30 July 2007

Memories of a war: Lebanon Oil Spill in the Mediterranean Sea

Last week marked the first anniversary of the Lebanon oil spill disaster caused by Israeli attacks in July 2006.

The Israeli air fighters attacked, last year, the Jiyeh facilities located 28 Km to the south of Beirut. More than 10 thousand tons of fuel oil spilled in the water of the Mediterranean Sea, from Jiyeh up to the north till the shores of Syria, to form one of the worst environmental disasters the Lebanese coast has suffered.

Of course, that is not all I remember from the July 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon; I live in south Lebanon, and bombings on our village was intense and some of it barely 100 meters away from our house. I lost a few good friends and neighbors in this war, my brother was injured and my father’s shop damaged; Back then, everyone - those who stayed in town - were constantly dodging air raids, moving from one place to another, trying to help people under the rubbles. It is called a war, but from my experience, it seemed like a trail of endless human sufferings.

Anyway, the war was over, and the Lebanese people and their friends had 3 major concerns:
- Rebuilding what is destroyed.
- Removing cluster bombs: almost a million of these extremely damaging bombs were thrown on us!
- Mitigating the oil spill impacts.

Greenpeace started, under the coordination of the Ministry of Environment and other organizations, the assessment and evaluation of the oil spill disaster, and helping in the oil spill cleanup and finding solutions. The “Rainbow Warrior” visited Lebanon to help in this issue, especially underwater with divers, and ran operations for three weeks until more material and vessels arrived. I remember seeing the ship in Beirut, but did not have the chance to get aboard….

Now, after one year, after all the cleanup efforts, some bags are still lying on some of our beaches, waiting to be handled, and risking to melt and spread in the water again, due to the summer warm sun.

In this first anniversary of the oil spill disaster, and as part of the “Defending Our Mediterranean” campaign, Greenpeace published a report and a short video about the Lebanon oil spill, stating the updates after one year, showing the other threats that endanger our sea, and of course the suggested solutions: Marine Reserves.

The waters of the Mediterranean Sea takes almost a 100 years to renew - because it is almost a closed sea – and this make it more fragile and requires more attention and more care.

You can watch the Video and read the report here: One year on Lebanon oil spill in the Mediterranean Sea.

You can join our “Mediterranean Defenders” list to receive updates and an Action Plan to help : Signup the Mediterranean Sea photo petition (if you dont have a related image, you can still sign up with just comments)

Whether you live on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, or you just spend a summer holiday on its beautiful coasts, or even just love Mediterranean food, you can help to save and protect the Mediterranean Sea, so you can continue to enjoy it.

The last war was not the first in the region, and unfortunately, maybe it will not the last, but like a UN envoy said after the cease fire:"I never seen a country recover that fast after such a war"… Our Mediterranean Sea needs recovery as well, it needs support and protection. Marine Reserves will provide that.

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3 September 2006

RIP Atún Rojo

by Mike, onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

We picked up anchor in the pre-dawn darkness and slipped in behind a procession of eight trawlers leaving the harbour of Cartagena. The timing was perfect and the Traffic Control Centre was none the wiser to a ninth echo moving on their radars. I have noticed that my heart beats loudly more often as master - I was anxious not to be discovered and wondered how Francis Drake must have felt in 1585 when he stole the guns from the fortified hills surrounding the port.

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30 August 2006

Impacts of coastal development on seagrass beds

by Roger, onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Seagrass beds are a common feature of shallow seas around much of the Mediterranean, and serve important functions as nursery areas, production of organic matter near the beginning of the food chain, and helping protect the seabed from erosion and sediment movement. They also provide a special habitat for small animals and plants which live amongst the fronds of the seagrass, particularly down near the base.

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A little jellyfish story

by Roger, onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

In recent weeks from the Rainbow Warrior we have seen a lot of jellyfish, particularly a big brown one as in the pictures. Some jellyfish sting humans, but this one seems harmless. I touched the mass of tentacles and felt nothing. Often there are little fish sheltering beneath the jellyfish.

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24 August 2006

Bon voyage Marseille

by Karli, onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

So, yesterday (23/8) finished around midnight. Today started at 2am, with Francois waking me with information that the tuna fishermen planned to come out from the port to the Rainbow Warrior - peacefully at anchor just outside the harbour entrance - at 6 am. We met for about an hour to discuss what might happen, and what we should do. A checklist was prepared, ending with "sleep while you can".

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23 August 2006

Tuna fishermen in angry denial

by Karli, onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Well, what a day.

The Rainbow Warrior is now at anchor at our authorised spot outside Marseille harbour.

We spent the day in a standoff with around 25 French industrial tuna purse-seiners surrounding us. On three occasions this boiled up... the first as we arrived, the second when we were slipping at anchor (which had been dropped in deep water for safety reasons in the first incident) - the second time we raised the anchor to move to a safer anchorage all the vessels again swarmed around us - these are multi-million euro vessels that can go any direction they like and are simply more manoeuvrable than the Rainbow Warrior. Very quickly we had to again drop the anchor.

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Marseille - almost there

by Dani onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

It was early in the morning but this was definitely not like any other morning. We've been on course to Marseille for a few days now. The transit has been a bit bumpy for most of the way, but the seas calmed in the early hours of the morning before we arrived in Marseille. The wind was followed by a cosy cold and humid breeze that swept the sky clean to expose all the beautiful stars that could possibly be visible. At that point it came to my mind that we might be experiencing the "calm before the storm".

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22 August 2006

Search and rescue

by Mike onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Somewhere inside my cabin a phone is ringing; where is the light switch? I scramble in the direction of the sound, narrowly escaping the meter high edge of my bunk. "Captain! I receive mayday on VHF close by!" The anxious Russian accent of the second mate reminds me that I'm on the Rainbow Warrior and that I am the captain. The first night of my command. It's three o'clock in the morning.

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21 August 2006

Rescue boat

by Phil onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Got woken up at 04:00 this morning. We had just recieved a Mayday distress call from a vessel sinking nearby. As the emergency boat driver I'm one of the first that the bridge officers call. First we prepared the boat for launching. This meant searchlights, medical supplies, extra life jackets, warm clothing and a stretcher. I then went up to the bridge to speak with the captain and look at the chart to see where the vessel was in relation to our ship.

It was at this time I was told that the distressed vessel was a yacht with three crew. The vessel was near the coast about 8 miles from our ship, in a small bay. The chart also showed me that the water in this bay was quite shallow and there were a lot of rocks in the area..

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2 August 2006

Rainbow Warrior to help MSF mission

With our ship in the region and MSF needing urgent help to get humanitarian supplies to Lebanon we've teamed up to help transporting much-needed supplies to Lebanon. Here's the official statement on the mission -

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1 August 2006

Friendly cuttlefish on night dive

by Roger onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

On a recent night dive we encountered a small cuttlefish hanging around on the bottom. Looking at first very like a small rock, the animal moved around hardly disturbed by our lights and cameras. Cuttlefish are like squid but have a limey shell inside which sometimes washes up on beaches when the animal dies. These "cuttlefish bones" are sometimes given to cage birds like budgies and parrots to sharpen their beaks on.
The cuttlefish has a very strange eye with a wiggly black slit for a pupil. In the close up picture you can also see the coloured pigment cells in the skin, the size of which can be changed by the animal so it can alter the colour to match the surroundings, and to flash ripples of colour along the back to indicate different moods.

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31 July 2006

Giant feather-duster worm

by Roger onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

A spectacular tube worm was present on many of our dives in the Mediterranean. Standing about half a metre tall on a parchment-like muddy tube, a spiral of feathery tentacles or gills reaches high into the water where it catches microscopic plankton for food. Standing up from the bottom, the worm looks rather like the old feather-duster used by housemaids for centuries. The detail photo shows tiny feathery branches on the gills, which trap the plankton and pass it along to the mouth of the worm protected in the tube. The feathery gills would be tasty for fish, so at the slightest disturbance the gills are withdrawn in a flash into the tube.

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Poisonous Bristleworm common in Mediterranean

by Roger onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Bristleworms, or Polychaete worms, are very common in the sea, but you seldom see them. They are usually very tasty for fish so they hide away under rocks and in crevices. I was surprised to see a large juicy-looking bristleworm running around on open rock faces underwater, in many of the places we dived in the Mediterranean. It turns out that this worm is poisonous to fishes, and being brightly coloured the fish soon learn not to try to eat it. Bunches of white bristles stick out from each of the many segments of the worm. The bristles are needle-sharp and connected to a poison apparatus. The close view shows the head of the worm, with orange "bonnet", various tentacles, branching red gills along the back, and two black eyes on one side of the head, so the animal has four eyes! If you see this worm, don't pick it up with bare hands! The bristles will stick in your fingers.

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The Amazing life of Nudibranchs or Sea Slugs

by Roger onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

They say "fact is stranger than fiction". Try this one: Jellyfish, sea anemones, corals and hydroids are all related to each other. They have special stinging cells in their tentacles with which they sting and trap small fish or tiny prey animals. In some types the sting is so strong it is dangerous to humans. The stinging cells are usually triggered by touching the tentacles.
Some nudibranchs or seaslugs specialise in eating hydroids. They have developed an amazing technique whereby they can eat the hydroids without triggering the stinging cells and thus don't get harmed by the poisonous stings. But they go even further than that. When they eat the hydroid the stinging cells remain intact and migrate through the stomach wall and into colourful projections on the back of the nudibranch. Here the stinging cells become embedded in the skin of the nudibranch and are ready to sting a fish or other predator which may try to eat the nudibranch! So the nudibranch uses the defence mechanism of the hydroid to protect itself from predators. Nudibranchs are often very brightly coloured and obvious. This serves as a warning to fish that the nudibranch either tastes horrible or can sting. This is the same reason why butterflies are so colourful - they taste horrible and the colours are a warning to birds not to eat them.

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29 July 2006

Rent-a-crowd with underwater banners

by Roger onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

With the Rainbow Warrior Mediterranean Tour in full swing calling for a network of Marine Reserves, we took the opportunity to get our message across using underwater banners in four different languages. Four banners required at least eight divers to hold them, and it is hard enough organising two divers to hold one banner properly underwater. The prospect of getting eight divers holding banners, together with a few extra divers just for luck, was quite daunting and I was anticipating a shambles underwater.
Surprisingly the activity went quite well, with expert choreography by our underwater videographer Marco Care who had a knack of getting people to do just what he wanted underwater, using a series of cryptic signals which I personally did not understand. We got shots of the banners in a row on the bottom, in two vertical layers, and floating on the surface against the sun. Hopefully the pictures get the message across to lots of people - Marine Reserves Now!

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28 July 2006

Junk Dive

by Roger onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Wherever intensive industrial activity occurs on the coast, humans generally make a mess of the adjacent sea and seabed. Recently we dived in just such an area, off a commercial wharf and industrial site, and the mess on the bottom was somewhat predictable. There were old wheels, pipes, old gas cylinders, cables, twisted beams, rusting steel containers of various sorts, bits of metal strapping, and of course some plastic bags and rags. Our dive team filmed and photographed what we could, and used the opportunity to show a banner calling for marine reserves in the Mediterranean. We found evidence not only of junk deliberately discarded by people with little respect for the sea, but also evidence of overfishing in the area. There were hardly any fish over 20cm long, and old bits of fishing line were common...

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26 July 2006

Fish apartment block

by Roger onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

People have thrown their junk in the sea for hundreds of years. Before modern times most of this stuff was not a big problem - stone jars and pottery, or degradable materials like wood. Most of it either rotted away harmlessly or became incorporated into the rock and sediment of the seabed. But modern rubbish is mostly plastic, or even worse nasty invisible chemicals which create biological havoc of a new kind. This is marine pollution on a different scale, bad enough to cause lots of damage to the ecology of the sea, and something Greenpeace is fighting against in its effort to Save the Mediterranean.
Not all modern rubbish is entirely nasty. Occasionally we find an example of modern rubbish that has provided an opportunity for marine animals - a new little piece of habitat to occupy - and sometimes these examples have a humorous side. I want to share with you this little gem I found on a recent dive. A discarded brick has provided an enterprising little fish, a topknot blenny, with a five-star apartment on the seabed, where he can sit on his balcony and watch the world go by.

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25 July 2006

Let me tell you what we've been up to

by Elif onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

I've been wanting to write about what we've been doing on our ship, but we've had problems with the Internet connection. It is all fixed now, so stay tuned.
Today, I want to tell you what we've been up to since we left Istanbul.

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Tuna or Dolphins?

by Karli onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

The Rainbow Warrior is now sailing around the Turkish coastline conducting a whale and dolphin survey with scientists from Dokuz Eylul University in Turkey and the Israeli Marine Mammals Research and Assistance Center, IMMRAC. For the scientists onboard, this is an exciting piece of research as it is the first cetacean survey in many years to be carried out in Turkey. For the rest of the crew on-board, it is a chance to maximise our dolphin (and whale) watching: three people on permanent dolphin-alert, armed with large binoculars and staring out to sea.

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22 July 2006

Research proceeds slowly because of the weather

by Harun, scientist onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Dolphins were not with us today...
Today, with the help of suitable weather conditions we could only make observations in the area between Dikili and Candarli Bay from 6:00 in the morning till 8:00. This time we were not as lucky as the last time unfortunately. Although we could see many seagulls, trawl ships and a few grey weathercock birds, we could not observe any dolphins. It is highly possible that this area may host pipe burunlu yunus due to its being so shallow.

About the method of research:

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20 July 2006

Hello from Cunda

by Harun, scientist onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Yesterday morning we joined the Rainbow Warrior from Istanbul, who is going on its excursion to build up the sea reserves in Mediterranean, in order to mark the important sea mammals areas in East Mediterranean.
DOLPHINS ARE SEEN IN THE END
We couldn't work from the beginning of the excursion until this noon because of the northeast wind. We could only find the water whose limit is under the limit of 4B - which is suitable for our visual census technique - only in the Musellim passage which is between Baba Cape and Mytilene. During our 2 hours of observations in this passage, a small group of Afalina, consisting of two adults and one young one, watched us from the bow of our ship for about 15 minutes. Being together with them in this short time of period made all the team excited and pleased. But the weather forecast reports show that there will be strong storms for a few more days… Still, we are waiting for the dolphins and whales we are to observe patiently. In my next text I will introduce you the divers team and dolphin cruise team. Until then, have a nice day.

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19 July 2006

Saving our Med in the Turkish waters

by Hibsy & Shaggy, (no longer) onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

Today the Rainbow Warrior has sailed to her next stage of the Defending Our Mediterranean tour, to continue spreading the message about marine reserves. However, this time the Warrior was looking different. As of early morning, the crew and volunteers worked together to put up a shining banner between her main and jib masts, its 4 metres high letters read "PEACE NOW!". It was a weird feeling to see our glowing ship sail away from us in the Bosphorus canal. Between waving goodbyes, hiding tears, and taking pictures; along with our Turkish activists, we were staring at her while she was gradually shrinking and disappearing behind the Turkish hills.

Now, stand outside your house, look at it from a distance, and start imagining it moving away. Generally, one would walk away from ones home, but watching our home float further from our eyes, was one of the strangest sensations. One that is hard to describe.

Not for long our dear Rainbow Warrior, we will soon be back onboard to join our family, who we already miss a lot!

Two new scientists, have also joined our family onboard, to work together on a survey of whales and dolphins along the Turkish coast.
Good luck to you all, and fair winds!

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17 July 2006

The Mediterranean is still being threatened

by Canan, onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

As an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace Mediterranean, I hope that this ship tour will be a step towards cooperation between the Mediterranean countries, and a move away from conflict.
It is not just Greenpeace crew and activists who are the warriors of the Rainbow, it is the people of the Mediterranean, people who we will meet along the way, people who are working to protect their sea, their livelihoods, for the future.

Think of our planet, and what covers it? Two quarters of the earth's surface is water. And beneath the surface, our seas and oceans hold 80 percent of life.

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PEACE, an endangered word.

by Hibsy, onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

What is happening in the Middle East is intolerable and inhumane! The loss of lives, families, and their homes is devastating. War is a violent game that is harming us all. The Warriors of the Rainbow are all sending their love and support to our friends in need, and are demanding peace now! We add our voice to the voice of the Esperanza Crew, in sending our positive energy and thoughts from the Mediterranean Sea to the people of the Middle East, in Israel and Lebanon, in these very difficult times. We will continue to strive for what we want to achieve.
Add your voice to ours! and may peace reign amongst us soon.

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Life, energy, and hope

by Hibsy, onboard the Rainbow Warrior in the Mediterranean sea.

The most beautiful and inspiring thing about being in Istanbul is the number of passionate and devoted volunteers and members we have met and are still sharing our days with. They've come from various places of Turkey to meet the Warrior and its crew and to tell the Turkish people about our campaigns and actions onboard of our green ship.
We are fighting to save our seas and oceans in a very difficult time, for the political situation in the Mediterranean and the Middle East is getting worse by the day. All the crew and volunteers here are against this violence and want all wars in all countries to end NOW.

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