First images of unique Brazilian coral reef at mouth of Amazon

 Oil companies obtained rights to the area before the giant reef was discovered.
Guardian graphic

From The Guardian by Damian Carrington

The first images have been released of a unique coral reef that stunned scientists when discovered in 2016 at the mouth of the Amazon.
The 600 mile-long reef is expected to reveal new species as scientists explore it further, but oil companies are planning to drill in the area.
The photographs were captured from a submarine launched to a depth of 220 metres from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza. Campaigners say drilling must be prevented to protect the reef.

 Area with the GeoGarage platform (DHN map)

The discovery of the reef, which stretches from French Guiana to Brazil’s Maranhão state, was a complete surprise to scientists because many of the world’s great rivers have major gaps in reef systems at their mouths.
Corals mostly thrive in clear, sunlit water, and the waters near the mouth of the Amazon are some of the muddiest in the world.

 Greenpeace is in the foothills of the Amazon River aboard the ship Esperanza to document the newly discovered Amazonian Corals, an immense yet little-known biome, but already threatened by oil exploration.

In this first dive Greenpeace shows the world the beauty of this discovery.

But the reef spans the mouth of the Amazon and is already known to be home to more than 60 species of sponges, 73 species of fish, spiny lobsters and stars.
“This reef system is important for many reasons, including the fact that it has unique characteristics regarding use and availability of light,” said Nils Asp, a researcher at the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, on board the Esperanza.
“It has a huge potential for new species, and it is also important for the economic well-being of fishing communities along the Amazonian coastal zone.”

 The Amazon coral reef viewed from a submarine launched from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza. Photograph: Greenpeace 

Oil exploration blocks have been granted for the area and the oil companies Total, BP and Petrobras could start drilling if they obtain authorisation from the Brazilian government.
“We must defend the reef and the entire region at the mouth of the Amazon river basin from the corporate greed that puts profits ahead of the environment,” said Thiago Almeida, a campaigner at Greenpeace Brazil.
The mouth of the Amazon river basin is also the habitat of the American manatee, the Amazon river’s yellow turtle, dolphins and the river otter.

Images of the reef were taken from a submarine launched from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, currently stationed in the Amazon to campaign against drilling

 Photograph: Greenpeace 

Scientists revealed the existence of the reef in April 2016 and wrote: “These [exploration] blocks will soon be producing oil in close proximity to the reefs, but the environmental baseline compiled by the companies and the Brazilian government is still incipient and largely based on sparse museum specimens.
Such large-scale industrial activities present a major environmental challenge.”
Greenpeace Brazil said 95 wells have already been drilled in the region, none of which found economically or technically viable gas and oil.
But the Brazilian government speculates that the area may contain 14bn barrels of oil.

Links :

• Greenpeace :  The Amazon Reef: Brazil’s newly discovered and already threatened treasure
• National Geographic : First Photos of New Amazon Coral Reef System Released
• BBC : Amazon Reef: First images of new coral system
• Huffington Post : Stunning Photos Of Recently Discovered Amazon Reef Emerge As Drilling Threat Looms

El Niño unveiled in incredibly detailed animation

This animation looks beneath the ocean surface to reveal the oceanic processes that led to the 1997/98 El Niño - an event that caused billions of dollars of damage worldwide and was followed by consecutive strong La Niña events.

It is so detailed that it took 30,000 computer hours crunching ocean model data on Australia’s most powerful supercomputer, Raijin, before it could be extracted by the NCI visualisation team to produce the animation. 

From Spatial Source by Anthony Wallace

During the 1997/98 El Niño event, billions of dollars of damage was casued around the Pacific region.
With climate change advancing, it is crucial that El Niño and La Niña events are carefully studied to limit the effect of future effects.
To facilitate this, Australian researchers from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science have produced a remarkable high-resolution animation of the largest El Niño ever recorded.
So detailed is the animation that it took 30,000 computer hours crunching ocean model data on Australia’s most powerful supercomputer, Raijin, before it could be extracted by the NCI visualisation team to produce the animation.
Raijin is the same computing infrastructure that will be used for Australia’s impending dynamic datum to perform the daily coordinate adjustments as Australia’s continent drifts north east.

 "As the planet warms it also appears that the swings between the two extremes, from El Niño to La Niña like the 1997 to 1999 sequence, will become more frequent.”

The 97/98 El Niño event was linked to massive forest fires in Indonesia, catastrophic flooding in Peru and the first major global coral bleaching event that killed 16% of the world’s corals in a single year.
Researchers believe the model confirms that better observation systems can help us forecast these events earlier.
“The animation shows how shifting pools of warmer or cooler than average water 300m below the surface of the ocean can trigger these powerful events,” said Dr Alex Sen Gupta, a member of the visualisation team from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
“When these pools of water burst through to the surface and link up with the atmosphere they can set off a chain reaction that leads to El Niños or La Niñas.”
The El Niño animation looks beneath the ocean surface to reveal the oceanic processes that led to the 1997/98 El Niño event, and casts light on what we can expect from future events.
“The animation shows us that a well-developed deep ocean observation system can give us advance warning of extreme El Niños and La Niñas,” said team member Dr Shayne McGregor from Monash University.
“Preserving and expanding the currently sparse observation system is critical to improving our seasonal prediction capability in the future.”

The animation was created by Australia’s most powerful supercomputer, Raijin, which will also be used for Australia’s impending dynamic datum. 

The underlying ocean model for the animation uses a 30km horizontal grid and splits the vertical depth into 50 cells, which was processed using the Raijin supercomputer.
This allows researchers to analyse the El Niño and the subsequent La Niñas at a higher resolution than before possible.
“Raijin gives us the capacity to model complex global systems like El Niño that require a high resolution for a better accuracy,” said Associate Prof Andy Hogg, a member of the team from the Australian National University.
“It was these huge volumes of data produced by the model that meant we needed the specialist visualisation expertise from NCI to reveal what happened in detail.”
Findings by CSIRO and the University of New South Wales suggest that ‘super’ El Niños like the 97/98 event are likely to become more frequent as the climate warms.
A member of the visualisation team, Dr Agus Santoso found in 2013 that as the climate warms, we are likely to see noticeable changes to El Niños.
“As the planet warms it also appears that the swings between the two extremes, from El Niño to La Niña like the 1997 to 1999 sequence, will become more frequent,” said Dr Santoso from the University of New South Wales.
“For this reason and many others a reliable early warning of El Niño and La Niña will be vital for farmers, industry groups and societies to be better prepared for the extreme conditions they inevitably bring.”

Links :

• EurekaAlert : Two who enabled El Niño forecasts win 2017 Vetlesen Prize
• Forbes : What Experts Think Of Speculation That El Niño Will Return In 2017
• GeoGarage blog :  La Niña might not be coming after all / One year time lapse of the 2015-2016 El Niño event / NASA examines El Niño's impact on ocean's food source / Today's oceans are different than they were twenty years ... / El Niño expected to strengthen further: High Impacts ... / The strongest El Niño on record may be brewing in the ... / Slow slosh of warm water across Pacific hints El Niño is ... / Global warming will increase intensity of El Nino ...

The digital ocean

Our ocean is alive with information.
See what's possible when it's all connected.
This is the Digital Ocean.
by Liquid Robotics

ESA's Earth observation programmes: an introduction

High above us, satellites are looking down at our Earth.

This video provides an introduction to ESA's Earth observation programmes.
More about ESA's Earth observation programmes on Esa website

"A Plastic Tide" film depicts shocking plastic pollution worldwide

Every day millions of plastic bottles are thrown away without a thought and many end up in our oceans.
And now scientists say it could be getting into our bodies.

Research seen exclusively by Sky News suggests people who eat seafood are absorbing tiny pieces of plastic into their bloodstream with unknown effects on their health.

From Treehunger by Katerine Martinko

Sky News has launched an Ocean Rescue campaign with an excellent 45-minute film that puts the serious plastic problem into perspective.
“The ocean where life on Earth began is being turned into a synthetic soup.”
With these words, Sky News science correspondent Thomas Moore embarks on a journey to explore the immense problem of plastic pollution.
The result is a 45-minute documentary film called “A Plastic Tide,” released January 25 as part of Sky News’ Ocean Rescue campaign.
Moore starts in Mumbai, India, where a city beach once used for swimming and playing is now completely covered in plastic garbage.
Surprisingly, it’s not from direct littering, but from the ocean tide; every day brings a fresh layer of garbage, which could come from anywhere on the planet.

 © Sky News: Ocean Rescue campaign

From there, Moore heads to London to visit the city sewer system, where plastic waste such as syringes, cotton buds, sanitary products, and the omnipresent wet wipes cause serious blockages and are flushed out into the Thames River.
(People think ‘flushable’ wet wipes will dissolve, but they’re made of plastic and will last for years.) Volunteers haul 500 tons of trash out of the Thames each year, most of it plastic.
It’s sobering to think that no beach or shoreline is unaffected by this pollution.

Graphic: Conrad Walters. Source: NCEAS

Due to the ocean currents and waterways that flow into those oceans, plastic waste that’s tossed in Australia or Japan could easily end up in Scotland.
This is the tragic case of Arrochar, a small harbour town at the end of Scotland’s sea lochs that receives endless amounts of garbage on its beaches.
Tourists, whose numbers are shrinking as a result, wonder why the locals live in such filth, assuming that the plastic-strewn beach is the result of littering, when it’s really a matter of currents.
There was a time in the mid-nineteenth century when scientists thought plastic would bring tremendous benefits – and it did, in some ways.

But the problem is not with the plastics that make our lives better, such as medical supplies and hygiene.
The problem lies with single-use plastics, or those which are thrown out within a year of production.
Approximately 320 million tons of plastic are manufactured annually, but 40 percent of this is single-use items.
Only 5 percent of plastics are effectively recycled, which means that the remaining 95 percent – almost all the plastic ever made – remains on the planet.
Much of it ends up the oceans and breaks down, over decades of sunlight and pounding waves, into microplastics that measure 5 millimeters or less.
These are ingested by shrimp, plankton, fish, birds, turtles, and other sea animals, creating an insidious cycle of contamination that we’re only just starting to understand.

Plastic beach

Profession Colin Janssen from the University of Ghent in Belgium estimates that the average Belgian, who enjoys mussels and other seafood, eats up to 11,000 pieces of microplastic per year.
Our children could eat even more, with estimates as high as 750,000 microparticles per year by the end of this century.

Janssen’s studies of mussels have found that microplastics do not always stay in the stomach.
They can be absorbed into the bloodstream, which could have frightening repercussions for human health.
Janssen told The Telegraph:

“Where do [microplastics] go? Are they encapsulated by tissue and forgotten about by the body, or are they causing inflammation or doing other things? Are chemicals leaching out of these plastics and then causing toxicity? We don’t know and actually we do need to know.”

Moore pays a visit to Dr. Jan Van Fragenen in the Netherlands, who performs post-mortems on seabirds who have died from plastic ingestion.
The thought of countless birds dying from startvation, caused by an artificial sense of satiety brought on by plastic lodged in their stomachs, is awful; and the quantity of plastic in their bodies is horrifying.
Moore watches Fragenen remove 18 pieces of plastic from one fulmar’s stomach weighing just over 0.5 gram.
Scaled to a human, this would be the equivalent of a lunchbox of trash.
The bigger the bird, the bigger the pieces are.
Fragenen showed an albatross whose stomach contained a toothbrush, a fishing line floater, and a golf ball, among other things.

The film does an excellent job of depicting the severity of the problem and of providing various viewpoints from all around the globe, emphasizing our interconnectedness and shared dependence on the health of our oceans.
It ends on a hopeful note, depicting beach cleanup activist Afroz Shah hard at work in Mumbai.
After 62 weeks of cleaning with a team of volunteers, the beach that Moore initially visited has reappeared from beneath its layer of trash.

 By 2050, plastic in the oceans will outweigh fish, predicts a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum.

The report projects the oceans will contain at least 937 million tons of plastic and 895 million tons of fish by 2050.

Part of the reason is that plastic use has increased 20-fold in the last 50 years, and it's continuing to rise.
But we also don't reuse nearly as many plastics as we could, causing them to go into landfills that can then pollute the oceans.
The report helps quantify just how much plastic this is: It's "equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean every minute."
But we could prevent this much plastic from ever entering the ocean.
For example, only 14% of plastic packaging is recycled, and it's the biggest source of plastic pollution in the oceans, according to the report.
 

“Cleaning up rubbish is addictive,” Shah says with a grin, and his volunteers nod enthusiastically.
The group insists that the mindset is gradually changing as they educate people and set an example.
“It may take a generation before we’re used to not throwing plastic away,” but Shah is certain that day will come.
It cannot come soon enough.

Links :

• BP&R : BPF responds to Sky’s ‘A Plastic Tide’ Documentary 
• Ethical Corp : Why we're launching Sky Ocean Rescue campaign to reduce single-use plastic
• The Guardian : Shampoo bottle made from ocean plastics hailed as ‘technological breakthrough’ 
• The Alternative Daily : Eat Seafood? You’re Ingesting 11,000 Pieces Of Plastic Every Year
• GeoGarage blog :  Seabirds eat floating plastic debris because it smells like ... / 8 maps show plastic's impact on the world's oceans ... / 'Biodegradable' plastics are a big fat lie / A plastic ocean / We can solve the ocean plastic problem / Seabirds 'blighted by plastic waste'By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world's ... / Big rise in North Pacific plastic waste / Book review: Plastic Ocean