Mythic descent: rare red bandfish drops from heaven to jail

From ForArgyll.com: Mythic descent: rare red bandfish drops from heaven to jail

Inveraray Jail, one of Scotland’s top visitor attractions, has just had a very strange visitor.

Prison warder Adam Trela witnessed an unusual fish, 60cm long, fall from the sky this morning (1st June) into the grounds of the Jail. It is assumed to have been dropped by a sea bird.

Alex Blackman, manager of the neighbouring Sea Life Sanctuary in Oban, identified the fish as a red bandfish (Cepola rubescens). This particular variety of red bandfish is commonly associated with the south west coasts of England and Wales and is thought to extend to the the west coast of Scotland.

It is unusual to find individuals of the species above 15m long.

The Sanctuary Curator Dennis Chamberlin adds: ‘Red bandfish live at the bottom of the sea bed and burrow into muddy areas. It may have swum into a creel or lobster pot, which is fairly common – and been caught by a gull whilst a fisherman was releasing it back into the sea’.

Gavin Dick, Prison Governor for the interactive 19th century jail, says: ‘We were amazed to find this peculiar looking fish in our prison grounds this morning! Had this happened in the 19th century, I’m sure the prisoners would have fought over who was going to have this for their tea!’

Inveraray Jail was once the courthouse and prison serving Argyll. Real life warders, matrons and prisoners bring the 19th century prison alive.

Visitors – or visiting masochists - can try out prison beds and hammocks in the old and new prisons, sit in on a trial in the spectacular courtroom, sample the brutal 19th century prison punishments and search through prison records for their naughty ancestors.

The privately run attraction is open all year round. For more information:

visit the Inveraray Jail website
phone 01499 302381

BP told government in 2008 it could handle oil spill 10 times the size of one plaguing Gulf

From the Daily Mail: BP told government in 2008 it could handle oil spill 10 times the size of one plaguing Gulf

Add fuzzy math to the list of problems plaguing BP.

The British oil giant promised a government agency in 2008 that it could handle an oil spill 10 times the size of the disaster currently wreaking havoc in the Gulf of Mexico, according to documents.

In BP's worst-case scenario presented to the Minerals Management Service, it listed a well roughly 60 miles from the current gusher that could spew 250,000 barrels of oil a day if it exploded, Bloomberg reports.

"BP has obviously overpromised and underdelivered," Bob Deans of the Natural Resources Defense Council said. "They told us they had a plan that could deal with the consequences of a worst-case scenario. They don't."

The BP plan submitted to the government two years ago said in the event of a spill, they could "help to limit environmental and ecological damage to sensitive areas."

Try telling that to the oil-soaked wildlife along the Gulf Coast.

The April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and sparked a massive underwater spill that has leaked between 19 million and 43 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, according to government estimates.

"Clearly we do have an oil-spill response plan in place," BP spokesman David Nicholas told Bloomberg.

On Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will meet with state and federal prosecutors to possibly seek charges against BP.

Islands of the World #7: Gasparilla, Florida

Gasparilla Island is a barrier island in southwest Florida, United States, on the border of Charlotte and Lee Counties. Its largest town is Boca Grande and it is the location of the Gasparilla Island State Park.

Gasparilla was an important stop for phosphate shipping until the dredging of the Port of Tampa in the 1970s, and was a major vacation destination for the elite from Tampa and Fort Myers. Shipping has declined substantially since the last quarter of the 20th century, tourism remains important to the island's economy. Much of the development of this legend is the result of promotion by a local hotel and railroad line.

According to Florida folklore, Gasparilla Island gets its name from the legendary pirate captain José Gaspar ("Gasparilla", c. 1756 – 1821), who had his base on the island and purportedly hid his fabulous treasure there.

The forklore account does not appear in writing until about 1900, when it was included in an advertising brochure for the Charlotte Harbor and Northern Railroad company, which was given to the guests of the Boca Grande Hotel. It mentions that Gaspar's massive treasure, hidden somewhere on the island, had never been found. The version of the Gasparilla story told in the pamphlet influenced all later accounts, but is likely apocryphal. The name "Gasparilla" appears on maps dating to well before the time of the buccaneer; historians have suggested the island was named for a Spanish missionary named Gaspar or Gasparillo.

A trio of pet Mexican Spinytailed Iguanas, Ctenosaura pectinata, released on Gasparilla Island by a resident in the 1970s has led to a current population explosion of over 12,000 lizards.

Gasparilla Island is known for its fabulous tarpon fishing, which gave it the nickname of "The Tarpon Capital of the World". Each year, tarpon tournaments are held from early May until mid-July.

Islands of the World #6: Marco Island, Florida

Marco Island is the largest of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, located on the Gulf of Mexico in Southwest Florida.

Originally named San Marco Island by Spanish explorers, Marco Island is a city in Collier County. It is the principal city of the Naples–Marco Island Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 12,879 at the 2000 census.

The climate is subtropical with distinct wet and dry seasons with most of the rainfall falling between the months of June and October.

Geography
Marco Island is located at 25°56′26″N 81°42′53″W / 25.94056°N 81.71472°W / 25.94056; -81.71472 (25.940619, -81.714843)[3].

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 17.1 mi² (44.3 km²). 10.6 mi² (27.4 km²) of it is land and 6.5 mi² (16.9 km²) of it (38.13%) is water.

Demographics
As of the 2000 census, there were 12,879 people, 7,134 households, and 5,200 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,407.1 people per square mile (543.5/km²). There were 14,826 housing units at an average density of 1,402.1/mi² (541.6/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 98.08% White, 0.24% African American, 0.18% Native American, 0.58% Asian, 0.01% Pacific Islander, 0.49% from other races, and 0.42% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.09% of the population.

Florida's Ten Thousand Islands:
The Ten Thousand Islands are a chain of islands and mangrove islets off the coast of Southwest Florida. Despite the name, the number of islets in the chain only number in the hundreds. Marco Island is the largest and northernmost island in the chain.

The 99-mile long Wilderness Waterway begins at Everglades City and ends at Flamingo at the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. Administrative control of the islands is split between Collier County and Monroe County.

Most of the Ten Thousand Islands are too small for human habitation to be practical, but some are suitable for overnight visits, as dictated by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Since this is a wilderness area where wind, weather and lack of fresh water can become threatening, the Wildlife Service recommends only seasoned canoeists and sea kayakers attempt the trip. The southern tip has become a prime destination for snorkeling and water sports vacations. Some of the southeastern islands in the chain are included in the area of Everglades National Park.

Vocabulary builder #7: G is for Gam

A Gam is a large school of whales.

You will rarely heard this term used today... although it was in use in the 1970s.

That is the thing about terminology - some usage becomes out of date - but nevertheless must still be learned because when you read books about what other oceanographers or other ocean scientists have done, you'll need to recognize the terms they use.

Today, the more common term is a "pod" of whales.

White House Tries to Regroup as Criticism Mounts Over Leak

New York Times: White House Tries to Regroup as Criticism Mounts Over Leak (May 31, 2010)

This article is by Clifford Krauss, John M. Broder and Jackie Calmes.

My comments encased in [],as I point out the contradictions within the article.

HOUSTON — The Obama administration scrambled to respond on Sunday after the failure of the latest effort to kill the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. But administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of barrels of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.

“We are prepared for the worst,” said Carol M. Browner, President Obama’s climate change and energy policy adviser. “We have been prepared from the beginning.” [Then why did you wait 8 days to start trying to find firebooms?]

Even as the White House sought to demonstrate that it was taking a more direct hand in trying to solve the problem, senior officials acknowledged that the new technique BP will use to try to cap the leak — severing the riser pipe and placing a containment dome over the cut riser — could temporarily result in as much as 20 percent more oil flowing into the water during the three days to a week before the new device could be in place.

“This is obviously a difficult situation,” Ms. Browner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “but it’s important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge.” [Efforts to cap the leak have failed since the beginning. The government is claiming this is their failure from day one? That is impressive!]

“We have been directing BP to take important steps,” including the drilling of a second relief well, she added.

The White House said that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would make his eighth trip to the region and that the number of government and contract employees sent to work in areas affected by the spill would be tripled.

But despite the White House efforts, the criticism also intensified. Colin L. Powell, who served as secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that the administration must move in quickly with “decisive force and demonstrate that it’s doing everything that it can do.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, appearing on “Meet the Press,” again criticized the administration’s efforts, saying: “We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis. I think there could have been a greater sense of urgency.”

The administration has left to BP most decisions about how to move forward with efforts to contain the leak. [I thought the goverment was in charge from Day 1 - telling BP what to do?] But Ms. Browner made a point of saying that the administration, led by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, had told BP that the company should stop the top kill. Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort.

BP engineers are now working on several containment plans, with the first being implemented over the next few days.

“According to BP, the riser cutting will likely start Monday or Tuesday,” the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement on Sunday.

Using submarine robots, technicians intend to sever the riser pipe on top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-high stack of pipes above the well that failed to shut off the leak when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. A funnel-like containment device will be fitted above the cut riser to draw the escaping oil through tubing attached to a drilling ship.

But BP officials acknowledged that there was no certainty that this attempt would work. Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, appearing on “This Week,” also said that if it did work, some oil would still seep out until relief wells provided “an end point” in August.

The failure of the most recent effort — known as a top kill, which BP officials expressed great optimism about before trying it [and which they were not allowed to finish under orders from the government] — has underlined the gaps in knowledge and science about the spill and its potential remedies. Ever since the explosion and the resulting leak, estimates of how much oil is escaping have differed by thousands of barrels a day. Both government and BP officials said on Sunday that they had no accurate idea of how much oil was spilling into the gulf.

“We honestly do not know,” Mr. Dudley said on “Meet the Press.” “We’ve always found this a difficult oil to measure because of the huge amounts of gas in the oil.”

“The one thing about this method that we’re about to go into — it will and should measure the majority of the flow,” he said.

Mr. Dudley said that the original estimates by the government and BP officials of 5,000 barrels a day were based on satellite pictures and that the current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels was “issued without an actual flow measurement.” If the leak is not contained or slowed and continues at the higher estimated flow rate of 19,000 barrels a day until Aug. 20 — four months after the accident — it could amount to close to 2.3 million barrels spilled into the gulf.

After more than a month of diagnostic tests and the pumping of tens of thousands of barrels of drilling fluids — and everything from golf balls to shards of rubber — into the broken blowout preventer, engineers are still debating about what they think may be the inner contours of the five-story stack of pipes and how to best contain its leaking gashes.

In the end, all the mysteries of what went wrong and caused one of the greatest environmental calamities of history [a bit of hyperbole, surely. Although the wildlife around that area are certainly facing a calamity....but there was Ixtoc, etc. etc. and the land will recover. Too late for the current generation perhaps...but in ten years...] may not be known until the well is finally killed and the ill-fated blowout preventer is brought up from the bottom of the sea.

The final plugging of the well will have to wait until August, when the two relief wells are scheduled be completed. Those wells are being drilled diagonally to intersect with the runaway well and inject it with heavy liquids and cement. Work could be slowed by storms in what is expected to be an active summer hurricane season.

Officials from BP and the administration announced on Saturday that the top kill was a failure and had been abandoned [I thought they had just been ordered to stop because the government was afraid?], and that engineers were once again trying to solve the problem with a containment cap. A similar operation was tried nearly four weeks ago, but it failed because a slush of icy water and gas, known as hydrates, filled the large containment device, blocking the escaping oil from entering it. This time, engineers will pump hot sea water around the new, smaller device to keep hydrates from forming, and there will be far less space between the cap and the well for any hydrates that do form to flow in.

BP officials expressed optimism on Sunday about the new operation, though one technician working on the project warned that there were concerns that hydrates could again stymie the containment effort. The technician and outside experts also warned that by cutting the riser, the engineers may increase the flow of escaping oil.

Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston, said that he thought BP’s next plan had a good chance of succeeding, but that there was also a risk of increasing the flow of escaping oil by 10 percent.

“Then it just makes the situation worse for longer,” he said, unless the containment cap succeeds in collecting a substantial amount of oil.

Bad news: Radioactive fish found near Vt. nuclear plant; Worse news: Fish said to be ordinary

This story regards rivers rather than oceans, but of course the overall problem is the same -- treating water as a dumping ground for human waste (and doing it incompetently) is going to bite us in the butt sooner or later.

From 43 News: Bad news: Radioactive fish found near Vt. nuclear plant; Worse news: Fish said to be ordinary

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — When a fish taken from the Connecticut River recently tested positive for radioactive strontium-90, suspicion focused on the nearby Vermont Yankee nuclear plant as the likely source.

Operators of the troubled 38-year-old nuclear plant on the banks of the river, where work is under way to clean up leaking radioactive tritium, revealed this month that it also found soil contaminated with strontium-90, an isotope linked to bone cancer and leukemia.


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Three days later, officials said a fish caught four miles upstream from the reactor in February had tested positive for strontium-90 in its bones. State officials say they don't believe the contamination came from Vermont Yankee.

Tritium was reported leaking from the plant in January, and since then has turned up in monitoring wells at levels 100 times the federal Environmental Protection Agency's safety limit for that substance in drinking water. Other radioactive isotopes have been found as well, including cesium-137, zinc-65 and cobalt-60.

Officials have said tritium has been flowing downhill from the plant to the adjacent river, though it is diluted quickly in the fast-flowing stream. Tests on river water have not produced measurable tritium readings. Now the question is whether strontium-90, generally considered a more dangerous isotope than tritium, may also have found its way to the river.

State health officials say Vermont Yankee most likely was not the source of the radioactivity in the fish, a yellow perch. Fish and other living things — including humans — around the world have been absorbing tiny amounts of strontium-90 since the United States, Russia and China tested nuclear weapons in the atmosphere in the 1950s and 1960s. A fresher dose was released by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

"It's clearly consistent with the background levels from Chernobyl and weapons testing that went on until 1965," said Michael Dumond, chief of prevention services, which includes radiological health, for the state of New Hampshire. The river between the states is New Hampshire territory, though Dumond said New Hampshire has largely deferred to Vermont on testing samples from it.

Does that mean strontium-90 is present in fish caught around the world?

"Yes. It's everywhere," said John Till, president of South Carolina-based Risk Assessment Corp. and a consultant for more than three decades in testing for radioactive substances in the environment.

Till said he supports nuclear power but faults the industry for a lack of speed and candor in discussing its risks.

Should people limit fish consumption because strontium and other radioactive substances can collect in their tissue?

"Absolutely not," Till said, adding that the amounts are too tiny to be a concern. (Some states, including Vermont, have urged limits on fish consumption — especially by children and pregnant women — because of mercury contamination.)

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has determined that radioactive strontium is a human carcinogen, but the arm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that tracks toxic substances says exposures must be at high levels before the risk of cancer is elevated.

David Deen, a Vermont state legislator, Connecticut River Watershed Council river steward and fishing guide, is not mollified.

"As a guide, I'll tell you when the fish you're angling for are identified as having strontium-90 in them, it doesn't do much for the image of pristine fishing," said Deen, chairman of the House Fish and Wildlife Committee.

Some people think Vermont Yankee should not be let off the hook any more easily than was the fish that ended up in a Tennessee lab and tested positive for strontium-90.

William Irwin, radiological health chief for the state of Vermont, acknowledged that it was impossible to establish a baseline for strontium-90 in Connecticut River fish, because the state had not tested for it before this year. For that reason, it can't be determined for certain whether Vermont Yankee has been adding strontium-90 to the river

Irwin said the 59 picocuries per kilogram found in the perch's bones was actually at the low end of measurements taken from fish caught even much farther from nuclear plants.

Still, Irwin's comments troubled Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician by training, an internationally known critic of nuclear power and author most recently of a book debunking nuclear as a solution to global warming, "Nuclear Power is Not the Answer."

"What is the baseline level in fish from (bomb-testing and Chernobyl) fallout?" Caldicott asked in a phone interview from her home country of Australia. "What he's saying is fallacious. He doesn't have a baseline level, so to say it's the same as baseline level is not true."

Irwin said there was strong evidence that the strontium-90 in the fish was not from Vermont Yankee, but added it is impossible to say for sure.

Vermont Yankee spokesman Larry Smith said the only spot on the reactor site where strontium-90 had been found was in the pit plant technicians had dug looking for the source of the tritium leak, in an alley between two plant buildings.

Irwin said strontium-90 appeared not to have migrated from there. "We did not find it in groundwater," he said. "We did not find it in river water." And it was not found in soil samples taken farther from the site of the Vermont Yankee leak.

Irwin said a study last year by the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation found levels of strontium-90 in Hudson River fish at up to three times the level found in the Connecticut River fish. That study looked at fish samples from much farther from the nearest nuclear plant — 80 to 90 miles upriver from Indian Point — and attributed the results to bomb testing and Chernobyl, Irwin said.

Caldicott was not convinced. "Fish can swim 80 miles," she said. "To say that the strontium-90 didn't come from Indian Point, I would be very suspicious."

Irwin said the fish seemed to have caught the public's imagination. Asked what species the fish was, he said he didn't know, but later said it was "a red herring."

Given his doubts that the strontium in the perch came from Vermont Yankee, Irwin said he considered it more important that he and his staff focus on testing roughly 2,000 samples taken since January closer to the reactor than the four-mile distance at which the fish was found.

"We're sampling groundwater, drinking water, river water, river sediments, soil and fish. Starting next week we'll be collecting vegetation," Irwin said. "We're going to be doing all of these analyses of all these samples for a very long time."

"We're in this for the long haul," he said. "We'll get more samples. We'll get more analytical data, and we'll get a better and better picture of what the truth is."