KenSea – development of an environmental sensitivity atlas for coastal areas of Kenya

The Kenya coastline extends 600 km from the border of Tanzania in the south to the border of Somalia in the north (Fig. 1). The Kenyan coast features a diverse marine environment, including estuaries, mangroves, sea grass beds and intertidal reef platforms and coral reefs, which are vital for the reproduction of marine organisms. These coastal ecosystems are regarded as some of the most valuable in Kenya but face serious threats from the ever increasing human pressure of tourism, industrial pollution, destructive fishing, mangrove logging and other unsustainable uses of marine resources. Another serious threat is the maritime transportation activities along the coast and at the ports. It is estimated that at any given time more than 50 ships operate in the major shipping lanes off the Kenyan coast, of which about nine are oil tankers with capacities ranging from 50 000 to 250 000 tonnes. Furthermore, the harbour of Mombasa serves as the major port for countries in East Africa. In recognition of the risks posed by oil pollution the government of Kenya and the commercial petroleum industry agreed to develop a National Oil Spill Response Contingency Plan (NOSRCP) with the purpose of enabling a speedy and effective response to any oil spill within the territorial waters of Kenya. An important element of this plan was the mapping of the coastal resources and the development of an environmental sensitivity atlas showing the vulnerability of the coast to marine oil spills. In 2004, the Government of Kenya approached the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Kenya for financial support to develop an environmental sensitivity atlas. The project was approved and forwarded for funding by the Danish Consultancy Trust Fund administrated by United Nations Operational Program (UNOPS) in Copenhagen. The project was announced in Denmark, and the KenSea group headed by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) was awarded the contract. The project comprises four phases: (1) data compilation and development of the KenSea database, (2) development of a coastal classification for Kenya, (3) development of the sensitivity index jointly with a group of stakeholders, and (4) compilation of the KenSea environmental sensitivity atlas (Tychsen 2006)

Damage Identification of Offshore Jacket Structure via a Kalman Filter Based Nonlinear State Estimation

Offshore structures, functioning in harsh and extreme environmental conditions, may experience structural damages that can be challenging to reliably identify with conventional methods, especially if the damages do not correspond to a permanent change in the modal properties. In this study, a state-of-the-art Kalman Filter (KF) framework aided by a Finite Element (FE) analysis is employed for nonlinear state estimation and, consequently, structural damage identification of an offshore steel jacket structure subjected to unknown extreme wave loads. The outcome of this approach enables the estimation of the nonlinear structural response that, in turn, allows the localization and quantification of the damage

Late Ordovician trace fossils from offshore to shallow water mixed Siliciclastic and carbonate facies in the Ringerike Area, Oslo Region, Norway

Upper Ordovician (Rawtheyan-Hirnantian) deposits in the Ringerike area contain 21 ichnogenera of burrows and two ichnogenera of borings. These deposits consist of a lower siliciclastic part and an upper part dominated by carbonates and mixed clastic-carbonate deposits. Sedimentological and geochemical investigations combined with an ichnological analysis in the lower siliciclastic part point to a shallowing from a transitional-offshore partly dysoxic zone to an oxic delta front/upper shoreface facies. The trace fossils belong to the proximal, archetypal, and distal Cruziana ichnofacies. The upper part of the sequence comprises a complex pattern involving patch reefs interfingering with shallow marine deposits of sandstones and crinoidal limestones in the southern area and carbonate mud banks to the north. The carbonate mud banks were subaerially exposed with the development of local coastlines. The overlying transgressive sediments, consisting of sandstones and carbonates, contain an offshore to transitional trace fossil assemblage