Barely visible to the naked eye, sea urchin larvae grow and transform into bottom-dwelling urchins.
"We commend the Government of Argentina for their conservation stewardship in creating this new network of marine protected areas," said Dr. Cristián Samper, President and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
"Isla Pingüino and Makenke Coastal Marine Parks now protect vital wildlife populations for posterity and create new opportunities for Argentina's ecotourism industry."
Stretching some 80 miles south of Puerto Deseado and extending 12 miles out to sea, Isla Pingüino covers nearly 1,800 square kilometers (720 square miles) of ocean and cliff-bordered coastline.
The new protected area contains large populations of South American sea lions, red-legged cormorants, and one of the largest colonies of imperial cormorants found anywhere (with more than 8,000 breeding pairs).
Isla Pingüino also boasts one of the only colonies of rockhopper penguins on the coast of Patagonia.
Farther south, the Makenke Coastal Marine Park begins at the entrance of the Ría San Julián, covering almost 600 square kilometers (230 square miles) of shore and ocean.
The park contains the largest colony of rare red-legged cormorants in the country.
Credit: G. Harris/Wildlife Conservation Society.
Both marine protected areas are steeped in history as well as natural wonders.
Charles Darwin traveled to the region now contained in Isla Pingüino in 1833, describing the wildlife he observed there during his seminal voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.
Makenke Coastal Marine Park now borders the inlet of San Julian, where in 1520 Ferdinand Magellan executed and marooned a group of mutineers intent on aborting what would become the world's first circumnavigation of the globe.
Isla Pingüino and Makenke Coastal Marine Parks were made possible as a result of work conducted by Dr. Patricia Gandini, President of the National Parks Service, and Dr. Esteban Frere of the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral.
Both biologists began studying the wildlife of the coast of Santa Cruz with support of WCS in 1985.
Both areas were identified as priority conservation sites by the Patagonia Coastal Zone Management Plan project, carried out by both the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Fundación Patagonia Natural with support from the Global Environmental Facility and the UNDP (United Nations Development Program).
Support for the research was also provided by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Conicet).
A place to return : Makenke contains one of the largest breeding colonies of red-legged cormorants in Argentina.
WCS has been involved in the conservation of coastal Patagonia since the 1970s, beginning with Dr. Roger Payne's behavioral work on southern right whales, and continues to this day with research by WCS's Global Health Program on new threats to their survival.
WCS began a long-running study on Magellanic penguins in the 1980s.
That work led to conservation efforts that helped reduce the number of penguin deaths due to oil spills at sea from more than 40,000 a year to fewer than 1,000 annually, and helped move shipping lanes 30 miles offshore to avoid spills affecting seabird colonies.
WCS has also been conducting research on southern elephant seals, South American sea lions, rockhopper penguins, cormorants, gulls, terns, and other species that breed along the shores of Patagonia.
These studies informed the region's first atlas of breeding seabirds, a work designed to guide management decisions on fisheries and other natural resource usage.
Over the past 40 years WCS has helped Argentina transition from harvesting of coastal wildlife to a burgeoning tourism industry based on its spectacular coastal species.
These two new parks are the latest addition to the country's extraordinary marine conservation effort.
Measurements of individual Galileo horizontal position fixes performed for the first time using the four Galileo satellites in orbit plus the worldwide ground system between 1000 and 11:00 CET on Tuesday 12 March 2013, showing an overall horizontal accuracy over ESTEC in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, of 6.3 m.
The obtained accuracy in the 10 meters range fulfills expectations.
A minimum of four satellites is required to make a position fix in three dimensions.
The first two were launched in October 2011, with two more following a year on.
This first position fix of longitude, latitude and altitude took place at the Navigation Laboratory at ESA’s technical heart ESTEC, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands on the morning of 12 March, with an accuracy between 10 and 15 metres – which is expected taking into account the limited infrastructure deployed so far.
A 3D presentation of the Galileo satellite navigation system, a joint development by the European Union and European Space Agency.
This constellation of satellites will allow users to pinpoint their location anywhere on Earth -- launched on 20 October 2011.
“The test of today has a dual significance: historical and technical,” notes Javier Benedicto, ESA’s Galileo Project Manager.
With only four satellites for the time being, the present Galileo constellation is visible at the same time for a maximum two to three hours daily.
This frequency will increase as more satellites join them, along with extra ground stations coming online, for Galileo’s early services to start at the end of 2014.
With the validation testing activities under way, users might experience breaks in the content of the navigation messages being broadcast. In the coming months the messages will be further elaborated to define the ‘offset’ between Galileo System Time and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), enabling Galileo to be relied on for precision timing applications, as well as the Galileo to GPS Time Offset, ensuring interoperability with GPS. In addition, the ionospheric parameters for single frequency users will be broadcast at a later stage.
The definition phase and the development and in-orbit validation phase of the Galileo programme were carried out by ESA and co-funded by ESA and the European Community.
The Full Operational Capability phase is managed and fully funded by the European Commission.
The Commission and ESA have signed a delegation agreement by which ESA acts as design and procurement agent on behalf of the Commission.
Nadine Christian is considered the first novelist from her island home’s 223 years of civilized existence. “Remembering Love” by all accounts is a fine piece of work.
However, in fairness to Christian anything good that happens within her remote spec of volcanic rock called Pitcairn Island will always be prefaced by its notorious past.
Historians and lovers of true adventure on the high seas hear the words “Pitcairn Island” and instinctively think of Lt. William Bligh, Fletcher Christian and Mutiny on the Bounty in 1789.
From the mutiny, thoughts unconsciously turn to bleak isolation of the insurgents’ abysmal resting place — Pitcairn Island.
An early drawing of Pitcairn Island – from the collection of Maurice Allward.
Pitcairn is a small, but distinctive, island in the heart of the southern South Pacific.
It is more than 3,300 nautical miles from New Zealand and 1,400 nautical miles from Tahiti, and with a population of about 60, it represents one of the most remote and inaccessible jurisdictions on Earth. Still, its tropical beauty and haunting features and sad reminders of the past like “Christian’s Cave” continue to make for an appealing adventure.
You cannot fly into Pitcairn because its 2.5 square miles of land mass are mostly mountainous.
From neighboring New Zealand, it is 10 days by yacht.
Because of strong ocean currents and jagged volcanic minefields, a yacht or small ship cannot land there.
Islanders send long boats out to meet visitors and supply ships.
The mutineers of the HMS Bounty would find this information about a remote, uninhabited (but inhabitable) island useful when they sought a place to hide from the British Admiralty in 1779.
However, in January 1790, no island could have been a more perfect haven than Pitcairn for the mutineers of the Bounty.
The island was misplaced on British charts, and it was here that Christian and eight other dissenters, plus 24 Tahitian men and women settled.
The ship was burned in what is known today as Bounty Bay and its remains are still visible.
After nearly two years of being isolated on the island, most of the mutineers, including Fletcher Christian were murdered.
Some accounts say Christian committed suicide, while others believe he somehow escaped Pitcairn and returned to England, hiding out for the remainder of his life.
John Adams, the last survivor of the seized ship, insisted Christian was killed by the Tahitians.
The cave Christian lived in remains a focal point of the island.
It rises some 250 feet and provides a spectacular view of the vast blue Pacific.
It is not much more than a small indentation, but it is where Christian often sat, scanning the ocean hoping not to be discovered by a distant British ship.
All of the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island are descendants, or married to descendants, of the original mutineers including Nadine Christian.
She is the wife of a descendant of Fletcher Christian and the author of “Remembering Love,” an excellent first novel.
Through the wonder of the Internet, the review was picked up by resident Sue O’Keefe who has since become an occasional pen pal, and through her, I met Nadine Christian.
The book has a strong focal point — a young girl returning to her Pitcairn Island home to rediscover her roots, linking pieces of her past together and, yes, finding love.
The story is woven with skillful dialogue, easy transition and credible island scenes that are the essence of Pitcairn’s beauty, mystery and magnetism.
Its pages, worth any book lover’s time, represent seeds of a promising dramatist.
Christian’s style has a way of carrying one off to the South Seas without exorbitant fare or throttling red tape.
Nadine went to Pitcairn from New Zealand in 2002.
She is 40 and filled with energy to write novels, perhaps based loosely on Pitcairn’s past.
“I love it here,” Christian said.
“I enjoy the beauty, the stillness, the hard work and total unpredictability of each new day. It isn’t a 9-to-5 existence. It’s more like 24/7. It can be a bit claustrophobic at times, but the Internet and phone system opens you up to the world.
There was no happy ending for the majority of the 18 original mutineers.
Some were murdered. Some returned to England and hanged for their crime.
Some were pardoned, but forever lived in the shadows of a shameful past.
For Nadine Christian, however, happy and inspiring endings now and then can make for a fine calling card.
Two years after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, researchers in the US and Canada are concerned about the possible damage that could be caused by invasive species that have found their way to North America on debris resulting from the 2011 disaster.
According to UPI, experts in the northwest US and Canada are having difficulty determining whether or not marine life washing ashore on the debris will be a threat to the environment and/or living things native to the region – or for how long they could pose a threat.
In this photo released by NOAA, a boat lost in the Japanese tsunami of 2011 sits onshore on a remote Canadian island. The boat was discovered Aug. 9, 2012.
Chapman and his OSU colleagues have been tracking and studying the debris since shortly after it began arriving on nearby beaches. That includes a dock that arrived on Agate Beach in Lincoln County, Oregon last summer following roughly 450 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Chapman explained the debris and the organisms they have found living on it have been extremely unpredictable.
Experts in Canada are faced with a similar situation, according to CTV British Columbia reports published Saturday.
with Wakame, a known invasive seaweed, exotic mussels (Mytilus edulis or M. galloprovicialis) and barnacles clinging to the "tsunami dock"
Dolf DeJong, vice president of conservation and education at the Vancouver Aquarium, told reporters invasive species were “a legitimate threat” to the province’s ecosystem.
DeJong warned, depending on exactly which organisms managed to survive and how many there are on any given piece of debris, they could adversely impact the region’s biodiversity, damage the oceans, and even have a negative fiscal influence by harming populations of economically-important life forms like shellfish.
An enthused Steve Backshall watches from his canoe as Orca Dolphins jump and dive in the sea infront of him off the Canadian coast - a process known as breaching.