shipping
2 minutes to midnight, 3D printed turtle eggs, awkward fiddlers, Egyptian welders, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: January 29, 2018.
Fog Horn (A Call to Action)
- Good morning. The time is now 2 minutes to mid-night. Doomsday Has Never Been Closer. Good luck.
Despite the fact that we live in extremely dangerous times, the scientists in charge of the clock said there is hope. The clock has been wound backwards before, in the wake of the Cold War or during times when nuclear superpowers expressed interest in not mutually assuring destruction.
The scientists argue that civil society should turn the screws on government to reduce carbon emissions and push for even more ambitious climate action than what the Paris Agreement calls for. That sounds like a more fruitful plan than huddling in a bunker.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Some technology is pretty good, though: Cracking down on poaching with 3D-printed fake turtle eggs
Bone-eating zombie worms, octopus overlords, old wooden ships and new woes for deep-sea mining. It’s the Monday Morning Salvage! January 1, 2018.
Fog Horn (A Call to Action)
- Stop. Breathe. Take a step back. This can all be incredibly overwhelming. Pick the fight that matters most to you and take a few days deciding what success looks like, what strategies will work, and what tactics are available to you. And then hoist your flag and get to work.
- And when you meet someone fighting a different fight, remember to support them. There are already enough fronts to advance without taking friendly fire from our flanks.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Maybe it’s time to seriously consider just giving control of the world to the cephalopods. A New Species of Giant Octopus Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight.
The frilled giant Pacific octopus. Photo Courtesy D. Scheel
- The most depressing annual run-down on the environmental science web: The Animals That Went Extinct in 2017.
Busting Ocean Myths: How many containers are really lost at sea?
The Claim: 10,000 containers are lost at sea every year.
Who said it: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Slashdot, Yahoo News, NOAA, me, and many others.
Status: False.
10,000 is one of those numbers that’s big enough to be surprising, but not so huge to inspire immediate incredulity. The worldwide shipping industry is enormous and containers do get lost overboard. With a few recent high-profile maritime accidents, it’s not hard to believe that 10,000 containers could be sent to swim with the fishes every year.
The MOL Comfort breaks its back. Image via gCaptain.
Fortunately, it’s pretty hard to hide a missing container and the number of containers lost at sea is actually much lower than 10,000. In 2011 and 2014, the World Shipping Council surveyed it’s members to find out exactly how many containers are lost at sea each year. What they found was that not only was the number of lost containers an order of magnitude less than the 10,000 figure, but that the average was driven up by two catastrophic accidents–the sinking of the MOL Comfort and the grounding of the MV Rena.