Mysterious Cold-water Eddy 'Monsters' Lower Sea Level off Aussie Coast; 'A Very Powerful Natural Feature'

Oceanographers have identified a huge, dense mass of cold water off Sydney but know very little about what causes it or the influence it has in the Tasman Sea ecosystem.
“What we do know is that this is a very powerful natural feature which tends to push everything else aside – even the mighty East Australian Current,” says CSIRO’s Dr David Griffin.
Dr Griffin, from the Wealth from Oceans Flagship Research program, said cold-water eddies regularly appear off Sydney. “Until 20 years ago we would not have known they even existed without accidentally steaming through them on a research vessel,” he said.
“However, now that we can routinely identify them from space via satellite, marine scientists can evaluate their role as a source of life in the marine ecosystem.”
Reaching to a depth of more than 1000m, the 200km diameter ocean eddy has a rotational period of about seven days. Its centre is about 100km directly offshore from Sydney.
Ocean eddies can have a life of 2-3 weeks although similar eddies identified off South Australia and Western Australia are known to have survived several months.
In a complex cause-and-effect relationship, the East Australian Current is being forced to take a wide detour around the eddy off Sydney instead of flowing along the edge of the continental shelf. In its centre, cold water from 400m is raised upwards some 200m. The sea surface, conversely, is lowered by 70cm. This dip in the surface of the ocean is invisible to the eye, but it can be accurately measured by the European and US satellites Jason-1, Envisat and GFO orbiting the Earth.
The upward displacement of the water was recorded by a robotic Argo float deployed by CSIRO as part of the international Argo program. The cold-water eddy phenomena will be one of a wide range of issues to be discussed during a meeting which began in Hobart today of nearly 200 European, US and Australian scientists working with satellite altimetry – instruments that measure the height of the ocean to detect cold and warm water.

Paleotempestology: Researcher Uncovers Prehistoric Hurricanes by Digging into the Past

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita focused the international spotlight on the vulnerability of the U.S. coastline. Fears that a "super-hurricane" could make a direct hit on a major city and cause even more staggering losses of life, land and economy triggered an outpouring of studies directed at every facet of this ferocious weather phenomenon. Now, an LSU professor takes us one step closer to predicting the future by drilling holes into the past.
Kam-biu Liu, George William Barineau III Professor in LSU's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, is the pioneer of a relatively new field of study called paleotempestology, or the study of prehistoric hurricanes. Liu, a long-time resident of Louisiana, became even more interested in the subject during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when a national debate was sparked concerning hurricane intensity patterns and cycles.
"People were discussing the probability of a Category 5 hurricane making direct impact on New Orleans," said Liu. "That's tricky, because it's never actually happened in history. Even Katrina, though still extremely powerful, was only a Category 3 storm at landfall."
Currently, experts tend to agree that Atlantic hurricane activity fluctuates in cycles of approximately 20-30 years, alternating periods of high activity with periods of relative calm. But records of such events have only been kept for the last 150 years or so. What would happen, Liu wondered, if you looked back thousands of years? Would larger cycles present themselves?
How does a scientist study storms that happened during prehistoric times? "Basically, we worked under the assumption that the storm surge from these catastrophic hurricanes would have the capability to drive sand over beach barriers and into coastal lakes," said Liu. "This is called an overwash event. We believed that pulling sediment cores from coastal lakes and analyzing the sand layers might give us the information we needed." The same methodology can be used to find overwash sand layers in coastal marshes. Using radiocarbon analysis and other dating techniques, Liu and his research team worked to develop a chronology of prehistoric storms in order to analyze any emerging patterns or cycles.
This methodology has proven successful for the group. In an article printed in the March issue of American Scientist, the magazine of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, Liu states that evidence from the Gulf Coast drill sites shows that hurricanes of catastrophic magnitude directly hit each location only approximately 10 – 12 times in the past 3,800 years. "That means the chances of any particular Gulf location being hit by a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane in any given year is around 0.3 percent," said Liu.
After spending more that 15 years studying dozens of lakes and marshes along the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, Liu and his students are moving on to a more tropical location. Liu was recently awarded more than $690,000 from the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, or IAI, for his new project titled "Paleotempestology of the Caribbean Region," which is slated to run for five years. He serves as the principal investigator for this international and multi-disciplinary project, which involves 12 other co-investigators from four different countries, including another contributor from LSU, Nina Lam, a professor in the Department of Environmental Studies.
Liu's Caribbean research has attracted funding not only from the IAI but also from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He and his students have already engaged in three separate expeditions to the Caribbean, stopping in Anguilla, Barbuda and the Bahamas, in the summer and fall of 2006 to core coastal salt ponds in order to gather paleohurricane evidence for analysis. He has recently returned from a coring trip to the Mosquito Coast of Honduras, where he and his co-workers studied how Hurricane Mitch, a catastrophic hurricane that killed more than 12,000 people in Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998, impacted the local communities and environment. His students have also conducted coring fieldwork in Barbados, Nicaragua and Belize during the past year. With many future trips to the Caribbean in the planning stages, they hope to reproduce a prehistoric hurricane analysis as successful as their Gulf Coast study.

http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=87021310945

Taiwan discovers frozen natural gas

Taiwan has found off its coast huge deposits of frozen natural gas, known as the 'ice that burns' and billed as the energy source of the future, a newspaper said Saturday.A team of Taiwanese and Japanese researchers have succeeded in extracting samples of methane hydrate from the ocean floor off Taiwan's southwest coast and will publish their report in May, the Liberty Times reported.The team began its exploration two years ago, after US and Japanese scientists suspected methane hydrate deposits in the region through monitoring by satellite and scientific equipments.Relying on a deep-sea remote-controlled research ship, the team recently extracted crystallized methane hydrate from a depth of 1,100 metres and recorded how it began to melt at 500-metre depth and vaporize at 400-metre depth.Methane hydrate, in its original form, looks like whitish-yellow ice or ice cream. But at room temperature, it vaporizes and can be ignited, thus the name 'the ice that burns'.'One unit of methane hydrate contains 170 units of natural gas. So the ocean floor is like a gas cylinder holding compressed methane hydrate in crystal form,' Professor Yang Tsan-yao from the National Taiwan University and one of the team members was quoted as saying. The team estimates that Taiwan's southwest coast holds about 600 billion cubic metres of methane hydrate, enough to meet Taiwan's energy needs for 60 years.Several countries, including Japan, the US and Canada, have begun to explore methane hydrate - also called the 'greenhouse energy' - with Japan hoping to start commercial exploration in 2010.

Kyrgyzstan News.NetSaturday 24th March, 2007 (IANS)

http://www.kyrgyzstannews.net/story/236640

Huge Underground "Ocean" Found Beneath Asia

A giant blob of water the size of the Arctic Ocean has been discovered hundreds of miles beneath eastern Asia, scientists report.
Researchers found the underground "ocean" while scanning seismic waves as they passed through Earth's interior. But nobody will be exploring this sea by submarine. The water is locked in moisture-containing rocks 400 to 800 miles (700 to 1,400 kilometers) beneath the surface.
"I've gotten all sorts of emails asking if this is the water that burst out in Noah's flood," said the leader of the research team, Michael Wysession of Washington University in St. Louis.
"It isn't an ocean. [The water] is a very low percentage [of the rock], probably less than 0.1 percent."
Given the region's size, however, that's enough to add up to a vast amount of water.
Earthquakes Reveal "Ocean"
Wysession and former graduate student Jesse Lawrence discovered the damp spot by observing how seismic waves from distant earthquakes pass through Earth's mantle.
The wet zone, which runs from Indonesia to the northern tip of Russia, showed up as an area of relatively weak rock, causing the seismic waves to lose strength much more rapidly than elsewhere. The water got there by the process of plate tectonics, in which sections of the Earth's crust shift. This process caused the ocean bottom to be pulled beneath continental plates all around the Pacific Rim.
Normally, Earth's internal heat bakes the water out of the rocks before it gets more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) deep. The water then escapes upward as volcanic gas.
But along the eastern Pacific Rim, conditions allow the rock to be drawn much deeper before the moisture is cooked out.

Read More >http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070227-ocean-asia_2.html

Research Team Uses Satellite for the First Time to Track Earth's 'History of Water'

Boulder, Colorado (Feb 2, 2007 15:55 EST) For the first time, scientists have used a spaceborne instrument to track the origin and movements of water vapor throughout Earth's atmosphere, providing a new perspective on the dominant role Earth's water cycle plays in weather and climate.
A team of scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer on NASA's Aura satellite to gather data on "heavy" and "light" water vapor in order to retrace the history of water over oceans and continents, from ice and liquid to vapor and back again. The researchers were able to distinguish between the two because heavy water vapor molecules have more neutrons than lighter ones do.
By analyzing the distribution of the heavy and light molecules, the team was able to deduce the sources and processes that cycle water, the most abundant greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere, said David Noone of CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Noone, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder's atmospheric and oceanic sciences department, is the corresponding author of a paper on the subject that appears in the Feb. 1 issue of Nature.

Read More>http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=45398610027

Rare "Prehistoric" Shark Photographed Alive

Flaring the gills that give the species its name, a frilled shark swims at Japan's Awashima Marine Park on Sunday, January 21, 2007. Sightings of living frilled sharks are rare, because the fish generally remain thousands of feet beneath the water's surface.Spotted by a fisher on January 21, this 5.3-foot (160-centimeter) shark was transferred to the marine park, where it was placed in a seawater pool."We think it may have come to the surface because it was sick, or else it was weakened because it was in shallow waters," a park official told the Reuters news service. But the truth may never be known, since the "living fossil" died hours after it was caught.

This serpentine specimen may look like a large eel, but its six slitlike gills help mark it as a cousin of the great white, the hammerhead, and other sharks. But this isn't your average fish.Believed to have changed little since prehistoric times, the frilled shark is linked to long-extinct species by its slinky shape and by an upper jaw that is part of its skull. Most living sharks have hinged top jaws.

With a mouthful of three-pointed teeth, the frilled shark may be a fearsome hunter, but it's considered harmless to humans. Those needle-like choppers are better suited to fleshier forms found in the deep sea, such as squid and other sharks.

Right now it's known as a "living fossil." But the frilled shark may be on its way to joining its ancestors.Often accidentally caught and killed in trawlers' nets in Japanese waters, frilled sharks are known to turn up in fertilizer or animal food and occasionally on dinner plates. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) lists the species as near threatened, meaning it "is close to qualifying for or is likely to qualify for a threatened category in the near future."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/photogalleries/frilled-shark/photo4.html

Feds Given C-minus In Ocean Conservation

The United States government made progress last year in advancing the cause of healthier oceans -- but not much.
The 2006 Ocean Policy Report Card, issued Tuesday by the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, gave the federal government a grade of C-minus, up marginally from a D-plus for 2005.
The initiative, a combined effort by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Pew Oceans Commission, is led by retired Adm. James D. Watkins and Leon Panetta, former Central Coast congressman and Clinton administration chief of staff. Its mission is to evaluate progress toward protecting marine resources.
"To raise the grade in 2007, we need much more progress from Congress and the administration," said Panetta.
The C-minus was arrived at by averaging grades in six component subjects: C-minus for national ocean governance; A-minus for state governance; D-minus for international leadership; D-plus for research and science efforts; B-plus for fisheries management; and F for new funding.
In addressing funding and research, Watkins highlighted the need to investigate the ocean's role in climate change.
"We are trying to fight climate change with one arm tied behind our back," he said.
The report said the U.S. scored poorly in international leadership because of the failure of the previous Republican-controlled Senate to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
In the category of fisheries management, the U.S. earned a B-plus for setting a firm deadline to end overfishing with the passage of the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act.
The A-minus awarded for state governance was the highest mark, with the California Ocean Protection Council getting special mention.
"In the race to preserve our oceans, the states are outdistancing the federal government," said Panetta.
"The states are making the grade, and California is at the head of the class," said Karen Garrison of the Natural Resources Defense Council. With the passage of Proposition 84 in 2006, a bond act that provides support for protection of coastal resources, California stands as a role model for the rest of the nation, she said.
Julie Packard, executive director of Monterey Bay Aquarium, applauded California for meeting the Pew Ocean Commission's concerns.
"It's time for the federal government to do the same," she said. "Our oceans are too precious to delay action any longer."
Packard praised Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"His administration has made significant progress toward assuring a future with healthy oceans by supporting creation of a network of marine protected areas off the Central Coast," she said.
In a public hearing Friday at the Best Western Beach Resort, the Fish and Game Commission will finalize plans for the marine protected areas.
"No other state has a full, comprehensive network like California does," said Tim Eichenberg, pacific director of Ocean Conservancy, an ocean advocacy group.
"It is important for people in the Central Coast to show their support," he said. "People should come to the hearing on Friday in Monterey and speak up on behalf of the oceans before the Fish and Game Commission."
The report card gave credit to President Bush for designating the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, a 140,000-square-mile reserve of protected islands, atolls and ocean.
To address the need for more federal action, Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, recently introduced H.R. 21, known as Oceans-21, which would establish an Oceans Trust Fund and a framework for regional oceans governance.
"Our oceans are at our mercy," he said.

By Brian Lee

Hearld Staff Writer

http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/16594957.htm