From University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
The possible spread of the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig over the course of one year was studied in a series of computer simulations by a team of researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Eight million buoyant particles were released continuously from April 20 to September 17, 2010, at the location of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
The release occurred in ocean flow data from simulations conducted with the high-resolution Ocean General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator (OFES).
“The paths of the particles were calculated in 8 typical OFES years over 360 days from the beginning of the spill,” says Fabian Schloesser, a PhD student from the Department of Oceanography in SOEST, who worked on these simulations with Axel Timmermann and Oliver Elison Timm from the International Pacific Research Center, also in SOEST.
“From these 8 typical years, 5 were selected to create an animation for which the calculated extent of the spill best matches current observational estimates.”
The dispersal of the particles does not capture such effects as oil coagulation, formation of tar balls, chemical and microbial degradation.
Computed surface concentrations relative to the actual spill may therefore be overestimated.
The animation, thus, is not a detailed, specific prediction, but rather a scenario that could help guide research and mitigation efforts.
The animation shows the calculated surface particle concentrations for grid boxes about 10-km-by-10-km in size into April 2011.
For an estimated flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon of 50,000 barrels per day over a 150 day period, a concentration of e.g. 10 particles per grid box in the animation corresponds roughly to an oil volume of 2 cubic meters per 100 square kilometer.
The oil spreads initially in the Gulf of Mexico, then enters the Loop Current and the narrow Florida Current, and finally the Gulf Stream.
“After one year, about 20% of the particles initially released at the Deepwater Horizon location have been transported through the Straits of Florida and into the open Atlantic,” explains Timmermann.
This animation suggests that the coastlines near the Carolinas, Georgia, and Northern Florida could see the effects of the oil spill as early as October 2010.
The main branch of the subtropical gyre is likely to transport the oil film towards Europe, although strongly diluted.
The animation also shows that as the northeasterly winds intensify near Florida around October and November, the oil in the Atlantic moves closer to the eastern shores of the US, whereas it retreats from the western shores of Florida.
The narrow, deep Straits of Florida force the Florida Current into a narrow channel, creating a tight bottleneck for the spreading of oil into the Atlantic.
As the animation suggests, a filtering system in the narrowest spot of the Florida Current could mitigate the spreading of the oil film into the North Atlantic.
This research was supported by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), NASA and NOAA through their sponsorship of the International Pacific Research Center in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Links :
- SOEST
- NASA image of the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico (acquired July 4)
49ers are without doubt the fastest and probably the most temperamental Olympic class sailboat, particularly now that the Tornado catamarans have been shut out of the 2012 London games.
These planing dinghies carry a lot of canvas, and their crews are engaged in a constant, high-speed balancing act as the tippy craft rocket around at speeds many power boats can't match.
From BBC News
A vessel in distress on the Ireland waterways between Kesh and Enniskillen owes its happy ending to an iPhone application.
Motor cruiser, the Wee Rascal, called 999 in the early hours of Sunday morning asking for assistance as the weather worsened.
However, an extensive search of the area around its reported position by Enniskillen RNLI and the Erne Coastguard Rescue team was fruitless.
With no flares, flash lights or VHF radio onboard, the Wee Rascal was unable to signal its position to rescuers.
It was then that the Belfast Coastguard resorted to mobile phone technology a locator iPhone app was able to give rescuers the vital latitude and longitude they needed.
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency said the cruiser was finally located 25 miles away from its reported position, dangerously amongst the rocky shoreline off Eagle Point ("Gubnagole Point").
It was brought away from the rocks by Enniskillen and taken to the safety of Belleek marina.
Coastguard Watch Manager Steven Carson said it was a "combination of luck and technology" that saved those onboard.
"They had charts on board but obviously no real idea of how to get to their destination or how to report their position in an emergency," he continued.
"Vital hours were wasted eliminating one possible location after another, time that we wouldn't have had if the vessel had struck the rocks and sunk."
"I hope that this experience will help the crew to realize why navigation training is essential for all mariners, whether you're on a lough or the open sea."
Links :
From Hydro International
Today, almost one hundred ocean scientists who once worked at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) near Godalming, UK, are to meet at Southampton's National Oceanography Centre to launch of a book "Of Seas and Ships and Scientists".
The event will be co-hosted by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) and by the book's publishers, Lutterworth Press.
It will feature photographs and material of the NIO era held in the NOC archives.
The book describes the origins of NIO in the inter-war years and during World War II, and its development under the charismatic leadership of the late Sir George Deacon.
The book's chapters are all written by former NIO scientists and are filled with personal anecdotes, descriptions of doing science at sea and of the groundbreaking discoveries made in the 1950s, 60s and 70s that underpin present day marine science.
The book shows how the institute's science changed our understanding of the world's oceans.
This book captures the excitement of a formative phase of UK science during and immediately following WWII.
It links back to scientists working at Antarctic whaling stations and the complimentary voyages of Captain Scott's Discovery that explored the vast icy Southern Ocean, funded by a tax on whale oil.
In the depths of WWII a small group of young scientists were brought together under the inspirational leadership of Dr (later Sir) George Deacon, and shortly after the end of the war, the UK's first National Institute of Oceanography was formed.
The discoveries from 50 years ago underpin our modern-day science.
The book's chapters are all written and edited by NIO scientists and convey the atmosphere of work at sea in a bygone age before small computers, satellite navigation and easy communication.
The book is A useful introduction for students of marine and/or environmental science.
It will appeal to many scientists and the general public, to those interested in science and innovation during and after WWII and of course to many living in the Surrey who always wondered what went on in the leafy lanes that were home to NIO and its successors for almost 50 years.
The book was the idea of Dr John Gould of the NOC who also worked at NIO.
His co-editors are :
• Sir Anthony Laughton a geophysicist, who from 1978 to 1988 was Director of the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, NIO's successor.
• Professor Howard Roe, a biologist who later became Director of the Southampton Oceanography Centre (1999 - 2005) and,
• "Tom" Tucker, an expert of ocean instrumentation who in 1944 at the age of 19 joined the Admiralty's Group "W" (for waves) that became part of NIO.
Despite being more 30 miles from the sea, the NIO was Britain's first truly national laboratory for studying the oceans and was the forerunner of the National Oceanography Centre.
From Robert Fulford, National Post
In 1992, thousands of rubber duckies and other bathtub toys fell from a ship during a storm in the Pacific and began to circle the Earth on a voyage that lasted more than 16 years.
Their arrival on beaches from Australia to England delivered to oceanographers fresh data about currents and gave the world yet another metaphor for global interconnection.
That metaphor went to work most recently in Water (MIT Press), a thick paperback that's part of Alphabet City, a series of anthologies edited in Toronto by John Knechtel.
Timothy Stock, a philosophy professor in Britain, uses that famous shipment in an essay, The Waters of Metaphysics.
After quoting Plato ( "all things are the offspring of flow and motion"), he writes about the ancient Greek idea that the ocean was the birthplace of the gods and the modern conviction that all elements eventually move through the ocean, thereby through the food chain.
And, as he says, evolution reminds us that it was in the oceans that the first signs of life appeared.
The message of Water seems especially striking in this tragic summer, shadowed by the BP explosion and vast pollution in the Gulf of Mexico.
Knechtel and his contributors set out to explore the hazards afflicting the oceans and also bring their readers alive to the poetry inherent in water.
Humans have always regarded water with awe but not necessarily respect.
We know that without the oceans we are lost but we also seem to believe that we can mistreat them without risk.
Perhaps the summer of 2010 will change the place we give to water in our collective imagination.
Water, in the eccentric tradition of Alphabet City, contains a visual study of the 1997 Manitoba flood, interpretations of Niagara Falls, an examination of the branding of bottled waters, some Arnaud Maggs pictures of mould formations staining the pages of a water-damaged ledger from the days of Yukon gold prospecting and a short story about a woman in her bath living through a depression while brooding about Pierre Bonnard's gorgeous bath paintings of his wife and mistress.
Knechtel also includes the score of a piece of music written by Melissa Grey as accompaniment to the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, complete with stills from the film and cues connecting music to the pictures (SHOWER CURTAIN OPEN ... KNIFE).
Ravine City, by Chris Hardwicke, is an eloquent piece about a way to rebuild Toronto by opening up the city's many buried streams and rivers.
Hardwicke would restore the city's natural water cycle and line the ravines with terraced housing and gardens working in symbiosis with the city's watersheds.
Water, just by mentioning the case of the rubber duckies, sent me scurrying off in search of the definitive work on that subject and its implications, Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science (Smithsonian Books: Harper Collins), by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano, published last year.
When I first heard the outlines of this story the phrase "urban myth" danced through my head. It seemed too good to be true. Ebbesmeyer persuaded me otherwise.
It began Jan. 10, 1992, when a container ship, en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Wash., ran into a hurricane near the international dateline.
The waves were so powerful that they broke some of the steel cables holding the huge containers, releasing 12 of them over the side.
One that was lost held 28,800 Friendly Floatee bathtub toys, made in China for The First Years Inc. of Avon, Mass.
They were red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and, of course, yellow ducks.
We might expect that elaborate wrapping around the toys would have dragged them straight to the bottom.
But they managed to escape five levels of packing, from the heavy steel containers (violent waves opened the door latches) to the plastic and paper boxes (water pulped the cardboard) before finally floating free.
It took 10 months for the first 10 Floatees to reach shore near Sitka, Alaska, having been swept along by the Subpolar Gyre, the ocean current in the Bering Sea.
By then they had covered about 3,200 km and two oceanographers in Seattle, Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, were tracking their progress.
(Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham were already studying 61,000 Nike running shoes that had fallen in the ocean two years earlier. -see 'Hansa Carrier' below-)
A few months later another 20 toys reached Alaska.
By August 1993, 400 more had been found along the shores of the Gulf of Alaska. Ingraham logged them in his OSCURS (Ocean Surface Currents Simulation), a program that calculates the course of wind and currents.
Other toys, after following a circuitous route to Washington state, began arriving there in 1996.
The oceanographers predicted that some toys would drift north, get locked in Arctic ice, then eventually be released.
In a few years they could move across the Pole to the Atlantic. Then where would they go? Eventually they arrived in Maine, Iceland, Newfoundland, the U.K. and Germany.
The last of the survivors continued to float, Ebbesmeyer says, "bleached and battered but still recognizable after 16 years." Well, the manufacturer said they were designed to survive 52 dishwasher cycles.
Ebbesmeyer approaches this narrative with a cheerful buoyancy: "These high-seas drifters offer a new way of looking at the seas. Call it 'flotsametrics.'
It's led me to a world of beauty, order and peril I could not have imagined even after decades as a working oceanographer."
He loves his status as flotsam headquarters for data sent back by the world's 1,000 or so dedicated beachcombers.
It's a joyful story of discoveries he tells in his book.
But he brings the reader back to Earth, and starts us thinking again about BP, when he describes the seabed slowly filling with bits of plastic that poison the fish and eventually the humans who eat them.
Thousands of containers fall into the sea every year, creating an oceanic junkyard.
And the junk never disappears.
These days beachcombers keep coming across flotsam antiques, like a plastic ball decorated with 40-year-old cartoon characters or Japanese glass buoys for fishing nets that haven't been used in half a century.
These relics are fascinating bits of the past, but when it comes to the fate of the oceans, perhaps beachcombers have stumbled upon the melancholy truth.
Links :
