BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - An Antarctic cruise ship carrying 122 passengers and crew started to take on water and leak fuel after it ran aground on Thursday, an Argentine naval official said.
Admiral Daniel Martin told local television a nearby passenger ship was on its way to the stricken Panamanian-flagged vessel, called the Ushuaia after the Tierra del Fuego port from which it sailed in Argentina on Sunday.
He said none of the boat's passengers had been injured.
"We've received information from the captain of the Ushuaia that the boat is grounded ... with a minimal amount of water coming in and some fuel loss," Martin said.
He said the ship lay some 186 miles (300 km) southwest of Argentina's Marambio military base on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Cruise travel has grown in Antarctica in recent years, with tourists paying thousands of dollars to see towering icebergs, seals, whales and penguins.
A year ago, more than 150 crew and passengers, many of them elderly, escaped unhurt in a dramatic rescue after their cruise ship hit ice off Antarctica and sank.
The ship is operated by Antarpply Expeditions, based in Ushuaia.
A commercial ship travels through the Northwest Passage...
Greenlanders vote on expanding autonomy on Tuesday. A 'Yes' (likely), will mean more interest in oil and minerals exploration revenues in the future, to compensate for Denmark assistance which would likely decrease with autonomy...
Relocating an entire sinking nation... :(((
On French Television, my friends Olivier Gilg and Brigitte Sabard explain why populations of lemmings go up and down and up and down... (I was with them in Greenland last year). Enjoy! or via this link: http://www.france3.fr/STATIC/video/index-fr.php?titre=Lemmings&url=mms://a988.v101995.c10199.e.vm.akamaistream.net/7/988/10199/3f97c7e6/ftvigrp.download.akamai.com/10199/sgv/diff/videotheque/regions/bfc/emissions/cotedocs/7B5DA_b21a_jt_081018_lemmings.wmv§ion=regions_bfc&rubrique=video
Oct. 8: off-site meeting with top officers of Rabobank near New York. I have a chance to present the conclusions of our Pax Arctica expedition. Very smart questions from a parterre of challenging business people. Thanks Emmanuel (Durand) for organizing this.
French American School of NY in Mamaroneck
Two proud students of the French-American School of New York, and their expedition friends, display the FASNY flag in front of a glacier near Otto Fjord on July 17, 2o08. They will present the results of the Pax Arctica Expedition at a school-wide meeting on October 7, 2008 at FASNY. Don't miss it!!
On November 21st, adults and children from the Pax Arctica 2008 Expedition will meet with President Gorbachev in Moscow and present the results of their observations and findings. Sponsors will also be present. For information, email to: lh@sagax.com.
Back in the spring, my daughter Flaam and I had the chance to have a very interesting guided tour of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory with Peter DeMenocal
''Il nous reste sept ans pour inverser la courbe des émissions de CO2'' When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show. [...]
Full story at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?hp
A midnight rainbow - Radstock Bay - July 28, 2008.
"Leading ice specialists in Europe and the United States for the first time have agreed that a ring of navigable waters has opened all around the fringes of the cap of sea ice drifting on the warming Arctic Ocean.
By many expert accounts, this is the first time the Northwest Passage over North America and the Northern Sea Route over Europe and Asia have been open simultaneously in at least half a century, if not longer"
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The state of Alaska sued Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Monday, seeking to reverse his decision to list polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
Gov. Sarah Palin and other state officials fear a listing will cripple offshore oil and gas development in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in Alaska's northern waters, which provide prime habitat for the only polar bears under U.S. jurisdiction.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Snow and Ice Data Center has reported that sea ice in the Arctic now covers about 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since satellite measurements began in 1979 was 1.65 million square miles, last September.
With about three weeks left in the Arctic summer, this year could wind up breaking that record, scientists said.
Arctic ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter. But over the years, more of the ice is lost to the sea with less of it recovered in winter. While ice reflects the sun’s heat, the open ocean absorbs more heat, and the melting accelerates warming in other parts of the world.
Sea ice also serves as primary habitat for threatened polar bears.
“We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point,” said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the data center, in Boulder, Colo. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now.”
Five climate scientists, four of them specialists on the Arctic, told The Associated Press that it was fair to call what was happening in the Arctic a “tipping point.”
Last year was an unusual year when wind currents and other weather conditions coincided with global warming to worsen sea ice melt, Dr. Serreze said. Scientists wondered if last year was an unusual event or the start of a new and disturbing trend.
This year’s results suggest the latter because the ice had recovered a bit more than usual thanks to a somewhat cooler winter, Dr. Serreze said. Then this month, when the melting rate usually slows, it sped up instead, he said.
The most recent ice retreat primarily reflects melt in the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska’s northwest coast, and the East Siberian Sea, off the coast of eastern Russia, according to the center.
The Chukchi Sea is home to one of two populations of Alaska polar bears.
Federal observers flying for a whale survey on Aug. 16 spotted nine polar bears swimming in open ocean in the Chukchi. The bears were 15 to 65 miles off the Alaska shore. Some were swimming north, apparently trying to reach the polar ice edge, which on that day was 400 miles away.
Polar bears are powerful swimmers and have been recorded on swims of 100 miles, but the ordeal can leave them exhausted and susceptible to drowning.
And the melt in sea ice has kicked in another effect, long predicted, called “Arctic amplification,” Dr. Serreze said.
That is when the warming up north is increased in a feedback mechanism and the effects spill southward starting in autumn, Dr. Serreze said. Over the last few years, the bigger melt has meant more warm water that releases more heat into the air during fall cooling, making the atmosphere warmer than normal.
On top of that, researchers are investigating “alarming” reports in the last few days of the release of methane from long-frozen Arctic waters, possibly from the warming of the sea, said Bill Hare, a Greenpeace climate scientist, who was attending a climate conference in Ghana. Giant burps of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, is a long-feared effect of warming in the Arctic that would accelerate warming even more, according to scientists.
Over all, the picture of what is happening in the Arctic is getting worse, said Bob Corell, who headed a multinational scientific assessment of Arctic conditions a few years ago. “We’re moving,” he said, “beyond a point of no return.”
