Massive Waimea Bay - XXL big wave surfing this week

Big wave surfing at Waimea Bay

The world famous Waimea bay, when it starts breaking in El Niño wintertime, it's the premier big wave spot, you'll find a lot of pro's and big wave legends in the water.

Not the longest wave, or the most perfect. But big.

In winter time it's home for the famous Eddie Aikau Big wave classic on the North Shore of Oahu.
-> location on the Marine GeoGarage

Another solid swell hit the islands Sunday night, and the Bay was firing on Monday morning, January 11th. (video Jan 16th)
Lots of wipe outs, a tow-in ride at first light, heavy barrels.

Links :

• SurferMag : Waimea Bay, a century of change
• NYTimes : As Hawaii’s seas roil, surfers await the big one
• SaveTheSurfers.org : keeping the spirit alive
• YouTube : I / II / III / IV
  

Barrier reef braces for flood impact

Flood water levels based on mapping by Brisbane City Council and computer modeling
by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

From BBCNews

As floodwaters in the Queensland capital Brisbane begin to recede, scientists are casting their eyes out to sea and wondering whether the region's greatest natural feature, the Great Barrier Reef, will be scarred by the experience.

-> Position in the Marine GeoGarage

This is the world's largest reef system - in fact, the largest thing on Earth made by living organisms, stretching for 2,600km along the coast.
Its myriad of islands and tendrils teem with fish, also supporting dugongs, dolphins, turtles and shellfish - and because of all that, a tourist trade worth several billion dollars per year.

The flood waters emerging from Brisbane itself are not a major concern, as the reef lies further north.
But northern rivers are also seeing flow rates way above normal.
As the water floods into the seas west of the reef, it inevitably freshens the environment around the reef; which is not good news.

Flood devastation mapped by high-res sky cams from NearMap
View large map

"Freshwater kills corals, and there is nothing we can do about it," says Katharina Fabricius, principal research scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Queensland is a heavily agricultural state.
And this means that the floodwater brings with it another threat.
Pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and sediment - mud - are washed off the farms, into the rivers and then onto the reef.
The fertilizers do in the sea what they do on land - stimulate the growth of plants.

But here, that is a problem, as the marine plants cover growing coral, choking it to death.
The sediment also hurts the reef, blocking sunlight and covering the coral fronds.
This run-off degrades the reef at the best of times; but in flood conditions, it becomes much more serious.
"The young corals are highly sensitive to exposure to organically enriched sediments," Dr Fabricius tells BBC News.
"That retards the ability of reefs to recover from the freshwater damage.
"My own research has also shown that increasing levels of nutrients can lead to more seaweed - up to a five-fold increase - and reduce coral biodiversity, with half of the coral species potentially lost from the exposed sites."

Local issue

The sites at highest risk are reefs close to the shore and close to the mouths of rivers discharging floodwater.
For example, the Keppel group of islands lies about 10km from the shore, in the path of water rushing from the mouth of the Fitzroy River.

Scientists monitoring coral there say they have already seen indications of coral damage, but that is is too early to tell how big the impact is likely to be.

As the floodwater spreads further from land, it dissipates in the seas - but can still have major consequences.
"The waters discharging from the Fitzroy River are moving hundreds of kilometres north and 50-100km offshore," says Michelle Devlin, a coral reef ecologist from James Cook University in Townsville.
"There is the potential for large areas of the reef to experience river plume water, with potentially damaging levels of nutrients, sediments and pesticides."

Recovery hopes

On their own, the floods would not necessarily be a significant threat.
The region has had them regularly down the years (see BOM reports)
1991 saw major damage to inshore coral - but it recovered.
"The 1991 flood was extremely hard for the reef - pretty much most of the corals were wiped out down to about six to eight metres of depth, and it took about 10 years for them to recover," says Alison Jones from Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, through which the Fitzroy flows.
"But they recovered magnificently; we're very spoiled here in terms of the amount of coral and the speed at which it can grow and recover."

However, what concerns scientists most is that this is just one more hit for an ecosystem that is already struggling to cope with many long-term threats.
These include overfishing, climate change, disease, chronic pollution and shipping.
"The problem is that all forms of disturbances, loads of sediments/nutrients/pesticides, as well as bleaching events from warming seawaters, more intense cyclones and more frequent outbreaks of coral predators such as the crown-of-thorns starfish, all increase in frequency and intensity," says Katharine Fabricius.
"This gives the reefs often not enough time to recover before they get hit again."

The crown-of-thorns starfish is a good example of how the various threats interact.
It eats coral polyps, the organisms that actually build reefs.
Overfishing of one of its few predators, the giant triton, allows the starfish population to expand. Meanwhile, in at least one reef system, fertiliser run-off has stimulated the growth of algae, which has provided predators with an alternative food.

Reefs stressed by climatic factors, pollution and disease will be less resilient to attack by the voracious starfish.

Climate of concern

It is likely to be several weeks at least before scientists are able to gauge the true scale of the flood's short-term impacts.
The continuing threat of bad weather means that travel to the reef is constrained.
And it will be some time - the exact period dependend again on weather - before all of the flood's cargo has travelled through the multifarious fronds of the reef system.

The hope is that it will prove to be a one-off hit from which corals, fish and everything else can recover.
The long-term threats, though, remain, despite recent initiatives to reduce agricultural run-off, constrain shipping and fishing, and tackle the crown-of-thorns.

Climate change is likely to hit reefs in the middle of the tropics harder and faster than the Great Barrier Reef.
Neverless, along with ocean acidification also caused by carbon dioxide emissions, it remains the most significant issue for the region, with a 2007 report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority concluding:
"Projections of future sea temperatures suggest that coral bleaching could become an annual phenomenon in the course of this century, threatening to undermine the physical and ecological foundations of this diverse and productive ecosystem."

Links :

• NASA : Heavy rains in Queensland
• NASA (2007) : River plumes threaten Great Barrier Reef
  
• ESA : Swamped down under
• GeoSciencesAustralia : Satellite images show flood spread
  
• ABCNews : Great Barrier Reef 'should recover' from flood damage
  

Marine GeoGarage URL generator

http://marine.geogarage.com/api/url

Some webmasters of marine websites asked us how to help them to automatically generate some Marine GeoGarage URL from a list of geographical positions (Lat/Lon).

see also : Sharing Marine GeoGarage places

So, this link is a basic user interface allowing to get a direct access to a geographical position in the Marine GeoGarage.
Notes :

• Latitude/Longitude (WGS84) : in decimal degrees (DD.DDDDD)

e.g. : 37.91 / -122.35 with plus (+) for North/East & minus (-) for South/West

Note : Got coordinates in degree-minute-second degrees and need them in decimal format fast ?

So calculate DD.DDDDD = DD+MM/60+SS.SSS/3600 or DD+MM.MMM/60
or go to Zonums for example

• Chart layer codes :

1. USA (NOAA) : noa
2. Bahamas (WaveyLine) : wl
3. New Zealand (Linz) : nz
4. Brazil (DHN) : dhn
5. Argentina (SHN) : shn
6. UK & misc. (Brit. Adm.) : uk
7. Canada (CHS) : chs
8. Australia (AHS) : ahs
9. ...

• Zoom : maps on Google Maps have an integer "zoom level" which defines the resolution of the current view. Zoom levels between 0 (the lowest zoom level, in which the entire world can be seen on one map) to 21+ (down to individual buildings) are possible within the default roadmap maps view. Google Maps sets zoom level 0 to encompass the entire earth. Each succeeding zoom level doubles the precision in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Note: not all zoom levels appear at all locations on the earth. Zoom levels vary depending on location, as data in some parts of the globe is more granular than in other locations.

In the case of multiple geographical positions, it's possible to use in a Unix terminal window the following command-line tool. So passing parameters for lat, lon and code :

$ curl -d lat=37.91 -d lon=-122.35 -d z=15 -d code=noa http://marine.geogarage.com/api/url.json

you get the following Marine GeoGarage URL for the corresponding Lat/Lon geographical position (e.g. : 37.91N/122.35W) :

http://marine.geogarage.com/routes?map1=eyJwb3MiOnsieiI6MTUsImxsIjoiMzcuOTEsLTEyMi4zNSJ9LCJvIjp7Im5vYSI6e319fSAg

Swimming stars : dolphins vs humans

From Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds

In the high speed world, water becomes thick, dense - an alien environment that we struggle to get through.

Over time a strong swimmer can manage about 2 miles an hour.
But that’s nothing compared to other mammals like the dolphin, that can reach speeds 5 times faster.
But it's only in slow motion that we can see why the dolphin is so much at home here, and why we aren't.
Water is 800 times thicker than air - so thick that it pulls and distorts our soft bodies as we swim, causing drag which holds us back.
The water doesn't distort the dolphin's body at all, passing smoothly over it.
The dolphin has much thicker skin, like rubber, that stops his blubber from flapping.

So while we struggle to make headway, the dolphin is barely trying, and when they need to go faster, they can make it look effortless.

Using state-of-the-art technologies, Richard Hammond goes beyond the limits of the naked eye and explores the hidden secrets of the invisible world around us.

Human vision is pretty miraculous, but our eyes aren’t quite as powerful as you might imagine. What we can see is stuff that reflects or emits light with wavelengths in a very narrow band (since you ask, from about 750 to 400 nanometres).
What we can’t see is the rest.
That’s all matter that reflects or emits light over the other 99.99% percent of the spectrum.
In fact, we’re almost blind.

Fixing incorrect information in Google Maps

We got a couple of emails from users that would like to report incorrect information regarding Google Maps info.
Perhaps a misspelled marina name, incorrect building name in some harbor, etc.

Fortunately, Google makes it very easy to report problems like that.
You can read all of your options on this help page, but in most cases you'll simply want to use the "Report a Problem" link in Google Maps.

The item will usually be corrected in Google Maps within a month, and then corrected in Google Earth at some point after that.

Note : that is for Google Maps.
Regarding nautical charts and Marine GeoGarage overlays, don't hesitate to contact us directly and we will redirect the info to the Hydrographic Service concerned by the issue.