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What an amazing expedition.
I just finished watching Under the Pole. It’s about an expedition to trek from the North Pole towards land all the while doing dives (51 to be exact) to film the little seen underside of the Arctic Ice. Some fantiastic footage of unusual ice formations and creatures (arctic shrimp, sea angels and more) in their habitat. The ability of man to take on and survive in such an inhospitable environment is truly amazing.
Definitely worth watching if you get a chance.
The Japanese Environment Ministry has opened a 10 person panel of experts to discuss the definition and the process of designation of coastal and other water areas as “sea santuaries”. This comes after a 1992 study found that over ten percent of tidal land in Japan have been lost since 1976 and about three percent of marine forest has also been lost in the same period.
The article only gives these dates. But I would not be surpised if these are the latest figures. It usually takes about 10 years for the Japan government to act on any approved proposal. That means any action from this panel will probably only take effect in 2017 at the earliest. You can call me cynical but must also call me a realist.
Click here to read the full article from Daily Yomiuri.
When man saw in his telescope a planet for the first time he noticed it was round and came to guess that his own planet (indeed that is what it was) might also be round. The act of circumnavigation by Christopher Columbus (even though it was not quite a circumnavigation – he mistook America for Asia) proved it conclusively. This is just one instance of how wrong one can be from using his senses alone. Sure, the earth seems to be flat, but it is not. The discovery brought about a major shift in our thinking to say the least.
Such shifts are not uncommon as Thomas Kuhn has famously shown – he called them paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts have occurred many times throughout history. That the Earth revolves around the sun was one such shift. Less dramatic was the discovery that language does not have inherent meaning (that it is arbitray) is another. Our perceptions change or shift through such discoveries.
But how do paradigms come into existance? Most simply through a lack of information. The terracentric view of astronomy came to hold sway (at least in Western culture) – partly but not holy wholy – because 1) it seems that way since the planet does not feel like it is moving, and 2) a book (the Bible) said so. This is nothing but presumption from available information, without another method to verify it that it comes to become fact. And often with persumption comes arrogance, as in the following case.
It has been discovered that dolphins actually call each other by something akin to a name, suggesting that they have the capacity – like humans – for language. But why have we come to presume for such a long time that we are the only creatures on this planet to have language capacity is a complex and perplexing one. In our conceit we have dulled our senses to sounds that turn out to be sophisticated communication, perhaps as sophisticated as ours. Or to put it another way, we have simply dismissed something as noise when in fact it was language.
So please tell me: how many times do we have to make the same mistake before we will learn to be humbled by how little we really know? Or are we again going to congratulate ourselves for making such “great” discoveries and forget our past stupidities?
There was an article in the Daily Yomiuri earlier this month about how marine sound might seem like a jet engine roar to whales. Sometimes we only think of noise pollution as a human problem, but really it is as much a problem to the animals with whom we share this planet as it is to us.
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