Rutgers Underwater Glider Halfway to Europe

One of the Rutgers ocean gliders just made it halfway across the Atlantic.

On April 27, 2009, students and scientists from Rutgers University launched a small underwater robotic glider off the coast of New Jersey. The glider was christened The Scarlet Knight by Zdenka Willis, director of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System. While previous explorers like Columbus and Lindbergh used boats or planes to cross the Atlantic, The Scarlet Knight will attempt to be the first underwater robot to cross the Atlantic Ocean. With help from a number of international partners, students from the Coastal Ocean Observation Lab will pilot The Scarlet Knight Glider on its eight-month voyage.

h/t to reader Thomas Tomayo.

Big Offshore Gas Find

Shell has announced a new discovery of natural gas in deep water and west of Norway.

Shell, operator of the prospect, made the find in a wildcat well at a depth of 1,376 meters (4,515 feet), the greatest water depth ever in Norway, the directorate said. Wildcat wells are drilled in zones not known to be productive. “In a Norwegian context, this is a medium-size discovery,” Bente Nyland, head of the directorate, said in an interview on TV2. “It does open up for new opportunities to the west and may be an indication of a petroleum system that continues westwards, where we haven’t conducted any exploration.”

The only challenge for this field seems to be the distance to shore.

“The depth of the discovery isn’t a particular problem, there’s a lot of development at such depths elsewhere in the world,” Nyland said. “The challenge is that it lies far from land, so it will require a significant engineering process with a possible pipeline from the field.”

The Barents Observer reports the rig Leiv Eriksson is currently doing drilling in the appraisal well.

Drilling in this part of the Norwegian Sea has so far been sparse. A major finding in the area would move the Norwegian oil and gas industry further north. From before, the Lofoten waters and Barents Sea is a top priority for the industry.

Ancient Tsunami

BBC has an article about an ancient tsunami hitting New York:

A huge wave crashed into the New York City region 2,300 years ago, dumping sediment and shells across Long Island and New Jersey and casting wood debris far up the Hudson River. The scenario, proposed by scientists, is undergoing further examination to verify radiocarbon dates and to rule out other causes of the upheaval. Sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate that some sort of violent force swept the Northeast coastal region in 300BC.

via instapundit.com

USNS Impeccable

The USNS Impeccable was involved with a confrontation with Chinese ships in the South China Sea.

Chinese "fishermen" nearly made off with some of the US Navy’s most modern and secret submarine tracking equipment, it seems, in a South China Sea incident Sunday that is making diplomatic waves.

Unarmed American seamen on the USNS Impeccable were reduced to turning their firehoses on five Chinese military and fishing vessels – one of which approached to within 25 feet before the US ship withdrew, according to the US Navy account.

The incident is the latest in a string of clashes and standoffs between Chinese and US military forces in the South China Sea, though with both Beijing and Washington apparently keen to maintain close relations, this affair is not expected to boil over.

The Impeccable is a designated T-AGOS vessel built to tow a Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System.

Impeccable class ships have a hull form based on that of Victorious. Acoustic systems should include an active low frequency towed array, which has a series of modules each of which houses two high-powered active transducers. These can be used with either mono or bistatic receivers.

Floating City

An interesting idea for a floating city is described in this article on CNN.

Friedman said the floating city may be built in modular pieces so that city blocks and neighborhoods can be recombined to create new urban layouts.

The idea of building cities on the sea is not new, he said, but the Seasteading Institute has come closer to realizing the goal than others.

"A lot of people over the past hundred plus years have had this idea and even specifically building cities on the ocean to try out new forms of government," he said. "But they've pretty much been totally imagined and if they did try, they totally failed."

Cape Wind EIS Released

The Cape Wind EIS was released by the Minerals Management Service.

A federal agency said Friday that the nation’s first offshore wind farm, proposed for the waters off Cape Cod, posed no serious environmental threat, bringing it a major step closer to fruition.

However, there may be other legal hurdles as mentioned by Jonathan Adler.

Project opponents also promised litigation and other efforts to prevent the erection of wind turbines in the Sound. Senator Kennedy, for one, voiced his continued opposition and predicted any lease to Cape Wind would be overturned.

Rhode Island is in the midst of studying the potential for its own wind farm offshore as we mentioned previously.

Global Sea Ice Levels Growing

Michael Asher recently blogged about sea ice growth in Daily Tech.

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.

Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.

The data is being reported by the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.

Each year, millions of square kilometers of sea ice melt and refreeze. However, the mean ice anomaly -- defined as the seasonally-adjusted difference between the current value and the average from 1979-2000, varies much more slowly. That anomaly now stands at just under zero, a value identical to one recorded at the end of 1979, the year satellite record-keeping began.

h/t to reader Andy Maher.

Navy Settles NRDC Suit on Sonar testing

WAPO reports that the Navy and NRDC settled a lawsuit on Friday over the effects of sonar on marine mammals:

HONOLULU -- The Navy has settled a lawsuit filed by environmentalists challenging its use of sonar in hundreds of submarine-hunting exercises around the world.

The Navy said Saturday the deal reached with the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups requires it to continue to research how sonar affects whales and other marine mammals.

It doesn't require sailors to adopt additional measures to protect the animals when they use sonar.

The agreement comes one month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Navy in another sonar lawsuit the NRDC filed.

In return for continuing the tests of mid-frequency sonar, the Navy has agreed to fund continued research.

The Navy said the settlement, which was reached Friday, calls on it to spend $14.75 million over three years on marine mammal research topics of interest to both the Navy and the plaintiffs.

The Navy said the long-range research program it adopted under the settlement is basically the same as the one it set out to follow in August 2005, two months before the lawsuit was filed.

It looks to me like the Navy got their way on this.