Category Archives: High Seas

Photo Illustrations by Brendan Pattengale | Maps by La Tigre

Images above: Glaciers from the Vatnajkull ice cap, in Iceland

Brendan Pattengale is a photographer who explores how color can convey emotions in an image. In his photo illustrations throughout this article, the colors of the original photos have been adjusted, but the images are otherwise unaltered.

This article was published online on February 3, 2021.

We live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earths surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle. When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a new North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses. Of more immediate interest today, a variation in the composition of the Earths atmosphere of as little as 0.1 percent has meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests and a half mile of ice atop Boston. That negligible wisp of the air is carbon dioxide.

Since about the time of the American Civil War, CO2s crucial role in warming the planet has been well understood. And not just based on mathematical models: The planet has run many experiments with different levels of atmospheric CO2. At some points in the Earths history, lots of CO2 has vented from the crust and leaped from the seas, and the planet has gotten warm. At others, lots of CO2 has been hidden away in the rocks and in the oceans depths, and the planet has gotten cold. The sea level, meanwhile, has tried to keep uprising and falling over the ages, with coastlines racing out across the continental shelf, only to be drawn back in again. During the entire half-billion-year Phanerozoic eon of animal life, CO2 has been the primary driver of the Earths climate. And sometimes, when the planet has issued a truly titanic slug of CO2 into the atmosphere, things have gone horribly wrong.

Today, humans are injecting CO2 into the atmosphere at one of the fastest rates ever over this entire, near-eternal span. When hucksters tell you that the climate is always changing, theyre right, but thats not the good news they think it is. The climate system is an angry beast, the late Columbia climate scientist Wally Broecker was fond of saying, and we are poking it with sticks.

The beast has only just begun to snarl. All of recorded human historyat only a few thousand years, a mere eyeblink in geologic timehas played out in perhaps the most stable climate window of the past 650,000 years. We have been shielded from the climates violence by our short civilizational memory, and our remarkably good fortune. But humanitys ongoing chemistry experiment on our planet could push the climate well beyond those slim historical parameters, into a state it hasnt seen in tens of millions of years, a world for which Homo sapiens did not evolve.

When theres been as much carbon dioxide in the air as there already is todaynot to mention how much theres likely to be in 50 or 100 yearsthe world has been much, much warmer, with seas 70 feet higher than they are today. Why? The planet today is not yet in equilibrium with the warped atmosphere that industrial civilization has so recently created. If CO2 stays at its current levels, much less steadily increases, it will take centurieseven millenniafor the planet to fully find its new footing. The transition will be punishing in the near term and the long term, and when its over, Earth will look far different from the one that nursed humanity. This is the grim lesson of paleoclimatology: The planet seems to respond far more aggressively to small provocations than its been projected to by many of our models.

To truly appreciate the coming changes to our planet, we need to plumb the history of climate change. So let us take a trip back into deep time, a journey that will begin with the familiar climate of recorded history and end in the feverish, high-CO2 greenhouse of the early age of mammals, 50 million years ago. It is a sobering journey, one that warns of catastrophic surprises that may be in store.

Read: Scientists have uncovered a disturbing climate change precedent

The first couple of steps back in time wont take us to a warmer worldbut they will illuminate just what sort of ill-tempered planet were dealing with. As we pull back even slightly from the span of recorded historyour tiny sliver of geologic timewell notice almost at once that the entire record of human civilization is perched at the edge of a climate cliff. Below is a punishing ice age. As it turns out, we live on an ice-age planet, one marked by the swelling and disintegration of massive polar ice sheets in response to tiny changes in sunlight and CO2 levels. Our current warmer period is merely one peak in a mountain range, with each summit an interglacial springtime like today, and each valley floor a deep freeze. It takes some doing to escape this cycle, but with CO2 as it is now, we wont be returning to an ice age for the foreseeable future. And to reach analogues for the kind of warming well likely see in the coming decades and centuries, we will need to move beyond the past 3 million years of ice ages entirely, and make drastic jumps back into the alien Earths of tens of millions of years ago. Our future may come to resemble these strange lost worlds.

Before we move more dramatically backwards in time, let us briefly pause over the history of civilization, and then some. Ten thousand years ago, the big mammals had just vanished, at human hands, in Eurasia and the Americas. Steppes once filled with mammoths and camels and wetlands stocked with giant beavers were suddenly, stunningly vacant.

The coastlines that civilization presumes to be eternal were still far beyond todays horizon. But the seas were rising. The doomed vestiges of mile-thick ice sheets that had cloaked a third of North American land were retreating to the far corners of Canada, chased there by tundra and taiga. The roughly 13 quintillion gallons of meltwater these ice sheets would hemorrhage, in a matter of millennia, raised the sea level hundreds of feet, leaving coral reefs that had been bathed in sunlight under shallow waves now drowned in the deep.

By 9,000 years ago, humans in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mexico, and the Andes had independently developed agriculture andafter 200,000 years of wanderinghad begun to stay put. Sedentary settlements blossomed. Humans, with a surfeit of calories, began to divide their labor, and artisans plied new arts. The Earths oldest cities, such as Jericho, were bustling.

Its easy to forget that the Earthcozy, pastoral, familiaris nevertheless a celestial body, and astronomy still has a vote in earthly affairs. Every 20,000 years or so the planet swivels about its axis, and 10,000 years ago, at civilizations first light, the Earths top half was aimed toward the sun during the closest part of its orbitan arrangement today enjoyed by the Southern Hemisphere. The resulting Northern-summer warmth turned the Sahara green. Lakes, hosting hippos, crocodiles, turtles, and buffalo, speckled North Africa, Arabia, and everywhere in between. Lake Chad, which today finds itself overtaxed and shrinking toward oblivion, was Mega-Chad, a 115,000-square-mile freshwater sea that sprawled across the continent. Beneath the Mediterranean today, hundreds of dark mud layers alternate with whiter muck, a barcode that marks the Saharas rhythmic switching from lush green to continent-spanning desert.

Imprinted on top of this cycle were the last gasps of an ice age that had gripped the planet for the previous 100,000 years. The Earth was still thawing, and amid the final approach of the rising tides, enormous plains and forests like Doggerlanda lowland that had joined mainland Europe to the British Isleswere abandoned by nomadic humans and offered to the surging seas. Vast islands like Georges Bank, 75 miles off Massachusettswhich once held mastodons and giant ground slothssaw their menagerie overtaken. Scallop draggers still pull up their tusks and teeth today, far offshore.

By 5,000 years ago, as humanity was emerging from its unlettered millennia, the ice had stopped melting and oceans that had been surging for 15,000 years finally settled on modern shorelines. Sunlight had waned in the Northern summer, and rains drifted south toward the equator again. The green Sahara began to die, as it had many times before. Hunter-fisher-gatherers who for thousands of years had littered the verdant interior of North Africa with fishhooks and harpoon points abandoned the now-arid wastelands, and gathered along the Nile. The age of pharaohs began.

By geologic standards, the climate has been remarkably stable ever since, until the sudden warming of the past few decades. Thats unsettling, because history tells us that even local, trivial climate misadventures during this otherwise peaceful span can help bring societies to ruin. In fact, 3,200 years ago, an entire network of civilizationsa veritable globalized economyfell apart when minor climate chaos struck.

There is famine in [our] house; we will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land. This letter was sent between associates at a commercial firm in Syria with outposts spread across the region, as cities from the Levant to the Euphrates fell. Across the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, dynasties that had ruled for centuries were all collapsing. The mortuary-temple walls of Ramses IIIthe last great pharaoh of Egypts New Kingdom periodspeak of waves of mass migration, over land and sea, and warfare with mysterious invaders from afar. Within decades the entire Bronze Age world had collapsed.

Historians have advanced many culprits for the breakdown, including earthquakes and rebellions. But like our own teetering worldone strained by souring trade relations, with fractious populaces led by unsteady, unscrupulous leaders and now stricken by plaguethe eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean were ill-prepared to accommodate the deteriorating climate. While one must resist environmental determinism, it is nevertheless telling that when the region mildly cooled and a centuries-long drought struck around 1200 B.C., this network of ancient civilizations fell to pieces. Even Megiddo, the biblical site of Armageddon, was destroyed.

This same story is told elsewhere, over and over, throughout the extremely mild stretch of time that is written history. The Roman empires imperial power was vouchsafed by centuries of warm weather, but its end saw a return to an arid coldperhaps conjured by distant pressure systems over Iceland and the Azores. In A.D. 536, known as the worst year to be alive, one of Icelands volcanoes exploded, and darkness descended over the Northern Hemisphere, bringing summer snow to China and starvation to Ireland. In Central America several centuries later, when the reliable band of tropical rainfall that rings the Earth left the Mayan lowlands and headed south, the megalithic civilization above it withered. In North America, a megadrought about 800 years ago made ancestral Puebloans abandon cliffside villages like Mesa Verde, as Nebraska was swept by giant sand dunes and California burned. In the 15th century, a 30-year drought bookended by equally unhelpful deluges brought the Khmer at Angkor low. The hydraulic empire had been fed and maintained by an elaborate irrigation system of canals and reservoirs. But when these canals ran dry for decades, then clogged with rains, invaders easily toppled the empire in 1431, and the Khmer forfeited their temples to the jungle.

Hopscotching through these human disasters to the present day, we pass perhaps the most familiar historical climate event of all: the Little Ice Age. Lasting roughly from 1500 to 1850, the chill made ice rinks of Dutch canals, and swelled up Swiss mountain glaciers. Tent cities sprung up on a frozen Thames, and George Washington endured his winter of cold and privation at Valley Forge in 1777 (which wasnt even particularly harsh for the times). The Little Ice Age might have been a regional event, perhaps the product of an exceptional run of sunlight-dimming volcanism. In 1816, its annus horribilis, the so-called year without a summerwhich brought snows to New England in Augustglobal temperatures dropped perhaps a mere half a degree Celsius. While it is perennially plumbed by historians for insights into future climate change, it is not even remotely on the same scale of disruption as that which might lie in our future.

As Europe emerged from its chill, coal from 300-million-year-old jungles was being fed into English furnaces. Although the Earth was now in the same configuration that, in the previous few million years, had invited a return to deep, unthinkable ice ages, for some reason the next ice age never took. Instead the planet embarked on an almost unprecedented global chemistry experiment. Halfway through the 20th century, the climate began behaving very strangely.

Read: The strange future Hurricane Harvey portends

So this is the climate of written history, a seemingly eventful stretch that has really been the random noise and variability of a climate essentially at peace. Indeed, if you were to find yourself in an industrial civilization somewhere else in the universe, you would almost certainly notice such similarly strange and improbably pleasant millennia behind you. This kind of climate stability seems to be a prerequisite for organized society. It is, in other words, as good as it gets.

As we jump back 20,000 yearsto yesterday, geologicallythe world ceases being recognizable. Whereas all of recorded history played out in a climate hovering well within a band of 1 degree Celsius, we now see what a difference 5 to 6 degrees can makea scale of change similar to the one that humans may engineer in only the next century or so, though in this case, the world is 5 to 6 degrees colder, not warmer.

An Antarcticas worth of ice now rests atop North America. Similar sheets smother northern Europe, and as a result, the sea level is now 400 feet lower. The midwestern United States is carpeted in stands of stunted spruce of the sort that would today look at home in northern Quebec. The Rockies are carved up, not by wildflower-dappled mountain valleys, but by overflowing rivers of ice and rock. California is a land of dire wolves. Where the Pacific Northwest edges up against the American Antarctica, it is a harsh and treeless place. Nevada and Utah fill up with cold rains.

During World War II, at Topaz, the desolate Japanese American internment camp in Utah, prisoners combed the flats of the Sevier Desert for unlikely seashells, fashioning miraculous little brooches from tiny mussel and snail shells to while away their exile. The desert seashells were roughly 20,000 years old, from the vanished depths of the giant Pleistocene-era Lake Bonnevillethe product of a jet stream diverted south by the ice sheet. This was once a Utahan Lake Superior, more than 1,000 feet deep in places. It was joined by endless other verdant lakes scattered across todays bleak Basin and Range region.

Elsewhere, the retreat of the seas made most of Indonesia a peninsula of mainland Asia. Vast savannas and swamps linked Australia and New Guinea, and of course Russia shared a tundra handshake with Alaska. There were reindeer in Spain, and glaciers in Morocco. And everywhere loess, loess, and more loess. This was the age of dust.

Ice is a rock that flows. Send it in massive sterilizing slabs across the continents, and it will quarry mountainsides, pulverize bedrock, and obliterate everything in its path. At the height of the last ice age, along the crumbling margins of the continental ice sheets, the rocky, dusty spoils of all this destruction spilled out onto the tundra. Dry winds carried this silt around the world in enormous dust storms, piling it up in seas of loess that buried the central U.S., China, and Eastern Europe under featureless drifts. In Austria, not far from the site of the voluptuous Venus of Willendorf figurine, carved some 30,000 years ago, are the remains of a campground of the same agetents, hearths, burnt garbage pits, hoards of ivory jewelryall abandoned in the face of these violent, smothering haboobs. Ice cores from both Antarctica and Greenland record a local environment that was 10 times dustier than today. All of this dust seeded the seas with iron, a vital nutrient for carbon-hogging plankton, which bloomed around Antarctica and pulled gigatons of CO2 out of the air and deep into the ocean, freezing the planet further.

Read: When a killer climate catastrophe struck the worlds oceans

This parched Pleistocene world would have appeared duller from space, hosting as it did a quarter less plant life. CO2 in the atmosphere registered only a paltry 180 ppm, less than half of what it is today. In fact, CO2 was so low, it might have been unable to drop any further. Photosynthesis starts to shut down at such trifling levels, a negative-feedback effect that might have left more CO2unused by plantsin the air above, acting as a brake on the deep freeze.

This was the strange world of the Ice Age, one that, geologically speaking, is still remarkably recent. Its so recent, in fact, that today, most of Canada and Scandinavia is still bouncing back up from the now-vanished ice sheets that had weighed those lands down.

In 2021, we find ourselves in an unusual situation: We live on a world with massive ice sheets, one of which covers one of the seven continents and is more than a mile deep. For most of the planets past, it has had virtually no ice whatsoever. The periods of extreme coldlike the ultra-ancient, phantasmagoric nightmares of Snowball Earth, when the oceans might have been smothered by ice sheets all the way to the tropicsare outliers. There were a few other surprising pulses of frost here and there, but they merely punctuate the balmy stretches of the fossil record. For almost all of the Earths history, the planet was a much warmer place than it is today, with much higher CO2 levels. This is not a climate-denying talking point; its a physical fact, and acknowledging it does nothing to take away from the potential catastrophe of future warming. After all, we humans, along with everything else alive today, evolved to live in our familiar low-CO2 worlda process that took a long time.

How long, exactly? Fifty million years ago, as our tiny mammalian ancestors were still sweating through the jungly, high-CO2 greenhouse climate they had inherited from the dinosaurs, India was nearing the end of an extended journey. Long estranged from Africa and the august, bygone supercontinent of Gondwana, the subcontinent raced northeast across the protoIndian Ocean and smashed into Asia in slow motion. The collision not only quieted CO2-spewing volcanoes along Asian subduction zones; it also thrust the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau toward the stars, to be continually weathered and eroded away.

As it turns out, weathering rocksthat is, breaking them down with CO2-rich rainwateris one of the planets most effective long-term mechanisms for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, one that modern geoengineers are frantically trying to reproduce in a lab, for obvious reasons.

Adding to this colossal Himalayan CO2 sink, the more recent buckling, tectonic mess that lifted Indonesia and its neighbors from the sea over the past 20 million years or so also exhumed vast tracts of highly weatherable ocean crust, exposing it all to the withering assault of tropical rainstorms. Today this corroding rock accounts for roughly 10 percent of the planets carbon sink. Over tens of millions of years, then, the stately march of plate tectonicsthe balance of volcanic CO2 and rock weatheringseems to have driven long-term climate change, in our case toward a colder, lower-CO2 world. As well see, humans now threaten to undo this entire epic, geologic-scale climate evolution of the Cenozoic eraand in only a few decades.

When Earths blanket of CO2 was finally thin enough, the planets regular wobbles were at long last sufficient to trigger deep glaciations. The ice ages began. But the climate was not stable during this period. The ice advanced and retreated, and while the descent into the wild episodes of the Pleistocene epoch could be leisurelythe depths of planetary winter taking tens of thousands of years to arrivethe leap out of the cold tended to be sudden and violent. This is where positive feedback loops come in: When the last ice age ended, it ended fast.

Coral reefs marking the ancient sea levelbut today lying deep off the coasts of Tahiti and Indonesiareveal that about 14,500 years ago, the seas suddenly jumped 50 feet or so in only a few centuries, as meltwater from the late, great North American ice sheet raged down the Mississippi. When a 300-foot-deep lake of glacial meltwater spanning at least 80,000 square miles of central Canada catastrophically drained into the ocean, it shut down the churn of the North Atlantic and arrested the seaborne flow of heat northward. As a result, tundra advanced to retake much of Europe for 1,000 years. But when ocean circulation kicked back into gear, and the dense, salty seawater began to sink again, the system rebooted, and currents carried the equators heat toward the Arctic once more. Temperatures in Greenland suddenly leaped 10 degrees Celsius in perhaps a decade, fires spread, and revanchist forests reclaimed Europe for good.

In Idaho, ice dams that had held back giant lakes of glacial meltwater about six times the volume of Lake Erie collapsed as the world warmed, and each released 10 times the flow of all the rivers on Earth into eastern Washington. The floods carried 30-foot boulders on biblical waves, through what were suddenly the worlds wildest rapids. They left behind a labyrinth of bedrock-scoured canyons that still covers the entire southeastern corner of the state like a scar. When the Earths climate changes, this is what it can look like on the ground.

As the ice sheets of the Northern Hemisphere finally lost their grip, darker land around the melting margins became exposed to the sun for the first time in 100,000 years, accelerating the ices retreat. Permafrost melted, and methane bubbled up from thawing bogs. Colder, more CO2-soluble oceans warmed, and gave up the carbon theyd stolen in the Ice Age, warming the Earth even more. Relieved of their glacial burden, volcanoes in Iceland, Europe, and California awoke, adding even more CO2 to the atmosphere.

Soon the Sahara would green again, Jericho would be born, and humans would start writing things down. They would do so with the assumption that the world they saw was the way it had always been. We were born only yesterday and know nothing, one of them would write. And our days on earth are but a shadow.

As we leap back in time again, we emerge before the final Pleistocene glaciation. Weve gone tremendously far back, 129,000 years, though in some ways weve only returned to our own world. This was the most recent interglacial period, the last of many breaks between the ice ages, and the last time the planet was roughly as warm as it is today. Once more, the seas have risen hundreds of feet, but something is awry.

As the Earths wobble and orbit conspired to melt more ice than the poles have shed so far today, the planet absorbed more sunlight. As a result, global temperatures were little more than 1 degree warmer than todays Anthropocene chart-toppersor maybe even the same. But sea level was 20 to 30 feet higher than it is now. (A full third of Florida was sunk beneath the waves.) This is sobering, as one paper put it.

Modelers have tried and mostly failed to square how a world about as warm as todays could produce seas so strangely high. Provisional, if nightmarish, explanations like the runaway, catastrophic collapse of monstrous ice cliffs more than 300 feet tall in Antarctica, which may or may not be set into motion in our own time, are fiercely debated in conference halls and geoscience departments.

Very soon, we may well have warmed the planet enough to trigger similarly dramatic sea-level rise, even if it takes centuries to play out. This is what the Exxon scientist James Black meant in 1977 when he warned higher-ups of the coming super-interglacial that would be brought aboutas a matter of simple atmospheric physicsfrom burning fossil fuels. But our trajectory as a civilization is headed well beyond the warmth of the last interglacial, or any other interglacial period of the Pleistocene, for that matter. So its time to keep moving. We must take our first truly heroic leap into geologic time, millions of years into the past.

Were more than 3 million years in the past now, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at 400 parts per million, a level the planet will not again see until September 2016. This world is 3 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer than ours, and the sea level is up to 80 feet higher. Stunted beech trees and bogs line the foothills of the Transantarctic Mountains not far from the South Polethe last members of a venerable line of once-majestic forests that had existed since long before the age of the dinosaurs.

What weve glossed over in our journey back to this ancient present: the entire evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, three Yellowstone super-eruptions, thousands of megafloods, the last of the giant terror birds, a mass extinction of whales, and the glacial creation and destruction of innumerable islands and moraines. As we make our way backwards in time to the Pliocene, the glaciations get briefer, and the ice sheets themselves become thinner and more temperamental. About 2.6 million years ago they all but disappear in North America, as CO2 levels continue their slow climb.

When we arrive in the middle of the Pliocene, just over 3 million years ago, CO2 levels are high enough that weve escaped the cycle of ice ages and warm interglacials altogether. Lucy the Australopithecus roams a heavily forested East Africa. We are now outside the evolutionary envelope of our modern world, sculpted as it was by the temperamental northern ice sheets and deep freezes of the Pleistocene. But as to atmospheric carbon dioxide, 3 million years is how far back we have to go to arrive at an analogue for 2021.

Despite the similarities between our world and that of the Pliocene, the differences are notable. In the Canadian High Arcticwhere today tundra spreads to the horizonevergreen forests come right to the edge of an ice-free Arctic Ocean. Though the world as a whole is only a few degrees warmer, the Arctic, as always, gets the brunt of the extra heat. This is called polar amplification, and its why maps of modern warming are crowned by a disturbing fog of maroon. Models struggle to reproduce the extreme level of warming in the Pliocene Arctic. Its a full 10 to 15 degrees Celsius warmer in the long twilight of northern Canada, and the pine and birch woodlands of these Arctic shores are filled with gigantic forest-dwelling camels. Occasionally this boreal world erupts in wildfire, a phenomenon echoed by the blazes that today sweep ever farther north. Elsewhere, West Antarcticas ice sheet may have disappeared entirely, and Greenlands, if it exists at all, is shriveled and pathetic.

A common projection for our own warming world is that, while the wet places will get wetter, the dry places will get drier. But the Pliocene seems to defy this saw for reasons not yet fully understood. Its a strangely wet world, especially the subtropics, wherein the Sahara, the Outback, the Atacama, the American Southwest, and Namibialakes, savannas, and woodlands replace deserts. This ancient wetness might come down to inadequacies in how we model clouds, which are under no obligation to behave in physical reality as they do in simplified lines of computer code. Hurricanes were almost certainly more consistently punishing 3 million years ago, just as our storms of the future will be. And a more sluggish circulation of the atmosphere might have lulled the trade winds, turning El Nio into El Padre. Perhaps this is what brought rainsand lakesto the Mojave at this time.

Our modern coastlines would have been so far underwater that youd have to take great pains to avoid getting the bends if you tried scuba diving down to them. Today, traveling east through Virginia, or North or South Carolina, or Georgia, midway through your drive youll pass over a gentle 100-foot drop. This is the Orangeburg Scarp, a bluffhundreds of miles longthat divides the broad, flat coastal plain of the American Southeast. It comprises the eroded and smoothed-out rumors of once-magnificent sea cliffs. Here, waves of the Pliocene high seas chewed away at the middle of the Carolinasan East Coast Big Sur. This ancient shoreline is visible from space by the change in soil color that divides the states, and is visible on much closer inspection as well: To the east of this strange drop-off, giant megalodon-shark teeth and whale bones litter the Carolina Low Country. Though warped over the ages by the secret workings of the mantle far below, these subtle banks 90 miles inland nevertheless mark the highest shoreline of the Pliocene, when the seas were dozens of feet higher than they are today. But even within this warm Pliocene period, the sea level leaped and fell by as much as 60 feet every 20,000 years, to the rhythm of the Earths sway in space. This is because, under this higher-CO2 regime, the unstable ice sheet in Antarctica took on the volatile temperament that, 1 million years later, would come to characterize North Americas ice sheet, toying with the ancient coastline as if it were a marionette.

So this is the Pliocene, the world of the distant present. While todays projections of future warming tend to end in 2100, the Pliocene illuminates just what sort of long-term changes might inevitably be set in motion by the atmosphere weve already engineered. As the great ice sheets melt, the permafrost awakens, and darker forested land encroaches on the worlds tundra, positive feedbacks may eventually launch our planet into a different state altogether, one that might resemble this bygone world. Nevertheless, human civilization is unlikely to keep atmospheric CO2 at a Pliocene levelso more ancient and extreme analogues must be retrieved.

Were now deeper in the past, and the planet appears truly exotic. The Amazon is running backwards, and gathers in great pools at the foot of the Andes. A seaway stretches from Western Europe to Kazakhstan and spills into the Indian Ocean. Californias Central Valley is open ocean.

What today is the northwestern U.S. is especially unrecognizable. Today the airy, columnated canyons of the Columbia River in Oregon swarm with tiny kiteboarders zipping through gorges of basalt. But 16 million years ago, this was a black, unbreathable place, flowing with rivers of incandescent rock. The Columbia River basaltsold lava flows that spread across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, in some places more than two miles thickwere the creation of a class of extremely rare and world-changing volcanic eruptions known as large igneous provinces, or LIPs.

Some LIPs in Earths history span millions of square miles, erupt for millions of years, inject tens of thousands of gigatons of CO2 into the air, and are responsible for most of the worst mass extinctions in the history of the planet. They live up to their namethey are large. But these mid-Miocene eruptions were still rather small as far as LIPs go, and so the planet was spared mass death. Nevertheless, the billowing volcanoes raised atmospheric CO2 up to about 500 ppm, a level that today represents something close to the most ambitious and optimistic scenario possible for limiting our future carbon emissions.

In the Miocene, this volcanic CO2 warmed up the world to at least 4 degrees Celsius and perhaps as much as 8 degrees above modern temperatures. As a result, there were turtles and parrots in Siberia. Canadas Devon Island, in the high Arctic, is today a desolate wasteland, the largest uninhabited island in the worldand one used by NASA to simulate life on Mars. In the Miocene, its flora resembled Lower Michigans.

The sweeping grasslands distinctive to our cooler, drier, low-CO2 world had yet to take over the planet, and so forests were everywherein the middle of Australia and Central Asia and Patagonia. All of this vegetation was one of the reasons it was so warm. Forests and shrubs made this planet darker than our own worldone still painted pallid hues in many places by bare land and iceand allowed it to absorb more heat. This change in the planets color is just one of the many long-term feedback loops awaiting us after the ice melts. Long after our initial pulse of CO2, they will make our future world warmer and more alien still.

As for fauna, were now so distantly marooned in time from our own world that most of the creatures that inhabited this leafy planet range from the flatly unfamiliar to the uncannily so. There were big cats that werent cats, and rhino-size hell pigs that werent pigs. There were sloths that lived in the ocean and walruses that werent related to todays walruses. Earths largest-ever meat-eating land mammals, African juggernauts like Megistotherium and Simbakubwa, not closely related to any living mammals today, tore early elephants apart with bladed mouths.

And with CO2 at 500 ppm, the sea level was about 150 feet higher than today. Approaching Antarctica in the middle Miocene by sea, the waters would be warmer than today, and virtually unvisited by ice. To get to the ice sheet, youd have to hike far past lakes and forests of conifers that lined the coast. Trudging past the trees and finally over endless tundra, you would come at last to the edge of a much smaller ice sheet whose best days were still ahead of it. An axiom about this land-based Antarctic ice sheet in paleoclimatology is that its incredibly stubborn. That is, once you have an ice sheet atop the heart of Antarctica, feedback loops kick in to make it exceedingly hard to get rid of. Barring true climatic madness, a land-based Antarctic ice sheet is essentially there to stay.

But in the middle Miocene this young Antarctic ice sheet seemed to have a temper. It might have been surprisingly dynamic, as one paper cheerfully puts it. As CO2 increased from just below todays levels up to about 500 ppm, Miocene Antarctica shed what today would amount to 30 to 80 percent of the modern ice sheet. In the Miocene, Antarctica seemed exquisitely tuned to small changes in atmospheric CO2, in ways that we dont fully understand and that were not incorporating into our models of the future. There will undoubtedly be surprises awaiting us in our high-CO2 future, just as there were for life that existed in the Miocene. In fact, the Antarctic ice sheet may be more vulnerable today to rapid retreat and disintegration than at any time in its entire 34-million-year history.

In the 16 million years since this mid-Miocene heat, the volcanic hot spot responsible for the Columbia River basalts has wandered under Yellowstone. Today it powers a much tamer kind of volcano. It could cover a few states in a few inches of ash and disrupt global agriculture for years, but it couldnt launch the planet into a new climate for hundreds of thousands of years, or kill most life on the surface. Unfortunately, there is such a supervolcano active on Earth today: industrial civilization. With CO2 likely to soar past 500 ppm from future emissions, even the sweat-soaked, Siberian-parrot-populated world of the middle Miocene might not tell us everything we need to know about our future climate. Its time to go back to a global greenhouse climate that ranks among the warmest climate regimes complex life has ever endured. In our final leap backwards, CO2 at last reaches levels that humans might reproduce in the next 100 years or so. What follows is something like a worst-case scenario for future carbon emissions. But these worst-case projections have continued to prove stubbornly accurate in the 21st century so far, and they remain a possible path for our future.

Were now about to take our largest leap, by far, into the geologic past. We hurdle over 40 million years of history, past volcanic eruptions thousands of times bigger than that of Mount St. Helens, past an asteroid impact that punched out a gigantic crater where the Chesapeake Bay sits today. The Himalayas slump; India unhitches from Asia; and the further back we go, the higher the CO2 level rises and the warmer the Earth gets. The Antarctic ice sheet, in its death throes, vanishes altogether, and the polar continent instead gives way to monkey puzzle trees and marsupials. We have arrived, finally at the end of our journey, in the greenhouse world of the early age of mammals.

Today the last dry land one steps on in Canada before setting out across the ice-choked seas for the North Pole is Ellesmere Island, at the top of the world. But once upon a time there was a rainforest here. We know this because tree stumps still erode out of the barren hillsides, and theyre more than 50 million years old. Theyre all thats left of an ancient polar jungle now whipped by indifferent Arctic winds. But once upon a time, this island was a swampy cathedral of redwoods, whose canopy naves were filled with flying lemurs, giant salamanders, and hippolike beasts that pierced the waters. At this polar latitude, on some late-fall evening of the early Eocene, the sun tried and failed to lift itself from the horizon. A pink twilight reached deep into the jungle, but soon the sun would set entirely here for more than four months. In this unending Arctic dark, the stillness would be broken by the orphaned calls of tiny early primates, who hopped fearlessly over stilled alligators that would start moving again when the sun returned from beyond the horizon. In this unending night, tapirs hunted for mushrooms and munched on leaf litter that was left over from sunny days past and that in the far future would become coal.

We have no modern analogue for a swampy rainforest teeming with reptiles that nevertheless endures months of Arctic twilight and polar night. But for each degree Celsius the planet warms, the atmosphere holds about 6 percent more water vapor, and given that global temperatures at the beginning of the age of mammals were roughly 13 degrees warmer than today, its difficult to imagine how uncomfortable this planet would be for Ice Age creatures like ourselves. In fact, much of the planet would be rendered off-limits to us, far too hot and humid for human physiology.

Not only was this a sweltering age, but it was also one cruelly punctuated by some of the most profound and sudden CO2-driven global-warming events in geologic historyon top of this already feverish baseline. Deep under the North Atlantic, the Eocene epoch kicked off in style 56 million years ago with massive sheets of magma that spread sideways through the crust, igniting vast, diffuse deposits of fossil fuels at the bottom of the ocean. This ignition of the underworld injected something like the carbon equivalent of all currently known fossil-fuel reserves into the seas and atmosphere in less than 20,000 years, warming the planet by another 5 to 9 degrees Celsius. Evidence abounds of violent storms and megafloods during this ancient spasm of climate changeepisodic waves of torrential rains unlike any on Earth today. In some places, such storms would have been routine, separated by merciless droughts and long, brutal, cloudless heat waves. Seas near the equator may have been almost as hot as a Jacuzzitoo hot for most complex life. As for the rest of the planet, all of this excess CO2 acidified the oceans, and the worlds coral reefs collapsed. Ocean chemistry took 200,000 years to recover.

The most jarring thing about the early age of mammals, though, isnt merely the extreme heat. Its the testimony of the plants. In higher-CO2 conditions, plants reduce the number of pores on their leaves, and fossil leaves from the jungles of the early Eocene have tellingly fewer pores than todays. By some estimates, CO2 50 million years ago was about 600 ppm. Other proxies point to higher CO2, just over 1,000 ppm, but even that amount has long bedeviled our computer models of climate change. For years, in fact, models have told us that to reproduce this feverish world, wed need to ramp up CO2 to more than 4,000 ppm.

This ancient planet is far more extreme than anything being predicted for the end of the century by the United Nations or anyone else. After all, the world that hosted the rainforests of Ellesmere Island was 13 degrees Celsius warmer than our own, while the current global ambition, enshrined in the Paris Agreement, is to limit warming to less than 2, or even 1.5, degrees. Part of what explains this glaring disparity is that most climate projections end at the end of the century. Feedbacks that might get you to Eocene- or Miocene-level warmth play out over much longer timescales than a century. But the other, much scarier insight that Earths history is very starkly telling us is that we have been missing something crucial in the models we use to predict the future.

Some of the models are starting to catch up. In 2019, one of the most computationally demanding climate models ever run, by researchers at the California Institute of Technology, simulated global temperatures suddenly leaping 12 degrees Celsius by the next century if atmospheric CO2 reached 1,200 ppma very bad, but not impossible, emissions pathway. And later that year, scientists from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona were similarly able to reproduce the warmth of the Eocene by using a more sophisticated model of how water behaves at the smallest scales.

The paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney thinks the key may be the clouds. Today, the San Francisco fog reliably rolls in, stranding bridge towers high above the marine layer like birthday candles. These clouds are a mainstay of west coasts around the world, reflecting sunlight back to space from coastal California and Peru and Namibia. But under higher-CO2 conditions and higher temperatures, water droplets in incipient clouds could get bigger and rain down faster. In the Eocene, this might have caused these clouds to fall apart and disappearinviting more solar energy to reach, and warm, the oceans. That might be why the Eocene was so outrageously hot.

This sauna of our early mammalian ancestors represents something close to the worst possible scenario for future warming (although some studies claim that humans, under truly nihilistic emissions scenarios, could make the planet even warmer). The good news is the inertia of the Earths climate system is such that we still have time to rapidly reverse course, heading off an encore of this world, or that of the Miocene, or even the Pliocene, in the coming decades. All it will require is instantaneously halting the super-eruption of CO2 disgorged into the atmosphere that began with the Industrial Revolution.

We know how to do this, and we cannot underplay the urgency. The fact is that none of these ancient periods is actually an apt analogue for the future if things go wrong. It took millions of years to produce the climates of the Miocene or the Eocene, and the rate of change right now is almost unprecedented in the history of animal life.

Humans are currently injecting CO2 into the air 10 times faster than even during the most extreme periods within the age of mammals. And you dont need the planet to get as hot as it was in the early Eocene to catastrophically acidify the oceans. Acidification is all about the rate of CO2 emissions, and we are off the charts. Ocean acidification could reach the same level it did 56 million years ago by later this century, and then keep going.

When he coined the term mass extinction in a 1963 paper, Crises in the History of Life, the American paleontologist Norman Newell posited that this was what happened when the environment changed faster than evolution could accommodate. Life has speed limits. And in fact, life today is still trying to catch up with the thaw-out of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago. Meanwhile, our familiar seasons are growing ever more strange: Flycatchers arrive weeks after their caterpillar prey hatches; orchids bloom when there are no bees willing to pollinate them. The early melting of sea ice has driven polar bears ashore, shifting their diet from seals to goose eggs. And thats after just 1 degree of warming.

Subtropical life may have been happy in a warmer Eocene Arctic, but theres no reason to think such an intimately adapted ecosystem, evolved on a greenhouse planet over millions of years, could be reestablished in a few centuries or millennia. Drown the Florida Everglades, and its crocodilians wouldnt have an easy time moving north into their old Miocene stomping grounds in New Jersey, much less migrating all the way to the unspoiled Arctic bayous if humans re-create the world of the Eocene. They will run into the levees and fortifications of drowning Florida exurbs. We are imposing a rate of change on the planet that has almost never happened before in geologic history, while largely preventing life on Earth from adjusting to that change.

Taking in the whole sweep of Earths history, now we see how unnatural, nightmarish, and profound our current experiment on the planet really is. A small population of our particular species of primate has, in only a few decades, unlocked a massive reservoir of old carbon slumbering in the Earth, gathering since the dawn of life, and set off on a global immolation of Earths history to power the modern world. As a result, up to half of the tropical coral reefs on Earth have died, 10 trillion tons of ice have melted, the ocean has grown 30 percent more acidic, and global temperatures have spiked. If we keep going down this path for a geologic nanosecond longer, who knows what will happen? The next few fleeting moments are ours, but they will echo for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. This is one of the most important times to be alive in the history of life.

This article appears in the March 2021 print edition with the headline The Dark Secrets of the Earths Deep Past.

Go here to see the original:

Could Climate Change Be More Extreme Than We Think? - The Atlantic

The untimely death of a family member can be very devastating. Not only have you lost the love and support of someone who is very important to you, but it can also have a major financial effect on you. If the death of your loved one was due to the negligence of another person or company, you may have thought about suing them. If they died while working or traveling at sea, there are Houston maritime lawyers that you can hire to represent you.

Whenever you bring a civil lawsuit against anyone, you will have a limited time to file it. This time period is called the statute of limitations. The Death on the High Seas Act has a three-year statute of limitation. The clock begins ticking the second the accident happens.

What is DOHSA?

The Death on the High Seas Act offers a legal solution for families who have lost a member because of negligence.

As with all wrongful death cases, only a spouse child, or dependent relative may file such a suit. The death must have taken place in a vessel at sea or on a plane that was at least 12 nautical miles into international waters. It was enacted by the United States Congress in March of 1920.

You can seek compensation for things such as funeral expenses, loss of future wages, proven financial losses caused by the death, and psychiatric treatment for family members.

Proving Negligence

In order to recover compensation in a death on the high seas complaint, you will have to establish that the crew was negligent, or that the vessel your relative was traveling in should not have been allowed to operate.

An attorney may use inspection records for a ship or plane in order to prove this. They may also subpoena previous work reports on the ship's crew. They may try to prove that the crew failed to follow safety protocols.

An attorney may try to establish that the crew did not receive proper training. They will review the records of any medical treatment given to the decedent to see if there was impropriety or negligence involved in the medical care provided by the ship's Infirmary. it is not uncommon for cruise lines to hire doctors who have not been trained in the United States.

Finding an Attorney

The attorney that you select should be a specialist in maritime law. They should have a staff that is large enough to take the time needed to research your case. They should have an excellent reputation online and be able to provide you with references.

Nothing can ever replace a family member. However, compensation can help you move on with your life and teach a cruise line or a shipping company to be more careful in the future.

Visit link:

Statute of Limitations for the Death on the High Seas Act - State-Journal.com

The NOAA Ocean Prediction Center is predicting seas in excess of 60 feet associated with a low pressure system that has rapidly intensified in the North Atlantic off the northeast coast of the U.S.

Low pressure rapidly intensified yesterday and overnight, and continues to produce #hurricaneforce winds to 75 kt today, the Ocean Prediction Center said in an update posted to Facebook.

At 12:00 UTC, National Weather Serviced meteorologists analyzed significant wave heights of 52 feet, or 16 meters, associated with the storm. The latest NWS North Atlantic High Seas Forecast showed a Hurricane Force Wind Warning is in effect for the area with seas forecasted to build to 60 feet, or more than 18 meters, over the next 24 hours!

.24 HOUR FORECAST LOW 46N42W 954 MB. WITHIN 360 NM SE AND 180 NM NW QUADRANTS WINDS 55 TO 75 KT. SEAS 44 TO 60 FT. NOAA Hurricane Force Warning issued 1630 UTC FRI JAN 29 2021.

Remember, significant wave height is the average height of the tallest 1/3 of waves, so individual waves can be much larger and may be more than twice the significant wave height.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, the world record for the tallest significant wave height was recorded by North Atlantic buoy located between Iceland and the United Kingdom in February 2013. The wave height: a whopping 62.3 feet, or 19 meters!

The previous record of 18.275 meters (59.96 feet) was measured on 8 December 2007, also in the North Atlantic.

While todays forecast is calling for seas that could approach previous records, verifying wave heights with a high degree of certainty is a different ball game, as you need to rely on either buoy data (most accurate but fixed locations), ship observations (first you need a ship in area), or satellite altimeter data that has a history of being finicky.

In one instance in 2018, the National Hurricane Centers Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch reported that satellite radar picked up a significant wave height of 83 feet associated withHurricane Florence. Although forecasters at first believed the data to be accurate, they admitted that the reading could have also been the result of extremely heavy rain, which may have produced bad data.

For the latest analysis and forecast guidance on this from NOAA, head over to https://ocean.weather.gov/Atl_tab.php.

Read the original:

North Atlantic Storm Forecasted to Produce Massive 60-Foot Seas gCaptain - gcaptain.com

The global system is built on buying and selling, but often, no one pays for the most basic goods and services that sustain life water to drink, soil to grow food, clean air to breathe, rain forests that regulate the climate.

Continuing to ignore the value of nature in our global economy threatens humanity itself, according to an independent report on biodiversity and economics, commissioned by the British government and issued Tuesday. The study, led by Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge University economist, is the first comprehensive review of its kind.

Even while we have enjoyed the fruits of economic growth, the demand we have made on natures goods and services has for some decades exceeded her ability to supply them on a sustainable basis, Mr. Dasgupta said. The gap has been increasing, threatening our descendants lives.

For many people, nature has intangible or spiritual value that is impossible to measure, the report notes. But natures services to humans have been taken for granted in our global economy, in large part because they are generally free for the taking. Humans are farming, fishing, poaching, logging, mining and burning fossil fuels so rapaciously that we have triggered a biodiversity collapse. As many as a million species of plants and animals are at risk of disappearing, and the worlds leaders are failing to act.

Beyond the intangible losses that come when a species vanishes, this erosion of biodiversity poses tangible threats to humanity.

Just as diversity within a portfolio of financial assets reduces risk and uncertainty, diversity within a portfolio of natural assets increases natures resilience in withstanding shocks, Mr. Dasgupta said. At the global level, climate change and Covid-19 are striking expressions of natures loss of resilience.

In economic terms, the report reframes nature itself as an asset. It offers a new economic model for leaders around the world to make calculations that factor in the benefits of nature, for example the way wetlands protect against flooding and peatlands store vast amounts of carbon.

What the Dasgupta report is doing really well is highlighting the value of what Mother Nature gives us without demanding a paycheck, said Matthew E. Kahn, an environmental economist at Johns Hopkins University. When you go to Starbucks, Starbucks wants to be paid for that cup of coffee. Mother Nature is providing services but shes not demanding a stream of payments.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Prince Charles and David Attenborough all spoke at the reports release on Tuesday, praising the project and calling for action.

It is sheer madness to continue on this path, Prince Charles said. Sir Partha Dasguptas seminal review is a call to action that we must heed, for ladies and gentlemen, it falls on our watch and we must not fail.

The solution begins, the report says, by understanding that our economies are embedded within nature, not external to it. We must change how we measure economic success, it urges, because gross domestic product does not account for the depreciation of assets, including environmental ones. As our primary measure of economic success, the authors wrote, it therefore encourages us to pursue unsustainable economic growth and development.

International arrangements are needed to manage certain environments that the whole planet relies on, the report says. It asks leaders to explore a system of payments to nations for conserving critical ecosystems like tropical rain forests, which store carbon, regulate climate and nurture biodiversity. Fees could be collected for the use of ecosystems outside of national boundaries, such as for fishing the high seas, and international cooperation could prohibit fishing in ecologically sensitive areas.

The reports release comes ahead of a United Nations meeting on biodiversity later this year; environmentalists hope that it will result in an international agreement to confront biodiversity loss similar to the Paris Agreement on climate change. The United States is the only state in the world, apart from the Vatican, that is not party to the underlying U.N. treaty on biodiversity.

Conservation groups applauded the report.

The idea that we are part of Nature and that natural capital is an asset that needs to be sustainably managed will come as no surprise to Indigenous communities who have valued nature through the ages, said Brian ODonnell, director of the Campaign for Nature. But, for those who have embraced economic systems based on limitless growth it requires a fundamental rethinking of how progress is valued and measured.

Read more here:

Nature Doesnt Get a Paycheck. Now, Theres a Movement to Change That. - The New York Times

Weve heard a fair old bit from Ultimate Games over the last few months, with them already committed to launches of Ultimate Summer and Smuggler Simulator. Now though they are adding a new simulator to their list, one that promises to deliver a whale of a time Essex: The Whale Hunter.

Due to land on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch and PC in 2023, Essex: The Whale Hunter will whisk us off to the high seas of the 19th century, working the island of Nantucket and sailing the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

A whaling simulator inspired by Moby-Dick, the creators of Essex promise that it will deliver a high seas adventure filled with emotions and realism. Its being developed by the Polish studio 3T Games and will be published by Ultimate Games, in yet another collaboration between the companies.

So what should we be looking forward to? Well, Essex: The Whale Hunter is a single-player focused whaling simulator, and this will see you embarking on a great adventure in the open waters of the Atlantic. The player you, me and your friends will step into the shoes of a whaling ship captain before taking in elements attached to that: whale hunting, including the majestic and awe-inspiring cachalots.

In Essex: The Whale Hunter, players will embark on a unique journey through a world that no longer exists. The bulk of the action will take place on the Atlantic, but we will also visit the island of Nantucket, which could be described as the Wall Street of 19th-century whaling. Herman Melvilles masterpiece serves as our main inspiration during development, and were striving to properly capture the unique nature of this multi-dimensional novel said Rafa Jelonek, CEO at 3T Games.

Throughout Essex we will be faced with many challenges, starting off with just the very basics in place, such as recruiting the optimal crew. But it wont be long before things start to get tricky and proper maintenance of the ship will play a crucial role as you focus on the search and hunt for whales. And just for good measure, it will also include economic elements and allow you to trade the gathered resources.

More details will be revealed at a later time but for now, expect to find the main features of Essex: The Whale Hunter covering the following

Well be sure to bring you any further news of Essex: The Whale Hunter prior to it launching on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch and PC through Steam in 2023.

Hit up the trailer to see how things are looking

See the article here:

Essex: The Whale Hunter coming to Xbox One, Series X|S, PS4, PS5, Switch and PC in 2023 - TheXboxHub

Although all cruise lines in North America are currently shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic, those people itching to get back on the high seas should prepare themselves to follow CDC orders when cruising returns.

According to a report by Royal Caribbean Blog, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has passed a new order requiring people to wear masks on public transportation, and that includes cruise ships.

Royal Caribbean Blog cited the CDCs order, which stated: Persons must wear masks over the mouth and nose when traveling on conveyances into and within the United States. Persons must also wear masks at transportation hubs as defined in this Order.

What forms of travel fall under the CDC order?

The order, which goes into effect Feb. 1, 2021, pertains to forms of travel including aircraft, train, road vehicle, vessel or other means of transport, Royal Caribbean Blog reported, and applies within any state, locality or territory.

Are there exceptions?

The CDC order lists instances when the requirement to wear a mask does not apply, among which are: while eating, drinking, or taking medication, for brief periods; or while communicating with a person who is hearing impaired, when the ability to see the mouth is essential for communication; or when its necessary to temporarily remove the mask to verify ones identity.

According to the CDC order, those persons who are exempt include children under 2 years old, as well as a person with a disability who cannot wear a mask, or cannot safely wear a mask, because of the disability as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Also exempt, the CDC order states, is a person for whom wearing a mask would create a risk to workplace health, safety, or job duty.

Royal Caribbean Blog reported that cruise lines must provide adequate notice of the rule, - disembarking any person who refuses to comply. Additionally, guests should be informed that wearing a mask on the conveyance is a Federal law requirement and failure to comply constitutes a violation of Federal law.

Royal Caribbean had previously set its own similar guidelines.

The new rules require what the cruise lines have already agreed to do on their own, according to Royal Caribbean Blog.

The Healthy Sail Panel, back in September 2020, proposed passengers and crew members wear face masks on cruise ships. The list of protocols included 74 detailed steps that the panel believes will protect guests, crew members and the places cruise ships visit from the spread of COVID-19, the report explained.

Royal Caribbean specified in its rules that when its cruise ships return to service, face masks will be required, with exceptions similar to what the CDC outlined, Royal Caribbean Blog reported.

Royal Caribbean explained that although guests will not be required to wear face masks in their own stateroom, they should wear face masks in nearly all public settings regardless of physical distancing measures, reported Royal Caribbean Blog - with exceptions in dining venues. There seated guests will be permitted to eat and drink without face masks, provided physical distancing is observed.

Royal Caribbean Blog further explained that in order for seated guests without face masks to safely dine, restaurant seating will be arranged to allow for physical distancing, and tables and chairs will be disinfected.

The cruise lines rules also stated that guests should not wear masks while engaged in activities that may cause the mask to become wet, such as when swimming in their pools, or when participating in strenuous activities, such as jogging, running, or in fitness classes, the report explained.

In addition, Royal Caribbean Blog stated the cruise lines rules require face masks to be worn at all bars or nightclubs when not seated and actively eating or drinking with your party.

Royal Caribbean crew members will wear masks and gloves at all times, the report stated.

Based on the CDCs new order, it is yet unclear whether Royal Caribbean will change any of these protocols, Royal Caribbean Blog said.

The CDCs aim in issuing the new order is to ensure people in close contact are not putting the public health at risk, the report explained.

Mask use is only part of the prevention protocol.

Along with the use of masks, the CDC believes other preventive measures, including social distancing, frequent handwashing, and cleaning and disinfecting frequently touched surfaces, is one of the most effective strategies available for reducing COVID-19 transmission, Royal Caribbean Blog said.

READ MORE:

Read more from the original source:

Cruise ship passengers will be required to wear masks, new CDC order states - pennlive.com

O TS Shipping, a subsidiary of AS Tallinna Sadam, won a public tender organized by the Estonian Transport Administration for the provision of icebreaking services and navigation in the Gulf of Finland in the period 20.12.2022-20.04.2032. The icebreaking service in Estonian coastal waters is provided with the multifunctional icebreaker Botnica, similarly to the previous 10-year charter agreement, annually from December 20 to April 20. The agreement will be signed in the near future in accordance with the conditions set out in the procurement and the offer.

The total estimated cost of the agreement to be concluded is EUR 54.2 million, i.e. EUR 5.4 million per year. From the 2025/2026 working period, the contract fee may be indexed with the Estonian consumer price index, but not more than 3% annually. The contract fee is fixed, i.e. the Transport Administration pays for all charter days, regardless of the actual use of the icebreaker.

Compared to the icebreaking service agreement of the previous 10-year period, there is an additional condition to bring a replacement vessel for service within 10 days in case the contracted main vessel Botnica should fall out of use. Among other things, we mitigate this risk by increasing the reliability of Botnica's vital systems.

MPSV Botnica was built at Aker Finnyard shipyard in 1998. The ICE-10 / Polar Class 4 ice class carrying vessel is 97.3 meters long and 24.3 meters wide. In open water, Botnica has a maximum speed of 16.5 knots, and in ice up to 80 cm, the ship can move at speeds of up to 8 knots. The maximum thickness of ice that Botnica can pass at a steady speed is 1.2 meters. During the summer periods from June to the end of October, Botnica assists Panamax-type merchant vessels in the Arctic waters of northern Canada in the export of iron ore from the port of Milne Inlet to the high seas. According to the charter agreement, Botnica provides escort and ice monitoring vessel service, pollution monitoring and emergency services. The total number of Botnica charter days in 2020 was 249 days and the annual utilization rate of the ship was 68%, in 2019 261 days and 72% accordingly.

Tallinna Sadam is one of the largest cargo- and passenger port complexes in the Baltic Sea region, which serves annually 10 million passengers and 20 million tons of cargo in average. In addition to passenger and freight services, Tallinna Sadam group also operates in shipping business via its subsidiaries O TS Laevad provides ferry services between the Estonian mainland and the largest islands, and O TS Shipping charters its multifunctional vessel Botnica for icebreaking and construction services in Estonia and offshore projects abroad. Tallinna Sadam group is also a shareholder of an associate AS Green Marine, which provides waste management services. According to audited financial results, Tallinna Sadam groups sales in 2019 totaled EUR 130.5 million, adjusted EBITDA EUR 74.3 million and net profit EUR 44.4 million.

Additional information:

Marju ZirelHead of Investor RelationsTel. +372 5342 6591

m.zirel@ts.ee

Read more from the original source:

MPSV Botnica's 10-year icebreaking service to the Transport Administration - GlobeNewswire

Volkswagen is embracing electric vehicles and that doesnt just apply to those on land.

Quite the opposite as the company is teaming up with Silent-Yachts, which is a manufacturer of solar-electric catamarans.

According to the automaker, they first became aware of Silent-Yachts in 2019 and this eventually lead to talks between the two companies. These discussions paved the way for Silent-Yachts to use Volkswagens MEB modular electric drive kit.

Also Read:Lexus Launches $3.5 Million LY 650 Yacht

The companies didnt go into specifics, but it sounds like Silent-Yachts will use MEB battery packs. Regardless, Volkswagen said the company will benefit from economies of scale and this should enable future yachts to be more affordable.

While it seems odd that Volkswagen has taken an interest in yacht building, the company said they want to further increase the enthusiasm for electromobility, demonstrate the technological strengths of its platform and show that driving fun, long ranges, smooth cruising and clean mobility are also possible on the high seas.

As part of this effort, Volkswagen has tapped Cupra to help Silent-Yachts create a new model with a contemporary touch. Its a double decker that features clean lines as well as gently sloping roofs equipped with solar panels. The yacht also has angular accents, large greenhouses and what appears to be four MEB battery packs.

If everything goes according to plan, the first yacht with MEB technology will be introduced in 2022. Following a start-up period of four years, the shipbuilder is set to make at least 50 yachts annually.

While Silent-Yachts isnt a household name, they introduced the Solarwave 46 in 2009. The company has since delivered a dozen catamarans including the Silent 55, which can cover up to 99 miles (160 km) a day using solar energy. Since cloudy days are always a possibility, the boats are equipped with an emergency diesel generator.

Read more here:

VW And Cupra Are Using Their MEB Electric Drive Tech On Yachts Now Too - CarScoops

Now that the year 2021 begins, the outlook for Comic Con they are no better than in 2020. Luckily Image Comics and Skybound Entertainment they are trying to find a solution where people can come together without danger of getting infected. So they are exploring the idea of a comic book convention on a cruise ship.

Image Comics and Skybound Entertainment sent a survey to know the opinion of the fans to achieve a way to Bring the community back together at a Comic Con when things are safe.

Calling all comic book lovers! Its been a wild year, to say the least, and weve spent a lot of time thinking about ways to bring the fan community back together when things are safe. Our solution? Have a good vacation!

We know that everyone could use a great vacation and wed love to hear your thoughts on how to bring the conference room to the ocean with an immersive vacation focused on all things cruise comics. So live a Comic Con experience on the high seas

The idea of a Comic Con Cruise-based is not exactly new. There have been smaller conventions on cruise ships during the 1990s and 2000s and in 2017. Fan2Sea Entertainment tried to do an annual event but they only managed to launch one edition.

A cruise ship can be a good idea if it has strong anti-COVID-19 security measures in place before passengers board. So people could enjoy a Comic Con like those that existed before the pandemic. Hopefully more ideas like this will come up so people can get back together around their favorite hobbies like Marvel, DC Comics The Star Wars.

Read more here:

The future of Comic Con could be on the high seas - Market Research Telecast

We here at FishOn understand they're playing something called the Super Bowl this Sunday, which kind of confused us. We thought it could only be an official Super Bowl if the Patriots were playing. They change the rule or something? Do the Krafts know about this?

So this is our special Super Bowl preview. Sources tell us the game will pit the Chiefs of Kansas City against the Buccaneers of Tampa Bay and apparently the oldest living man on planet Earth plays quarterback for the Buccaneers.

There. That's it. All we know. And really all you need to know. Look how much time and effort we saved you. Celebrate through the subsequent environs of FishOn.

Onward, into the stuff.

Special FishOn Super Bowl quiz question

Who are the only four quarterbacks to lead different teams to a Super Bowl?

Hint: They don't include Fran Tarkenton, Joe Kapp, Jim Plunkett, Babe Parilli, Tom Yewic, John Huard, Tom Sherman, Mike Taliaferro, Matt Cassel, Tony Eason, Zeke Bratkowski, Ryan Leaf or Cate Blanchett. Though if we could take any of them, have to say we're on the Cate Freight Train

The answer is going no-huddle down below.

USCGC Tahoma gettin' er done

We got a missive from the U.S. Coast Guard last week that described a recent 58-day tour of the North Atlantic fisheries by the 270-foot, Kittery, Maine-ported Coast Guard Cutter Tahoma.

Wonder if they ran into the Buccaneers while out on the high seas?

The cutter participated in three search-and-rescue missions - including one on Christmas Eve when the F/V Angela Michelle was disabled about 100 miles east of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That mission included assistance from vessel and crews from Station Gloucester.

In early December, the Tahoma responded to 170 nautical miles east of Nantucket, where the F/V Fearless had become disabled. The Tahoma towed Fearless 260 nautical miles, over five days, until relieved near Buzzards Bay by a commercial tugboat. Those numerals are not typos.

All told, according to the Coast Guard, the Tahoma helped save nine lives. That there is a fair piece of work and worthy of the coveted FishOn seal of approval. We clap our fins.

RIP, Ozie

We close today on the saddest note of all. Our friend Ozie died last week at his home in Gloucester, leaving an immense void in the world in which he travelled and the legions of people who knew and loved him.

He was, quite simply, as good and decent a person as we've ever met. He was smart, interesting and funny - not just funny, but rapier-quick funny with a view often enough just a hair off plumb to make it it a hoot.

We here at FishOn were not spared. He thought we should recast the title of FishOn. He suggested FiSean.

Gloucester is a glorious town of individuals, traversed by those of highly independent thought and deed.

Yet The Wizard stood out. Ozie was generous, tolerant and fiercely loyal. As he navigated his own health challenges, he never once complained. Never. He had the heart of a fighter and the soul of an optimist, his eyes squarely on the thin line of the horizon. The past, for Ozie, was never prologue.

Before his health issues sidelined him, he was an artist as a carpenter. Or perhaps a carpenter as an artist. At play, he was an accomplished fisherman, skier and poker player. He was dangerous at the pool table and still holds the shotput record at Hamilton-Wenham High School. You can look it up. Go Generals.

And there is this: Ozie could eat an oyster. One year at the Mayor's Reception during the Schooner Festival, which he regarded as his second Christmas, we watched our man go for 66 or 68 (as usual, the Russian judge) on his own. Then and there, he was the Oyster Whisperer.

Our hearts and good thoughts are with Mary Beth, his beloved wife, and their combined families. And to Lucky the Wonder Pup, of course.

There is a tendency, really a kindness, to lionize people in their passing, to gild the lily of their life in a parting gift of warm remembrance.

But not here.

No matter the homage or accolade, anything you say about Mark Osborne, even as you raise a glass, as we did Friday night at the Crow's Nest and Saturday eve at Pratty's, the trajectory falls short of his extraordinary essence and short-arms how much we already miss him.

Special FishOn Super Bowl quiz answer

There is of course, the Old Buccaneer, our Tom, who will be making his 10th appearance in the big game and Brady's first with someone other than the Patriots. The other three are Craig Morton (Cowboys and Broncos), Peyton Manning (Colts and Broncos) and Kurt Warner (Rams and Cardinals). Manning is the only quarterback so far to win a Super Bowl with two different teams (2007 Colts and 2014 Broncos).

We here at FiSean says that changes Sunday. Bucs in the upset.

As always, no fish were harmed in the making of this column.

Contact Sean Horgan at 978-675-2714, or shorgan@gloucestertimes.com. Follow him on Twitter at @SeanGDT

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Read the rest here:

FishOn: Saving lives and a life lost | Fishing Industry News | gloucestertimes.com - Gloucester Daily Times