Missing Australians Rescued & more– 22nd Aug 2023

Ahoy from Tibidabo! This is Rorshok’s Ocean Update from the 22nd of August twenty twenty-three A summary of what's going down in the 70% surface of the Earth covered in salt water

After two days of research, the four Australians missing after their boat went off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province on Sunday, the 13th, were found alive. Three of them were floating on surfboards in the ocean, while the last one was found miles away.

Indonesian authorities reported that the boat was seen on Monday the 14th, near Sarang Alu island, but the heavy rain and big waves made any attempt to find the surfers impossible on Monday.

The Australian government expressed its gratitude towards the Indonesian authorities for their effort in the search for the missing people.

In other news, Egyptian seamen were stuck for two weeks in the Black Sea because of a traffic jam of cargo ships. All the vessels were waiting their turn to enter the Danube River to pick up Ukrainian grain. Finally, on the weekend of the 12th and 13th of August, they had a quick stop at the Romanian Black Sea port of Sulina to refurnish supplies of drinks and food.

However, they were alarmed as the next stops were going to be in areas of the Danube where Russia already attacked two Ukrainian river ports. The situation is tense after Russia withdrew the deal offering safe passage for the vessels picking up grain in Odessa last month and on Sunday, the 13th of August, a Russian patrol ship fired and temporarily boarded a cargo ship sailing through the Black Sea.

Romania is now offering a lifeline if Ukraine agrees to ship more grain out of Romanian ports on the Danube, like Galati and Braila, close to the Ukrainian borders and protected by NATO.

Moving on to new discoveries. A crew of scientists from Australia and the United States has discovered a marine animal with twenty arms in an expedition near Antarctica. The sea creature has a shape similar to a strawberry. Its colors range from red to purple, and they are enormous in size. They generally live around a thousand meters (or three thousand and three hundred feet) underwater, and they are remotely related to starfish.

From one sea animal to another. More than 65% of the whales examined in a graduate student’s investigation had microplastic in their blubber and lungs. The research will be published on the 15th of October on Environmental Pollution, and it was recently published online. Greg Merrill Junior, the author of the research, and graduate student at the Duke University Marine Lab, remarks that this discovery shows that microscopic plastics can travel beyond the digestive system and reach the tissues.

The sea animals used as samples were thirty-two stranded or subsistence-harvested whales from Alaska, North Carolina, and California. All four tissues analyzed from different parts of the whales’ bodies contained plastics. In the next step of the research, the student will run toxicology tests on the whales’ tissues.

Still on whales. The phenomenon of whales stranding is becoming more frequent due to climate change. After the discovery of a dead humpback calf in the Southern Group island of Mangaia, on Friday, the 11th of August, the biologist Nan Hauser declared that “beach calves are becoming scary”.

Because of climate change, the currents are changing and the waves are getting higher. Consequently, calves are pushed away from their mothers and they get separated.

The whale migration path is changing because the waters where they used to go are now too warm and lack food. Hauser declared that when she started her research in nineteen ninety-eight, whales were showing up on Rarotonga around June, starting their migratory season, and being fully active in July, but now they don’t show up before August.

And still no good news for whales. On Thursday, the 17th, the crew of a sailboat fired projectiles toward a pod of killer whales in the Strait of Gibraltar, in the Cadiz province. PACMA, a party for the animals’ rights, published a video of the accident that immediately went viral. From the video, it’s not clear what the sailors were firing at the whales, or if the whales attacked the vessel first. On Sunday, the 20th of August, the Guardia Civil identified the crew members. The catamaran was found in the El Ejido port of Almerimar, in the region of Almería.

A criminal investigation is now ongoing to understand if the facts constitute a crime. However, as PACMA remarked, orcas are in the Spanish Catalog of Threatened Species and any harm to them is prohibited.

Talking about warming oceans. After the record global sea surface temperatures of July twenty twenty-three, Canada is now seeing all its three oceans superheating. Hot spots were found in Canada’s Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, while the temperatures in the Pacific are going alarmingly upwards since the temperature peak is usually in September.

Susanna Fuller, the vice president at Oceans North, declared that the consequences of human-caused climate change are quicker and bigger than expected: “It all just underscores the incredible urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That's the most important thing we can possibly do”.

Moving on to the Mediterranean Sea, the British multinational oil and gas company BP is investing in a large-scale project off Egypt.

BP hired a company specialized in drilling waste management, TWMA, with a deal of fifteen million dollars. The project will use drilling cuttings processing technology to process drilling waste coming from the exploration and development of other projects in the Mediterranean Sea. The work will start in Octobertwenty twenty-three and will last five years.

Abdelrahman Amin, general manager for TWMA Egypt, declared: “The environmental benefits associated with this technology were an important factor in securing this award. BP is always eager to ensure their project’s environmental impact is kept to a minimum.”

Another project is foreseen to link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans as an alternative to the Panama Canal. China is in fact planning a new shipping channel that will cross Colombia, counterbalancing the US influence in the area.

The aim is to enhance the flow of goods between Asia and Latin America. The plan is to establish a dry channel that will connect the port of Bonaventura, located on Cascajal Island, Colombia with the Atlantic shores via a railway that will cross the country.

China imports raw materials and commodities from Latin America. This year, the trade between China and Colombia increased by five billion US dollars.

In other news, on Wednesday, the 16th of August, the Indian Coast Guard rescued the Chinese national Yin Weigyang in the Arabian Sea. Yin Weigyang was stranded on a Panama-flagged research vessel. Emergency assistance was necessary as the man experienced symptoms of cardiac arrest. The Maritime Rescue Coordination Center in Mumbai communicated with the vessel and provided tele-medical assistance. The rescue took place at night and the vessel was 200 kilometers (or 125 miles) off the coast of Mumbai. The rescue process presented more difficulties because of the complete darkness.

Moving on to California. A wine company illegally aged its alcohol products in the ocean. Emanuele Azzaretto and Todd Hahn, from the company Ocean Fathoms, were forced to hand over around two thousand bottles of wine to be destroyed. The two were sinking crates of wine a mile off Santa Barbara’s coast for a year.

During that time, a reef ecosystem developed in the crates and on the bottles, and, when the wine was removed, the sea life was also removed with it. The company was planning to sell the wine for up to 500 US dollars per bottle.

Their website advertised bottles covered in corals, sea shells, and hard-shelled tubes. The Federal Food and Drug Administration said the wine was contaminated and not fit for human consumption.

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