Ocean stories

Ocean Stories Trailer 2016 from greg goggin

100 Stories featuring artists, scientists, film makers, athletes and more

whose lives have been inspired by their love and commitment to the Ocean. 

Nuclear submarine breaking through Arctic ice

Arctic Circle (March 10, 2016) Los Angeles-class submarine  USS Hartford (SSN 768) breaking through several feet of solid ice in order to surface in the Arctic Circle near Ice Camp Sargo during Ice Exercise (ICEX) 2016.
Service members and civilians assigned to Arctic Submarine Lab clear ice from the hatches to allow for surface access
 ICEX is a five-week exercise designed to research, test, and evaluate operational capabilities in the region.
(U.S. Navy video by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Tyler Thompson and Staff Sgt. Edward Eagerton/Released

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/this-footage-of-a-fast-attack-submarine-breaking-throug-1765813296 

A tribute to USS 571 Nautilus - First nuclear submarine to surface the Arctic Ice (see article)

Links :

• YouTube : USS Alexandria SSN 757 surfaces through the ice near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, March 15, 2007 / USS HAWKBILL (SSN 666) Surfaces Through The Arctic Ice / USS New Hampshire (SSN 778)

Image of the week : San Francisco HR oblique view

from Mapbox
DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 satellite collected an astonishing view of San Francisco
We don’t often see pictures like this one.

The problem is haze: as a camera in space looks toward the horizon, it sees more water vapor, smog, and other stuff in the atmosphere that obscures the Earth.

But our friends at DigitalGlobe built WorldView-3 with a sensor suite called CAVIS, which lets it quantify and subtract haze – making atmospheric effects virtually invisible.

Only WorldView-3 can see so clearly at this angle.
The satellite is about 17° above the horizon from San Francisco, and it is looking about 60° away from the point directly under it.

At first I thought there was a typo, because 17° off horizontal should be 73° off vertical, not 61°.

But while sketching it out, I realized I was assuming the ground is flat.

WorldView-3 is way out over the Pacific – more than 1300 km or 800 miles to the west, and over that distance the Earth curves by about 12°!
Pan and zoom to see landmarks and details 

SF with the GeoGarage platform

Historic UN talks could save the high seas

No-man’s-land. B1mbo, CC BY-SA

From The Conversation by Glen Wright and Julien Rochette

You wouldn’t know it from land, but 45% of the surface of the globe lies outside the control of any government. The high seas (and seabed) are designated as “Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction” by the UN, with little regulation and few environmental safeguards.
Now, after a decade of discussions, a new treaty will be negotiated to ensure the conservation and sustainable use of the biodiversity in these areas.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982, already provides a “Constitution for the Ocean”, but it doesn’t say much about the high seas or the seabed that lies beyond our borders.
Indeed, we used to believe that these areas were not worth exploiting or protecting, but scientific and technological advancements are opening up a world of possibilities.

In recent decades, cargo shipping has grown rapidly and industrial fishing has moved into ever deeper and more distant waters.
At the same time, a range of novel activities are under development.
Contracts have been signed with the International Seabed Authority to mine valuable minerals from the seabed, and scientists and entrepreneurs are dreaming up new ways to use the ocean to mitigate climate change through “geoengineering”.
One such idea is to “fertilise” the ocean with iron, stimulating algal blooms that can lock away carbon.
We have also found a wealth of potential uses for the unusual genes contained in unique deep sea organisms.
“Marine genetic resources” taken from these organisms are now turning up in everything from anti-cancer drugs to high-end skin creams. The search to find such genes, known as “bioprospecting”, has begun in earnest, with the US, Germany, and Japan, leading the charge.

All this activity puts further pressure on already stressed and fragile marine ecosystems, and will only be exacerbated by climate change and ocean acidification.
This is a problem. Though we are not always aware of the vast ocean expanse beyond the horizon, the high seas provide us with a range of invaluable resources, not least seafood, clean air, and the global sea routes that deliver goods from across the globe to our doorstep.
The high seas contain unique habitats - such as huge underwater mountains and vents that spew boiling water into the icy depths - and we are constantly discovering new flora and fauna making their homes in these extreme environments.
At the same time, high seas ecosystems are highly interconnected with the seas and coasts that do happen to fall within national jurisdiction, with species constantly criss-crossing the arbitrary lines we have drawn on the map. If we fail to to properly manage our global ocean, we have a lot to lose.

Tangled net

Unfortunately the global regulatory framework for these areas is a hodgepodge of different legal instruments and organisations that mostly do not work well together.
Even when they do, huge gaps remain.
There is currently no way to create internationally recognised marine protected areas (MPAs) on the high seas, while the exploitation of marine genetic resources has been a thorny issue because their status under international law is unclear.
There are no global rules requiring the assessment of the environmental impacts of a range of activities, including bioprospecting.

Despite a consensus decision to press on with negotiations, states haven’t always seen eye to eye.
In particular, there has been intense ideological debate about the status of marine genetic resources: developing countries are concerned that only the wealthiest countries can afford to exploit this common resource, while many developed countries don’t want their potentially profitable activities to be subject to regulation.
States agree on some issues, such as the need to provide developing countries with the know-how and technology to conduct marine scientific research.
International guidelines are already in place, but states have been slow to act.
Some efforts have been made, such as the provision of training for early career scientists in developing countries and shared scientific cruises, but such efforts are limited, ad hoc, and uncoordinated.
It is unclear how a new agreement could kickstart a new era of assistance and cooperation.
Even issues that initially appear easy to address may ultimately prove tough to resolve in the context of charged negotiations.
For example, while almost all states have their own environmental impact assessment laws at home, agreeing a similar process for the high seas is likely to be far more complicated.

Stormy weather
The current consensus is already an uneasy one, and this meeting is only the first of four that will take place in 2016 and 2017.
It won’t be until 2018 that the UN General Assembly decides on the convening of an intergovernmental conference to adopt a new treaty.
This is undoubtedly an historic and optimistic moment, and an important first step to ensuring that our global ocean gets the protection it so badly needs.
Nonetheless it seems likely that there will be many more storms ahead before any heads of state are signing on the dotted line.

Massive network of robotic ocean probes gets smart upgrade

Ray Collins/Barcroft Media/Getty
Oceans can be monitored with increasing scope and quality with the use of Argo floats.

From Nature by Jeff Tollefson

The Southern Ocean guards its secrets well.
Strong winds and punishing waves have kept all except the hardiest sailors at bay. But a new generation of robotic explorers is helping scientists to document the region’s influence on the global climate.
These devices are leading a technological wave that could soon give researchers unprecedented access to oceans worldwide.

www.jcommops.org/board?t=Argo

Oceanographers are already using data from the more than 3,900 floats in the international Argo array.
These automated probes periodically dive to depths of 2,000 metres, measuring temperature and salinity before resurfacing to transmit their observations to a satellite (see ‘Diving deeper’).
The US$21-million Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling Project (SOCCOM) is going a step further, deploying around 200 advanced probes to monitor several indicators of seawater chemistry and biological activity in the waters around Antarctica.
A primary aim is to track the prodigious amount of carbon dioxide that flows into the Southern Ocean.
“The Southern Ocean is very important, and it’s also very poorly known because it’s just so incredibly miserable to work down there,” says Joellen Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona in Tucson and leader of SOCCOM’s modelling team.

Scientists estimate that the oceans have taken up roughly 93% of the extra heat generated by global warming, and around 26% of humanity’s CO₂ emissions, but it is unclear precisely where in the seas the heat and carbon go.
A better understanding of the processes involved could improve projections of future climate change.

SOCCOM, which launched in 2014, has funding from the US National Science Foundation to operate in the Southern Ocean for six years.
Project scientists’ ultimate goal is to expand to all the world’s oceans.
That would require roughly 1,000 floats, and would cost an estimated $25 million per year.

Interest in this global array, dubbed the Biogeochemical Argo, is growing.
The Japanese government has put a proposal to expand use of SOCCOM probes on the agenda for the meetings of the Group of 7 leading industrialized nations in Japan in May.
And the project is gaining high-level attention as a result: the SOCCOM team has briefed John Holdren, science adviser to US President Barack Obama.
Project scientists are rushing to develop a plan to expand use of the next-generation probes.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, couldn’t they wait a year?’” jokes SOCCOM associate director Ken Johnson, an ocean chemist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California.
His team is drafting a proposal to present to the inter­national Argo steering committee at a meeting that begins on 22 March.

  Beautifully viz'd data & floats in deep ocean. 

(courtesy of earth.nullschool.net)

Meanwhile, another set of researchers hopes to extend the existing Argo array beyond its current 2,000-metre limit.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admini­stration (NOAA) is spending about $1 million annually on a Deep Argo project to monitor ocean temperature and salinity down to 6,000 metres.
The agency deployed nine Deep Argo floats south of New Zealand in January, and is planning similar pilot arrays in the Indian Ocean and the North Atlantic.

The deep-ocean data will be particularly useful in improving how models simulate ocean circulation, says Alicia Karspeck, an ocean modeller at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
“From a scientific perspective, it’s a no-brainer,” she says — noting that the new floats are a low-risk investment compared with spending money on developing models without additional oceanographic data.

NOAA is using two different models of float, both designed to withstand the crushing pressures at the bottom of the sea.
And Argo teams in Japan and Europe are already using upgraded floats that can reach down to 4,000 metres.
The goal is to establish a new international array of some 1,250 deep-ocean floats — most of which would need to dive to 6,000 metres.
Doing so would provide basic data on 99% of the world’s seawater.
“We are really still working the bugs out of the equipment and trying to show that we can do this,” says Gregory Johnson, a NOAA oceanographer in Seattle, Washington, and one of the principal investigators for Deep Argo.

Even if scientists succeed in expanding next-generation ocean probes around the globe, he says, the data that they provide will not supplant detailed measurements of carbon, water chemistry, salinity and temperature that are currently made by ship-based surveys.
Deep Argo measures only temperature and salinity, and the technology used in Biogeochemical Argo is not yet sensitive enough to measure subtle changes in the deep ocean.
Still, ship surveys — which are done on average every ten years — cannot follow how heat is taken up by the deep ocean.
By contrast, Deep Argo would allow researchers to continually watch heat move through the oceans.
That could lead to a better understanding of how the oceans respond to global warming — and how the climate responds to the oceans.
“This has all kinds of ramifications for ecosystems and climate,” says Johnson of NOAA.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Critical global ocean monitoring program struggling to stay afloat without funding promises, warn scientists / Measuring ocean heating is key to tracking global warming / How long can oceans continue to absorb Earth’s excess heat? / Different depths reveal ocean warming trends