Into the sea

Making the connection between how we care for our yard and the health of our local waterways 

From Surfrider

Most people have no idea of the connection between how they manage their lawn and gardens at home and the health of our local waterways and beaches.

From unnecessarily treating our garden and lawns with chemical fertilizers and pesticides to applying too much water, we’re killing all the beneficial biology in our soils that support beautiful and healthy plants, and it’s creating polluted runoff. Landscaping chemicals don’t stay where they are applied, but instead can leach into groundwater or be washed away by runoff when it rains or when misdirected irrigation runs off our properties. The resulting storm water and urban runoff pollutes local waterways and harms coastal ecosystems by causing harmful algal blooms and killing fish and other aquatic animals. Water affected by runoff makes it dangerous to swim and play in.

Ocean Friendly Gardens act like a sponge in your landscape. These gardens are shaped in a natural way to capture rain and runoff, contain native, climate appropriate plants and healthy, living soil which soaks up, stores and filters out pollutants from stormwater and road runoff. They have the added bonus of providing native habitat for bees, birds and butterflies. And it’s an important tool in addressing climate change as healthy plants and soil work in combination to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere. In the most basic terms, Ocean Friendly Gardens can conserve water, help clean up local waterways, and be beautiful and affordable too.
Want to make your backyard more ocean-friendly? Here are some easy ways to conserve water and prevent polluted runoff from hitting the ocean:
Get dirty! Stop using chemical fertilizers and pesticides and pull weeds by hand instead.
Mulch, mulch, mulch. Apply organic compost to your yard and garden and cover it with mulch to build healthy, living soil that acts like a sponge to hold onto rain for your plants’ use during dry months. Soil microbes, which are like probiotics, help the soil’s ability to absorb nutrients and resist drought, disease and pests and aid in cleaning up pollution and capturing carbon that plants absorb from the atmosphere.
Compost. Make your own soil amendments by composting your yard and kitchen scraps in a compost or worm bin.
Go native! Plant native plants and grasses that don’t need supplemental irrigation when they are fully-grown. You’ll also be providing food and habitat for butterflies, birds and bees.
Shape your garden to slow down and soak up rainwater. Leave a natural buffer or slightly raised border around the edge of your yard to prevent runoff from leaving your property and polluting local waterways.
Barrel on! Install a rain barrel to store rainwater for future watering needs, and direct the overflow into the landscape and not onto the driveway and out to a storm drain. If rain barrels are not an option, direct gutters to the landscape. This reduces flooding and keeps polluted runoff from reaching the ocean.
Mind the gap. Make your walkways and driveways permeable by cutting gaps in them or make sure they are pitched to drain into your yard.

Healthy beaches start upstream with clean rivers, lakes and streams. Whether you live inland or by the coast, we can all do our part to protect local waterways and our ocean from being polluted.

Looking for more ways to learn more and help support the Surfrider Foundation's efforts to protect our ocean, waves and beaches?

Links :

• Learn more about our Eastern Long Island Chapter featured in Into the Sea.
• Support our clean water work to make sure a day at the beach or local waterway won't make you sick!
• Find a chapter near you to join in and help protect our ocean, waves and beaches.

Man of Aran

Man of Aran is a 1934 British fictional documentary (ethnofiction) film directed by Robert J. Flaherty about life on the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland.

It portrays characters living in premodern conditions, documenting their daily routines such as fishing off high cliffs, farming potatoes where there is little soil, and hunting for huge basking sharks to get liver oil for lamps.

Some situations are fabricated, such as one scene in which the shark fishermen are almost lost at sea in a sudden gale.

Additionally, the family members shown are not actually related, having been chosen from among the islanders for their photogenic qualities.
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh is a play set on the Aran Islands at the time of the filming of Man of Aran.
The film won the Mussolini Cup for best foreign film at the 2nd Venice International Film Festival

Aran islands on the West coast of Ireland with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO chart)

Global warming is melting the Greenland ice sheet, fast

Cryosat reveals recent Greenland ice loss 
Between 2011 and 2014, Greenland lost around one trillion tonnes of ice.
This corresponds to a 0.75 mm contribution to global sea-level rise each year – about twice the average of the preceding two decades.
These results from the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) at the University of Leeds combine data from the CryoSat mission with a regional climate model to map changes in Greenland ice-sheet mass. 
source : ESA

From The Guardian by John Abraham

The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing 110 million Olympic size swimming pools worth of water each year.

A new study measures the loss of ice from one of world’s largest ice sheets.

They find an ice loss that has accelerated in the past few years, and their measurements confirm prior estimates.

As humans emit heat-trapping gases, we expect to see changes to the Earth.

One obvious change to be on the lookout for is melting ice.

This includes ice atop mountains, ice floating in cold ocean waters, and the ice within large ice sheets or glaciers.

It is this last type of ice loss that most affects ocean levels because as the water runs into the oceans, it raises sea levels.

This is in contrast to melting sea ice – since it is already floating in ocean waters, its potential to raise ocean levels is very small.

So measuring ice sheet melting is important, not only as a signal of global warming but also because of the sea level impacts.

But how is this melting measured? The ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are huge and scientists need enough measurements in space and time to really understand what’s going on.

That is, we need high-resolution and long duration measurements to fully understand trends.

In a very recent publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, an international team reported on a new high-resolution measurement of Greenland.

The lead author, Malcolm McMillan from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modeling, and his colleagues mapped Greenland with incredibly high resolution (5 km distances).

They accomplished this mapping by obtaining data from the Cryosat 2 satellite.

This satellite uses a technique called radar altimetry to measure the height of surfaces.

It is able to track the elevation of the ice sheets on Greenland with high precision.

If the height of the ice sheet is growing, it means the ice is getting thicker.

If the heights are decreasing, it means the ice layers are getting thinner.

Watch this documentary on Greenland which icebergs are said to be melting.

A simplistic view would be that if ice sheets become taller, then they contain more frozen water.

If they are shorter, they contain less water.

But, this isn’t the entire story.

Scientists also have to account for other changes, such as changes to density, surface roughness, and water content.

When you realize that the Greenland Ice Sheet is thousands of meters thick, and the top layers include both snow and firn (which later get buried and compressed into ice), it becomes apparent that accounting for the constitution of the ice sheet is important when estimating how much water is being delivered to the ocean.

The authors of this study did such an accounting and they discovered that not only is Greenland losing a lot of ice, but the loss varies a lot depending on location and year.

For example, 2012 was a year of incredible ice loss compared to other years.

Also, the western side of the ice sheet is losing much more ice than the eastern side.

They also found that a small part of the ice sheet (less than 1% of the sheet) is responsible for more than 10% of the mass loss.

Why are scientists out flying over Greenland, drilling into its ice, and monitoring it from space?

The answer is that they see it as a bellwether of future Earth.

In total, they estimate approximately 270 gigatons of ice loss per year for 2011–2014.

This result is almost a perfect match to independent measurements made by other researchers and builds our confidence in their conclusions.

To put this in perspective, the Greenland Ice Sheet is losing approximately 110 million Olympic size swimming pools worth of water each year.

New maps chart-Greenland glaciers melting risk

 NASA : First Map Of Thawed Areas Under Greenland Ice Sheet

Lead author Malcolm told me:

"Using high resolution satellite data from ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission, we have produced a detailed and comprehensive picture of how Greenland has changed in recent years.

In particular, we have been able to map the changing ice sheet in fine detail, and pinpoint where, and when, the greatest ice losses have occurred.

These observations reveal not only the extent of Greenland’s contribution to sea level in recent years but, thanks to their high resolution, allow us to identify the key glaciers that are showing the greatest signs of change.

The data also enable us to look at how much ice has been lost in each year and, for example, to quantify the large impact on the ice sheet of the record summertime temperatures occurring in 2012.

Within a wider context, satellite records such as these are crucial for systematically monitoring our climate system, and assessing the impact of rising temperatures across Earth’s polar regions.

In particular, they help us to understand the sensitivity of the ice sheet to changes in its surrounding atmosphere and ocean environment, and aid the development of reliable sea level rise projections."

The duration of this study is pretty short (4 years).

I will be very interested to see if the mass loss continues at the same rate in following years.

If the rate of mass loss increases, it may signify a larger future contribution to sea level from Greenland.

This would be bad news for vulnerable coastal cities like Miami and certainly something coastal areas should plan for.

Links :

• WashingtonPost : Greenland’s ice sheet is in danger. Here’s what we’re seeing on the frozen landscape.
• DTU : Mass loss of Greenland and Antarctica from GRACE, IceSat and CryoSat
• A high-resolution record of Greenland mass balance
• YouTube : NASA | Measuring Elevation Changes on the Greenland Ice Sheet / NASA | Greenland's Ice Layers Mapped in 3D  
• NASA : The new Arctic 
• John Eglander : Greenland is getting greener

Canada CHS update in the GeoGarage platform

36 nautical raster charts updates

see GeoGarage news

UNESCO wants to protect sites deep in the ocean that don’t belong to any country

From Quartz by Leslie Josephs 

The United Nations agency tasked with protecting the world’s cultural and environmental wonders is setting its sights really low.

As in, the bottom of ocean.

UNESCO has called out five areas in the high seas—from habitats of delicate coral to one of white sharks’ favorite hangouts—that it thinks should be among the next generation of World Heritage Sites.

The designation of “World Heritage Site” is more than a bragging right or marketing slogan. Countries apply for the designation to access the World Heritage Fund, which provides money to help preserve these areas.

There are currently 1,052 places worldwide have been declared UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The list spans from Persepolis to Grand Canyon National Park, from Lake Turkana to the Galapagos Islands.

There are already some underwater sites included on the list, such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, but ecosystems out on the high seas—in areas that are not governed by any sovereign nation—are a gray area for UNESCO.
That’s because governments are the ones who have to ask UNESCO to consider adding the site to its prestigious list, and ecosystems in the high seas don’t have anyone to apply for them.

“Although these sites are far from our shores, they are not safe from threats, whether it be climate change, deep seabed mining, navigation or plastic pollution,” says UNESCO.

It argued for the inclusion of five areas in the high seas in a report (pdf) last week (Aug. 3):

• The Costa Rica Thermal Dome, a nutrient-rich area of the eastern Pacific where species like blue whales and leatherback sea turtles migrate and feed.
• The White Shark Café, a stretch of the Pacific between North America and Hawaii that’s a habitat of white sharks
• The Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean that’s home to free-floating algae.
• The Lost City Hydrothermal Field, a deep-sea system of active hot springs and carbonate spires.
• The Atlantis Bank, a sunken fossil island in the sub-tropical Indian Ocean that’s home to deep-sea coral species and large anemones

It’s not yet clear how the designation will affect those sites.
Often, the UNESCO seal gives sites much more international attention and can lead to a flood of tourists to the areas it is trying to protect—especially if there’s the chance that it is endangered.