Birthday boat sinks in southern Vietnam; 15 dead

The Jakarta Post –

A little boy’s birthday party went tragically wrong when a double-decker tour boat capsized during a storm in southern Vietnam, killing 15 people – including the 3-year-old being honored and four other children, officials said Sturday.

Divers recovered the bodies, including two Chinese adults, from the Saigon River on Saturday afternoon, but one passenger remained missing, said Trieu Van Giau, head of Binh Duong provincial waterway police. The incident remains under investigation, but bad weather is being blamed.

Several peole managed to swim to safety following Friday evening’s incident, which occurred while the restaurant-style boat was cruising the river during heavy rains and violent winds, said Le Van Hieu, chief of Binh Nham village in Binh Duong province, 19 miles (30 kilometers) northwest of Ho Chi Minh City

“It’s horrible to see the birthday party for that 3-year-old boy turn into a tragedy,” he said.

The boat was about 100 yards (meters) away from the terminal when it went down around 7 p.m, he said.

According to state-run media, a Vietnamese businessman was throwing the birthday celebration. Thereports said the father managed to survive, but that nine family members – including his wife, son and 6-year-old daughter – did not make it to shore.

One survivor was quoted as saying he was having a beer with friends when the boat started to sink. He said it flooded with water so fast that he wasn’t ableto reach his wife and son on the other side of the deck. Others reported that all of the windows had been closed to keep the rain out, which may have hindered passengers’ escape.

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Heavy penalties set vs owners of cargo ship that destroyed corals

Business Mirror – 

Ocean Acidification and the Battle Between Coral and Seaweed

Smithsonian Mag –

As we pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the ocean absorbs some of it. And as CO2 dissolves, it makes the oceans’ water more and more acidic.

This acidification creates plenty of potential problems for life in the oceans, but corals might have it the worst. If the ocean becomes too acidic they won’t be able to create their calcified skeletons; the chemical reaction they rely on slows down under lower pH levels .

But scientists in Australia say that the situation is more dire than expected. In their study, published in Ecology Letters, they show that higher CO2 levels may be give seaweed an advantage in a competition with coral.

Corals compete with seaweeds for space on the reef. When corals are healthy, the coral–seaweed competition reaches a balance. But if the corals aren’t doing so well because of something like eutrophication, then seaweed can take over.

In this new study, the researchers studied the coral-seaweed battle in miniature, setting up bits of each (Acropora intermedia, the most common hard coral in the Great Barrier Reef, and Lobophora papenfussii, an abundant reef seaweed) in tanks in the lab. Each tank had one of four CO2 levels in the air above it, resulting in four different pH levels: 300 parts per million (equivalent to pre-industrial CO2 and pH levels), 400 ppm (present-day), 560 ppm (mid-21st-century estimate) and 1140 ppm (late-21st-century estimate).

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How a Swimming Pool Can Cool a Power Plant

Steve Rousseau –

Inspired by the enormous swimming pools he builds as part of his real estate business, Chilean biochemist Fernando Fischmann and his company, Crystal Lagoons Corp., have devised a new design for a power plant cooling system. It recycles and cleans the water rather than dumping it out to sea and endangering wildlife.

Fernando Fischmann is a Chilean biochemist turned real estate mogul. And, if his new idea works out, he could make another career turn—inventor of a way to make power plants more ocean-friendly. Inspired by the giant pools he’s built for resorts, Fischmann came up with the idea of using closed pools to provide the water to cool large power plants, reducing their environmental impact.

It all started with Fischmann’s filtration system. Any pool owner knows the pain of keeping one clean, but Fischmann was working on a different scale. The largest pool made by his company, Crystal Lagoons, was built for the San Alfonso del Mar resort in Chile: It contains enough water to fill 6000 ordinary swimming pools, Fischmann says.

Cleaning it the way you would your backyard pool would require 6000 standard filters and another 6000 doses of chlorine. Fischmann put his biochemistry skills to work figuring out a more practical solution.

The resultant water treatment system, which took six years to develop, is composed of only two steps. “You need permanent application of chemicals and then a filtration system,” says Fischmann.

The Crystal Lagoons technology doesn’t add a constant flow of chemicals to the water. Instead, 400 sensors per acre continually monitor bacteria and algae levels. When those levels get too high, the system automatically injects the same chemicals used to treat drinking water, such as chlorine (to disinfect the water) and lime (to keep the pH level balanced).

Because these chemicals are applied more efficiently, the amount that the pools need is 100 times less than what’s used in an equivalent drinking water system. Ultrasonic pulses then cause algae to cluster up, making the filtration stage easier and more efficient.

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Adelaide dive site buoy deliberately cut loose

Express Advocate – 

Police have confirmed the navigation marker and mooring buoy which went missing from the Adelaide dive site were deliberately cut loose.

Brisbane Water police are investigating and want assistance to find those responsible.

The mooring buoy was found soon after it went missing on May 1, while the navigation marker was found on May 9 on a beach north of Hawks Nest.

Acting commander Steve Kentwell said the incident posed an extreme danger to boats and divers in the area.

“Tampering with or removing navigational buoys not only poses a threat to watercraft and those onboard but anyone in the water as well,” Supt Kentwell said.

“The area from which the buoys were removed is a recreational dive site and there was a real danger of a larger vessel striking the sunken battleship or divers who might have been in the area.

“It is an act of stupidity that had the potential to cause serious injury or death.”

A Primary Industries Department crown lands division spokesman said both the buoy and the marker were back at Avoca Beach but weather conditions had delayed completion of the re-installation.

“Options for making the system more robust are being investigated,” the spokesman said.

 

Belief in their buried recalls an era marked by pirates

Christopher Klein –

Captain Jack Sparrow swashbuckles back onto silver screens this weekend in the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean’’ movie. While warm Caribbean climes are naturally thought of as pirate territory, it’s often forgotten that bygone buccaneers, like many vacationers today, summered in New England hideaways. And where pirates once lurked, tales of buried treasure endure.

“Buccaneers started to appear off New England as early as the 1540s, and through 1720 New England was very closely associated with piracy,’’ says Stephen O’Neill, who teaches a course on the history of piracy at Suffolk University. According to O’Neill, about 20 percent of the buccaneers in the “Golden Age of Piracy’’ at the turn of the 18th century were New Englanders.

Far from being universally feared, O’Neill says pirates were at one time welcomed with open arms in cities such as Boston and Newport. “The Colonies were fairly poor, and pirates were the only people who had hard cash,’’ he says.

And legends have grown that notorious sea bandits such as Blackbeard and Captain William Kidd stashed some of that hard cash among the island-studded harbors and secluded coves of New England’s jagged coastline. While there is little historical evidence that chests overflowing with jewels, gold bars, and pieces of eight are underfoot, that hasn’t stopped centuries of New Englanders from tilling soil and sand in search of interred fortunes.

To see the remnants of one of New England’s most bizarre pirate treasure hunts, I head to the Lynn Woods Reservation and Dungeon Rock, a geological formation that bears a striking resemblance to a human skull worthy of a Jolly Roger. It made an apt hideout for pirate Thomas Veal — that is, until 1658, when he was supposedly entombed inside one of the rock’s caves along with his ill-gotten goods in an earthquake.

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