Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Orcas Keep Sinking Boats Off Iberia, Unnerving Sailors – The New York Times

The yacht Grazie Mamma II carried its crew along the coastlines and archipelagos of the Mediterranean. Its last adventure was off the coast of Morocco last week, when it encountered a pod of orcas.

The marine animals slammed the yacht’s rudder for 45 minutes, causing major damage and a leak, according to Morskie Mile, the boat’s Polish operators. The crew escaped, and rescuers and the Moroccan Navy tried to tow the yacht to safety, but it sank near the port of Tanger Med, the operator said on its website.

The account of the sinking is adding to the worries of many sailors along the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula, where marine biologists are studying a puzzling phenomenon: Orcas are jostling and ramming boats in interactions that have disrupted dozens of voyages and caused at least four boats in the past two years to sink.

Rapid disintegration and weakening of ice shelves in North Greenland | Nature Communications

The glaciers of North Greenland are hosting enough ice to raise sea level by 2.1 m, and have long considered to be stable. This part of Greenland is buttressed by the last remaining ice shelves of the ice sheet. Here, we show that since 1978, ice shelves in North Greenland have lost more than 35% of their total volume, three of them collapsing completely. For the floating ice shelves that remain we observe a widespread increase in ice shelf mass losses, that are dominated by enhanced basal melting rates. Between 2000 and 2020, there was a widespread increase in basal melt rates that closely follows a rise in the ocean temperature. These glaciers are showing a direct dynamical response to ice shelf changes with retreating grounding lines and increased ice discharge. These results suggest that, under future projections of ocean thermal forcing, basal melting rates will continue to rise or remain at high level, which may have dramatic consequences for the stability of Greenlandic glaciers. North Greenland ice shelves have lost more than a third of their masses, thinning dramatically from below due to increased ocean temperatures. In response, grounding lines have retreated and the amount of ice discharged into the ocean has increased.
— Read on www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42198-2

Watch David Bowie Perform “Starman” on Top of the Pops: Voted the Greatest Music Performance Ever on the BBC (1972) | Open Culture

The Beatles were made for black-and-white television, as evidenced by the immediacy with which their 1964 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show launched them into permanent international superstardom. Open Culture, openculture.com
— Read on www.openculture.com/2023/11/watch-david-bowie-perform-starman-on-top-of-the-pops.html