Down world’s deepest pool

Deccan Chronicle - 

Daredevil free-diver Guillaume Néry has lungs of steel.

The 29-year-old has become the first in the world to deep dive 33 metres to the bottom of NEMO 33 — a container filled with 2.5 million litres of non-chlorinated spring water.

The NEMO 33 is a tank in Brussels, Belgium that’s being used to train scuba divers.

The pool is also capable of simulating varied conditions which scuba divers may face during work hours.

Surprisingly, according to reports, this pool is rather tame for Frenchman Néry.

In 2004, he plunged 96 metres in Saint-Leu in France and then in 2006, he beat that feat with a 109-metre dive in Nice, France.

For the NEMO 33 dive, experts feel, Nery must have held his breath for a good five minutes plus.

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Ella-Marie, 10, one of the youngest qualified scuba divers in the world

Zoe Forsey -

A ten-year-old girl from Watford is one of the youngest people in the world to become a qualified scuba diver.

Ella-Maria Lopez, who is a Year 5 pupil at Knutsford School, first discovered her passion for the hobby when she tried a pool dive while on a family holiday in Ibiza.

She then went on another trial dive in an enclosed lagoon and immediately realised her passion.

Ella-Maria, of Radlett Road, said: “It is fun to do and it is a really great experience to see lots of fish and coral.

Sometimes you just find yourself stopping and looking at the fish – it is breathtaking.

“I never get scared when I am diving. My friends think it is really cool that I am doing it.

They keep asking me what I see.”

In order to get her PADI diving qualification Ella-Maria had to complete a series of dives including shore and boat dives while on a family holiday in Egypt.

Divers must be over the age of ten to complete the training course, and Ella-Maria started hers on the day of her tenth birthday.

She had to prove to the instructors that she could complete a number of different skills including clearing her mask and removing and replacing all her kit while underwater.

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Port Royal to be on UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites

Jamaica Information Service - 

The Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT) has commenced work towards securing Port Royal’s inclusion on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) list of World Heritage sites.

The process involves a series of activities, focusing mainly on the portions of the Sunken City, and adjoining areas over which the town’s existing layout was built, culminating with the preparation and submission of the nomination dossier to UNESCO in July 2014.

Port Royal is currently on UNESCO’s World Heritage tentative list, having been so placed in February 2009.

One of the activities, an assessment of the sites, was conducted over the last week by a team, headed by Professor of the Nautical Archaeology programme, Anthropology Department, Texas A&M University, in the United States, Dr. Donny Hamilton.

Speaking at the presentation of the findings, at the Morgan’s Harbour Hotel, Port Royal, on May 29, the JNHT’s Technical Director in charge of Archaeology, Dorrick Gray, said the week-long exercise entailed visiting and viewing the sunken structures beneath the sea, within the harbour, and under the town’s existing buildings and general layout, totalling upwards of 51 acres, the state of which is well preserved.

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A treasure trove of marine history

Janis Blower - 

A unique collection of documents and other records, much of it relating to shipbuilding and marine engineering in the North East, is being made available to the public on Tyneside.

The School of Marine Science’s Special Collection at Newcastle University dates back, in some cases, to the 19th century, and covers industries such as marine engine building, shiprepairing, and shipbreaking among others.

The collection includes company records, brochures and catalogues, ship and yard plans and photographs.

Wonderfully, there is also a British shipbuilding database, listing some 80,000 British-built ships of the 19th and 20th centuries, searchable by name etc, though this is only available in-house and not on the Internet.

Funding of the collection has been made possible by a number of organisations, among them the Catherine Cookson Foundation and the Sir James Knott Trust.

It includes company records of Swan Hunter, going back to 1890; British Shipbuilders and its subsidiaries; shipbreaking companies, such as Hughes Bolckow of Blyth, and North Eastern Marine at Wallsend.

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Dugongs in Balikpapan gulf face extinction

The Jakarta Post - 

The endangered dugong (Dugong dugon), or seacow, which is found in the Balikpapan gulf, East Kalimantan, Indonesia, is at risk of extinction as its numbers have continued to decrease due to industrial expansion, a researcher says.

Stanislav Lhota, a researcher from the Czech Republic, said “Massive industrial expansion, which includes waste and land expansions, has caused sedimentation in Balikpapan gulf waters.

Heavy metals and other pollutants, such as those from vessels’ lubricants, also threaten seaweed — the seacows’ food,” Lhota said recently.

Lhota cited noise pollution from vessels traveling in and out of the harbor as another factor worsening the dugongs’ habitat.

“[The busy traffic] is scaring the dugongs and forcing them to go far away,” he said.

The downstream area of Balikpapan gulf has witnessed rapid industrial expansion; the Balikpapan administration plans to broaden the expansion to the upstream area also.

“If this happens, sea grass along the Balikpapan coastline will disappear due to sedimentation and chemical pollution from industrial activities,” he said, adding that if the local administration turns the west side of the city into an industrial area, “Balikpapan will no longer have a healthy coast”.

In the long run, the planned expansion will also affect the habitats of coral, green turtles and irrawaddy dolphins, he added.

Dugong, one of the rarest animals in Indonesia, can be found from Madagascar and East Africa to India and Australia.

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Shipwreck in Solent is Flower of Ugie boat

BBC News - 

A mysterious shipwreck that lay in the Solent for 160 years has been identified by archaeologists as the 19th Century sailing barque the Flower of Ugie.

The wreck lies on a sand bed in the eastern Solent off the Hampshire coast and was first discovered by fishermen in 2003.

It is only recently that archaeologists have been able to name the vessel. Hampshire and Wight for Maritime Archaeology (HWTMA) identified the ship’s remains as that of the Flower of Ugie which sank in 1852 following a great storm in the English Channel.

The ship’s identity has been revealed to coincide with the release of a new book by HWTMA about the history of the wreck.

Dr Julian Whitewright, a maritime archaeologist at the group, said: “On the night of the 26th December 1852, while carrying coal from Sunderland to Cartagena in Spain, the Flower of Ugie ran into a storm off Portland.

“The ferocious weather that battered the whole of the south coast that night nearly capsized the ship and the crew were forced to cut down two masts to right it.

“In the early hours of the following day the Flower of Ugie sought shelter in the Solent, but it grounded on Horse Tail Sand and the crew were forced to abandon ship before the vessel broke apart later that day.”

The vessel was not seen again until 2003 when a local fisherman snagged his nets on the wreck.

It lay in two parts, 12 metres below the surface of the water.

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Lies you’ve been told about the Pacific garbage patch

Annalee Newitz -

You’ve probably heard of the “Pacific garbage patch,” also called the “trash vortex.”

It’s a region of the North Pacific ocean where the northern jet stream and the southern trade winds, moving opposite directions, create a vast, gently circling region of water called the North Pacific Gyre — and at its center, there are tons of plastic garbage.

You may even have seen this picture of the garbage patch, above — right? Wrong.

That image, widely mislabeled as a shot of the Pacific garbage patch, is actually from Manila harbor.

And it’s just one of many misconceptions the public has about what’s really happening to plastics in the ocean.

We talked with Scripps Institution marine biologist Miriam Goldstein, who has just completed a study of how plastic is changing the ecosystem in the North Pacific Gyre, about myths and realities of the Pacific garbage patch.

“That picture of the guy in the canoe has been following me around my whole career!” Goldstein laughed when I brought it up.

“I think it’s an example of media telephone, where somebody wanted something dramatic to illustrate their story — and then through the magic of the internet, the picture got mislabeled.”

Goldstein has gone on several research trips to the garbage patch, 1,000 miles off the coast of California, and has even swum in it. “We have never seen anything like that picture,” she asserted.

“I’ve never seen it personally, and we’ve never seen it on satellite.”

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