Another Antarctic Tourist Ship in Trouble (run aground)

[jpak]

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/another-antarctic-tourist-ship-in-trouble/?hp

Just over one year after the polar cruise ship MV Explorer sank off Antarctica, another such ship, the MV Ushuaia, has run aground on rocks in the same area. Governments and international organizations responsible for protecting the environment on the frozen continent are likely to feel more pressure to tighten rules for tourist ships at the ends of the Earth.

I’ll be adding details below overnight, in part thanks to e-mails from Jon Bowermaster, a writer and filmmaker who can often be found kayaking in Antarctic waters but who this time was on the National Geographic Explorer, another ship, about 40 miles from the scene of the grounding. (he was an eyewitness to last year’s rescue.)

To get some impressions of the benefits and risks of polar travel, I called Geoff Green, the founder and executive director of an amazing program called Students on Ice, which has used a variety of ships — including the Ushuaia once — to take more than 1,000 students from three dozen countries to the Arctic and Antarctic. (Their next trip, celebrating the International Polar Year, was scheduled to be aboard the Ushuaia. Mr. Green said he was closely tracking the situation Thursday night.)

“I’m definitely a big believer that the polar regions are incredible platforms for education,” he said. “It makes issues like climate change real and personal and these kids have dome back and made a difference. But I also believe we have to do it in an way where we’re obviously not having any impact on the places we’re going. But there do need to be limits and more rules.”

<not nuch more>

[XemaSab]

1. A friend of a friend was on the Explorer

Waiting for the rescue ships was NO FUN.

[jpak]

2. I visited the Explorer once (at Palmer Station)

They had old-school Titanic-style open life boats.

Those folks were just damned damned damned lucky the weather wasn't bad when they abandoned ship...

[NNadir]

3. I personally know - somewhat to my regret - a fool who used to run school tours

for kids trying to get points on their Ivy League admissions applications by pretending to be going on "Antarctic Scientific Expeditions."

Mostly it involved rich kids participating in the pile up of oil drums on the continent.

This is the sort of thing that results from useless twits hauling themselves off to Antarctica just to say they've been there:



Speaking of twits, here's the Greenpeace station in Antarctica, funded by a bunch of useless self absorbed yuppie brats with too much money and too little education, who want to go to Antarctica, burning multi-ton ton of dangerous fossil fuels per person in the process to try to "protect" Antarctica from useless self absorbed yuppie brats with too much money and too little education.

Never let it be said that the people in Greenpeace were any different than one of those religious bigots who rail against gay marriage while keeping their gay lovers nice and cozy in church funded accommodations.



The PM3A nuclear reactor at McMurdo Sound was dismantled at the behest of stupid people after operating 10 years.

Everywhere on earth when nuclear reactors have been shut by public stupidity, they have been replaced by dangerous fossil fuels. McMurdo was no exception.

The reactor displaced about 1500 US gallons of diesel fuel per day. The core of the reactor, ironically enough, was about the size of, well, an oil drum.

The reactor had a weld leak, causing dip shits from ignorance factories like Greenpeace to have a cow. After 10 years of operation the reactor was shut and removed.

Ironically the yuppie twits from Greenpeace who foul Antarctica with their dangerous fossil fuel supplies life nearby, presumably cowering under the table in fear of a tritium atom that might have been left behind after the reactor was removed.

The result of the reactor removal has been the transport, by air, of huge quantities of oil to Antarctica so B level professors from B-level universities could drag kids from Prep Schools around to get points for their Harvard and Princeton application essays, on Mommy and Daddy's checkbook of course.

Some sediments in McMurdo Sound out of Winter Quarters Bay have a remarkable 4.5 grams of hydrocarbons per kg of sediment.

This topic is covered in Environmental Pollution Volume 143, Issue 3, October 2006, Pages 456-467.

I've communicated with a few people who have traveled to Antarctica. Mostly they're fluff, flaky dunderheads.

I think the dangerous fossil fuels expended to drag them there was a terrible waste.

The habitation of Antarctica has been rendered correspondingly worse by the anti-nuke freaks like the fundamentalists at Greenpeace, of course, not that there is ONE of them who can have their dogma eroded by any quantity of data.

As for the removal of the reactor and the failure to replace it:

Heckuva job.

The people responsible for this mess must be very proud.

[jpak]

4. LOL!!1111

:rofl: