The $250 million successful USA renewable energy effort dismissed with one paragraph in 1997 and dropped even from the NREL website
From ScienceDaily Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa say that the Leeward side of Hawaiian Islands may be ideal for future ocean-based renewable energy plants that would use seawater from the oceans' depths to drive massive heat engines and produce steady amounts of renewable energy.
It involves placing a heat engine between warm water collected at the ocean's surface and cold water pumped from the deep ocean. Like a ball rolling downhill, heat flows from the warm reservoir to the cool one. The greater the temperature difference, the stronger the flow of heat that can be used to do useful work such as spinning a turbine and generating electricity.
The history of OTEC dates back more than a half century. However, the technology has never taken off -- largely because of the relatively low cost of oil and other fossil fuels. But if there are any places on Earth where large OTEC facilities would be most cost competitive, it is where the ocean temperature differentials are the greatest.
Analyzing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Oceanographic Data Center, the University of Hawaii's Gérard Nihous says that the warm-cold temperature differential is about one degree Celsius greater on the leeward (western) side of the Hawaiian Islands than that on the windward (eastern) side.
This small difference translates to 15 percent more power for an OTEC plant, says Nihous, whose theoretical work focuses on driving down cost and increasing efficiency of future facilities, the biggest hurdles to bringing the technology to the mainstream.
"Testing that was done in the 1980s clearly demonstrates the feasibility of this technology," he says. "Now it's just a matter of paying for it."
It has been the biggest and most comprehensive attempt ever to answer that age-old question – how many fish are there in the sea?
Published today, a 10-year study of the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the world's oceans attempts just that. The Census of Marine Life, which hopes to paint a baseline of marine life, estimates there are more than 230,000 species in our oceans.
"From coast to the open ocean, from the shallows to the deep, from little things like microbes to large things such as fish and whales," said Patricia Miloslavich of Universidad Simón Bolívar, Venezuela and co-senior scientist of the COML. The study also covers crabs, plankton, birds, sponges, worms, squids, sharks and slugs.
A team of more than 360 scientists around the world have spent the past decade surveying 25 regions, from the Antarctic through the temperate and tropical seas to the Arctic to count the different types of plants and animals.
The results show that around a fifth of the world's marine species are crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters, krill and barnacles. Add in molluscs (squid and octopus) and fish (including sharks) and that accounts for up to half of the number of species in the world's seas. The charismatic species often used in conservation campaigning – whales, sea lions, turtles and sea birds – account for less than 2% of the species in the world's oceans.
The surveys have also highlighted major areas of concern for conservationists. "In every region, they've got the same story of a major collapse of what were usually very abundant fish stocks or crabs or crustaceans that are now only 5-10% of what they used to be," said Mark Costello of the Leigh Marine Laboratory, University of Auckland in New Zealand. "These are largely due to over-harvesting and poor management of those fisheries. That's probably the biggest and most consistent threat to marine biodiversity around the world."
The main threats to date include overfishing, degraded habitats, pollution and the arrival of invasive species. But more problems are around the corner: rising water temperatures and acidification thanks to climate change and the growth in areas of the ocean that are low in oxygen and, therefore, unable to support life.
The COML identified enclosed seas such as the Mediterranean, Gulf of Mexico, China's shelves, Baltic, and the Caribbean as having the most threatened biodiversity. "Enclosed seas have the risk that, when you impact it and throw chemicals or other garbage into it, it will not go away so easily as it will from the open ocean," said Miloslavich.
Dense coastal populations of humans also tend to be packed along enclosed seas, meaning increased pollution and extraction of more biodiversity from the water.
The Mediterranean, which contains almost 17,000 identified species, scored the maximum threat rating of five for four of the categories. Scientists studying the Mediterranean identified problems related to increased litter from shipping and munitions across the sea as well as bombs discharged during the Kosovo war.
The Mediterranean also faces problems because of invasive species displacing the creatures that already live there. This sea had the most alien species out of all the 25 regions surveyed by the COML, with more than 600 (4% of the all species present). Most had arrived from the Red Sea via the Suez Canal.
The most diverse regions identified by the COML are around Australia and south-east Asia. "It's also a hotspot for terrestrial biodiversity as well and this has been known for about 100 years," said Costello.
"It looks like that region with the coral reefs has always had a very high rate of speciation. It also has a very diverse range of habitats – from the deepest areas of the oceans to large areas of shallow seas, which can support coral reefs."
Both Australian and Japanese waters contain more than 30,000 species each and are among the most biologically diverse in the world. Next in line are the oceans off China, the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
Apart from algae and the seabirds and mammals that travel around the sea, the COML identified the manylight viperfish (Chauliodus sloani) as the most "cosmopolitan" marine creature. Its presence was recorded in around a quarter of the world's seas.
"This inventory was urgently needed for two reasons," said Costello. "First, dwindling expertise in taxonomy impairs society's ability to discover and describe new species. And secondly, marine species have suffered major declines – in some cases 90% losses – because of human activities and may be heading for extinction, as happened to many species on land."
Miloslavich said the COML data would "allow policy-makers to make better and more informed decisions on what areas should be protected for the better management of resources and the ecosystems as well, in order that they keep providing good services."
The results of the survey are published today online at the PLoS ONE journal. More detailed results will be published in October, at which time the COML will confirm how many species it estimates are in the world's oceans.
And for every marine species of all kinds known to science, COML scientists estimate that at least four have yet to be discovered. They said that around 70% of species of fish have been discovered, for example, but for most other groups likely less than one-third are known. As of February, the number of marine fish species known to science stood at 16,764, and was growing at around 100 a year.
Scientists estimate that there are almost 22,000 fish species in the world. The most fruitful potential areas for discovery include the tropics, deep seas and southern hemisphere.
"At the end of the Census of Marine Life, most ocean organisms still remain nameless and their numbers unknown," said Nancy Knowlton, a biologist at the Smithsonian Institution, leader of the COML's coral reef project. "This is not an admission of failure. The ocean is simply so vast that, after 10 years of hard work, we still have only snapshots, though sometimes detailed, of what the sea contains. But it is an important and impressive start."
About one quarter has naturally dissolved or evaporated, and another quarter was captured at source or skimmed or burned. Those portions have effectively been eliminated from the sea.
A further quarter has been dispersed, either naturally or chemically - leaving the remaining quarter that, in Noaa's words...
"...is either on or just below the surface as light sheen and weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments." In the early days, the scale of the leak became a vital statistic, central to questions both about the incident's politics ("Is BP telling the truth? Is the government?") and about the eventual ecological impact.
But at what appears to be the tail end of the affair, arguably size matters less than ever.
Just as with fishing or anything else you do in the marine world, the issue isn't only "how much?" but "where?"
Heavy trawls dragged over grey, boring sea floor will leave behind grey, boring sea floor. Use the same gear on deepwater coral, and you wreak ecological carnage.
Likewise Deepwater Horizon. Oil flecked across the wide Gulf seas will have far less impact on wildlife or fish or anything else than if blobs of the stuff happen to congregate in a marsh vital for a threatened species of breeding bird, or an aggregation of spawning bluefin tuna.
Along some beaches, people are still rescuing oil-soaked pelicans; on others, they're already toasting themselves in the Gulf sun, as though the oil never happened.
At present, as I discussed in my analysis article on Tuesday, evidence for widespread ecological damage is thin; so we have to presume that as of now, the significant volume of oil that remains (even a quarter of 4.9 milion barrels is still far more than released by the Exxon Valdez) is not hitting enough of those key zones to be having a major impact.
The other question posed by the Noaa analysis is a "who?" question, as in "who looks good now?"
Away from the oil-washed segments of Gulf coast where hydrocarbons pervade the air, arguably the strongest aroma generated by this whole affair has been one of political fragrance.
It's been said that US politicians could heavily and publicly blame BP because of what the B stands for. That's not to excuse anything the company has done, and it has admitted culpability in a number of ways; but it's hard to imagine good ol' Southern boys being quite so disparaging if the oil company in question had been of good ol' Southern origin.
Shifting everything onto the company's shoulders was also a way of distracting attention from anything the Bush or Obama administrations, or indeed the Houses of Congress, could have done differently - such as insisting on a regulatory regime with more stringent safeguards.
With mid-term elections approaching, having a government agency proclaim a kind of victory over the oil now is what you might term a fairly slick piece of business.
"There's some science here, but mostly it's spin, and it breaks my heart to see them do it... I'm afraid this continues a track record of doubtful information distributed through Noaa." Perhaps the most doubtful aspect of it, though, is that for ecological purposes it appears simply to be addressing a question that doesn't matter very much.
The numbers of top-level predators in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, such as halibut and swordfish, decreased significantly from population levels 100 years ago, according to a new NOAA report released today by the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
The National Marine Sanctuaries Conservation Series report, "Stellwagen Bank Marine Historical Ecology Final Report" describes fish populations in the sanctuary that are resilient, but have suffered declines in numbers and species diversity over time.
The report, produced by the Gulf of Maine Cod Project at the University of New Hampshire, presents results of a three-year survey and analysis of historical documents and manuscripts relevant to the historical ecology of the sanctuary. The authors, Stefan Claesson and Andrew Rosenberg, former director of NOAA Fisheries Northeast Regional Office, said the report’s findings challenge currently established baselines "and should influence the direction of management actions needed to improve overall ecosystem integrity."
Key findings from the research include:
Halibut, swordfish and other top predators in the sanctuary were overfished to near commercial extinction in the late 19th and 20th centuries;
Declines in diversity of bottom-dwelling species in the western Gulf of Maine, including the sanctuary, from 1900 to 2000;
Maximum annual catch levels of important commercial species declined by nearly 50 percent over a 100 year period; and
Proportional catch ratios of haddock and cod in the sanctuary have reversed in the last 100 years from 3:1 to 1:7.
"These findings present a serious wake-up call to marine resource managers, the fishing community and environmentalists," said Craig MacDonald, superintendent, Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. "Biodiversity conservation is one of the key management priorities for the sanctuary, and a major focus in our new management plan."
According to the report, the waters of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary have been fished for nearly 400 years, since European mariners came to the New World even before the Pilgrims. Near-shore fish populations and micro-banks, such as Stellwagen, were already showing declining numbers by the early 1800s, the report notes.
Since the late 19th century, human interactions with the Stellwagen Bank ecosystem caused dramatic changes to animal populations, according to the report’s authors. They attribute the relatively quick ecosystem shifts to the development of new fishing technologies, such as gill nets and trawl gear, which were invented and adopted to improve efficiency and catch levels in an environment of declining numbers of fish caught and increasing market demand.
The report recommends additional analysis that examines historical trends for fish populations and habitat conditions back to 1800, and identifies socio-economic and cultural drivers related to shifts in catch levels.
Designated in 1992, Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary encompasses 842 square miles of ocean, stretching between Cape Ann and Cape Cod. Renowned for its scenic beauty and remarkable productivity, the sanctuary supports a rich diversity of marine life including 22 species of marine mammals, more than 53 species of seabirds, more than 80 species of fishes, and hundreds of marine invertebrates.
NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources.
