AFP UK

Oil from bulk carrier OS-35 damaged in a collision as it left the port of Gibraltar has reached shore

Small amounts of oil from a bulk carrier that collided with a gas tanker off Gibraltar has reached the shoreline of the British territory and neighbouring Spain, local officials said Friday.

The head of Gibraltar’s government, Fabian Picardo, told Spanish news radio Cadena Ser that a slick from the stricken vessel had reached “parts of the coast of Gibraltar.”

“But it was a small slick, we don’t want there to be any slick, but it was small,” he added.

Crews have been deployed to “begin the clean-up of oil from the shoreline,” the government of Gibraltar said in a statement.

Gibraltar’s department of environment has received reports “of small numbers of oiled birds,” it added.

Meanwhile the mayor of the Spanish town of La Linea de la Concepcion which borders Gibraltar said an oil slick from the carrier had reached its beach, forcing its closure.

“What has arrived is a slick which, frankly, is worrying but we are not talking about a tragedy,” Juan Franco told local reporters.

The carrier — the OS 35 — has been beached off Gibraltar since the two vessels collided late on Monday off the territory located on the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula.

The captain of the damaged ship was detained for questioning on Thursday for allegedly not obeying Gibraltar port orders initially after the collision.

No one was injured in the accident.

Booms were placed around the stricken cargo ship but some oil still managed to escape the floating barriers.

Gibraltar officials said Friday that all of the diesel on the ship had been removed, and the priority now was the removal of the heavy fuel oil that is still on board.

Divers on Thursday sealed two tank vents that leaked fuel from the bulk carrier and the amount of oil that is leaking is “significantly reduced”, the government of Gibraltar statement said.

Gibraltar, measuring just 6.8 square kilometres (2.6 square miles), overlooks the only entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean, putting it on the key shipping route to the Middle East.

Its strategic location and low tax rates have helped turn it into one of the world’s busiest ports for ships to refuel.

Greenpeace said oil spills will “continue to be a threat” in the Strait of Gibraltar as long as it continues to be “the biggest ‘low cost’ fuel station in southern Europe.”

Uranus and Neptune, ice giants where scientists believe diamond rain falls below the surface

It could be raining diamonds on planets throughout the universe, scientists suggested Friday, after using common plastic to recreate the strange precipitation believed to form deep inside Uranus and Neptune.

Scientists had previously theorised that extremely high pressure and temperatures turn hydrogen and carbon into solid diamonds thousands of kilometres below the surface of the ice giants.

Now new research, published in Science Advances, inserted oxygen into the mix, finding that “diamond rain” could be more common than thought.

Ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are thought to be the most common form of planet outside our Solar System, which means diamond rain could be occurring across the universe.

Dominik Kraus, a physicist at Germany’s HZDR research lab and one of the study’s authors, said that diamond precipitation was quite different to rain on Earth.

Under the surface of the planets is believed to be a “hot, dense liquid”, where the diamonds form and slowly sink down to the rocky, potentially Earth-size cores more than 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) below, he said.

There fallen diamonds could form vast layers that span “hundreds of kilometres or even more”, Kraus told AFP.

While these diamonds might not be shiny and cut like a “a nice gem on a ring”, he said they were formed via similar forces as on Earth.

Aiming to replicate the process, the research team found the necessary mix of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in a readily available source — PET plastic, which is used for everyday food packaging and bottles. 

Kraus said that while the researchers used very clean PET plastic, “in principle the experiment should work with Coca-Cola bottles”.

The team then turned a high-powered optical laser on the plastic at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

“Very, very short X-ray flashes of incredible brightness” allowed them to watch the process of nanodiamonds — tiny diamonds too small to see with the naked eye — as they formed, Kraus said.

“The oxygen that is present in large amounts on those planets really helps suck away the hydrogen atoms from the carbon, so it’s actually easier for those diamonds to form,” he added.

– New way to make nanodiamonds? – 

The experiment could point towards a new way to produce nanodiamonds, which have a wide and increasing range of applications including drug delivery, medical censors, non-invasive surgery and quantum electronics.

“The way nanodiamonds are currently made is by taking a bunch of carbon or diamond and blowing it up with explosives,” said SLAC scientist and study co-author Benjamin Ofori-Okai.

“Laser production could offer a cleaner and more easily controlled method to produce nanodiamonds,” he added.

The diamond rain research remains hypothetical because little is known about Uranus and Neptune, the most distant planets in our Solar System.

Only one spacecraft — NASA’s Voyager 2 in the 1980s — has flown past the two ice giants, and the data it sent back is still being used in research.

But a NASA group has outlined a potential new mission to the planets, possibly launching next decade.

“That would be fantastic,” Kraus said.

He said he is greatly looking forward to more data — even if it takes a decade or two.

Tourists on a Florida beach await the launch of NASA's new Moon rocket before it was called off on August 29, 2022

Up to 400,000 visitors are expected to flock to the Florida coast on Saturday, hoping to catch a glimpse — and hear the roar — of NASA’s rocket launch to the Moon.

If the uncrewed Space Launch System (SLS) lifts off successfully, it will be not only awe-inspiring but historic for NASA, marking the first of its Artemis missions plotting a return to the Moon.

The Kennedy Space Center will be closed to the public, but spectators on local beaches will be able to see the most powerful vehicle that NASA has ever launched climb into the sky.

“I remember being a little kid and some of the (Apollo) lunar landings,” Alberto Tirado told AFP on Cocoa Beach, the day before the rocket’s scheduled launch.

“So I want to feel that power and what they felt in the 1960s.”

On Monday, when a first launch attempt had to be scuttled at the last moment due to technical issues, local Brevard County authorities had expected between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors.

Don Walker, the county’s communications director, says that though Monday’s numbers have yet to be finalized, they estimate “double that amount on Saturday.”

“We are ‘guesstimating’ the launch viewing crowd to number between 200,000 to 400,000 people,” Walker told AFP.

For comparison, SpaceX’s first manned launch in 2020 — amid the pandemic — drew 220,000 people.

The fact that the launch is scheduled for a weekend, with Monday also a US holiday, means that the crowd is likely to be much larger, said Meagan Happel with the Space Coast Office of Tourism.

As on Monday, traffic is expected to get heavy “three to four hours” before the launch, Happel told AFP.

Liftoff is currently scheduled for 2:17 pm (18:17 GMT) on Saturday, with the potential for up to a two-hour delay if necessary.

Hotels along the coast have been fully booked for several weeks, and there are only a limited number of parking spaces near the best viewpoints.

Artemis 1 is a test flight without any astronauts on board.

The Orion capsule, after separating from the SLS rocket, will spend about six weeks in space and travel at one point nearly 40,000 miles (64,000 km) past the Moon — farther than any human-grade vehicle has ever gone.

It is the Orion that will then take future astronauts back to the Moon — including the first woman and the first person color to walk on its surface — in 2025 at the earliest.

Uranus and Neptune, ice giants where scientists believe diamond rain falls below the surface

It could be raining diamonds on planets throughout the universe, scientists suggested Friday, after using common plastic to recreate the strange precipitation believed to form deep inside Uranus and Neptune.

Scientists had previously theorised that extremely high pressure and temperatures turn hydrogen and carbon into solid diamonds thousands of kilometres below the surface of the ice giants.

Now new research, published in Science Advances, inserted oxygen into the mix, finding that “diamond rain” could be more common than thought.

Ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are thought to be the most common form of planet outside our Solar System, which means diamond rain could be occurring across the universe.

Dominik Kraus, a physicist at Germany’s HZDR research lab and one of the study’s authors, said that diamond precipitation was quite different to rain on Earth.

Under the surface of the planets is believed to be a “hot, dense liquid”, where the diamonds form and slowly sink down to the rocky, potentially Earth-size cores more than 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) below, he said.

There fallen diamonds could form vast layers that span “hundreds of kilometres or even more”, Kraus told AFP.

While these diamonds might not be shiny and cut like a “a nice gem on a ring”, he said they were formed via similar forces as on Earth.

Aiming to replicate the process, the research team found the necessary mix of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in a readily available source — PET plastic, which is used for everyday food packaging and bottles. 

Kraus said that while the researchers used very clean PET plastic, “in principle the experiment should work with Coca-Cola bottles”.

The team then turned a high-powered optical laser on the plastic at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

“Very, very short X-ray flashes of incredible brightness” allowed them to watch the process of nanodiamonds — tiny diamonds too small to see with the naked eye — as they formed, Kraus said.

“The oxygen that is present in large amounts on those planets really helps suck away the hydrogen atoms from the carbon, so it’s actually easier for those diamonds to form,” he added.

– New way to make nanodiamonds? – 

The experiment could point towards a new way to produce nanodiamonds, which have a wide and increasing range of applications including drug delivery, medical censors, non-invasive surgery and quantum electronics.

“The way nanodiamonds are currently made is by taking a bunch of carbon or diamond and blowing it up with explosives,” said SLAC scientist and study co-author Benjamin Ofori-Okai.

“Laser production could offer a cleaner and more easily controlled method to produce nanodiamonds,” he added.

The diamond rain research remains hypothetical because little is known about Uranus and Neptune, the most distant planets in our Solar System.

Only one spacecraft — NASA’s Voyager 2 in the 1980s — has flown past the two ice giants, and the data it sent back is still being used in research.

But a NASA group has outlined a potential new mission to the planets, possibly launching next decade.

“That would be fantastic,” Kraus said.

He said he is greatly looking forward to more data — even if it takes a decade or two.

Screen grab from 2011 video of a man believed to be the last known survivor of of the Tanaru indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon

For more than 20 years he lived alone in the Brazilian Amazon eating nuts, fruit and game — a symbol of the struggle of indigenous people who exist in isolation in the rainforest.

Now this man whose very name was unknown is dead, and his passing has made headlines around the world.

His life was marked by massacres that left him as the lone survivor of a small tribe attacked by gunmen apparently hired by ranchers seeking to exploit the pristine Amazon.

He was found dead lying in a hammock on August 23 in Tanaru Indigenous Territory. Authorities found no signs of violence and believe he died of natural causes.

The man was covered in the bright feathers of a bird called the guacamaya, a kind of macaw, local news reports said.

The Tanaru Indigenous Territory covers 8,000 hectares (30 square miles) of protected rainforest in Brazil’s southwestern Rondonia state, bordering Bolivia. The reserve is surrounded by sprawling cattle ranches.

Rife with rogue miners and wood cutters whose work is illegal, it is one of the most dangerous regions of Brazil, according to the Survival International NGP.

The Tanaru land “is like an oasis of green in the sea of destruction,” said NGO director Fiona Watson.

– An arrow shot –

The “man of the hole” was first spotted in 1996 by a documentary team traveling with officials of the National Indian Foundation, a government agency that was probing a massacre committed against his tribe.

Proving the presence of indigenous people in the Tanaru forest area was necessary in order to grant the area legal protection.

The footage was featured in a documentary called “Corumbiara” in 2009.

In it, the man’s eyes are seen peering out from inside a straw hut. A spear pokes out at one point, as if to scare visitors away. But no one utters a word.

Over the years Funai teams came back with representatives of neighboring tribes to try to determine what language the man spoke and learn more about his people.

But he made clear he did not want to engage anyone. Feeling threatened, one time he shot an arrow that left a visiting team member seriously wounded.

“One can only imagine what this man was thinking, going through, living on his own, not able to speak to anybody and I think very frightened because any outsider for him represented a threat, given his terrible experience,” Watson said.

After that, authorities just tried to patrol his territory and look for signs that he was still alive.

In the last known footage of him alive — shot in 2011 but not released until seven years later — he is seen semi-naked cutting down a tree with an axe.

Besides bows and arrows that showed he hunted, there were gardens where he grew fruit and vegetables, such as papaya and manioc.

“We saw one of his gardens and it was full of produce — very beautifully kept,” said Watson who visited the site in 2005.

But what most fascinated researchers were the many holes he dug — some two meters (seven feet) deep and with sharp spears at the bottom.

Funai said officials found 53 places that had been his home in the Tanaru territory, always with the same structure: a small straw hut with one door and a hole.

The holes were used to trap animals but experts think they may also been a place for him to hide from intruders or had some kind of spiritual purpose.

The holes, Watson said, are “a mystery that has died with him,” as is the history of the Tanaru people.

Funai has identified 114 indigenous groups that live in isolation in Brazil’s part of the Amazon.

Drought: An emaciated cow stands at the bottom of a dried-up water pan in Iresteno, a Kenyan town bordering Ethiopia

African countries on Friday agreed on a common push to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — a goal that scientists fear is increasingly elusive — at upcoming UN climate talks.

The five-day Africa Climate Week, held in the Gabonese capital of Libreville, is one of a series of regional confabs ahead of the COP27 in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, from November 6 to 18.

The talks “reiterated the need to further accelerate climate action on all fronts, namely in adaptation, loss and damage, climate finance, and adopting more ambitious mitigation measures to keep the 1.5-degree target within reach,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, who will chair the COP27, said in a statement.

African countries are among the nations that are least to blame for the fossil-fuel gases that stoke global warming, accounting for less than four percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide.

But they are also among the countries that are most exposed to climate impacts, such as worsening drought, floods and cyclones.

Funding to help poorer countries curb their emissions and strengthen their resilience is traditionally one of the thorniest issues at COPs — Conferences of the Parties — under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

According to the African Development Bank, Africa will need as much as $1.6 trillion between 2020-2030.

In many rich countries, catastrophic heatwaves and wildfires this year have strengthened demands for action on climate.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the threat to growth posed by the Covid-19 pandemic have also cast a shadow on prospects for meeting funding needs.

“The geopolitical realities and energy crisis confronting the world have opened the door for backtracking on climate commitments and we must do everything to ensure this does not happen,” warned Shoukry. 

In 2015, 196 UN members meeting in Paris set the goal of keeping warming to well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels, and preferably to 1.5C.

But experts say that surging carbon emissions have endangered the lower goal.

“Science tells us if we continue business as usual, global average temperature will rise… more than 3C by the end of the century,” said the UN’s deputy climate chief, Ovais Sarmad.

In May this year, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said there was an even chance that the 1.5C target would be breached within the next five years.

The Libreville meeting brought together around 2,300 delegates from government, NGOs and the private sector from around 50 African countries.

A James Webb Space Telescope direct image of an exoplanet — the image shows HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light

The James Webb space telescope has taken its first image of an exoplanet — a planet outside our solar system — as astronomers hail the device’s performance since its launch last year.

Images from the most powerful space telescope ever built have thrilled observers in recent months as it orbits the Sun a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth.

Its latest pioneering pictures show the exoplanet, called HIP 65426 b, is a gas giant with no rocky surface and could not be habitable.

“This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally,” said Sasha Hinkley, astronomy professor at the University of Exeter, who led the observation team.

Webb’s infrared gaze and coronagraphs — telescopic attachments that block out starlight — enable it to take direct images of exoplanets.

“It was really impressive how well the Webb coronagraphs worked to suppress the light of the host star,” Hinkley said in a NASA statement on Thursday.

The HIP 65426 b exoplanet is six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter and young — about 15 to 20 million years old, compared to the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.

The telescope, which only released its first images in July, has already revealed dazzling new detail of the Phantom Galaxy and of the planet Jupiter.

The Hubble space telescope previously captured direct exoplanet images, but in far less detail.

“I think what’s most exciting is that we’ve only just begun,” said Aarynn Carter, of the University of California. “We may even discover previously unknown planets.”

The $10-billion Webb telescope is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. It is expected to operate for approximately 20 years.

Oil from bulk carrier OS-35 damaged in a collision as it left the port of Gibraltar has reached shore

Small amounts of oil from a bulk carrier that collided with a gas tanker off Gibraltar has reached the shoreline of the British territory and neighbouring Spain, local officials said Friday.

The head of Gibraltar’s government, Fabian Picardo, told Spanish news radio Cadena Ser that a slick from the stricken vessel had reached “parts of the coast of Gibraltar.”

“But it was a small slick, we don’t want there to be any slick, but it was small,” he added.

Crews have been deployed to “begin the clean-up of oil from the shoreline,” the government of Gibraltar said in a statement.

Gibraltar’s department of environment has received reports “of small numbers of oiled birds,” it added.

Meanwhile the mayor of the Spanish town of La Linea de la Concepcion which borders Gibraltar said an oil slick from the carrier had reached its beach, forcing its closure.

“What has arrived is a slick which, frankly, is worrying but we are not talking about a tragedy,” Juan Franco told local reporters.

The carrier — the OS 35 — has been beached off Gibraltar since the two vessels collided late on Monday off the territory located on the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula.

The captain of the damaged ship was detained for questioning on Thursday for allegedly not obeying Gibraltar port orders initially after the collision.

No one was injured in the accident.

Booms were placed around the stricken cargo ship but some oil still managed to escape the floating barriers.

Gibraltar officials said Friday that all of the diesel on the ship had been removed, and the priority now was the removal of the heavy fuel oil that is still on board.

Divers on Thursday sealed two tank vents that leaked fuel from the bulk carrier and the amount of oil that is leaking is “significantly reduced”, the government of Gibraltar statement said.

Gibraltar, measuring just 6.8 square kilometres (2.6 square miles), overlooks the only entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean, putting it on the key shipping route to the Middle East.

Its strategic location and low tax rates have helped turn it into one of the world’s busiest ports for ships to refuel.

Greenpeace said oil spills will “continue to be a threat” in the Strait of Gibraltar as long as it continues to be “the biggest ‘low cost’ fuel station in southern Europe.”

Greenpeace wants a ban on industrial fishing in all of the UK's protected marine conservation areas

Greenpeace UK said Friday it had dropped 18 large boulders on the seabed in a marine conservation zone off the coast of southwest England to prevent “destructive” industrial fishing.

The environmental campaigners sailed to the western part of the Channel between the UK and France, loaded with the boulders of Portland limestone, each weighing between 500 and 1,400 kilograms (1,100 and 3,100 pounds). 

The giant rocks were dropped on Thursday from its Arctic Sunrise research vessel in an area of the South West Deeps (East) Conservation Zone, which lies some 190 kilometres (120 miles) off Land’s End, the most westerly point of mainland England.

“We are placing large limestone boulders on the seabed to create a protective underwater barrier which will put the area off limits to destructive fishing,” Anna Diski, UK oceans campaigner, told AFP on board.

The action would make it “impossible for them to drag the heavy fishing gear along the seabed, destroying the habitat and disturbing the carbon”, she added.

Artists created a giant ammonite sculpture — inspired by the fossil often found in Portland limestone — out of one of the boulders, which was also placed on the seabed.

The names of the action’s celebrity backers and supportive politicians were also inscribed on the rocks.

“Right now, there’s an industrial fishing frenzy happening in UK waters, and what’s our government doing about it?” asked Greenpeace UK’s head of oceans, Will McCallum.

“Greenpeace UK has created this underwater boulder barrier as a last resort to protect the oceans. We’d much rather the government just did their job.” 

McCallum said it was “outrageous” that bottom-trawlers are allowed to operate on the seabed in protected areas.

“They destroy huge swathes of the marine ecosystem and make a mockery of our so-called ‘protection’,” he added.

– ‘Get serious!’ –

The action comes after the latest round of UN talks to try to secure protection for marine life in international waters broke up without agreement.

Greenpeace said the 4,600-square-kilometre (1,776-square-mile) South West Deeps is “one of the most heavily fished so-called Marine Protected Areas in the UK”.

It cited figures from the Global Fishing Watch monitoring agency that said that 110 vessels — more than half of them from France — fished for 18,928 hours in the area in the 18 months to July.

Of that, industrial vessels with bottom-towed fishing gear spent 3,376 hours fishing in the zone. 

Bottom-trawling is only banned in four out of the UK’s 76 offshore Marine Protected Areas, and the government is consulting over possible bans in a further 13. 

“The problem is that the majority of the UK’s MPAs don’t have any actual protection at all,” said Jasmine Watkiss, one of those on board the Arctic Sunrise.

“The government needs to get serious about ocean protection before it’s too late.

“The next prime minister should ban industrial fishing in all of the UK’s Marine Protected Areas by tweaking commercial fishing licences,” she added.

UK regulator the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) said it had launched an investigation into Greenpeace for the “potentially illegal” deposit of construction material.

But it assessed that dropping the rocks “will have minimal impact” on fishing activity in the area.

“The MMO remains open to discussions with Greenpeace to ensure we can achieve our joint goal of marine nature recovery.” 

Neil Whitney, a fisherman from East Sussex in southern England, said bottom-trawling was “like ploughing a combine harvester through a national park”. 

“They’re able to take out entire ecosystems, and if they cause a fishery to collapse, they just move on to the next one,” he added.

“Industrial fishing, like fly-shooters (vessels which tow lead-weighted ropes along the seabed) and supertrawlers (trawlers over 100 metres long), are killing our marine environment, and small-scale UK fishermen like me are losing out big time.”

He said it was “absurd” that bottom-trawling was legal in MPAs. “MPAs are supposed to be the areas where fish stocks can recover, so that we fish for generations to come.”

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Indonesian energy minister Arifin Tasrif said officials failed to reach a consensus on a joint communique

G20 energy talks in Bali ended Friday with the world’s leading economies pledging to accelerate the transition to cleaner energy, but there was no binding agreement as officials struggle to overcome discord over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The price of energy has skyrocketed since Moscow launched its military offensive, with many Western countries scrambling to find alternative sources in an attempt to cut ties with Russia.

Energy upheavals have put pressure on global efforts to address climate change.

Host Indonesia put forward a plan at the talks outlining principles to speed up a “fair” transition to greener energy and it was endorsed by the G20 nations.

The non-binding “Bali Compact”, which lists principles for achieving net zero emissions, was agreed by all members, Indonesian energy minister Arifin Tasrif said. 

Details were not released but the minister said the plan seeks to strengthen national energy planning and implementation to improve energy security, efficiency and boost investment and financing.

“G20 energy ministers sent a strong signal to the market that policymakers are taking action to strengthen the investment-enabling environment,” Tasrif told an online press conference Friday.

But the officials failed to reach a consensus on a joint communique due to “differences among countries” at the one-day meeting, Tasrif said without elaborating.

Several nations, including Britain and France, denounced the invasion of Ukraine and said it had destabilised energy supply. 

The presence of Russia at the forum meant a consensus could not be reached for a communique, a source close to the meeting told AFP.

The “current energy crisis shows the urgency to accelerate the energy transition”, the source added.

Representatives from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Germany, India, South Africa and the European Union were also present, according to a list seen by AFP. 

The energy talks follow G20 environment discussions in Bali on Wednesday that also ended without a joint communique, reflecting divisions among member countries over how to tackle climate change.

Britain’s climate minister Alok Sharma said governments should “revisit and strengthen” their commitments to achieving net zero emissions.

“There must not be any backsliding on commitments,” he tweeted on Wednesday. 

This week’s talks are a prelude to a November leaders’ summit that Indonesian President Joko Widodo has said Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will attend despite Moscow’s isolation.