Fishermen blast premier dive sites off Indonesia

KOMODO ISLAND, Indonesia (AP) — Coral gardens that were among Asia's most spectacular, teeming with colorful sea life just a few months ago, have been transformed into desolate gray moonscapes by illegal fishermen who use explosives or cyanide to kill or stun their prey.

The site is among several to have been hit inside Komodo National Park, a 500,000-acre reserve in eastern Indonesia that spans several dusty, tan-colored volcanic islands. The area is most famous for its Komodo dragons — the world's largest lizards — and its remote and hard-to-reach waters also burst with staggering levels of diversity, from corals in fluorescent reds and yellows to octopuses with lime-green banded eyes to black-and-blue sea snakes.

Dive operators and conservationists say Indonesia's government is not doing enough to keep illegal fishermen out of the boundaries of the national park, a U.N. World Heritage site. They say enforcement declined greatly following the exit two years ago of a U.S.-based environmental group that helped fight destructive fishing practices.

Local officials disagree, pointing to dozens of arrests and several deadly gunbattles with suspects.

Michael Ishak, a scuba instructor and professional underwater photographer who has made hundreds of trips to the area, said he's seen more illegal fishermen than ever this year.

The pictures, he said, speak for themselves.

When Ishak returned last month to one of his favorite spots, Tatawa Besar, known for its colorful clouds of damselfish, basslets and hawksbill sea turtles, he found that a 500-square-meter (600-square-yard) section of the reef had been obliterated.

Many smaller patches were destroyed elsewhere at the site.

"At first I thought, 'This can't be right. I must have jumped in the wrong place,'" he said, adding he swam back and forth to make sure he hadn't made a mistake. "But it was true. All the hard coral had just been blasted, ripped off, turned upside down. Some of it was still alive. I've never seen anything like it."

The national park's corals are supposed to be protected, but fishermen are drawn there by locally popular fish like fusiliers and high-value export species like groupers and snappers.

Fishermen can be seen in small wooden boats, some using traditional nets or lines. Others are blasting sites with "bombs" — fertilizer and kerosene mixed in beer bottles. Breathing through tubes connected to air compressors at the surface, young men plunge to the bottom and use squeeze bottles to squirt cyanide into the coral to stun and capture fish.

Dive operators are increasingly seeing dead fish on the sea floor or floating on the surface.

"The biggest problem is that fishermen seem to be free to come into Komodo, completely ignoring the zoning and resource use regulations," said Jos Pet, a fisheries scientist who has worked with numerous marine conservation groups in the area in recent years.

He said they are "quite simply fishing empty this World Heritage Site."

Sustyo Iriyono, the head of the park, said problems are being exaggerated and denied claims of lax enforcement.

He said rangers have arrested more than 60 fishermen over the past two years, including a group of young men captured last month after they were seen bombing fish in waters in the western part of the park.

One of the suspects was shot and killed after the fishermen tried to escape by throwing fish bombs at the rangers, Iriyono said. Three others, including a 13-year-old, were slightly injured.

"You see?" said Iriyono. "No one can say I'm not acting firmly against those who are destroying the dive spots!"

He added that the park is one of the few places where fish bombing is monitored with any regularity in Indonesia, a Southeast Asian nation of more than 17,000 islands.

Divers, however, say enforcement has dropped dramatically since 2010, when the government reclaimed sole control of operations.

For two decades before that, The Nature Conservancy, a U.S.-based nonprofit, had helped the government confront destructive fishing practices there. "No-take zones" were created, protecting spawning areas, and coastal areas also were put off limits.

Patrols using park rangers, navy personnel and local police were key to enforcement.

In 2005, the government gave a 30-year permit to Putri Naga Komodo, a nonprofit joint venture company partially funded by The Nature Conservancy and the World Bank to operate tourist facilities in hopes of eventually making the park financially self-sustaining.

Entrance and conservation fees — just a few dollars at the time — went up several tenfold for foreign tourists. With around 30,000 local and international visitors annually at the time, that would have given the park a budget of well over $1 million, but outraged government officials demanded that the funds go directly into the state budget. The deal collapsed in 2010, when Putri Naga Komodo's permit was yanked.

"They had no right to directly collect the entrance fees from the tourists," said Novianto Bambang, a Forestry Ministry official.

Dive operators and underwater photographers have asked The Nature Conservancy and similar organizations like WWF Indonesia, to return to Komodo and help with conservation efforts there.

Nature Conservancy representative Arwandridja Rukma did not address that possibility, saying even though it was heartwarming to see so much concern about this "national treasure," it only takes part in projects at the invitation of the government.

View the original article here

Better Earthquake Warnings Within Reach, Scientists Say

SAN DIEGO — More accurate early warnings for dangerous tsunamis and powerful earthquakes could be within reach for the millions of people who live in vulnerable areas of the western United States, said scientists gathered here this week for the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America.

In fact, researchers said, the instruments needed to produce better quake warnings are already in place; improving warnings simply requires adding information from GPS monitors to information delivered by vast networks of seismometers that dot the western United States, which are currently the sole provider of the data used to alert people in the moments before powerful shaking strikes.

"We depend on seismic networks for early warning, but they have limitations, especially for large earthquakes," said Yehuda Bock, a research geodesist and senior lecturer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.  Bock pointed to Japan's devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the deadly tsunami that followed as an example of the value of improved early warnings.

Although the Japanese have incredibly advanced earthquake and tsunami warning systems, they don't include GPS data in the mix — and GPS data can provide key information about the true magnitude of the most massive earthquakes.

Marrying the data

Seismometers close to an earthquake can pick up on the energy it released and transmit that information in real time to faraway places, providing warning before the ground shaking jolts a population center. However, seismometers aren't so good at accurately assessing magnitudes larger than 7. That's where GPS comes in. Though it takes a tiny bit longer to arrive at its first measurement, GPS is very good at assessing magnitude, because it literally measures how much the ground is moving.

"We're talking about real-time accuracy within centimeters," said Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory.

When Japan's March 2011 earthquake struck offshore along a subduction zone — a type of fault where the ocean floor is grinding beneath another tectonic plate in a slow-motion dive — authorities estimated it was a magnitude 8 earthquake within about 120 seconds, said Walter Szeliga, a geodesist and research professor at Central Washington University. [7 Craziest Ways Japan's Earthquake Affected Earth]

"A magnitude 8 is a very large earthquake, but it's not expected to produce nearly as large a tsunami as you did have," Szeliga told OurAmazingPlanet. Combined seismic and GPS data would have revealed far more quickly that the quake was in fact a magnitude 9 — a quake about 30 times more powerful than a magnitude 8, he said.

"So an early warning is, in part, for shaking, but it's really useful for rapid tsunami alerts," Szeliga said.

The shadow of the March 2011 Tohoku disaster loomed large in discussions of how to improve warnings for the United States, which, like Japan, has the dubious distinction of sitting right next door to a fault — the Cascadia subduction zone — which is capable of producing the most powerful kinds of earthquakes on the planet.

Twofold threats

However, the seismological situation for the United States is a bit more complicated than it is for Japan, Allen told OurAmazingPlanet.

"They are mostly concerned about offshore earthquakes," Allen said. The United States faces threats not only from offshore earthquakes along the Cascadia fault, but also from those that hit on land — so-called strike-slip quakes, the sort produced by the San Andreas fault.

"That's why we're a little behind them," Allen said. "We need faster methodology because our cities are right on top of the faults."

He said an early warning system using both GPS and seismic data is operational right now, and about 50 scientists and a few public and private entities have access to the warnings. The system would require more instruments if it were to be made public — a goal that Allen envisions reaching by 2015 if funding comes through. Current estimates put the price tag at about $150 million.

The system could alert people from a few seconds to tens of seconds to up to a minute before an earthquake hits, using real-time information streamed from instruments close to the spot where the sudden movement along a fault first began.

"When people experience an earthquake, they just experience the strong shaking at their location," Allen said. "But the earthquake probably started seconds or minutes earlier at some distant location; you use the instruments close to the epicenter to constrain its size, so people get a warning before they feel the shaking."

This story was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience.

View the original article here

DARPA releases cause of hypersonic glider anomaly

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An unmanned hypersonic glider likely aborted its 13,000 mph flight over the Pacific Ocean last summer because unexpectedly large sections of its skin peeled off, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said Friday.

The Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., atop a rocket and released on Aug. 11, 2011, was part of research aimed at developing super-fast global strike capability for the Department of Defense.

The vehicle demonstrated stable aerodynamically controlled flight at speeds up to 20 times the speed of sound, or Mach 20, for three minutes before a series of upsets caused its autonomous flight safety system to bring it down in the ocean, DARPA said in a statement.

A gradual wearing away of the vehicle's skin was expected because of extremely high temperatures, but an independent engineering review board concluded that the most probable cause was "unexpected aeroshell degradation, creating multiple upsets of increasing severity that ultimately activated the Flight Safety System," the statement said.

Initial shockwaves created by the gaps in the skin were more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand, but it was still able to recover and return to controlled flight, said Kaigham J. Gabriel, DARPA's acting director.

Eventually the upsets grew beyond its ability to recover.

The 2011 flight was the second time an HTV-2 was launched. The first flight, in April 2010, also ended prematurely.

Data from that flight was used to correct aerodynamic design models for the second test, resulting in controlled flight, and now data from the latest flight will be used to adjust assumptions about thermal modeling, Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz, the DARPA program manager, said in the statement.

"The result of these findings is a profound advancement in understanding the areas we need to focus on to advance aerothermal structures for future hypersonic vehicles. Only actual flight data could have revealed this to us," he said.

Most specific details of the program are secret. DARPA has released artist renderings showing a craft that looks something like the tip of a spear. After the 2011 flight the agency released handheld video, taken aboard a monitoring ship, that showed a dot streaking across the sky.

The HTV-2 would have splashed down in the ocean regardless of the anomaly. The vehicles are intended to be used once and are not recovered.

View the original article here

Scientists: Fish are sick where BP's oil spill hit

BARATARIA BAY, La. (AP) — Two years after the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, scientists say they're finding trouble with sick fish that dwell along offshore reefs and in the deep waters — especially in places where the oil spill hit the hardest.

The scientists are unsure what's causing a small percentage of the fish they're catching to have large open sores and strange black streaks. The biggest question is whether contaminants from the BP spill are causing the problems. For now scientists can't say for sure if the spill is the cause or if it's normal to find this number of sick fish.

The fish illnesses don't pose an increased health threat to humans, scientists say, but they could be devastating to prized species and the people who make their living catching them.

View the original article here

US scientists head to Mount Everest for research

KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — A team of American scientists and researchers flew to the Mount Everest region on Friday to set up a laboratory at the base of the world's highest mountain to study the effects of high altitude on humans.

The team from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota says it plans to monitor nine climbers attempting to scale Everest to learn more about the physiology of humans at high altitudes in order to help patients with heart conditions and other ailments.

"We are interested in some of the parallels between high altitude physiology and heart failure physiology," Dr. Bruce Johnson, who is heading the team, told The Associated Press before leaving Nepal's capital, Katmandu, for the mountain. "What we are doing here will help us with our work that we have been doing in the (Mayo Clinic) laboratory."

Johnson and the eight other team members flew to the airstrip at Lukla, near Everest, on Friday.

It will take them about a week to trek to the Everest base camp, with several porters and yaks helping to carry their 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds) of medical equipment. They will set up their lab at the base camp, which is located at 5,300 meters (17,380 feet), and expect to be at the camp until at least mid-May.

The team says Everest's extreme altitude puts climbers under the same conditions experienced by patients suffering from heart disease.

The team members plan to study the effects of high altitude on the heart, the lungs, muscle loss and sleep during their stay at Everest, which peaks at 8,850 meters (29,035 feet).

Johnson said that the team's laboratory at the Mayo Clinic focuses on lung congestion during heart failure and that lung congestion often kills mountain climbers.

Hundreds of climbers and their guides attempt to climb Everest every year, while thousands more trek up to the base camp. Several of them suffer from high altitude sickness and other complications because of the low level of oxygen.

An experienced Sherpa guide who had scaled Everest at least 10 times died of high altitude sickness Wednesday at the mountain's base camp, becoming the first fatality in this year's spring climbing season.

Hundreds of climbers and their guides are currently camped at the base camp preparing to scale Everest. Climbers generally try to scale the mountain in May, when weather conditions usually improve just enough to enable them to attempt to reach the peak.

View the original article here

Science lacking on whether death penalty deters murder

Scientific research to date provides no useful conclusion on whether the death penalty reduces or boosts the murder rate, said a report by the US National Academy of Sciences on Wednesday.

A committee of scientists reviewed research done over the past 35 years and found it was "not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates," said the report.

"Consequently, claims that research demonstrates that capital punishment decreases or increases the homicide rate by a specified amount or has no effect on the homicide rate should not influence policy judgments."

The report was issued by the NAS's National Research Council, which convened a Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty to look at available evidence on how the death penalty may affect murder rates.

A previous report by the NRC in 1978 found that "available studies provide no useful evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment."

In the decades since that report, "a considerable number" of studies have attempted to judge how well it works, or does not, and have reached "widely varying conclusions," the latest report said.

"Fundamental flaws in the research we reviewed make it of no use in answering the question of whether the death penalty affects homicide rates," said Daniel Nagin, professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of the committee that wrote the report.

"We recognize that this conclusion may be controversial to some, but no one is well-served by unsupportable claims about the effect of the death penalty, regardless of whether the claim is that the death penalty deters homicides, has no effect on homicide rates or actually increases homicides."

Until now, a key flaw in the research has been the failure to account for how punishments such as life in prison without the possibility of parole may affect homicide rates.

Also, a number of assumptions have hobbled previous studies, particularly by assuming that potential murderers actually consider the risk of execution and respond accordingly.

Instead, researchers going forward must perform more rigorous studies that assess how potential criminals view the death penalty and its likely effect on their actions, the report said.

Better methods for future research include collecting data that consider both capital and non-capital punishments for murder and doing studies on how potential murderers perceive a range of punishments in homicide cases, it said.

Just 15 percent of people who have received the death sentence since 1976 have been executed, "and a large fraction of death sentences are reversed," added the report.

The members did not examine the moral arguments for or against capital punishment, or the costs involved.

View the original article here

More to Come Soon

More to come soon!