Group items tagged

Cuban Migration Continues Without Residency Policy.

A new inter-agency platform for information sharing on migrant smuggling by sea has been launched today (6 July) by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in order to better understand unsafe mixed migration by sea.

Europol Launches JOT to Combat Illegal Sea Migration.

The Migration of the Supertankers.

Increasing numbers of gray whales migrating closer to shore could put whales at risk for ship strikes, entanglements, and pollution.

After analyzing five years of blue whale calls, researchers at MBARI, Stanford University, and several other institutions discovered that the time of day that the whales sing changes dramatically depending on whether the whales are feeding or migrating. This discovery will give scientists new insights into the lives of these endangered giants of the sea and might eventually be used to help protect them from human threats such as ship strikes.

Bound by the laws of the sea to help vessels in distress, shipping companies say Europe's migration crisis has placed unreasonable demands on their crews to act as lifesavers in the Mediterranean.

Bound by the laws of the sea to help vessels in distress, shipping companies say Europe's migration crisis has placed unreasonable demands on their crews to act as lifesavers in the Mediterranean.

Video news release about the Conference held at IMO about unsafe mixed migration by sea.

The OEF Foundation has released a new report which examines how the response to the Somali piracy crisis could make crossing the Mediterranean safer for refugees.

For Pacific islands like Palau, Tuvalu and Kiribati, the implications of climate change are clear - and devastating. Already, these governments have begun to plan for a future in which entire populations have to relocate as their islands vanish under the rising sea. But climate change also threatens ways of life in subtler ways, leaving families around the world to work out for themselves how to cope.

European Union nations agreed to speed up the deportation of failed asylum seekers as they took a harder line toward tackling the bloc's worst migration crisis since World War II.

United Nations agencies are meeting in London to discuss concerted ways to address the high numbers of lives being lost at sea in unsafe craft, particularly in the Mediterranean Sea, where hundreds of people are reported to have died in recent weeks alone on dangerous and unregulated sea passages.

Marine environmental DNA (eDNA) is an important tool for biodiversity research and monitoring but challenges remain in scaling surveys over large spatial areas, and increasing the frequency of sampling in remote locations at reasonable cost. Here we demonstrate the feasibility of sampling from commercial vessels (Mediterranean ferries) while underway, as a strategy to facilitate replicable, systematic marine eDNA surveys in locations that would normally be challenging and expensive for researchers to access. Sixteen eDNA samples were collected from four fixed sampling stations, and in response to four cetacean sightings, across three cruises undertaken along the 300 km ferry route between Livorno (Tuscany) and Golfo Aranci (Sardinia) in the Ligurian/Tyrrhenian Seas, June-July 2018. Using 12SrDNA and 16SrDNA metabarcoding markers, we recovered diverse marine vertebrate Molecular Operational Taxonomic Units (MOTUs) from teleost fish, elasmobranchs, and cetaceans. We detected sample heterogeneity consistent with previously known variation in species occurrences, including putative species spawning peaks associated with specific sea surface temperature ranges, and increased night time abundance of bathypelagic species known to undertake diel migrations through the water column. We suggest commercial vessel based marine eDNA sampling using the global shipping network has potential to facilitate broad-scale biodiversity monitoring in the world's oceans.

A comprehensive new map and report tracking whale migrations around the globe highlights where they go in the high seas and the cumulative impacts the animals face from industrial fishing, ship strikes, pollution, habitat loss and climate change.

Seabed fluid flow is a widespread and important natural phenomenon in marine environments, which involves complex multi-physics, multi-process and multi-scale processes. The developments in offshore geophysical technology have facilitated the discovery of the widespread emissions of seabed fluids. For an overview on the state-of-the-art seabed fluid flow research and for obtaining a perspective on future research in the China Seas, we reviewed the data, reports, and publications particularly that associated with cold seeps such as pockmarks, seeps, domes, mud volcanoes, and gas hydrates in the Bohai Sea, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea. This study presents the first report for seabed fluid flow on all China Seas with the basic information required to undertake additional analytical studies of these features. Furthermore, we explore processes responsible for them and their implications. Although the seabed fluid flow is widespread, dynamic, and influential, it is still poorly examined and understood. To understand seabed fluid flow in both time and space, it is important to investigate how and why these seabed fluids form and migrate.