NZ Linz update in the GeoGarage platform

9 charts has been updated in the GeoGarage platform
Linz June update published July 24, 2015 (Updated to NTM Edition 15)

see : GeoGarage blog

Seabirds 'blighted by plastic waste'

 Plastic swallowed by albatrosses in the Pacific ocean

Hawaii: Message in the Waves - BBC

From BBC by Jonathan Amos

About 90% of seabirds have eaten plastic and are likely to retain some in their gut, a new analysis estimates.

The study concludes that matters will only get worse until action is taken to stem the flow of waste to the oceans.
Researcher Erik Van Sebille says the oceans are now filled with plastic and it is "virtually certain" that any dead seabird found in 2050 "will have a bit of plastic in its stomach".
Dr Van Sebille and his colleagues report their work in the journal PNAS.
On one level, the analysis is shocking, but on another, its findings seem depressingly familiar.
Numerous studies have now catalogued the rising mass of plastic debris being dumped, blown or simply washed out to sea; and it is having a deleterious impact on the marine environment.
To the foraging bird, a discarded plastic cigarette lighter or a shiny bottle top can look like a fish.
If ingested, this litter may simply stay in the gut, unable to pass through, putting the animal's health at risk.
As more and more plastic waste finds its way into the oceans - about eight million tonnes a year in one recent estimate - so the hazards to wildlife increase.

 Midway Island is an uninhabited island about 2000 km from any other coast line.

It lies roughly equidistant between North America and Asia, and almost halfway around the world from England.

In their PNAS paper, the Australian and UK scientists reviewed decades of peer-reviewed literature to trace the evolution of seabirds' exposure to plastic debris.
Back in 1960, the data showed that maybe fewer than 5% of birds would be found with waste fragments in their stomach.
Today, this figure is roughly 90%.
And, on current trends, by 2050, the team predicts that plastic ingestion will touch 99% of the world's seabird species, with nearly every individual affected.
"Plastic in seabirds is ubiquitous, and it's increasing," study leader Chris Wilcox from CSIRO, Australia's federal research agency, told BBC News.
To get to its 2050 extrapolation, the team had to understand the hotspots of risk, by overlaying the known foraging behaviour of the world's 400 or so seabird species on to the known distribution of plastic waste at sea.

This approach demonstrated that the regions of highest risk are not where most floating plastic congregates, which is in the centres of the great ocean gyres, sometimes dubbed "garbage patches" or "islands" for the way the debris just goes round and round.
Rather, the zones of highest concern are where most seabirds are found, which is in a band in the Southern Ocean, near Australia, South Africa and South America.
Once thought of as having pristine waters, this region is now sufficiently polluted to ensure a great array of species encounters some waste.
"A pristine ocean doesn't exist anymore," said Dr Van Sebille, who is affiliated to Imperial College London.
"Every ocean is now filled with plastic. Some have more than others, but what we found is that even the oceans that are not known for their plastic - they still have quite a bit of plastic and they can be where the harm is really done just because that's where all the birds live."

 Open up any dead bird, and most are likely to contain plastic fragments

Another key finding from the research is that the problem really is solvable.
If only the stream of plastic waste getting into the oceans can be shut off, then seabirds have the capacity to recover quite quickly.
Dr Wilcox explained: "Because exposure to plastic turns out to be a strong predictor of how much plastic the birds have in them; that is, the more plastic they're exposed to, the more they ingest - this implies that if we reduce the amount of plastic going into the oceans, you would expect all these species to essentially respond.
"And this makes this problem different from something like climate change. It ought to be relatively easy to fix."
Jenna Jambeck from the University of Georgia, US, is an expert on plastic waste issues.
She was not involved in the study but said it had eloquently made the link between solid waste management practices on land, the plastic input into the oceans, and the impacts being felt by seabirds globally.
"It illustrates that if we implement solutions to reduce plastic input into the oceans, we can reduce impacts to individual seabirds.
"Solutions include improving solid waste management where it is lacking, and also working upstream on product redesign and materials substitution moving towards a more circular system," she told BBC News.

 This is a solvable problem, say the scientists: Just shut off the waste stream 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog :  Tiny plankton snacking on plastic is a big problem for the food chain
  

Monterey Canyon: Stunning deep-sea topography revealed

From MBARI

About the canyon

Monterey Canyon is one of the deepest submarine canyons on the west coast of the United States.
The canyon head lies just offshore of Moss Landing on the Central California coast.
From there, the main channel meanders over 400 kilometers seaward to a depth of more than 4,000 meters on the abyssal plain.
Repeated mapping in certain areas of the canyon have shown that the terrain changes substantially every few months due to large sediment-transport events involving both debris flows and turbidity currents.
If the water drained from Monterey Bay, the newly revealed terrain would be stunning, with cliffs, gorges, valleys, and spires matching the scenery found in some of our most beautiful national parks.

 Monterrey Canyon with the GeoGarage platform

How these maps were created

Sonar has long been used to map the seafloor, usually with equipment mounted on a ship's hull.
The ship travels back and forth, sending sound waves toward the ocean floor.
When the sound waves hit the bottom, they bounce back to the surface, where the sonar receivers use the returned signals to indicate the depths of the seafloor.
Modern multibeam sonars use numerous narrow beams covering wide swaths of the seafloor to create maps like the bathymetric map shown here.
The more detailed maps overlaid on the base map were created with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's mapping autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV).
Although the AUV uses the same technology, it flies closer to the bottom, allowing higher resolution maps to be made.
The AUV bathymetric maps show details as small as one meter (three feet) across, and are among the most detailed maps ever made of the deep seafloor.
Researchers use the detailed maps to understand seafloor morphology and the movement of sediment within submarine canyons.

 Cross-sections of the Monterey Canyon (left) and Grand Canyon (right) shown at the same scale demonstrate that these features are similar in size and shape.

Both canyons are conduits through which massive volumes of sediment move.

While water flowing in the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon, a directly analogous process is not known to have occurred within Monterey Canyon.

Canyon life

Monterey Canyon and the waters above it provide a wide array of habitats, from rocky outcrops and the soft seafloor to the dark midwater, where there is little or no sign of light from above nor of the seafloor below.
MBARI researchers often encounter rarely seen biological communities, observe novel behaviors of deep-sea organisms, and discover new species in the deep sea.

Mono 60 Edmond de Rothschild in the breeze (30 knots)

28 to 35 knots of north-westerly breeze accompanied by a 2.5 to 3-metre swell…
Fasten Seatbelts

Launched on 7 August in Vannes, after an eleven-month build at the Multiplast yard, le Mono60 Edmond de Rothschild was able to put in her first tacks just ten days later offshore of the team’s base in Lorient.
However, on Monday of this week, thanks to a boisterous low off the north-west tip of Brittany, Sébastien Josse and Charles Caudrelier (his co-skipper for the Transat Jacques Vabre) opted to trial the machine in some blustery conditions.
It proved to be a rather bracing sail which cameraman Christophe Castagne captured in full for Gitana Team.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : First flights off Lorient

Visualisation of the Invisible : 3D Map of Antarctica

From AWI

The Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the TU Dresden’s Institute for Cartography (Germany) are presenting their joint three-dimensional map of the Antarctic continent and the seafloor of the Southern Ocean at this year’s International Cartographic Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

For the first time, the map simultaneously shows viewers three geographic layers: the Antarctic ice sheet, the land masses it conceals and the surrounding underwater landscape.
The map covers a total depth range of over 12,000 metres: from the ice sheet, down to the depths of the surrounding Southern Ocean.
The so-called lenticular print is a novelty; the scientists portrayed Antarctic ice sheet, which is up to 4,800 metres thick, as a honeycombed grid structure, allowing viewers to see through it to the mountain ranges below.
Another new feature is that the scope of depth includes the entire z-axis.

In the past, it was only possible to show deeper areas or, in the case of world maps, the corresponding ocean regions but without any depth, according to Lars Radig.

2 sources combined

One major source of data for the new 3D visualisation was the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO), a digital representation of the entire Antarctic seafloor south of the 60th parallel that was released in 2013 under the auspices of the Alfred Wegener Institute.
The second key source was provided by Bedmap2, a three-dimensional digital map of Antarctica that depicts the bedrock under the Antarctic ice sheet.
The new True-3D visualisation is the first of its kind to combine the two datasets.