ocean

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Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Paging Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, we need you at the Baltic Sea as soon as possible. In what sounds like an opening for the next X-Files movie, an ocean salvage exploration company found an object on the floor of the Baltic Sea that looks an awful lot like a UFO.

The sonar images are vague at best, but the object still bears an uncanny resemblance to the outline of the Millennium Falcon. Has George Lucas been spotted anywhere in the vicinity?

The images come courtesy of the Ocean Explorer team, an experienced group of Swedish salvagers that already raised an impressive collection of rare and very expensive champagne from the watery depths.

Expedition leader Peter Lindberg notes that the mystery object is 60 meters across. Lines in the ocean floor next to it almost look like a skidded landing area.

Chances are that the discovery has a much less titillating explanation than coming from another planet. It could be a sunken vessel or a flooded archeological site. There will be no answers until the team goes in for a closer look.… Read more

Picking up where the late uber-adventurer Steve Fossett left off, Virgin impresario Richard Branson said today he wants to go to the deepest spot on Earth.

In a press conference today in Newport Beach, Calif., Branson announced his Virgin Oceanic and Five Dives initiatives, which could send a Virgin-branded deep-sea submersible with a single pilot to the deepest spots in each of the planet's five oceans.

Virgin Oceanic will use the DeepFlight Challenger, a submersible built by Hawkes Ocean Technologies of Point Richmond, Calif., for the dives.

The five dives are intended to be to the Pacific Ocean's … Read more

For nearly a year, a glass bottle has been heading west on the high seas, bringing with it a message of the precariousness of the oceans. And at every step of its long journey, it has told the world where it is. Meet the message in a bottle, high-tech edition.

For 17 years, California artist Jay Little has been putting traditional messages in standard bottles and sending them seaward, hoping that they would one day encounter someone and create a new relationship. But for each of more than 200 attempts, it was all analog: Until someone found one of the … Read more

Ocean Power Technologies today said it has completed construction of a "workhorse" buoy designed to generate electricity from wave motion for utility-scale projects.

The company's PB150 PowerBuoy is about 150 feet from top to bottom, although most of the structure is underwater. It can generate a peak of 150 kilowatts of power and feed the grid in waves between 4.9 feet and 22.9 feet.

The plan is to deploy the PB150 later this year about 33 miles off the coast of Scotland, where the device was manufactured and has been tested in the European Marine … Read more

Scottish wave power company Aquamarine Power today said it raised funds to commercialize its wave power machine, including an investment from Swiss industrial giant ABB.

Edinburgh-based Aquamarine secured $17.36 million, with $12.6 million coming from ABB, which has a large portfolio of products in the power utility sector.

The investment from ABB is a significant endorsement for wave power, which is being pursued actively in the U.K. There is a European marine energy test site at the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland along with several other research efforts.

"Wave energy is primed to become … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--When it comes to harvesting energy from oceans and rivers, the "sink or swim" approach doesn't really work.

Getting wave and tidal power machines to actually deliver power into the grid requires multiple stages of testing, with each one a step closer toward deploying devices in open waters, according to experts at a marine energy conference here earlier this week.

Dropping these expensive and often bulky machines, be they underwater turbines or buoys, into harsh ocean conditions without a phased approach and long-range game plan is a recipe for disappointment, they said.

"We need … Read more

Humans may have naturally occurring nanotechnology to thank for partially cleaning up the oil spill from BP's Deepwater Horizon rig.

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found that previously undiscovered ocean floor microbes have literally risen to the occasion and begun degrading the giant underwater oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico.

While there was belief that some ocean microbes might aid in the degradation of the oil spill, the process has happened more aggressively than anyone predicted it would, according to a report from environmental biotechnologists at the Berkeley Lab.

One of the giant oil plumes that formed … Read more

Maine is now home to the "largest ocean energy device ever installed in U.S. waters," the Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) announced Wednesday.

That device is the company's Beta Power System, which was installed in Cobscook Bay off of Eastport, Maine, and includes a submerged Turbine Generator Unit with a capacity of 60 kilowatts.

The TGU works in similar principle to a wind turbine, but with a horizontal turbine propelled by tidal currents instead of wind. The turbine is built from composite materials resistant to corrosion and, being gearless, requires no lubricants that could make their … Read more