Thames Estuary's annual seals survey for new protection plan get ...
Xinhua LONDON, July 31 (Xinhua) -- Marine biologists in London started an annual survey on Monday of the Thames Estuary to count the number of seals living in ... and more » |
The Star Online |
Hotel team making swamp hospitable for mangroves
The Star Online SOME 13 staff members of G Hotel in Penang have planted 100 mangrove seedlings along the Sungai Acheh mangrove forest belt in Nibong Tebal in support of environmental conservation. Led by general manager Michael Hanratty, the team trudged into ... |
SunLive |
Councils seek power over mangroves
SunLive So when people make environmental claims around mangroves, you have to ask how that fits,” says Sandra. Scott says the bill was the initiative of the two councils, and for a local bill to come before parliament, it usually requires the local MP to ... |
Market Business News |
Mangrove forests disappearing faster than average forest loss
Market Business News Despite their huge ecological and economic value, mangrove forests are disappearing much faster than the average rate of forests around the world. Fortunately, although still patchy, awareness of their ecological and economic value is rising and there ... |
Times of India |
NMMC moves high court for permission to cut mangroves; seeks early hearing
Times of India NMMC said, "We can always refer the design of the holding ponds and find out the actual capacity of the holding ponds to calculate the reduction in the capacity because of siltation and mangrove growth to know the quantum of silt deposited that could ... |
Port Canaveral leads congressional briefing on seaport support for local estuaries
American Journal of Transportation Port Canaveral, FL - Port Canaveral Environmental Director Bob Musser recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief the Congressional Estuary Caucus on the importance of the National Estuaries Program to the nation's economy. Musser spoke at the ... |
The Guardian |
Seals going swimmingly in the greater Thames estuary
The Guardian “It's a good news story,” says zoologist Anna-Christina Cucknell, as she watches seals glide smoothly through the water, their dark eyes watchful as their heads swivel like periscopes. “In the 1950s, the Thames was declared biologically dead. But the ... |
Business Mirror |
Kalibo mangroves eco-park an environmental marvel
Business Mirror KALIBO, Aklan—The Kalibo Bakhawan Eco-Park, a mangrove forest in Kalibo, Aklan, in Western Visayas region, is helping the town mitigate disasters, such as flooding and air pollution. Medelyn Quadra of the Provincial Environment and Natural Resources ... |
'Be Advocates for Mangrove Protection' | Fiji Sun
Fiji Sun Online Launch of the Suva Foreshore Rehabilitation and Mangrove Planting The Permanent Secretary for Environment Joshua Wycliffe has urged Fijians to be ... |
Times of India |
Rampant encroachment on mangroves
Times of India This was reported earlier too of how rampant encroachment on mangrove land in eroding are ecosystem in Chedha Nagar area, if the authorities dont look into this all dont clear the encroachments the mangroves will all be destroyed soon..Thanks for ... |
Mangrove Protection and Conservation
Daily Excelsior Sitting in a small city of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, far-far away from the coasts, we may wonder why we should talk about Mangroves. Since last two years from the year 2015, General Conference of UNESCO, adopted 26th July, as a day to impress upon ... |
The Sunshine Coast Daily |
Mangroves out, restaurants in at Sunshine Plaza development
The Sunshine Coast Daily MANGROVES and other marine plants will be removed from a Coast waterway as a part of a major shopping centre's expansion plans. Sunshine Coast Council has approved Lendlease's application to remove plants from a section of Cornmeal Ck that runs ... |
SpaceCoastDaily.com |
Port Canaveral's Bob Musser Leads Congressional Briefing On Seaport Support For Local Estuaries
SpaceCoastDaily.com BREVARD COUNTY • PORT CANAVERAL – Port Canaveral Environmental Director Bob Musser recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief the Congressional Estuary Caucus on the importance of the National Estuaries Program to the nation's economy. |
Post-Bulletin |
Climate concerns fuel more travel to fragile corners of the world
Post-Bulletin Small mangrove plants are meant to replenish some of the tropical trees that have been lost in Sri Lanka. The California-based environmental non-profit Seacology has pumped millions of dollars into mangrove restoration projects on this island nation ... |
The Estuary Owners Association v. Shell Oil Company | The Recorder
The Recorder Claims of soil and groundwater contamination not barred by statute of repose for construction defects (Kline, P.J.) and more » |
Telegraph.co.uk |
Ghostly 117-year-old shipwreck briefly emerges for first time on sonar
Telegraph.co.uk A ghostly shipwreck has been discovered on the estuary bed after it sank on Christmas Eve 117 years ago. Lodged in the sands of the Severn Estuary, the remains of the boat were captured by sonar imagining for the first time. It is thought to be cargo ... |
Agai: Protect Our Mangroves For The Future
Fiji Sun Online Mangroves has been there for centuries and is slowly being cut down, washed away and polluted because of lack of sustainable management. Are we doing enough for our future generation? We do things that we desire and ten to forget that our mangroves ... |
The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), also known as the doldrums, is one of the dramatic features of Earth’s climate system. Prominent enough to be seen from space, the ITCZ appears in satellite images as a band of bright clouds around the tropics. Here, moist warm air accumulates in this atmospheric region near the equator, where the ocean and atmosphere heavily interact. Intense solar radiation and calm, warm ocean waters produce an area of high humidity, ascending air, and rainfall, which is fed by converging trade winds from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The convected air forms clusters of thunderstorms characteristic of the ITCZ, releasing heat before moving away from the ITCZ — toward the poles — cooling and descending in the subtropics. This circulation completes the Hadley cells of the ITCZ, which play an important role in balancing Earth’s energy budget — transporting energy between the hemispheres and away from the equator.
However, the position of the ITCZ isn’t static. In order to transport this energy, the ITCZ and Hadley cells shift seasonally between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, residing in the one that’s most strongly heated from the sun and radiant heat from the Earth’s surface, which on average yearly is the Northern Hemisphere. Accompanying these shifts can be prolonged periods of violent storms or severe drought, which significantly impacts human populations living in its path.
Scientists are therefore keen to understand the climate controls that drive the north-south movement of the ITCZ over the seasonal cycle, as well as on inter-annual to decadal timescales in Earth’s paleoclimatology up through today. Researchers have traditionally approached this issue from the perspective of the atmosphere’s behavior and understanding rainfall, but anecdotal evidence from models with a dynamic ocean has suggested that the ocean’s sensitivity to climate changes could affect the ITCZ’s response. Now, a study from MIT graduate student Brian Green and the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography John Marshall from the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, investigates the role that the ocean plays in modulating the ITCZ’s position and appreciates its sensitivity when the Northern Hemisphere is heated. In so doing, the work gives climate scientists a better understanding of what causes changes to tropical rainfall.
“In the past decade or so there’s been a lot of research studying controls on the north-south position of the ITCZ, particularly from this energy balance perspective. ... And this has normally been done in the context of ignoring the adjustment of the ocean circulation — the ocean circulation is either forcing these [ITCZ] shifts or passively responding to changes in the atmosphere above,” Green says. “But we know, particularly in the tropics, that the ocean circulation is very tightly coupled through the trade winds to atmospheric circulation and the ITCZ position, so what we wanted to do was investigate how that ocean circulation might feedback on the energy balance that controls that ITCZ position, and how strong that feedback might be.”
To examine this, Green and Marshall performed experiments in a global climate model with a coupled atmosphere and ocean, and observed how the ocean circulation’s cross-equatorial energy transport and its associated surface energy fluxes affected the ITCZ’s response when they imposed an inter-hemispheric heating contrast. Using a simplified model that omitted landmasses, clouds, and monsoon dynamics, while keeping a fully circulating atmosphere that interacts with radiation highlighted the ocean’s effect while minimized other confounding variables that could mask the results. The addition of north-south ocean ridges, creating a large and small basin, mimicked the behavior of the Earth’s Atlantic’s meridional overturning circulation and the Pacific Ocean.
Green and Marshall then ran the asymmetrically heated planet simulations in two ocean configurations and compared the ITCZ responses. The first used a stationary “slab ocean,” where the thermal properties were specified so that it mimicked the fully coupled model before perturbation, but was unable to respond to the heating. The second incorporated a dynamic ocean circulation. By forcing the models identically, they could quantify the ocean circulation’s impact on the ITCZ.
“We found in the case where there’s a fully coupled, dynamic ocean, the northward shift of the ITCZ was damped by a factor of four compared to the passive ocean. So that’s hinting that the ocean is one of the leading controls on the position of the ITCZ,” Green says. “It’s a significant damping of the response of the atmosphere, and the reason behind this can just be diagnosed from that energy balance.”
In the dynamic ocean model, they found that when they heat the simulated ocean-covered planet, eddies export some heat into the tropical atmosphere from the extra-tropics, which causes the Hadley cells to respond — the Northern Hemisphere cell to weaken and the Southern Hemisphere cell to strengthen. This transports heat southward through the atmosphere. Concurrently, the ITCZ shifts northward; associated with this are changes in the trade winds — the surface branch of the Hadley cells — and the surface wind stress near the equator. The surface ocean feels this change in winds, which energizes an anomalous ocean circulation and moves water mass southwards across the equator in both hemispheres, carrying heat with it. Once this surface water reaches the extra-tropics, the ocean pumps it downwards where it returns northward across the equator, cooler and at depth. This temperature contrast between the warm surface cross-equatorial flow and the cooler deeper return flow sets the heat transported by the ocean circulation.
“In the slab ocean case, only the atmosphere can move heat across the equator; whereas in our fully coupled case, we see that the ocean is the most strongly compensating component of the system, transporting the majority of the forcing across the equator.” Green says. “So from the atmosphere’s perspective, it doesn’t even feel the full effect of that heating that we’re imposing. And as a result, it has to transport less heat across the equator and shift the ITCZ less.” Green adds that the response of the large basin ocean circulation broadly mimics the Indian Ocean’s yearly average circulation.
Marshall notes that the ability of the wind-driven ocean circulation to damp ITCZ shifts represents a previously unappreciated constraint on the atmosphere’s energy budget: “We showed that the ITCZ cannot move very far away from the equator, even in very ‘extreme’ climates,” indicating that the position of the ITCZ may be much less sensitive to inter-hemispheric heating contrasts than previously thought.”
Green and Marshall are currently expanding upon this work. With the help of David McGee, the Kerr-Mcgee Career Development Assistant Professor in EAPS, and postdoc Eduardo Moreno-Chamarro, the pair are applying this to the paleoclimate record during Heimrich events, when the Earth experiences strong cooling, looking for ITCZ shifts.
They’re also investigating the decomposition of heat and mass transport between the atmosphere and the ocean, as well as between the Earth’s oceans. “The physics that control each of those oceans’ responses are dramatically different, certainly between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans,” Green says. “Right now, we’re working to understand how the mass transports of the atmosphere and ocean are coupled. While we know that they’re constrained to overturn in the same sense, they’re not actually constrained to transport an identical amount of mass, so you could further enhance or weaken the damping by the ocean circulation by affecting how strongly the mass transports are coupled.”
Discovery of Elusive Banded Rail Signals Hope for Estuaries
Island Conservation News The bird in question is a Banded Rail that lives and feeds along marsh, wetland, and estuary shorelines. Throughout New Zealand the Banded Rail is considered to be “declining,” making a sighting in the Te Atatu wetland in west Auckland for the first ... |
Port Canaveral Leads Congressional Briefing on Estuary Issues
Maritime Professional (blog) Port Canaveral Environmental Director Bob Musser recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief the Congressional Estuary Caucus on the importance of the National Estuaries Program to the nation's economy. Musser spoke at the Caucus's third briefing at ... |
Daily Mail |
Ghostly wreck of The Brunswick revealed: Incredible sonar images show the ill-fated cargo ship stuck in the Severn ...
Daily Mail In 1900, a cargo vessel called The Brunswick overturned in the Severn Estuary and until now, the mysterious ship had never been seen again. Now, scientists have used sonar imaging to capture the first stunning photographs of the ghostly wreck lodged in ... Shipwreck found under Bristol Channel's shifting sandsBBC News all 3 news articles » |
This eco movement in Kerala stresses the importance of mangroves ...
Indulge (press release) (registration) Kannur Kandal Project is the best example of a community effort taking shape as a full-fledged conservation venture. As the programme celebrates one year of ... and more » |
The governments of Canada and Saskatchewan are planning to invest in public infrastructure to provide modern wastewater services to Canadians.
Each government is contributing up to $2.16m towards the project, with the Town of Pilot Butte responsible for all remaining costs.
The total estimated cost of this project is $6.53m.
The wastewater services are expected to mitigate potential damage from severe storms and other natural hazards and protect provincial waterways and preserve local ecosystems.
Funding provided by the governments will be used to upgrade and expand Pilot Butte’s wastewater treatment facilities and storm water management systems.
Pilot Butte Mayor Peggy Chorney said: “Without the support of other levels of government, projects like these would be challenging to complete on our own.
“Our town’s wastewater project will enable us to continue to build a sustainable community that meets the needs of our residents now and into the future.”
The wastewater plant upgrades include new pumping and pipeline infrastructure, expansion and upgrade of the existing lagoon, and the addition of effluent disinfection equipment.
Another infrastructure work underway in Pilot Butte includes the construction of storm water drainage infrastructure on Arbor Street and the surrounding area.
Upon completion, the work will control erosion, prevent flooding and reduce the burden on the sanitary sewer system.
Once completed, the projects are set to increase the sustainability of the town.
Emefcy Group and RWL Water have completed their previously announced definitive merger agreement to form Fluence Corporation.
The agreement, which was initially announced in May this year, brings together latest technologies and delivery platforms to optimise treatment solutions for the water cycle.
Fluence’s products will address all segments of the water value chain, from desalination to wastewater treatment and waste-to-energy.
The comprehensive distributed water services firm will provide local and sustainable treatment and reuse solutions to businesses and communities across the globe.
Fluence CEO Henry Charrabe said: “The combination of complementary decentralised and packaged water and wastewater treatment solutions is paving the way for Fluence to emerge as the leading global provider of innovative water and wastewater solutions serving municipal, industrial and commercial markets.
“In pairing RWL Water’s proven execution capabilities and standardised solutions with Emefcy’s breakthrough technologies, Fluence operates at the forefront of the movement that is solving the world’s most pressing water challenges.”
The company will continue to serve and support all existing RWL Water and Emefcy customers and will bring the latter’s wastewater treatment technology to new clients across the globe.
Fluence executive chairman Richard Irving said: “The merger will substantially accelerate Emefcy’s deployment in China and other key markets while making significant operational and distribution gains.”
The operating and regional entities of Fluence are located around the globe, including the US, China, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, France, Israel and Dubai.
Thomson Reuters Foundation |
How mangroves got their roots back in East Java
Thomson Reuters Foundation In a village called Gelung in East Java, Indonesia, 43-year-old Rustima looks out from the small kiosk she maintains with her husband overlooking the sea and a new mangrove rehabilitation site. Here, as in other low-lying island areas, each time the ... |
For a post later, I’ve been watching some old British films involving diving, that this one was just so… I could not resist sharing.
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Protecting mangroves
Himalayan Times To my delight, all 20 communities, independently, chose to invest in the restoration of their mangroves that had been completely or partially destroyed by the tsunami. To them, losing their mangroves was like losing their ancestors: Mangroves defended ... |
Local bays competing for estuary program
Port St. Joe Star The St. Andrew Bay watershed is in competition with three other Northwest Florida watersheds for a chance to host a $2.2 million estuary program through the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (GCERC). The GCERC was set up in 2012 through the ... |
HuffPost |
Mangroves and their value to Samoa | HuffPost
HuffPost It is World Mangroves Day, and what better time than now to appreciate the contribution of this under appreciated coastal plant in our lives and ecosyste... United Nations News Centre - On International Day, UN spotlights ...UN News Centre NIO, MSI sign MoU to advance mangrove researchTimes of India all 2 news articles » |
Reviving the Mangroves in Costa Rica
The Costa Rican Times They have reforested 762 hectares but the survival rate is only 14%, so 106.68 hectares remain reforested. This amount equals around 825,095 tons of carbon staying underground. In addition to contributing to the mitigation of climate change, mangroves ... |
Pravda |
Global Warming: Study evaluates the impact of the Paris Agreement on temperate estuaries
Pravda An in situ study in the Mondego estuary, coordinated by researchers from the Center for Functional Ecology (CFE) of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra (FCTUC), reveals that, contrary to expectations, there are no ... |
HERE. NOW |
Clamour for creation of mangroves
HERE. NOW According to Sobhakar Behera, an environmentalist, “The Super Cyclone of 1999 had devastated the Erasama coast in Jagatsinghpur district, but the mangrove forests stood firm against the tidal surge at that time. This coast would have met similar fate ... |
Thomson Reuters Foundation |
How mangroves got their roots back in East Java
Thomson Reuters Foundation In a village called Gelung in East Java, Indonesia, 43-year-old Rustima looks out from the small kiosk she maintains with her husband overlooking the sea and a new mangrove rehabilitation site. Here, as in other low-lying island areas, each time the ... |
BBC News |
Sailor Arthur Taylor 'drowned in choppy Cardigan estuary'
BBC News An experienced and healthy 90-year-old sailor drowned off the Ceredigion coast after his small boat capsized in gusty conditions, an inquest has heard. Arthur Roy Taylor probably drowned near Gwbert within 30 minutes of his boat capsizing, Aberyswyth ... and more » |
Vancouver Sun |
Wildlife win with end of Pacific NorthWest LNG project
Markets Insider "WWF-Canada is pleased that the Pacific NorthWest LNG project no longer threatens the Skeena estuary, which plays a fundamental and irreplaceable role in the coastal ecology of northern British Columbia. The threat to the estuary, combined with the ... Petronas cancels $11.4-billion LNG project near Prince RupertVancouver Sun Pacific Northwest LNG Cancels Proposed Project on Lelu IslandMY PG NOW For immediate release July 25, 2017 Pacific NorthWest LNG Project Not ProceedingPacific NorthWest LNG all 110 news articles » |
