Monday, October 23rd, 2006
Member countries of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), including the UK, are perpetuating pollution from the Arctic to Antarctic that is contaminating wildlife and entering our food chain. Only 17 out of 166 member countries of IMO have ratified the legislation. However, the majority of the shipping industry supports a ban, with only the unscrupulous operators still using it. "Countries who have not signed up - including the UK - should be ashamed."
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Saturday, October 21st, 2006
Dive a few hundred metres beneath the ocean's surface and the environment changes rapidly, becoming darker and colder as the pressure rises. It is amazing to think of warm-blooded mammals in such an inhospitable environment, yet this is the domain of whales and dolphins. Beaked whales are particularly at home in deep water, as Peter Tyack and his colleagues discovered when they tagged two species and monitored their dives. They found that beaked whales repeatedly make long dives as deep as 2 km in search of squid, making their average foraging dives deeper and longer than any other air-breathing animal.
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Friday, October 20th, 2006
The list of the best selling SCUBA books of the last three months is now up. Keeping its number one spot is Dive Atlas of the World: An Illustrated Reference to the Best Sites by Jack Jackson. New entries include Dive In Style and Diving the World.
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Thursday, October 19th, 2006
A new survey of reefs along Madagascar's southwestern coast found massive damage from coral bleaching, including some reefs that lost up to 99 percent of their coral cover. A number of coral bleaching events - where rising sea temperatures cause corals to turn white and ultimately die - have struck Madagascar's southwest coast over the years, the worst being in 1998 and 2000.
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Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Sewage is a growing threat to oceans and seas, putting at risk marine life and habitats as the pollution problem escalates, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reports.
The "State of the Marine Environment" report found that substantial progress had been achieved in reducing oily wastes and organic pollutants such as long-lived industrial chemicals in the past two decades but other problems had grown worse.
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Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
The SCUBA Travel Gifts for divers page now offers discount vouchers for underwater cameras bought at Jessops.com. Offers valid from now till the end of the year.
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