UPCOMING EVENTS
Open House Featuring Energy Independence Now CEO Brian Goldstein (AltaSea)
Saturday, February 26th from 10:00am – 12:00pm.
Brian Goldstein leads EIN in its mission to support a transition to a clean transportation system. With a background in finance, Brian has professional experience in the alternative fuels, renewable energy, energy efficiency, transportation technologies, and financial services sectors.
Attendance is free and open to the public. If you are unable to attend in-person, please join us via livestream starting at 10:45am!
ALTASEA COMMUNITY
Port of Los Angeles, Port of Shanghai, and C40 Cities announce partnership to create world’s first transpacific green shipping corridor between ports in the United States and China (C40 Cities)
Convened by C40 Cities and the ports of Shanghai and Los Angeles, and including key maritime stakeholders, this partnership has agreed to work on an initiative to establish a Green Shipping Corridor to decarbonise goods movement between the largest ports in the United States and China. The partnership intends to work together to achieve these goals by developing a “Green Shipping Corridor Implementation Plan” by the end of the 2022 calendar year that will include deliverables, milestones, and roles for the partnership.
TEXEL and AltaSea to bring urgently needed new energy storage technology to the California market (Cision PR Newswire)
Cost-effective and circular energy storage is needed to utilize renewable energy and move away from fossil fuels. Markets like California have reached the end of the road; it is not possible to add more wind and solar power to California without adding an energy storage solution. TEXEL and the Port of Los Angeles based innovation hub, AltaSea, have teamed up to demonstrate TEXEL’s long duration energy storage technology in Los Angeles.
2021 Expedition Highlights Reel – A Year of Wonders (Ocean Exploration Trust)
E/V Nautilus and the Corps of Exploration explored the Eastern Pacific Ocean from Southern California to British Columbia and halfway across the ocean basin to the Hawaiian Islands over the course of six months in 2021. With a global audience following along, we mapped over 107,000 km2 and explored never-before-surveyed areas of the ocean floor with over 60 ROV dives. This highlight reel shares only a sliver of the incredible things we’ve seen and accomplished with our partners. Take a walk with us down memory lane as we remember colorful critters, geological marvels, privileged first looks at never-before-seen seafloor, and of course, the moment when our ROVs Hercules and Argus unexpectedly became temporarily detached from Nautilus.
San Pedro’s Battleship Iowa CEO presented with Navy’s most prestigious civilian award (Daily Breeze)
Jonathan Williams has received the U.S. Navy’s most prestigious civilian award for his work to bring the USS Iowa to the Port of Los Angeles and establish it as a Navy-licensed museum.
Williams, president and CEO of the Pacific Battleship Center and president of the L.A. Fleet Week Foundation, received the Distinguished Public Service Award from the Department of the Navy on earlier this month during the Surface Navy Association’s 34th National Symposium in Arlington, Virginia.
MARINE SCIENCE
Giant pristine coral reef discovered off Tahiti (BBC News)
Marine explorers have discovered a “pristine” 3km (2-mile) coral reef at depths of 30m (100ft) off the coast of Tahiti, French Polynesia.
It is one of the largest discovered at that depth, says the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which led the mission.
Dr Julian Barbiere, from Unesco, said there were probably many more of these ecosystems “we just don’t know about”.
“We should be working to map them and to protect them,” he said.
Sinking 1,000 NYC subway cars in the Atlantic to create a reef didn’t go as planned (Fast Company)
After 58 years of service, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has now retired every single one of its remaining “Brightliners” (R-32 subway cars). Known for their shiny corrugated stainless-steel paneling, the Brightliners bid New York City farewell earlier this month, before they were taken by rail to be scrapped in Ohio.
Most of the cars were retired more than 10 years ago, when more than 1,000 of them were shipped to coastal areas in Delaware, New Jersey, and Georgia and dropped on the ocean floor as part of an artificial reef program.
Winners of the 2021 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest (The Atlantic)
The judging for the 10th annual Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest, organized by the Underwater Photography Guide, has finished, and the winning images and photographers have been announced. The photographer Luc Rooman won Best in Show for his image of a pair of fighting pike. The organizers of the contest have once more shared some of the winners and honorable mentions from 13 categories.
Ocean heat waves trigger ‘squid bloom’ along Pacific coast, scientists say (The Seattle Times)
Marine heat waves driven by climate change have fueled a dramatic increase in market squid along the Washington and Oregon coast over the past two decades, new research shows.
Market squid from central California to northern Washington saw a fivefold increase over the past 22 years, according to a report published by the American Fisheries Society last month. But the largest swells were seen in Washington and Oregon, where models showed each state respectively saw a 39-fold and 25-fold increase in population density of squid during the examined time frame.
SUSTAINABLE AND INNOVATIVE BUSINESS
Algae Market Potentially Worth $320 Billion Draws Honda, Eneos (Bloomberg News)
Oil refiner Eneos Holdings Inc. and Honda Motor Co. are among a group of more than 35 Japanese companies and institutions that have banded together to try to tap the potential of microalgae to help replace fossil fuels and to provide an array of food and consumer goods products.
By banding together under an initiative called Matsuri (Microalgae Towards Sustainable & Resilient Industry), the group is hoping to create enough demand for the phytoplankton to make a large-scale algae farm viable in Malaysia.
How Japan Is Promoting Ocean Sustainability Through Science And Startups (Forbes)
Individuals and organizations around the world are racing to cut emissions to prevent the worst outcomes of global warming. These efforts usually focus on the atmosphere, but the oceans of our planet absorb about 30% of human-generated carbon dioxide. The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for the conservation, sustainable use of oceans, seas and marine resources as one of 17 strategies to transform our world. In Japan, a maritime nation of over 6,800 islands, scientists and entrepreneurs are applying leading-edge science and technology to change our relationship with oceans and protect them, and our planet, for future generations.
Modern governments all need a ministry of the oceans – here’s why (The Conversation)
The ocean is becoming ever more central to our economies. Around 80% of internationally traded goods are transported by sea, and even brief blockages cause panic in global markets. Fishing remains big business, but in the 21st-century fish farming is even bigger.
Most fossil fuel discoveries this century have happened offshore, and offshore wind or wave power will be key to the green transition. As minerals vital to hi-tech industries become scarce on dry land, companies are eyeing the vast mineral wealth of the deep seabed instead.
All these trends contribute to what social scientists have called the “blue acceleration” – a trajectory towards a more intense reliance on the ocean and its resources.
EDUCATION
30 Ways Science Educators Teach With The New York Times (The New York Times)
On February 10th, we’re hosting a webinar about teaching science with The New York Times. In preparation for that event, we put a call out to educators: We wanted to hear about the many different ways science educators use the articles, graphs and multimedia in The New York Times to help students connect the concepts they’re learning in school to current events.
San Diego college student pens children’s book to encourage underrepresented kids in STEM (The San Diego Union-Tribune)
While Taylor Brown thought she was better at science and math than she was at English and writing, it turns out that she could pursue both. She made the switch to STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects in high school, but during a recent summer research program in Sweden, she found time to write and publish her first children’s book, “What Do You Know About…STEM!”
