Current Could Push Oil Spill Up East Coast

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is expected to strike the Louisiana coastline , and officials are bracing for impacts to shorebirds, turtles, shellfish and other endangered wildlife. But many ocean scientists are now raising concerns that a powerful current could spread the still-bubbling slick from the Florida Keys all the way to Cape Hatteras off North Carolina.

read here

Posted in oceans, pollution | Leave a comment

World’s first coral reef atlas published

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

The coral reefs of the Central Indian Ocean have now been quantified and mapped in the world’s first coral reef atlas, prepared by the Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad.

The atlas, called the ‘Coral Reef Atlas of the World’, also gives a report on the health of different reefs.

It has emerged that Gujarat’s coral reef cover has eroded by 23.2% over the past two decades. One of the main factors cited for this degradation is anthropogenic influence, i.e., impact of human activity.

A detailed assessment of the health of the coral reefs in the Central Indian Ocean is given in the Coral Reef Atlas along with an assessment of the health of the other coral reefs of the world.

The atlas gives an idea of the health of the reefs through maps indicating their extent, distribution and habitat.

It is interesting that while the reef at Andaman & Nicobar Islands has almost recovered from the damage caused by the deadly tsunami of 2004, the coral reef in the Gulf of Kutch (GoK) are in a ‘degrading condition’. Incidentally, the GoK has the highest concentration of corals along mainland India.

India ranks tenth in the world in coral cover. Indonesia tops the list, followed by the Philippines and Australia. The atlas covers the coral reefs of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives and the British Indian Ocean Territory.

Giving a detailed map of the coral reef distribution between 25 degree north and 25 degree south latitudes, the atlas reveals some striking facts through a comparison with a previous study of 1987.

Source(s) :

DNA

GIS Development

Posted in map making, News, oceans | Leave a comment

Russia and Norway Reach Accord on Arctic Border

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

The leaders of Russia and Norway resolved a 40-year-old dispute over dividing the Barents Sea and part of the Arctic Ocean into clear economic zones extending to the edge of Europe’s northern continental shelf. The agreement could herald oil and natural gas exploration in a huge and potentially lucrative region.When Russian scientists planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole in 2007, it seemed that a “race to the Arctic” was on, with northern nations aggressively jostling for the right to exploit resources that were previously out of reach.

The Norwegian and Russian frontiers cap Europe’s northernmost bulge. The new delimitation extends the two countries’ 122-mile land border northward beyond all the islands of the Barents Sea and into the Arctic Ocean, although the two leaders did not provide an exact northward distance.

Conventional practice elsewhere in the world has been to position maritime boundaries at the midpoint between opposing land masses, and for 40 years that has been Norway’s goal with respect to its Svalbard archipelago to the west and the Russian island groups of Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land to the east.

Russia argued instead for a “meridian line” boundary running more or less straight north from the mainland, which would have provided it with an additional 67,000 square miles of economic territory — about equal to the entire Norwegian sector of the North Sea, whose oil resources have made Norway a rich country.

full story

Posted in Natural Resources, News | Leave a comment

Endangered Sea Turtles at Risk from Gulf Oil Spill

Posted on May 2, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

Endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico are likely to be affected by the oil spilling from the broken Deepwater Horizon wellhead during their peak migration to nesting beaches, warn scientists and conservation workers who have invested decades in the sea turtles’ recovery.

read here

Posted in BIODIVERSITY, Ecosystem | Leave a comment