ALES at Stony Brook: November 20, 2011 The Epic Catch

ALES at Stony Brook: November 20, 2011 The Epic Catch: As you may have heard by this point, one of the primary objectives of our work out here is to differentiate the acoustical properties of k...

Antarctic Salp Genomics Cruise 2011: Picture of the Day - November 21, 2011

Antarctic Salp Genomics Cruise 2011: Picture of the Day - November 21, 2011: Cape Petrels ride the waves in Bransfield Strait, Antarctica. Photo Peter H. Wiebe

Processes Regulating Iron Supply at the Mesoscale - Ross Sea (PRISM-RS): Puntas Arenas - our port of departure

Processes Regulating Iron Supply at the Mesoscale - Ross Sea (PRISM-RS): Puntas Arenas - our port of departure: Punta Arenas is a port city in the extreme south of Chile . The city has a good infrastructure, in particular an abundance of shops, such a...

Antarctic Salp Genomics Cruise 2011: Picture of the Day - November 11, 2011

Antarctic Salp Genomics Cruise 2011: Picture of the Day - November 11, 2011: AWAY AT LAST! An LMG Zodiac plows through the waves toward Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island, Antarctica. At the helm is Jullie Jackson...

Agreement to create biggest marine reserve at Antarctica

Canberra, Nov 4 (IANS) Delegates from 25 nations at a Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) meeting in the Tasmanian capital Hobart Friday agreed to a plan to create the world’s largest marine reserve in the waters around Antarctica.

The meeting accepted a framework for protected areas in the Ross Sea and Southern Ocean, reported Xinhua.

While key countries fishing there at the moment includes Russia, Norway, South Korea, New Zealand, Britain and Spain, the proposal will prohibit industrial fishing in the reserves.

The Antarctic Ocean Alliance (AOA), a coalition of environmental groups including Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, said the agreement was a positive step.

“(The commission’s) member countries now have all the tools to create a circumpolar network of marine reserves,” Greenpeace spokesman Richard Page said in a statement released Friday.

“(They) must act now to protect the penguins, seals, seabirds and other vulnerable marine life inhabiting the icy waters around Antarctica and so lead the way in protecting the high seas.”

CCAMLR is set to make a decision by the end of next year on exactly what areas will be protected in the Southern Ocean.

Signatory parties to the convention include Australia, China, Japan, Britain and the US.

Huge Crack Discovered in Antarctic Glacier

A huge, emerging crack has been discovered in one of Antarctica's glaciers, with a NASA plane mission providing the first-ever detailed airborne measurements of a major iceberg breakup in progress. 

NASA's Operation Ice Bridge, the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown, is in the midst of its third field campaign from Punta Arenas, Chile. The six-year mission will yield an unprecedented three-dimensional view of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice. The glaciers of the Antarctic, and Greenland, Ice Sheets, commonly birth icebergs that break off from the main ice streams where they flow in to the sea, a process called calving.

The crack was found in c, which last calved a significant iceberg in 2001; some scientists have speculated recently that it was primed to calve again. But until an Oct. 14 IceBridge flight, no one had seen any evidence of the ice shelf beginning to break apart. Since then, a more detailed look back at satellite imagery seems to show the first signs of the crack in early October.

"We are actually now witnessing how it happens and it's very exciting for us," said IceBridge project scientist 

Michael Studinger of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It's part of a natural process, but it’s pretty exciting to be here and actually observe it while it happens."

Gravity pulls the ice in the glacier westward along Antarctica's Hudson Mountains toward the Amundsen Sea. A floating tongue of ice reaches out 30 miles (48 kilometers) into the Amundsen beyond the grounding line, the below-sea-level point where the ice shelf locks onto the continental bedrock. As ice pushes toward the sea from the interior, inevitably the ice shelf will crack and send a large iceberg free. [Photo Album: Antarctica, Iceberg Maker]

Pine Island Glacier is of particular interest to scientists because it is big and unstable and so is one of the 

largest sources of uncertainty in global sea level rise projections.

A primary goal of Operation IceBridge is to put the same instruments over the exact same flight lines and satellite tracks, year after year, to gather meaningful and accurate data of how ice sheets and glaciers are changing over time. But discovering a developing rift in one of the most significant science targets in the world of glaciology offered a brief change in agenda for the Oct. 26 flight, if only for a 30-minute diversion from the day's prescribed flight lines.

The IceBridge team observed the rift running across the ice shelf for about 18 miles (29 km), using an instrument called the Airborne Topographic Mapper, which uses a technology called lidar (light detection and ranging) that sends out a laser beam that bounces off a surface and back to the device. The lidar instrument measured the rift's shoulders about 820 feet (250 meters) apart at its widest, although the rift stretched about 260 feet (79 meters) wide along most of the crack. The deepest points from the ice shelf surface ranged from 165 to 195 feet (50 to 60 meters).

When the iceberg breaks free, it will cover about 340 square miles (880 square kilometers) of surface area. Radar measurements suggested the ice shelf in the region of the rift is about 1,640 feet (500 meters) feet thick, with only about 160 feet of the shelf floating above water and the rest submerged.

It is likely that once the iceberg floats away, the leading edge of the ice shelf will have receded farther than at any time since its location was first recorded in the 1940s.

 

This story was provided by OurAmazingPlanet.com, a sister site of SPACE.com. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Melting Norwegian ice spawns massive surge in cod stocks

Helped by a warming climate, Norway’s near monopoly on the stuff of fish’n chips looks set to grow. 

Fishermen and scientists here agree they’ve never seen as many cod as they’re catching now, and they say melting Arctic ice is the reason. 

Researchers have said the receding ice has opened up larger areas of shallower Arctic water in the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea into which young fish are fleeing predators. They confirm their test catches from a globally warmed Atlantic Current have turned up record numbers -- about 120 billion -- of yearlings destined to become commercial fish. 

Fishermen are mostly pleased with the development: “On behalf of future generations, I’m truly glad for the cod count,” fisherman Kaare Ludvigsen told broadcaster NRK. 

In contrast to Atlantic Canada, where the cod fishery collapsed in the 1980’s due to overfishing, Norway’s commercial cod banks are still the richest in the world. Coastal waters stretching into the arctic from the Lofoten Islands to the Spitsbergen archipelago are the spawning sites for three types of migrating cod schools.

That migration now runs farther north than ever, and Russian and Norwegian researchers have found birthing fish in latitudes beyond 82 degrees north. 

Such is the cod’s new clout that Norwegian fishermen are worried the seabed where the fish dine will be stripped clean for future generations of cod, just as they worried the Kamchatka crab, or king crab, had been bulldozing the cod’s ecosystem. They asked for and received larger catch quotas to make room for other commercial fish, as their three-species winter fishing season starts to roll.

Mr. Ludvigsen’s fishermen colleagues met in Trondheim this week to discuss whether there were “too many” fish in the sea and agreed to more than double their catch in 2012 to 751,000 tons.

Norway exported a record 1.12 billion kroner ($201.7-million) worth of wild cod in September, but not since the frugal years just after the Second World War have there been such abundant catches.

In the Arctic, meanwhile, seasonal ice flows have shrunken to their smallest covering in 8,000 years, according to a recent German study.

Norway, meanwhile, has pressed its commercial maritime rights nearly to the North Pole and won recognition for its claims at the United Nations in New York.