Hawaii Travel

One way of looking at the global ocean current picture is that it’s driven by gravity.

(Image: Left panel ‐ glacial current conveyor belt flow 21,000 years ago; Right panel ‐ reorganized conveyor belt flow 17,500‐15,000 years ago with deep‐water sinking in the North Pacific. Credit: IPRC.)

Cold water is heavier than warm water, so gravity lets it sink. Saltier water is heavier than less salty water, so gravity also forces it to sink.

Warm water flows northward in the Atlantic, gets chilled, and sinks. It sucks other water behind it, and pushes on the water in front of it, launching a system of currents that ultimately extends around the world.

Hawai’i scientist Axel Timmermann, of the University of Hawai’i's International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), is part of an international team of scientists who have studied what happened when this system stopped working 16 millennia ago. It was a period of dramatic climate change that scientists call the Mystery Interval.

They reported their findings in the July 9 issue of Science. A press release here.

A research team looked at sediment cores from 30 places around the Pacific, and studied the marine organisms that lived in the Pacific during the period in question.

They write that as the last ice age ended, between 17,500 and 15,000 years ago, melting glaciers dumped so much cold fresh water into the North Atlantic that it blocked the big current flow there.

But the world’s ocean currents didn’t stop. Instead, the North Pacific took over as the prime mover in current flow, said Timmermann’s co-researcher and lead author in the Science paper, Yusuke Okazaki, of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology:

“Around 17,000 years ago, the North Pacific surface waters grew saltier, and the resulting higher density there caused massive sinking. Newly formed icy deep water spilled out of the subarctic North Pacific at depths of 2000-3000 meters merging into a southward flowing deep western boundary current. A warm, strong poleward current, moreover, formed at the surface. It released much heat into the atmosphere and supplied water for the Pacific deep overturning circulation,” Okazaki said.

Timmermann said that the collapse of the North Atlantic current system might have launched a severe cooling episode, but that the new North Pacific current activity began moving water in such a way that equatorial heat was transferred northward, “and possibly prevented further cooling of the Northern Hemisphere.”

The new Pacific activity may also have roiled up deep-ocean waters rich in carbon, and increased the globe’s carbon dioxide levels, causing still more warming, the authors say. The result may have been that instead of the dying Atlantic circulation causing more cooling, the new Pacific circulation may have had the opposite effect, said IPRC’s Laurie Menviel, another author of the paper.

“This could have catalyzed further warming and accelerated the glacial meltdown,” Menviel said.

It’s an intriguing theory. Timmermann said more tests are needed to confirm the conclusions about activity during the Mystery Interval.

“Our findings caution against the Atlantic-centric view of abrupt climate change that has prevailed amongst climate scientists for the last 20 years. They highlight the complicated adjustments happening in the global ocean during these periods of climate change, in which the North Pacific was definitely a player to be considered.”

Timmermann also said that it is unlikely a similar Atlantic-Pacific swap could occur today, mainly because the Bering Strait between North America and Russia-Siberia was once iced over and now is open. That means water movement would prevent a dramatic salinity change that launched the North Pacific circulation system more than 15,000 years ago.

If this stuff fascinates you, there’s a three-part National Science Foundation video interview with Timmermann here.

The paper: Okazaki, Y., A. Timmermann, L. Menviel, N. Harada, A. Abe-Ouchi, M. O. Chikamoto, A. Mouchet, H. Asahi, 2010: Deep Water Formation in the North Pacific During the Last Glacial Termination, Science, July 9, 2010.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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welp. party of the summer as far as i’m concerned. recaps are a-plenty, with hawaiian ryan obviously being my favorite. cause he brought a BAND to play in the POOL.
next one is sunday sep 5th. you got 8 weeks to lose all that junk, but please keep it in your trunk.

Bacardi b90x Pool Party with [...]
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Any archaeological dig by definition takes you back in time, and the years-long studies at the Makauwahi cave and sinkhole at Maha’ulepu on Kaua’i chronicles a few thousand years of history.

David Burney calls the site a “poor man’s time machine,” and does a remarkable job supporting that definition in his new book, Back to the Future in the Caves of Kaua’i.

I was struck by his opening lines: “Visitors come to Hawaii seeking paradise, but the truth is, these islands have become a kind of living hell for nature.”

Makauwahi, whose lost name was recovered as part of the investigation, chronicles the descent from a pre-human Hawaiian environment filled with unique forms of wildlife, and surrounded by a dense, diverse native dryland forest.

The initial blow came from the first invasion by humans and the rats they brought with them. Land use practices, and the use of fire helped bring about the initial decline. The arrival of Westerners speeded it up.

Burney did the work with a team of fellow scientists and volunteers, key among them the late archaeologist Bill Kikuchi and Burney’s wife, Lida Pigott Burney. He calls his work paleoecology, the study of ancient environmentals through the use of fossil organisms, and Burney adds an overlay of archaeology to study human impacts on the natural environment.

Makauwahi is a stunning natural feature. A limestone shelf, formed by ancient sand dunes hardened into rock, eaten away from within by flowing water, forming deep cave systems. The roof of the largest cave portion has collapsed, creating a wide skylight, with dark caves extending from within it.

Burney found that it was possible to dig down through the wet sediment on the Makauwahi floor and turn the time machine’s dial to points in the past.

The surface inches included plastics and beer poptops. A few feet through the Western period, iron fish hooks and goat bones were found. A few more feet through the early Hawaiian period, were canoe parts, shell fishhooks and a basalt mirrror. And then deep into the pre-human past, the bones of strange extinct birds and shells, and the pollen of long-lost forest plants were located.

He found old structure posts inside the cave, indicating its use in early human times, and he tracked down families with their own histories about the use of the cave. He found ancient traditions about the cave. He tracked the debris from a tsunami that helped fill the cave floor, and the silt from surrounding fields that flowed in during floods.

With a remarkable tally from seed and pollen studies of the plants that once existed around here, Burney and Lida Burney launched an ecorestoration effort, planting some of the species that their work proved had once thrived around here.

It’s not a perfect restoration. Some of the plants are extinct. In other cases, the exact species can’t be determined, so Burney and his team went to similar habitats to identify the most likely near relatives.

That’s how the Ni’ihau fan palm, Pritchardia aylmer-robinsonii, came to be planted inside the cave, where it thrives. It might be the same Pritchardia species whose pollen was found in ancient sediments, or not quite. But it’s likely close.

The ecological restoration effort is a step—rebuilding the past as opposed to discovering the past–another way of rolling back the clock.

In his summation, Burney recalls his book’s opening lines about the environment’s destruction by humans: “Wouldn’t it be a big relief if we could discover, over the next few critical years, that humans can, in a similar stretch of a few generations, actually stop wiping out the rest of nature while maintaining or even improving the human standard of living.”

The book weaves a number of stories, about the history of the region, about a scientist’s inquiries, about a family, and friends, and about how we are changing our planet. It’s a good read. Pick it up at your local bookstore, or try the National Tropical Botanical Garden bookstore or other online resources.

Back to the Future in the Caves of Kaua’i: A Scientist’s Adventures in the Dark, by David A. Burney, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2010, 198 pages, hardcover, $28.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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goes to shakazine.  of COURSE:
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It turns out that building a four-seater car that can get 100 miles to the gallon isn’t easy.

Even if you offer a $10 million prize to do it.

(Image: the Edison2 car, a four-seater with a single-cylinder turbocharged engine. Credit: Edison2.)

With all the interest in bringing electric cars to Hawai’i from folks like Korean carmaker CT&T, and Project Better Place, it’s interesting to look at the future of high fuel-efficiency vehicles. It turns out a lot of them are electric–but it also turns out there’s a new view on powerplants.

The Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize offered $10 million to build a car that could go 100 miles on a gallon, and it got lots and lots of interest. Dozens of companies, colleges, backyard shops, high school shop classes and innovative entrepreneurs hopped up to say they could do it.

Ultimately, 26 vehicles were accepted into the testing, which is conducted by Consumer Reports. The testing includes such requirements as that the car be able to run the required distance and that it’s stable enough to be safe for the highway (for example, it doesn’t flip over on a sharp turn).

There are also emissions tests, fuel economy tests, and ultimately, the requirement that the car be able to run for hours, getting the required 100 miles to the gallon (or in the case of vehicles run on electricity, fuel cells or other non-gas engines the equivalent.)

But after two rounds of testing, there’s only one team—which has two vehicles—still in the running for the Mainstream class prize for a traditional four-seat, four-wheeled car that mainstream consumers might buy.

Another 13 vehicles are still alive in the Alternative class, which includes all kinds of interesting cars with two or three wheels, generally seating two people instead of four. Here is the rundown on the standings so far.

The final phase of testing will take place during the last two weeks of July at the Michigan International Speedway, and the X Prize is to be issued in September.

Cars don’t need to be gasoline fueled. They can be run on alternative fuels, and even electricity. Indeed, a lot of the alternative cars are electric cars.

The remaining competitor in the Mainstream class is a team called Edison 2, which has two versions of its “Very Light Car,” which are both powered by internal combustion engines.

The cars run a single-cyclinder, turbocharged 40-horsepower power plant. It uses E85, which is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. And as the photo above shows, it’s not your grandmother’s Oldsmobile.

The Edison2 team is largely made up of sports car racers. Their cars seat four, have room for your luggage, and advertise a top speed of 100 miles an hour. They have a 6.5-gallon fuel tank, and before you worry that this is just too small, Edison2 says the cars have a range of 600 miles.

The key, according to the Edison2 website, is weight and wind resistance. So they worked very hard to build an aerodynamically efficient shape, and to cut weight wherever possible. For example, they used carbon-fiber instead of metal in some places, and managed to cut the weight of brakes from a pound to a few ounces.

They also claim the car is more recyclable than most.

The remaining cars in the competition are broken into two alternative classes, one for vehicles with side-by-side seating and one with tandem seating—one in front of the other. Edison2 also has a car in this group. Here’s the list from the X Prize folks, listed by team name, car name, where they’re from and how their car is powered.

Alternative Class – Tandem
Commuter Cars, Tango (Spokane, WA) Battery Electric
Edison2, Very Light Car #95 (Charlottesville, VA) Internal Combustion Engine
Spira, Spira4u (Carrollton, IL/Banglamung, Thailand) Combustion Engine
X-Tracer, E-Tracer 7002 (Switzerland) Battery Electric
X-Tracer, E-Tracer 7009 (Switzerland) Battery Electric

Alternative Class – Side-by-Side
Amp, amp’d Sky(Cincinnati, OH) Battery Electric
Aptera, Aptera 2e (San Diego, CA) Battery Electric
Li-ion Motors, Wave II (North Carolina) Battery Electric
RaceAbout Association, RaceAbout (Finland) Battery Electric
Tata Motors, Indica Vista EV X (Coventry, UK) Battery Electric
TW4XP, TW4XP (Italy) Battery Electric
Western Washington University, Viking 45 (Bellingham, WA) Gas/Electric Hybrid
ZAP, Alias (Santa Rosa, CA) Battery Electric

One of the odd features of the competition is that most of the cars are electric, but the only competitor still standing in the Mainstream class uses a liquid fueled engine. From the Edison2 website, here’s their explantation for that.

“Edison2 entered the X Prize accepting the conventional wisdom that success would require an electric or hybrid electric drive. In fact, this assumption underlies our name, Edison2.

“Examination of the interplay between weight, drag, regenerative braking and acceleration, however, demonstrated to us the key importance of low weight and low aerodynamic drag in automobile efficiency, and led us away from a hybrid or electric drivetrain.”

Indeed, the competitor says, the heavy batteries required in an electric car work against the vehicle’s fuel economy. The company blog says six pounds of gas has the energy contained in 500 pounds of battery.

Many teams think outside the box to reach the electric car conclusion. Interestingly, this team thought outside that box, and got back into the original box.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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There are maps and then there are Rob Siemers maps.

Siemers, a Kaua’i cartographer, through his company Environmental Designs has now produced remarkable guides to four islands, Hawai’i, Maui, O’ahu and Kaua’i. The O’ahu guide is the most recent, published a couple of months ago. The Maui guide is about to be redesigned and reprinted.

Maps they hand you at rental car companies, and even many of the ones you might buy in a store, tend to be flimsy things with simple roadmaps surrounded by advertisements.

No ads in Siemers publications. Instead, they’re packed with information-rich graphics. He markets them as both maps and atlases.

“It’s an educational guide. A whole different flavor from what you find anywhere else…a compilation of a lot of information from all over,” Siemers said.

As an example, the Big Island map works as an excellent road map, with zoomed boxes for the detailed transportation systems at Hilo, Hualalai resorts, Waikoloa, Kawaihae, Waimea, Kailua-Kona and the Kailua-Keauhou corridor.

But there are also maps of trails, and bits of information on the culture and history of the island, including important Hawaiian cultural sites and the locations of the old sugar mills.

There’s a color map on geology, showing the several volcanoes that formed Hawai’i Island, when they were active, and what they have contributed to the shape of modern Hawai’i. And there is a section on climate, with data on rainfall, wind, ocean swell patterns and more.

There is a nice section translating place names, and of course, the place names are rendered with the appropriate diacritical markings.

The “O’ahu Island Atlas and Maps” includes special boxes on Pearl Harbor and Hanauma Bay. Several of the boxes of information include references, so you can conduct independent study.

Siemers, with degrees in both physical geography and environmental conservation, has the education and skills to do it alone, but it doesn’t hurt that his father is the noted island geologist and educator Chuck Blay.

The map/atlases retail for around $7 and are available at Borders stores statewide, as well as museums, national parks and monuments, and literary outlets like Native Books, BookEnds and Basically Books.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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i haven’t stopped listening to this summer mixtape from fiero since they sent it to me. two months ago. i am so ready for this. so so so ready. except for the 20lbs i kind of want to shed. oh well. have a listen. and SEE YOU SATURDAY!
Les Aerobiques Mixtape by [...]
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An ongoing mystery of the oceans is how marine algae manage to be very productive when the sunshine they need for photosynthesis is only near the surface and the nitrate nutrients they require are in the deep ocean.

A group of scientists working off Hawai’i believes it has a clue—it involves traveling plants and swirling deep ocean currents.

(Image: Microscopic algae may move between the sunlit surface waters where they can conduct photosynthesis, to deeper waters where they can pick up essential nutrients. Image: Kim Fulton-Bennett © 2010 MBARI)

The subject is important for several reasons, among them that the algae are at or near the bottom of the ocean food chain and thus are important to ocean productivity, and also that they lock up a lot of the carbon dioxide in the surface oceans, which has climate change implications.

“It is not understood how biologically mediated (dissolved inorganic carbon) uptake can be supported in the absence of nutrients,” write researchers Kenneth Johnson, Stephen Riser and David Karl, in a paper in Nature.

Johnson is with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Riser with the University of Washington School of Oceanography, and Karl with the University of Hawai’i's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

Here’s what a news release on the subject says: “The sea around Hawaii may be clear and blue, but it hides an enduring oceanographic mystery. Surface waters in this and other mid-ocean areas contain almost no nitrate or other plant nutrients. Yet each year, microscopic algae (phytoplankton) flourish in these vast, open-ocean areas. Although miniscule in size, these mid-ocean algae consume about one fifth of all the carbon dioxide taken up by plants and algae worldwide.”

Their theory on the subject is this: The deep ocean nutrients don’t make it all the way to the sunlit surface ocean, and the sunshine doesn’t reach deep into the ocean. But maybe they’re meeting halfway, with some mechanism bringing nutrients nearly to the surface, and algae being able to dip down to the nutrient zone before returning to the photosynthesis zone.

The researchers tossed an Apex profiling float into the ocean north of Hawai’i. This drifting robot stayed at sea for 21 months, rising to the surface and dropping to 1,000 meters deep, then rising again, over and over, measuring what it found in the water as it went.

The drifter found that from January to October each year, there’s an increase in oxygen levels in the upper ocean, within 100 meters of the surface. Meanwhile, there is a comparable decrease in nutrient levels—notably nitrates—in the next level down, from 100 to 250 meters down.

Something is making the oxygen and eating the nutrients at comparable rates, even though they’re not in the same place. The obvious culprit here is algae, the microscopic ocean plants that breathe in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, and which eat nutrients like oceanic nitrates.

The scientists suggest that there are two kinds of movement taking place. First, the nutrients are being periodically carried by natural ocean circulation into the bottom layers of the sunlit zone. Second, it is already known that some algae can move through the water, some by buoyancy regulation mechanisms, and others using tiny tails called flagella to whip their ways forward. So once the nutrients are brought halfway, some of the algae themselves may be making the connection.

Here’s how the scientists describe it in their paper: “We suggest that the phytoplankton present in the deep waters must be able to consume the nitrate that is transported vertically in these events. The phytoplankton must then detrain from the upwelled plumes by upward motility, perhaps through buoyancy regulation, before the water returns to depth.”

Their suggestion is not so much that algae are bobbing up and down the water column, but that perhaps dormant algae in the deep ocean rise to near the surface with the nutrients, where they can catch just enough sunlight to “wake up” and rise to the sunlit zone when the nutrient-rich water cycles back into the depths.

The researchers in coming years will be launching more drift floats in other parts of the oceans to get a better handle on the phenomena.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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The little observatory at right is Earth’s early warning system—our canary in the coalmine, so to speak.

(Image: The PS1 {Pan-STARRS 1} observatory atop Haleakala. Credit: Rob Ratkowski.)

One of its missions is to watch for killer asteroids—ones that could crash into the Earth with devastating effect.

Over three years or so, it is expected to locate 100,000 asteroids. If it finds one on a collision course with Earth, then there’s the next problem.

What can we do about it?

Here is the response from the group led by Robert Jedicke and Richard Wainscoat: “If these are found with sufficient lead time, we may be able to nudge them out of the way.”

That raises all kinds of movie-theater fiction scenarios, but as fans of Jules Verne know, science fiction often isn’t falsehood so much as a predictor of future reality.

Pan-STARRS was developed by folks at the University of Hawai’s Institute for Astronomy. With a five-foot mirror and a 1,400 megapixel camera, it scans the sky looking for anything that moves against the background, or which has a significant change in brightness from night to night.

That camera (Let’s see, the one you have at home has, what, 8 megapixels?) is the biggest digital camera in the world. It will take more than 500 shots per night, and the images will be processed at the Maui High Performance Computing Center.

“This telescope is on the cutting edge of technology. It can image a patch of sky about 40 times the area of the full moon, much larger than any similar-sized telescope on Earth or in space,” said Nick Kaiser, a UH astronomer and head of the Pan-STARRS project.

For more information on the project, see here. Another web site that deals with Pan-STARRS is here. And some press releases from the various project partners are here.

A telescope and camera of that kind of power, of course, has lots of applications. So in addition to looking for killer asteroids, Pan-STARRS 1 will be engaged in a number of other research projects.

It will be looking for “brown dwarfs” stellar bodies whose size falls in the region between small stars and giant planets. It will measure the motion of stars, measure astronomical distances, and look into dark matter and black holes, which are quite different despite their names.

Oh, and what does STARRS stand for? Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System.

Which raises the question, is there a term for something that is an acronym of an acronym? As in: PS1 is short for Pan-STARRS 1, a portion of which in turn is short for Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System.

Yep, it is a nested acronym.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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Tropical cyclone systems have started forming early in the warm waters of the Eastern Pacific.

Just a couple of weeks into the 2010 hurricane season, weather forecasters have already identified three systems along the coast of Central America. At this writing, the first and second systems appear to have dissipated. The third is Tropical Storm Blas

(Image: Tropical Storm Blas at 5 a.m. June 17. Credit: National Weather Service.)

None has appeared in the Central Pacific, which is the piece of ocean inhabited by the Hawaiian Islands. But many of our hurricanes start off as tropical systems in the Eastern Pacific.

We won’t be covering these on a daily basis at RaisingIslands.com, although you can do so here. http://www.prh.noaa.gov/cphc/ Rather, this is an alert that the season is upon us, and it’s a good time for residents of the Islands to be sure they have their preliminary hurricane season ducks in a row.

A key piece of this preparedness is to have a preliminary discussion with family and co-workers about what will happen if a hurricane approaches. What are you employers’ requirements. Does your family have safe shelter, are you in an evacuation zone, do you have a designated rendezvous point in case you’re separated, and do you have an agreed-upon person outside your island to call in case of a severe disruption.

Also, do you have a family disaster kit? Now is a good time to prepare one, or to check the status of the one you have. Details can be found on the Web or in the disaster preparedness guide in almost any telephone book. It will include food, water, flashlight, battery radio, your family’s medications, pet supplies, personal hygiene supplies, first aid gear, and so on. It should also include a list of important telephone numbers, email addresses and so forth.

As for Tropical Storm Blas, current projections have it dying out within the week. But there will be more as time goes on, and some will be more forceful. Some may move into Hawaiian waters.

Hurricanes are heat engines, and the water temperatures around Hawai’i are now not warm enough to support an active hurricane—but as the summer progresses they will be.

In the words of the Boy Scout motto, be prepared.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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