In a booming sector where the biggest ships have doubled in size since 2000, pressure is growing to make cruising a greener, more sustainable way to travel
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Toxic, filthy and cheap, the sludge-like substance known as heavy fuel oil has powered the shipping industry since the 1960s. What is perhaps less well known is that this same substance is still used to power more than half of cruise ships today, making what many choose as an alternative to flying one of the most environmentally damaging ways to travel.
The good news is that the industry, under pressure from environmentalists and new regulations, is adopting new technologies, energy saving designs and studying alternative fuels.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/28/2024 - 02:00
11/28/2024 - 00:43
As Australia’s natural environment declines, Labor appears to cave to vested interests, writes Felicity Wade
On Thursday we were hoping to be celebrating the Australian parliament passing legislation to create a federal Environmental Protection Agency, an expert watchdog to oversee our country’s natural bounty. This was going to be a major moment for which my organisation, the Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) and many others had worked for years. Promised on the eve of the 2022 election, it was the centre-piece of the Labor’s commitment to the environment. But late on Tuesday afternoon the legislation was moth-balled.
It is a sad and sorry tale.
Felicity Wade is national co-convener of the Labor Environment Action Network
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11/28/2024 - 00:40
The case, brought by the EDO on behalf of three Tiwi Island traditional owners, was dismissed in January in a scathing judgment
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The federal court has ordered the Environmental Defenders Office to pay $9m in costs to Santos after a failed legal challenge to the company’s Barossa offshore gas project.
The case, brought by the EDO on behalf of three Tiwi Island traditional owners, was dismissed in January when Justice Natalie Charlesworth delivered a scathing judgment that made adverse findings against the legal firm.
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11/28/2024 - 00:00
Devastated by quota changes post-Brexit, fishers are pinning all their hopes on Ireland’s politicians as they head into a general election
Words and pictures by Finbarr O’Reilly
Gale force winds gusting across the North Atlantic Ocean kicked up thick spumes of spray from the heaving swell soon after the Ocean Crest and Carmona trawlers left the main Irish fishing port of Killybegs in County Donegal. No other boats were fishing in the area when the storm swept over Ireland’s north-west coast. This was February, and the window for catching migrating mackerel was quickly closing but the two trawlers had yet to fill their quotas.
“This weather is about the limit of what we can fish in,” said skipper Gerard Sheehy as the nose of the Ocean Crest plunged into the trough of a swell, sending a wall of white water crashing over the hull and wheelhouse windows, momentarily obscuring the view before the vessel tilted back upwards into an oncoming wave.
Skipper Gerard Sheehy (centre) with his crew aboard the Ocean Crest in February
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11/28/2024 - 00:00
Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria
Abandonment, when it came, crept in from the outskirts. Homes at the edge of town were first to go, then the peripheral grocery stores. It moved inward, slow but inexorable. The petrol station closed, and creeper vines climbed the pumps, amassing on the roof until it buckled under the strain. It swallowed the outer bus shelters, the pharmacies, the cinema, the cafe. The school shut down.
Today, one of the last institutions sustaining human occupation in Tyurkmen, a village in central Bulgaria, is the post office. Dimitrinka Dimcheva, a 56-year-old post officer, still keeps it open two days a week, bringing in packages of goods that local shops no longer exist to sell. Once a thriving town of more than 1,200, Tyurkmen is now home to fewer than 200 people.
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11/24/2024 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 24 November 2024; doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00096-0
A global assessment of preferential access areas for small-scale fisheries
11/21/2024 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 21 November 2024; doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00092-4
Effects of stock rebuilding – A computable general equilibrium analysis for a mackerel fishery in Korea
World Ocean Explorer Wins Gold Medal Serious Simulation Award from Serious Play Annual International Competition
10/26/2023 - 14:35
For Immediate Release October 19, 2023
Sedgwick, Maine USA World Ocean Explorer, a 3D virtual aquarium and educational simulation, was recently cited for excellence, winning a Gold Medal Award in the 2023 International Serious Play Awards Program.
World Ocean Explorer is an innovative 3D virtual aquarium designed for educational exploration of the world’s oceans. With interactive exhibits and a lobby space, visitors can immerse themselves in realistic marine environments, including a DEEP SEA exhibit funded by Schmidt Ocean Institute, showcasing unprecedented deep-sea discoveries off Australia. Targeted at 3rd graders and beyond, this immersive experience offers a range of perspectives on the ocean environment and can be explored through guided tours or user-controlled interfaces. Visit DEEP SEA at worldoceanexplorer.org/deep-sea-aquarium.html.
Serious Play Conference brings together professionals who are exploring the use of game-based learning, sharing their experience, and working together to shape the future of training and education. For more information on Serious Play Award Program visit seriousplayconf.com/international-serious-play-award-programs.
World Ocean Explorer is a transformative virtual aquarium designed to deepen understanding of the world ocean and amplify connection for young people worldwide. Organized around the principles of Ocean Literacy and the Next Gen Science Standards, World Ocean Explorer brings the wonder and knowledge of ocean species and systems to students in formal and informal classrooms, absolutely free to anyone with a good Internet connection. As an advocate for the ocean through communications, World Ocean Observatory believes there is no better investment in the future of the sustainable ocean than through a new approach to educational engagement that excites, informs, and motivates students to explore the wonders of our marine world and to understand the pervasive connection and implication for our future, inherent in the protection and conservation of all aspects of our ocean world.
World Ocean Explorer presents an astonishing 3-dimensional simulated aquarium visit, organized to reveal the wonders of undersea life, with layers of detailed data and information to augment the emotional connection made to the astonishing beauty and complexity of the dynamic ocean. Within each of the virtual exhibits, students visit exemplary theme-based sites with myriad opportunities to understand the larger perspectives of scientific knowledge as organized and visualized to dramatize the impact and change on ocean life as a result of natural and human-generated events. Through immersion among displays, mixed media and 3D models, the experience of an aquarium visit will be brought into classrooms or home school environments as a free, accessible, always available opportunity for teaching and learning. All of this will be available to a world audience without physical limitation or cost. World Ocean Explorer, a project of the World Ocean Observatory, receives support from the Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, Visual Solutions Lab, the Climate Change Institute, the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, and The Fram Museum Oslo. To learn more about the current and future exhibits of World Ocean Explorer, visit worldoceanexplorer.org.
media contact
Trisha Badger, Managing Director, World Ocean Observatory | [email protected] +12077011069
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