Canada CHS update in the Marine GeoGarage

As our public viewer is not yet available
(currently under construction, upgrading to Google Maps API v3 as v2 is officially no more supported),
this info is primarily intended to our B2B customers which use our nautical charts layers
in their own webmapping applications through our GeoGarage API.

41 charts have been updated (February 3, 2014) in the GeoGarage platform :

• 1202 CAP ÉTERNITÉ À/TO SAINT-FULGENCE
• 1209 SAINT-FULGENCE À / TO RIVIÈRE SHIPSHAW
• 1313 BATISCAN AU/TO LAC SAINT-PIERRE
• 3058A ARROWHEAD TO/À BLANKET CREEK
• 3058B BLANKET CREEK TO/À REVELSTOKE
• 3549 QUEEN CHARLOTTE STRAIT WESTERN PORTION/PARTIE QUEST
• 3550 APPROACHES TO/APPROCHES À SEYMOUR INLET AND/ET BELIZE INLET
• 3598 CAPE SCOTT TO CAPE CALVERT
• 3605 QUATSINO SOUND TO / À QUEEN CHARLOTTE STRAIT
• 3624 CAPE COOK TO CAPE SCOTT
• 3741 OTTER PASSAGE TO BONILLA ISLAND
• 4001 GULF OF MAINE TO STRAIT OF BELLE ISLE / AU DÉTROIT DE BELLE ISLE
• 4015 SYDNEY TO/À SAINT-PIERRE
• 4016 SAINT-PIERRE TO/À ST JOHN'S
• 4017 CAPE RACE TO / À CAPE FREELS
• 4023 NORTHUMBERLAND STRAIT / DÉTROIT DE NORTHUMBERLAND
• 4202 HALIFAX HARBOUR POINT PLEASANT TO/À BEDFORD BASIN
• 4203 HALIFAX HARBOUR BLACK POINT TO/À POINT PLEASANT
• 4237 APPROACHES TO / APPROCHES DE HALIFAX HARBOUR
• 4277 GREAT BRAS D'OR / ST. ANDREWS AND / ET ST. ANNS BAY
• 4278 GREAT BRAS D'OR AND / ET ST PATRICKS CHANNEL
• 4279 BRAS D'OR LAKE
• 4308 ST. PETERS BAY TO/À STRAIT OF CANSO
• 4340 GRAND MANAN
• 4422 CARDIGAN BAY
• 4593 SUNDAY COVE ISLAND TO\À THIMBLE TICKLES
• 4625 BURIN PENINSULA TO/À SAINT-PIERRE
• 4639 GARIA BAY AND/ET LE MOINE BAY
• 4641 PORT AUX BASQUES AND APPROACHES / ET LES APPROCHES
• 4667 SAVAGE COVE TO/À ST BARBE BAY
• 4679 HAWKES BAY \ PORT SAUNDERS\ BACK ARM
• 4826 BURGEO TO/À FRANÇOIS
• 4827 HARE BAY TO / À FORTUNE HEAD
• 4831 FORTUNE BAY NORTHERN PORTION/PARTIE NORD
• 4839 HEAD OF/FOND DE PLACENTIA BAY
• 4847 CONCEPTION BAY
• 4851 TRINITY BAY - SOUTHERN PORTION / PARTIE SUD
• 4855 BONAVISTA BAY SOUTHERN PORTION / PARTIE SUD
• 4864 BACK ISLAND TO/À LITTLE DENIER ISLAND
• 4906 WEST POINT À/TO BAIE DE TRACADIE
• 4911 ENTRÉE À/ENTRANCE TO MIRAMICHI RIVER

So 690 charts (1665 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

This startup wants to reverse the tide on our overfished oceans

Fish being raised in protected farms.

Image credit : Bryce Groark

From Entrepreneur by Catherine Clifford

People are eating a lot of fish.
More than ever before.
Without some clever innovation, we may very well eat all the fish in the sea.
That’s hardly an exaggeration, either.
Where each person ate an average of 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of fish in 1960, the average person ate 19 kilograms, or almost 42 pounds, of fish in 2011, according to a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The report claims that about 85 percent of the world's oceans are at their fishing limits.
Which means that, if current rates continue, the oceans will be near barren in 35 years.

That’s where aquaculture comes in.
Aquaculture, or the breeding and harvesting of aquatic animals and plants, has become a growing practice and is seen as a solution to the fish consumption crisis.
In 1951, aquaculture netted 640,000 kilograms, or 1.4 million pounds, of fish around the world.
By 2011, aquaculture was bringing in 84 billion kilograms, or 185 billion pounds, of fish.

Image credit: Made by Aqua-Spark with data from a 2012 report released by
the Food and Agriculture Department of the United Nations.

“Beyond 2030, aquaculture will likely dominate future global fish supply. Consequently, ensuring successful and sustainable development of global aquaculture is an imperative agenda for the global economy,” says a report on the fish industry from the World Bank released this month.
Hoping to foster innovation in this space, two entrepreneurs, Amy Novogratz and Mike Velings, have launched an investment fund called Aqua-Spark.
The fund seeks out sustainable fish-farming techniques and innovations and invests in them.
In particular, the Netherlands-based investment fund will seek out best-in-class hatcheries to invest in, or new technologies to battle disease epidemics that fish battle in the fish farms.

Prior to founding Aqua-Spark last year, Novogratz was the director of the TED Prize, an award given to an individual who demonstrates extraordinary global vision.
Velings, meanwhile, is a serial entrepreneur and investor.
He started Connexie, a payroll service in the Netherlands, and A-Spark Good Ventures, a company that invests in entrepreneurs around the world.

Aquaculture farms.
Image credit: Bryce Groark.

Novogratz and Velings met on a boat trip in the Galapagos inspired by TED Prize winner Sylvia Earle, a life-long oceanographer and explorer.

Earle won the TED prize in 2009 and then took 100 people on the Galapagos voyage in 2010.
There, Novogratz and Velings determined that they would make preservation of the oceans their passion. They also fell in love and ended up getting married.
Aqua-Spark had raised $5 million in seed funding as of early February, but the goal is to raise at least 15 million euro to get started. In the next 10 years, Velings says he wants Aqua-Spark to be a 200 to 300 million euro fund (about $270 million to $410 million).
Unlike a venture capital company, Aqua-Spark does not expect to cash out of the investment.
So, while a VC will invest in a startup and then look for a return on that investment either by the entrepreneur selling the company or going public, Aqua-Spark does not look for entrepreneurs to cash out quickly.

 
That’s because aquaculture is a long-term cash-intensive business.
Building fish farms is expensive.
And the infrastructure required to build recirculating aquaculture systems, which are completely closed systems and entirely self-sustaining, is particularly expensive.
Initial investments in aquaculture businesses will run from 250,000 euros to 5 million euros (about $340,000 to $7 million), depending on the idea.
Rather than looking for a quick cash-out, Aqua-Spark will make money through dividend returns. And because of the steady nature of the industry, the company expects to make revenues from dividends of 12 percent per year after the first five to seven years.
Returns of 12 percent or higher are pretty impressive, and that’s exactly part of Aqua-Spark’s pitch to investors.
“This is one of the few places you can make an old-fashioned, handsome return combined with social and environmental good. You can feel good about it but you can also -- it is a very solid investment,” says Velings.

NZ Linz update in the Marine GeoGarage

As our public viewer is not yet available
(currently under construction, upgrading to Google Maps API v3 as v2 is officially no more supported),
this info is primarily intended to our iPhone/iPad universal mobile application users
(Marine NZ on the App Store) 
and our B2B customers which use our nautical charts layers
in their own webmapping applications through our GeoGarage API.  

9 charts have been updated in the Marine GeoGarage

(Linz January update published February 7, 2014) 

• NZ51 Tauroa Point to Cape Brett
• NZ52 Cape Brett to Cuvier Island
• NZ512 Cape Karikari to Cape Brett
• NZ521 Cape Brett to Bream Tail
• NZ4314 LPG Terminal
• NZ5214 Marsden Point
• NZ5216 Poor Knights Islands, High Peak Rocks and Sugarloaf Rock
• NZ5219 Approaches to Marsden Point
• NZ5612 Napier Harbour

Today NZ Linz charts (180 charts / 313 including sub-charts) are displayed in the Marine GeoGarage.

Note :  LINZ produces official nautical charts to aid safe navigation in New Zealand waters and certain areas of Antarctica and the South-West Pacific.

Using charts safely involves keeping them up-to-date using Notices to Mariners
Reporting a Hazard to Navigation - H Note :
Mariners are requested to advise the New Zealand Hydrographic Authority at LINZ of the discovery of new or suspected dangers to navigation, or shortcomings in charts or publications.

Greenland glacier sets glacial speed record

Water pressure greases the skids for Jakobshavn, clocked at 2 meters per hour.

From Ars Technica by Scott K. Johnson

If the term “ice stream” sounds like an oxymoron to you, you haven't seen the Jakobshavn. (Pronounced “yah-cobes-hah-ven”.)
This glacier on the western coast of Greenland is one of the few things in the crysophere that can’t really be said to move at a glacial pace.
As ice flows from the center of Greenland to the edges, it gets funneled into low spots, forming outlet glaciers.
In some places where that funneling is extreme and the ground surface is slick, the ice behaves like toothpaste being squeezed from a tube.
These places are ice streams.

Almost seven percent of the Greenland ice sheet gets forced through the Jakobshavn Glacier.
This tremendous flow of ice makes Jakobshavn stand out—it once filled a fjord with a floating shelf of ice that was more than 35 km long.
Once, but no more.
That shelf has disappeared over the past 150 years as the glacier has receded; since the mid-1990s, it has retreated more than 10 kilometers.

 Satellite images of the Jakobshavn Glacier in 2001 and 2010.

source : NASA

Because so much ice moves through the Jakobshavn, it has been intensely studied.
Since 2009, the University of Washington’s Ian Joughin and several collaborators have been using the German Aerospace Center’s TerraSAR-X satellite to precisely track the glacier’s velocity.
(Records using other methods go back further.)
The satellite data reveals that the Jakobshavn got even faster over the past two years, setting a new glacial speed record at over 46 meters per day in the summer of 2012.
That’s almost 2 meters per hour.

So why the acceleration? It has to do with the topography beneath the ice.
Many factors that affect the flow of a glacier, and the conditions at the base make a huge difference.
Where the ground isn’t frozen (which is more common than you might think), water pressure counteracts some portion of the glacier’s weight, reducing the friction that slows the glacier.
Anything that raises that water pressure greases the skids and lets the glacier speed up.

Much of the bedrock beneath Jakobshavn’s final stretch is well below sea level and filled with seawater, though the ice is thick enough that it sits on the bottom rather than floating.
The ground below the end (or “terminus”) of the Jakobshavn isn’t flat, so as it retreats, the terminus finds itself in deeper or shallower water.
In 2012, it retreated into the bottom of a depression several hundred meters deeper than its previous location.
Since deeper water means higher water pressure, the ice there could flow more quickly, pulling on the ice behind it.
The peak flow rate near the terminus in the summer of 2012 was about four times faster than speeds in the mid-1990s.
The average speed for the year was nearly 3 times faster.

What goes down will come up in this case, and the terminus will soon retreat to the shallower backside of this depression, which should slow it down a bit.
The researchers believe that slower flow rate could last a few decades.
Beyond that high point, however, is a much broader basin.
Once the terminus starts to retreat into that basin, flow will ramp up again, surpassing even the current rate.
It will then likely retreat 50 km to the other side of the basin before the end of the century as the increased flow rate helps it shed more ice.
Between 2000 and 2011, the Jakobshavn Glacier alone lost ice equal to nearly 3 percent of global sea level rise.
As it retreats and shrinks further, it will continue to make a sizeable contribution because Jakobshavn is what a big glacier looks like on fast-forward.

Links :

• Cryosphere : further summer speedup of Jakobshavn Isbræ

Mystery of huge underwater 'crop circles' solved

This image shows mysterious ‘crop circles’ on the seabed off the Island of Møn, Denmark. 

Image credit: Jacob Topsøe Johansen.

From CS Monitor

Mysterious underwater rings of eelgrass, off the coast of Denmark, are the result of poison, biologists say.
The rings weren't created by fairies, bombs, or visiting aliens, say researchers.

They're not the work of World War II bombs or aliens or fairies.
Instead, mysterious underwater rings spotted off the coast of Denmark are the result of poison, biologists say.

Striking rings of green eelgrass — some of them up to 49 feet (15 meters) wide — can occasionally be spotted in the clear Baltic water off the coast of Denmark's island of Møn.
The formations were captured in tourist photos in 2008 and again in 2011, sparking the type of speculation that's usually reserved for crop circles.

 This is an eelgrass plant growing off the cliffs of Island Mon in Denmark.

The plants create a circle formation. Credit: Ole Pedersen

But biologists Marianne Holmer from University of Southern Denmark and Jens Borum from University of Copenhagen assure that the circles have "nothing to do with either bomb craters or landing marks for aliens."
"Nor with fairies, who in the old days got the blame for similar phenomena on land, the fairy rings in lawns being a well known example," Holmer and Borum said in a statement today (Jan. 30).

 On Sunday, June 19, 2011, this quincunx of five circles
was videotaped underwater where Nils Natorp, Manager of the Mons Klint
Research Center on the eastern coast of the Danish island of Mon in the Baltic
Sea, was taking visitors on a field trip.

Mr. Natorp contacted two divers to go in the water to see what the circles were made of and the divers confirmed the plants are eelgrass.

But how the circles were made to persist in the water was still a mystery.

Aerial video of the June 19, 2011,

The biologists concluded that the rings formed because of the radiating pattern in which the eelgrass grows — and dies when exposed to toxins.
In the mud around the eelgrass, the scientists detected high levels of sulfide, a substance that's poisonous to eelgrass and can build up naturally in a chalky seabed like the one off Møn (or unnaturally when agricultural pollutants enter an ecosystem).
"Most mud gets washed away from the barren, chalky seabed, but like trees trap soil on an exposed hillside, eelgrass plants trap the mud," Holmer and Borum explained.
"And therefore there will be a high concentration of sulfide-rich mud among the eelgrass plants."
Though it might resemble a type of seaweed, eelgrass is actually a flowering plant.
And when it grows, it expands outward in all directions, creating circle-shaped colonies.
While healthy adult eelgrass plants seem to be able to withstand the sulfide in their environment, the old plants at the heart of the colonies drop dead, the researchers said.

"The result is an exceptional circular shape, where only the rim of the circle survives — like fairy rings in a lawn," Holmer and Borum added.
Fairy rings in a lawn are typically blamed on the outward growth of fungi, but other fairy circles on land have long puzzled scientists.
A famous example can be found in the desert grasslands of Namibia in southern Africa, where researchers have offered up a wide range of explanations for the vast field of circular patches, from ants and termites to gas seeps and resource competition.

The explanation for the eelgrass fair rings is detailed in this month's edition of the journal Marine Biology.