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San Francisco sand dunes

  It turns out there are more than 2 square miles of dunes right next to the city, and world-class dunes at that: Only a few sites around the globe have larger dunes of this sort.

 Access, however, will remain difficult unless you're a sand dab or Dungeness crab. The dunes are just west of the Golden Gate, submerged in 100 to 350 feet of sea water. Scientists grasped the extent and size of the underwater dunes -- technically known as "sand waves" -- only recently, aided by sophisticated, multiple-beam sonar that provides stunningly detailed images of the submarine topography.

The sand waves range up to 700 feet long and reach heights of more than 30 feet, Barnard said. It is a dynamic system, he said, with the configuration of the individual dunes changing significantly with each tidal cycle. But overall and over time, the net change to the entire field is slight.

"We knew they were there, but we didn't know their extent or how large they were," Hanes said. "Our work gave us the first 3-D map of the area."

"We know some of the sand waves off the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound reach heights of 90 feet, but that system up there moves such a tremendous amount of water," Greene said. The flow is powerful. About 500 billion gallons -- or enough water to fill 660,000 Olympic-size swimming pools -- move through the mile-wide Golden Gate over each six-hour period, Barnard said. The Golden Gate has one of the strongest tidal currents in the world, averaging about 5.6 miles an hour," Barnard said. "Water moving at that speed can move a great deal of sediment."

Air strike oil spill a 'catastrophe' in Lebanon

I didn't see much about this in the papers but it sounds pretty f&*cked - the editor

Along Lebanon's sandy beaches and rocky headlands runs a belt of black sludge, 10,000 to 30,000 tonnes of oil that has spilled into the Mediterranean Sea after an Israeli strike on a power plant. Lebanon's Environment Ministry says the oil flooded into the sea when Israeli jets hit storage tanks at the Jiyyeh plant south of Beirut on July 13 and 15, creating an ecological crisis that Lebanon's government has neither the money nor the expertise to deal with.

"We have never seen a spill like this in the history of Lebanon. It is a major catastrophe," Environment Minister Yacoub al-Sarraf told Reuters.

"The equipment we have is for minor spills. We use it once in a blue moon to clean a small spill of 50 tonnes or so. To clean this whole thing up we would need an armada ... The cost of a full clean-up could run as high as $40-50 million." The spill is especially threatening since fish spawn and sea turtles nest on Lebanon's coast, including the green turtle which is endangered in the Mediterranean, local ecologists say.

blackened tar on a once popular beach

  Even if Lebanon is able to mop up, the marine ecosystem could take years to recover, local environmentalists say. Commercial fishing and tourism has been at a standstill since the war began because of the air and sea blockade. July is hatching season for turtle eggs and baby turtles have to reach deep water as fast as possible to avoid predators. With the oil in their way, they will not survive," Wael Hmaidan, a local environmental activist said. The oil spill, part of which has settled on the sea floor, threatens blue fin tuna, which is an important but overfished commercial fish, as well as shark species."

Divers find Hitler's aircraft carrier The location of the wreck of the Graf Zeppelin had been a mystery for more than half a century

POLISH divers have discovered the rusting wreckage of Nazi Germany’s only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, solving one of the most enduring maritime riddles of the Second World War. For more than half a century the location of the huge vessel was kept secret by the Soviet authorities. Even the opening of the Moscow archives in the 1990s failed to produce a precise bearing. The once-proud ship was simply one of dozens of wrecks that littered the bed of the Baltic Sea near the Bay of Gdansk. “We were carrying out soundings for possible oil exploration,” Krzysztof Grabowski, of the Petrobaltic exploration group, said. “Then we stumbled across a vessel that was over 260 metres (850ft) long at a depth of 250 metres.” Divers confirmed this week that it was the German ship, though who owns her and what — if anything — will happen to her remains unclear. When the Graf Zeppelin was launched in 1938, Adolf Hitler raised his right arm in salute to a warship that was supposed to help Germany to become master of the northern seas. But, when fleeing German troops scuttled her in April 1945, she had never seen service — a casualty of infighting within the Nazi elite and the changing tide of war. The Graf Zeppelin was scuttled in shallow water near Szczecin and it proved easy for the Red Army to recover her after marching into the Polish port. According to an agreement with the Allies, German and Japanese warships should have been sunk in deep water or destroyed. The Russians repaired the ship, then used her to carry looted factory equipment back to the Soviet Union. In August 1947 Allied spies observed her being towed back to the Polish Baltic coast and then used for target practice at Leba by Soviet dive bombers. It appeared that the Russians were preparing for possible action against US aircraft carriers. The Graf Zeppelin sank a second time, and remained undetected until now. Lukasz Orlicki, a Polish maritime historian, said: “It is difficult to say why the Russians have always been so stubbornly reluctant to talk about the location of the wreck. Perhaps it was the usual obsession with secrecy, or perhaps there was some kind of suspect cargo.” At 262 metres, the Graf Zeppelin was comparable to the biggest of the US carriers that played such a significant role in the Pacific. She had a range of 8,000 nautical miles, meaning that she could easily have reached the North Sea.

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