Arctic nations to bar fishing fleets from fast-thawing seas around the north pole

Protecting Fisheries in the International Waters of the Central Arctic Ocean 

from Oceans North Canada

From The Guardian

The United States, Russia and other Arctic nations signed an agreement on Thursday to bar their fishing fleets from fast-thawing seas around the north pole.

Arctic Ocean

The accord, also signed in Oslo by the ambassadors of Canada, Norway and Denmark, is a response to global warming, which is melting sea ice in the central Arctic Ocean, an area the size of the Mediterranean.

The deal had been delayed by more than a year by tensions over Ukraine.

The central Arctic probably has no commercial fish stocks now, experts say, but melting sea ice may draw fish such as cod farther north.

Forty percent of the area was briefly open water when summer sea ice shrank to a record low in 2012.

The deal “will prevent a problem from arising ahead of time,” said David Balton, US deputy assistant secretary of state for oceans and fisheries.

“Very little is known about this area of the ocean.”

“Climate change is affecting the migration patterns of fish stocks,” Norwegian foreign minister Boerge Brende said in a statement.

He said Arctic states had a responsibility to protect the international waters, starting 200 nautical miles (230 miles) from their coasts.

Thursday’s accord was negotiated in outline in Greenland in February 2014, to be signed in June 2014.

But Russian president Vladimir Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in March 2014, and in protest, both the United States and Canada boycotted one meeting of the Arctic Council last year in Moscow.

That protest “was the exception to the rule” of cooperation in the Arctic, Balton said.

Many other Arctic activities have remained on track with Russia, such as exercises linked to search and rescue and oil spills.

The Arctic states also want other major fishing nations – such as China, Vietnam, South Korea and all European Union states – to agree not to venture into the central Arctic Ocean.

“It’s a new ocean emerging,” said Scott Highleyman, director of international Arctic affairs at the Pew Charitable Trusts environmental group.

“It’s hugely encouraging – it’s hard to get governments’ attention for problems that haven’t occurred yet.”

The Chukchi sea near Shishmaref, Alaska, is part of the Arctic Ocean.

Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Greenpeace Arctic campaigner, Sophie Allain said that the agreement should have gone further: “With this agreement the Arctic States have recognised that the Arctic Ocean is an extraordinary environment which requires far better scientific understanding. But sadly they have missed the chance to deliver the permanent protection this area desperately needs ... This region should be declared a marine sanctuary, where all extractive practices, including oil production, are banned.”

Thursday’s agreement also called for more research into the Arctic marine resources.

The first fish likely to thrive are Arctic cod, also known as polar cod, which have a natural anti-freeze in their blood, said Alf Haakon Hoen, research director at the Norwegian Institute for Marine Research.

But authorities should be wary of allowing trawlers into the area, because of the threat to other species, such as polar bears, whales, seals and seabirds, he said.

The Arctic thaw is also opening the region to more oil and gas exploration and shipping.

The United States, the current chair of the eight-nation Arctic Council that includes Russia, plans to host an oil spill exercise in 2016.

Links :

• ThePew : Fisheries mapbook
• Greepeace : Arctic sanctuary
• ADN : 5 nations sign declaration to protect Arctic 'donut hole' from unregulated fishing

An ocean of data

 A $2 million competition to help heal our oceans
The Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE promises to improve our understanding of how CO2 emissions are affecting ocean acidification, with breakthrough sensors that can help us begin the process of healing our oceans.

From HuffingtonPost by Wendy Schmidt

I am an avid sailor, inspired not only by the visual beauty of the ocean and its vast power, but also by the practical (and potentially lifesaving) information that allows me to sail - the data on currents, winds and waves. It's the ocean we cannot see, but can measure.
Sailors have relied on this information for centuries, and as technology has improved, our ability to gather it has also improved.
Gathering data near the ocean's surface, where we can see and feel it, is relatively straightforward. The real challenge is grasping what's going on under the surface, out of sight.
We often hear about changes occurring in the ocean, such as warming, overfishing, pollution and ocean acidification.
But how do we know exactly what's going on without dependable information?

Our understanding of the ocean is limited because there are numerous difficulties in collecting data. Primarily, it's often very expensive; researchers can pay $10,000 or more per day simply to travel to the place where they want to gather information.
But beyond the expense, gathering data in the rough ocean environment can be time-consuming and physically difficult.
For many reasons, water samples from different depths have to be collected and brought up to the surface for analysis in labs, and it can be difficult to preserve the integrity of these samples.

Part of the reason for creating the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE was to address some of these challenges in gathering data about the ocean.
I want to spur innovation in pH sensors because we need more information on ocean acidification in varying coastal environments and at depth.
For the ocean, I want sensors that are accurate, durable, affordable and easy to use.

The Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE was launched in September 2013.
The competing sensors were put through three progressively difficult tests: one in pristine lab conditions, one in coastal waters, and one in the deep ocean - down to 3,000 meters (or almost two miles below the ocean's surface where I sail).
The finalist teams have developed pH sensors that can make measurements as accurate as water samples analyzed in a lab.
Their sensors are affordable and durable, and have shown that they can withstand the high pressures of the deep ocean and operate for a month or longer in rugged coastal locations.

 Of the 70 teams that competed for the XPrize, 18 of which delivered hardware, Sunburst Sensors, a small Montana company with just nine employees, rose to the top with a technology that can accurately measure the pH of the ocean for 10 to 15 times less money than anything else before it.

Sunburst Sensors takes home both top prizes in $2 million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE

 Sunburst Sensors strives to provide its customers high-quality chemical sensors for marine and freshwater applications.

The SAMI-CO2 and SAMI-pH (Submersible Autonomous Moored Instrument) have been deployed by researchers around the world interested in long term monitoring of pCO2 and pH.

Today, as we celebrate this leap in our ability to gather more data on ocean acidification, I also celebrate that the technological innovations that came out of this competition could potentially be applied to other ocean sensors.
We challenged our teams to develop sensors that go deeper and continue working in difficult environments. We challenged them to produce cheaper sensors.
We challenged them to make it easier to collect data about the oceans so we can be better stewards.
In applying our technical expertise to the ocean, it's possible to get good quality data and more of it. Armed with that information, we will be better equipped to address the many other challenges the ocean is facing.
We will be able to tell if there is a change, and the magnitude of that change.
With more data, we will be able to understand, and with that understanding, we can help the oceans.
And in helping the oceans, we will be helping the planet - and ourselves - to a healthier life, because it's all connected.

Links :

• OA-ICC : Ocean acidification

'Sharks don't like to eat people': attack statistics contradict untested theories

From The Guardian by Oliver Milman

More of us are in the water than ever before – and while we kill 100m of them every year, it seems that sharks just don’t like the way we taste

Mick Fanning’s close shave with a shark while competing in South Africa is likely to amplify mutterings from some ocean-goers over what they perceive as a dangerous escalation in shark numbers.

 Shark Attacks Mick Fanning at J-Bay Open

Any flurry of shark attacks spurs calls for something to be done.
Already in 2015, there have been 13 unprovoked attacks by sharks, causing one fatality, in Australia.
This is fairly unusual – there’s only been one year over the past decade with more than 14 attacks.
In the US, eight people have been attacked off the coast of North Carolina since the start of June.
In one incident, a 12-year-old girl had her arm and part of her leg bitten off, while a 16-year-old boy had to have his arm amputated.
These incidents have led to a string of untested theories, with the North Carolina attacks blamed upon a change in water temperature that attracted a large group of migrating warm-water sharks, such as bull and tiger sharks.

In Australia, some surfers say shark numbers are exploding and that they are looking for food closer to shore.
“Anecdotally, surfers and fishermen across the country have been reporting that the size and abundance of large sharks are ­noticeably higher than they’ve been, in some places, for 30 years,” the Australian newspaper has stated.
“Some are asking if it is time to lift the great white’s protected status.”
Humans’ fear of sharks can be seen in the shark nets erected in parts of South Africa, New South Wales and Queensland, as well as the baiting and shooting program in Western Australia that was scaled down following an outcry from environmentalists and scientists.

So far, 2015 looks set to be on the higher side in numbers of global shark attacks.
Last year, there were 72 unprovoked shark attacks in the world, leading to three deaths, according to the University of Florida, which collates shark attack statistics.
There were 83 attacks in 2012 – the highest in the past decade – but it’s unclear whether there has been a sharp increase in attacks once population growth and improved record-keeping are factored in.
Australia had 120 attacks between 2000 and 2009 – more than double that of any other decade on record since 1900.
But when attacks per million people are considered, the picture is far less scary, with the trend dipping down from the 1930s, albeit with a slight rise in the past decade.

 Distribution of shark attacks in Australia between 1900 and 2009, including total number of attacks, the total population of Australia and the shark attacks per million people.

The Taronga Conservation Society, which collated this data, states that there have been 15 incidents a year, on average, over the past decade, compared with 6.5 annual incidents from 1990 to 2000.

But this increase in attacks, the society says, “coincides with an increasing human population, more people visiting beaches, a rise in the popularity of water-based fitness and recreational activities and people accessing previously isolated coastal areas.
“There is no evidence of increasing shark numbers that would influence the rise of attacks in Australian waters.”

Further research, published in the Australian Medical Journal last year, cites an increase in whale numbers as contributing to a spate of shark attacks on people off the Western Australian coast.
The risk for bathers less than 25m from shore is, however, “likely to remain very low, and well below the risk of other recreational activities undertaken in WA”, the journal states.
Other scientists back up this view – an increase in attacks must be seen in the context of increasing numbers of people in the sea, while shark populations are hard to pin down.
The idea of hordes of vengeful sharks is fanciful.
“Your toaster is more likely to kill you than a shark,” said Culum Brown, a fish biologist at Macquarie University.
“It is extremely unlikely that you will ever be, or even know, a shark attack victim.
“I think the numbers are pretty obvious. There are more people in the water each year: it’s not that there are more sharks. In fact in all likelihood there are fewer sharks due to over-fishing and habitat damage.”

Sharks are fast moving, cryptic animals.
Studying them is expensive, but what we do know about them shouldn’t be overly alarming, Brown said.
The chances of being attacked are extremely small and those who are attacked are predominantly targeted around the legs, suggesting that sharks are exploring their potential prey rather than devouring it.
“We do know that sharks don’t like to eat people,” he said.
“Studies show they respond strongly to the smell of seals and fish, but not humans.
The trouble with sharks is that they are inquisitive and when checking out a potential prey item they typically come up and have a nibble.
“Of course, if a 4m white shark has a nibble on you, it’s likely to be life-threatening. If they don’t like what they taste they leave.”

Unlike whales, sharks are hard to count.
But most scientists doubt the idea that protecting species such as great whites has resulted in their numbers ballooning, pointing out that an estimated 100m a year are killed worldwide, often for the shark fin soup market.
“The shark attack debate is a bit like the climate change debate,” said Dr Daniel Bucher, a marine ecologist at Southern Cross University.
“You can focus on the background noise or you can look at the long-term trend.
“You’d expect the number of attacks to go down given the number of sharks that have been killed since the 1980s. There is no plague of sharks out there. There’s just a larger population that spends more time in the water, increasing the probability of an attack.”
Bucher said research shows shark attacks can be influenced by rainfall and whether swimmers or surfers are near river mouths or fish feeding areas.

The film crew tags a number of great white sharks to study their movement patterns along Australia's coast. When one of the devices washes ashore, could a killer whale be to blame? 

Interactions with sharks also vary – sharks generally pass people without a second thought, although being in a group of people and turning to face the shark rather than thrashing around wildly in an attempt to move away can help.
But sharks have been evolving as awe-inspiring predators for at least 455 million years, and much more work is required to know exactly what triggers attacks.
Bucher said two incidents – one fatal, one not – off the coast of Byron Bay in February, showed there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to shark attacks.
“The fellow taken at Byron Bay was in shallow, warm water – it broke all the rules really,” he said. “Shark research is expensive and you can only study a few individuals. So that research becomes hard when one of those individuals does something you wouldn’t expect of shark populations at large.”

Links :

• ISAF : about shark attacks

Stowaways and crimes aboard a scofflaw ship

'Sea Pearl' ex 'Dona Liberta'

From New York Times by Ian Urbina

CHIOS, Greece — The rickety raft made of empty oil drums and a wooden tabletop rolled and pitched with the waves while tied to the side of the Dona Liberta, a 370-foot cargo ship anchored far from land in the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa.

“Go down!” yelled a knife-wielding crew member, forcing two Tanzanian stowaways overboard and onto the raft. As angry clouds gathered on the horizon, he cut the line.

Gambling on a better life, the stowaways had run out of luck.
They had already spent nine days at sea, most of the time hiding in the Dona Liberta’s engine room, crouched deep in oily water.
But as they climbed down onto the slick raft, the men, neither of whom knew how to swim, nearly slid into the ocean before lashing themselves together to the raft with a rope.

As the Dona Liberta slowly disappeared, David George Mndolwa, one of the abandoned pair, recalled thinking: “This is the end.”

Few places on the planet are as lawless as the high seas, where egregious crimes are routinely committed with impunity.
Though the global economy is ever more dependent on a fleet of more than four million fishing and small cargo vessels and 100,000 large merchant ships that haul about 90 percent of the world’s goods, today’s maritime laws have hardly more teeth than they did centuries ago when history’s great empires first explored the oceans’ farthest reaches.

Murders regularly occur offshore — thousands of seafarers, fishermen or sea migrants die under suspicious circumstances annually, maritime officials say — but culprits are rarely held accountable. No one is required to report violent crimes committed in international waters.

Through debt or coercion, tens of thousands of workers, many of them children, are enslaved on boats every year, with only occasional interventions.
On average, a large ship sinks every four days and between 2,000 and 6,000 seamen die annually, typically because of avoidable accidents linked to lax safety practices.

Ships intentionally dump more engine oil and sludge into the oceans in the span of three years than that spilled in the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez accidents combined, ocean researchers say, and emit huge amounts of certain air pollutants, far more than all the world’s cars.
Commercial fishing, much of it illegal, has so efficiently plundered marine stocks that the world’s population of predatory fish has declined by two thirds.

The Dona Liberta has been among the most persistent of scofflaws, offering a case study of misconduct at sea, according to an examination of shipping, insurance and port records, and dozens of interviews with law enforcement, maritime experts and former company associates.
The vessel not only cast off stowaways — Jocktan Francis Kobelo, the second man ordered onto the raft, died from the 2011 ordeal — but has also been accused of a long list of other offenses over the past decade.

Path of the Dona Liberta
From 2011 to 2014, the rusty refrigerated cargo vessel traced the coasts of Africa and Europe, abandoning crew members, abusing stowaways, dumping oil and committing other crimes along the way.

Port calls were often the only means of locating the ship, which frequently turned off its required satellite tracking signal.

Source: SkyTruth

As the rusty refrigerator ship moved across two oceans and five seas and among 20 ports, it routinely abused, cheated and abandoned its crew, caused an oil slick nearly 100 miles long, and drew citations from a half-dozen countries for other environmental violations.

Creditors chased its owner for millions of dollars in unpaid debts, and maritime watchdog groups listed its parent company as an illegal fishing suspect.

Still, the ship operated freely and never lacked for work or laborers.

“In the maritime world, it’s far easier for countries to look the other way with problem ships like the Dona Liberta than to do something about them,” said Mark Young, a retired United States Coast Guard commander and former chief of enforcement for the Pacific Ocean.

Vessels that disappear over the horizon tend to vanish not just from sight but from oversight, a New York Times investigation found.

Countries have signed dozens of maritime pacts, the shipping industry has published reams of guidelines and the United Nations maritime agency has written hundreds of rules, all aimed at regulating ships, crews and safety.

But those laws are also often weak, contradictory and easily skirted by criminals.

National and international agencies usually have neither the inclination nor resources to enforce them.

The modern flagging system, which allows ships to buy the right to fly the flag of a country as long as it promises to follow its laws, provides good cover for the unscrupulous.

Usually, a ship may be stopped on the high seas only by a law enforcement or military vessel flying the same flag. The world’s navies, though, have been scaling down for decades.

Most nations, including the Bahamas, whose flag the Dona Liberta flew, have no ships that regularly patrol beyond their national waters.

(Some landlocked countries like Mongolia and Bolivia offer flags for cheaper costs.)

When wrongdoing occurs, no single agency within a country or specific international organization typically has a sufficient stake in the matter to pursue it.

The stowaways on the Dona Liberta, for example, were undocumented immigrants from Tanzania, living in South Africa and brought to shore in Liberia.

The ship was owned by a Greek company incorporated in Liberia, crewed primarily by Filipinos, captained by an Italian, flagged to the Bahamas and passing through international waters.

“Who leads such an investigation?” Mr. Young asked.

There is much at stake: A melting Arctic has expanded trade routes.

Evolving technology has opened the deep seabed to new mining and drilling. 

Maritime rivalry and piracy have led to more violent clashes.

And, with an ever more borderless economy, sea commerce is vital to many countries.

“Without ships, half of the world would freeze and the other half would starve,” Rose George, a British nautical writer, said.

In recent months, the United States has said that it intends to take a bigger role in high seas governance.
“We ignore the oceans at our peril,” said Secretary of State John Kerry, who has pushed for more marine conservation globally and in May brokered a landmark deal with Russia to regulate trawling in Arctic waters.

Mr. Young pressed for urgent action.
Asked to describe the world’s oceans today, he said: “Like the Wild West. Weak rules, few sheriffs, lots of outlaws.”

‘The ground swallows you’

As the storm set in, 20-foot swells seesawed the 7-by-8-foot raft.

To avoid flipping over, the two Tanzanian stowaways splayed flat on their backs.

Their hands chafed from grasping a piece of rebar poking up from one of the rusty blue drums.

Weather is more punishing on the open water because it comes from above and below.

Mr. Mndolwa compared it to experiencing an earthquake and a hurricane at the same time

For eight pitch-black hours, the men stared upward in a driving rain, keeping their mouths closed because waves kept washing over them and squinting because shutting their eyes intensified the seasickness.

Mr. Kobelo had stowed away on ships three times before in search of work wherever he landed, according to his brother, Michael.

He went to Angola, Senegal and then Singapore, where he spent a year as a night watchman and firefighter in a small dry dock.

Though he could have faced prosecution, most countries do not bother to charge stowaways. Immigration authorities eventually sent him back to Tanzania.

To Mr. Mndolwa, who is barely literate and had never before left Africa, Mr. Kobelo’s descriptions of his time in Singapore — free hospital visits, restaurant meals, beaches where the police never shooed him away — sounded far better than his life in Cape Town.

By day, the two men roamed the sidewalks near South Africa’s Table Bay, selling knockoff watches and soccer jerseys.

By night, they slept in a makeshift lean-to under a bridge.

For those seeking escape, few routes are as perilous as the sea.

Roughly 2,000 stowaways are caught each year hiding on ships.

Hundreds of thousands more are sea migrants, whose journey involves some level of complicity from the ship’s crew.

In interviews, these travelers compared the experience of stowing away at sea to hiding in the trunk of a car for an undetermined length of time, going to an unknown place across the most brutal of terrains.

Temperatures are extreme.

It is impossible to bring enough food or water.

And if you try to flee en route, one former stowaway in Durban, South Africa, said, “the ground swallows you whole.”

To get on board, some stowaways pose as stevedores or deck cleaners.

Others swim under the stern and squeeze through a space where the rudder meets the ship.

Many scale the side, helped by “stowaway poles”: long bamboo sticks with toeholds and a hook.

“Love boats,” which are common in ports and deliver prostitutes, drugs and alcohol to large ships, sometimes also bring uninvited passengers.

After sneaking on board, they hide in hulls or shipping containers, crane cabs or tool trunks.

But concealed corners that might look inviting often turn deadly once ships set sail.

Refrigerated fishing holds become cold, exhaust pipes heat up, shipping containers are sealed and fumigated.

Maritime newsletters and shipping insurance reports offer a macabre accounting of the victims: “Crushed in the chain locker,” “asphyxiated by bunker fumes,” “found under a retracted anchor.”
Most often, though, death comes slower.

Vomiting from seasickness leads to dehydration.

People pass out from exhaustion.

They starve.

In May 2011, Mr. Mndolwa and Mr. Kobelo got their chance at a new life.

They overheard a deckhand in port mention that the red-bottomed ship waiting dockside with no night watchman was leaving soon for England.

Carrying their passports, a loaf of bread and a plastic bag filled with orange juice, the men shimmied across the ship’s mooring rope that night, crept down to the engine room, and stayed there, whisperingly still, for the next five days.

source SkyTruth

But their hiding spot soon proved unbearable.
The turbines left their ears ringing.
The fumes made them lightheaded.
The heat “stole our breath,” Mr. Mndolwa recounted.
Within two days their food ran out.
Creeping through the mazelike lower levels of the ship up to the deck, they found crackers and bottled water in an enclosed lifeboat.
They were discovered there four days later.
Locked in a room below deck, they waited while the captain and crew determined their fate.

Smoke and fire

Though small, Greece is a superpower in the maritime world, with many shipping lines and a disproportionate number of the wealthiest shipowners.
Nearly half of the best known shipping families hail from Chios, a tiny Greek island five miles off the coast of Turkey that was long prized by successive empires and nations.

Proud of its nautical pedigree, Chios claims as native sons (not without dispute) two great men of the sea — Homer and Christopher Columbus.
It is also home to George Kallimasias, whose family has been in shipping for three generations.
By most accounts, he runs Commercial S.A., which operated the Dona Liberta and a fleet of about two dozen similar ships.

Even in a struggling economy, Greece’s shipping magnates benefit from favorable government treatment, including an exemption for shipping firms from certain taxes.
Shipowners control most of the country’s major oil companies, soccer teams and television stations, and played a major role in bailing out its banks in recent years.

The nation’s major shipping families also have a reputation for noblesse oblige — many of the island’s soccer fields, schools and hospitals bear plaques with their names.
Mr. Kallimasias, though, is decidedly invisible.

“He is nothing like the others,” said a dockworker at the Chios marina.
He pointed to Mr. Kallimasias’s 107-foot yacht, Something Wild, which the worker said is always guarded and rarely used.
Mr. Kallimasias’s seaside house in Chios sits behind a 15-foot wall.
When he drives around, he is typically accompanied by bodyguards, according to a former employee and associates in Athens.

“The guy is smoke,” said Lefteris Kormalos, a ship engine parts dealer.

Last year, Mr. Kormalos won a court decision for $30,000 in unpaid debts from Mr. Kallimasias, who is named in at least 15 similar lawsuits in Greek or American courts.

Legal documents variously describe him as owner, consultant or managing director of Commercial S.A., another business called Fairport Shipping and the Dona Liberta.

Built in Japan in 1991, the Dona Liberta was operated or owned by several British and Japanese companies before Commercial S.A. acquired it in 2004.

It had variously been named the Emerald Reefer, the Sanwa Hope and the Sun An. Over the years it has flown the flags of Panama, the Bahamas and Kiribati, a tiny island nation in the Central Pacific.

A slow, powerful workhorse, the steel-hulled vessel has more than 20,000 cubic feet of refrigeration space, enough to carry the equivalent of more than 25 million cans of tuna, the Dona Liberta’s main cargo.

Known more commonly as “reefers,” this type of refrigeration ship is a dying breed that has been squeezed out of the business of transporting fruits and vegetables by container ships that are more than three times their size and have superior temperature-control technology.

To survive, many reefers have shifted in recent years to moving fish, much of it illegal, and other contraband like counterfeit cigarettes and drugs, according to maritime insurance officials.

Mr. Kallimasias did not respond to interview requests.

A clerk at the office of Commercial S.A. and Fairport Shipping in Athens shouted at a reporter through a front-gate intercom that it was inappropriate to have visited there, a point reiterated later in an email from Fairport’s lawyer, Alexandros Papalamprou.

In the 1980s, when one of Mr. Kallimasias’s companies failed to repay a loan of more than $11 million to the National Bank of Greece, members of the Greek Parliament investigated.

They found one ship of his worth seizing, but it caught fire at sea and sank, in what was believed to be a deliberate act to collect insurance on it, according to legal documents provided to The Times by a Parliament member.

Dinos Anargyrou, a former Kallimasias supplier and litigant, recounted how the courts were unable to seize Mr. Kallimasias’ assets in 2013 for another unpaid debt.
At the last minute, his company moved its corporate address from a two-story luxury building in an upscale section of Athens to a 100-square-foot vacant apartment in an aging downtown high-rise.

Scrounging for food

In whispered phone calls or surreptitious notes, crew members from the Dona Liberta regularly contacted the international seafarers’ union, pleading for help.

They described safety violations, harsh conditions, wage theft and abandonment, union records show.

By 2012, the mistreatment led the union to warn mariners against working for the Dona Liberta and other ships owned by Commercial S.A., according to union officials based in London.

“Lack of winter jackets, hard hats and safety shoes,” one union inspector wrote, describing crew members working outside in Norway in November.

In Spain and South Africa, the crew complained that the captain routinely doctored the log books to show wages that were never paid and ship repairs that never occurred.

“When your contract is over, they send you home, saying they’ve transferred the money,” Yuriy Cheng, a Ukrainian, wrote in an undated post in Russian on a mariners’ online forum about the Dona Liberta’s owner.

“You get home, and there is nothing there.”

Mr. Cheng described a standoff on his ship between management and the mostly Filipino crew members, who stopped work after a year of not being paid despite threats that they would be jailed if they failed to deliver the cargo.

“These guys are 40 or 50 years old,” he wrote, “and they were crying like babies out of frustration.”

In June 2011, George Cristof, a veteran sailor, knew something was wrong from the moment he stepped on board the Dona Liberta in the Port of Truro, England.

Hired by a maritime employment agency in Galati, Romania, he had been instructed in a brief call with Mr. Kallimasias’s shipping company to fly immediately to England because a full crew was waiting, ready to launch.

But when he arrived, Mr. Cristof found the situation far different, he recalled in an interview.

The provisions were gone, the cargo hold empty, the crew departed.

The Dona Liberta had barely enough fuel to power the wheel room’s overhead lamp, much less run the ship’s 5,600-horsepower engine.

Mr. Cristof was soon joined by another Romanian, Florin Raducan, and for the next several months the two men survived by fishing over the side and begging for canned goods and bottled water from passing ships.

Some days they did not eat.

They lacked the money and documents needed to disembark and return home.

Their phone cards were drained, their cigarettes were all but gone.

The men had no heat, running water, functioning toilets or electricity.

They collected rainwater to clean themselves.

“It wasn’t enough,” Mr. Cristof recounted.

He soon developed a severe fungal infection on his chest, his medical records show.

Each day the men waited for orders that never came.

“Jail with a salary,” Mr. Cristof said, reciting a common expression about work at sea.

“Except the salary isn’t guaranteed.”

More than 2,300 seafarers have been similarly stranded by their employers over the last decade, United Nations data shows.

A ship’s cargo is often better protected than its crew.

The industry only recently imposed rules, taking effect in 2017, mandating that shipowners carry insurance or show other proof that they can cover the costs of sailors marooned in port, as well as seafarers’ death and long-term disability entitlements.

In England, an aid organization came to the rescue of the two Romanians.

“They did not want to stay but they refused to leave,” Ben Bailey, project manager of the group, Mission to Seafarers, said of the men’s predicament.

Each sailor had paid more than $1,000 to the employment agency to get the job on the Dona Liberta, he said.

Abandoning the ship forfeited any chance of recouping that money or collecting the wages promised to them.

After five months, though, Mr. Cristof and Mr. Raducan gave up.

They flew back to Romania. For Mr. Cristof, the breaking point had come when he learned his children could no longer afford school.

For Mr. Raducan: finding out that his wife had resorted to begging in public.

Maritime merry-go-round

Few crimes are tougher to investigate than those that occur at sea.

There are no cameras on the corner, no phones to tap, usually no weapons to retrieve.

Crew members are often changed mid-voyage, so witnesses are scarce.

“The crime scene is moving,” explained Mr. Young, the former Coast Guard official who is now senior officer of conservation enforcement at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Complicating matters is what industry officials call the “maritime merry-go-round.”

Asked about investigating the Dona Liberta’s possible crimes on the high seas, a United States Coast Guard official said it was not its jurisdiction.

“Try Interpol,” he suggested.

The authorities there said that its role was mostly to pass information between countries.

Officials at the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, said that the country whose flag the vessel flies is supposed to investigate any allegations.

An official at the Bahamas flag registry program said that any inquiry by his office would be referred to the I.M.O.

Early one morning in April 2012, the three-person staff at SkyTruth, an environmental watchdog group based in West Virginia, huddled over satellite footage sent from the European Space Agency.
Their attention was quickly drawn to a half-dozen black slashes — what looked to them like intentional dumping from ships — in waters off the coast of Africa.

The longest gash in the ocean imagery stretched about 92 miles from Cabinda, Angola

 On the leading edge of the slick, the Dona Liberta was headed northwest.

Ships have several options for handling the large amount of oily wastewater and fuel sludge that their engines produce during voyages.

They can incinerate it on board, pay to unload it at a waste depot or — cheapest of all — use a “magic pipe,” a jury-rigged hose that illegally pumps the waste directly overboard or underwater.

Source: SkyTruth; Envisat ASAR image courtesy European Space Agency via SkyTruth

That episode of dumping was not an isolated event. In February 2012, British environmental authorities had to clean up a slick caused by the Dona Liberta in the River Fal.

Eight months before that, the ship was cited by Russian inspectors for having doctored its oil logbooks, a telltale sign of illegal dumping at sea.

The Dona Liberta was cited for the same offense by Spanish inspectors in July 2009, Dutch inspectors in 2005, and British inspectors in 2004.

Most of these citations did not result in fines, most likely because few countries beyond the United States and Britain consistently prosecute such violations.

This time, no investigation was even opened.

When other environmental groups alerted United Nations maritime officials, Interpol and the United States Coast Guard about the oil slick, officials said they had no jurisdiction.

“Of the few people watching, even fewer do anything to stop it,” said John Hocevar, the oceans director at Greenpeace.

Desperation

Stowaways have long been forced to walk the plank, subjected to the rough justice of the oceans.
Though often victimized, they are also trespassers, usually desperate, occasionally dangerous, but by no means a new problem in the maritime world.

More humane captains put stowaways to work before dropping them off at the next port.

But in recent years, European immigration laws have tightened, terrorism fears have grown and port authorities around the world have responded by raising the penalties for ships arriving with people not listed on the manifest.

The rules on land, though, often conflict with the realities at sea.

Captains are prohibited from jettisoning stowaways, but they are blocked or fined if they bring them to shore.

Nations have generally shifted the responsibility of handling stowaways onto the shipping industry, putting pressure on shipowners, captains and crew, said Paloma Maquet, an expert on stowaways based at Université de Poitiers in France.

Captains sometimes tell their deckhands: “Make the problem go away.”

In 2014, two Guinean stowaways, one of whom soon drowned, were pushed or leapt overboard off the French coast after several African countries would not let them disembark, according to media accounts and human rights advocates.

Police investigators said the fees were a factor in the episode.

Two years earlier, a crew threw four African stowaways into the Mediterranean (all survived) after the captain was told the costs of repatriation.

These expenses can run to $50,000 per stowaway, or double that if cargo delays are involved.

On their raft in the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Mndolwa and Mr. Kobelo woke up the morning after the storm to an azure sky.

They sat up, untied themselves, and began passing the time talking about soccer and their families. Malnourishment, dehydration and the frigid ocean spray had sapped them.

By sunset, panic set in as the temperature began falling.

“Words dried up,” Mr. Mndolwa explained.

He began saying the Lord’s Prayer, first in his head, then aloud. Mr. Kobelo joined in until he began coughing, and vomiting blood.

Hope soon appeared as a speck on the horizon.

A 10-foot wooden boat with a loud outboard motor was approaching.

“Why are you there?” a fisherman yelled in broken English as he tossed a rope to the raft.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Mndolwa replied.

A half-day later, the stowaways arrived at a fishing pier several miles outside the port city of Buchanan, Liberia, where they were soon detained for being undocumented.

“Why do you put us in jail and let the crew go?” Mr. Mndolwa recalled asking a Liberian immigration official.

“The authorities deal with crimes on land, not on the water,” he said the official responded.

Six days after reaching land, Mr. Kobelo, whose coughing had grown worse, died.

He was 26.

Sitting in a one-room house in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, his brother, Michael, 37, said he blamed the Dona Liberta for the death.

His brother broke the law by stowing away, he conceded.

“But even here in Tanzania we are told if you catch a thief, you don’t beat him,” he said. “You don’t throw him into the sea.”

The Dona Liberta arrived in the Port of Truro, near the southwestern tip of England, in June 2011, about a month after the stowaways were set adrift.

The British police, apparently alerted by Liberian officials, boarded the ship and interviewed the captain.

They later closed the investigation for lack of evidence, according to port officials.

(They cited privacy reasons in declining to release the names of the Dona Liberta’s captain or crew, as had Liberian port and immigration officials, who also refused to be interviewed.)

Capt. Mark Killingback, the harbor master for the Port of Truro, said that it was clear from its weatherworn appearance that the Dona Liberta had fallen on hard times.

He added that his office had received several requests from foreign creditors to detain the ship.

After his arrest, Mr. Mndolwa remained in his cell for five months before being flown to Tanzania, and eventually returned to Cape Town.

Now 27, he lives near the same bridge as he did before boarding the Dona Liberta.

The encampment, which includes other stowaways, is a dangerous spot.

(A Times videographer was robbed there at knifepoint and beaten.)

On a portside slope strewn with trash and excrement, Mr. Mndolwa’s thatch and stick lean-to contains a soiled blanket and dozens of losing lottery tickets, dangling like a mobile.

One recent day he tried to sell a couple packs of gum and some hair braids to drivers waiting at a nearby stoplight, later bartering his faux-leather belt for shoelaces from another homeless man.

He will try to stow away again, he said.

“I just believe the ship is going to change my life.”

A new name

For much of last year, the Dona Liberta disappeared after turning off its location transponder.

Though illegal under most conditions for large ships, disconnecting the device is easy and especially common on vessels carrying contraband.

Then in November, the rusty reefer reappeared in the Gulf of Thailand.

When approached by a reporter eight miles off the coast, the Chinese captain explained that his ship had a new owner — a Chinese company — and a new flag — Kiribati.

The ship’s new name, Sea Pearl, was painted on its forward hull, alongside a shadow of its old one. (The ship has since changed its flag, again, to Vanuatu.)

Asked about the ship’s past misdeeds, the captain demurred.

“Different company, different company,” he said.

Links :

• NYTimes : No More Sea Blindness: Covering Stowaways on a Lawless Ocean
• NYTimes : Murder at sea : captured on video but killers go free

America's Cup 2010 : USA17

America's Cup from Adam Docker
BMW Oracle Racing 90
She could achieve a velocity made good upwind of over twice the wind speed
and downwind of over 2.5 times the wind speed 

The secret to the sea sapphire’s colors and invisibility

Sapphirina, or sea sapphire, has been called “the most beautiful animal you’ve never seen,” and it could be one of the most magical.
Some of the tiny, little-known copepods appear to flash in and out of brilliantly colored blue, violet or red existence.
Now scientists are figuring out the trick to their hues and their invisibility.
The findings appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and could inspire the next generation of optical technologies.

Copepods are tiny aquatic crustaceans that live in both fresh and salt water.
Some males of the ocean-dwelling Sapphirina genus display striking, iridescent colors that scientists think play a role in communication and mate recognition.
The shimmering animals’ colors result when light bounces off of the thin, hexagonal crystal plates that cover their backs.
These plates also help them vanish, if only fleetingly.
Scientists didn’t know specifically what factors contributed to creating different shades.
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat wanted to investigate the matter.

The researchers measured the light reflectance — which determines color — of live Sapphirina males and the spacing between crystal layers.
They found that changes of reflectance depended on the thickness of the spacing.
And for at least one particular species, when light hits an animal at a 45-degree angle, reflectance shifts out of the visible light range and into the ultraviolet, and it practically disappears.
Their results could help inform the design of artificial photonic crystal structures, which have many potential uses in reflective coatings, optical mirrors and optical displays.

The authors acknowledge funding from the Israel Science Foundation, the Crown Center of Photonics and the ICORE: the Israel Excellence Center “Circle of Light” and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat (Israel).

Scientists predict huge sea level rise even if we limit climate change

Sea level rises of eight inches have already worsened flooding effects from storms

such as Hurricane Sandy.

Photograph: John G Wilbanks/Alamy

From The Guardian

Study of past sea level changes shows coastal communities may face rises of at least six metres even if we limit global warming to 2C, reports Climate Central

Even if world manages to limit global warming to 2C — the target number for current climate negotiations — sea levels may still rise at least 6 meters (20 ft) above their current heights, radically reshaping the world’s coastline and affecting millions in the process.
That finding comes from a new paper published on Thursday in Science that shows how high sea levels rose the last time carbon dioxide levels were this high.
That was about 3m years ago, when the globe was about 3-5F warmer on average, the Arctic 14.4F warmer, megasharks swam the oceans, and sea levels stood at least 20 ft above their current heights.

The megasharks aren’t coming back but those sea levels could be, no matter what happens in December’s climate summit in Paris.
“Even if we meet that 2C target, in the past with those types of temperatures, we may be committing ourselves to this level of sea level rise in the long term,”Andrea Dutton, a geochemist at the University of Florida and one of the study’s co-authors, said.
“The decisions we make now about where we want to be in 2100 commit us on a pathway where we can’t go back. Once these ice sheets start to melt, the changes become irreversible.”

The study examined past changes and laid out a framework for using them to refine our understanding of what the future holds for coastal communities.
According to separate research by Climate Central, a 20-ft sea level rise would reshape the US coast, causing Louisiana to lose its boot and transforming the Bay Area into the Bays Areas by forming a second inland bay. It would also threaten the world’s coastal nations and megacities.

Sea levels have already risen about eight inches (200mm) compared to pre-industrial times.
That rise has helped boost the surge and flooding damage from storms such as Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan, and dramatically increased the occurrence of everyday flooding during high tide in cities from Baltimore to Honolulu.

The most recent projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate that if emissions continue on their current trend, sea levels could continue to rise another 39 in by the end of this century.

By 2050, 26 major US cities will face an “emerging flooding crisis.” Globally, storm damage could cost cities from Hong Kong to Dhaka to New York trillions annually unless adaptation measures are taken.
According to Climate Central estimates, 150 million or more people are currently living on land that will either be submerged or exposed to chronic flooding by 2100.

But sea level rise isn’t going to just turn off after 2100 and according to climate scientists, current greenhouse gases are baking much more than three feet of sea level rise into the system.
The world’s oceans, ice sheets and climate are constantly performing an intricate dance.
The current rate of warming could have them dancing a different routine forcing ice sheets to accommodate by melting, and sea levels in turn to rise.
“Ice sheets as we see them today appear to be out of equilibrium with the present climate,” Dutton said.

Recent research showed the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough ice to lift sea levels 10-13 ft, appears to have entered collapse, mostly driven by warm water and, to a lesser degree, air melting its ice shelves from above and below.
Those ice shelves essentially act as doorstops, keeping the rest of Antarctica’s massive stores of ice on land.
Losing them would send ice tumbling to the sea and, after it melted, lapping up against the shorelines around the world.
Other parts of the Antarctic ice sheet are also less stable than previously believed and could further drive sea level rise from the southern hemisphere’s store of ice.

Greenland melting

The planet’s other major cache of land ice is Greenland.
Its melt and contribution to sea level rise have increased over the past decade and scientists project that it will play an increasingly larger role in raising the oceans.

In addition to looking at the deep past, Dutton’s analysis also considered the more (geologically) recent past by looking at periods around 400,000 and 125,000 years ago when global temperatures were 3.6F and 1.8F above pre-industrial times, respectively.
Because they’re more recent, Dutton’s analysis was able to get better estimates of the upper bounds of sea level rise.
And those results don’t bode well for the world’s coastlines as they showed that sea levels were up to 42 ft higher than the present.
“These numbers are consistent with our study on sea level commitment,” Anders Levermann, a sea level rise expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who authored a 2013 study, said.
Levermann said the Dutton’s approach of breaking down sea level rise by the different ice sheets could help with regional sea level estimates. For example, Greenland’s melt could drive up sea levels on the Eastern Seaboard in addition to having a potential impact on ocean circulation.

“We’re going to reach temperatures we had in the past periods in the next couple of decades. Understanding which are the most vulnerable sectors of polar ice sheets is critical to projecting future pattern of sea level rise regionally,” Dutton said.

The big outstanding question — and the one that’s most relevant to people living along the coasts — is just how long it could take sea levels to rise to such great heights. The process isn’t linear. It’s currently accelerating and that trend is expected to continue. Dutton said her group is working on new techniques to better define the rates of rise, but other efforts have shown tipping points could cause sudden, rapid rises faster than previous estimates.

“There are some recent modeling efforts that now show you could get a section of the Antarctic ice sheet, several meters worth of sea level rise, to go in a decade. We used to think it was centuries,” she said.

Links :

• The Boston Globe : The big Chill 
• The Guardian : Warming of oceans due to climate change is unstoppable, say US scientists 
• NOAA : International report confirms: 2014 was Earth’s warmest year on record
• Climate Central : Coastal Nations, Megacities Face 20 Feet of Sea Rise

Human impact on the oceans is growing — and climate change is the biggest culprit

(a) Absolute difference between current (as of 2013) and earlier (as of 2008) per-pixel cumulative impact scores based on 12 anthropogenic stressors that could be compared across time (max cumulative impact score for both periods=11.1). Positive scores represent an increase in cumulative impact. (b) Extreme combinations of cumulative impact and impact trend include areas with combinations of the highest (top quartile) and lowest (bottom quartile) impact and increasing (top quartile) and decreasing (bottom quartile) impact. In both panels, areas of permanent sea ice are shaded white and the area within maximum sea ice extent is shaded to indicate where scores are less certain because change in sea ice extent could not be included

 

From WashingtonPost by Chelsea Harvey

Human impact on the oceans is growing - and climate change is the biggest culprit. 

The world’s oceans have suffered a lot at the hands of humans — ask any marine conservationist. Unsustainable fishing, pollution and the effects of climate change are just a few of the issues that worry scientists and environmentalists.

While we have a good idea of which activities are causing harm to the ocean, scientists have been less clear on which ones are the most damaging and which regions of the ocean are getting the worst of it.
Now, new research has allowed scientists to map the impacts of 19 different types of human activity that have harmed the ocean over a span of five years.
The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The researchers used global-scale data to map the cumulative impacts of human activities between 2008 and 2013, pinpointing which areas are under increasing stress, which areas are experiencing a decrease and which human activities are having the biggest impacts in which areas.
They found that nearly two-thirds of the ocean in experiencing an increase in these man-made impacts — and climate change is the worst of all, driving the majority of the changes the researchers observed.

 (a) Sea surface temperature anomalies, (b) nutrient input, (c) demersal destructive fishing and (d) pelagic high bycatch fishing. Positive scores represent an increase in stressor intensity. Note that colour scales differ among panels and are nonlinear.

The effects of this climate change include temperature anomalies in the water, ocean acidification and an increase in ultraviolet radiation.
These factors can create conditions unfavorable to some marine organisms, changing the composition of ecosystems, driving animals to different parts of the ocean and even causing some species to begin dying off. Ocean acidification, for instance, is notorious for interfering with the ability of certain organisms, such as coral, to build the shells they use to protect their bodies.

And while the study reveals that some types of activities, such as overfishing, tend to cluster in specific regions, the effects of climate change appear to be “truly global,” says lead author Benjamin Halpern, a professor of environmental science and management at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Any global or regional scale efforts to improve ocean condition really need to address climate change,” he says.

Within the two-thirds of the ocean experiencing an increase in stress, the researchers found that five percent of the world’s oceans are heavily harmed by human activity and likely require immediate attention.
Five percent may not sound like much, but Halpern says these areas are among the parts of the oceans most important to humans.
“Many of them are in coastal areas where a lot of people live, and so they’re places that we care about a lot and places that we don’t want to see disappear because they’re providing us so many goods and benefits from the oceans,” he says.
Some of the most highly impacted coastal regions the study identified included the Faroe Islands, the eastern Caribbean, Cape Verde and the Azore Islands.

 The relationship between current cumulative impact (as of 2013) and 5-year change in impact from 5 years before for each country’s EEZ (200 nm) is shown based on the 12 common stressors. Bubbles are scaled to the area (ln) of each country’s EEZ and colour-coded by the change in the log of coastal population (25 miles inland) per year from 2008 to 2013; a subset of countries is labelled. Grey bubbles are nearly uninhabited. Horizontal dashed red line is the global median cumulative impact score in 2013; vertical line is no change over time.

Mapping out the parts of the oceans experiencing heavy or increasing stress can help policymakers better allocate resources for conservation, targeting the areas that are in the most need.
And these maps can also help world leaders figure out the scale of the effort required to combat a problem.
For example, local efforts may be enough to target specific regions that are heavily affected by overfishing.
But combating the effects of climate change, which are widespread throughout the Earth’s oceans now, will likely require an international effort, Halpern says.

The study also identifies regions experiencing a decrease in stress from human activity.
Admittedly, these regions comprise a much smaller percentage of the world’s oceans — just 13 percent.
But pinpointing these areas can provide equally valuable information, according to Halpern.
“In some cases they do likely indicate success stories where management action has helped improve the condition of the ocean,” he says, meaning policymakers can look to these areas for information on management techniques that have proved effective.

In fact, figuring out the kinds of conservation efforts that are most effective is the most important next step for research in the field, Halpern says.
Tuesday’s study may be able to pinpoint areas that are doing well and areas that are not, but it’s not able to provide any information about the management techniques that are affecting these areas.

The study does present a fairly dire view of the health of the world’s oceans — but Halpern stresses that there are some positive takeaways, too.
“Although things are generally getting worse across the planet, there are places that are getting better,” he says.
“And hopefully we can learn from those, see what we’re doing well, and apply those lessons to other parts of the planet.”

Links :

• ClimateCentral : Climate Change Is Increasing Stress on Oceans

The strongest El Niño on record may be brewing in the Pacific

Sea surface temperature anomalies showing the telltale sign of an El Nino in the tropical Pacific.

From Mashable by Andrew Freedman

El Niño conditions are intensifying in the tropical Pacific Ocean, potentially leading to a record event that would help control rainfall in East Africa and possibly bring desperately needed drought relief to California, while temporarily cutting off rainfall to parts of the Indonesian rainforest.

A record strong event would also virtually guarantee that 2015 will beat 2014 as the warmest year this planet has seen since records began in the late 19th century.
In recent weeks, the water temperatures have grown warmer, propelled by a reversal of seasonal trade winds and the sloshing of mild ocean waters from west to east across the Pacific.

The atmosphere has shown telltale signs of positive feedback that are reinforcing the El Niño, including the formation of several tropical cyclones spinning in the central and northwestern Pacific Basins.
Taking these observations into account, a new forecast released Thursday by the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) in Maryland calls for a strong El Niño event to occur between now and the coming northern hemisphere winter, which is when El Niño conditions tend to peak, as well as when they have their greatest influence on global weather patterns.

 Sea surface temperature anomalies, showing the milder ocean waters near the equator with time.

According to a more detailed forecast from the CPC and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, there is a 96% chance of continued El Niño conditions from September through November, with a 94% chance of such conditions lasting through January.
The CPC outlook can be viewed as conservative when it comes to the predicted intensity of the El Niño event, considering that many individual El Niño experts, armchair meteorologists on Twitter, and individual computer model runs are predicting a potentially record strong event, exceeding the previous record-holder of 1997-98. El Niño data extends back to 1870.
The CPC takes such models into account when making its forecasts.
However, Michelle L'Heureux, a climate forecaster at CPC, told Mashable that the hype surrounding the potentially unprecedented intensity of the El Niño may be just that, hype.
"Even one or two westerly wind bursts does not necessarily always "make" an El Niño," she wrote in an email.
"Last year is a perfect example of that... a few westerly wind bursts in early 2014 and then they died out. It is the series of westerly wind bursts (or cumulative average over many months) that we forecasters pay attention to," she added.

Huge atmospheric response to pumped up El Niño

In a blog post, L'Heureux wrote that focusing on weekly average sea surface temperatures can be distracting, and is largely meaningless.
Right now, the weekly sea surface temperature departures from average are comparable to the record 1997-98 El Niño, she wrote.
"While a short-term (daily or weekly) number might be striking, it shouldn’t be used as an indicator of El Niño strength unless it is carefully placed into a larger context," she continued.
L'Heureux noted that none of the major forecasting centers responsible for monitoring El Niño are predicting a record event at this time, including CPC.

Conscious coupling between the air and ocean 

In order for El Niño events to occur and strengthen, an intricate dance must take place between the ocean and atmosphere, and some aspects of these interactions are not well understood.
So far this spring and summer, however, the atmosphere has been reinforcing the ocean conditions, and vice versa, with a temporary reversal of the east-to-west trade winds observed near the equator, because of a phenomenon known as a westerly wind burst.
Such wind bursts are crucial to creating and reinforcing strong El Niño events, since they drive pulses of mild sea surface temperatures eastward toward South America, according to recent research.
The strength of an ongoing wind burst, may be a sign of a particularly strong event to come.

"Right now we slightly favor a strong El Niño because we are seeing more bursts and we are further along in the year," L'Heureux wrote in her Climate.gov blog post.
"This causes us to be more confident in the staying power of this El Niño."

The bottom line: To get a significant El Niño event going (and keep it going), the atmosphere and ocean need to communicate like a healthy couple does — one in which one listens and responds to the other while bringing something new to the table.
There is a reason why meteorologists refer to the process of creating and maintaining an El Niño as reliant on "coupling" between the ocean and the atmosphere.

 Comparing the strong #ElNino years of 1982,97 w/this year in Jun. 2015

Why you need to pay attention to El Niño

There are two main reasons why El Niño is a big deal — including its intensity.

First and foremost, the climate cycle is the most consequential natural climate phenomenon on the time scale of individual seasons to a couple of years, since it has ripple effects in areas far removed from the tropical Pacific.
El Niño events typically occur once every three to seven years, and predicting them in advance can protect lives as well as save businesses and governments money.

Second, El Niño events usually boost global average surface temperatures, elevating the probability that a particular year will set a record for the warmest year. So far, 2015 has been running hotter than 2014 did, and last year was the warmest year recorded since reliable instrumental records began in the late 19th century.
An intense El Niño would virtually assure that 2015 will break last year's record, since it acts as an added factor on top of long-term, manmade global warming.

 Typical El Nino winter weather pattern.

From Australia to California, El Niño brings alters weather extremes

Typically, El Niño events tend to shift rainfall away from northeastern Australia, with unusually dry conditions spreading south to encompass much of the Queensland coastline.
In the past, strong El Niño events, including one in 1982-83 and another in 1997-98, were accompanied by major droughts in parts of Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, although drought can also occur there in the absence of El Niño.

A major drought has been ongoing in Java, for example, even though conditions during the past year were only defined as resembling El Niño, without satisfying the formal scientific criteria.
Drier than average conditions are also likely to occur in Indonesia, according to IRI forecasts. Rainfall patterns that are crucial to agricultural production can also shift in eastern Africa as a result of El Niño and Indian Ocean temperatures.
In the U.S., El Niño usually exerts most of its influence during the fall and winter, with increased precipitation along the West Coast in particular.
This would be good news for drought-plagued California and other Western states, but a wetter than average winter is far from certain at this point.

 The tropical W Pacific has been very active recently, and this video shows the development of Typhoons Nangka, Chan-hom, and Linfa over the past few days through the Himawari-8 infrared, water vapor, and visible satellite imagery.
Linfa is the westernmost system, and is shown making landfall in China. Chan-hom is the next system to the east, and is currently approaching the coast of China.
Nangka is the easternmost system to the W of Guam.

NOAA picture

One likely connection to El Niño that is already manifesting itself is a below average Atlantic hurricane season, since El Niño events tend to increase upper level winds across the tropical North Atlantic, tearing nascent storms apart before they can intensify.
At the same time, El Niño conditions can favor more tropical cyclones in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean.
Currently, there are three tropical cyclones spinning their way toward China and Japan, one storm moving toward Hawaii, and two new storms predicted to develop in coming days off the west coast of Mexico.
L'Heureux says that El Niño alters the air circulation over the globe, and increases the likelihood of certain weather conditions.
"This can be a huge advantage to those who want to hedge bets or plan for certain outcomes. The fact that our probabilities are [greater than] 90% means that folks can start making those bets and preparing for potential impacts."