The sea levels have been rising along the south coast of England according to the researchers at the University of Southampton. The water level has been rising at a rate of 1.3 mm per year at Southampton. Professor Robert Nicholls, a coastal engineer who is running the study says, “While these changes seem small, over a century they accumulate and substantially increase the risk of flooding during storms, unless there have been corresponding upgrades to flood defenses. A water level that had an average likelihood of occurring once every 100 years in 1900 now has an average likelihood of occurring on average every 10 to 25 years, depending on the site considered. As sea levels continue to rise and probably accelerate, this increase in the likelihood of flooding will continue.”
I thought this article was interesting because they do not mention a cause of the rise in the sea level. This is a large study. The researchers have collected data from Scilly Isles to Sheerness, which are places on the south side of England. As a group, they have added “150 years worth of historic data to the existing record of English Channel sea-level change.”
I am wondering, why the researchers not know what the cause of the rise is? Also, is this impacting their shorelines, and marine life?
Additional Information
In this article I read, Mike Wells, an Australian free-diver broke a world record by swimming through the country’s longest ocean cave on a single breath. Wells swam 395 feet through fish rock cave that was 85 feet below the surface. It did it in just 2 minutes and 40 seconds.”It was very hard,” Mr Wells said after the dive. ” But I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, literally.”
“One thing I do is to try and almost fall asleep partly closing my eyes, but just open them enough so I can see where I’m going,” he said. “I take in the surrounds, the fish, the rays the corals, sponges, and try to forget the urge to breathe. This keeps my body relaxed and ultimately I use less oxygen.
“As the breath hold progresses I can really feel my heart beating, I can feel every twitch of every muscle as it’s so quiet while diving, dead silence,” he said.
I really think this is very cool, to break a world record would be so awesome. I respect this guy for training for this task. This guy is fantastic!
How do you train physically and emotionally for a feat like this?
Have you swam all of you life?
With shortages of fuel and global warming becoming a major issue for the world, things need to be changed and new fuel supplies should be found. Recently the Navy has started studying and trying to find ways of using salt water as jet fuel. They have somewhat processed the water into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons. This could be turned into a kerosene fuel source that could be burnt at very high temperatures, perfect for jets.
It is a complicated process that involves taking the carbon dioxide from the water and combining it with hydrogen. That is done by splitting water molecules with electricity and creating a hydrocarbon fuel sorce. The process is known as Fischer-Tropsch that has been around for awhile and is used to commercially produce a gasoline like hydrogen fuel source.
Link to main site = http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17632-how-to-turn-seawater-into-jet-fuel.html
Would turning salt water into a usable fuel source work and would there still be to many left over chemical compounds and materials such as salt making it difficult for an engine to combust the source and turn over?
If it happens to work out for jet fuel will they maybe considering using salt water as a fuel for common objects like heating house and running automobiles for everyday people?
NOAA’s Fisheries Services were in the middle of a research project last July in the Gulf of Mexico when they caught a giant squid. This was only the second recorded giant squid in that area. The first one was found floating dead on the Mississippi River delta in 1954. This squid was caught on July 30 2009 during a 60-day scientific study off the coast of Louisiana.
NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center and the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service were working together on the NOSAA Research Vessel Gordon Gunter studying the diversity of sperm whale prey. They were trawling at a depth of more than 1500 feet when they caught the giant squid.
The squid was preserved and shipped off to Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for Natural History to have for further studying. The squid is over 19 ½ feet long and weighs about 103 pounds.
Some things i was still wondering after I read this article is how many giant squid have they found in the world, and how many live squid have they found?
I got my info from here http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=97518210064
In 1729 blobs were discovered in the Mediterranean. As the seawater temperatures have gone up in the past few years, these mucus-like materials have been reforming in the summer and with the winters warmer weathers they have also been forming regularly. They are made up of living and dead organisms, such as shrimps and copepods and they can get up to 124 miles long. These blobs have been making trouble for many fishermen and making it hard for swimmers. Scientists have found that these blobs can be a deadly hazard to human and animal life.
This story on these blobs like things is probably one of the gnarliest things I have ever heard of. This caught my eye and I thought it was so cool. I mean mucus-like blobs that just pop out of nowhere is definitely something you should be reading about, especially the people that fish in the summer times. I learned that we have to be careful with what things are in the ocean, because you never know what new species you will be running into.
Is there any other known causes of these blobs?
Where else have these blobs been known to appear?
In this article I read about a very rare Black Coral Forest. Italian researchers have found a rare black coral forest off the coast of Rome. This rare coral forest is the size of two soccer fields and is around the depth of 150 feet to 300feet. The Italian researchers didn’t give out the location of this rare coral because of treasure hunter. This rare coral is also used to make some sort of jewelry.
This coral has very bright colorful tissue. But the skeleton is a dark brownish color
Where else has this rare black coral forest?
What makes it so rare?
I just read this article about how Dubai moved 1,100 coral-encrusted rocks, each weighing about five tonnes! They had to move it so it wouldn’t get damaged by future development.
Traditional methods of moving coral is too damaging so they had to use a new method. Usually 30% of coral dies while being transported, this time only 7% did. They attached the coral to the bottom of a 90 foot barge and moved it to the new area not going over 2 knots. ”Nothing like this has ever been attempted before and we are very pleased with the outcome.”
I read this article becasue I am interested in what people are doing to help preserve our habitats and help the earth. I thought this was very interesting. Take a look at this website for more information on rebuilding coral reefs.
Do you think this is good for our planet? What could they do better to save more coral next time?
Wild salmon and farmed salmon can now be distinguished from each other by a technique that examines the chemistry of their scales.
Recent studies have shown that the number of wild salmon are decreasing very rapidly in the Atlantic oceans and the numbers have been at an alarming rate for farmed fish @ a whopping 130,000 tons to a small hump in the graph at 5,000 tons of wild salmon. The problem with these numbers is that the number of farmed fish actually escape from fish camps and actually get mixed into the wild life eco system which causes a bad out come for the wild salmon damaging there habitat
Fish scales are formed from the same chemicals as bones and teeth and grow like tree rings, preserving a chemical record of the water the fish lived in throughout its whole life.
So this will help the fish get determined on which is wild and which is farmed.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090930102530.htm
Q 1. Do you prefer farmed or wild salmon?
Q 2. Is this something worth looking into?
Within the past two weeks, three humpback whales have been caught in shark nets off the Australian coast this migration season – the most recent one being a month-old calf. Though rescuers are able to free the whales safely in a relatively short amount of time, focus is being thrown on how to prevent whales from being trapped in the first place.
The problem is that 12,000 humpback whales are migrating in an area where shark nets are located and are inevitably getting caught. The shark nets aren’t going anywhere and some are proposing to look into a way to prevent the whales from swimming too close to the coast while others are proposing attaching alarms that emit the sounds of killer whales to scare off the humpbacks. The problem with both of these solutions is that they don’t want to harm the whale watching or tourist industry and of course they don’t want to disturb their migration patterns.
Which, if any, of these solutions do you think will be the most effective? What kind of negative effects would scaring the humpbacks have on their migration patterns?
In this article I read, about a missing scientific robot (called “Waldo” for short), that has been missing since Monday Aug. 31 2009. This Robot has been patrolling the waters of Southwest Florida waters looking for red tide. “The AUVs are designed to glide up and down and forward through the water, sending signals to satellite each time they surface.” “Waldo was tooling along offshore from Venice just fine, making reports every two hours between Aug. 26 and 31.” “Then, bam, it just stopped sending a signal.”
They think Waldo had a malfunction or a leak or a computer problem. Waldo costs around $100,000! I choose to write aboout this topic because it is very interesting how they lost such an expensive and important tool. Do you think the reward should be higher? Why is waldo so important?