Kainos

Kainos - Teaser from Jeff Dotson

Dolphins protect long-distance swimmer from shark

From ABC news

A long-distance swimmer seeking to become the first British man to complete the Ocean’s Seven, a group of seven long-distance swims around the world, was protected on his journey by a pod of dolphins who scared off a shark, according to the swimmer’s support team.

Adam Walker was swimming the approximately 16-mile long Cook Strait off the New Zealand coast last Tuesday when he spotted a shark in the water below him.
Just as his fears began to rise, Walker said he was surrounded by a pod of around 10 dolphins that swam with him for more than an hour.
“I’d like to think they were protecting me and guiding me home,” Walker wrote on his Facebook page.
“This swim will stay with me forever.”

Walker finished the Cook Strait swim in eight hours and 36 minutes.
He has already conquered the English Channel, Gibraltar Straits, Catalina Channel, Molokai Strait and Tsugaru Strait.

Ocean's Seven is a group of 7 long distance swims scattered across the globe: Irish Channel, the Cook Strait, the Molokai Channel, the English Channel, the Catalina Channel, the Tsugaru Strait and the Strait of Gibraltar.

It has only been completed by one person ever: on Saturday July 14th 2012, Mr Redmond from Ballydehob, Co. Cork, Ireland became the first person to complete the Ocean 7's Challenge when he successfully crossed the Tsugaru Strait in Japan.

Adam Walker will be the next...

With the Cook Strait now under his swim cap, Walker has only the North Channel in the Irish Sea left to swim to complete the Ocean’s Seven.
He will take that on this August, according to his YouTube page, and, if successful, complete the Ocean’s Seven.
In a fitting coincidence, given the animals he encountered in Cook Strait, Walker is swimming to raise money for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, an organization that bills itself as “the leading global charity dedicated to the conservation and protection of whales and dolphins.”

Links :

• Stuff.co.nz : Swimmer knocks another strait off

Slow life

Slow Life from Daniel Stoupin

"Slow" marine animals show their secret life under high magnification.

Corals and sponges are very mobile creatures, but their motion is only detectable at different time scales compared to ours and requires time lapses to be seen.

These animals build coral reefs and play crucial roles in the biosphere, yet we know almost nothing about their daily lives.
Learn more about what you see in my post:

notes-from-dreamworlds.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/slow-life.html

EDIT - answer to a common question: yes, colors are real, no digital enhancement, just white balance correction with curves.

When photographers use white light on corals, they simply miss the vast majority of colors.

To make this little clip I took 150000 shots.

Why so many?

Because macro photography involves shallow depth of field.

To extend it, I used focus stacking. Each frame of the video is actually a stack that consists of 3-12 shots where in-focus areas are merged.

Just the intro and last scene are regular real-time footage.

One frame required about 10 minutes of processing time (raw conversion + stacking).

Mystery of 'ocean quack sound' solved

The bizarre noise was first heard 50 years ago but now scientists say the Antarctic minke whale is its source

From BBC

The mystery of a bizarre quacking sound heard in the ocean has finally been solved, scientists report. 

The noise - nicknamed "the bio-duck" - appears in the winter and spring in the Southern Ocean. However, its source has baffled researchers for decades.

Now acoustic recorders have revealed that the sound is in fact the underwater chatter of the Antarctic minke whale.
The findings are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
Lead researcher Denise Risch, from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Massachusetts, said: "It was hard to find the source of the signal.
"Over the years there have been several suggestions... but no-one was able to really show this species was producing the sound until now."

Lars Kindermann and Ilse Van Opzeeland of the Alfred Wegener Institute obtained this sound recording, which -- although it sounds like the quack of a mechanical waterfowl -- is actually a minke whale.

 The researchers attached acoustic monitoring tags to the whales to eavesdrop on them

If it quacks like a duck

The strange sound was first detected by submarines about 50 years ago.
Those who heard it were surprised by its quack-like qualities.

Since then, the repetitive, low frequency noise has been recorded many times in the waters around the Antarctic and western Australia.
Suggestions for its source have ranged from fish to ships.

The researchers now say they have "conclusive evidence" that the bio-duck is produced by the Antarctic minke whale.
In 2013, acoustic recorders were attached to two of the marine mammals and recorded the whales making the strange noise.
Dr Risch said: "It was either the animal carrying the tag or a close-by animal of the same species producing the sound."
The researchers do not yet know under what circumstances the minke whales make their distinctive vocalisations, although the sounds that were recorded were produced close to the surface and before the mammals made deep dives to feed.

The team says solving this long-standing mystery will help them to learn more about these little-studied animals.
Dr Risch said: "Identifying their sounds will allow us to use passive acoustic monitoring to study this species.
"That can give us the timing of their migration - the exact timing of when the animals appear in Antarctic waters and when they leave again - so we can learn about migratory patterns, about their relative abundance in different areas and their movement patterns between the areas."

The team will be analysing data from the PALAOA station, the Alfred Wegener Institute's (AWI) permanent acoustic recording station in Antarctica, which has been recording in the Southern Ocean continuously in the last few years.
This is not the only acoustic puzzle that scientists have recently shed light on
Another baffling low frequency noise - called The Bloop - turned out to be the sound of Antarctica's ice cracking.

Links :

• NOAA : Scientists Identify Source of Mysterious Low-Frequency Sound Heard for Decades in the Southern Ocean

Slow slosh of warm water across Pacific hints El Niño is brewing

The maps show a cross-sectional view of five-day-average temperature in the top 300 meters* of the Pacific Ocean in mid-February, mid-March, and mid-April 2014 compared to the long-term average (1981-2010). 
Warmer than average waters are red; cooler than average waters are blue.
Each map represents a 5-day average centered on the date shown.

From NOAA

The El Niño / La Niña climate pattern that alternately warms and cools the eastern tropical Pacific is the 800-pound gorilla of Earth’s climate system.
On a global scale, no other single phenomenon has a greater influence on whether a year will be warmer, cooler, wetter, or drier than average.
Naturally, then, the ears of seasonal forecasters and natural resource managers around the world perked up back in early March when NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued an “El Niño Watch.”

 NOAA info

The “watch” means that oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean are favorable for the development of El Niño within the next six months.
These maps reveal one of the most significant of those favorable signs: a deep pool of warm water sliding eastward along the equator since late January.
 
The pool of warm water was lurking in the western Pacific in mid-February, but it shifted progressively eastward in the subsequent two months.
By mid-April, the unusually warm water was close to breaching the surface in the eastern Pacific off South America.
NOAA declares El Niño underway when the monthly average temperature in the eastern Pacific is 0.5° Celsius or more above average.

 Forecasts depending on different models

Such warm surface waters are unusual in the eastern Pacific because the prevailing wind direction across the tropics is east to west: from South America to Indonesia.
The easterly winds pile up sun-warmed surface waters in the western Pacific like gusty winds build snow into drifts.
Average sea level is literally higher in the western Pacific than the eastern Pacific.

As the warm surface water is pushed westward by the prevailing winds, cool water from deeper in the ocean rises to the surface near South America.
This temperature gradient—warm waters around Indonesia and cooler waters off South America—lasts only as long as the easterly winds are blowing.
If those winds go slack or reverse direction in the western Pacific, the warm pool of water around Indonesia is released and begins a slow slosh back toward South America.
The slosh is called a Kelvin wave.
If the Kelvin wave has a strong impact on the surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific, then it can help change the atmospheric circulation and trigger a cascade of climatic side effects that reverberate across the globe.

Will the odds of an El Niño event increase or decrease as summer arrives?
How can one climate pattern have such a powerful effect on weather far away?
For answers to these and other questions, keep an eye out for a new blog planned for launch on Climate.gov in coming weeks.
Produced by scientists from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the blog will follow the developing El Niño from the perspective of scientists at the United States’ operational climate prediction center.

Links :

• Wired : If El Niño comes this year, it could be a monster
• NOAA : El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Technical Discussion