Ernest Hemingway's Cuba logs could be source for deep-sea fish data

Cojimar is a small fishing village east of Havana, forming a ward (consejo popular) part of the Habana del Este municipality.

It was an inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

(GeoCuba nautical chart with the Marine GeoGarage : 

Marina Hemingway in the left bottom corner))

From Sydney Morning Herald by Michael Weissenstein

A dozen tiny, ageing fishing boats bobbed in the wake of the massive, gleaming white sport-fishing yacht taking Ernest Hemingway's grandsons to the village that inspired the Nobel laureate's greatest work.
Fishermen waved to the Hemingways and hundreds waited on shore Monday to greet the descendants of a man who fished from Cojimar for decades, hauling in marlin, sharks and tuna from the warm waters off the Cuban coast.
"He was a fisherman," grandson Patrick Hemingway said, looking at the men gathered to greet him. "He considered them his brothers."

John Hemingway (left) and Patrick Hemingway (right), grandsons of the US author Ernest Hemingway, pay tribute to their grandfather at his statue in Cojimar village, Havana.

Photo: Reuters

Along with a team of US researchers, Hemingway and his brother John are on a five-day mission to leverage their famous name to encourage closer ties fbetween the United States and Cuba and, hopefully, open the way for scientists to gain access to the writer's fishing logs, a long-concealed and potentially valuable source of knowledge about the area's massive predatory game fish.

Researchers gathered little information about the health of deep-sea fish populations in the years before industrial fishing devastated populations of tuna and other highly desired big species in the second half of the last century.

That leaves sport fishermen's records as some of the only resources for marine scientists seeking a benchmark to measure population declines.

Ernest Hemingway lived in Cuba from 1939 to 1960 in a villa on lush, orchard-filled grounds in the village of San Francisco de Paula on the south-east edge of Havana.

From Cojimar, he often launched his boat, the Pilar, with first mate Gregorio Fuentes, who helped inspire the ageing fisherman who battles a giant marlin in the Pulitzer-winning Old Man and the Sea.

One of the earliest and most prolific sport fishermen in the Florida Straits, Hemingway may inadvertently have created an unparalleled scientific resource as he prowled some of the world's richest fishing grounds.
Hemingway assembled thousands of books, photographs and journals, many of which deteriorated over decades of exposure to Cuba's baking heat and high humidity, and the longstanding neglect of the estate known as Finca Vigia.

The logs are now kept by Cuba's National Cultural Heritage Council which, in order to protect the fragile documents, only allows conservators to handle them.

Hemingway proudly displays a marlin trophy in Havana Harbour (July, 1934)

Fishing logs typically contain details of the numbers of fish caught, the location of the catch and weight of the fish.

Hemingway's obsessive record-keeping, combined with the thousands of hours he spent on the water, have researchers hoping his logs could provide essential details about deep-sea fish populations over the last 75 years in the Straits.

"Hemingway was there in Cuba for 20 years. If he did keep log books for that long, having 20 years - even if it is only for a single vessel - would be very valuable," said Dr David Die a US-based fishery scientist.

"It would be a record of relative changes in the size and the abundance of fish over a period where we do not have any other records. It's exactly the type of information that we use nowadays when we assess populations of fish in the ocean."

The great white shark caught off Cojimar in 1945 which is allegedly 6.4 m (21 ft) long and weighed an estimated 3,175 kg (7,000 lb).

The US-based Finca Vigia foundation is working with the Cuban council to preserve the house and Hemingway's many documents.

Mary Jo Adams, executive director of the Boston-based foundation, said she has seen some pages of Hemingway's fishing logs, which list everything from what Hemingway and his guests ate for lunch on a certain day to how many fish they caught and the timing of the tides.

The foundation is helping Cuban curators preserve and digitise thousands of the most significant documents in the Finca Vigia.

Ms Adams said she believes many of the fishing logs may be bound and at less risk of deterioration since they have not yet been studied closely.

 Photo of Hemingway and Elicio Arguelles posing alongside a giant marlin, 

signed and inscribed in fountain pen :

“To J. C. De Clairmont from his and Wheerler’s friend, Ernest Hemingway.

This fish caught by Elicio Arguelles, Cuban sportsman, Old Man and the Sea Expedition, Cabo Blanco, northern coast of Peru, May 1956.”

Cuba's National Cultural Heritage Council declined an Associated Press request to see the logs ahead of the scientists' trip, saying only conservators could enter the storage room where most of Hemingway's documents are kept.
Apart from the fishing logs, the scientists and game-fish experts travelling with the Hemingways have other goals: 

 They hope Cuba will agree to participate in an ocean-wide program of genetically sampling white marlin and spearfish to better track them and measure the health of the species across the Atlantic. They would like organisers of an annual Cuban fishing tournament named after Hemingway to require anglers to use circular hooks, which are less-damaging and make it easier to catch and release fish.

They also hope Cuba will allow scientists to import satellite trackers which could be attached to fish caught during the tournament in order to study their movements once they are released.
The researchers acknowledge the difficulty of winning approval to bring in such equipment, which is looked at with suspicion by Cuban authorities.

Ms Adams said, however, that Dr Die's hopes of finding scientific information in the logs may be well founded.
"He kept records of everything," she said.

"I suspect the fishing logs would be just as detailed."
Dr Die acknowledged it remains far from clear whether he'll gain access to the logs, although he expects to know more after meeting with Cuban scientists and cultural officials later this week.
"Whether they even allow us to touch them, it depends on the curators," he said.

"It's an open question."

Links :

• NYTimes : Hemingway at Sea
• The Telegraph : Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson: review

Canada finds British vessel that vanished on doomed North-West Passage expedition in 1840s

Explorers in Canada have found the wreck of one of two British ships lost in 1845 to the country's Northwest Passage that vanished with 128 crew during Sir John Franklin’s “lost expedition” to find route through Arctic ice
(see original video)

From The Telegraph by Philip Sherwell

One of the most enduring and tragic mysteries of British maritime history came a crucial step closer to being solved on Tuesday when Canada announced the discovery of a Royal Navy vessel that disappeared in the Arctic nearly 170 years ago.
The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were last seen in 1845 under the command of Sir John Franklin on a doomed Admiralty expedition to find the legendary Northwest Passage of ice-filled waters linking the Atlantic and Pacific.
Their disappearance launched one of the largest rescue operations in history, lasting from 1848 to 1859.
The vessels were never found, but the searches did result in the discovery of the fabled passage through the Arctic archipelago.

 A painting of the HMS Erebus trapped in ice (PA)

Inuit hunters told a Scottish explorer in 1854 that the ships had become icebound.
They said the crew had tried to escape on foot but were defeated by the cold and some even resorted to cannibalism to try to survive – a report that caused outrage when it reached London.

Canadian Geographic

 CHS nautical chart with the Marine GeoGarage

Stephen Harper, the prime minister, said that the wreckage of one of the missing vessels has now been located using a recently deployed, remotely operated underwater vehicle.
He said that although it was unclear which ship had been found, the sonar images recorded on Sunday contained enough information to confirm that they showed one of the pair.
The sonar images indicate that the vessel is remarkably well-preserved.
Ryan Harris, an underwater archeologist who is one of the Parks Canada search team leaders,said that the image projected at a press conference showed the deck structures were intact, including the main mast, which was sheared off by the ice when the ship sank.
He expected the ship’s contents to be in similarly good condition.

 Sonar picture (Parks Canada)

Canada launched a fresh search operation using divers and archaeologists in 2008 to find the ships, which were believed to have become trapped in ice off King William Island in the Victoria Strait in the Arctic territory of Nunavut before being carried for hundreds of miles.
Conflicting reports handed down through local tribal communities about where the vessels sank meant that the new generation of explorers were targeting a huge and inaccessible search area.

 Parks Canada's Ryan Harris, left, briefs Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on efforts to find the Franklin Expedition aboard the HMCS Kingston west of Pond Inlet on Eclipse Sound in Nunavut, Canada on Aug. 24. (see PM info)

I am delighted to announce that this year's Victoria Strait expedition has solved one of Canada's greatest mysteries, with the discovery of one of the two ships belonging to the Franklin Expedition," Mr Harper said.
"Finding the first vessel will no doubt provide the momentum - or wind in our sails - necessary to locate its sister ship and find out even more about what happened to the Franklin Expedition's crew."
The disappearance and grisly fate of the 128 hand-picked crew had long fascinated Canadians.
"This is truly a historic moment for Canada," Mr Harper continued during a visit to
Parks Canada's laboratories in Ottawa after the recent discovery of expedition relics on an island in Nunavut.
"This has been a great Canadian story and mystery and the subject of scientists, historians, writers and singers so I think we really have an important day in mapping the history of our country."
On Monday, the Nunavut government announced that a team of archaeologists found an iron fitting and wooden artifact from a Royal Navy ship on an island in the southern search area.
Other traces of the expedition have been found over the years.
The frozen remains of three crewmen were recovered in the 1980s, including the perfectly preserved body of John Torrington, a 20-year-old petty officer , in an ice-filled coffin.
European explorers had been frustrated in their efforts to find the passage as a shorter route to Asia since John Cabot died on an expedition voyage in 1497.
Roald Amundsen of Norway finally completed the first trip in 1906.

Erebus and Terror Leaving for discovery of North-West Passage (Alamy)

Sir John was undertaking his fourth Arctic expedition when his team vanished.
His two vessels were equipped with the latest in nautical technology for the arduous conditions, a water distillation system and three years' worth of preserved and tinned food supplies.
In 1847, his wife urged the Admiralty to send a search party, but the British government delayed that mission for another year.
When the Admiralty finally launched its search, it also offered a £20,000 reward – a huge sum in those days that attracted so many search ships that eventually more vessels and men were lost looking for the expedition than had set out under Sir John.
Mr Harper’s government announced the new search in 2008 as Canada sought to establish sovereignty over the disputed waters of the Northwest Passage where melting polar ice has finally opened the shipping route that Sir John’s doomed expedition was seeking.

Links :

• TheStar : Charting Canada's waters a painstaking process
• The Telegraph : Who was Sir John Franklin ?
• Toronto Star : The Star with the Franklin search: How the Franklin wreck was finally found
• Canadian Geographic : 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition 
• Radio Canada : (in French) Des images d'une épave de l'expédition Franklin
• GeoGarage blog : Canada searches for Sir John Franklin’s rescue ship 

First of its kind map reveals extent of ocean plastic

A plastic bag floats in the water off the coast of Pulau Bunaken, Indonesia.
Photo : Paul Kenedy, Getty

From National GeoGraphic

When marine ecologist Andres Cozar Cabañas and a team of researchers completed the first ever map of ocean trash, something didn't quite add up.

Their work, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, did find millions of pieces of plastic debris floating in five large subtropical gyres in the world's oceans.
But plastic production has quadrupled since the 1980s, and wind, waves, and sun break all that plastic into tiny bits the size of rice grains.
So there should have been a lot more plastic floating on the surface than the scientists found.

"Our observations show that large loads of plastic fragments, with sizes from microns to some millimeters, are unaccounted for in the surface loads," says Cozar, who teaches at the University of Cadiz in Spain, by e-mail.
"But we don't know what this plastic is doing. The plastic is somewhere—in the ocean life, in the depths, or broken down into fine particles undetectable by nets."
What effect those plastic fragments will have on the deep ocean—the largest and least explored ecosystem on Earth—is anyone's guess.
"Sadly," Cozar says, "the accumulation of plastic in the deep ocean would be modifying this enigmatic ecosystem before we can really know it."

But where exactly is the unaccounted-for plastic?

In what amounts?

And how did it get there?

"We must learn more about the pathway and ultimate fate of the 'missing' plastic," Cozar says.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge mass of rubbish, or trash vortex,
held in place in the north-east of the Pacific Ocean by swirling underwater currents.

This build-up of marine debris is a danger to many marine mammals, birds and underwater ecosystems as a whole.

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

One reason so many questions remain unanswered is that the science of marine debris is so young.

Plastic was invented in the mid-1800s and has been mass produced since the end of World War II.

In contrast, ocean garbage has been studied for slightly more than a decade.

"This is new mainly because people always thought that the solution to pollution was dilution, meaning that we could turn our head, and once it is washed away—out of sight, out of mind," says Douglas Woodring, co-founder of the Ocean Recovery Alliance, a Hong Kong-based charitable group working to reduce the flow of plastic into the oceans.

The North Pacific Garbage Patch, a loose collection of drifting debris that accumulates in the northern Pacific, first drew notice when it was  discovered in 1997 by adventurer Charles Moore as he sailed back to California after competing in a yachting competition.

A turning point came in 2004, when Richard Thompson, a British marine biologist at Plymouth University, concluded that most marine debris was plastic.

Research on marine debris is also complicated by the need to include a multidiscipline group of experts, ranging from oceanographers to solid-waste-management engineers.

"We are at the very early stages of understanding the accounting," says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association, based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. 

"If we think ten or a hundred times more plastic is entering the ocean than we can account for, then where is it? We still haven't answered that question.

"And if we don't know where it is or how it is impacting organisms," she adds, "we can't tell the person on the street how big the problem is."

Law, along with Thompson, is one of 22 scientists researching marine debris for the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The group is grappling with some of these questions and plans to publish a series of papers later this year.

One of the most significant contributions made by Cozar's team, says Law, was data collected in the Southern Hemisphere: "I can't tell you how rare that is."

 Great Pacific Garbage Patch

National geographic Education

New maps document floating plastic trash
 

Tens of thousands of tons of plastic garbage float on the surface waters in the world's oceans, according to researchers who mapped giant accumulation zones of trash in all five subtropical ocean gyres.

Ocean currents act as "conveyor belts," researchers say, carrying debris into massive convergence zones that are estimated to contain millions of plastic items per square kilometer in their inner cores.

 G Staff, Jamie Hawk

Source : Andrés Cozar, University of Cadiz, Spain

One Answer

Cozar's team was part of the Malaspina expedition of 2010, a nine-month research project led by the Spanish National Research Council to study the effects of global warming on the oceans and the biodiversity of the deep ocean ecosystem.

Originally Cozar was assigned to study small fauna living on the ocean surface.

But when tiny plastic fragments kept turning up in water samples collected by the expedition scientists, Cozar was reassigned to assess the level of plastic pollution.

The two-ship expedition spent nine months circumnavigating the world. But Cozar also used data gathered by four other ships that had traveled to the polar regions, the South Pacific, and the North Atlantic to complete the map.

The team analyzed 3,070 water samples.

"One of the most striking observations was the conspicuous presence of plastic in the surface samples, even thousands of kilometers from the continents," he says.

"The plastic garbage patch in the South Atlantic Gyre was one of the most striking."

Cozar says that one answer to the missing-plastic mystery is that some of the tiniest bits of plastic are being consumed by small fish, which live in the murky mesopelagic zone, 600 feet to 3,300 feet (180 to 1,000 meters) below the surface.

Little is known about these mesopelagic fish, Cozar says, other than that they're abundant.

They hide in the darkness of the ocean to avoid predators and swim to the surface at night to feed.

"We found plastics in the stomachs of the fishes collected during Malaspina's circumnavigation," he says. "We are working on this now."

One of the most common mesopelagic fish is the lantern fish, which lives in the central ocean gyres and is the main link in the tropical zone between plankton and marine vertebrates.

Because lantern fish serve as a primary food source for commercially harvested fish, including tuna and swordfish, any plastic they eat ends up in the food chain.

"There are signs enough to suggest that plankton-eaters, the small fishes, are important conduits for plastic pollution and associated contaminants," Cozar says.

"If this assumption is confirmed, the impacts of a man-sustained plastic pollution could extend over the ocean predators on a large scale."

Links :

• AIP : How well-connected is the surface of the global ocean?
• NT Times : Choking the Oceans With Plastic (by Charles J. Moore)
• WhyFiles : Oceans’ true boundaries explain the source of ocean water — and “garbage patches”
• NBCnews : Math might help nail Oceans' plastic 'Garbage Patch' polluters
• FastCoexist : James Dyson is designing a giant vacuum-on-a-boat to clean ocean trash
• GeoGarage blog : Ocean garbage patch is mysteriously disappearing

Live interactive 3D map lets you watch rain, clouds and even hurricanes across the globe

From DailyMail  by Jonathan O'Callaghan

• an interactive map from Europe's MeteoGroup lets you watch weather unfold around the world
• by selecting different icons weather of varying types can be watched live in different countries
• for example users can see the global cloud cover and also where it is raining at the moment
• the interactive map even tracks the path of tropical storms and shows where wind is moving on Earth
• data is pulled live from a forecast model by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Ever wanted to see what's going on with the weather in the world at this very second?
Now you can thanks to an interactive map that lets you see temperature, rainfall, winds and more in countries across the globe.

Called MeteoEarth you can navigate around the 3D globe below using your mouse, while selecting the icons on the right hand side will also reveal different types of weather.
MeteoEarth.com was launched by MeteoGroup, headquartered in London, one of Europe’s leading private weather companies.
The technology which powers MeteoEarth.com has been adapted from a professional broadcasting tool used by TV presenters around the world
Impressive 3D graphics compliment the high-end gaming technology used to fully engage the user with exploring the world’s weather.

For people who are simply interested in gaining a general overview of the world’s weather conditions, they can choose from a selection of weather layers; ranging from precipitation and cloud cover, to wind direction and temperature.
They can zoom in to focus on different areas of the world, zoom out to get a global overview, or even rotate the globe using the mouse.
For the more avid weather enthusiasts, there is the option to observe tropical storms by simply clicking a button to be guided towards an area on the globe where a tropical storm is occurring, with a line showing its path.
Once here, there are details of the storm’s name, wind, gust and overall speed.
Different layers of weather information can be built up to visualize the storm in its entirety.

An interactive map from Europe's MeteoGroup lets you watch the weather unfold around the world. By selecting different icons weather of varying types can be watched live in different countries.

For example users can see the global cloud cover or also where it is raining at the moment.

The interactive map even tracks the path of tropical storms (shown in Central America ) and shows where wind is moving on Earth

The interactive map will also show isobars (seen here above the UK), which reveal high and low-pressure systems (pictured).

In order to make the air pressure comparable, no matter what height you’re at, the air pressure is converted to the mean sea level.

As a comparison value, the barometric (atmospheric) pressure is shown in white, high pressure areas are in red and low air pressure is in blue

In addition a built-in screenshot feature provides an easy way to take particular weather images of a certain area, capturing still images of weather situations.
The frame of the map can be altered to include close-up sections of the map or zoomed out to get a more global overview.
The data on MeteoEarth.com comes from a forecast model by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
This is then refined by MeteoGroup using their own algorithms, and finally visualised on the website in the interactive map..
The data on MeteoEarth.com is updated twice per day.
It comes from the forecast model each day at 0:00UTC and 12:00UTC and the data is updated at 6:00UTC and 18:00UTC.

This is all an automated process with no human interaction, although MeteoGroup tells MailOnline their in-house developers are currently working on improving this process to offer an even more ‘live’ representation.
'This website will help to educate users with no prior meteorological experience about the weather,' said David Kaiser, Head of Consumer at MeteoGroup.
'The breathtaking graphics combined with the wealth of information about each weather feature provides an engaging demonstration of the world’s current weather and is sure to provide hours of entertainment to anybody viewing it.'

Data is pulled live from a forecast model by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

'This website will help to educate users with no prior meteorological experience about the weather,' said David Kaiser, Head of Consumer at MeteoGroup.

'The breathtaking graphics combined with the wealth of information about each weather feature provides an engaging demonstration of the world’s current weather and is sure to provide hours of entertainment to anybody viewing it'

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Real-time world winds animated map / Isaac storm as it appears in a visualization of America's wind / Watching Earth's winds, on a shoestring / Perpetual ocean : currents looks like a living Van Gogh painting

Creating within : an incredible journey inside waves

Breathtaking slow motion waves

An award winning documentary that follows two lifelong friends, on a surfing pilgrimage to remote parts of the Australian coastline to film epic waves in memory of their other friend who took his life.
It captures their journey of filming in the elements, as the film Within is brought to life.
Filmmaker Darius reflects on how Billy's death sparked the beginning of his inward journey, shifting his perspective about what matters in life and expanding his connection to the ocean, into new forms of visual expression.

An impressionistic exploration of the ocean, Within creates the space to linger, in vivid detail, dwelling on the ocean in movement, flowing through the majestic folds of nature.