9-13 April 2018

For Your Information

• Celebrating volunteer researchers as Citizen Science Day approaches -- This coming Saturday, 14 April 2018, is Citizen Science Day, an annual event designed to celebrate and promote the various aspects of citizen science that include amazing discoveries, inspiring projects and dedicated volunteers. In recognition of the contributions made by the citizen scientists who help in monitoring the Earth's atmosphere and oceans, NOAA has been highlighting one of the programs that involves citizen scientist participation each day, beginning on 2 April and continuing through 14 April. [NOAA News]
• Worldwide GLOBE at Night 2018 Campaign for April is underway -- The fourth in the series of GLOBE at Night citizen-science campaigns for 2018 will continue through Sunday, 15 April. GLOBE at Night is a worldwide, hands-on science and education program designed to encourage citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of their night sky by matching the appearance of a constellation with the seven magnitude/star charts of progressively fainter stars. These constellations are Leo in the Northern Hemisphere and Crux for the Southern Hemisphere. Activity guides are also available. The GLOBE at night program is intended to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution. The fifth series in the 2018 campaign is scheduled for 5-14 May 2018. [GLOBE at Night]
• Applications invited for participation in Ocean Guardian Schools Program -- The NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries in coordination with the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation has invited preK-12 schools in coastal counties of California, Oregon and Washington to become involved in fostering ocean literacy and environmental stewardship by applying to the Ocean Guardian School Program. Ocean Guardian School grants, which range from $1000 to $4000 per school, are awarded annually to fund hands-on school- or community-based projects. Applications for the 2018-19 school year are being accepted through the end of April. [NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries Education]
• Finalists for the 21st Annual National Oceans Sciences Bowl are lauded -- NOAA officials are congratulating the students and educators from twenty-three of the nation's high schools who have advanced to the 21st Annual National Oceans Sciences Bowl (NOSB) finals that will be held in Boulder, CO on 19-22 April 2018. The NOSB is a program of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, a community-based organization, that is designed to enrich science education through a national academic competition. The intention is to have high school students increase their knowledge of the marine sciences. [NOAA News]
• Hydrothermal vent organisms -- You are invited to read this week's Supplemental Information...In Greater Depth that describes how geoscientists have investigated the deep-sea environment in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents that form along the oceanic ridges nearly 3000 meters below the ocean surface. Interestingly, a diverse and abundant community of marine organisms has been found to live in these extreme oceanic conditions.

Ocean in the News:

• Eye on the tropics -- During the past week, tropical cyclone activity was confined to the western South Pacific Ocean basin. Remnants of former Tropical Storm Iris were located off the coast of Queensland, Australia at the start of last week. However, Iris reformed over the waters of the Coral Sea late last Monday (local time). This reformed Tropical Storm Iris has taken a track toward the southeast offshore of Australia during the first half of the week, before curving to take a track toward the east. As it traveled, torrential rain associated with Iris fell along the coast of Queensland. By late in the week, Iris then abruptly turned toward the north. Iris was beginning to dissipate this past Saturday approximately 500 miles to the east-southeast of Cairns, a city along the eastern coast of Far North Queensland, Australia. Satellite imagery and additional information for Tropical Storm Iris are available from the NASA Hurricane Page.
  Tropical Storm Josie continued its travels toward the southeast across the waters of the western South Pacific Ocean to the southwest of the Fiji Islands. Although it did not make landfall, torrential rains accompanying this tropical cyclone produced flooding that resulted in at least four deaths on Fiji [abc.net News]. (Note: Josie was a category 1 tropical cyclone on the Australian scale, which is equivalent to a weak tropical storm on the U.S. Saffir-Simpson scale.) By early Wednesday (local time), Josie had become an extratropical cyclone (midlatitude low pressure system) approximately 350 miles to the south-southeast of Suva, the capital city of Fiji. The NASA Hurricane Page has satellite images and additional information on Tropical Storm Josie.
• Early forecast for 2018 Atlantic hurricane season is made -- Last week, the hurricane forecast team from Colorado State University headed by Dr. Phil Klotzbach released its initial "Extended Range Forecast of Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Activity and Landfall Strike Probability for 2018" that provides projected estimates of the number of named tropical cyclones (hurricanes and tropical storms) during the upcoming hurricane season that officially begins on 1 June 2018. The team, which had been formed by the late Professor William Gray, foresees slightly above-average tropical cyclone activity during this upcoming hurricane season. The team's initial April forecast envisions fourteen named tropical cyclones, which include seven hurricanes. Of these hurricanes, the forecasters foresee three major hurricanes (category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Scale). A typical North Atlantic hurricane season would have slightly more than ten named systems, based upon long-term averages running from 1931 to 2010. The average number of hurricanes is six per annum. A slightly above-average probability is anticipated for major hurricanes making landfall along the United States coastline and in the Caribbean in 2018. The team bases their outlook on the likelihood that the current weak La Niña conditions will evolve into ENSO-neutral conditions during the next several months. They do not foresee any development of an El Niño event by late summer and early autumn during the peak in the Atlantic hurricane season. However, the waters of the western tropical Atlantic are anomalously warm, while the eastern tropical Atlantic and far North Atlantic are anomalously cool over the past month, which indicates that the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation index is close to the long-term average. [The Tropical Meteorology Project]
  In mid-May, forecasters with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) also should provide their outlook for the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season.
• Larger cargo ships now allowed to enter Florida's Port of Miami -- With last week's dedication of a new NOAA's Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System (PORTS®) in the Port of Miami, FL, super-sized cargo ships can now safely use the port. The PORTS® system with its new real-time current meters will provide vital navigation information to these ships to permit them to safely enter the Miami seaport. Many of these super-sized ships that originate in Asian ports are now passing through the recently expanded Panama Canal to reach Miami. PORTS® is an information system operated by NOAA's National Ocean Service that measures and disseminates oceanographic and meteorological data that mariners need to navigate safely. [NOAA Media Release]
• A podcast features the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- A 10-minute podcast was produced by NOAA's National Ocean Service that features the "Garbage Patches" in the large ocean basins where gyres in the large-scale circulation of near-surface ocean waters tend to concentrate marine debris, most notably plastics. The most famous Garbage Patch is the one in the North Pacific that is located in the North Pacific Gyre. An explanation is given for how the gyres accumulate the garbage. [NOAA National Ocean Service Podcast]
• Annual growth increments in fish otoliths can serve as proxy indicators of past climates -- Fish otoliths are hard calcium carbonate structures in the vestibular labyrinth of fish that are used for hearing. Annual growth increments (annuli) can form in these fish otoliths, with changes in the width of the annuli indicative of changes in the environment where the fish reside. Therefore, chronologies of temperature can be generated from these otoliths in an analogous fashion to what dendrochronologists extract from their analysis of tree-ring width. Fish otolith chronologies have been reconstructed over a 25-year interval for yellowfin sole in Alaska's Bering Sea. [NOAA Fisheries Alaska]
• Using new control methods to help protect coral reefs from invasive species -- A team of researchers from Hawaii and Maine has found that several control efforts such as the removal of shipwrecks and application of chlorine may help mitigate the damaging effects of corallimorph, a type of invasive anemone, on valuable coral reefs in the Central Pacific Ocean. [USGS News]
• Newest editions of historical natural hazard events posters have been released -- A collaboration between NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), its World Data Service (WDS) for Geophysics and the International Tsunami Information Center (ITIC), a UNESCO/IOC-NOAA partnership, has resulted in three updated poster-size maps that show the worldwide distribution of major tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions over the last several millennia. One of the updated posters is entitled "Tsunami Sources 1610 B.C. to A.D. 2017." Over 1200 confirmed tsunami source events are displayed on the map that are from earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides and other causes. These displayed events are from the 2500 events contained in the NCEI Global Historical Tsunami Database. The second poster, with a title "Significant Earthquakes 2150 B.C. to A.D. 2017," contains the locations of destructive earthquakes around the globe of many of the approximately 6000 earthquakes that are archived in the NCEI Significant Earthquake Database. The third poster has a title of "Significant Volcanic Eruptions 4360 B.C. to A.D. 2017" and displays many of the roughly 800 volcanic eruptions contained in the NCEI Significant Volcanic Eruptions Database. [NOAA NCEI News]
• Satellites document the 30-year decline of two glaciers in northwestern Greenland -- Images made from data collected by two of NASA's Landsat satellites in late September 1987 and 30 years later in September 2017 show how Tracy and Heilprin glaciers, two "marine-terminating outlet glaciers," have been rapidly retreating along the coast of Prudhoe Land in northwest Greenland. The image acquired in 1987 was from data obtained by the Thematic Mapper on NASA's Landsat 5, while the more recent image was from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8. Scientists report that the Tracy glacier retreated by 364 meters per year between 2000 and 2017, while the Heilprin lost 109 meters per year over the same span. The glacial retreat has been attributed to a increasing global temperatures over the last several decades. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• "Top 10 list" is "all about ice" -- A web producer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has recently produced a web page that features ten selected items concerning various aspects of ice on planet Earth, including its measurement using several new Earth observing satellite platforms and aircraft. NASA is scheduled to launch the GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission this year to track the movement of water over the planet, including Earth's frozen regions. The ICESat-2 spacecraft will also be launched this year by NASA that is designed to precisely measure the changing elevation of ice around the world using an onboard laser instrument. Operation IceBridge, NASA's aerial survey of polar ice, is also featured. [NASA Global Climate Change News]
• Reconstructing past climate records could involve five creative proxy indicators -- For more than a century, paleontologists have been using a variety of proxy indicators that approximate past climate in the absence of direct measures such as temperature using thermometers or precipitation using rain gauges. These proxy indicators include tree rings, corals, cave formations, cores of ocean or lake sediments and ice cores to reconstruct climate records over long time intervals, often extending back a million years into the past. Some of these efforts during the last half century have used radiochemical analysis involving the determination of ratios between heavy and light isotopes of such chemical elements as oxygen, carbon and nitrogen to ascertain if the climate at some time in the past were hot, cold, dry, or wet. Recently, some scientists have employed novel proxy indicators such as bat guano, Roman aqueducts, snail shells, whale earwax and sponges. [EOS Earth & Space Science News]
• An All-Hazards Monitor -- This Web portal provides the user information from NOAA's National Weather Service, FAA and FEMA on current environmental events that may pose as hazards such as tropical weather, fire weather, marine weather, severe weather, drought and floods. [NOAA/NWS Daily Briefing]
• Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com]

Concept of the Week: Solving the Mystery of Seamount Ecosystems

The United States Commission on Ocean Policy reports that less than 5% of the ocean floor has been explored. This is beginning to change as scientists and engineers develop and apply new technologies to investigate deep ocean waters and the sea bottom (refer to Chapter 13 in your DataStreme Ocean textbook). Consider, for example, the effort to obtain a better understanding of seamount ecosystems.

A seamount is a submarine mountain of volcanic origin (now extinct) that rises more than 1000 m (3300 ft) above the ocean floor. Usually a seamount summit is 1000 to 2000 m (3300 to 6600 ft) below sea level. They occur as isolated peaks, chains (e.g., Emperor Seamounts in the North Pacific; New England chain in the North Atlantic), or clusters. The term "seamount" was first applied in 1936 to the Davidson Seamount located off the coast of Southern California. Scientists estimate that perhaps 30,000 dot the ocean floor with as many as two-thirds located on the Pacific Ocean bottom. However, fewer than one thousand seamounts have been named and only a handful of seamounts has received detailed scientific study.

In recent years, discovery of unique life forms on seamounts has spurred scientific interest in seamount ecosystems. Many nations, including the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, are supporting scientific cruises to observe and collect specimens from seamount ecosystems. Seamount ecosystems are unusually productive and are home to unique species. Some seamount surveys have found that certain seamount species are endemic, that is, they live on only one seamount or a few nearby peaks. For example, up to one-third of all species living on some seamounts off New Caledonia are endemic while up to half of the invertebrates and fish on the Nazca seamount off Chile are endemic. In the northeast Pacific, large-scale eddies may transport larval fish from coastal environments to isolated seamounts located out at sea. Furthermore, some scientists argue that seamounts may function as stepping stones that allow for migration of species over lengthy periods--perhaps over millions of years. In addition, some seamounts may serve as aids to navigation for fish that migrate over long distances. For example, hammerhead sharks may use the magnetic field surrounding seamounts to find their way.

The recent effort to survey and explore seamount ecosystems has reached new urgency with the realization of the devastating impact of commercial fish trawlers on those ecosystems. In some cases, trawling has striped off most marine life (e.g., coral gardens) from the surface of seamounts leaving behind mostly bare rock. Typically, trawled seamounts have only half the biomass and considerably fewer species than undisturbed seamounts. Scientists anticipate that a better understanding of seamount ecosystems will help make the case for their conservation and inform the most effective strategies for their protection. Australia is one of the first nations to protect seamount ecosystems, establishing the Tasmanian Seamount Marine Reserve in 1999. The reserve covers 370 square km (140 square mi) and includes more than a dozen seamounts.

Historical Events:

• 9 April 1770...The English explorer Captain James Cook discovered Botany Bay on the Australian continent.
• 10 April 1877...The first of two great coastal storms struck the Virginia and North Carolina coasts. The Oregon Inlet was widened by three-quarters of a mile. The "entire topography of country is materially altered," according to a description of the altering of sand dunes at Cape Hatteras, NC. (Intellicast)
• 10 April 1996...The world's fastest measured surface wind (outside of a tornado) was recorded on Barrow Island, Australia, in Tropical Cyclone Olivia. Winds reached a speed of 249 mph. This gust became the highest surface wind speed record, replacing the 231-mph wind gust measured at New Hampshire's Mount Washington Observatory on 12 April 1934. (National Weather Service files)
• 10 April 1998...Northeast winds at 40 mph on the 9^th and 10^th combined with high levels of Lake Erie produced waves to 14 ft along the lakeshore in Ottawa and Sandusky Counties in Ohio. Much damage resulted, along with the destruction of 10 houses. Bulldozers were needed to clear the debris from roads. Downtown Port Clinton streets were flooded. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
• 11 April 1803...A twin-screw propeller steamboat was patented by John Stevens of Hoboken, NJ. (Today in Science History)
• 11 April 1900...The U.S. Navy acquired its first submarine, a 53-foot craft designed by Irish immigrant John P. Holland that was propelled by gasoline while on the surface and by electricity when submerged. (Today in Science History)
• 13 April 1960...The Navy's first navigation satellite, Transit-1B, was placed into orbit from Cape Canaveral, FL and demonstrated the ability to launch another satellite. The Transit system was designed to meet Navy's need for accurately locating ballistic missile submarines and other ships. (Naval Historical Center) (Today in Science History)
• 14 April 1543...Bartolomé Ferrelo returned to Spain after assuming command of the ill-fated expedition of the Spanish navigator Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo (who died on San Miguel Island in California's Channel Islands). The expedition was the first known entry by Europeans into San Francisco Bay in the New World.
• 14 April 1851..."The Lighthouse Storm" of 1851 struck New England on this date. Heavy gales and high seas pounded the coasts of New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts. The storm arrived at the time of a full moon and high tide producing unusually high waves. The storm was so named because it destroyed the lighthouse at Cohasset, MA. Two assistant lighthouse keepers were killed there when the structure was swept away by the storm tide. (National Weather Service files)
• 14-15 April 1912...The British steamer RMS Titanic sank following its collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland on its maiden voyage from South Hampton to New York. The collision occurred at about 11:45 PM on 14 April and the ship, which was considered unsinkable, sank in 2.5 hours during the early morning hours of the 15^th. Reports showed 1517 people out of 2207 onboard lost their lives in this accident. Because of this disaster, certification and life saving devices were improved and an International Ice Patrol was established to monitor the iceberg hazards in the North Atlantic. The U.S. Coast Guard continues to conduct much of the effort. (US Coast Guard Historian's Office) A 21-year old telegraph operator at the Marconi radio station in New York City, David Sarnoff who became a pioneer in radio and television broadcasting, received and transmitted the distress calls from the Titanic. (Today in Science History)

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Prepared by AMS Ocean Central Staff and Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D.,
email hopkins@aos.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2018, The American Meteorological Society.