BTNEP announces Estuary Artworks contest winners
Daily Comet BTNEP announces Estuary Artworks contest winners. The Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program has announced the winners of its third annual Estuary Artworks contest, held Sept. 24 at the Purple Penguin Art Co. in Thibodaux. Local division ... |
Thomson Reuters Foundation |
Protecting mangroves, Kenya's fishermen net cash - and more ...
Thomson Reuters Foundation But traditional attitudes toward the mangroves are shifting, as communities become aware of a new benefit from keeping the trees standing: cash payments for carbon storage. Local people who are protecting and replanting mangroves are now selling 3,000 ... |
Estuary Artworks to be held Sept. 24
Houma Courier "Estuary Artworks provides children and families with a chance to visually explain why our estuary is so important to them personally. Our rich culture, biodiversity, recreational activities and lifestyles gives these young artists a host of topics to ... and more » |
The Register Star |
Columbia Land Conservancy receives $43K estuary grant ...
The Register Star The Columbia Land Conservancy was one of 10 projects to receive a combined total of $441091 in grants to help communities in the Hudson River Estuary ... Money from NY state will benefit Hudson River Estuary projectsThe Daily Freeman Hudson River Estuary community grants awarded for six area projectsMid-Hudson News Local organizations to receive grant money to help protect Hudson ...NEWS10 ABC all 4 news articles » |
The Guam Daily Post (press release) (registration) |
Protecting mangroves, Kenya's fishermen net cash – and more fish
The Guam Daily Post (press release) (registration) GAZI BAY, Kenya – For fishing communities on Kenya's southern coast, felling mangrove trees to make boats has long been a part of life. But traditional attitudes toward the mangroves are shifting, as communities become aware of a new benefit from ... |
South China Morning Post |
See a rare West African conservation success story
South China Morning Post As his wooden pirogue putt-putts through the dense mangroves of Senegal's Sine-Saloum Delta, Mamadou Bakhoum is in a race with the tide. Dressed somewhat incongruously in an ill-fitting beekeeping suit, he keeps a weather eye on the congested mass ... |
Astro Awani |
Ericssons Connected Mangroves project wins UN climate change ...
Astro Awani The Ericssons Connected Mangroves project uses sensors to provide near real-time information to restore dwindling mangrove plantations. and more » |
Bradenton Herald |
Long Bar Pointe reapplies for mitigation bank state permit
Bradenton Herald Yet in this new application, developers still plan to cut 30 percent of those mangroves to a minimum height of 12 feet. No other mitigation bank has cut mangroves, which requires a special license, or has been adjacent to an active construction site. |
Hindustan Times |
'Greed for space by builder lobby has reduced Mumbai's mangrove cover by 50%'
Hindustan Times Arvind Untawale, executive secretary of the Mangrove Society of India, a non-profit organisation formed in 1990 that works towards the preservation of existing mangrove forests, highlights the main reason for the destruction of mangroves in Mumbai. A ... and more » |
The Daily Freeman |
Money from NY state will benefit Hudson River Estuary projects
The Daily Freeman Riverkeeper — $50,000 for the environmental watchdog group to support community science water-quality projects throughout the Hudson River Estuary that monitor fecal indicator bacteria and support the development of protocols to monitor algae and ... Local organizations to receive grant money to help protect Hudson RiverNEWS10 ABC all 2 news articles » |
Patch.com |
DEC Awards Grants to Protect Hudson River Estuary Watershed
Patch.com Ten projects will divvy up a total of $441,091 in funds to help protect water quality and habitats, conserve open space and increase storm resiliency in the Hudson River Estuary watershed. The largest grants of $50,000 were awarded to Vassar College, ... and more » |
Yellow Advertiser |
Artefacts from Thames Estuary wrecks on show at pop-up museum ...
Yellow Advertiser A MULTI-COLOURED shipping container is not what you would normally expect when you think of a museum. and more » |
The Guardian |
Two bodies found in Norfolk estuary
The Guardian Two bodies found in Norfolk estuary. Police say birdwatcher spotted man and woman on mud banks of Breydon Water in Great Yarmouth. Police officers were working at the scene with the coastguard and fire and rescue services. Photograph: Christopher ... Norfolk Police launch investigation after 'two bodies spotted' at Breydon WaterDaily Mail Breydon Water: Man and woman found dead on mudbank at Norfolk nature reserve by birdwatcherMirror.co.uk Two bodies found on Breydon Water mudbankSky News all 19 news articles » |
Hindustan Times |
Why Mumbai's mangrove forests are being destroyed
Hindustan Times The 1,000-square-feet of mangrove forest encroached by actor Kapil Sharma next to his office in Versova, Andheri (West), will be worth around Rs2 crore, said city-based realtors. Residents of another 60 bungalows along the 400m stretch of the road, too ... and more » |
Daily Post North Wales |
Conwy estuary's taunting terrapin finally snared by RSPB staff
Daily Post North Wales A “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” found in lagoons on the Conwy estuary has been rehomed to prevent it damaging local wildlife. Staff at the RSPB Conwy nature reserve have often spotted a red-eared terrapin basking in sunshine near reeds. But all ... |
Study cites mangroves as carbon sinks
Philippine Information Agency ILOILO CITY, Sept. 28 (PIA6) – Protected mangroves in this city have demonstrated the potential to serve as carbon sink by sequestering and storing considerable amounts of atmospheric carbon to mitigate the impacts of climate change, according to a ... |
FEATURE-Protecting mangroves, Kenya's fishermen net cash - and more fish
Reuters Africa GAZI BAY, Kenya, Sept 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - For fishing communities on Kenya's southern coast, felling mangrove trees to make boats has long been a part of life. But traditional attitudes toward the mangroves are shifting, as communities ... |
Having rare species puts Sabah on the mangrove
Daily Express Kota Kinabalu: Sabah can become a world centre for mangroves and one advantage in realising this is the recent discovery of an extremely rare mangrove tree species – Bruguiera hainesii – in one of the islands in Tunku Abdul Rahman Park, off the State ... |
Thomson Reuters Foundation |
Protecting mangroves, Kenya's fishermen net cash - and more fish
Thomson Reuters Foundation But traditional attitudes toward the mangroves are shifting, as communities become aware of a new benefit from keeping the trees standing: cash payments for carbon storage. Local people who are protecting and replanting mangroves are now selling 3,000 ... and more » |
In certain parts of the ocean, towering, slow-motion rollercoasters called internal tides trundle along for miles, rising and falling for hundreds of feet in the ocean’s interior while making barely a ripple at the surface. These giant, hidden swells are responsible for alternately drawing warm surface waters down to the deep ocean and pulling marine nutrients up from the abyss.
Internal tides are generated in part by differences in water density, and created along continental shelf breaks, where a shallow seafloor suddenly drops off like a cliff, creating a setting where lighter water meets denser seas. In such regions, tides on the surface produce oscillating, vertical currents, which in turn generate waves below the surface, at the interface between warmer, shallow water, and colder, deeper water. These subsurface waves are called “internal tides,” as they are “internal” to the ocean and travel at the same frequency as surface tides. Internal tides are largely calm in some regions but can become chaotic near shelf breaks, where scientists have been unable to predict their paths.
Now for the first time, ocean engineers and scientists from MIT, the University of Minnesota at Duluth (UMD), and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have accurately simulated the motion of internal tides along a shelf break called the Middle Atlantic Bight — a region off the coast of the eastern U.S. that stretches from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. They found that the tides’ chaotic patterns there could be explained by two oceanic “structures”: the ocean front at the shelf break itself, and the Gulf Stream — a powerful Atlantic current that flows some 250 miles south of the shelf break.
From the simulations, the team observed that both the shelf break and the Gulf Stream can act as massive oceanic walls, between which internal tides ricochet at angles and speeds that the scientists can now predict.
The researchers have published their findings in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans and the Journal of Physical Oceanography. The team includes Samuel Kelly, an assistant professor at UMD who was a postdoc at MIT for this research; Pierre Lermusiaux, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and ocean science and engineering at MIT; Tim Duda, a senior scientist at WHOI; and Patrick Haley, a research scientist at MIT.
Lermusiaux says the team’s simulations of internal tides could help to improve sonar communications and predict ecosystems and fishery populations, as well as protect offshore oil rigs and provide a better understanding of the ocean’s role in a changing climate.
“Internal tides are a big chunk of energy that’s input to the ocean’s interior from the common [surface] tides,” he explains. “If you know how that energy is dissipated and where it goes, you can provide better predictions and better understand the ocean and climate in general.”
“Dead calm”
The effects of internal waves were first reported in the late 1800s, when Norwegian sailors, attempting to navigate a fjord, experienced a strange phenomenon: Even though the water’s surface appeared calm, their ship seemed to strongly resist sailing forward — a phenomenon later dubbed “dead water.”
“It would be dead calm in the water, and you’d turn your ship on but it wouldn’t move,” Lermusiaux says. “Why? Because the ship is generating internal waves because of the density difference between the light water on top and the salty water on the bottom in the fjord, that keep you in place.”
Since then, scientists have found that surface tides, just like internal tides, are generated by the cyclical, gravitational pull of the sun and the moon, and travel between density-varying mediums. Surface waves travel at the boundary between the ocean and the air, while internal waves and internal tides flow between water layers of varying density.
“What people didn’t really know was, why can those internal tides be so variable and intermittent?” Duda says.
Following the tide
In the summer of 2006, oceanographers embarked on a large-scale scientific cruise, named “Shallow Water ’06,” to generate a detailed picture of how sound waves travel through complex coastal waters, specifically along part of the Middle Atlantic Bight region. The experiment confirmed that internal tides stemmed from the region’s shelf break at predictable intervals. Puzzlingly, the experiment also showed that internal tides arrived back at the shelf break at unpredictable times and locations.
“One would think if they were all generated at the shelf break, they would be more or less uniform, in and out,” Lermusiaux says.
To solve this puzzle, Lermusiaux, Haley, and their colleagues incorporated data from the 2006 cruise into hydrodynamic simulations to represent tides in a realistic ocean environment. These data-driven simulations included not only tides but also “background structures,” such as density gradients, eddies, and currents such as the Gulf Stream, with which tides might interact.
After completing more than 2,500 simulations of the Middle Atlantic Bight region, they observed that internal tides generated close to the shelf break seemed to flow out toward the ocean, only to bounce back once they reached the Gulf Stream. As the Gulf Stream meandered, the exact direction and location of the internal tides became more variable.
"Looking at the initial plots from the simulations, it was obvious that some type of interaction was happening between the internal tide and Gulf Stream,” Kelly says. “But the simulations could produce a huge number of complicated interactions and there are lots of theories for different types of interactions. So we started testing different theories.”
Terms of agreement
The researchers sought to find mathematical equations that would describe the underlying fluid dynamics that they observed in their simulations. To do this, they started with an existing equation that characterizes the behavior of internal tides but involves an idealized scenario, with limited interactions with other features. The team added new “interaction terms,” or factors, into the equations that described the dynamics of the Gulf Stream and the shelf break front, which they derived from their data-driven simulations.
“It was really exciting when we wrote down a set of slightly idealized equations and saw that the internal tides extracted from the complex simulations were obeying almost the exact same equations," Kelly says.
The match between their simulations and equations indicated to the researchers that the Gulf Stream and the shelf break front were indeed influencing the behavior of the internal tides. With this knowledge, they were able to accurately predict the speed and arrival times of internal waves at the shelf break, by first predicting the strength and position of the Gulf Stream over time. They also showed that the strength of the shelf break front alters the speed and arrival times of internal tides.
The team is currently applying their simulations to oceanic regions around Martha’s Vineyard, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, where internal tides are highly variable and their behavior can have a large role in shaping marine ecosystems and mediating the effects of climate change.
“Our work shows that, with data-driven simulations, you can find and add missing terms, and really explain the ocean’s interactions,” Lermusiaux says. “If you look at ocean or atmospheric sciences today, understanding interactions of features is where big questions are.”
This research was funded in part by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.
East Bay Times |
Alameda: Homeowners can buy Oakland Estuary parcels
East Bay Times Properties that abut the Oakland Estuary are photographed from the High Street Bridge in Alameda on Tuesday. The parcels on a 1.8-mile strip known as the Oakland Inner Harbor Tidal Canal, currently owned by the federal government, will soon be offered ... |
Maha to remove 1k illegal houses on mangroves
Mumbai Mirror "The Cell, being an authorized body, can initiate action of demolishing the encroachment on mangrove area. We are waiting for September to get over as monsoon season is going on. The eviction is not initiated on humanitarian grounds," Chief conservator ... |
Protecting mangroves, Kenya's fishermen net cash – and more fish
Reuters GAZI BAY, Kenya (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - For fishing communities on Kenya's southern coast, felling mangrove trees to make boats has long been a part of life. But traditional attitudes toward the mangroves are shifting, as communities become ... and more » |
'Hands on' in the mangroves: Rookery Bay hosts National Estuaries Day
Naples Daily News They learned directly from the biologists and researchers on the Rookery Bay staff in a series of “junior scientist” labs inside the reserve headquarters, and ventured outside on a brilliant morning to experience the mangrove estuary first hand. As ... |
Civil servants to plant mangroves in Pangasinan town
Philippine Information Agency LINGAYEN, Pangasinan, September 27 (PIA) – To show care for the environment, civil servants in western Pangasinan will spend the morning of September 30 planting mangroves to fortify the watershed area at Barangay Malimpuec here. Director Flordeliza ... |
gulfnews.com |
Abu Dhabi's greenery, including mangroves, absorbs emissions
gulfnews.com Abu Dhabi: Abu Dhabi's green cover, including mangroves, absorbs around six per cent of total carbon dioxide emissions every year, according to the Environment Agency - Abu Dhabi's (EAD) results of its second Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory Project. UAE lifts its carbon cut targetThe National all 4 news articles » |
Athletics Weekly (blog) |
Running routes: Exe Estuary
Athletics Weekly (blog) Follow the estuary to the pedestrian level crossing (caution: fast, frequent trains) and continue through Starcross and Dawlish before following the coast path signs to Teignmouth. Catch a train ride along Brunel's masterpiece back to Exeter. » Jen and ... |
The Indian Express |
Maharashtra court upholds seizure of JCB used to destroy mangroves
The Indian Express Last year, around 1250 square metres of a reserved mangrove forest near Mahul were allegedly being destroyed. and more » |
Battleground Blog (blog) |
Thai farmers turn to mangroves to aid in eco-friendly shrimp farms
Battleground Blog (blog) Many farmers turned to shrimp production, and in a couple of years Thailand became the world's third largest shrimp exporter. But the creation of somany ponds for shrimp production meant a downfall in other directions: thousands of hectares of ... |
Celebrate Great Bay, Hampton-Seabrook estuaries
Foster's Daily Democrat National Estuaries Week is Sept. 17-24. Because the Great Bay is one of only 28 in the United States designated as an “estuary of national significance,” it deserves special recognition and our appreciation for all it provides. Rivers flowing from 52 ... |
New Straits Times Online |
Mangrove clearing leads to floods
New Straits Times Online PANTAI REMIS: THE destruction of mangrove forests along the coastal areas is to be blamed for the recent floods that occurred during the high tide phenomenon in several states. In fact, the problem had been predicted by environmentalists and green ... |