This Hawaiian Island is so polluted with plastic that it might become a superfund site

Tern Island. (Photo: France Lanting/Getty Images)

From Takepart by Taylor Hill

Ocean plastic and toxic waste left behind by the military threaten sea turtles, seals, and other marine life. 

Hawaiian green sea turtles, monk seals, and black-footed albatrosses are all closer to getting a cleaner, plastic-free home as the federal government takes a step toward declaring a remote Pacific atoll a Superfund site.

The designation, which the United States Environmental Protection Agency gives areas severely contaminated by hazardous waste, would be the first granted for a site that was investigated for ocean plastic pollution.
“I’m thrilled the EPA is taking this historic first step to protect Hawaiian monk seals and green sea turtles from dangerous plastic litter,” said Emily Jeffers, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.
“These animals face enough threats to their survival from sea level rise and habitat loss; the last thing they need is to choke on a floating plastic bag.”

Tern Island is a tiny coral island located in the French Frigate Shoals

in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Tern Island with the Marine GeoGarage

Located about 564 miles northwest of Honolulu, Tern Island is as remote as an island can get.
But the atoll is directly in the path of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, catching bits of the billions of pounds of swirling plastic that inundates the area.
That plastic—whether bags, fishing lines, or bottle caps—often ends up in the bellies of marine animals and birds.
“Initial studies conducted by EPA in areas outside of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands indicate that microplastic marine debris can accumulate and transport contaminants in the marine environment into the food chain,” Dean Higuchi, an EPA spokesman, said in an email.
Higuchi pointed out that the Superfund designation wouldn’t come just because of drifting plastic. “The major thing to remember…is the contamination that was left from the military activities on Tern Island,” he said.
From 1942 to1979, the U.S. Navy used the island as an airfield, a missile range, and an aircraft refueling station. The Coast Guard also maintained a facility there.
What did they leave behind?
An abandoned airstrip and a landfill filled with generators, electronics, cable, batteries, wires, and a 50,000-gallon neoprene fuel tank.

The government’s initial assessment found toxic substances such as polychlorinated biphenyls and lead in the buried military waste and determined that further action was warranted.
“At this point, no decision has been made on exactly what the next steps will be in designating the site as a Superfund, but the focus will really be on the PCBs and the lead from military activities,” Higuchi said.
“Plastics were also looked at because the petition asked them to be reviewed, but as of now, it’s not considered a hazardous substance in and of itself.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson, Ariz.–based nonprofit, petitioned the EPA to conduct the initial study in 2012.
While the environmental group asked the EPA to look at plastic pollution in the entire Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the government agency limited the research to Tern Island.
“I think the EPA is using Tern Island as a test case to better understand the dangers posed to wildlife by plastic and microplastic pollution,” Jeffers said.
“We wrote this petition in an attempt to come up with creative ways to address the problem—we know that we can’t possibly designate all the areas heavily affected by plastic pollution as Superfund sites, but hopefully the EPA’s actions will draw more attention to the problem.”
With the ball rolling at Tern Island, are other plastic-polluted sites candidates for Superfund listing? Not yet, says Higuchi, but this could be the start of a new wave of cleanup efforts.
“There are likely many other areas, not only in the U.S., but worldwide, where plastic pollution presents a hazard to the marine ecosystem, the food chain, and potentially to human health,” Higuchi said.

Links : 

• TakePart :  Ocean Plastic Pollution Costs $13 Billion a Year, and Your Face Scrub Is Part of the Problem

5 terrifying facts from the leaked UN Climate Report

A massive "ice island" breaks free from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland in 2012.

Rex Features/AP

From Mother Jones by James West

How many synonyms for "grim" can I pack into one article?
I had to consult the thesaurus: ghastly, horrid, awful, shocking, grisly, gruesome.

illustration : Andrea Surumi

This week, a big report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was leaked before publication, and it confirmed, yet again, the grim—dire, frightful—reality the we face if we don't slash our global greenhouse gas emissions, and slash them fast.

This "Synthesis Report," to be released in November following a UN conference in Copenhagen, is still subject to revision.
It is intended to summarize three previous UN climate publications and to "provide an integrated view" to the world's governments of the risks they face from runaway carbon pollution, along with possible policy solutions.

As expected, the document contains a lot of what had already been reported after the three underpinning reports were released at global summits over the past year.
It's a long list of problems: sea level rise resulting in coastal flooding, crippling heat waves and multidecade droughts, torrential downpours, widespread food shortages, species extinction, pest outbreaks, economic damage, and exacerbated civil conflicts and poverty.

But in general, the 127-page leaked report provides starker language than the previous three, framing the crisis as a series of "irreversible" ecological and economic catastrophes that will occur if swift action is not taken.

Here are five particularly grim—depressing, distressing, upsetting, worrying, unpleasant—takeaways from the report.

1. Our efforts to combat climate change have been grossly inadequate.
The report says that anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas emissions continued to increase from 1970 to 2010, at a pace that ramped up especially quickly between 2000 and 2010.
That's despite some regional action that has sought to limit emissions, including carbon-pricing schemes in Europe.
We haven't done enough, the United Nations says, and we're already seeing the effects of inaction. "Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history," the report says.
"The climate changes that have already occurred have had widespread and consequential impacts on human and natural systems."

2. Keeping global warming below the internationally agreed upon 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (above preindustrial levels) is going to be very hard.
To keep warming below this limit, our emissions need to be slashed dramatically.
But at current rates, we'll pump enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to sail past that critical level within the next 20 to 30 years, according to the report.
We need to emit half as much greenhouse gas for the remainder of this century as we've already emitted over the past 250 years.
Put simply, that's going to be difficult—especially when you consider the fact that global emissions are growing, not declining, every year.
The report says that to keep temperature increases to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, deep emissions cuts of between 40 and 70 percent are needed between 2010 and 2050, with emissions "falling towards zero or below" by 2100.

3. We'll probably see nearly ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean before mid-century.
The report says that in every warming scenario it the scientists considered, we should expect to see year-round reductions in Arctic sea ice.
By 2050, that will likely result in strings of years in which there is the near absence of sea ice in the summer, following a well-established trend.
And then there's Greenland, where glaciers have been retreating since the 1960s—increasingly so after 1993—because of man-made global warming.
The report says we may already be facing a situation in which Greenland's ice sheet will vanish over the next millennium, contributing up to 23 feet of sea level rise.

4. Dangerous sea level rise will very likely impact 70 percent of the world's coastlines by the end of the century.
The report finds that by 2100, the devastating effects of sea level rise—including flooding, infrastructure damage, and coastal erosion—will impact the vast majority of the world's coastlines. That's not good: Half the world's population lives within 37 miles of the sea, and three-quarters of all large cities are located on the coast, according to the United Nations.
The sea has already risen significantly: From 1901 to 2010, global mean sea level rose by 0.62 feet.

5. Even if we act now, there's a real risk of "abrupt and irreversible" changes.
The carbon released by burning fossil fuels will stay in the atmosphere and the seas for centuries to come, the report says, even if we completely stop emitting CO2 as soon as possible.
That means it's virtually certain that global mean sea level rise will continue for many centuries beyond 2100.
Without strategies to reduce emissions, the world will see 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming above preindustrial temperatures by the end of the century, condemning us to "substantial species extinction, global and regional food insecurity, [and] consequential constraints on common human activities."

What's more, the report indicates that without action, the effects of climate change could be irreversible: "Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems."

Grim, indeed.

Links :

• Bloomberg : Irreversible Damage Seen From Climate Change in UN Leak
• NYTimes : Our Lonely Home in Nature
  

Advisory notice on "Web Mercator"

4037 NGA raster nautical charts displayed upon Google Maps imagery
(Marine GeoGarage) 

NGA released a cease and desist regarding webmapping products for navigation and targeting due to inaccuracies with the default map.

I just learn that National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) published some recent documents (February & May 2014) regarding the use of Web Mercator projection originally adopted by the leaders of the Internet (created for Google Maps, then adopted for Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps), and also embraced by other commercial API providers (OpenLayers, Leaflet, ArcGIS for JS...).
This term is used to refer to the fact that these providers use a specific Mercator projection which is neither strictly ellipsoidal, nor strictly spherical.
So this affects calculations done based on processing the map as a flat plane.

 "Maps from G. Mercator are worthless" (translation from French)

I don't say that NGA seems to discover webmapping, 9 years after the introduction of Google Maps in 2005 and the adoption of this specific projection for their maps and imagery, but this is an old debate since the arrival of the first geo web actors, what Dodge & Perkins examined in 2008 as an apparent decline in mapping quality ("McMaps", amateur(ish) maps made by non-experts or neogeographers).
On a technical point of view, Noel Zinn (in 2010) and more recently Daniel Streb (in 2012) have perfectly explained before NGA the technical issues relative to the choice of a pseudo Mercator projection.

In 2009, International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP which created the EPSG codes) described quite well the Coordinate Conversions and Transformations including Formulas for this projection (see the evolution in the time of the EPSG codes for Google Mercator,  not a recognised geodetic system in the last Web Mercator -Auxiliary Sphere- EPSG:3857 version.
"We have reviewed the coordinate reference system used by Microsoft, Google, etc. and believe that it is technically flawed. We will not devalue the EPSG dataset by including such inappropriate geodesy and cartography." said EPSG.

1.3.3.2 Popular Visualization Pseudo Mercator
(EPSG dataset coordinate operation method code 1024)
This method is utilized by some popular web mapping and visualization applications.
It applies standard Mercator (Spherical) formulas (section 1.3.3.1 above) to ellipsoidal coordinates and the sphere radius is taken to be the semi-major axis of the ellipsoid.
This approach only approximates to the more rigorous application of ellipsoidal formulas to ellipsoidal coordinates (as given in EPSG dataset coordinate operation method codes 9804 and 9805 in section 1.3.3 above).
Unlike either the spherical or ellipsoidal Mercator projection methods, this method is not conformal: scale factor varies as a function of azimuth, which creates angular distortion.
Despite angular distortion there is no convergence in the meridian. 

 EPSG definition said in 2006 the projection "uses spherical development of ellipsoidal coordinates."

 extract from OGP publication

So Web Mercator is really a non conformal projection : scale factor in the N/S meridian direction not equal to scale factor in E/W parallel direction : not a constant, but a function of azimuth (direction).
By the way, Google Maps chose for its pseudo Web Mercator to use a radius of the Earth equal to the semimajor axis of the WGS84/GRS80 reference ellipsoid (Equatorial radius : 6,378,137.0 meters), which is much larger than the Mean radius whose value is about 6,371,007.0 meters used in Mercator Spherical).
But actually Web Mercator is "almost conformal" when looking at small areas...
An infinitesimal circle drawed on the ellipsoid surface, would become an ellipse on the map, but an ellipse with a very small flattening, and really similar to a circle.
For this reason deformation of shape is very small too when looking at small areas, and is not visually notable : a square building is projected as a (almost) square building.
For memory, conserving the shape of square buildings was one of the major reason for the choice of this specific pseudo Mercator by the original Google Maps team (Where2 Technologies startup co-founded by Jens and Lars Rasmussen brothers), and adopted by many web maps today.
Note : the first launch of Google Maps actually did not use pseudo Mercator but Plate Carree, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality.
The majority of Google Maps users are looking down at the street level for businesses, directions, etc...
While this distorts a 'zoomed-out view' of the map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality.

with GDAL/PROJ4 tools : delta = 36.3 km at Lat = 58°
echo -5.0 58.0 | cs2cs -f “%.10f” +init=epsg:4326 +to +init=epsg:3395 (Geo2Mercator)
=> -556,597.454, 7,931,049.576
echo -5.0 58.0 | cs2cs -f “%.10f” +init=epsg:4326 +to +init=epsg:3857 (Geo2WebMercator)
=> -556,597.454, 7,967,317.535
The units of web Mercator are not really Meters, they are "Web Mercator Meters"

and they are equal only on the Equator line.

When you go north or south from the Equator line, the ratio (difference in Northing between Mercator and Web Mercator) between the two units is getting bigger.

However, although Web Mercator shares some of the same properties of the standard Mercator projection (north is up everywhere, areas near the poles are greatly exaggerated), rhumb lines (or loxodromes, lines of constant true heading that navigators used to sail before GPS) are not straight lines.

courtesy of Noel Zinn document

So as non-conformal with not straight loxodromes, this projection should not be really called “Mercator” according the terms of IHO : Web Mercator can't be used for navigation.

Actually the aim of Google Maps was at first visualization of maps and aerial/satellite imagery on the web and not to be a tool for accurate surveying computations : Web Mercator wouldn’t be used for surveying, geodetic or scientific purposes.

To simplify the calculations, we use the spherical form of this projection, not the ellipsoidal form. Since the projection is used only for map display, and not for displaying numeric coordinates, we don’t need the extra precision of an ellipsoidal projection. The spherical projection causes approximately 0.33% scale distortion in the Y direction, which is not visually noticeable. 
(source : Bing Maps Tile System)

However, Web Mercator is a projection that maps from ellipsoidal WGS84 LatLon (LL) to XY in Web Mercator meters and back to ellipsoidal LL : so a completely reversible LLXY.
The first version of the public Marine GeoGarage website (unprojecting back plotted waypoints in Web Mercator meters to WGS84 LatLon coordinates) proposed some Route planning tool allowing the user to save the waypoints and routes created with the webmapping in gpx or Garmin formats to be use in GPS or chart plotters.

The loss of conformality implied when using directly the simpler and faster spherical formulas, didn't worry his creators because Google Maps was targeted for the majority of people, so non specialist.
The reason for the creation of this specific pseudo Mercator simplifying mathematical calculations was Javascript performance (scale factor not computed).
Reprojection of the coordinates to the Web Mercator projection (from EPSG:4326 to EPSG:3857):
x = a*λ (a = WGS4 semi-major axis -Equatoril radius- 6,378,137m)
y = a*arctanh(sinφ) − a*e*arctanh(e*sinφ) : eccentricity (e) of the Earth not taken into account (eq 0) in Web Mercator (for info e=0.081819190842621)
so (Lat φ and Lon λ are in radians) about 5 times faster than the ellipsoidal Mercator

 zoom level 1 has 4 square tiles

By the way, in order to get an entire world map similar to a (very large) square (pyramidal tiles : 256 px x 256 px), Google Maps uses some bound in Latitude (85.0511° = arctan(sinh(π))


Web applications are a very important platform because of their ability to reach a large number of people easily.
Web Mercator as the pioneer projection chosen for 2D webmapping became the standard for sharing data on the web because of the richness of the offer in matter of maps and imagery provided by the giants of the Internet.
That's also the main reason why we decided to match the nautical charts with satellite and aerial imagery, in order to align properly with the services such as these popular contents.
-> see GeoGarage blog :
http://blog.geogarage.com/2012/11/south-pacific-sandy-island-proven-not.html
http://blog.geogarage.com/2011/01/bahamas-wlp-update-in-marine-geogarage.html

By the way, we must recall that the GeoGarage nautical charts web and mobile viewers are not to be used as a primary tool for navigation.
The goal is not to replace the existing Electronic Chart System for navigation, but to provide a maritime route planning tool accessible for a large audience.


As the basic quandary is the accuracy issue in 2D Planisphere web viewers, why not approaching reality using a 3D Globe ?

NOAA nautical raster charts in Google Earth from Marine GeoGarage on Vimeo.

Google Earth viewer using re-projecting on the fly individual tiles 
in Mercator to Plate Carree before rendering them.
However kml format proved to not be very adapted for adding a custom streamable large tileset.

In the next future, with the ongoing advent of HTML5 and WebGL, developing virtual globe applications running in the web browser without any plug-in will allow to stay focus on the visualization.

 see video : UKHO Multitouch demo

While the sphere is a close approximation of the true figure of the Earth and satisfactory for many purposes, geodesists have developed a number of models to represent a closer approximation to the shape of the Earth, using a cartesian XYZ coordinate frame of reference (Earth-Centered, Earth-Fixed -ECEF- used in GPS) and datum transformation to the more commonly used geodetic-mapping coordinates of Latitude, Longitude, and Altitude (LLA).
But portraying the reality of our planet as a nearly spherical surface in a three-dimensional world is also a challenge, especially if we plan to integrate altitudes and bathymetry.

 Google Maps (Earth) new version on WebGL-enabled browser

The best of the ellipsoïdal and Geoid models can represent the shape of the earth over the smoothed, averaged sea-surface to within about one-hundred meters.
Through a long history, the "figure of the Earth" was refined from flat-Earth models to spherical models of sufficient accuracy to allow global exploration, navigation and mapping.

Vertical deflection

But like with the use of 2D world viewers on the web, if you work in some field that required accurate maps, you would not necessarily find globes in common use.

 Gerard Mercator's 1541 terrestrial globe on display in the Harvard Map Collection exhibit hall.

Along with a 1551 celestial globe, this is one of only 22 surviving matched pairs in the world, and the only matched pair in America.

The most accurate globe would be a globe the size of earth itself.
Jorge Luis Borges's "On Exactitude in Science" describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map (Map as a Territory):
In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Links :

• Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections by John P. Snyder
• Business Insider : The Most Popular Map Of The World Is Highly Misleading
• The Guardian : Why Google Maps gets Africa wrong 
• GeoGarage blog : Gerardus Mercator : father of modern mapmaking
• ESRI : Measuring distances and areas when your map uses the Web Mercator projection 
• OpenLayers : Spherical Mercator
• How WGS 84 defines Earth
• Scientific American : The Geoid: Why a map of Earth’s gravity yields a potato-shaped planet
• Some Principles of Web Mercator Maps and their Computation 
  
• Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection (by Mark Monmonier) 

Sea Chair

Sea Chair from Studio Swine
Ingenuity at sea knows no limits.
What should fishermen do with the piles of plastic that come up in their nets?
These UK mariners invented a furnace to melt down plastic scraps and build stools, all while still at sea.
They even put the designs online so that anyone can try their hand at making reclaimed plastic furniture.

Since the discovery of the Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997, which is predicted to measure twice the size of Texas, five more have been found across the world’s oceans with the Atlantic gyre predicted to be even larger.
This plastic takes thousands of years to degrade, remaining in the environment to be broken up into ever smaller fragments by ocean currents.

The gyre stretches from the coastlines of California to the shores of Japan.
Recent studies have estimated 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans.
The number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years and the size of the accumulation is set to double in the next ten.

Sea Chair is made entirely from plastic recovered from our oceans.
Together with local fishermen, Studio Swine collects and processes the marine plastic into a stool at sea.

We thought we had seen everything in freediving

We thought we had seen everything in freediving from FreedivingUAE

Do you have any hidden talents or any special tricks you can do?

Maybe it’s moving your tongue in a special way or being extremely flexible.

David Helderle can do something absolutely amazing.

The funny thing is, he didn’t think it was anything special until a freediving veteran saw him doing it and was dumbfounded not only by the feat itself, but by the way David seemed to do it so effortlessly.

So what’s Helder's special ability?

He can create mini vortexes that shoot through the water to create intricate patterns in just about any direction.

That may not sound like much, but anyone who has tried freediving or even just been messing around in the water knows that it’s no easy task to control water the way he can.

Seeing is believing so watch the video above to see this one of a kind “magic” show on display for yourself.

We sat down with the 40 year old Frenchman to find out a bit more about his story and found a passionate freediver who believes that it’s more than just a sport but rather, “something spiritual” that provides him with an escape from the stress of daily life where he feels that we are normally forced to show an altered version of ourselves.

For him, being below the surface gives him a chance to be true to himself without having to put on any acts or trying to convince anyone that he is anything other than David.

“You can knock at my door,” says Helder , “and I will not answer because I’m not there.”

More than anything, it’s the meditative qualities of freediving and the chance to be “someone else” that have this 35 year freediving veteran so excited about the next dive.

It was his father, a freediver in his own right, that got young David started around age 4.
It hasn’t all been easy though.

His worst failure came around age 12 when,

“I had a blackout when doing dynamic inside a pool. I [was] rescued by a friend who was acting as a buddy. At that time, I was trying to find a different path than the one taught by my dad and my breath up was a mix of hyperventilating followed by a slow belly breathing. That technique led me to the blackout. I then decided that performing a slow belly breathing prior to a dive was definitely the only right way to freedive safely!”

When asked about his biggest success, Helder responds with a smile and says,

“Staying enough time underwater to make some friends: Clown fish and groupers are very friendly!!”

David’s advice to anyone thinking about freediving or trying to improve their skills is to dive without a watch. In his opinion, that frees up your mind to relax and focus on the sensations around you. While he doesn’t have any inspirational quotes to share, Helder leaves us with his own parting words of wisdom that make his passion about freediving abundantly clear:

“…if I am freediving it ‘s to find peace beyond thoughts and words. Freediving is taking a retreat.”

Be sure to watch the video to see some stunning footage of David’s underwater vortexes and some of the marine life he encounters on his adventures.

Pay special attention to the tricks he does around minute 2:40 if you want to see a really impressive display of his talents.