Taiwan tourists are destroying a piece of exactly what they travel to see on an outlying mid-Pacific islet known — at least at one time — for its abundant coral reefs.

A pair of Taiwan environmental groups that marshaled 56 people to check the coral supply near Orchid Island, which is southeast of Taiwan proper, for the first time since 2004 found that the sensitive but colourful marine species covered only 18 percent of the surrounding ocean floor, down from 65 percent, said the Taiwan Environmental Information Center .

The Taipei-based information centre and its research partner the Taiwan Association for Marine Environmental Education suspect that the aftermath of a long-lasting August typhoon may have caused parts of the reef to break apart.

But they’re more concerned about a long-term influx of overeager Taiwan tourists who visit the sparsely populated island for diving or snorkeling in its azure waters.  Humans are taking too much coral or other aquatic life out of the water, hurting the ecosystem, said information centre special projects manager Kung Lu.

“Tourists have been taking too much out of the ocean,” Kung said. “Some of them just don’t know.”

Green Island, a neighbouring islet off the same subtropical coast and arguably northeast Asia’s top diving spot, is fighting an epidemic of diseased coral  as tourist traffic surges to nearly 400,000 visits per year . Orchid had gotten off easier because it’s farther from Taiwan’s main island, with fewer flights and hotels.

Coral reefs, delicate undersea structures resembling rocky gardens made by tiny animals called coral polyps, are nurseries as well as shelters for fish and other sea life. It will take 50 to 100 years before Orchid Island’s coral grows back to even 40 percent of the offshore ocean floor, the information centre estimates.

    When you’re looking for shrinking packs of multiyear ice in the Arctic Ocean, bizarre things tend to happen. Top Canadian scientist David Barber knows this first hand, as he explained in a presentation in Parliament on Wednesday. Barber said that to all extents and purposes the multiyear ice in the Arctic had already vanished, which could open up the region to shipping and mineral exploitation.

    Barber, who holds Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, boarded the icebreaker Amundsen last month and steamed north from the Arctic port of Tuktoyaktuk to look for the Beaufort Sea pack ice, the “thickest, hardest, meanest, multi year sea we have left in the northern hemisphere”.

    According to up-to-date satellite maps provided by the Canadian Ice Service, the Amundsen should have started ploughing into progressively thicker ice almost from the start. Soon after the ship set sail Barber went to bed, and then woke up at 2 am in a panic.

    “I looked on my screen and we’re doing 13 knots. We do 13.7 knots in open water and we’re right here (in an area where the maps show there should be thick ice) somewhere, doing 13 knots,”  he said.

      “And I just panicked, I thought ‘Oh My God, Stephane the captain is not on the bridge and the first officer has gone crazy, he’s driving this thing way too fast through the sea ice’. So I go up on the bridge and talk to the guys and they say “There is no ice here’.”

    The ship sailed for hundreds of miles, first to the north and then eastwards, “trying to find multiyear sea ice that would even slow us down”. All they found was so-called rotten ice — a thin layer covering small chunks of multiyear ice.

    Eventually the ship found a 10-mile floe of “nice typical traditional Beaufort Sea pack ice” close to the Canadian Arctic archipelago. As they were about to attach the ship to the floe Barber looked out and saw a crack open up right in front of him. “I went ‘Wow, that’s kind of weird’.”  Even weirder, he and a colleague then saw the ice move up and down as a swell hit it.

    “And as we watched, literally, without any exaggeration, the entire multi-year floe broke up in five minutes,” he said. Barber blames waves which started off the north coast of Siberia and then rolled across the Arctic Ocean, pushed along by a low pressure system and unencumbered by rotten ice.

    No wonder he says that “I’ve never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic”.

((Broken Arctic sea ice as seen from a window in from a U.S. Coast Guard C130 flight over the Arctic Ocean September 30, 2009. REUTERS/Yereth Rosen))

The seven seas get a single U.S. approach in a draft federal plan for oceans released on Thursday (and dated Sept. 10, when it was given to the prez). The report is a response to President Obama’s request for a plan and says a new National Ocean Council should use ecosystem management to take on the task. Previous efforts have been focused on solving individual problems — saving fisheries, stopping water pollution — which did not always match.

“This is the first time they have declared their intention to adopt a new way of managing the oceans, one that puts a priority on the health of the marine ecosystem, from which all the other benefits flow,” said Chris Mann, director of the Pew Charitable Trust’s campaign for healthy oceans.

Goals include addressing changing conditions in the Arctic, reacting to climate change and ocean acidification and land practices that affect water.

But wait — until they come up with details, it might not amount to a hill of beans.

Photo credit: Reuters/ (Fishing boats and other vessels form the words “Acid Ocean”  in Alaska,  September 2009)

Half a million Magellanic penguins are among the critters to get protection in a new coastal marine park just established by Argentina.

“It is the first protected area in Argentina specifically designed to safeguard not only onshore breeding colonies but also areas of ocean where wildlife feed at sea,” the Bronx-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said on Tuesday.

“Researchers found that the area was in need of protection from increasing pressures by commercial fishing and the oil industry,” said WCS, which helped set up the park. Named the Golfo San Jorge marine park, it became official earlier this month.

Only a fraction of the planet’s coastlines and marine areas are protected, so any move in this area is bound to be welcomed by conservationists.

According to conservation group WWF for example, only 0.6 percent of the world’s oceans have been designated as protected - compared to almost 13 percent of the planet’s land area.

The new reserve is in Golfo San Jorge in Chubut Province, some 1,056 miles (1,700 kilometers) south of Buenos Aires. WCS said it covers approximately 250 square miles (647 square kilometers) of coastal waters and nearby islands strung along almost 100 miles (160 kilometers) of shoreline.

“The region serves as a nesting and feeding ground for some quarter million pairs of Magellanic penguin, estimated to represent 25 percent of the entire population in Patagonia. Its 50 small islands also support two nesting colonies of southern giant petrels that represent over 80 percent of its population on the entire Patagonian coast,” WCS said.

(Photo credit: Graham Harris/Wildlife Conservation Society)

With worries about recession in many countries, does it make sense to try out some more radical ideas for fighting global warming, like placing mirrors in the sky to block the sun or fertilising the oceans to soak up greenhouse gases?

They sound like great proposals at first sight: simple,  probably cheaper and in some cases reversible. See a story about the technologies here. But there’s a lot of scepticism among scientists in the U.N. Climate Panel – there could be nasty side effects.

If you spew clouds of tiny particles, such as sulphur, into the upper atmosphere to block out some sunlight, for instance, they will eventually fall to earth and add to smog (think Beijing on bad days before the Olympics). Backers say that volcanoes do the same thing naturally — big eruptions can cool the planet. But who wants to breathe it in every day?

You can also dump iron filings into the seas to spur a bloom of algae which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then sink to the bottom when they die and cut the amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Sounds great, but it might also make the oceans more acidic — shellfish, crabs, lobsters, etc could then find it harder to build shells and so be more vulnerable to predators.

And if you put a giant barrier in space to reflect sunlight it might cause all sorts of havoc with the climate.

Time Magazine once called such “geo-engineering” options the “Hail Mary pass” - a desperate throw that just might win you the match. 

Is it worth the risk?

There are two turtle tales brewing on the coast of Texas at the moment and they’re both good.

First the numbers tale. 

The dedicated folks at the South Padre Island conservation facility Sea Turtle, Inc, report record numbers of nests by endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles.

“We have had record numbers of ridley nests on the Texas coast this year. We have found over 170 so far in 2008 compared to the previous record of 128 for all of last year,” Sea Turtle, Inc, curator Jeff George told Reuters.

This is the fifth straight year that the numbers have increased.

The species still has a few weeks left to its nesting season in the area, so the recorded 2008 total could reach 200.

The other turtle tidbit? Biologists report that for the first time in at least 70 years they have identified a leatherback turtle nest on the Texas coast.

The 203 cm (over six-foot) wide track in the sand was the first clue to the identity of the leatherback which laid two eggs early in June on Big Shell Island on the Padre Island National Seashore.

The eggs are being kept in an incubation facility and should hopefully hatch sometime around early August.

The massive leatherbacks are the largest of all living turtles, making them a wildlife icon.

George said both tales are good signals which show that conservation efforts from less destructive fishing practices to beach preservation and public education are working.

“The hope is that there are more turtles in the Gulf of Mexico that will use Texas as their breeding ground,” said George.

(Photo credit: Tim Wimborne, Reuters, April 12, 2006)

It’s almost creepy watching this video of a colossal squid slowly thawing out in a giant tub at the Museum of New Zealand. If this were a horror movie, after all, it would suddenly start flailing around with its monstrous tentacles.

Researchers say that the squid, weighing 495 kg (1,090 lb) and caught off Antarctica in 2007, will be unfolded for study on Wednesday after it is defrosted. It is expected to be 6-8 metres long.

That could tell scientists more about colossal squid, rare creatures that are the world’s biggest invertebrates. Sometimes someone wanders into the video frame and you get a sense of how enormous the squid is.

So the video above is not just a curiosity that looks like a poorly stocked fish section in a supermarket with a broken freezer full of water.

“This squid is a really nasty agressive sort of squid…a gelatinous blob with seriously evil arms on it,” the New Zealand Press Association quoted Steve O’Shea, a squid expert at the University of Auckland, as saying of a previous colossal squid in 2003.

“Without any doubt if you fell in the water, you could be shredded to bits by a colossal squid. It is the T-Rex of the oceans,” he said.

So if you thought Jaws was bad….