UPCOMING ALTASEA EVENTS
AltaSea Open House: Regenerative Aquaculture featuring Pacific6 (AltaSea)
April 29 from 10:00 am – 12:30 pm
Event is free and open to the public. More details and RSVP information coming soon!
Blue Hour (AltaSea)
October 14, 2023 – Save the date!
AltaSea’s Blue Hour connects science, culture and community by cultivating immersive experiences through multi-disciplinary arts. From global to local, creators and innovators chronicle the vision of a Blue Economy, telling the stories of the ocean, the humanity of those devoted to its preservation and future. Blue Hour supports AltaSea’s Project Blue, which offers students a voice in supporting LA as the center of the Blue Economy through education, career opportunity, access to access to arts and culture. This year’s Blue Hour Guest Curator is American interdisciplinary artist, Kim Abeles whose artworks explore the environment, biography, geography and feminism. Stay tuned for more updates!
ALTASEA COMMUNITY
EIN, AltaSea, the Japanese Consulate, Japan House LA, and UCLA Hold DriveH2 Symposium at Site of Forthcoming Hydrogen Education Center (Yahoo!)
Energy Independence Now (EIN), AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles, the Japanese Consulate, Japan House Los Angeles, and UCLA jointly hosted a symposium featuring two expert panel discussions on “Carbon Mitigation” and “Hydrogen Strategy.” The post-panel VIP Reception featured an exclusive preview of the forthcoming DriveH2 Hydrogen Education Center at the AltaSea Campus in San Pedro.
Long-Lost Ship Found In Lake Huron, Confirming Tragic Story (Huffpost)
Even for the Thunder Bay area, a perilous swath of northern Lake Huron off the Michigan coast that has devoured many a ship, the Ironton’s fate seems particularly cruel.
The 191-foot (58-meter) cargo vessel collided with a grain hauler on a blustery night in September 1894, sinking both. The Ironton’s captain and six sailors clambered into a lifeboat but it was dragged to the bottom before they could detach it from the ship. Only two crewmen survived.
The search and inspections for the ship involved a number of organizations, including Ocean Exploration Trust, founded by Robert Ballard, who located the sunken wreckage of the Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck.
MARINE SCIENCE
A treaty to protect the world’s oceans has been agreed after a decade of talks (NPR)
For the first time, United Nations members have agreed on a unified treaty to protect biodiversity in the high seas — nearly half the planet’s surface — concluding two weeks of talks in New York.
The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994, before marine biodiversity was a well-established concept.
An updated framework to protect marine life in the regions outside national boundary waters, known as the high seas, had been in discussions for more than 20 years, but previous efforts to reach an agreement had repeatedly stalled. The unified agreement treaty was reached late Saturday.
The Big Lives of Tiny Creatures (Hakai Magazine)
They are some of the most bizarre and otherworldly animals on Earth, some of the most abundant life in the oceans, and some of the tiniest creatures with the biggest impact on our lives—plankton. Without them, the world as we know it would cease to exist.
Dive beneath the surface of the North Pacific Ocean through these Hakai Institute videos that capture the wonderful lives of the tiny, the miniature, the microworld. Meet all kinds of plankton, living epic lives just out of sight.
Robot provides unprecedented views below Antarctic ice shelf (Phys.org)
High in a narrow, seawater-filled crevasse in the base of Antarctica’s largest ice shelf, cameras on the remotely operated Icefin underwater vehicle relayed a sudden change in scenery.
Walls of smooth, cloudy meteoric ice suddenly turned green and rougher in texture, transitioning to salty marine ice.
Nearly 1,900 feet above, near where the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf meets Kamb Ice Stream, a U.S.-New Zealand research team recognized the shift as evidence of “ice pumping”—a process never before directly observed in an ice shelf crevasse, important to its stability.
SUSTAINABLE AND INNOVATIVE BUSINESS
Here comes the world’s first offshore wind seaweed farm (electrek)
E-commerce giant Amazon is funding the world’s first commercial-scale offshore wind seaweed farm that will sit between turbines – and this project has the potential to achieve a lot of great things.
The North Sea Farm 1 project, off the Netherlands coast, will consist of a a 10-hectare (25-acre) seaweed farm that is expected to produce at least 6,000kg of fresh seaweed in its first year.
It’s expected to become operational by the end of the year, and the first seaweed harvest is expected in spring 2024. The hope is that the project evolves into a blueprint for offshore seaweed farming that can be rolled out globally.
Scientists Are Trying to Pull Carbon Out of the Ocean to Combat Climate Change (Scientific America)
There’s a growing consensus among climate scientists that in order to avoid the worst effects of global warming, humanity has to find a way to sequester carbon dioxide — and most efforts to date have focused on removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
But two ongoing efforts — including one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — have turned to the oceans, rather than the air. And if successful, the scientists say the process could significantly cut the cost of using carbon capture to fight global warming.
Are investors in the seaweed sector looking in the wrong place? (The Fish Site)
While seaweed processing and product development are receiving the most investments, research from Hatch Innovation Services suggests that limited availability of biomass is the biggest bottleneck in the industry – indicating that production deserves more dollars in both established and emerging seaweed regions.
EDUCATION
How (and why) this man plans to live underwater for 100 days (NPR)
The report was due on Christmas Day, 2012 — and so Joseph Dituri was up late on Christmas Eve.
Earlier that year, he’d retired as a U.S. Navy diver and officer and joined the team of filmmaker James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger mission to the bottom of the Mariana Trench — more than 35,000 feet under sea level.
One detail has stuck with him from reviewing the report on that trip that Christmas Eve: the finding that an organism at that depth contained a chemical that potentially could be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
Great Bear Sea: vast new marine zone a ‘mindset shift’ for conservation (The Guardian)
Nearly a decade ago, Canadian political leaders, environmental activists and Indigenous nations came together to shelter a sprawling 6.4 million-hectare area of trees, sea wolves, salmon and grizzly bears – a project that was named, with some branding acumen, the Great Bear Rainforest.
The plan has since been hailed as a triumph for protecting swathes of old-growth cedar and spruce and drawing global attention to an area of pristine forest the size of Ireland.
This week, Indigenous nations in British Columbia are hoping to replicate that success by extending the model out to the ocean: a new network of protected marine zones called the Great Bear Sea.
Aquarium of the Pacific Announces 2023 African American Scholars (Association of Zoos and Aquariums)
The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif., announced its 2023 cohort of African American Scholars during the Aquarium’s annual African American Festival. The 2023 scholars were selected by a committee including Aquarium staff members and members of the community and include five undergraduate students, two masters students, and three Ph.D. students from eight different schools throughout California.
