Gizmodo Australia » oceans

Matte Black Earthrace Power Boat Hunts Those Who Hunt Whales

Jack Loftus — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Last we heard from Earthrace, the super sleek 24m power boat that runs on its captain’s fat, it was circumnavigating the globe. Today, the ship has a new Batman paint job and a new mission: Hunting whalers.

Specifically Japanese whalers. The same Japanese whalers made famous by the camera-happy efforts of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. You know, the group whose anti-whaling, conservationist exploits on the high seas can be seen on a reality TV show near you, right now?

Now, the paint job and wild design aren’t just for aesthetics. Nay, they also turn this sleek trimaran into a radar-deflecting stealth boat. Presumably, this will allow the Earthrace to sidle up to unsuspecting whaling ships, where it will then “protest” peaceably.

The boat leaves Perth on December 7 on a three-month journey alongside the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Steve Irwin to protest Japan’s industrial whaling program. Good luck, and be careful. Stealth or not, last I checked matte black wasn’t harpoon-proof. [LIFE via Boing Boing]

Declassified Russian UFO Files More Abyss Than Close Encounters

Jack Loftus — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Traditional conspiracy theorists would have you believe classified military UFO reports are all about flying saucers and little green men. Truth is, at least in Russia, the aliens had a penchant for aquatic locales—not space.

We know this because on Friday Russia declassified pages and pages of its Cold War UFO sightings. A full 50% of the sightings were in the ocean, and a further 15% were in lakes like Baikal (the world’s deepest).

In one sad case, three Russian navy diving cadets lost their lives chasing “a group of humanoid creatures dressed in silvery suits.” In another, straight out of The Abyss, a sub commander details an encounter where an underwater UFO reached speeds of 230 knots. “It was like the objects defied the laws of physics,” he said.

Regardless, accuracy of these reports aside, we can take solace in the fact that Ed Harris has experience with both space and sea. [Scoop Deck via Wired]

Russia To Ring The Arctic With Floating Nuclear Power Stations

Jack Loftus — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Poor Mr. Polar Bear. When he’s not jumping from melting ice chunk to ice chunk trying desperately not to drown, he’s avoiding the floating Russian nuclear power stations and their potential toxic waste.

You read that correctly, fellow Net denizens. Coming soon, Mr. Polar Bear and his brethren will be sharing real estate with a ring of floating, self-sustained nuclear power stations. It’s all part of Russia’s—and the world’s—ongoing thirst for energy.

Environmentalists are understandably outraged over the impact said stations could have on an already endangered area of the globe, and if polar bears could talk, I imagine they’d be outraged too.

Said a rep from Bellona, a Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, “[The plan] is highly risky. The risk of a nuclear accident on a floating power plant is increased. The plants’ potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment through emissions of radioactivity and heat remains a major concern. If there is an accident, it would be impossible to handle.”

Oh, and there’s this fear that Russia will simply dump the radioactive waste into the Arctic Sea anyway, which they’ve done before on several occasions. To date at least 12 nuclear reactors from decommissioned Russian submarines have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid waste.

Pretty soon the ocean will be like a 24/7 aurora borealis up there. A wonderful, cancer-causing aurora borealis. [Guardian]

Download Google Earth 5.0 Now: Explore the Oceans and Travel Back in Time

Matt Buchanan — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:31:50 +0000

Google Earth 5.0 beta is live and more amazing than ever: You can travel back in time and see how a place has developed, go ocean-diving with Jacques Cousteau, and record your journeys to share.

It looks really incredible, and we’re totally installing it right now. Can’t wait to see what the historical imagery turns up! [Google Earth via Twitter/Harry McCracken]

Searaser Wave Buoy Can Generate, Store Enough Power For 470 Homes

Kit Eaton — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:34:53 +0000

We’ve mentioned ocean power stations a bit recently, and now here’s one with a rather different approach: It can store power for when its needed. Searaser is in prototype form at the moment, and it works by bobbing up and down as waves pass by. An underwater pump uses this motion to push water into a reservoir 160 feet uphill. And there it sits until it’s simply released to power a generator. Neat stuff, particularly when the inventors say a full-sized version can power about 470 homes all by itself. [The TImes via Dvice]

World’s Deepest Living Fish Filmed for the First Time Are Gross

Jesus Diaz — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:00:00 +0000

This is a group of snailfish–the deepest living fish in existence–filmed alive for the first time in history in the name science and nausea. They live at depths of 4.6 miles (7,500 meters) or more, so scientists had to develop new camera technology capable of supporting a pressure of 8,000 tonnes per square metre–”the equivalent to that of 1600 elephants standing on the roof of a Mini car”–for a period of days.

The submersible platform reached 7.69km down the Japan Sea trench, and had to stay there for two days to be able to obtain this crystal clear footage, taking a total of five hours to reach the seabed. The camera equipment was designed specifically for this mission by the engineers at OceanLab–the sub-sea research facility of the University of Aberdeen.

According to project leader Dr Alan Jamieson, the resulting video taking during those two days is “absolutely amazing”.

We got some absolutely amazing footage from 7700 metres. More fish than we or anyone in the world would ever have thought possible at these depths. It’s incredible. These videos vastly exceed all our expectations from this research. We thought the deepest fishes would be motionless, solitary, fragile individuals eking out an existence in a food-sparse environment. But these fish aren’t loners. The images show groups that are sociable and active–possibly even families–feeding on little shrimp, yet living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

Whatever. Any fish that have teeth that do this…

…are not my friends. [OceanLab via Daily Mail]

Video and image credit: Natural Environment Research Council and University of Aberdeen.

Water Invisibility Barrier Protects Against Tsunamis

Gizmodo US Edition — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:35:25 +0000

Research into invisibility cloaks, which work by bending light around 2D objects, could end up protecting offshore rigs and vulnerable coastlines from water. Scientists at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France said that established cloaking principles can be applied to ocean waves, and built a 10cm model to show how carefully placed concentric pillars make objects in the centre “invisible” to the sea.

Waves pass along the radial corridors, interacting with the pillars and producing forces that pull the water away from the innermost ring. The water is then pushed out of the cloaking area as if it had not encountered anything at all. The circular formation could be used to protect anything from oil rigs to islands, though very few islands can probably afford the amount of pillars needed to make this effect work. [New Scientist via Dvice]

Scientists Propose Adding Lime to Oceans to Reduce CO2

Kit Eaton — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:20:00 +0000

The oceans already absorb megatons of atmospheric carbon, but scientists say that there’s a way to boost this so that CO2 levels could drop to pre-industrial age levels. The answer sounds like a cocktail recipe: add lime. Limed seawater has boosted alkalinity, which lets it absorb more CO2 and stops it from releasing it back so readily. The idea’s been around for a while, but the new proposition is that lime production should occur in areas rich in energy resources and limestone, but where commercial power generation is overly expensive. One suggested location is Nullarbor Plain in Australia which has limestone and abundant sunlight for solar power. Sounds like a whacky but not-infeasible scheme, though I suspect there’re quite a few “polluting the oceans” concerns to get around before it could be tried out. [Physorg]

World’s First Tidal Turbine Power Station Goes Online, Doesn’t Blend Seals

Kit Eaton — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:09:00 +0000

However exciting the rubber robot snake wave power generator sounds, a real seagoing power station is way more interesting. And over in the UK, they’ve just turned on the world’s first commercial tidal power generator station. SeaGen is situated in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, and it has twin turbines that spin as the tide rushes into and out of the lough at up to 8 knots. The moving seawater spins the turbines for around 20 hours each day and when it’s up to full operating capacity, SeaGen will be pushing out 1.2 megawatts of power, roughly enough to supply 1,000 homes. And since the revolution speed is only around 10 to 15 per minute, the blades shouldn’t offer a threat to sealife like the local common seals. Eco-friendliness all ’round. [Daily Mail]

Flying Priest Found Deceased in the Atlantic, God Positioning System Still Missing

Jesus Diaz — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:30:00 +0000

Father de Carli, the flying priest who got lost last April, has been found deceased in the middle of the Atlantic. In an effort to raise funds for a local charity organisation, De Carli planned to stay for more than 19 hours up in the air using a thousand party balloons, taking a GPS with him to communicate his position in case emergency. Unfortunately for the generous man, the trip ended in disaster.

His body was found yesterday by the Anna Gabriela, a tug working for Brazilian oil company Petrobras, 1,100 kilometres from Father De Carli’s starting point. His trip started on April 20 after a mass, and his last contact was a desperate attempt to learn how to use his GPS and communicate his position as the wind took him deep into the Atlantic Ocean.

I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am.

An Petrobras official spokesman said that “his clothes and shoes indicate that it’s him.” And now I don’t know if I should say “Godspeed, Padre” or “this is another candidate for the Darwin Awards.”

[Editor's Note: I commend you for finding your way out of this world while trying to do some good for the rest of it. Rest in Peace, De Carli. -B.L.] [Bloomberg]