Total Pageviews

Thursday, October 23, 2014

New Zealand Electricity Prices

In New Zealand, the power generation and distribution infrastructure was paid for from the taxes of New Zealand citizens and companies.

I don't know if that statement is 100% true, 90% true or possibly 50% true but in this article, I am talking about that portion of our electrical "plant" that was paid for by Kiwis.

When the citizens of a country pay for their electrical infrastructure, there is an implicit contract between them and their government.  Namely, that electrical prices will be kept as low as possible.  There is absolutely no reason that the power companies need to make a profit.  They should price their electricity such that they can pay reasonable wages to their workers, have enough for maintenance and upgrading and even put away, over the years, a fund for contingencies such as earthquakes and storms.  Electric companies are large enough to self insure.

And why should electricity prices be kept low.  There are three reasons.  First for the citizens, inexpensive electricity is a component of welfare.  When the government is throwing away jobs as fast as it can, being able to afford electricity is a necessity, not a luxury.

Secondly, electricity is a component of the cost of everything we buy in New Zealand.  Just think of the electric bill of a super market or any other retail outlet.  This cost goes on the price of everything we buy.  Again, with jobs scarce and the government allowing and encouraging overseas workers to comer here and take jobs from Kiwis, we need less expensive goods.

Thirdly, energy is a component of everything we manufacture and  export.  Inexpensive electricity gives us a definite advantage against our overseas competitors.

Let's go back a couple of years to when our electrical companies were owned by our government (by us).  The government had this silly system of telling the electric companies what dividend they expected and the company had to pay it.  that is totally backward.  Dividends are paid when a company makes a profit, not paid and then the captive audience, the power users of New Zealand have to pay the inflated electric costs in order to pay the dividend.  Besides the power companies should not be making a profit.

The government would argue, of course, that this revenue was necessary for the government to do her good works for the people of New Zealand.  She collects this money and uses it for health care, welfare and so forth.  However it costs money to collect and distribute money.  It is far more efficient to simply leave this money in the hands of New Zealand citizens and companies than to collect it and redistribute it.  Cheaper electricity is an instant welfare payment to all Kiwis and if you want to talk health care, cheaper electricity lowers the running costs of every hospital and clinic in the land.  Electricity is so universally used that it is far better to keep its price down than to use it as a hidden tax.

Note that people are now considering seriously a guaranteed minimum wage for every adult citizen.  Inexpensive electricity is very much along the same path.

Now we have the cockamany situation that the government has sold off almost half of our power companies and the new owners are arguing that the power companies should be paying them a dividend.  Sorry bunky.  Companies distribute dividends when they make a profit and you still don't own a controlling interest in these companies. and so can't set the policy.  Unfortunately, the upper echelon of these companies probably now does own shares and they will want to set up the situation so that they get dividends.  Is this an argument for not allowing anyone in a company to own shares in that company.  I know this flies in the face of the argument that if they own shares they will do their best to make the company profitable but perhaps this should be reversed in companies such as electrical which are a universal good and a universal necessity and  where the main way of making the company profitable is to gouge their customers.

Friday, July 18, 2014

Celibacy

A talk with brother Ignathius

Brother Ignathius, you are one of the smartest people I know.  For heaven sake, you are a Jesuist, trained not only in the arts and science but in rhetoric and logic.  I've tried to steer the conversation in this direction a number of times so you would see the truth for yourself but we always go off on a tangent.  You have about the most serious case of cognitive dissonance* I have ever seen.

*The ability to hold two mutually exclusive beliefs in your head at the same time without going bonkers.

Actually, now that I think about it, I saw a more serious case a few years ago.  One of my friends from the now defunct local sect invited me to go on a geological field trip.  This sect broke up for all the usual reasons.  The final straw was when the ladies realized that they were not the unique "hand maiden" of the charismatic leader and further realized that their daughters were reaching puberty.  Many of the folks now live in our community.  Sects to my mind are an abomination but don't get me wrong.  These are the nicest folks I have met.  I taught many of their kids in high school and they had the same range of abilities of any bunch of kids.  One thing that distinguished them, though, is that they were great to teach.  Polite, keen, eager to learn.  A real pleasure but I am getting off the subject.

This field trip was led by a geologist from one of our local universities and he was a creationist.  That's right, he believed that the world was created some 6000 years ago.  If a geologist-creationist is not the ultimate case of cognitive dissonance, I don't know what is.  Anyway, I promised my friend I would be good and not rock the boat.  Our area is a geologist paradise.  You can even see the KT boundary in a couple of locations and marine fossils from extinct animals abound.

At one point in our walk up the gorge we saw a sequence of clay,sand,pebbles,, clay,sand,pebbles repeated at least 500 times.I couldn't resist.  I sidled up to the geologist and asked him what had created this.  He told me that it was The Flood.  I restrained myself and just nodded and moved away.

Back, though to Celibacy.  Don't you see why the church insists on Celibacy for  her priests.  I have no idea if the church instituted celibacy with this in mind but its potential to control it's priests must have been obvious almost immediately.  You do realize, I assume, that nowhere in the bible is it said that priests should be celibate.  At the roots of your religion, the Jewish religion, a man is enjoined to be married.  Celebacy is church created artifact just like confession.  Now confession, there is a wowser.

Most regimes have to resort to sending agents, listening in on private conversations, trolling through garbage and, in our modern world,  spying on our e-mails.  All these methods are likely to get the agents outed and even killed and can put considerable egg on the face of the regime that sent them.  The Catholic church has worked out a system whereby everyone comes and confesses their secrets to officers of the church.  Michaevelli must have learned his trade from the church.

With celibacy, the church has you by the short and curlies.  Let's assume that the sexual preferences of church officers are the same, percentage wise, as the rest of the population*.  You have the same proportion of homosexual paedophiles, heterosexual paedophiles, adult oriented homosexuals and adult oriented hetrosexuals.

*Apparently not the case but let's not be nasty here.

By the by, if you look at the work of Kinsey, some of us are pure homosexuals, some pure heterosexuals and rest of us on  a spectrum somewhere in between. How we end up, for many of us, depends  on our experiences, especially in early life.

What has been coming to light lately is homosexual paedophilia amongst the clergy.  I suspect this is because it is such an abomination in the eyes of the public.  However this must only be the tip of the iceburg.  Hetrosexual paedophilia is also horrendous but in the eyes of the public somewhat less so, homosexual relations with a consenting adult less again and hetrosexual relationships with  consenting adult still less reprehensible.    If priests abusing boys is coming to light, how many cases of the other three types of relationship will there be.  And, if you are a priest all are sins according to the catholic church.

In the mildest case lets say you are  having it off with the wife of one of your parishioners.  When you confess, you are told to say so many hail maries, forgiven and told to sin no more.  You are behoden to the church which has relieved the pangs of guilt you feel and next time you repeat the sin, you can confess again.  The church has infinite capacity for forgiveness, especially when it keeps you firmly under their thumb.  In fact, they advertize their infinite capacity for forgiveness, depending on her priests not to cotton on to how this keeps them servile.

In the most serious case when you have been buggering the choir boys, the church will send you to another parish to start over and defend you from the law.  Payment will be made to the victim if the church can't get out of it, and the church will do everything possible to keep you safe.  This combined with your feelings of guilt and disgust with yourself makes you their slave.  If you wake up an leave this most un-christian organization, you will be open to the full force of the law.  So added to your guilt are the  possible consequences.

I started by suggesting that the percentage of priests with various orientations is the same as the general public but I strongly suspect this is not the case.  As I mentioned, which way many of us go is dependent not only on our predilections but also on our early sexual experiences.  Amongst the youth that priests start with, some will be homosexually inclined and some on the fence.  When their first sexual experience is with a priest, I'd be willing to bet that many of them will become priests.  The ones we, the public, hear about are the hetrosexual boys that find their experience with a priest soul shattering.  I would love to see a survey of how many serving church officers were started, sexually,  by a catholic priest in their youth.  Maybe, brother Ignathius, you could conduct a straw poll amongst the clergy you know.

Pope Fancis, bless his little white socks, is talking about eliminating celibacy.  I doubt if he will succeed any more than President Obama succeeded in doing all the great things he intended.  Not only is it too ingrained in the church culture but the people at the top realize, overtly or instinctively the level of control it give them over their underlings.  I wish Francis every success. It could be the beginning of the end of this most unchristian institution.


Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Tay Beavers of Scotland






In a world of vanishing species and even whole ecologies, the Scots are doing something amazing,  They are letting the premier key animal of the northern hemisphere, the beaver,  spread through their water ways.  Even more amazing, these beavers, extinct for 400 years,  are from some accidental introduction(s)  and the authorities are expressing a wait-and-see attitude rather than getting their nickers in a knot about not having initiated the introduction themselves.  How unusual is that amongst officialdom?  There is also an official introduction in Knapdale, on the West coast but that's another story.  This blog is about the Tay Beavers.

You have all probably heard of the Firth of Forth.  It is an estuary on the East coast of Scotland  where Edenburg is located.  The Firth of Tay is smaller and is the next Firth  to the north.  





The Tay is the longest river system in Scotland an has a huge catchment extending three quarters of the way across to the West coast.  The catchment includes, amongst other areas, much of the Cairngorm Mountains to the North.



 
Catchment area of the River Tay

Scotland is a very green country.  Areas which are not in crops are in pasture or forest and along the major rivers, reasonably wide riparian zones* are fenced off from grazing animals.

 *  Riparian zone - The strip of land along both sides of a river.  Keeping this area fenced off from domestic animals and well vegetated preserves water quality and protects adjacent land from flooding.  It shades the river, reducing temperature extremes and provides habitat for a variety of wild life and path ways through which they can migrate. 

The area to the right of the fence is the Riparian zone.  River Tay is barely visible through the shrubs and trees.


The Scots have a wonderful attitude toward their beautiful country with wind turbines everywhere and  a goal of  having 100% renewable energy within a decade or two.  Despite a virtually 100% vegetation cover in its catchment, the tributary rivers of the Tay are prone to quite serious floods.  So what is the status of beavers in the Tay catchment at present.

The beaver population, Castor fiber is increasing by one estimation at at about 26% per year.  I gather that this is an estimate based on counting lodges (beaver houses).  From the same statistic, it is estimated that as of 2014 before the spring birth of kits, there are about 250 beavers in total.  At present, with a couple of exception, the beavers are still in the process of occupying  rivers which are too large for them to dam.  In such situations, they build bank lodges by burrowing into the bank, usually starting under water and often under a tree.

A typical bank burrow.  Often there is an air hole in the top of the breeding chamber covered with branches
  Entrance to a beaver burrow under a tree.  The river is low so the entrance is nearly exposed.


They burrow upwards on a slope and often cover the location of the burrow with a large pile of cut logs and branches.  Typically in both bank lodges and pond lodges there is a wide area just above the water level where the beavers dry off and groom and a higher wide area  where the beavers sleep and the kits are born.  In a pond lodge, this is a more or less stable situation since the beavers are  determining, to a large extent, the height of the water in their pond.  River levels, by contrast, go up and down considerably with floods and droughts.


 

Pile of logs and branches above a bank burrow.  The upper chamber of the burrow can extend up into the pile of branches.

Besides lodges, you can detect that beavers are in an area by the felled trees  along the shore.  Often the tree that was felled is gone and what you see is the stump with  teeth marks.  You may also see branches with some or all of the bark nibbled off and if you look closely, you can see nibble marks on the underlying wood.


Beaver felled tree.  Pond created by dam in background.

                                Some of the bark nibbled off a felled tree

Displaying 2014-06-04 12.53.55.jpg
Beavers usually cut all around a tree and have no idea which way it will fall.  

The origin of the beavers
There is some controversy about the origin of the Tay beavers and I would like to put one such legend to rest.  Besides, dealing with it, introduces some  information about beavers and their populations.

Some people feel that they were accidentally or purposefully released from Bamff.  This perception is enhanced  because Paul and Louise Ramsay are two of the staunchest advocates for  beavers in Scotland.

When you bring any animal or plant into a new area the odds are very high that  the organism will escape its confines.  If the 'outside' is suitable it will start to spread.  So it is not possible to say that no beavers escaped from Bamff.  However, we can say with a very high degree of probability that most of the beavers in the Tay catchment are not from Bamff.  There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, after many tries, the first breeding success at Bamff was in 2007.  Since beaver kits stay with their parents for two years and then look for their own territory in the third year, the earliest any beavers could have left  Bamff would have been in 2010. However there are many suitable sites in Bamff and much evidence of colonies which spread from the original colony so let's be very conservative and add one more year.  Beavers were most unlikely to have left Bamff before 2011.


Then you have to look at the fencing around Paul's beaver compound.    Beavers burrow and would eventually get out of any compound but they would have their work cut out for them to get through this level of fencing.  Again let's be conservative and add one more year.  We are up to 2012 before the first beavers could have left Bamff.  Myself, I would put the time a couple of years later but let's stick with 2012.  Here is the clincher.

The first reliable, confirmed reports of Tay catchment beavers were in 1999 on the lower Earn.  Since initially beavers are virtually invisible* in a catchment when you don't know they are there and  difficult to spot even when you are looking for them, it is likely that some previous reports from well before 1999  were correct but let's just use the later, confirmed 1999 date.  This means that the beavers already in the Tay catchment had at least 13 years to multiply and be fruitful before the first Bamff beavers could have entered the catchment.

* It's a little like buying a new car.  Suddenly you notice cars of the same type everywhere. Once your eyes are tuned in to the different appearance of a swimming otter and a swimming beaver and once you know what a beaver nibbled or cut branch looks like, you spot them easily.  

                 When you know what to look for, beaver sign is pretty obvious.
Beavers also make channels from their pond both for escape from predators and to help them float wood to the pond.  Pictured Bob Smith, Naturalist  extraordinaire.

Let's further assume that in 1999, when there was the first iron clad sighting of beavers,  there was only one colony of 5 beavers  in the Earn.  If beavers were already being seen, it is likely that there were more but again let's be conservative and assume there was only one colony.  We will use the figure I have heard for the growth rate of the population of 26%pa.  That seems pretty conservative* considering the almost complete lack of bears and wolves which are the main beaver predators, and the fantastic beaver habitat along the Tay and its tributaries.  To find the population after 13 years, starting with 5 beavers at 26%, raise 1.26 to the 13th power and multiply by 5.  The result is just over 100 beavers in the catchment before the first Bamff beavers could have been recruited to the Tay catchment.  Clearly most of the beavers came from elsewhere.

*A colony of beavers consists of two adults, some two year olds, some one year olds and in the spring the kits. Let's assume two surviving kits from each year.  Each spring we have two additions to a colony of 6 beavers or an increase rate of 33%.  Hence 26% seems a reasonable increase rate.  Andrew Kitchener in his excellent book Beavers, records that when introduced to virgin territory, beaver populations increase at from 20 to 34%.  As the population increases, the rate slows as beavers come into conflict with each other.  Beavers are tied to aquatic territories and repel strange beavers.  Populations increase until all the available territories are filled, have a slight overshoot and then settle back to a stable population.

As for beaver escapes from Bamff,  I walked the area downstream of Bamff, and despite it being, to all appearances, excellent beaver territory, I couldn't find any beaver trace.

Above, I mentioned that most of the beavers are still in rivers and living in bank burrows.  This is not so in Bamff.  There are no large rivers running through Bamff.  The beavers were  introduced to a small lake which was completely fenced in.  Now the  beavers have started building dams in the little burns and ditches on the property.  Here we get a hint of the tremendous benefits beaver will bring when they spread to the minor burns (streams) and seeps of the Tay catchment but first of all, what good are they doing at present when they are largely confined to bank burrows in the major rivers.


Benefits from beavers at present.
All over Scotland we saw uprooted trees.  True, these were mainly evergreens (conifers) and very seldom in the riparian zone.  In the riparian zone most of the trees are deciduous and beavers cut these trees down.  They can easily fell a tree that is a foot in diameter and even larger.  At first glance, it seems strange to cite cutting down trees in the riparian zone as a good thing, especially in light of my former comment about keeping the riparian zone vegetated so let's examine this.

When a deciduous tree is felled, it coppices.  That is to say it sends out a plethora of branches from the stump.  The roots remain and continue growing and holding the banks of the river together during floods.  With the top of the tree gone, it is no longer in danger of being tipped over by a high wind or heavy snow fall and is  less prone to been torn loose by a flood.  A tree that is tipped over by wind, snow or flood is  uprooted, exposing the bank to erosion.  Our weather is already extreme enough and said to be getting more so.  Any move that stabilizes river banks has to be good.
Beaver cut stumps send out a bad-hair-day of branches.  River Tay just visible in background.


When there is a heavy canopy, along the riparian zone, the understory is suppressed from a lack of sunshine.  By cutting down trees, the beavers open the understory to light which grows better and has a stronger, more extensive root system, further reinforcing the banks.  I would go so far as to say, if you have a heavy canopy on the banks of a flood prone river and beavers have not yet settled in your area,  start a program of thinning the trees. Cut them at waist level or so to leave lots of buds for coppicing.   This is even more important if the riparian vegetation is conifers which "chemically" suppress the understory in addition to shading it.

One farmer, who shall remain nameless, apparently thought he would stop the beaver from settling in his area by ripping out all the vegetation on the bank along side his farm.  He was attempting to deny food to the beavers and thus stop them from burrowing and thus preserve the stop banks.  Nice move!!!  

Going back to the evergreens, common cause has it that beavers very very rarely cut down evergreens.  To the contrary, we saw many evergreens felled by beavers.  Below is a picture of the needles of one of these trees.  It was tentatively identified as a Norwegian Pine.  This brings me to one of my favorite hobby horses.
  A branch from a tree cut down by beavers.  Beavers prefer deciduous trees but apparently will also fell evergreens.


                     Evergreen felled by beavers.  Possibly a Norwegian pine.

Beaver Detractors
 It is an odd fact that some anglers and some fisheries biologists are against the introduction of beavers.  I actually met a fisheries biologist some years ago in Prince Rupert on the coast of British Columbia who was on his way to destroy  a beaver dam.  He thought that it was blocking the migration of salmon upstream.  I posed a question to him.  I asked him, "How come  in the days before the European trapped  the beavers to near extinction and when there was a beaver dam in every possible location where one could be squeezed, the salmon runs were  orders of magnitude greater than the present runs".  He still went out to break up the beaver dam but hopefully it got him thinking.

Actually, the modern biologist could be forgiven for thinking that beaver dams retard the upstream migration of salmon.  Not only does our modern biologist spend an inordinate amount of time writing grant proposals, if he gets the grant, he has to write numerous reports on his work.  And he is unlikely to get a grant just to study the behaviour of beavers.  He has to measure something.  When he gets out in the field, he has to quickly collect data.

Suppose he is studying the flora or fauna in a beaver pond and in the stream above and below the pond.  He only has a day or two in the field because of the expense of staying somewhere which is coming out of his grant and all his time is spent collecting samples and preserving them for examination back in his lab.  As he is working, he observes salmon in the plunge pool below a beaver dam and jumps to the wholly understandable conclusion that the dam is stopping the migration of salmon.  He hasn't got time to just sit quietly beside the beaver dam and observe.

How much less  he is inclined to sit beside the dam during and after  a period of Scottish sunshine which tends to fall from the sky in buckets or at night when the beavers are active.  And following a rain event is the time when salmon tend to migrate upstream.  Rather sensible adaptation on their part when you think about it.  When you have a rain, the stream swells.  If the beaver dam is not quite full, it fills and the water trickles or flows over the top.  This triggers the migration urge of the salmon and points the way to the rest of the stream.  From a salmon eye point of view, it must be a bit puzzling to know which bank of the plunge pool to jump over until a trickle or a stream of water points the way.

                      Observing beavers in the evening in a "Scottish Mist"


I'm surprised at the assumption by biologists, who have undoubtedly seen movies on National Geographic of salmon vaulting great water falls, of thinking that a sex crazed salmon on his once in a life time act of procreation will be stopped by a wee beaver dam.  Besides as mentioned, before European hunting, beaver dams were ubiquitous in streams and salmon runs were huge.

Likewise, anglers could be forgiven for jumping to the same conclusion.  They are out there fishing and see beavers and their works from time to time.  If they aren't sitting beside a beaver dam when the salmon pop over them, they could be forgiven for thinking that the fish they see in the plunge pool are stuck there.  Besides, anglers tend to be sensitive to the word Dam, not differentiating between a hydo dam with no fish ladder and a beaver dam.  It  is not surprising they are suspicious.  They have  spent a huge amount of time in the past removing old tires, car bodies and so forth from their streams.  With that mind set, it is hard to conceive that anything in a stream is beneficial for fish.  For instance, when a tree falls into a stream, the automatic response will be to get out the chain saw and remove it.  How many anglers realize that "Big Wood" in a stream is actually beneficial to the salmonoid family.

Biological science has changed since the days of the old time naturalist and not entirely for the better.  The old style naturalist was often a parson of some little church in the countryside with much of his time to do with as he pleased.  Or he was member of the landed gentry, also with much time to spare.  They developed interests.  Some recorded the date of first bud burst in a variety of plants in their environment or the date a migratory bird first appeared.  This is now giving us invaluable data on climate change as we observe the present day situation.  Others would record everything they could observe about the behaviour of a species of bird in their garden.  Even Darwin, himself, studied the earthworm for much of his life with special attention to how much soil they brought up to the surface each year.


There are still people who spend a lot of their time observing nature but they are few and far between and rarely have doctorates.  Their observations are often dismissed by main stream biologist as not being "scientific".   I met three of them in Scotland and here are a couple of odd observations they told me about.

In one location in the Tay Catchment, there was an otter den close to a beaver den.  The beavers took exception to the proximity of the otters and walled up the otter den.  I've never heard of this behaviour.

In another incident, an otter was attacking beaver kits.  The mother beaver grabbed one of the kits in her mouth and the other one climbed on her back.  She she took off underwater, taking them to safety.  An otter has to be suicidal to tackle an enraged mother buzz saw with her razor sharp chisel teeth that can cut down large trees.  Predators tend to tackle, in so far as  possible, prey that isn't likely to damage them.  After all, they don't have the National Health system to patch them up.


An otter would have to be suicidal to challenge an enraged mother beaver that    can cut chips like this out of a tree with each bite.


I mentioned that beaver dams don't impede the upstream migration of salmon but this is not entirely true.  If a beaver dam has just been built in certain types of location and a plunge pool has not yet developed and especially if the flow of water in the stream is particularly low, salmon my find it hard to pass a dam.  Fortunately the beavers themselves help to solve the problem of low flows.  When they have populated a catchment, they hold water during high flow events and release it during droughts.  Streams that used to be intermittent, flow all year round,  One has to have the foresight and patience to wait until beavers have populated a catchment to see the full benefits.  If you jump to conclusions when the first beaver dam is built on a stream and destroy it, you will never see the benefits beavers bring.

Benefits of Beavers to Fish
However, it would be hard to justify beaver dams just on the fact that they don't impede the migration of salmon and trout.  The really important reason for beaver ponds vis a vis fish is that they are fantastic nurseries for fish.  Rather than typing the whole story again, have a look at this site.    In point form, though, Beaver ponds:

*   catch twigs, wood chips leaves and so forth which powers a cellulose based detritus cycle which feeds juvenile salmon
*   catch spent adult salmon in the fall and incorporate their nutrients  into the pond ecology and ecology of the surrounding area - also feeding juvenile salmon when they hatch out in the spring.
*  increase the total amount of salmon habitat by turning seasonal streams into perennial streams and providing perennial ponds.
*  clear the water of silt making the habitat more acceptable for salmon and trout and allowing light down to the bottom of the stream so that water plants can root and grow.
*  provide deep water where predatory wading birds can not operate
*  provide many nooks and crannies around the lodge and dam where small fish can hide.
*  provide quiet water so that the energy the fish takes in with its food is used for growth instead of for fighting currents.
*   evens out stream temperature.


The Atlantic Salmon
Now a word on the magnificent Atlantic salmon Salmo salar.  His biology is extremely variable within and between catchments so anything I say here will have exceptions. 

The Atlantic salmon reminds me in many respects of the Sockeye of the Pacific North West where I hale from.  His Latin name, Salmo salar, means 'the leaper'.  He is aptly named.  Atlantic salmon are known to swim at least 200 miles upstream to spawn and for the most part they die after spawning.  Some, however return to the sea and are called Kelts.  Juveniles generally spend two years in fresh water but have been known to remain for as much as 8 years before returning to the sea.  Some even remain land locked and never go back to the sea.  Just like Sockeye, some populations use a lake as if it was the ocean and migrate upstream to spawn.  The young return to the lake to grow.  Landlocked Sockeye are called Kokane.  In North America, land locked Atlantic salmon are called Quananiche.  I don't know if they have a special name in Europe.  Atlantic salmon tend to stay at sea from one to three years.  Atlantic salmon have been caught weighing as much as 45kg.  If there was ever a fish that would benefit from extensive beaver dams in the catchment, this is it.
 
 Atlantic Salmon leap  great water falls in a single bound.

As mentioned, beavers at present are mostly confined to the rivers but with a growth rate of 26%, soon they will start to migrate up smaller and smaller streams.  Much of Scotland has high vertical relief so their ponds will tend to be narrow with their long axis along the flow of the stream.  Many of the smaller streams do not have a vegetated fenced off riparian zone making it sub-optimal habitat for beavers.  If after consideration, you want to encourage beavers to take up residence in your area, fence off a 5 or 10 meter wide zone on either side of your stream and truncheon* in a wee forest of willows.

 Initially beavers mainly eat bark.  This log has been cut and stripped of its bark.  Later, as the pond fauna develops, aquatic vegetation forms much of the food for beavers.


                                     Beaver also eat grasses and sedges. 

 
Truncheoning
Cut up a deciduous tree into piece a couple of hand spans long.  Larger logs you can split into 4, small branches cut up with pruning shears.  Sharpen the bottom end of the larger logs and simple pound them into the ground along side the stream.  For the smaller twigs, use a steel bar to punch a hole and drop them in and heel.  You can do this even by  little steams that only flow when it rains.  You will be amazed where beavers can create a pond and change a seasonal stream to a perennial one.

A beaver dam in high relief country creating a long narrow pond.  Dam is vegetated with the roots further strengthening the dam.  Plunge pool on the right gives the salmon purchase to leap the dam.

Long Term Benefits from Beavers
We now get to the long term benefits from beavers as they create dams throughout the catchment.  We have already touched on their effect on fish populations.  They also mitigate flood and droughts in downstream rivers.  They store water , not only in their dams, but in the raised water table around their dams.  They increase the wetted area of a stream, increasing infiltration into the ground and by holding the water on the land, give it time to infiltrate.  All this  water, held on the land during high steam flow events is released slowly over time.  Water that is stored underground is not prone to evaporation and flows slowly back into the streams.  Over the years as a deeper and deeper sponge of material is produced by the beaver dams and as some become wetlands, the flood mitigation effect increases.
t
Five of 12 dams that the beavers built in this little ditch.  Each dam will fill up and overflow in a rainfall event, holding water on the land and both delaying and decreasing the flood peak.  More water will be directed into the ground to later appear during times of drought.




This is a man-made dam which holds back a very large pond/small lake.  All the beavers had to do was to dam up this little gulch to raise the water level in the pond. All done for free with no need to bring in a back hoe.

Streams that have never flowed continually, now flow all year round increasing the total area of the catchment available for fish.  Floods which used to occur with rain events of a given magnitude now don't occur.  Rivers flow clearer because beaver ponds settle silt out of the water and catch bed load.  in addition to decreasing flood peaks, beaver populated streams have delayed flood peaks.  When the flood peaks are fed into the downstream river in a staggered fashion, the flood peak in the river is further decreased.

Over the long term, with the dams collecting silt and inter-layering it with organic material caught in the dam, they create rich bottom land.

 
As the beaver ponds fill up with silt and organic material, and as sedges and grasses grow in from the edges of the pond, the beavers may continue to raise the dam or, if there is no wood close by, abandon the site.  Later when the trees have recolonized the area, a new colony of beavers will take up residence and often build their dam over the old dams.  Thus rich bottom land is accumulated and the stream takes on a terraced appearance.

Note that fish that spawn and die above the dam will be caught by the dam and add to the nutrient stock of the area.  This may explain the observation by one biologists that he found fish tangled up in a beaver dam.  He thought they had got tangled on their way upstream, a mistake the old time naturalist would never have made!!!  The creation of bottom land is a long term process and won't be apparent until your children or grandchildren take over the farm.  beavers abandon sites from time to time and a beaver pond then becomes a wetland with all the known benefits they bring.  Later, another colony of beavers will take over the area and another layer of rich organic sponge will be added, further mitigating down stream floods and droughts.

Beavers in the catchment of a hydro electric dam even increase the amount of electricity the dam can produce and the amount of water available for irrigation.  Water which has to be let out over the spill-way during high rain fall events, simply flows down to the sea.  By reducing flood events and increasing water flow during low rainfall, a hydro dam become more effective.  Beavers also lengthen the life of a dam by catching the sediment that eventually fills up all dams and the bed load which makes deltas into the hydro dam, further decreasing its water holding capacity.The increased water flow beavers create tends to be in the summer when rainfall is lowest and when irrigation water is most needed.  The floods they mitigate tend to be in the spring when rain and melting snow pack swells the streams.

And here is an odd thought.  Beavers can help us charge our electric cars as they begin to penetrate the car market.  Most hydro-electric dams have generating capacity that far exceeds the amount of water available from the upstream catchment.  This is because hydro-electric dams are used for supply balancing.  They must be able to draw down the water in their lakes when there is a high demand for electricity and let the lakes fill up again when demand is low.  Any water you can divert from the spillway through the generators for some useful purpose is money earned by the dam operators and the cheapest form of electricity supplied to the customer.  By evening out the flow of water into the hydro lakes, more of the water can be used to generate electricity.  This is part of the answer to people who say electric cars are not practical because of all the extra generating capacity we would need.  In hydro-electric dams the generating capacity already exists.  We just have to make more efficient use of the water flowing into the hydro lake.  Beavers facilitate this.

Beavers also greatly increase the diversity of life in an area.  Instead of just a forest or pasture with a stream running through it, you now have some ponds as well and a meadow that may extend as much as 50 meters from the pond in which, with the shade removed, shrubs and forage plants grow.  A wide variety of beneficial birds and insects grow in   ponds which don't prosper in streams.  Sedges and grasses grow in the shallows, food for deer and other wild life and these terrestrial animals spread nutrients, which were caught by the beaver pond, up slope in their dung.  The dam itself grows many varieties of water plant that the beavers themselves use as food, reducing the pressure on adjacent trees.  The whole area is enriched.  The following link is of a beaver eating lilly pads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT9BdZeYZPA

Beaver Damage
One of the problems with beavers vis a vis people is that the so called damage they do is visible, immediate and in your face.  The good they do is long term and may not even be perceived by humans.  You notice when a flood washes a bridge or your house away.  You don't notice when a similar rainfall event doesn't wash away your assets.  Only a hydrologist with records of rainfall events vs floods would realize the same or greater rainfall event didn't cause a flood.

Beavers do fell trees but as was mentioned at the beginning, this is not always a bad thing.  And if you have some "must-be-potected" trees within 50 or so meters of a beaver colony, put a little chicken wire around them.  Cheap and effective.


        Tree protected  by chain mail mesh.  Chicken wire can also be used.

Beavers can also cause flooding.  Again the solution is simple.  Take away some logs and branches from the middle of the dam, Lay a piece of pipe of a suitable diameter in the cut, extending the pipe into the pond.  Drive in a U shaped frame of wood to hold the pipe down .  Problem solved.  The pond will remain at whatever level you have determined.  The beavers will repair the damage that night.  Once more cheap and effective.

A beaver deceiver.  Simply a pipe inserted into a dam to limit the level to a given depth.  Used when there is the chance that the pond might flood something that one doesn't want flooded.  Note the beginning of a plunge pool below the dam.


                 The inner end of the pipe is protected by a frame like this. 
.

This is one way to protect a culvert.  A beaver deceiver can be added if necessary.  You might ask, if such a big culvert is needed to take water during flood event, how can the pipe of a beaver deceiver carry this water.  The point is that when the water courses upstream of this culvert are populated by beavers, floods will be a thing of the past.

The benefits from beavers are so great that these minor inconveniences are worth solving  and pretty inexpensive.

PS
Lastly a word about rewilding, not from me but from George Monbiot.  I put this in because many people in Scotland, amongst them beaver enthusiasts,  are determined, in so far as possible, to bring back the exact variety of Castor fiber that existed in Scotland before it was extirpated.  The Norwegian variety seems to be the favoured one.  I can see where they are coming from but I would be inclined to bring some beavers from all over Europe, introduce them into various catchments and see which variety does best in an ecology which is nothing like it was 400 years ago, never mind a thousand years ago.  Further more,  let them breed together when they meet and with this greater available genetic pool, develop a beaver by natural selection which is most suited to Scotland.  George Monbiot, it his book Feral, p8 expresses it much better than I could.

"So young a word , yet so many meanings.  By the time 'rewilding' entered the dictionary, in 2011, it was already hotly contested.  When it was first formulated, it meant releasing captive animals into the wild.  Soon the definition expanded to describe the reintroduction of animals and plants species to habitats from which they had been excised.  Some people began using it to mean the rehabilitation, not just of particular species, but of entire ecosystems; a restoration of wilderness.  Anarcho-primitivists then applied the word to human life, proposing a wilding of people and their cultures.  The two definitions of interest to me, however, differ slightly from all of these.

The rewilding of natural ecosystems that fascinates me is not an attempt to restore them to any prior state, but to permit ecological processes to resume.  In countries such as my own [UK], the conservation movement, while well intentioned, has sought to freeze living systems in time.  It attempts to prevent animals and plants from either leaving or  -  if they do not live there already  -  entering.  It seeks to  manage nature as if tending a garden.  Many of the ecosystems, such as heaths and moorland, blanket bog and rough grass, that it tries to preserve, are dominated by the low, scrubby vegetation which remains after forests have been repeatedly cleared and burnt.  This vegetation is cherished by wildlife groups, and they prevent it from reverting to wood-land through intensive grazing by sheep, cattle and horses.  It is as if conservationists in the Amazon had decided to protect the cattle ranches, rather than the rainforest."

by the by, have a look at George's TED talk on rewilding.

PPS
To get an idea of what Scotland can expect as beavers spread, get a book by a fellow Brit, Eric Collier titled Three Against the Wilderness.  It talks about the state of the High Chilcoten in British Columba before the beavers were brought back and the effect they had.  Incidentally, I was asked in Scotland why beavers cut down more trees than they need at the moment. Or to put it in Darwineze, what is the adaptive advantage to a beaver of felling more trees than it needs for it's dam, lodge and food cashe.   Eric found the answer during the floods of 1948.  It's in his book.




Displaying 2014-06-04 12.20.58.jpg



Sunday, April 27, 2014

The jet stream(s)

We keep saying that the Jet Stream pushes weather systems around the world.  It just ain't so.  Let me start with a similar situation that occurred in science.

Before the Kiwi scientist, Earnest Rutherford did his work, we had the "Plum Pudding" model of the atom. Lets call this model 1.   Atoms were solid round little bodies packed together with their component parts touching each other.  Rutherford fired alpha particles (Helium nuclei) at a thin gold foil and found that hardly any of the alpha particles bounced back.   Most of them flew straight through the foil with no impedance what so ever.  From this was born the "solar system" model of the atom.  That is to say, most of the atom was empty space and most of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a very small (in relation to the size of the atom) location in the middle.  Electrons orbited around the nucleus like little planets.

This model, lets call it model 2,  was far and away better than the Plum Pudding model but only went so far.  For instance, it didn't explain the peculiar properties of water.  From various other sources, it was realized that water should not be liquid at the temperatures and pressures we have on earth and yet it is.  It was realized that the hydrogen atoms in water are not "attached" on opposite sides of the oxygen atom but rather the water molecule is in a V shape with an angle of 104.5 degrees between the arms formed by the two hydrogen atoms.  This means that the water molecule is positively charged on the Hydrogen side and negatively charged on the oxygen side nd since the positive side is a "naked proton, it has the relatively powerful "Hydrogen Bond"  This explains why water condenses at a much higher temperature than expected, why it expands when it freezes, why it has such a high phase change energy and a number of other peculiar properties it has.

Apparently the orbits of the electrons are not circular as in the planets but, in oxygen, the "p" suborbitals are  like dumb bells at right angles to each other.  Incidentally, this model, model 3, is better than the solar system model but still left something to be desired and later models are even better.

So back to the Jet Stream.

First we have to have a look at the air circulation systems of the earth known as the Hadley cells.  At the equator, the greatest intensity of sunlight hits the earth because the surface of the earth at the equator is at right angles to the sun's rays.  One square meter of incoming sun energy hits one square meter of the earth.  The further north or south you go, the wider the footprint of one square meter of sun radiation.  For the mathematically inclined, you can find how far the sun spreads out by multiplying the one square meter of incoming sun light by the cosine of the latitude.  Cos0 = 1 (at the equator) while cos90 = 0 (at the poles).  Of course this neat picture is complicated by the tilt of the earth.  We could define something called the solar equator and this would be the latitude at which the sun is directly over head at that time of the year.  At the height of summer in the Northern hemisphere, our so called solar equator is at 23 degrees North.

Clear air has some interesting properties.  It is opaque to a little bit of the UV radiation from the sun and this heats up a band of air high in the atmosphere but by far the greatest part of the radiation from the sun passes right through the atmosphere and hits the surface of the earth.  This heats the earth and the earth in turn heats the atmosphere from the bottom.  This effect is greatest at what we have called  the "Solar Equator".

Quite a bit of solar energy falls on the poles at the height of their summer.  However, the poles are covered in snow an ice rather than forests, plowed fields and cities.  The poles reflect much of the incoming radiation right back into space without heating the ground and hence without heating the atmosphere above the poles.  So what results from this uneven heating.

At the equator, with the intense heating of the atmosphere from below, this expands the air and causes it to rise.  In addition, a lot of water is evaporated and as it reaches the dew point, it condenses and gives out it's latent heat.  Air is sucked in from North and South along the surface of the earth to replace this rising air and at altitude, the rising air spreads out North and South.  It moves away from the equator and sinks again at about 30 degrees North and 30 degrees South.   Let's just focus on the northern hemisphere from now on.

At the North Pole, the air isn't been heated at all in winter and not all that much in summer and the air is radiating heat into space.  (every substance which is above absolute zero - minus 273C - radiates heat).  The air cools, contracts, gets heavy and sinks.  At altitude  air is sucked from the south and as this descending air hits the ground it spreads out toward the south.  It rises again at about 60 degrees North.

You will have noticed that we have a gap between 30 degrees North and 60 degrees North.  Between the Equatorial Hadley cell and the Polar hadley cell there is the Ferrel cell which is probably powered by its larger cousins much as an idler gear is powered by the gears on either side of it.




You will notice in this diagram that the surface winds do not blow directly North and South but are scewed to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the Left in the southern hemisphere.  This is due to a phenomenon called Coriolis which we won't go into here.

Of interest, though, note that at the equator we have a wall of rising air, between the Northern Hemisphere and Southern hemisphere equatorial Hadley cells  Between the Equatorial cell and the Ferrel cell (not labeled in this diagram) there is a wall of descending air and between the Ferrel cell and the Polar cell, once more a wall of rising air.

The second point of interest, which we see on the following diagram, is that the border between cells does not follow a line of latitude around the globe but waves north and south like a demented sine wave.  These waves are quite irregular and progress from West to East.  They are called Rossby waves.


And note that the above diagram is showing us two of the jet streams.  This is also the border of the circulation cells.  Jet streams occur where Hadley cells meet.You can see where we are going with this.  It isn't the Jet stream that pushes weather patterns around the world,  It is the rising (upwhelling if you like) wall of air or the downwhelling wall of air that occurs between the Hadley cells.  This may sound like nit picking but just as Model three for the atom was more useful than model 2 and 2 better than one,  we are likely to get a far better insight into our earth with a more accurate model.  A more refined model would likely be even better.


Saturday, April 12, 2014

Self Destruction or Rewilding?

We seem hell bent on wiping ourselves out or at the very least wiping out the relatively comfortable, interesting and fulfilling life we now have.

The sooner we admit that we are not as smart as we think we are the better.  Then we might be able to do something about it.

Until recently, the peak of our ecological knowledge dictated that if we wipe out the wolves, we will have more deer to hunt.  Read Farley Mowat's book Never Cry Wolf for a very comical treatment of this myth.  I bet most people "on the street" would still think that this is perfectly correct.

Go to TED talks and type in  the search box George Monbiot or Rewilding or both and have a look at a most erudite treatment of this myth.

We are wiping out species at a rate equal to or greater than during the past 5 great die offs with gay abandon and with little appreciation of the consequences.

Up until recently it was also commonly held that  if you kill all the whales, there will be more krill for fish to eat and hence more fish to catch.  I bet if you asked "the man in the street" you would find he would agree with this also.  George has something to say about this myth too.

And the height of ignorance was expressed by a fisheries biologist that I met in Prince Rupert, BC, Canada who was just off to break up a beaver dam.  He was convinced that beaver dams in streams were detrimental to Salmon and trout.  I mean, How ignorant can you get. You would expect this from a fisherman but not from a biologist.

We are woefully ignorant and the sooner  we realize it, the sooner we may be able to reverse our destructive tendencies.  So what can we do.

Once we have admitted our own lack of knowledge and moreover, our venality in the collective (corporate greed), there is only one solution.  We must set aside large areas on land and in the oceans for nature to get on with what nature does best.

Managed parks such as Kruger in South Africa and all the various other parks in Natal and elsewhere in the world are valuable but there must also be completely untouched areas.  Here is another example of ignorance.

In Kruger Park and other South African Nature reserves, they used to collect dead wood for the fires in the camps.  The accepted wisdom was that this would have no effect on the ecology of the park.  This was stopped when some bright ecologist realized that dead wood is the base for a whole network of organisms.  The cellulose in wood is a polysaccharide.  In other words, a chain of sugar molecules joined together in such a way that the giant molecules are insoluble and refractory to most multi-celled organisms.  Only bacteria can break down the cellulose and many multi-celled organisms from termites to cows have such bacteria in their gut.  In this way cellulose becomes a food source for a whole ecology.

Kruger now brings wood from outside the park for her fires.

If it took so long to realize something so simple such as the role of wolves and whales and of dead wood and of beavers, just how competent do you think we are  to manage vastly more complicated interactions in nature.  We must simply set aside areas which we leave alone.  We can introduce what we believe to be missing components of the ecology but then leave the area well enough alone to sort itself out.  This will generally result in a succession of ecologies similar but not the same as what happened when the continental glaciers retreated from the land.  It will be a source of wonder just what pathways the successions take and a lesson in what used to be and could be in the future.

Look at the story of the return of the wolves to Yellowstone Park.    Here again we have shown our incompetence and venality in our interaction with wolves and the results when we restore missing components and let nature get on with what she does best.  Many of you will be familiar with the story but for a really lucid description, go, again to Monbiot on TED talks.

We also thought we could manage the fisheries of the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland using a simple catch-per-unit-effort model while the catching techniques were ever improving.  How wrong we were there.  For an eye opener of what used to exist around the St Lawrence river area, read Farley Mowat's book, Sea of Slaughter.  Incidentally, some biologists warned against the fishing practices but were shut up by the Canadian Government.  Canada!! for heaven sake.  Considered one of the right thinking, scientifically advanced countries of the world. 

As a further example, just recently, under the Harper government, scientist were muzzled, especially if they wanted to talk out about climate change at threat of their jobs.  What jobs.  The job of a scientist is to speak the truth about what they discover.  These scientist were being paid a salary but they didn't have a job.  If this can occur in a liberal democracy, what must it be like in a totalitarian regime.

If we can't get something so obvious and so simple right, what chance is there that we will manage nature.  None at all.

And why should this lead to self destruction.  With most of us living in cities, we are pretty ignorant of the things nature does for us.  It provides clean air and water, food and fibre, genetic diversity, and a whole range of other benefits.  Besides, nature provides a balm for our senses in this overstressed world we live in.

For that matter, why do we think that us humans, a latecomer in evolution, have the right to wipe out other species who were here long before us.  I wonder if every planet on which life exists eventually produces a species that wipes out the planet and itself with it.

I'd actually doubt that we could wipe out all of humanity.  We are like cockroaches.  Very hard to exterminate.  Lovelock was laughed at when he suggested that within this century, human population would be down to 1b.  We are approaching 7b now so, if he is correct,  6 out of 7 of us won't survive.  He, of course, had no way of knowing just how serious the decline will be but what is pretty certain is that it would be the end of our technologically advanced civilization.  There goes the internet, the mass production of goods by robots which is only viable with a huge market, a sort of Pax UN (as faulty as it is) and so forth.  There goes also our effect on nature and she can begin to repair herself.  Then we will bounce back and do it all over again and again until we achieve total destruction.  Not a pretty picture.


There have been many many empires built up over the last 5000 years or so and all that remains of them is some archaeological remnants and a population of struggling humans occupying the same territory.  On a localized scale we have turned bread baskets into deserts.  The first people who arrived in a new territory wiped out everything their technology was capable of destroying.  European man arrived later and trashed whole ecologies.  There is some hope, though.  In some locations where man has eliminated himself, nature has come back with a vengeance.  A good example is along the border between Italy and the former Yugoslavia along the Soca valley.  In his book Ferral, George Monbiot describes how the Soca valley repaired itself after total destruction during the first world war.  A great read.

Look at North America, for instance.  When Europeans arrived, they were amazed at the richness of the ecology of North America.  Of course they were comparing it with Europe which they had already trashed.  They had no idea of what existed there before the "Indians" arrived.  All the richness Europeans observed was only a remnant of the original pre-human mega fauna.

For the first time, we have a commercially connected world.  We all breath the same air and depend on the same weather systems.  For the first time, as shown by the 2008 mini crisis, what happens in one location effects all of us and as the people in Western Canada will attest, the air pollution from Asia effects them.  I have a friend living on the West coast of Vancouver island.  Their laundry is regularly sullied by Asian pollution.

The ice of the Arctic is disappearing at a rapid rate and prediction of the effects of an ice free Arctic are dire.  It's not that we couldn't live in at least parts of the world under the new climate that seems likely to occur.  It is just that we have used our technology to adapt ourselves to the present climate and have allowed our population to grow to an extent that we are balanced on a knife edge.  A failure of the crops of the Northern Hemisphere for only one year, would send waves of destruction around the world.

I'm sad to say that what we need is a mid level disaster.  Nothing else will shake our system hard enough that we will do something about it.  Let's hope when we do finally wake up, that it is not too late.  This year (2016) is looking like we have already passed a critical tipping point.  2017 will either deny or firm up this impression.

In the mean time, let us set aside  areas as large as we can and leave them alone.  We can introduce remnant populations since often the migration routs have been cut by "civilization" but let nature get on with what it does best.  In Scotland, most major rivers have wide riparian zones. The rest of us should do the same.  These provide migration routs to connect wild areas.    We can even introduce species close to those that have long since disappeared and see how they do.  We are not necessarily trying to re-create what once was but rather an ecology of varied flora and fauna that nature can sort out and which will be a nucleus of recovery if we crash our economy and the rest of the ecology. 

Such areas will also remind us of what richness used to exist in our areas for comparison with the sad remains we have now.  We really need to reset our expectations.  Resetting our expectations may be one of the most important results of rewilding.

Friday, April 11, 2014

The Malasian Airliner

I'm puzzled about the search for the Malaysian Airliner.  Once they had detected even a single ping on the towed array, I would have thought that they would have pretty well pinned down the location of the source of the pings.

Before I explain what I mean, I must admit that my "knowledge" of how these things work is based on novels by authors like Tom Clancey.  However, Tom was said to be a bit of an enthusiast on modern weapons and did his homework.  The basic premises were confirmed in other novels.

As I understand it, when an atomic submarine, either the missle carriers or the attack boats, are on patrol, they stream a long line behind them which is festooned with acoustic sensors (microphones).  I'll explain how they work with simple geometry but of course, the signals detected by these sensors are fed into a computer which gives a virtually instant firing solution.  And as far as I understand, a single ping from an enemy submarine or a noise such as propeller cavitation,will determine its position.

Lets look at the simplest situation in which the target is at right angles to the towed array and right opposite the middle of the array.  The pings arrive at the front microphone and the back microphone at the same time.  This tells you that the target is located somewhere on a disk that intersects the towed array in the middle and at right angles to the array.  In the case of a black box which is pinging, you know it is on the bottom of the ocean so the black box is on a line where the disk intersects the bottom.

However, you don't only have microphones at the front and back of the array.  Let's look at the microphone that is in the middle of the array.  It is closer to the target than either of the end microphones.  It therefore receives the ping before either of the end microphones.  The speed of sound in water is well known.  As the wave front of the ping moves outward, the circle gets larger and larger such that for an infinitely distant target, the wave front is essentially flat.  The difference in time becomes shorter and shorter the further away the source of the ping is located.  From the difference, with modern electronics you get an estimate of range.  In other words, our disk becomes the rim of a bicycle wheel and becomes a solution of the two points where the rim meets the bottom of the ocean.

Now it seems unlikely that all the microphones on the array are omni-directional.  I would assume that there are some directional microphones and the difference in the amplitude of the sound recorded by these various  directional microphones gives you a direction.  In other words, if the "bicycle wheel rim"  intersects the sea bed in two locations, this sorts out which of these is the target.

An added dimension is added when the black box pings for an extended time and the boat is towing an array of microphones.  You are getting a view from a whole bunch of different angles all pointing to a given location. 

The geometry is only slightly more complicated when the ping is in front or behind the array.  In one sense, it is simpler.  If, say, the ping is behind the boat and off to the side, the front and back microphone receive the ping at different times and this indicates in what direction the pinger is located.

Then you have the "passing train" effect.  The pitch changes if the train is coming toward you or has passed and is going away from you.  In this case, the listener is on the train and listening to a stationary sound.  Same effect.

A modern submarine is dependent on knowing exactly where an enemy is located and quickly before they can get off a torpedo.  I can't understand why the location of a stationary source of repeditive pinging is not pinned down almost instantly.   What is all this steaming back and forth over the location to narrow down its position.  They certainly can't be towing an array such as the subs use.

For that matter, why was one of the American or Russian atomic subs not diverted to the location.  Surly they would have pinned down the location within minutes of arriving on location.  Perhaps they have been.  For that matter, they could be pinging themselves and mapping the bottom.  Surly the echo from a bunch of scrap Aluminium would be different from the echo from a soft muddy bottom.

I don't get it.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

SkyTruth

In case you haven't caught up with it yet, SkyTruth is going to create something of a revolution - a tool for actually seeing what is happening to our world in real time and providing the ability to see  changes over time.  I first heard about it from Michael Field of Fairfax on New Zealand National Radio on Friday the 14th of February, 2014.  He kindly sent me a transcript of the guts of what was talked about so rather than writing it out again, I have pasted it below.  It has been a long time coming since the beginning of the Satellite era but here it is finally. It is worth noting that you can't access it at present because the information is proprietary but this will change some time this year with the launch of a new satellite.

Shock at the scale of fishing in South Pacific

Michael Field
Fleets of sophisticated Chinese and Spanish fishing boats working the edge of New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) have been exposed by an American volunteer group whose work is creating a revolution to the environmental movement.
Fishing boats create picket fence lines on the edge of the EEZ around places like the Kermadecs and off East Cape, taking bluefin tuna, swordfish and orange roughy.
‘‘Most people would be gobsmacked by what we are finding,’’ geologist John Amos said from Shepherdstown, West Virginia, (pop. 805) where the group SkyTruth operating out of an office behind a draper’s shop.
They’ve also spotted an unusual 34-year-old Cambodian flagged tuna boat, Gral, leaving Suva, Fiji, and making straight for New Zealand’s Raoul Island despite having no licence, permissions or complying with normally strict quarantine procedures.
SkyTruth has been commissioned by the US based US$792 million (NZ$972 million) asset rich Pew Charitable Trusts to monitor what is happening around the Kermadecs, an archipelago 1100 km north of Auckland, home to one of the world’s most diverse marine life.
Pew has supported the Kermadec Initiative which is calling for a 620,000 sq km ocean sanctuary from the existing island reserves out to the EEZ.
SkyTruth use Automatic Identification System (AIS) satellite data transmitted from ships and satellite radar imagery to detect fishing boats that turn off or do not use AIS. 
Amos says they find many vessels ‘‘fishing-the-line’’ to catch valuable fish before the stock gets into New Zealand waters.
‘‘Not just around New Zealand, but also in Chilean waters, we see Chinese, Ukrainian and Spanish flag vessel fishing right up to the line.... You see this concentration of fishing effort around the line and you wonder how many of these migratory fish even make it through.’’
‘‘It is like a picket fence of fishermen.’’ Amos said they are producing a South Pacific map that will show the cumulative fishing that has gone on over a 12-month period.
‘‘That is the kind of thing we can do now,’’ he says, adding people will be shocked by what they see. 
New Zealand makes some money off the Spanish.
Last November two of the armada ships, Carmen Tere and Artico, were serviced in Whangarei. Their Indonesian crews complained of poor treatment at the time.
SkyTruth in the last couple of weeks has spotted Carmen Tere working a line off East Cape and Artico is on picket duty at the Kermadecs. A fleet of four Spanish ships is gathered in an area of orange roughy fishing grounds.Red baron
Most of their catches are taken to Papeete, or transhipped at sea.
With a new European Space Agency satellite, Sentinel 1, in orbit next month, SkyTruth expect a ‘‘stream of free radar imagery....
‘‘Clouds of data seems to be what we humans are good at producing these days, and using that is for good purposes.’’
It can identify problems in the EEZs and shows the sheer persistence of the fishing industry.
‘‘There is no place these guys don’t go.’’
SkyTruth first came to world attention when the White House used it to work out the scale of 2010’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Amos, 50, recently cataloguing the number and size of fracking operations, is a folk hero in the US.
‘‘You can track anything in the world from anywhere in the world,’’ Amos told the Washington Post last year.
‘‘That’s the real revolution.’’
SkyTruth’s technology edge was revealed when a 498 ton ‘‘fish transporter’’ Gral pulled into Suva on January 17.
Owned by South Korea’s ‘‘Aururoa Shipping’’ it had been called Arche until December – and before that the tuna longliner Gaia, Oryong No 332 and Sam Song No 507.
On January 20 it sailed out of Suva and made directly for Raoul, arriving at 2.55am on January 23.
Conservation Minister Nick Smith said he had not been briefed on Gral and referred questions to officials who could not provide information on it.
The Ministry of Primary Industries said ‘‘it had broken down and was undertaking repairs’’.
Amos dismisses the MPI line.
‘‘It appears that the moment they left from Fiji, (Raoul) was the destination.’’
Fuel was expensive and from watching marine traffic SkyTruth saw ships always went the straightest line possible.
A Tauranga ship, Claymore II, under charter to the Department of Conservation, earlier this month found Gral anchored in a bay they would use.
Its owner, Nigel Jolly, said before they left New Zealand, DOC rules required divers inspect the hull for marine life and a quarantine dog was run through.
‘‘After all those precautions we get a permit to go there, but if fishing boat or a visiting yacht seeks shelter at Raoul Island, no matter if it is a reserve, the law of the sea says it has a right.’’
They never found out what Gral was doing.
Bronwen Golder, director of Pew’s Kermadec Initiative, says SkyTruth under-scores the vulnerability of the area and the need for a marine sanctuary.
‘‘What this daily tracking shows is that there is constant international fishing activity just outside of New Zealand’s EEZ over extended periods and in fleets such as the Spanish,’’ she said.
SkyTruth has tracked Gral out of New Zealand’s EEZ and headed toward French Polynesia.
On the high seas late last week it rendezvoused with a Russian fishing boat, the 1137 ton Palmer which had switched its AIS off until the meeting.
On Saturday they remain within five kilometres of each other.
10 february 2014