A non frozen shrimp inside Antarctica Ice

In digging (about 200 meters deep) into the ice of West Antarctica (Ross Ice Shelf), to their utter surprise, NASA scientists found a shrimp-like creature (Lyssianasid amphipod) and also discovered a tentacle of jellyfish, in this polar desert.
NASA scientists were using a borehole camera to look back up towards the ice surface when they spotted this pinkish-orange creature swimming beneath the ice.

And they believe the probability that these two animals swim into the hole of six inches in diameter, about 20 kilometers away from open water, is 'almost zero'.
If higher-forms of life are able to survive underneath the hostile environment of Antarctic ice, the discovery by the NASA team furthers the debate as to how easily it will be to find extraterrestrial creates in the solar system.

Links :

• NASA
• Ice Shelf Drilling and Ocean Cavity Exploration
• Does Antarctic shrimp mean extraterrestrial life?
  

Tides, Earth's rotation among sources of giant underwater waves

Scientists are gaining new insight into the mechanisms involved in the generation of huge steep underwater waves that occur between layers of warm and cold water in coastal regions of the world's oceans.

Researchers at the University of Rhode Island said they discovered large amplitude, non-linear internal waves can reach heights of 490 feet (160 m) or more in the South China Sea, and the effects the waves have on surface wave fields ensure that they are readily observable from space.

The URI scientists' observations showed that the Earth's rotation modifies internal waves as they travel cross the deep basin. This effect mainly influences the internal waves that form on the 24-hour period of diurnal tides, dispersing the energy and inhibiting the steepening process. Internal waves that form on the semi-diurnal tides are not affected in this way, are more readily steepened and then break into the energetic, short period waves.

Link :

• Science daily

Message in the bottle : a sea of plastic garbage

Translation from Serge Poirot article in Ouest France

Fragmented garbage, trapped by the currents are concentrated in a vast area in the Sargasso Sea. The impacts are unknown, but we know that many animals suffer of this situation.

For twenty-two years, researchers and students in oceanography of the American Association Sea Education went to draw their fine mesh nets - more than 6 000 times - in the waters of the Atlantic between Nova Scotia (Canada ) and the Caribbean. They were counting the different species, but also waste.

In late February, at a conference in Portland (Oregon), they drew a not very appetizing statement in this unprecedented campaign. Since 1997, we knew the existence of a large garbage dump in the Pacific, "a continent of plastic" had imaged the sailors fell over.

80% came from continents

Sea Education has found a comparable concentration in the Atlantic, about 1 000 km from U.S. shores, in the Sargasso Sea. An area larger than France, where light plastic waste is concentrated of 200,000 fragments per square kilometer and with a depth of ten meters.

As the circling currents and winds are low, this "plastic soup" does not disperse. The wastes stay there, derived for many consumer products, most big like confetti. One hundred million tonnes of plastics are produced each year worldwide, Greenpeace said a tenth ends in the ocean. From this mass, 20% comes from ships and offshore platforms and 80% from land.

The fish eat, we also ...

The sustainable qualities that make the success of plastic objects become a major problem once they are in the sea. They last. But not in the form of bottles, boxes, bags or cans. Under the action of the sun, waves, abrasion, they crumble into ever smaller pieces.

"The impacts on the marine environment remain unknown, observes Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer from Sea Education. But we know that many marine animals eat the plastic and that has a negative effect on birds in particular. "
The next expedition, in June, will pursue the issue.

In 2008, oceanographer Charles Moore has published a study estimating the number to 267 species of animals - mammals, fish, birds, turtles - affected by waste plastics. Nearly half of the seabirds eat at one time or another by mistake. Sometimes they die, with an digestive tract obstruction.

Humans could also suffer the consequences.
The pieces of plastic, like sponges, concentrate pollutants which absorbed by fish, may well go back to our plates.


During this time, David de Rothschild and his crew are running an eco-expedition in the Pacific ocean called Plastiki (from San Francisco to Sydney) on a catamaran made of newly developed plastic bottles which are easier to recycle.

Links :

• Plastic is forever
• Eco-warrior sets sail to save oceans from 'plastic death' (The Guardian) / other article
• The Guardian : 'We're sailing through a sea of plastic'
  
• Rise abobe plastic - Surfrider Foundation
• Captain Charles Moore TED video on the seas of plastic
  
• http://twitter.com/Plastiki
  

Online learning module : introduction to Hydrography

The COMET Program is pleased to announce the publication of 'Introduction to Hydrography'.

This 1.5-hour module provides an introduction to the field of hydrography pertaining to nautical charting and navigation.
It covers how nautical charts are created, who creates them, the products available, and how to find and use them.

The intended audience for Introduction to Hydrography is anyone who uses nautical charts including ships' navigators, Navy Aerographer's Mates, and the general boating public.

Please follow this link to start the module:
http://www.meted.ucar.edu/oceans/hydrography/index.htm

Hydroptere & Moth Class, flying not floating

www.hydroptere.com

The Hydroptère project is not limited to the performance of the 60-feet trimaran which has beaten two world speed records at an average speed of over 50 knots in 2009 in the Mediterranean. Today, l’Hydroptère is in a shipyard in Lorient (France) and she should be back in the water in spring.

Alain Thébault (the only living Icarus among the oceanic skippers) and his team decided to extend the limits of the project and planned to develop two new boats, with the ultimate objective of sailing around the world in approximately 40 days on l’Hydroptère maxi.

To reach this objective, the team with the assistance of some retired engineers (the 'papés') and of their scientific adviser (The Swiss Technological Institute in Lausanne), decided to follow the same experimental process as that employed by Alain Thébault in the development of l’Hydroptère and to consider an intermediate step, that being to build on a reduced scale a test model i.e. l’Hydroptère.ch.
l’Hydroptère.ch will be used as a lab boat for testing geometries and behaviours in varied real conditions before starting the development of l’Hydroptère maxi.
As a Swiss-French project l’Hydroptère.ch which should be launched beginning of summer 2010 is being built in two shipyards, one in Brittany and one in Switzerland.

In the same time, some other hydrofoil flying boats are training in Dubaï with the need to burn themselves to every suns before the start of 2010 Puma Moth Worlds.

Links :

• Talking about foiling boats, let's go way back to 1989 (NF3 boat and Windrider RaveHydrosail Inc) designed by Sam Bradfield, co-founder of Hydrosail Inc.)
• DSS Dynamic Stability Systems