Reünie studievereniging GeoVUsie 20 november 2010
Archive for the ‘Science: Hydrological’ Category
Reunion GeoVUsie (post in Dutch)
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010Deep Horizon oil well blowout – Gulf of Mexico
Saturday, May 1st, 2010As I am a geologist, used to volunteer with world-renowned oiled-wildlife response expert Lee Fox who is based on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico (who usually funds her own oil spill cleanup work, so I urge you to make a donation) and used to live on that shore too, I have at least three reasons for being interested in how the various parties are dealing with this blowout.
Above: 1993 Tampa Bay oil spill cleanup – Photograph: Dawn Waldt
Some of those parties are the US Coast Guard, BP (British, leasing the platform), Transocean Ltd. (Swiss owner of the platform), and Cameron International Corp. (the Houston company that supplied the blowout preventer that apparently failed).
Read more:
Engineering details (ROVs, valves, capping):
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/04/30/oil-spill-blowout-preventer-valve.html?ref=rss#ixzz0mfkikIZ8
1999 report on how to deal with blowouts at sea:
http://www.mms.gov/tarprojects/311/311AA.pdf
UNEP on oil spills:
http://oils.gpa.unep.org/facts/operational.htm
WWF oil spill response report, but for Arctic conditions (2006): http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/wherewework/arctic/WWFBinaryitem12156.pdf
Infoplease.com – an undertaking by Pearson Education – on oil spills:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001451.html
(The Gulf of Mexico suffered a big spill in the 1970s after the blowout of an exploratory well, but that apparently had little environmental impact. The North Sea also had a blowout in the 1970s.)
Above: cleaned-up brown pelican – 1993 Tampa Bay oil spill cleanup – Photograph: Dawn Waldt
Flood defenses
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Today, an exhibition about flood defenses in the UK was officially opened. You can find the RIBA Flood Exhibition – Facing up to rising sea levels – at Portsmouth Cathedral, High Street in Old Portsmouth. It will last two weeks (15 – 27).
See also this PDF file with three flooding scenarios – retreat, defend, attack – for two British towns, namely Hull and Portsmouth, on the web site of the Institute of Civil Engineers.
With lots of thanks for giving me the info to Maricar Jagger, PR Officer for University of Portsmouth!
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Shot of inside of cathedral, with exhibition on other side
Cathedral on the outside, shot taken from very short (accidental) video of the cathedral, with gulls in background.
NOC’S number 1 in the world in oceanography
Friday, December 4th, 2009According to the Times Higher Education, the National Oceanography Center in Southampton (NOC,S) is currently the world’s number 1 when it comes to oceanography. This is based on publications and their influence, however, so organizations that take more risks in new research or work in niches would likely score lower.
http://www.soton.ac.uk/alumni/newsletter/nov09/oceanography.html
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409181&c=1
It is placed 9 in the list of top institutions in geosciences as published on 19 November 2009. I am not surprised to see that the University of East Anglia – which I mentioned on this blog before but have not yet visited, I regret to say – has landed in the 5th position.
NOC’s was my most recent academic affiliation.
Cyanide and sewage spill Trent River, UK
Thursday, October 8th, 2009An unknown quantity of cyanide and untreated sewage ended up in the British Trent somewhere between Stoke-on-Trent and Yoxall and created a “serious pollution incident.”
Thousands of fish were killed. The Environmental Agency pumped oxygen into the water overnight and today to correct the situation.
Last month, a local water company (Severn Trent Water) was fined for a sewage spill in the Trent.
Source: METRO, October 8, 2009, page 21
Water on the moon
Thursday, September 24th, 2009See Science. Just a little bit, but still…
Tidal bore video
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008Yet another new water-related journal
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008The new journal Marine Genomics has gone online at Elsevier’s ScienceDirect.
Another one is expected. The launch of the Journal of Great Lakes Research – in association with the International Association for Great Lakes Research – is scheduled for January 2009. See also this news page.
Elsevier now also has its Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK) in place. It addresses issues such as plagiarism, authorship disputes, multiple submission and/or publication, and research misconduct.
Polar Science: new journal
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008As the web site says, the new journal called Polar Science basically focuses on the following twelve disciplines (within the polar realm):
* space and upper atmosphere physics
* atmospheric science/climatology
* glaciology
* oceanography/sea ice studies
* geology/petrology
* solid earth geophysics/seismology
* marine earth science
* geomorphology/Cenozoic-Quaternary geology
* meteoritics
* terrestrial biology
* marine biology
* animal ecology
Computing planet Earth
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Yesterday, I attended a seminar on the future of design. Sounds pretty generic, but it turned out to be about engineering design (modeling, optimization). The focus of the talks was on aerodynamics and fluid dynamics (foils, airplane engines and the like). One of the white papers, however, contained a nugget to do with earth system science.