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Monday, July 28, 2008

China Plans to Install Deep Sea Mooring System in Arctic

China will soon set up its first annual deep sea sub-surface mooring system in Arctic Ocean to observe the long term changes in marine. The system will gather information on temperature, speed of currents and salinity at various depths in the coming years in the ocean, members of the country' third Arctic expedition team has said.

"It would facilitate studies of the impact of environmental changes in the Arctic Ocean on global climate, especially on China". A trap would catch marine lives on regular basis for scientific studies, they said aboard Xuelong ice breaker or "Snow Dragon", that left Shanghai on July 11 with 122 scientists and logistics staff for a 75 day expedition.

The team will study the polar regions, air quality, distinctive maritime resources and conduct comprehensive research on meteorological and geological conditions, it said. In 2003 China deployed a 40 day mooring system in the Bering Sea. The system will be installed in Chukchi Sea waters, where the currents from the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean converge.

The area is considered is very importance for scientific research on water variation, Dr Chen Hong Xia, a member of the expedition team, said. The system would be set up by the 3rd expedition in due course and retrieved by Chinese researchers scheduled to enter the Arctic region in 2009.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Deep Sea Rock, a Place to Harbor CO2

Every one of us know that the world has a carbon dioxide problem, and there are loads of suggestions on how to dealing it. Sequestration is a method, keeping off the gas out of the atmosphere through long-term storage. A great idea, if you can figure out where to put it. Lot of ideas has been proposed, like pumping it into old oil and gas fields or saline aquifers. At the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, researchers propose injecting CO2 into deep sea basalt formations, specifically a large expanse of the rock below 8,000 feet of the ocean on the Juan de Fuca plate in the Pacific Northwest.

Taro Takahashi, David S. Goldberg and Angela L. Slagle suggest in 'The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' that these porous deposits got many advantages. One is that minerals in the rock could react with CO2, forming stable carbonates. Another is that the deposits are blanketed by 1,000 feet of sediments which could block leaks. And the area is near the coast, so CO2 could be piped straight from power plants to injection sites. The researchers estimate there is enough basalt to store more than 120 years' worth of industrial and power-plant emissions by the United States.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Greenhouse Gases Threat Deep Sea Pacific Life

Oceans welling up from the depths along the Pacific Coast from Canada to Mexico, threatening a variety of marine organisms as carbon dioxide saturate the water and increase its corrosive acidity, government scientists report. Now the world's oceans take up tons of the global warming gas each year, and thus help to slow the pace of climate change, but the benefit is far outweighed by severe and damaging changes in water's chemistry, according to seagoing oceanographers.

In separate recent reports in the journal Science and in congressional testimony, the scientists warn that the rate of 'ocean acidification' is mounting, and say damage to some of the most essential deep sea living organisms in the ocean's food web is becoming more apparent. The acid can put in danger all sorts of marine animals, from shells to microscopic plankton to the beaks of giant squid, biologists are finding from seagoing studies and laboratory experiments.

A chemical oceanographer in Seattle, Richard Feely with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimates that the world's oceans have become at least 30% more acidic since the Industrial Age began more than 200 years ago, and that if greenhouse gas emissions continue hysterical, the world's oceans by this century will become 150% more acidic than they are today. "While the changes are alarming, it's practically impossible to predict how this unprecedented acidification will affect entire ecosystems," says Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Carnegie Institute's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Deep Sea Chemical Pollution

WASHINGTON - Marine scientists in U.S. say that they've found manmade chemical pollutants in deep sea squids and octopods, evidence of contamination in the deep ocean food web. Michael Vecchione from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and his colleagues Ellen Harvey, Michael Unger and George Vadas from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science said the chemical contaminants were found in 9 species of cephalopods; a class of organisms which includes octopods, squids, nautiluses and cuttlefishesss.

"It was surprising to find measurable and sometimes high amounts of toxic pollutants in such a deep and remote environment," Vecchione said. Among the chemicals detected were tributyltin; polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs; brominated diphenyl ethers; and DDT - dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane. The contaminants are known as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP) because they don't degrade and continue to persist in the environment for a very long time.

Cephalopods are vital to the diet of cetaceans, including dolphins, whales and porpoises. Although there have been reports of accumulation of POPs in the blubber and tissues of whales and other predatory marine mammals and some deep-sea fish, the researchers said their study is the first to focus on deep-sea cephalopods

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Scientists to Unlock Deep Sea Secrets of Earth's Crust

Scientists from Durham University will use robots to explore the depths of Atlantic Ocean to study about underwater volcanoes which has built the Earth's crust, says Eurekalert. The Durham experts have led an international team of scientists aboard on Britain's Royal Research Ship James Cook that is sailing from Ponta Delgada, San Miguel, in the Azores...

During this 5 week expedition they will use explorer robots to map individual volcanoes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge tectonic plate boundary that effectively runs down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean; almost 2 miles below the sea's surface. They will then use another robot, called ISIS, to gather samples from the volcanoes which will be dated using various techniques to shed more light on the timescales behind the growth of the Earth's crust and the related tectonic plates.

Principal investigator Professor Roger Searle, in the Department of Earth Sciences, at Durham University, said: "The problem is that we don't know how fast these volcanoes form or if they all come from melting the same piece of mantle rock. "The ridges may form quickly, perhaps in just 10,000 years with hundreds of thousands of years inactivity before the next one forms, or they may take half-a-million years to form, the most recent having begun before the rise of modern humans.

"Understanding the processes forming the crust is important, because the whole ocean floor, some 60% of the Earth's surface, has been recycled and re-formed many times over the Earth's history." Professor Searle's team will include scientists from Southampton, National Oceanography Centre, the Open University, the University of Paris and several institutions from USA. They will date the volcanoes using radiometric dating and by measuring the changing strength of the Earth's magnetic field through time as recorded by the natural magnetism of the rocks.

China Plans to Install Deep Sea Mooring System in ...

Deep Sea Rock, a Place to Harbor CO2

Greenhouse Gases Threat Deep Sea Pacific Life

Deep Sea Chemical Pollution

Scientists to Unlock Deep Sea Secrets of Earth's C...

May 2008

June 2008

July 2008