A virtual first look at unexplored seafloor : Farallon islands

Take a virtual ride over topography that would be right at home in a national park — except it's at the bottom of the ocean.
A new mapping tool has given scientists a first glimpse of the seafloor in an area off the coast of northern California. (Credit: NOAA)

From OurAmazingPlanet

A new mapping tool has given scientists a first glimpse of an area of the seafloor just west of the San Francisco Bay and, thanks to a new animation, ordinary people can take a ride over the newfound and dramatic topography.

Approaching the Farallones

>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

The newly mapped ocean floor lies within the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, a protected area that spans 1,279 square miles (3,312 square kilometers) of the Pacific Ocean just northwest of San Francisco.

Thanks to a sonar mapping tool, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently got a look at some unexplored areas of the sanctuary.

A video using data gleaned from sonar reveals dramatic ravines and canyons that plunge 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) into the deep ocean.

Virtual fly-through of San Francisco Bay revealing the seafloor as if the water was drained from the Bay.
The movie flies through the south and central Bay, pausing over prominent seafloor features including, large sand waves, rock pinnacles, current scour pits, as well as many human impacts on the seafloor. (source USGS)

These dramatic cliffs and two other areas are garnering some of the most attention from scientists. These seafloor regions have been well mapped for the first time, and may prove to be home to a host of valuable ocean species.
"These are the first highly detailed images of these areas in our sanctuary," Jan Roletto, sanctuary research coordinator, said in a statement.
"This area has promising potential as habitat for deep-sea corals and sponges."

Storms and cold weather left the air over the Bay Area clearer than usual, allowing the Farallon Islands to be seen on the horizon over the Golden Gate Bridge, with Alcatraz Island in the foreground.

Soon-to-be setting sn to the lower-left, accounting for semi-sihouette of foreground elements. 

Scientists are planning to revisit these areas in October 2012 to take even better measurements and better understand what creatures live there.

They plan to use a deep-diving robot to explore the depths.

Some of the sanctuary's most famous residents don't require deep-diving robots to get a good look. Great white sharks crowd the waters around the Farallon Islands, a smattering of tiny, steep mountains that rise from the sea about 25 miles (40 km) west of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

Links :

• Fly through Alcatraz - Golden Gate: San Francisco Bay (3D)

Celebrate World Oceans Day !

World Oceans Day is being celebrated by millions of people all over the globe.
 Be a part of the movement to protect our oceans!

From Oneworldoneocean

On World Oceans Day, let’s first check out the importance of water:

About 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth’s water.
Water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and in aquifers, and even in you and your dog.

Water is never sitting still, though, and thanks to the water cycle, our planet’s water supply is constantly moving from one place to another and from one form to another.

Things would get pretty stale without the water cycle!

Oceans cover 71% of the planet and are the source of life on Earth.

Over a billion people, including some of the poorest in the world, depend on the oceans and wild seafood for survival.

But our blue planet is under threat.

Each day we remove more than the oceans can replenish.

We are draining our oceans of life and protein for a hungry planet.
The good news is that our oceans are astoundingly resilient.

Contrary to popular belief, the sea is not ungoverned.

Ten countries control most of the world's wild seafood catch.

Oceana has won critical policy victories in many of these countries, protecting more than a million square miles of ocean.
We can turn things around if we focus on three goals: ending overfishing, controlling bycatch and protecting our ocean nurseries.

Now let’s check out the importance of our oceans:

The Ocean Is Earth’s Life Support

• 50 to 70 percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. That’s more than every one of the world’s rainforests combined.
• The ocean is the #1 source of protein for more than a billion people. Sea life provides one fifth of the average person’s animal protein intake.
• The ocean regulates our climate, absorbs carbon dioxide, holds 97% of Earth’s water, and supports the greatest abundance of life on our planet.
  

But The Ocean Is In Trouble

• 90% of the big fish are gone. Tuna, swordfish, halibut, cod, and flounder populations have been devastated by overfishing. Many of the fish caught today never even have the chance to reproduce.
• The average size of the remaining big fish has been cut in half or less in the last 50 years. The average weight of a swordfish caught today is 90 lbs., down from 266 lbs. in 1960.
• Discarded plastic bags and other trash have formed a toxic “plastic soup” that is gathering in five massive ocean gyres around the world. As the plastic breaks down, it is eaten by sea animals, birds, and fish, causing illness and death. It eventually enters our diets, too.
• Our oceans account for 71% of the planet, but less than 2% of our oceans are protected. We have protections in place for nearly 12% of all land (through areas like national parks).

11x World champion surfer, Kelly Slater, and The Nature Conservancy are working to save our oceans

So there you have it – now go celebrate our beautiful oceans and make a pledge today to do all you can to protect them!


Links :

• HuffingtonPost : If the Sea Was a Child: In Honor of World Oceans Day
  

Canada CHS update in the Marine GeoGarage

1310 Montreal

19 charts have been updated (May 27, 2012) and 102 has been withdrawn :

• 1234    CAP DE LA TETE AU CHIEN TO CAP AUX OIES
• 1310    PORT DE MONTREAL
• 1312    LAC SAINT-PIERRE
• 1313    BATISCAN TO LAC SAINT-PIERRE
• 1314    DONNACONA TO BATISCAN
• 1431    CANAL DE BEAUHARNOIS - LAC SAINT-LOUIS TO SAINT FRANCOIS
• 1432    LAC SAINT-FRANCOIS/LAKE ST.FRANCIS B-C
• 2023A    PETERBOROUGH TO LAKEFIELD
• 2023B    LAKEFIELD TO BURLEIGH FALLS
• 2023C    STONY LAKE
• 2202A    PORT SEVERN TO TOMAHAWK ISLAND
• 2202B    TOMAHAWK ISLAND TO TWELVE MILE BAY
• 2202C    TWELVE MILE BAY TO ROSE ISLAND
• 2202D    SOUTH CHANNEL AMANDA ISLAND TO PARRY SOUND
• 2202E    MOON ISLAND AND SURROUNDING AREAS
• 2204A    BYNG INLET TO KILLARNEY
• 2204B    BYNG INLET TO KILLARNEY
• 2204C    BYNG INLET TO KILLARNEY
• 2204D    BEAVERSTONE BAY TO KILLARNEY
• 3526    HOWE SOUND
• 4003    CAPE BRETON TO CAPE COD
• 4012    YARMOUTH TO HALIFAX
• 4098    SABLE ISLAND / ILE DE SABLE
• 4099    SABLE ISLAND / ILE DE SABLE - WESTERN PORTION
• 4233    CAPE CANSO TO COUNTRY ISLAND
• 4234    COUNTRY ISLAND TO BARREN ISLAND
• 4845    RENEWS HARBOUR TO MOTION BAY
• 4956    CAP-AUX-MEULES

So 688 charts (1659 including sub-charts) are available in the Canada CHS layer. (see coverage)

Note : don't forget to visit 'Notices to Mariners' published monthly and available from the Canadian Coast Guard both online or through a free hardcopy subscription service.
This essential publication provides the latest information on changes to the aids to navigation system, as well as updates from CHS regarding CHS charts and publications.
See also written Notices to Shipping and Navarea warnings : NOTSHIP

Venus transit offers opportunity to study planet's atmosphere

It won't happen again until December 2117.
On June 5th, 2012, Venus transited the face of the sun in an event of both historical and observational importance
The Venus Transit 2012 has come and gone but the Solar Dynamics Observatory has left us with memories that will last a lifetime.

From CSMonitor

The planet Venus made a slow transit across the face of the sun on Tuesday, the last such passing that will be visible from Earth for 105 years.

 Transits of Venus happen in pairs, eight years apart, with more than a century between cycles.

During Tuesday's pass, Venus took the form of a small black dot slowly shifting across the northern hemisphere of the sun.

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun.

During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate.  SDO provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day.
On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event--the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. 

This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. 

The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.

Armchair astronomers watched the six-hour and 40-minute transit on the Internet, with dozens of websites offering live video from around the world.

Closeup views from the Prescott Observatory in Arizona, fed into Slooh.com's webcast, showed a small solar flaring in the making just beneath Venus' sphere.

This movie shows the transit of Venus on 5-6 June 2012 as seen from SWAP, a Belgian solar imager onboard ESA's PROBA2 microsatellite.
SWAP, watching the Sun in EUV light, observes Venus as a small, black circle, obscuring the EUV light emitted from the solar outer atmosphere - the corona - from 19:45UT onwards.
At 22:16UT - Venus started its transit of the solar disk
The bright dots all over the image ('snow storm') are energetic particles hitting the SWAP detector when PROBA2 crosses the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where the protection of the Earth magnetic field against space radiation is known to be weaker.
Note also the small flaring activity in the bright active region in the northern solar hemisphere as Venus passes over.
Towards the end, you can see a big dim inverted-U-shape moving away from the Sun towards the bottom-right corner.
This is a coronal mass ejection taking off.

Tuesday's transit, completing a 2004-2012 pair, began at 6:09 p.m. EDT (2209 GMT).

Skywatchers on seven continents, including Antarctica, were able to see all or part of the transit. Even astronauts aboard the International Space Station joined in the spectacle.

"I've been planning this for a while," space station flight engineer Don Pettit said in a NASA interview. "I knew the transit of Venus would occur during my rotation, so I brought a solar filter with me."

Venus transits the face of the Sun as it rises over the Mediterranean in Malta

It's not all about pretty pictures.

Several science experiments were planned, including studies that could help in the search for habitable planets beyond Earth.
Telescopes, such as NASA's Kepler space telescope, are being used to find so-called extrasolar planets that pass in front of their parent stars, much like Venus passing by the sun.

During the transit of Venus, astronomers planned to measure the planet's thick atmosphere in the hope of developing techniques to measure atmospheres around other planets.
Studies of the atmosphere of Venus could also shed light on why Earth and Venus, which are almost exactly the same size and orbit approximately the same distance from the sun, are so different.
Venus has a chokingly dense atmosphere, 100 times thicker than Earth's, that is mostly carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Its surface temperature is a lead-melting 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius) and towering clouds of sulfuric acid jet around the planet at 220 miles per hour dousing it with acid rain.

"Venus is known as the goddess of love, but it's not the type of relationship you'd want," an astronomer said on the Slooh.com webcast.

"This is a look-but-don't-touch kind of relationship."

Scientists are interested in learning more about Venus' climate in hopes of understanding changes in Earth's atmosphere.
During previous transits of Venus, scientists were able to figure out the size of the solar system and the distance between the sun and the planets.

Tuesday's transit is only the eighth since the invention of the telescope, and the last until December 10-11, 2117.

It also is the first to take place with a spacecraft at Venus.

Observations from Europe's Venus Express probe will be compared with those made by several ground and space-based telescopes, including NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, the joint U.S.-European Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and Japan's Hinode spacecrafthttp://solar-b.nao.ac.jp/index_e.shtml.

Links :

• NASA : Venus transit 2012
• Fotopedia : images of the Venus transit

If seas are to survive, we need a New Deal for the Oceans

Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing is published by Allen Lane

From TheGuardian

Callum Roberts is a marine biologist, writer and conservationist.
His career has taken him round the world to study the planet's reefs, shoals and seabeds and his latest book, Ocean of Life, provides a detailed analysis of the woes that now beset these places: from plastic pollution to oil slicks; from melting icecaps to rising levels of acid waters; and from disintegrating coral reefs to spreading blooms of toxic algae.
Yet Roberts maintains that we can still save our beleaguered seas.
   

The picture that you paint of our oceans is very bleak. Is there any hope?
I think there is. We have this enormous challenge, I admit that.
The oceans are changing faster than at any time in human history, indeed for millions of years into the past.
But I think we can deal with those changes if we act carefully and quickly.

OK, so first outline the damage.
There are three main strands of destruction going on now.
The first concerns the rate at which we are removing life from the oceans.
Consider British waters.
In 1938, the UK fishing fleet landed more than five times more fish than we do now.
Yet trawlers today bristle with hi-tech gear such as echo-locators and scanners.
We cannot match past rates of catches because we have taken so many fish from the oceans.
Our fish stocks are heading for collapse while our dredgers are churning up the seabed, turning complex marine habitats into monotonous expanses of shifting gravel, sand and mud.
The second strand is pollution.
We are poisoning the seas in myriad different ways.
Some of them involve chemicals such as DDT and brominated flame retardants.
These are used on land, but get washed off by streams and rivers into the seas.
The oceans are the ultimate sinks and normally these toxins would settle on the seabed, but because we are dredging up ocean floors systematically the toxins get mixed back into the water.
As a result, many forms of sea-life – from seabirds to whales – have been found with high levels of toxins in their tissue.
The rising level of carbon dioxide in seawater is making it more acidic and more difficult for molluscs to form shells.
Then there is habitat destruction.
We are ripping up mangroves, marshland and beaches to make way for hotels, resorts and ports.
And on top of all those, there is the issue of climate change.
As icecaps melt, cold freshwaters pour from Greenland and the Antarctic and threaten to disrupt currents, including the Gulf Stream, which keeps Britain warm.

Not much to be cheerful about…
No. It is a grim picture, particularly as there will be up to 11 billion human beings on the planet by the end of the century.
That means we end up trying to intensify our fishing even further to provide as much food as possible.

 Callum Roberts: 'We can deal with these changes if we act carefully and quickly.'

So what can we do?
There are measures we can take, though we have to realise that things will get worse before they get better and will involve a radical overhaul of the way we steward the seas.
First, we need to curtail fishing to about a half of the current level and, for good measure, ban all fishing below depths of half a mile.
The deeper you go, fish take longer to grow and reproduce so that it takes longer to recover from depletion down there.
We also need to phase out the most destructive fishing gear including equipment that is used to dredge the sea floor for scallops and other bottom-dwelling species.
Expanding marine reserves is crucial.
We need them to cover about a third of the oceans and prohibit any exploitation of sea life within their boundaries.
This will give species places to recover, particularly in zones where the effects of global warming are likely to be more pronounced.
We have recently seen new reserves set up at Hol Chan in Belize, Cabo Pulmo in Mexico and Sea Park in the Bahamas.
We just need to expand the system.

And the stuff we dump in the seas?
We need to cut down and control more effectively toxins such as flame retardants that are ending up in the seas.
We also need to look at more commonplace forms of rubbish – plastic bags and bin liners get swept into rivers and seas and end up choking seabirds and turtles.
Controlling the way we dispose of supermarket packaging and the like is a simple business, but it would have a really beneficial impact on the marine environment.
We need to control the amounts of fertilisers and nutrients we put on our fields, which also get swept into the rivers and the seas, triggering the growth of toxic blooms of algae.
Finally, we need to protect our coastal zones, with their mangrove swamps and fragile banks of sands.
The crucial point is that none of these measures involves major political upheavals but they will have enormous consequences.
What we are talking about is the setting up of a New Deal for the Oceans.

Links :

• TheGuardian : Sea creatures and ocean vistas: the watery world under threat - in pictures
• CSMonitor : The Ocean of life
• WSJ : Fathoming the Ocean's Future
• DailyBest : ‘The Ocean of Life’—And the Sorrow Beneath the Sea
• TheEconomist : An ocean of troubles