8% thought it was mainly or entirely caused by natural processes; in the United States, around 32-36% hold this view.

• Asked to name in their own words "an important environmental issue of relevance to the coastline or sea," only 4% of respondents used the words "climate change," with most citing pollution or overfishing. However, several climate change-related impacts were frequently mentioned, notably coastal erosion, sea level rise, melting ice caps and flooding. Coastal erosion and/or sea level rise and/or climate change were cited by 24% and 27% of Irish and UK respondents respectively.

• Asked to comment on a list of 15 environmental issues related to the coasts or seas, respondents from all 10 countries said they had the greatest confidence in their understanding of, and were most concerned about, coastal pollution, over-fishing and melting sea ice. In last place, only 14% said they were informed about acidification of the oceans. However, nearly 60% expressed concern about that issue.

• Italian respondents claimed the greatest concern about issues on the list; those from Norway, the Netherlands and Estonia, the least.

• Not surprisingly, respondents living near the sea claimed more understanding and concern about all 15 issues than those further inland. But in an apparent paradox, Italy, the most southerly of the 10 countries, expressed the most concern about melting Arctic sea ice while Norway, the most northerly, voiced the least concern.

• Surprisingly, citizens of the low-lying Netherlands worry less about inundation than the 10-nation average (61% of Dutch survey participants cited sea level rise and coastal flooding as concerns compared with 70% across all 10 countries). Meanwhile, Dutch participants trusted their government to deal with climate change adaptation issues more than citizens of the other countries studied. And, compared with all other countries, a lower proportion of Dutch respondents foresaw "major economic impacts from coastal flooding" within the next 20 years.

• The in-depth research complimenting the survey explains that public concern and awareness depends on the extent to which issues are visible, subject to personal experience, or pose a direct threat to human populations. More remote and distant impacts are shown to be of little relevance to people's lives (such as ocean acidification). Even where there are already tangible and fairly immediate local implications, people still find it hard to make a personal connection with many marine climate change impacts. For instance, even people living in high risk areas seldom see themselves as personally at risk from sea level rise and associated coastal flooding.

• Asked when they thought particular climate change impacts would become apparent, over half of respondents in all 10 countries said 'changes in the frequency of extreme weather events (e.g. storms),' are already being felt.

• The poll found a high correlation between respondents who said they are more "concerned" about the impacts of climate change and those who said they think its impacts will come fairly soon. Those who declared themselves "highly concerned" tended to think they could already see these impacts happening. Females were more likely than males to say that impacts are already apparent and, in general, those under 24 and older than 65 were least likely to say that impacts are already apparent.

• Respondents' estimates of sea level rise and temperature change were generally in accord with scientific forecasts, suggesting "some fundamental messages are reaching the public," the survey report says. Citizens were able to accurately characterize changes in sea temperature that have occurred over the past 100 years, and they gave realistic predictions of anticipated sea temperature change as well as sea level rise in this century.

• Scientists working in universities or for environmental NGOs are trusted as a source of information about climate change impacts in the seas and ocean far more than government scientists or those working for industry. Men distrust all of the organizations and individuals listed more than women do, and in almost all cases, people over 35 expressed more distrust than those aged between 18 and 34.

• Personal actions taken by European citizens in response to marine climate change issues are shown to focus more on mitigating climate change (such as reducing energy use and using sustainable forms of transport) than adapting to its impacts (through protecting homes from flooding for example).

• Public support for actions by national governments and the European Union is shown to be highest for policies to protect and enhance marine environments (for example through tightening controls on pollution) and reducing carbon emissions, while measures to adapt to the impacts of climate change are ranked the lowest.

Links :

• WP : Scientific paper says bacteria dangerous to health are proliferating in warming oceans

Arctic ice cover hits historic low

Credits : CNES - Mercator Océan - MyOcean

From AFP

The area covered by Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point this week since the start of satellite observations in 1972, German researchers announced on Saturday.
"On September 8, the extent of the Arctic sea ice was 4.240 million square kilometres (1.637 million square miles).
This is a new historic minimum," said Georg Heygster, head of the Physical Analysis of Remote Sensing Images unit at the University of Bremen's Institute of Environmental Physics.
The new mark is about half-a-percent under his team's measurements of the previous record, which occurred on September 16, 2007, he said.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the record set on that date was 4.1 million sq km (1.6 sq mi).
The discrepancy, Heygster explained by phone, was due to slightly different data sets and algorithms.
"But the results are internally consistent in both cases," he said, adding that he expected the NSIDC to come to the same conclusion in the coming days.

Arctic ice cover plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool.
Retreating summer sea ice -- 50 percent smaller in area than four decades ago -- is described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale.

It is also further evidence of a strong human imprint on climate patterns in recent decades, the researchers said.
"The sea ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence," Heygster said in an statement released by the university.
"Climate models show, rather, that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic."

Albedo increases when an area once covered by reflective snow or ice -- which bounces 80 percent of the Sun's radiative force back into space -- is replaced by deep blue sea, which absorbs the heat instead.
Temperatures in the Arctic region have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the last half century.
The Arctic ice cover has also become significantly thinner in recent decades, though it is not possible to measure the shrinkage in thickness as precisely as for surface area, the statement said.
Satellite tracking since 1972 shows that the extent of Arctic sea ice is dropping at about 11 percent per decade.

NSIDC director Mark Serreze has said that summer ice cover could disappear entirely by 2030, leaving nothing but heat-trapping "blue ocean."
The NSIDC likewise monitors Arctic ice cover on a daily basis, but has not announced record-low ice cover.
Data posted on its website as of Saturday only covered the period through September 6.
By last week, it said, sea ice is almost completely gone from the channels of the Northwest Passage.
The southern route -- also known as Amunden's Route -- was also ice free, as was the Northern Sea Route along Siberia.

But even as the thaw opens shipping lanes, it disrupts the lives and livelihoods of indigenous peoples, and poses a severe threat to fauna, including polar bears, ice seals and walruses, conservation groups say.
"This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world," said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco.

The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, during the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian.
Air temperatures in the Arctic were warmer than today, and sea level was also four to six metres (13 to 20 feet) higher because the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets had partly melted.
Global average temperatures today are close to the maximum warmth seen during the Eemian.

Links :

• TheGuardian : The 'other' Arctic sea ice melt
• LiveScience : Arctic sea ice hits record low according to one measure
• YouTube : Animation of the melting season 2011
  

Artificial island could be solution for rising Pacific sea levels

The 'Lilypad' floating city, a concept by the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut

From BBC

Sea levels are rising so fast that the tiny Pacific state of Kiribati is seriously considering moving its 100,000 people on to artificial islands.
In a speech to the 16-nation Pacific Islands Forum this week, President Anote Tong said radical action may be needed and that he had been looking at a $2bn plan that involved "structures resembling oil rigs":
"The last time I saw the models, I was like 'wow it's like science fiction, almost like something in space. So modern, I don't know if our people could live on it. But what would you do for your grandchildren? If you're faced with the option of being submerged, with your family, would you jump on an oil rig like that? And [I] think the answer is 'yes'. We are running out of options, so we are considering all of them."

Kiribati is not alone. Tuvalu, Tonga, the Maldives, the Cook and the Solomon Islands are all losing the battle against the rising seas and are finding it tough to pay for sea defences.
Kiribati faces an immediate bill of over $900m just to protect its infrastructure.

But history shows there is no technological reason why the nation could not stay in the middle of the Pacific even if sea levels rose several feet.

The Uros people of Peru live on around 40 floating villages made of grasses in the middle of Lake Titicaca.
Equally, the city of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec predecessor of Mexico City that was home to 250,000 people when the Spaniards arrived, stood on a small natural island in Lake Texcoco that was surrounded by hundreds of artificial islands.

More recently, Holland, Japan, Dubai, and Hong Kong have all built artificial islands for airports, or new housing.
The mayor of London Boris Johnson has a vision of a giant international airport in the middle of the Thames estuary with five runways to replace Heathrow.

Kiribati could also take a lesson from the Maldives, where the rubbish of the capital city Male and the hundreds of tourist islands, is sent to the artificial island of Thilafushi.
It's growing about one square metre per day.

Neft Daslari, Stalin's city in the middle of the Caspian sea, is still operational after more than 60 years. At its peak it housed over 5,000 oil workers 34 miles off the Azerbaijan coastline.
It began with a single path out over the water and grew to have over 300km of streets, mainly built on the back of sunken ships.

Kiribati could emulate Spiral Island in Mexico.
This was constructed by British artist Richard "Rishi" Sowa on a base of 250,000 plastic bottles. The island was destroyed by Hurricane Emily in 2005 but is being rebuilt.
With millions of tonnes of rubbish already floating in the Pacific, and plans to collect it, Kiribati could solve two problems in one go.

But Tong's imagination has been stirred by a more futuristic vision. It's possible he's seen the "Lilypad" floating city concept by the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut.
This "ecopolis" would not only be able to produce its own energy through solar, wind, tidal and biomass but would also process CO2 in the atmosphere and absorb it into its titanium dioxide skin.

Bangkok architects S+PBA have come up with the idea of a floating "wetropolis" to replace eventually the metropolis of Bangkok.
They say that Bangkok is founded on marshes and with sea levels rising several centimetres a year and the population growing fast, it's cheaper and more ecologically sound to embrace the rising seas than fight them.

Stranger still could be the German architect Wolf Hilbertz's idea for a self-assembling sea city called Autopia Ampere.
Hilbertz plans to use the process of electrodeposition to create an island that would build itself in the water.
It would begin as a series of wire mesh armatures connected to a supply of low-voltage direct current produced by solar panels.
The electrochemical reactions would draw up sea minerals over time, creating walls of calcium carbonate on the armatures.

Islands have always fascinated political utopians, and now the billionaire hedge-fund manager and technology utopian Peter Thiel, has linked with Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and grandson of Nobel prize-winning free market economist Milton Friedman to envisage a libertarian floating country.

Their idea is to build a series of physically linked oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters.
The new state would be built by entrepreneurs and have no regulation, laws, no welfare, restrictions on weapons or moral code of ethics.
Eventually, millions of "seasteading" people would live there.

Plans for a prototype are said to have been drawn up for the first diesel-powered, 12,000-tonne structure with room for 270 residents.
Eventually, dozens – perhaps even hundreds – of these could be linked together, says Friedman who hopes to launch a flotilla of floating offices off the San Francisco coast next year.

In the end, it depends on money, which is in short supply for poor countries.
If the world puts up several billion dollars – as Tong and his people would probably prefer – it would be technically possible for Kiribati to stay where it is.

Realistically, though, Australia, New Zealand and larger Pacific states are likely to be leaned on heavily to provide land for the Kiribatians and the world can expect a series of evacuations over the next 30 years.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : "Recycled Island" turns ocean plastic into a paradise
• Tropical Island Paradise (Yacht Island Design) (DailyMail)
  

Amazing pictures of waves

One of the most amazing pictures ever taken by photographer Clark Little. He dedicated his life to produce these stunning photographs inside a breaking wave to give a unique vision of the power of the sea. (Clark Little/SWNS/Abaca)

Giant wave on the beach at Ke Iki, Hawaii, considered one of the best surf spots in the world. (Clark Little / SIPA)

All surfers in the world want to face it, while fear it. In French Polynesia, Teahupoo (the "wall of heads") is a powerful and sudden wave that emerges from the Pacific Ocean at high tide. The proximity of the reef (a few tens of centimeters from the surface when the depression is formed, leaving only a shallow draft) emphasizes the danger. (Peter Joli / Visual)

Teahupoo, Tahiti
Benjamin Thouard (Sea & Co ©)

The wave of Hokusai ... ! There are times when one would rather be elsewhere. Outside of Dungeons Reef, a legendary surf spot off Hout Bay, South Africa. Jake Kolnik (which was unhurt in the adventure!) is known as one of the best big wave surfers. He participated in by Rebel Sessions, a competition that lasts a hundred days, from July 15 to October 22, in which surfers from around the world defy the winter swell. Frisson guaranteed. Hunted by the objectives of the organizers, the best performance immortalized is then submitted to a jury of six professional surfing. (Nic Bothma / EPA / MAXPPP)

Very relaxed, South African surfer Josh Redman Tuesday faced the huge waves of Cape Town, on the southern tip of the country. From July to October each year, surfers play with the raging elements in the Rebel Sessions Awards where they offer a demonstration of their talents to many photographers. However, these shows remain dependent on the weather, sometimes capricious in that part of the globe. (Nic Bothma / EPA / MAXPPP)

Links :

• TreeHugger : The most beautiful waves...Ever (Clark Little Photography)