Creating an Oceanscape

A new, multinational initiative aims to protect 38.5 million sq. km. of Pacific ocean — larger than the areas of United States, Canada and Mexico combined. From Conservation International:

Across the globe, the world’s ocean is in crisis, threatened by massive overfishing, climate change and a myriad of other forces. Although the Pacific Islands Forum counts some of the world’s smallest countries as its members, the group has just made one of the boldest agreements for collaborative, integrated and adaptive ocean management yet: the launch of the Pacific Oceanscape.

“The new Pacific Oceanscape will help us build resilience in ocean ecosystems so that marine life has the best chance of adapting. Only by doing this can there be some assurance that the oceans, and millions of people who depend on them directly for their livelihood and well-being, will survive the onslaught of global climate change.” – President Anote Tong of Kiribati

Confused by Environmental Assessments from the BP Gulf Oil Leak?

There could be a reason for that, from Newsweek:

The program designed to assess the environmental effects of the BP spill may be skewed by the legal process, say scientists struggling to get funding for independent research.

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Deviations from normal sea surface temperatures (left) and sea surface heights (right) at the peak of the 2009-2010 central Pacific El Niño, as measured by NOAA polar orbiting satellites and NASA’s Jason-1 spacecraft, respectively. The warmest temperatures and highest sea levels were located in the central equatorial Pacific. Image: NASA/JPL-NOAA

A relatively new type of El Niño, which has its warmest waters in the central-equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than in the eastern-equatorial Pacific, is becoming more common and progressively stronger, according to a new study by NASA and NOAA. The research may improve our understanding of the relationship between El Niños and climate change, and has potentially significant implications for long-term weather forecasting.

Lead author Tong Lee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Michael McPhaden of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, measured changes in El Niño intensity since 1982. They analyzed NOAA satellite observations of sea surface temperature, checked against and blended with directly-measured ocean temperature data. The strength of each El Niño was gauged by how much its sea surface temperatures deviated from the average. They found the intensity of El Niños in the central Pacific has nearly doubled, with the most intense event occurring in 2009-10.

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As creatures of the land, it’s easy to forget that most of the living space on Earth resides in the oceans. Not only do oceans cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface, but the fact that they’re three-dimensional provides an incredibly wide range of habitats throughout the water column, with uniquely specialized ecosystems reaching from the relatively temperate ocean/air interface to the extreme temperatures, pressures and darkness of the ocean depths.

With so much of the oceans unexplored, so many extreme environments and so much biodiversity to be found, the images of lifeforms that ocean exploration reveals often seem as if they come from another world altogether. Which, of course, relative to us, they do.

This year, from June to August, an international team from the US and Indonesia collaborated to explore the deep seas near Indonesia. The expedition, known as the Indonesia-USA Deep-Sea Exploration of the Sangihe Talaud Region (INDEX 2010), featured a number of firsts including: the maiden voyage of NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer; the first joint Indonesia-USA ocean exploration expedition; and the first joint international mission with two ships sending live video to scientists in Exploration Command Centers ashore.

Following are a sampling of images returned from the mission. Although we haven’t been able to locate captions for all of the images just yet, we thought the visuals were so wondrously stunning that we’d share them now and add the captions later.

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When it comes to saving energy, this has got to be one of the easiest, no-brainers out there. There’s nothing to buy, no contractor to hire, no climbing up on the roof or crawling around in the attic. You don’t have to take shorter showers or change your diet – heck, you don’t even have to wear a sweater.

Just turn off the computer when you leave work on Friday.

Actually, turning off non-essential computers, monitors, fax machines and peripherals to save energy is a good idea anytime, but tomorrow, businesses, agencies and individuals throughout the US will be doing it as part of the third annual Power IT Down day — an effort to draw attention to how much energy we waste each weekend.

Power IT Down Day was intended to harness the power of the individual in helping government offices and contractors become more energy efficient. But why stop there? Anyone who works in an office anywhere in the world can use this as an opportunity to talk with IT managers and encourage coworkers to take this simple step.

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Brush fires, fueled by severe drought and spun by strong winds produced what’s being called a “fire tornado” — and some dramatic video — near Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Fins Across Florida: Public Art in Service of Environmental Awareness

Organizers aim to display approximately fifty 6-feet fiberglass Tarpon, uniquely decorated by local artists and sponsored by local businesses and individuals, throughout the Tampa Bay Area. The Tampa Bay effort is the first of a planned series of projects across Florida featuring 16 different fish found in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Florida’s Atlantic Coast and interior lakes. Proceeds benefit Tampa Bay Watch and the Outdoor Arts Foundation.

US Scientist Retracts Assertions Concerning Where the Gulf Oil Went

Our initial skepticism appears to have been justified. From the Guardian:

White House claims that the worst of the BP oil spill was over were undermined yesterday when a senior government scientist said three-quarters of the oil was still in the Gulf environment and a research study detected a 22-mile plume of oil in the ocean depths.

Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) departed from an official report from two weeks ago which suggested the majority of the oil had been captured or broken down.

“I would say most of that is still in the environment,” Lehr, the lead author of the report, told the house energy and commerce committee.

Dan Froomkin took things a step further and contacted 7 of the 11 scientists who supposedly reviewed the NOAA’s August 4 report:

…all the scientists on that list contacted by the Huffington Post for comment this week said the exact same thing: That although they provided some input to NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), they in no way reviewed the report, and could not vouch for it.

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This month, Elizabeth Cushman Titus Putnam became the first conservationist to receive the Presidential Citizens Medal, the United States’ second-highest civilian award, given to those “performing exemplary deeds of service for her country and fellow citizens.”

Putnam is broadly credited with launching the American conservation service movement more than 50 years ago with the founding of the Student Conservation Program (later to become the Student Conservation Association), and was one of thirteen 2010 recipients honored by President Obama at a White House ceremony on August 4.

Introduced to conservation as a field of study while a student at Vassar, Putnam was influenced by a 1953 article in Harper’s Magazine titled, “Let’s Close the National Parks,” which described how limited staffing and inadequate park funding were unable to keep pace with a dramatic increase in the number of park visitors.

Putnam envisioned an entirely different solution to the problem, and in her 1955 senior thesis, proposed adapting the Civilian Conservation Corps model to enlist student volunteers to assist with park maintenance and other labor-intensive activities. Aided by colleague Martha Hayne Talbot, Ms. Putnam secured the interest and support of officials in the National Park Service, and in 1957, the first student volunteers arrived at Grand Teton and Olympic National Parks.

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The image above, acquired by the Landsat 5 satellite on August 12, 2010, shows flooding near Kashmor, Pakistan, just before the second wave of the flood hit. The image below shows the region as it appeared last year on August 9.

Even before the second wave reached this section of the Indus River, floods covered much of the city of Khewali and the surrounding farmland. The flood-widened river is muddy and brown in the top image, and it impinges on the cement-gray town of Khewali.

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The Pakistani government now estimates that 20 million people have been displaced by floods that have left at least 1,600 dead and one-fifth of the country underwater. So great is the devastation and suffering that the situation threatens the nation’s food supply, its economy, and potentially, its political stability.

The Indus River, previously reported to be 15 miles wide at some places, has swelled even further in the past several days, threatening towns and villages in the southern Sindh province and forcing evacuations in areas that had been hosting refugees. Farms in the breadbasket Punjab region are now simply part of the river, their crops destroyed and farmers’ homes nowhere to be found.  Many who have fled doubt whether they’ll be able to recognize their land when they return.

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Surreal Glories of a Salt Flat

Lake Eyre basin, Australia. Source: NASA Earth Observatory.

At the NY Times Green blog, John Collins Rudolf calls attention to a PBS special scheduled to debut August 17:

The Lake Eyre basin stretches across 750,000 square miles of inland Australia, draining nearly a quarter of the continent’s land mass… For the past six years the Australian photographer Murray Fredericks has journeyed across the lake bed (it fills completely only about once every 100 years), camping alone on the salt flats for as much as five weeks at a time. He collected the photographs from these expeditions for display in Salt, a stunning 2006 gallery show in London, Sydney, Paris and Shanghai.

Now, this surreal landscape and Mr. Fredericks’s attempts to capture its strange permutations on film are the subject of a documentary that makes its premiere on PBS on Tuesday. The film, Salt — not to be confused with the hyperkinetic action thriller starring Angelina Jolie — is a meditation on solitude, nature, time and mankind’s struggle against the elements.

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While politicians and policy makers around the world debate the feasibility of modest measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next 30 or 80 years, a group in Australia has taken a bolder approach, asking what it would take to transform theirs into a zero-emission nation by 2020.

To answer that question, Beyond Zero Emissions and the Climate Emergency Network, (CEN) launched a comprehensive initiative whose work is presented in a new report, Zero Carbon Australia 2020 (ZCA 2020). Not only does the report indicate that decarbonizing Australia in ten years is technologically and economically feasible, it presents a roadmap for getting there.

The goals of ZCA 2020 were ambitiously scaled to meet the enormity of challenges they hoped to address:

• to transform Australia’s energy supply to entirely renewable sources in a decade;
• to utilize only proven, reliable, and commercially available technologies;
• to maintain or enhance the security and reliability of Australia’s energy supply, while maintaining; or enhancing social equity and the nation’s high standard of living;
• to maintain or enhance food and water security, and other environmental indices.

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The July 17, Image-of-the-Day at NASA’s Earth Observatory website featured a map showing aquatic dead zones around the world, created from data provided by the agency’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS).

MODIS observes changes in the way the ocean surface reflects and absorbs sunlight when water contains an abundance of organic matter, such as the overly fertile waters that can result in dead zones.

Human-induced dead zones are typically caused when fertilizer-laden runoff from farms and suburban yards flows into streams, rivers and eventually, bays and oceans, providing excess nutrients that trigger explosive planktonic algae growth.

When the algae die, they sink into deeper waters where their remains provide food for microbes. As the microbes decompose the organic algal matter, they deplete the supply of oxygen – without which, massive killing of fish and other sea life is often the result.

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Static-Kill: Personnel from BP, Helix Energy Services, Wild Well Control and Supreme Services manage valves on board the Q4000 to ensure pressure consistency in the lines as mud is pumped into the well 5,000 feet below, August 3. Photo: U.S. Coast Guard, Petty Officer 1st Class Sara Francis.

BP completed the cementing phase of its “static kill” operation on Thursday, effectively closing the well that for nearly three months leaked an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  Over a six-hour period ending at 3:15 p.m., cement was poured into the well to displace the drilling mud that on Tuesday successfully overcame the pressure driving the Macondo oil upward.

For several months, the earliest timeframe for permanently sealing the well has been mid-August, putting Thursday’s sealing somewhat ahead of schedule. The mid-August prediction, however, was based upon a bottom-kill procedure using one of two relief wells, the first of which will not be completed before next week.

A bottom-kill is generally considered more effective than a top-kill, which is essentially what the static-kill was. Ever since the static-kill was announced as a possibility, plans have included using both methods, primarily because there has been a longstanding question as to whether oil was flowing in the gap between the well’s inner piping and its outer casing. Bottom-kill is the only method that can cement that gap, often referred to as an annulus.

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In observation of National Farmers’ Market Week, August 1 – 7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture just announced that the 2010 National Farmers’ Market Directory lists 6,132 operational farmers markets. This figure represents a whopping16 percent growth over 2009 when the agency reported 5,274.

“Seeing such continued strong growth in the number of U.S. farmers’ markets indicates that regional food systems can provide great economic, social and health benefits to communities across the country,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Farmers’ markets provide fresh, local products to communities across the country while offering economic opportunities for many producers of all sizes.”

As environmentally conscious consumers reevaluate their habits, farmers’ markets have become a worldwide urban phenomenon. Cities are supporting their development as a vehicle to revitalize public spaces, and to stimulate the local economy by supporting local farmers, creating jobs, and increasing foot traffic in urban areas. Farmers’ markets reflect the unique character and ethnic diversity of their locales, which can also be a draw for tourism. Some markets feature live music and local arts and crafts as well, adding to the appeal.

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