One of world's largest marine parks created off coast of Easter Island

Map of the planned marine park (source The Guardian)

From The Guardian by Arthur Neslen

Rapa Nui protection area, about same size as Chilean mainland, will protect up to 142 species, including 27 threatened with extinction

One of the world’s largest marine protection areas has been created off the coast of Easter Island.

 Rapa Nui with the GeoGarage platform (NGA chart)

The 740,000 sq km Rapa Nui marine park is roughly the size of the Chilean mainland and will protect at least 142 endemic marine species, including 27 threatened with extinction.

An astonishing 77% of the Pacific Ocean’s fish abundance occurs here and recent expeditions discovered several new species previously unknown to science.

Apex predators found in the conservation zone include scalloped hammerhead sharks, minke, humpback and blue whales, and four species of sea turtle.

Easter Island’s waters are teeming with sea life, including 142 species found nowhere else on the planet and 10 endangered species.

See the animals and other underwater wonders that make this area so unique.

Matt Rand, the director of the Pew Bertarelli ocean legacy project, which campaigned for the park, said: “This marine reserve will have a huge global significance for the conservation of oceans and of indigenous people’s ways of life.
“The Rapa Nui have long suffered from the loss of timber, declining ecosystems and declining populations. Now they are experiencing a resurgence based on ensuring the health of the oceans.”

Plans for the marine park were first announced at a conference in 2015, at which the former US president Barack Obama declared his “special love for the ocean” in a video message.
The plans were confirmed in a speech by Chilean president Michelle Bachelet on Saturday.

The marine park’s creation was enabled by a 73% vote in favour of the conservation zone from Easter Island’s 3,000 Rapa Nui population in a referendum on 3 September, after five years of consultations.

Extractive industries and industrial fishing will be banned inside the reserve, but the Rapa Nui will be allowed to continue their traditional artisanal fishing on small boats, using hand lines with rocks for weights.

The indigenous people of Easter Island, the Rapa Nui, are connected to the ocean.

Women and men fish for their families, and gather shells to craft traditional jewelry and artwork.

But what happens when fish stocks decline and plastic from other countries washes up on the Easter Island coast?

The Rapa Nui formed Te Mau O Te Vaikava O Rapa Nui -the Mesa del Mar- an effort made up of prominent fishing, tourism, environmental, and cultural leaders, to determine the best ways to protect their ocean waters for future generations.

Ludovic Burns Tuki, the director of the Mesa del mar coalition of more than 20 Rapa Nui groups, said: “This is a historic moment – a great and beautiful moment for the Rapa Nui, for the world and for our oceans.
“We think this process can be an example for the creation of other marine reserves that we need to protect our oceans – with a respect for the human dimension.”

After the creation of a comparable marine protection area around the nearby Pitcairn Islands last year, proposals for a reserve in the Austral Islands’ waters could soon create a protected area of more than 2m sq km
 This would have a unifying potential for the Polynesian people, according to Burns Tuki.
“The ocean is very important to us as a source of food, but the Polynesians were great navigators and the ocean also represents our mother,” he said.
“It enables us to move with a double canoe between the different islands. It gives us everything.”

As global warming takes hold, some scientific papers suggest that marine reserves may also help mitigate climate change and provide a vital carbon sink.
The deep, clear and cool waters around Easter Island are also a resilient area for coral reefs.

Marcelo Mena, Chile’s environment minister, said: “This marine protected area adds to the legacy of President Bachelet and the 1.5m sq km of protected areas created by this government.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has called for 30% of the world’s oceans to be protected, but only about 1.6% has so far been covered by marine protection areas.

Links :

• NewsDeeply : As Big Marine Reserves Proliferate, a New Focus on Enforcement
• Pew : See The World’s Newest Marine Protected Area Around Easter Island
• SaveOurSeasMag : Science at the far end of the world 
• National Geographic : New Ocean Reserve, Largest in Africa, Protects Whales and Turtles
• Ptrotected planet : MPAs
• GeoGarage blog : New ocean reserve, largest in Africa, protects whales and ... / Protection of our oceans must go hand-in-hand with the ... / Earth gets a surge of new ocean sanctuaries / Easter Island environmental opportunity: protecting Rapa ...
  

Ship exhaust makes oceanic thunderstorms more intense

Lightning behind an aircraft carrier in the Strait of Malacca.

New research finds lightning strokes occurred nearly twice as often directly above heavily-trafficked shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea year-round from 2005 through 2016. Credit: public domain.

From Phys 

Thunderstorms directly above two of the world's busiest shipping lanes are significantly more powerful than storms in areas of the ocean where ships don't travel, according to new research.

A new study mapping lightning around the globe finds lightning strokes occur nearly twice as often directly above heavily-trafficked shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea than they do in areas of the ocean adjacent to shipping lanes that have similar climates.

The difference in lightning activity can't be explained by changes in the weather, according to the study's authors, who conclude that aerosol particles emitted in ship exhaust are changing how storm clouds form over the ocean.

The new study is the first to show ship exhaust can alter thunderstorm intensity.
The researchers conclude that particles from ship exhaust make cloud droplets smaller, lifting them higher in the atmosphere.
This creates more ice particles and leads to more lightning.

credit : NASA

The results provide some of the first evidence that humans are changing cloud formation on a nearly continual basis, rather than after a specific incident like a wildfire, according to the authors.
Cloud formation can affect rainfall patterns and alter climate by changing how much sunlight clouds reflect to space.
"It's one of the clearest examples of how humans are actually changing the intensity of storm processes on Earth through the emission of particulates from combustion," said Joel Thornton, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle and lead author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

"It is the first time we have, literally, a smoking gun, showing over pristine ocean areas that the lightning amount is more than doubling," said Daniel Rosenfeld, an atmospheric scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who was not connected to the study.
"The study shows, highly unambiguously, the relationship between anthropogenic emissions - in this case, from diesel engines - on deep convective clouds."

A map of ships crossing the Indian Ocean and surrounding seas during June 2012.

Most ships crossing the northern Indian Ocean follow a narrow, nearly straight track around 6 degrees North between Sri Lanka and the island of Sumatra.

East of Sumatra, ships travel southeast through the Strait of Malacca, rounding Singapore and extending northeast across the South China Sea.

Aerosol particle emissions in these shipping lanes are ten times or more greater than in other shipping lanes in the region, and are among the largest globally.

Credit: shipmap.org, an interactive map of commercial shipping movements, created by Kiln for University College London's Energy Institute.

All combustion engines emit exhaust, which contains microscopic particles of soot and compounds of nitrogen and sulfur.
These particles, known as aerosols, form the smog and haze typical of large cities.
They also act as cloud condensation nuclei - the seeds on which clouds form.
Water vapor condenses around aerosols in the atmosphere, creating droplets that make up clouds.

Cargo ships crossing oceans emit exhaust continuously and scientists can use ship exhaust to better understand how aerosols affect cloud formation.

In the new study, co-author Katrina Virts, an atmospheric scientist at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, was analyzing data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network, a network of sensors that locates lightning strokes all over the globe, when she noticed a nearly straight line of lightning strokes across the Indian Ocean.

Virts and her colleagues compared the lightning location data to maps of ships' exhaust plumes from a global database of ship emissions.
Looking at the locations of 1.5 billion lightning strokes from 2005 to 2016, the team found nearly twice as many lightning strokes on average over major routes ships take across the northern Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and into the South China Sea, compared to adjacent areas of the ocean that have similar climates.

More than $5 trillion of world trade passes through the South China Sea every year and nearly 100,000 ships pass through the Strait of Malacca alone.
Lightning is a measure of storm intensity, and the researchers detected the uptick in lightning at least as far back as 2005.

"All we had to do was make a map of where the lightning was enhanced and a map of where the ships are travelling and it was pretty obvious just from the co-location of both of those that the ships were somehow involved in enhancing lightning," Thornton said.

The top map shows annual average lightning density at a resolution of about 10 kilometers (6 miles), as recorded by the WWLLN, from 2005 to 2016.

The bottom map shows aerosol emissions from ships crossing routes in the Indian Ocean and South China sea from 2010.

Credit: Thornton et al/Geophysical Research Letters/AGU.

Forming cloud seeds

Water molecules need aerosols to condense into clouds.
Where the atmosphere has few aerosol particles - over the ocean, for instance - water molecules have fewer particles to condense around, so cloud droplets are large.

When more aerosols are added to the air, like from ship exhaust, water molecules have more particles to collect around.
More cloud droplets form, but they are smaller.
Being lighter, these smaller droplets travel higher into the atmosphere and more of them reach the freezing line, creating more ice, which creates more lightning.
Storm clouds become electrified when ice particles collide with each other and with unfrozen droplets in the cloud.
Lightning is the atmosphere's way of neutralizing that built-up electric charge.

Ships burn dirtier fuels in the open ocean away from port, spewing more aerosols and creating even more lightning, Thornton said.

"I think it's a really exciting study because it's the most solid evidence I've seen that aerosol emissions can affect deep convective clouds and intensify them and increase their electrification," said Steven Sherwood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney who was not connected to the study.
"We're emitting a lot of stuff into the atmosphere, including a lot of air pollution, particulate matter, and we don't know what it's doing to clouds," Sherwood said.
"That's been a huge uncertainty for a long time. This study doesn't resolve that, but it gives us a foot in the door to be able to test our understanding in a way that will move us a step closer to resolving some of those bigger questions about what some of the general impacts are of our emissions on clouds."

Links :

• Popular Science : Our pollution might actually be causing thunderstorms
• Splash247 :  Study maps correlation between busy shipping lanes and more intense thunderstorms
• Phys : Study confirms lightning more powerful over ocean than land

Norway to spend $315M on world's first ship tunnel

The Norwegian Public Roads Administration believes floating underwater tunnels could be the key to shorter driving times in the country.
Norway is home to more than 1,100 fjords, the deep glacial water inlets that divide land masses. Getting over one means taking a ferry, and that can add hours to a car trip.
Because fjords can be up to a mile deep, building a bridge over the waterway or tunnel underneath is not very practical.
But Norwegian engineers think they can build a quicker way.

They want to float concrete tunnels up to 100 feet below the ocean’s surface.
This would allow ships to sail unobstructed by bridges.

Floating pontoons would hold the concrete tunnels in place.

Engineers hope the ambitious $25 billion project will be completed by 2035.

From CNN by Juliet Perry

Norway has unveiled plans to build the world's first ship tunnel by smashing through a solid rock peninsula.

The mile-long, 118-feet-wide tunnel will pass through the narrowest part of the Stad peninsula in western Norway, allowing freight and passenger ships to bypass the stormy, exposed Stadhavet Sea and avoid a highly treacherous part of the Scandinavian nation's coastline.
Norway has unveiled plans to build the world's first ship tunnel by smashing through a solid rock peninsula.



The mile-long, 118-feet-wide tunnel will pass through the narrowest part of the Stad peninsula in western Norway, allowing freight and passenger ships to bypass the stormy, exposed Stadhavet Sea and avoid a highly treacherous part of the Scandinavian nation's coastline.

The 118 feet wide, mile-long tunnel will carve through the Stad peninsula in western Norway

views from the GeoGarage platform (NHS charts)

"The Kråkenes lighthouse, just south of Stad, is the meteorological weather station with the most stormy days, which can be anything from 45 to 106 days per year," says the Norwegian Coastal Administration, which announced the project.

The very high waves coming from different directions create complex and perilous sailing conditions, even after the wind has died down.
"The combination of wind, currents and waves around this part of the coastline make this section a particularly demanding part of the Norwegian coast," the administration says.
It says it hopes the tunnel will improve safety and stop ships from having to wait for bad weather to pass.

Moldefjorden in Norway, where the southern tunnel entrance is planned.

The team anticipates it will take three to four years to build the tunnel and cost an estimated $315 million.
To create it engineers will have to blast out a huge eight million tons of rock.
Passages and canals for boats have been built elsewhere in the world, but this will be the first tunnel allowing cruise and freight ships that weigh up to 16,000 tons to pass through solid rock.

The team anticipates that up to five ships will be able to pass through the tunnel every hour.
If you're wondering what might happen if two ships come nose-to-nose, it's unlikely, because there will be traffic lights.
"We are going to follow the usual standard with red and white lights to show when it is safe to pass," the team says.
The tunnel is due to open in 2023.

Links :

• Norwegian Coastal Administration : Stad Ship Tunnel / photos Flikr
• Wired : Norway's bold, maybe foohardy lan to build the world's first ship tunnel
• GeoGarage blog : Who, what, why: why build a ship tunnel?
• YouTube : TechInsider

Norway NHS, a new layer in the GeoGarage platform

A new layer in the GeoGarage platform
© Kartverket / © Norwegian Mapping Authority 
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 Norwegian waters (Exclusive Economic Zone)
EEZs extend 200 kms from shore (unless it clashes with another EEZ).
Norway has the Svalbard Archipelago and Jan Mayen in the Arctic and Bouvet Island in the Arctic.
All their claims on them are due to their remote nature meaning that all it took was a few decades of Norwegian whalers spending time on those islands for much of the world too think: 'they can have those remote islands'.
As this map shows, that ownership does come with its perks. 

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