Herbert Nitsch : back from the abyss

On June 6, 2012, the apnea diver Herbert Nitsch sought to improve his own world record in freediving by another 100 feet - to 800 feet (244 meters).

The record attempt off the Greek island of Santorini was to only be the beginning of his "1,000 feet" project.

Despite painstaking preparation, on this early summer afternoon Nitsch experienced the worst-case scenario.

Unconscious, he had to be brought to the surface by rescue divers - after reaching a depth of more than 818 feet (249.5 meters).

From DeeperBlue

For almost a year afterwards, there was no information whatsoever either about the accident or about Herbert Nitsch’s condition.

However, this documentary accompanied him during his incredible recovery, removed from the public eye, and offers world exclusive documentary material on the months of preparation leading up to and including the life-threatening accident in Santorini, the difficult rehabilitation in specialized clinics and finally, Nitsch's way back into the stillness of the underwater world of the sea.

Herbert Nitsch talks about his fateful dive and recovery :

“On June 6, 2012, I almost lost my life while pursuing a new world record.
First and foremost I would like to thank all those who believed in me and supported me since the record.
It played a big role in my well being and I can’t thank you enough for the concern, the care you gave to me. As freedivers know better than anyone, when you’ve been quite far down, getting back up is the only way to go – and all of you helped.
On that windy Wednesday in Santorino, Greece, the aim was to reach 800 feet (243.84 meters) with the no-limit freediving discipline, of which I already held the 700 feet world record. Several years of preparation, sled-design, safety measures and thorough training led up to this rather high profile event.
I did reach the record depth of 818.6 feet (249.5 meters), however, on the way back to the surface I lost consciousness due to narcosis (a first in free diving).
The sled and safety devices were designed in such a way, that it would stop at 10 meters depth, which it did, within reach of the safety divers.
Thanks to the well organized emergency rescue plan as part of my extensive pre-dive safety preparations, all went as scheduled after I reached the surface.
The original plan was that I would slow down the sled between 100 and 70 meters below the surface on the way back up, and have a one minute decompression stop at approximately 10 meters depth.
Because of the blackout due to narcosis (at approximately 100 meters below the surface), I was not able to slow down the sled, and thus it continued on to 10 meters where it stopped as programmed. Fortunately the safety divers brought me right away to the surface.
Because this omitted the planned 1 minute decompression stop, the result was serious DCS (decompression sickness), which is equivalent in my case to several brain strokes with severe initial consequences.
Prior to reaching the surface, I did regain consciousness and had the clarity of mind to ask for oxygen, to descend back to about 10 meters for about 20 minutes thus avoiding some impact of DCS. Underwater I realized that things were wrong in my head.
And once back to the surface I had to be brought with urgency by speedboat to the port of Fira, onward by ambulance plane to the hospital and decompression chamber in Athens.
After a good week’s stay in Athens, I was flown by ambulance plane to Murnau in Southern Germany to undergo recompression therapy for about a month.
This was followed by additional months of rehabilitation in Vienna to learn to walk, talk and move around again.
It was not an easy road.
During the course of rehabilitation I went into depression, wondering if I would ever get back to normal life again, to the point of contemplating jumping out of the window to end the mental chaos and physical limitations I endured.
Fortunately I realized that the second floor of the rehab center would not do the trick, so I gave up rather quickly on that idea.
Despite the slow progress and initial depression, I kept my motivation alive and made the decision to do anything to bring my life back to what it used to be.
I started a strict regime of super foods, healthy living, exercise and listening to my own intuition (even if this often meant disregarding well-meaning advice from doctors and experts).
I adopted the same attitude that I always used with freediving: pushing boundaries, further exploring the human potential and setting new limits where we thought we already knew everything.
I am doing well now.
There are still some physical challenges to deal with related to coordination and speech, which are typical consequences of neurological damage.
But from what I hear, those who have no idea of my condition do not really notice these limitations, which is a rather positive sign.
In January and February of 2013, I went with my father for a month trip in the South Pacific, where I lectured onboard a luxurious cruise liner, and started free diving again. It felt great to be back in the water.
In May I went back to Palau for freediving, and it made me realize once more that there is so much yet to explore in the deep blue.
It was a deliberate choice to keep quiet from the media for all this time since June 6 of last year until now.
After the record dive last year, the attention we received was overwhelming.
Because I was not in a position to make my own statements during most of that time and was not sure about my recovery and progress, I decided that healing had priority over media for the time being.
Also because media often misinterprets events or interviews, I decided to wait so I could tell my own story in my own words when the time is right.
Looking back, I am utterly convinced that my dive plan was realistic and feasible.
But what was not, was the way we conducted the dive under the forced conditions of that particular day.
I should have postponed the dive, prepare better and let the weather settle, before deciding to go for it.
Things could then have been different.
But life does not work backwards and even though I was obviously the one to pay the highest price for it, all those around me, family, friends, team, followers and supporters were also affected to some extent.
The support I received from everyone greatly contributed to my motivation and made my recovery easier.

A very thorough documentary by Red Bull will be aired June 6, 2013 (exactly one year after the record) around the whole event, including various phases of the recovery process and never seen before pictures.

The film team was also with me in the South Pacific for a while this January on the cruise, which is also featured in the documentary.
Lectures and writing will be the main focus for me in the coming months, along with more travels and new ideas linked to the underwater world.
I plan to work more towards the protection of the oceans, but also have in mind to design a new kind of submersible and new ways to explore the oceans.
Competitive freediving is not likely to be part of the future, but for the rest, I am still the same I used to be; the will to create new ways to achieve new things never left me.
I truly look forward to sharing more good news with you in the future.“

Links :

• Beyond the possible 
• Vimeo : Introducing Herbert Nitsch, the deepest man in the world
• Ted :  Herbert Nitsch - Breathless

Round the Island race 2013 timelapse

The course runs all the way round the Isle of Wight.

The Needles lighthouse

is a row of three distinctive stacks of chalk

that rise out of the sea off the western extremity of the Isle of Wight, UK

>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

Congratulations go to Sir Ben Ainslie and his all-British crew aboard his AC 45 catamaran J.P. Morgan BAR, from Solent Refit, the preparation base for the catamaran challenge.

Their craft trounced the existing Round the Island Race multihull record, which had stood for 12 years, by an impressive 16 minutes, finishing in 2 hours and 52 minutes across the course.
The previous multihull Race record was held by offshore legend Francis Joyon, who completed the 50 nautical mile 2001 course in just 188 minutes.

World oceans day : time to celebrate, conserve the blue part of the planet

 From HuffingtonPost

June 8 marks the 21st annual World Oceans Day, a time to commemorate the blue part of the planet while galvanizing support for increasingly threatened aquatic ecosystems.

The day was first proposed by the Canadian government in 1992 and has since gained global recognition, including a designation by the United Nations in 2008.

Unfortunately, many of the issues plaguing oceans worldwide have only gotten worse since last year's event.
A recent report by the Marine Conservation Institute criticized the United States' lackluster protection of coastal ecosystems, overfishing continues to deplete wild fish populations and studies show ocean acidification is still threatening certain regions.

Yet conservation efforts are gaining some steady support.
Secretary of State John Kerry convened a group of "ocean experts" earlier this week to discuss conservation, saying the State Dept. was "committed to addressing threats including pollution, overfishing, and ocean acidification," in a press release. The event comes shortly after the White House released the final version of a landmark National Oceans Policy in April, mandated by a 2010 executive order from President Barack Obama.

Take a look here for a list of World Oceans Day events, and if you're in New York City, glance up at the Empire State Building, which will be lighted white, blue and purple for the evening.

Links :

• Humanature : World Oceans Day Means Business

Trash in the deep sea: bringing a hidden problem to light

After reviewing every video clip that showed debris, and compiling where and when the debris was found,
the researchers discovered plastics were the most common seafloor trash.

 From LiveSciences

The mention of ocean pollution usually triggers searing images of birds and turtles choked by bags, fasteners and other debris floating at the ocean surface.
But thousands of feet below, garbage also clutters the seafloor, with as yet unknown consequences for marine life, a new study finds.

 Distribution of marine debris observed in Monterey Bay (N=1,149). MBARI ROV surveys over the 22-year study period are shown in red.

The relative abundance of trash was normalized by the amount of time spent searching the seafloor; the largest circles depict areas of trash accumulation which tend to occur on the outside walls of canyon meanders where high-energy water flow and erosion occur.

The main study grid (upper inset) extended to the abyssal plain and included Davidson Seamount, about 130 km to the southwest.
>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

"It's completely changing the natural environment, in a way that we don't know what it's going to do," said Susan von Thun, a study co-author and senior research technician at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Monterey, Calif.

For the past 22 years, MBARI researchers have explored the deep ocean seafloor from California to Canada and offshore of Hawaii.
Video researchers tagged every piece of trash seen during the deep-sea dives, cataloguing more than 1,500 items in all.
Sparked by a recent study on trash offshore of Southern California, scientists at MBARI decided to analyze the database of ocean debris they had gathered.
The results were published May 28 in the journal Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers.

 The relationship between rugosity and debris distribution in Monterey Canyon.

MBARI ROV surveys over the 22-year study period are shown in blue.

The distribution of natural debris (drift kelp, wood) in Monterey Bay is indicated by the blue circles; the distribution of anthropogenic marine debris is indicated by the orange triangles.

The red box outlines a “clean” section of the canyon.

"Unfortunately for me, I wasn't so surprised," said von Thun, who works in the MBARI video lab.
"I've seen plenty of trash as I've been annotating video."

More than half of the plastic items were bags.
A deep-sea coral living nearly 7,000 feet (2,115 meters) off the Oregon Coast had a black plastic bag wrapped around its base, which will eventually kill the organism, von Thun said.

The second biggest source of ocean trash was metal — soda and food cans.
Other common types of debris included rope from fishing equipment, glass bottles, cardboard, wood and clothing.

Because most of the ocean pollution came from single-use plastic bottles and cans, von Thun and her co-authors hope the research will inspire more people to reduce, reuse and recycle.
"The main way to combat this problem is to prevent all this stuff from getting into the ocean to begin with," von Thun told OurAmazingPlanet.
"We really have to properly dispose of items, reduce our use of single-use items and recycle."

 A discarded tire sits on a ledge 2,850 feet (868 m) below the ocean surface in Monterey Canyon off the central California coast.
CREDIT: © 2009 MBARI.

Changing seascape

The arrival of shoes, tires and fishing gear in the deep sea is a big change for deep-sea marine life. Their environment is mostly soft mud, so hard surfaces are rare, and sea creatures colonize the trash, von Thun said.
For example, MBARI is following the effects wrought by a shipping container that fell overboard into Monterey Canyon in 2004.
But even a discarded tire can make a home for certain sea creatures at 2,850 feet (868 meters) below the ocean surface.

In Monterey Canyon, a deep, winding gorge offshore of Central California, trash collects in the canyon's outer bends or in topographic highs or lows, just like in rivers on land, von Thun said. Currents also trap trash behind obstacles, such as dead whale carcasses.
"We think the canyon dynamics and the currents are actually helping to distribute the plastic and metal to deeper areas," von Thun said.

With only 0.24 percent of Monterey Canyon explored in the past two decades by MBARI, there could be more trash hidden in the canyon's depths, the researchers said

Links :

• MBARI

Rebuilding the coastline, but at what cost?

A survey of the region’s battered beaches

interactive map

From NYTimes

When a handful of retired homeowners from Osborn Island in New Jersey gathered last month to discuss post-Hurricane Sandy rebuilding and environmental protection, L. Stanton Hales Jr., a conservationist, could not have been clearer about the risks they faced.

“I said, look people, you built on a marsh island, it’s oxidizing under your feet — it’s shrinking — and that exacerbates the sea level rise,” said Dr. Hales, director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership, an estuary program financed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Do you really want to throw good money after bad?”

Their answer? Yes.

An aerial view of beachfront homes in Mantoloking, N.J.  
Richard Perry/The New York Times

Nearly seven months after Hurricane Sandy decimated the northeastern coastline, destroying houses and infrastructure and dumping 11 billion gallons of untreated and partially treated sewage into rivers, bays, canals and even some streets, coastal communities have been racing against the clock to prepare for Memorial Day.

Damage to the coastline was severe.
In New Jersey, 94 percent of beaches and dunes were damaged, with 14 percent suffering a major loss of dune vegetation and beach erosion of 100 feet or more; 43 percent were moderately affected, losing 50 to 100 feet of beach, according to an assessment by the American Littoral Society.

Thomas Herrington, a professor of ocean engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, estimated that on one stretch of coastline, 500,000 cubic yards of sand were lost in the storm.
“That’s unprecedented,” he said. “You usually lose that in a decade.”

The beach from Bay Head that extends north to Sandy Hook dropped six to eight feet vertically and eroded landward 100 to 150 feet horizontally, he said.
In New York Harbor, Raritan Bay and Jamaica Bay, a quarter of the beaches and dunes lost 50 to 100 feet of beach to erosion; on Long Island Sound, about 28 percent faced similar damage.
The Army Corps of Engineers will replace 27 million cubic yards of sand along the entire coast to restore and build “engineered beaches” in an effort to protect the homes and communities behind them, said Chris Gardner, a public affairs specialist for the corps’ New York district.

Many officials involved in storm recovery maintain that rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy will be different, incorporating the realities of climate change and rising sea levels.
Some ocean engineers and coastal scientists are not so sure.

“My fear is that the environmental damage from Hurricane Sandy is going to be long-term and will result more from our response than from the storm itself,” said Robert S. Young, head of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

“There have been steps taken” to rebuild better, said Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society.
Houses have been elevated, and in New Jersey there are discussions about bigger and better dune systems, he said.
But he cautioned, “When you really look at the macro — large scale — we are still going in and building in places that are risky.”

A bulldozer pushes sand near a boardwalk that was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy,
in Ortley Beach, New Jersey
photo taken January 7, 2013

Massive beach nourishment projects will restore beaches but require expensive upkeep and affect ecosystems. Individuals and communities are racing to rebuild sea walls that hasten erosion.
And federal taxpayers will foot the bill to rebuild communities that continue to be at risk.

One developer recently went so far as to advertise 24 waterfront acres for sale.
The ad acknowledges that the property “has historically been wetlands” — on which development is barred — but noted that the storm had filled it in with sand.

The Army Corps said it would be mindful of advances in thinking about climate change.
“We are more integrated with the science agencies than ever before on issues related to climate variability, and the science informs the actionable engineering decisions we make,” said Moira Kelley, a spokeswoman for the assistant corps secretary for civil works

Workers on lunch break watch the removal of the Star Jet roller coaster on May 14, 2013 in Seaside Heights, New Jersey

And agencies are striving to better prepare for storms.
In April, the Sandy Rebuilding Task Force — which is focused on regional resiliency — required that those using storm recovery funds to rebuild had to take additional measures to reduce flooding risks.
In New Jersey, tougher building codes and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new flood maps mean homes are being elevated and floodproofed.
New York has committed to using natural infrastructure where possible.
And New Jersey and New York are offering voluntary buyouts to homeowners in flood-prone areas: New Jersey will use $300 million of federal money to buy as many as 1,000 homes, while New York has committed an initial $197 million to buying what it hopes will be over 2,000 homes.

In New Jersey, the goal is to target contiguous properties to restore floodplains.
State officials said the effort was unprecedented — even if it applied to only a fraction of homes.
“We’d have to buy out 200,000 if you wanted to move everyone from potential harm,” said Larry Ragonese, press director of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

But in Washington, the impulse to dial back legislation that discourages development is percolating. There were efforts in Congress to delay the introduction of higher rates for federal flood insurance (they failed last week).

Construction on a new section of the Ocean grove boardwalk continues on April 11, 2013.

Ocean Grove, NJ, was denied FEMA funds for Hurricane Sandy restaoration because of the town's non profit status.

At the same time, environmental groups have taken issue with Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, over certain provisions in the Water Resources Development Act, a $12 billion water infrastructure bill that passed the Senate last week, which they feel would weaken the environmental review process.
In a statement, Ms. Boxer said the bill did not undermine current laws.
“By setting deadlines while preserving the protections in environmental laws, we ensure a sound and timely decision is made,” she said.

Not all of the environmental impact from Hurricane Sandy has been negative.

Beaches that were flattened in places like Breezy Point, in the Rockaways, and Fire Island may provide unique nesting opportunities for the endangered piping plover.
The fluff ball of a bird breeds between April and September.

Sand dumped into some bays could aid eelgrass and clam populations — if boating advocates do not get it dredged.

And at least one effort to restore wildlife habitats had the dual benefit of restoring the beach.
In Delaware Bay, the Littoral Society worked with other conservation groups for months to restore and prepare 1.25 miles of shoreline in time for horseshoe crab spawning season.
The storm destroyed nearly 70 percent of the New Jersey horseshoe crab habitat.

The crabs are part of a complex food chain.
Their eggs provide fuel to thousands of red knot shorebirds — an endangered species in New Jersey — as they migrate from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle.
Through public and private grants, $1.4 million was spent to remove debris and lay down 32,000 cubic yards of sand.
Last week, the crabs were spawning and the birds were feasting, Mr. Dillingham said.

Any silver lining for grasses, crabs and shorebirds faces a fundamental threat: the human urge to restore the beaches.

When Dr. Hales told the residents of Osborn Island that they should reconsider rebuilding, they countered that they wanted their children and grandchildren to enjoy the place that was so special to them.
“It’s really hard,” he said. But the reality, he added, is “there’s no future there.”

Links :

• Discovery News : New Jersey shore under oceanic assault