Ocean Events in COP28 & more – 5th Dec 2023

Ahoy from BA! This is Rorshok’s Ocean Update from the 5th of December twenty twenty-three A summary of what's going down in the 70% surface of the Earth covered in saltwater.

The 28th UN Climate Change Conference (or COP28) kicked off on Thursday the 30th of November, in Dubai. Leaders from all over the world gathered for the conference, which will last until Tuesday, the 12th of December. Many organizers are hosting ocean-related events. On Thursday, the 30th, the World Economic Forum discussed the ocean's role in the Paris Agreement; on Friday the 1st, the Nature-positive Pavilion hosted an event called Climate-forward Ocean Conservation Strategies to Deliver on Global Targets. On the same day, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Ocean Panel gathered the Ocean Panel member countries to discuss the ocean's potential to tackle climate change; on Sunday the 3rd, the UN Ocean Decade discussed the role of science in safeguarding the oceans, and on Monday the 4th, the Governments of France and Costa Rica spoke about important issues related to the 3rd United Nations Ocean Conference, which will take place in June twenty twenty-five in Nice. More events related to the oceans will take place next week.

Last week we talked about the fight of Greenpeace activists against deep-sea mining. Since Greenpeace is registered in the Netherlands, on Thursday the 30th, a judge from the Dutch court ordered the activists to leave the ship they occupied over last week in the Pacific Ocean. The ship was a deep-sea mining research vessel of The Metals Company. The judge, though, allowed the Greenpeace activists to keep protesting on the water surrounding the ship since the European Convention on Human Rights protects their right to demonstrate. The biggest environmental impacts of deep-sea mining are the destruction of the seafloor and marine life, and the creation of sediments that disturb marine animals. The practice also creates noise and contamination.

Moving on to the Indian Ocean. On Thursday the 30th The Indian Defense Acquisition Council approved the purchase of a second aircraft carrier for five billion US dollars to counteract China’s presence in the Indian Ocean. The new carrier will accommodate about twenty-eight planes and helicopters to cover 45,000 tons of water. According to Shekhar Sinha, former Vice Admiral in the Indian Navy, with this acquisition, India is defending its economic interests and the aquatic communication routes. In the meantime, China continues its naval advancement in the region, in particular with the Fujian, the country’s latest aircraft carrier. The People's Liberation Army Navy, or the Chinese Navy, includes 370 vessels and submarines, making it the world’s largest navy.

In other news, a crew of bio-scientists from the University of Rostock's Institute for Biosciences and Nuremberg Zoo's Behavioral Ecology and Conservation Lab in Germany published a study on Thursday the 30th of November, in the Journal of Experimental Biology, reporting that bottlenose dolphins can sense electric fields. However, they are not the only animals that have this ability - for instance, sharks and platypus can also sense electric fields. Still, only one other mammal possesses the skill: the Guiana dolphin. The crew chose to study bottlenose dolphins based on previous research, which stated that the neural cells in the dolphins’ snouts resembled the electric field detectors of the sharks.

Speaking of dolphins, on Tuesday the 28th of November, Sutton, an open-source intelligence analyst, reported that Russia’s Military Dolphins hosted in the harbor of Sevastopol, in Crimea, suffered severe injuries due to the storm that hit the Black Sea the last week. Russia is using the military dolphins for its invasion of Ukraine, probably to protect its naval base in the Black Sea.

That storm also caused the death of at least five people. One person died in the resort city of Sochi, one in Crimea, and one in the Kerch Strait. After four days of rescue operations in the region of Trabzon, in Turkey, the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency rescue teams found two other bodies belonging to two high school students — waves hit them and swept them into the sea. More than half a million people in Russia, Crimea, and Ukraine experienced a two-day power outage caused by the flood in the region that invaded the roads and took down the power lines.

Now, an update on the congestion of the Panama Canal caused by the drought that has been impacting the region for months. Two global container liner shipping companies, Hapag-Lloyd and Cosco, were the latest to introduce Panama Canal surcharges. On Friday the 1st, the number of daily transits was reduced again, this time from twenty-four to twenty-two. In the last week, twenty vessels were waiting to go through the canal, and the queue will likely increase. Because of the congestion, many carriers are considering rerouting their ships to the Suez Canal. According to Destine Ozuygur, eeSea operations and forecasting analyst, at least twenty-one vessels have completely rerouted towards the Suez Canal since May, avoiding the Panama Canal.

Since we mentioned the Suez Canal, Maersk Group and the Danish government reached an agreement on Ever Given, the container ship that got stuck in the Canal in March twenty twenty-one and blocked the waterway for six days. The Danish company Maersk sued Evergreen Marine Corporation - which operated the vessel - and Shoei Kisen Kaisha, the ship's owner, for forty-five million US dollars in damages. Evergreen argued that the vessel’s owner was solely responsible for costs and liabilities. This lawsuit’s verdict is important as it can set a standard for all similar cases in the shipping sector. Maersk withdrew the lawsuit, which means that the parties reached an agreement outside the court.

Moving on to Antarctica. Researchers tracked icebergs with a new AI tool in the Southern Ocean. The goal was to follow the entire life cycle of the icebergs of the region using satellite data. On Thursday, the 23rd of November, the British Antarctic Survey reported on this study published in the journal Remote Sensing of the Environment.

But how did these researchers track the iceberg cycle? Icebergs reflect microwaves to the Synthetic Aperture Radar. The surface of icebergs is covered in ice and snow, and their crystalline form allows icebergs to reflect microwaves very well.

Those microwaves are then transmitted to the AI tool, which allows scientists to collect images from day and night, covering the daily cycle of the icebergs. The life cycle of the icebergs is crucial for ocean dynamics: when they melt, they affect productivity, ocean circulation, and sea ice.

Talking about science, researchers from Cornell University created a robot inspired by a snail from Hawaii. The robot moves with the same undulation as the real animal, creating waves in the water surface that allow it to collect the microplastics on the surroundings. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, 80% of marine pollution comes solely from plastics, and the pre-existing methods to collect plastics often lack the ability to gather the micro-entities. The scientists still need to scale up the prototype for its use in the real water world, but their study published on Saturday the 25th of November, in the journal Nature Communications is promising.

Closing with the 1.1 million gallons (more than four million liters) of crude oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico, close to New Orleans, during the previous month. On Friday the 17th of November, an aircrew detected the spill for the first time while flying over the Main Pass Oil Gathering company’s pipelines. The pipelines actually closed one day before, when the extent of the oil spill was still to be identified. Only last week, the US Coast Guard announced the extent of the leak, but they still didn’t identify the source of it. So far, the US Coast Guard has been leading the clean-up procedures in the area, and declared that the oil didn’t endanger marine life.

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See you next week!