Empty Oceans

How does the human population affect the population of marine species? What can citizens do to sustain seafood populations? In this lesson, students will learn how pieces of the ocean food web, fish, are being removed faster than they can be replenished. Students will also learn how they can become informed consumers to promote sustainable seafood. Educational levels: Middle school, High school

Empty Oceans

How does the human population affect the population of marine species? What can citizens do to sustain seafood populations? In this lesson, students will learn how pieces of the ocean food web, fish, are being removed faster than they can be replenished. Students will also learn how they can become informed consumers to promote sustainable seafood. Educational levels: Middle school, High school

Launching the Grand Challenges for Ocean Conservation

The ten most pressing Grand Challenges in Oceans Conservation were identified at the Oceans Big Think and described in a detailed working document:A Blue Revolution for Oceans: Reengineering Aquaculture for SustainabilityEnding and Recovering from Marine DebrisTransparency and Traceability from Sea to Shore:  Ending OverfishingProtecting Critical Ocean Habitats: New Tools for Marine ProtectionEngineering Ecological Resilience in Near Shore and Coastal AreasReducing the Ecological Footprint of Fishing through Smarter GearArresting the Alien Invasion: Combating Invasive SpeciesCombatting the Effects of Ocean AcidificationEnding Marine Wildlife TraffickingReviving Dead Zones: Combating Ocean Deoxygenation and Nutrient Runof

Carting Away the Oceans 9

The Carting Away the Oceans report, released annually since 2008, identifies which major grocery chains are leaders in sustainable seafood and which are falling behind.The findings are telling.In the latest update, Whole Foods, Wegmans, Hy-Vee, and Safeway topped the list for their sustainable seafood practices. Roundy's, Publix, A&P, and Save Mart were the worst ranked companies. Publix and Kroger, both top ten supermarkets based on their annual sales, sell more Red List species than any other U.S. grocery chain.Applauding industry leaders and exposing those lagging behind is key to getting supermarkets to take responsibility and play their part in protecting our oceans and the people who depend on the

Carting Away the Oceans 8

Greenpeace released the 8th edition of its annual report, Carting Away the Oceans, which evaluates 26 major retailers on their seafood sourcing and sustainability. Whole foods and Safeway topped the ranking guide. Four supermarkets -- Roundy's, Bi-Lo, Save Mart and Publix -- failed altogether. Kroger, the fifth biggest food retailer in the world, is exposed for selling the most Red List species of any U.S. grocery chain, for the third consecutive year."Consumers want to be able to walk into their local grocery store and know that all the options are sustainable," said James Mitchell, Greenpeace Senior Oceans Campaigner. "That's why Greenpeace is pushing companies like Bi-Lo, Save Mart and Roundy's to drastically improve their sourcing, so that making the right decision is easy for their customers."Hy-Vee was evaluated for the first time and immediately entered the top five best performing retailers for sustainable seafood sourcing.Four of the top five supermarkets have, or will shortly launch private label (store brand) sustainable canned tuna products. Consumers will now be able to find sustainable and affordable alternatives to destructively-caught tuna at Whole Foods, Safeway, Trader Joe's, Hy-Vee, and Walmart. The report gives further credit to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's for not stocking Bumblebee, Chicken of the Sea or StarKist's tuna, which are caught using destructive fishing methods."When Greenpeace started ranking America's retailers on seafood sustainability in 2008, every company failed. We've seen huge improvements since then, yet grocery giants like Kroger are still stocking too many threatened Red List species, which are often caught using highly destructive fishing methods." said Mitchell.Despite progress made by the retail sector overall, overfishing, destructive fishing, and illegal fishing are still major problems for ocean conservation and the economies of developing countries.  Populations of the ocean's top predators like sharks, tuna, and swordfish have dropped by as much as 90% over the past half-century.  Bycatch - where species like sharks and turtles are caught unintentionally in the process of fishing, then thrown back into the sea dead or dying - threatens marine ecosystems as well as global food security.

Oceans governance in the Arctic

Global warming is bringing rapid change to the Arctic. The melting of sea ice and glaciers is increasing faster than scientists predicted even a year ago. Environmental change is forcing legal and economic developments, which in turn will have serious environmental and social consequences. However, the potential for conflict has been greatly exaggerated. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS C) has established the international legal regime governing the division of ocean space, sovereign rights over ocean resources, protection of the marine environment and the conduct of activities in and under the Arctic Ocean. Furtherrmore, a number of global environmental and maritime conventions apply to the Arctic. All the land territory, with its resources, is subject to national jurisdiction, as are the maritime zones proceeding seawards to the limits set our in the LOSe. While there is no multilateral political organisation with the power to regulate activities or to take legally binding decisions, there is a cooperative mechanism in the Arctic Council. Once all the maritime boundaries in the Arctic are delimited, the exploitation of resources can begin. However, first, precautionary measures should be adopted to ensure that the environment is protected as much as possible from increases in shipping and fishing as well as oil and gas development. This would require the elaboration of a regional seas agreement for the Arctic, incorporating elements of the Arctic Council, that reiterates the general principles in Part XII of the LOSC as well as those in the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, including the precautionary approach and the ecosystem approach

Long term persistence in the sea surface temperature fluctuations

We study the temporal correlations in the sea surface temperature (SST) fluctuations around the seasonal mean values in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We apply a method that systematically overcome possible trends in the data. We find that the SST persistence, characterized by the correlation $C(s)$ of temperature fluctuations separated by a time period $s$, displays two different regimes. In the short-time regime which extends up to roughly 10 months, the temperature fluctuations display a nonstationary behavior for both oceans, while in the asymptotic regime it becomes stationary. The long term correlations decay as $C(s) \sim s^{-\gamma}$ with $\gamma \sim 0.4$ for both oceans which is different from $\gamma \sim 0.7$ found for atmospheric land temperature.Comment: 14 pages, 5 fiure

Local Martingale and Pathwise Solutions for an Abstract Fluids Model

We establish the existence and uniqueness of both local martingale and local pathwise solutions of an abstract nonlinear stochastic evolution system. The primary application of this abstract framework is to infer the local existence of strong, pathwise solutions to the 3D primitive equations of the oceans and atmosphere forced by a nonlinear multiplicative white noise. Instead of developing our results specifically for the 3D primitive equations we choose to develop them in a slightly abstract framework which covers many related forms of these equations (atmosphere, oceans, coupled atmosphere-ocean, on the sphere, on the {\beta}-plane approximation etc and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations). In applications, all of the details are given for the {\beta}-plane approximation of the oceans equations