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Tag: pacific ocean
Ships And Blue Whales On A Collision Course Off California Coast

Ships And Blue Whales On A Collision Course Off California Coast

By Geoffrey Mohan, Los Angeles Times

Blue whales cluster for long periods of time in the busy Pacific Ocean shipping lanes off the California coast, raising concern about collisions between vessels and the endangered marine mammals, a new study has found.

Researchers used satellites to track 171 tagged blue whales over 15 years to produce the most detailed maps of the feeding areas of the marine mammals, which are protected from hunting under international regulations and are listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The study was published this week in the online journal Plos One.

“It’s an unhappy coincidence,” said lead author Ladd Irvine, a marine mammal ecologist at Oregon State University. “The blue whales need to find the densest food supply. There’s a limited number of those dense places, and it seems as though two of the main regular spots are crossed by the shipping lanes.”

The biggest overlap between the whales and ships occurs between July and October near the western Channel Islands, off Santa Barbara, with somewhat smaller overlaps near the Gulf of the Farallones, near San Francisco, and farther north at the northern edge of Cape Mendocino, according to the study.

The study’s conclusions are at odds with some previous research, based on more rudimentary sightings of whales, that suggested that shifts in shipping lanes would not affect the whales because they are too widely dispersed. The new study found more dense concentrations and tracked them over longer periods of time, an average of two to three months. One whale remained tagged for nearly a year and a half.

“This is far and away the most detailed look that we’ve gotten on where these whales go, and the timing of when they’re present and when they move,” Irvine said.

“The nice thing about the satellite data is you get a longer-term snapshot that crosses over multiple years,” said Monica DeAngelis, a marine mammal biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who has worked on previous efforts to protect whales from ship collisions.

“We knew that there were important habitat features in the ocean that we inferred these animals were homing in on, for feeding. But we were not sure of the extent of importance of these features,” DeAngelis said. “It gives us a lot more insight into what whales are doing.”

The largest animals on Earth, blue whales can grow to more than 100 feet in length and can weigh 150 tons. About 2,500 of an estimated worldwide population of 10,000 congregate in the waters off the West Coast.

In 2012, the International Maritime Organization agreed to divert southbound ships more than a mile away from Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa islands, off Santa Barbara, and elongated another lane in the Gulf of the Farallones, off San Francisco. Both changes came out of concern raised by increased blue whale sightings near areas where an upwelling in deep sea currents dishes up dense schools of krill, the primary food source of blue whales.

The process took years, and any new dialogue about further shifts is expected to take awhile, DeAngelis said.

The shipping industry, which has supported additional research on whale populations and behavior, has been somewhat wary of new regulation of shipping lanes.

“We’re looking to improve the science, and get the best handle we can on what the abundance, distribution, and behavior of these animals are so we can develop the best management strategy,” said T.L. Garrett, vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, a trade group that represents ocean carriers. “But it needs to be recognized by all parties. We don’t have adequate data to make those kinds of management decisions yet.”

Garrett said he was not surprised by the report’s findings that whales and ships intersect at certain times, given what is known about the species’ wide patterns of movement. The association and the industry support efforts to develop real-time tracking of ships and whales, as is done for the right whale on the Atlantic Coast.

Garrett cautioned, however, that changes to shipping lanes could have unintended consequences for shipping and other marine life.

DeAngelis agreed. “You wouldn’t want to put something in place that would be beneficial to the blue whales but then might be detrimental to humpback whales or fin whales_or ocean users,” she said.

Researchers, regulators, shippers, and other interested parties are planning to meet in the fall to discuss the latest data, DeAngelis and Irvine said.

Photo via WikiCommons

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Obama To Enlarge U.S. Marine Sanctuary

Obama To Enlarge U.S. Marine Sanctuary

Washington (AFP) – President Barack Obama will on Tuesday announce plans to significantly expand a U.S. sanctuary in the central Pacific Ocean in a move that could create the world’s largest such protected area, the Washington Post reported.

Obama will announce his intent to enlarge the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument from almost 87,000 square miles to nearly 782,000 square miles, the Post said.

The order, which would come into force later this year after a comment period, would make fishing, energy exploration and other activities off limits in the area, which includes uninhabited islands in a remote region.

The new area is adjacent to islands and atolls controlled by the United States and would include waters up to 200 nautical miles offshore from these territories.

The move is likely to trigger a political battle with Republicans over the scope of President Barack Obama’s executive powers, the paper said.

Photo: Jim Watson via AFP

Search Goes On In Ocean’s Stirred ‘Teacup’ Of Garbage

Search Goes On In Ocean’s Stirred ‘Teacup’ Of Garbage

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — The search and rescue teams working off the west coast of Australia seeking the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 discovered what oceanographers have been warning: Even the most far-flung stretches of ocean are full of garbage.

For the first time since the search focused on the southern Indian Ocean 10 days ago, the skies were clear enough and the waves calm, allowing ships to retrieve the “suspicious items” spotted by planes and on satellite imagery.

But examined on board, none of it proved to be debris from the missing plane, just the ordinary garbage swirling around in the ocean.

“A number of objects were retrieved by HMAS Success and Haixun 01 yesterday,” reported the Australian Maritime Safety Authority in a news release Sunday. “The objects have been described as fishing equipment and other flotsam.”

A cluster of orange objects spotted by a search plane on Sunday drew the same results, the Associated Press reported the following day: It was just fishing equipment.

Using a fresh analysis of flight data, investigators on Friday moved the search location in the southern Indian Ocean 680 miles to the northeast — waters where the currents are weaker but where there is more debris, according to an Australian oceanographer.

It is an oddity in one of the most remote places on the planet, far from any islands, shipping lanes or flight paths.

“You have garbage from Australia, from Indonesia, from India,” said Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “There are small vortexes that are mixing up the debris like stirring a teacup.”

Science writer Marc Lallanilla has referred to the search for Flight 370 as a “needle in a garbage patch.”

“In addition to foul weather, administrative bungling and the vastness of the search area, the search for MH 370 has been compounded by one other factor: the incredible amount of garbage already floating in the search area — and in oceans worldwide,” Lallanilla wrote on the website livescience.com.

The complicating factor underscored the difficulty the search teams face in trying to find out what happened to the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew. The plane disappeared March 8 during a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital.

Australian authorities said Sunday that a naval support ship, the Ocean Shield, will depart from Perth on Monday with a “black box detector” supplied by the U.S. Navy. The Towed Pinger Locator 25 carries a device that should be able to detect the so-called black boxes of the plane in waters as deep as 20,000 feet. The boxes record pilots’ conversations and flight data.

The search team is in a race against time because black boxes’ batteries last only 30 to 45 days.

The odds are stacked against finding them in time without a trail of debris to guide searchers. Investigators for now are merely surmising that the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean, based on an analysis of the flight’s path according to engine data transmitted via satellite.

The best-known precedent is the case of Air France Flight 447, which went into the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009. It took two years to find the body of the aircraft and the black boxes in the ocean depths, though pieces of debris were found on the surface within five days of the crash.

The lack of confirmed debris has prevented families from achieving any kind of closure over the deaths of their relatives. Chinese families, in particular, have rejected the assertion of the Malaysian government that the plane crashed with no survivors.

“We want evidence, truth and dignity,” read banners that Chinese relatives held up Sunday during an impromptu demonstration at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia Airlines said Sunday that it will fly families of passengers to Perth and will set up a family assistance center to provide counseling and logistical support, but will do so “only once it has been authoritatively confirmed that the physical wreckage found is that of MH 370.”

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters Monday that the search would continue.

“Now until we locate some actual wreckage from the aircraft and then do the regression analysis that might tell us where the aircraft went into the ocean, we’ll be operating on guesstimates,” Abbott told reporters at the Pearce air force base near Perth.

Photo: Xinhua/Zuma Press/MCT