Divers find 100-year-old shipwreck in Lake Baikal

NOVOSIBIRSK, September 11 (RIA Novosti) - Divers in Irkutsk have discovered an ancient ship that sank over 100 years ago on the bottom of Siberia's Lake Baikal, a team member said on Thursday.
The ship, thought to have been built in the late 18th or early 19th century, was found in the southern part of the lake at the depth of around 30 meters.
The vessel's hull, constructed without iron nails, is 16 m (52 feet) long, 5 m (16 feet) wide and 4 m (13 feet) deep. There is a hole in the right side of the hull and divers believe the ship sank during a storm.
They also discovered suspected human remains.
The expedition to the depths of the world's deepest and oldest lake was organized to search for historic artifacts linked with the Krugobaikal Railway, which saw numerous train crashes in the 19th century.
"We knew that this was the site of many train crashes and launched [the expedition] for this reason. As a result of the search, we ran across the sunken ship," Andrei Bobkov, a member of the diving team said, adding that the discovery was a complete surprise.
Bobkov said the team was also planning to make new dives to examine the ship and unearth the mystery of the shipwreck. However, the divers do not plan to recover the vessel due to concerns the wooden carcass, fragile after so long underwater, might be destroyed.
Baikal, called the Sacred Sea by locals for its size and beauty, is the world's oldest and deepest lake, with an age estimated at 25 million years. It holds around 20% of the planet's freshwater and is home to hundreds of unique species of fauna and flora.
The mysteries hidden in the lake's waters are currently attracting a great deal of attention. On Wednesday, a team of scientists using two Russian mini-submarines to research for the Russian Academy of Sciences, announced the completion of the first stage of their study.
The Mir-1 and Mir-2 deep-sea vehicles performed a series of 52 dives, including last week when they searched the lakebed for sacks of gold taken from the Imperial Russian reserves by the White Army's Admiral Alexander Kolchak when fleeing from the Bolsheviks in the winter of 1919-1920.
Some of the White Army officers reputedly froze on the ice as temperatures dropped to 60 degrees Celsius below zero, and the gold is thought to have sunk when the spring thaw came. However, no treasure, except boxes containing ammunition dating back to 1920s, was discovered.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080911/116704012.html

Seal levels tipped to rise 1m this century

October 27, 2008 11:00pm

SEA levels will rise by 1m this century, according to German scientists who warn global warming is happening faster than previously predicted.Citing UN data on climate change, two senior German scientists say that previous predictions were far too cautious and optimistic. Earlier estimates predicted a rise of 18cm to 59cm in sea levels this century. But that estimate is woefully understated, according to Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects, and Jochem Marotzke, a leading meteorologist. "We now have to expect that the sea level will rise by a metre this century," Professor Schellnhuber said in Berlin. He said it was "just barely possible" that world governments would be able to limit the rise in average global temperatures to just 2C by the end of the century, if they all strictly adhered to severe limits in carbon dioxide emissions. Those restrictions call for halving greenhouse emissions by 2050 and eliminating CO2 emissions entirely by the end of the century. But the German researchers said the resulting limited increase in temperature was predicated on strict adherence to those restrictions without exception, and even then there were many variables which could thwart the goals. Professor Schellnhuber, who is official adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate-change issues, said the new findings employed data unavailable to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its most recent global warming report. The two experts said the IPCC report had been based on data up to 2005 only, but since then ice loss in the Arctic had doubled or tripled.Professor Schellnhuber said 20 per cent of the loss of the ice sheet on Greenland could be directly linked to the added emissions from new Chinese coal-fired power stations.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24561491-953,00.html

Climate Change/Great Barrier Reef

Paul Maley November 01, 2008

Article from: The Australian

THE prediction of a prominent marine biologist that climate change could render the Great Barrier Reef extinct within 30 years has been labelled overly pessimistic for failing to account for the adaptive capabilities of coral reefs.University of Queensland marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said yesterday that sea temperatures were likely to rise 2C over the next three decades, which would undoubtedly kill the reef.
But several of Professor Hoegh-Guldberg's colleagues have taken issue with his prognosis.
Andrew Baird, principal research fellow at the Australian Research Council's Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said there were "serious knowledge gaps" about the impact rising sea temperatures would have on coral.
"Ove is very dismissive of coral's ability to adapt, to respond in an evolutionary manner to climate change," Dr Baird said.
"I believe coral has an underappreciated capacity to evolve. It's one of the biological laws that, wherever you look, organisms have adapted to radical changes."
Dr Baird acknowledged that, if left unaddressed, climate change would result in major changes to the Great Barrier Reef.
"There will be sweeping changes in the relative abundance of species," he said. "There'll be changes in what species occur where.
"But wholesale destruction of reefs? I think that's overly pessimistic."
Dr Baird said the adaptive qualities of coral reefs would mitigate the effects of climate change.
His comments were backed by Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chairman and marine scientist Russell Reichelt.
"I think that he's right," Dr Reichelt said. "The reef is more adaptable and research is coming out now to show adaptation is possible for the reef."
Dr Reichelt said the greatest threat facing the reef was poor water quality in the coastal regions, the result of excess sediment and fertiliser.
"If a reef's going to survive bleaching, you don't want to kill it with a dirty river," he said.
Professor Hoegh-Guldberg, who in 1999 won the prestigious Eureka science prize for his work on coral bleaching, said the view "that reefs somehow have some magical adaptation ability" was unfounded.
"The other thing is, are we willing to take the risk, given we've got a more than 50 per cent likelihood that these scenarios are going to come up?" Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.
"If I asked (my colleagues) to get into my car and I told them it was more than 50 per cent likely to crash, I don't think they'd be very sensible getting in it."
He told the ABC's Lateline program on Thursday the threat posed by climate change to the Great Barrier Reef should be treated as a "global emergency".
"Why we aren't just panicking at thispoint and starting to really make some changes? Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said. "It just ... it blows my mind sometimes."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24584070-30417,00.html

Crazy.....

Shark Jump

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJrOLEGmqs&feature=related

Amazing

The Great Blue Hole at Lighthouse Reef Atoll, Belize

Interesting..

Cyclone damaged 10% of reef

One of the most severe cyclones to lash Australia damaged at least 10% of the world heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, scientists said yesterday.

Cyclone Ingrid, even more powerful than Cyclone Tracy that devastated the northern city of Darwin on Christmas Day 1974, cut a swath through a third of the region's 260 coral reefs when it hit Queensland's far north coast in March.

The category four cyclone packed winds of more than 155mph and whipped up waves as high as 10 metres (33ft), according to the Australian bureau of meteorology.

Researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science discovered during a 15-day study tour that 80 individual reefs had borne the brunt of the cyclone. They warned it could take decades for the reef to recover

Katharina Fabricius, the project leader, said damaged sections of the reef had been found more than 62 miles from the eye of the storm.

More resistant coral on the outer edge of the damaged area was likely to take just two to three years to fully recover, Dr Fabricius said, while areas that were stripped bare of coral could take as long as 20 years to bounce back.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/aug/18/australia.bernardoriordan

We are to blame.

Jellyfish Invade the Globe, Thanks to Humans
By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 15 August 2005 06:26 pm ET

There are exotic Frankenfish in the Potomac, unbearably noisy foreign frogs in Hawaii, and the destructive spiny water fleas that have snuck into northern lakes.

Now you can add alien moon jellyfish to the growing list of invasive species that threaten ecosystems around the planet.

Scientists announced the discovery of 16 new species of "moon jellyfish" today while also saying the creatures are invading marine environments all over the world.

We're to blame

The jellyfish are carried by ships, the researchers said. They join several other species that have hitchhiked into new habitats, often to the demise of native species.The moon jellyfish could not have migrated naturally to so many corners of the globe, the scientists report.

The researchers conducted a 7,000-year computer simulation of possible movement based on ocean currents and the creatures' less-than-Olympic swimming skills. That combined with genetic data leaves ships as the only logical mode of transportation.

Ships take in water for stability, and some ends up in faraway harbors.

"Marine organisms traverse the globe in ballast water, on ship hulls and through the trade of exotic species such as tropical fish," said study leader Mike Dawson of the University of

California, Davis. "This has potential to displace local marine species, threaten ecosystems and cause billions of dollars in damage and preventive control."

Growing problem

Other studies suggest that nearly a quarter of all marine species in international harbors are alien, Davis said.

He has tracked the invading jellyfish in Japan, California, western Europe and Australia. The moon jellyfish are, in fact, just about everywhere, including Mexico, Alaska and along the Atlantic Coast of the United States. They include the stinging Portuguese man-of-war.
But 500 years ago, the study finds, they were not so widespread.

"Until now our knowledge of natural and human-assisted dispersal of species has been insufficient to confidently track and predict the spread of non-indigenous marine species," said University of New South Wales researcher Matthew England, who helped develop the computer program. "Now we have a tool that can include data on currents, geography and the biology of an organism to help separate natural dispersal from that which happens through shipping.

The DNA study also revealed that there are more species of moon jellyfish than known.

"We identified 16 species of moon jellyfish, revealing that marine biodiversity is actually much higher than was thought previously,"Dawson said.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/050815_jellyfish.html