Dams power Turkey's future, but drown its rich history

The Christian Science Monitor: Dams power Turkey's future, but drown its rich history

The stunning mosaics, courtyards, and passageways of the 1,800-year-old Roman spa complex of Allianoi were so dear to archaeologist Ahmet Yaras that he named his daughter after the Ilya River that ran by them.

As he now witnesses its waters rise and engulf the ruins he has fought so hard to save, he says their disappearance beneath the reservoir of a new irrigation dam feels like the loss of a child.

"This is the murder of history," says Dr. Yaras, who formerly headed the excavation team that found some 11,000 artifacts during a decade of digging at Allianoi – work that unearthed only 20 percent of the site.

Think you know the Middle East? Take our geography quiz.

The Yortanli dam is part of an unprecedented hydro­engineering program launched by the Turkish government to maintain the country's rapid economic development.

It is also one of the flash points in the battle between Turkey's government and an increasingly vocal lobby of activists and academics who fear the plans will exact a devastating toll on the country's rich historical and ecological wealth.

1,300 new plants to power Turkey's economic development
Mert Bilgin, a professor specializing in energy policy at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University, acknowledges that poor oversight has maximized the environmental damage associated with the projects. But he says Turkey's need to increase its energy output could hardly be more urgent as the country strives to fulfill its dream of becoming a major economic power.

In 2010, energy imports cost $40 billion, accounting for nearly half the country's foreign trade deficit. This cost is set to soar since Turkey needs to double its power capacity by 2020.

"The negative impact of energy expenditures on trade balance, and consequently on the current account deficit, is extremely important for the Turkish economy," says Professor Bilgin. "Many reports point out that Turkey may face electricity shortages shortly if it cannot develop energy infrastructure as much as its economic growth."

The Department for State Hydraulic Works is expected to invest some $71.5 billion in dam building by 2030, an investment that goes well beyond the long-running Southeast Anatolia Project. It includes a program to realize the country's full hydroelectric potential with 1,300 new plants.

New bill would endanger 80 percent of protected land
Many archaeological and environmental hot spots have already been threatened.

Now, a nature protection bill redrafted by the government in September and currently in parliament will abolish the country's largest network of nature reserves, endangering 80 percent of currently protected land. It will also do away with a set of regional culture- and nature-protection councils that in the past have sometimes held in check the government's dam-building schemes.

All conservation decisions will be placed in the hands of a committee dominated by appointees of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the main engine behind the hydroengineering program.

Turkey claims the draft law is part of its efforts to join the European Union, but the EU Commission has condemned the legislation. Some 200 Turkish groups have also come together to oppose it.

Guven Eken, president of the Turkish advocacy group the Nature Association, worries that, if passed, it could trigger "the mass destruction of biodiversity in Turkey" and a wave of government-backed development in formerly protected areas.

The net effect, he says, will be the end of all restrictions: "In the current political climate, we can see that the decisions of this committee aren't likely to be in favor of preserving human culture or environmental diversity. It's going to destroy our cultural heritage, our natural heritage, our quality of life."

Why politicians love big dams
Prof. Serhan Oksay, who specializes in environmental economics at Istanbul's Kadir Has University, says the pursuit of large-scale hydro­engineering projects is ingrained in Turkey's political culture.

The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, proposed harnessing the energy of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers more than 80 years ago, and influential past premiers like Suleyman Demirel and Turgut Ozal once spearheaded energy and infrastructure programs while still state-employed engineers.

"Since then, building dams for irrigation purposes or generating electricity has been deemed necessary for building up a prosperous country," says Professor Oksay. "Anyone with the ambition of building a successful political career seems to be in favor of such schemes."

Turkey's leaders have done little to hide their impatience with opposition to dam-building policies. Most vocal is Environment Minister Veysel Eroglu, widely regarded as the driving force behind the current program. Following the decision to bury the Allianoi baths last year, he described them as "just one pillar and a fountain."

'These can be found anywhere,' Mr. Eroglu said. "No one was aware of them before we dug them out. My job is to build dams, but we tried to protect this place."

Still-functioning thermal baths
It's true that when exploratory work started in 1998 as part of a survey for the dam, Yaras had no idea that beneath a field near Bergama lay one of the world's most extensive and best-preserved ancient health settlements.

But once archaeologists found the still-functioning thermal baths, as well as a hospital containing bronze medical instruments from the 2nd century AD, the following decade was consumed by a race to catalog the ruins and force Ankara to scrap the dam.

Authorities first buried the ruins in sand – a move they said would protect the ruins, although archaeologists have disagreed. Then they began flooding the area on the final day of 2010. The rising water is now some six feet deep. Eventually, the baths will sit in nearly 100 feet of silt and water.

"The most painful part may be that we will never know what knowledge we may have found," says Yaras. "I feel like a scientist who was on the verge of a major discovery, only to be banned from his laboratory."

Yaras and others embroiled in this bitter debate surrounding the future of Turkey's natural and cultural heritage doubt the government will concede an inch to conservation demands.

"Allianoi is only an example," says Yaras. "They will ruin many other precious sites."

Cop divers: A breed apart, a breed below

Edmonton Sun: Cop divers: A breed apart, a breed below

OTTAWA - It's one of the least popular types of specialized police work: dead body retrievers.

Of the 69,200 cops in Canada, only 110 are police divers.

This week more than half of them showed up at a frozen quarry near Ottawa to train in far more favourable conditions than many of them are used to.

Ottawa rookie cop Alana Fong sits on a towel-topped, waterproof kit case with her feet propped up on a small one. Wrapped in blankets she waits in a tent for colleague Walt Leshman to surface.

The burly Newfoundlander is far more experienced; he's been a police diver for four years.

Fong is about to make her second-ever ice dive.

In fact, she's the only female police diver in Ontario and one of only a handful in Canada.

She was fast-tracked into the unit - diving has always been something that interested her - having only been hired by Ottawa Police in May.

That's because they needed her.

"There's not a lot of people that want to do this job," says Const. Brent MacIntyre, of the Ottawa Police dive, marine and trails unit.

"It takes a certain type of police officer to want to go underwater and recover human remains, so there's not a lot of pickings when we're going out to recruit new officers."

Fong's first ice dive, completed Tuesday in the quarry, was an experience she'll never forget.

"It was incredible, actually. It was quite different than diving in the summer," she says.

"Here we have a lot of visibility, when you look up at the surface you can see so many colours."

MacIntyre can speak from experience about the contrast between the visibility in a quarry and what police divers are up against diving in places like the Ottawa River.

"It's like diving in tea," he says. "You can't see anything."

The quarry near Wakefield, Que., offers 128 feet of depth and numerous underwater objects to dive to.

The divers also conducted drills and exercises with dummies.

The busiest season of the year for police divers is just around the corner - spring thaw.

Cracked Mayan Code May Pave Way to Lost Gold

Fox News Latino: Cracked Mayan Code May Pave Way to Lost Gold
Led by Joachim Rittsteig, an expert in Mayan writing, a group of scientists and journalists left Germany Tuesday, on a mission to Guatemala in search of a lost Maya treasure allegedly submerged under Lake Izabal.

According to the German newspaper Bild, which sponsored the expedition, the expedition includes two reporters from the publication, a photographer, a television camera, and a professional diver who will submerge into Lake Izabal in an attempt to find eight tons of gold said to have been lost there.

The expedition is led by Joachim Rittsteig, an expert in Mayan writing, who claims to have cracked the famous Dresden Codex and discovered specific information in one of its chapters that leads to a treasure in Lake Izabal.

"The Dresden Codex leads to a giant treasure of eight tons of pure gold," said Rittsteig, who has spent more than 40 years studying the document, to Bild.

A professor emeritus at Dresden University and author of various publications about the Maya culture, Rittsteig stressed that "page 52 talks about the Maya capital of Atlan, which was ruined by an earthquake on October 30th in the year 666 BC. In this city, they kept 2,156 gold tablets on which the Maya recorded their laws."

The treasure sank, along with the city, into the waters of Lake Izabal, located in eastern Guatemala. But the German academic claims to have found the remains thanks to radar images taken in the area.

Rittsteig calculates that "just the gold in the tablets is estimated to be currently worth up to 211 million euros (290 million dollars)."

The Dresden Codex, drafted in the year 1250 AD by Mayan priests, is one of the four major documents that remain from that culture. It has been housed by the Saxon State Library in East Germany for the last 272 years.

The code was discovered in 1739 in the possession of a wealthy man in Vienna, though no one knows how he got a hold of it. He then donated it to the Dresden Library, where it is kept under bullet-proof glass in a room with other treasured documents.

Joachim Rittsteig has dedicated most of his entire life to decoding the codex, which is composed of 74 pages, 3.56 meters long with 74 distinct hieroglyphics.

The Dresden Codex contains much of what is known of Mayan Culture, including their understanding of astrology, medicine and even the end of the world. In the last chapter, the codex describes the coming apocalypse, which it says will take place on December 12th, 2012.

Is the Amelia Earhart mystery finally about to be solved?

Daily Mail Online: Is the Amelia Earhart mystery finally about to be solved? Diving team to explore plane wreckage at bottom of ocean

-Body of the downed plane was discovered in 2002 by fishermen
-Divers claims there is gold bullion on board coral-covered wreck
-But they have been unable to get it because of 20ft poisonous sea snake
-Tests on bones believed to be Earhart's found on island 'inconclusive'

A diving team is being put together in Papua New Guinea to swim down to the wreckage of a rust-and-coral-covered plane in the hope of solving one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries - the 74-year-old disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
The 40-year-old American and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared while attempting to fly around the world in 1937 in a Lockheed Model 10 Electra plane and most theories say they crashed near Howland Island in the central Pacific.
She and her navigator had completed 22,000 miles of the journey when they arrived at Lae in New Guinea, as the country was then known, and just 7,000 miles across the Pacific remained before they were due to land back in the U.S.

They took off on July 2, 1937, heading for Howland Island, 2,500 miles away but ran into trouble near the island, if radio reports purporting to be theirs can be believed.
Miss Earhart radioed to a U.S. ship in the area, the Itasca: 'We must be on you but cannot see you - but gas is running low. Have been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.'
The transmissions were the last anyone heard from the flyer and it was assumed the plane had crashed near Howland Island.

Numerous attempts to find the wreckage have failed - but now divers in Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea, some 400 miles from Lae, where the aircraft had taken off from, are convinced they have found the wreckage.

The mystery plane that lies 250ft under the sea, on a reef near Buka island, 800 miles west of the main island of Papua New Guinea, is said to resemble Miss Earhart's Electra.

What has made local people more excited is the knowledge that the crash site is in direct alignment with Miss Earhart's flight path from Lae in a straight north east direction to Howland Island.

Famous: In her day she was popular and would pull a crowd. Her mysterious death has kept that fame alive more than 70 year after her death

There have been many theories behind what happened to Earhart and Noonan. The most popular being that they ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea

The wreckage was found in 2002 when fishermen were diving for a local delicacy, a sea slug known as beche de mer. Putting a state-of-the-art diving team together so a detailed search of the aircraft can be made, however, has proved impossible until now.

But divers who have been down to the wreck recently claim that there is gold bullion on board - its extraction almost impossible, they say, because the plane is being guarded by a 20ft poisonous sea snake.

Numerous theories have been put forward to explain Miss Earhart's disappearance, including that she and her navigator died when the plane crashed into the Pacific.
Other theories suggests they came down on a remote island where they managed to survive for a while before they succumbed to thirst, hunger and injuries.
Another theory suggested that Miss Earhart had crashed onto an island and had become a prisoner of the Japanese who were widening their second world war net through the Pacific.

However Ric Gillespie, an expert on Miss Earhart's disappearance and who has made several trips to islands in the Pacific, said the Papua New Guinea claims of her plane lying in waters in the region were 'silly beyond description.'

He insisted there was 'simply no way' that the Electra could be anywhere near Papua New Guinea.

'Radio transmissions and other evidence indicate she landed on an atoll in the central Pacific and perished from a lack of food and water' he said.

Meanwhile, tests to determine if bone fragments recovered from a remote South Pacific island have proved inconclusive.

Scientists at the University of Oklahoma attempted to detect human DNA from three bone fragments recovered last year by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a group of aviation enthusiasts in Delaware that found the pieces of bone while on an expedition to Nikumaroro Island, about 1,800 miles south of Hawaii.
Forensic tests on bone fragments discovered on Nikumaroro Island have been inconclusive in determining if they contain human DNA
The group has uncovered several artifacts, including some old makeup and glass bottles from the 1930s that suggest Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan may have died as castaways on the island, said Ric Gillespie, director of the group.

'We knew this would be a tough job to get DNA from stuff that had laid around for 70 years,' Gillespie said in a phone interview.
'The woman's been missing for 74 years. We've been looking for her for 23 years. We have learned patience.'

Researchers at OU said about one-half gram of bone material remains that could be tested later.

'For posterity, we have decided to preserve this remaining bone,' Cecil Lewis, the director of OU's Molecular Anthropology Laboratory, wrote in his report.

'There is reason for optimism that someday in the near future, less destructive and more sensitive genomic methods will be able to resolve the bone's origin. For now, the question of whether the bone is human must remain unanswered.'

Lewis said tests are ongoing on clumps of material resembling soil or feces that also were recovered at the site.

In 1940, just three years after Earhart disappeared, a British overseer on the island recovered a partial human skeleton and several artefacts at what appeared to be a former campsite, Gillespie said.

The bones later vanished, but Gillespie said the findings support their theory that Earhart was able to land on a reef surrounding the remote island and send distress signals that were picked up by distant ships.

'There's a tremendous story of a castaway here who was catching various things,' Gillespie said.

'We just don't know for sure who the castaway was.

Russian subs plumb depths of Lake Geneva

SwissInfo.ch: Russian subs plumb depths of Lake Geneva
by Thomas Stephens in Lausanne, swissinfo.ch


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Two deep-sea Russian submersibles will dive to the bottom of Switzerland’s largest body of water in the summer to gain a better idea about its geology and physics.
The elemo project, coordinated by the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), will bring together researchers from around the world to explore the lake’s abysses with the aim of better understanding and protecting it.



“Our lake is special – and not just because of its beauty,” Andrew Barry, professor of ecological technology at EPFL and part of the elemo project, told swissinfo.ch.

“Most lakes are quite small and Coriolis [the effect of the earth’s rotation on, among other things, ocean flow patterns and plughole water] has no effect. The Great Lakes in the United States are actually like small seas. Our lake is the magic size for interaction between certain forces,” he said.

Some 1.5 million people live near Lake Geneva, which provides drinking water for half of them. But despite its importance, there is still much to learn about the complex workings of the ecosystem.

“One thing that can happen in lakes like this is that currents sweep along the edge of the lake and can interact with bottom sediment and suspend sediments into the water column,” Barry said. “If those sediments contain anything that we think is hazardous, then we want to know where they go.”

Will he be taking part in the dives? “To be honest I’m a bit dubious – I don’t like being in an enclosed space under water.”

“Not the Caribbean”

And the two Mir submersibles won’t be bobbing along just under the surface: the eight-metre, three-person vessels have a maximum operating depth of 6,000 metres, although the lowest point in Lake Geneva is 310 metres.

Mir – which as with the space station means both “world” and “peace” in Russian – will enable researchers to gather large amounts of data and to place grids over entire areas. They will be able to study how pollutants accumulate and even perform field experiments on the lake bed.

“Of course it’s not the Caribbean here so you don’t have very nice underwater scenes, but each lake is different,” Ulrich Lemmin, a professor at EPFL interested in rheology, the study of the flow of matter, told swissinfo.ch.

“The mixture of stone and mud is different everywhere, and this difference also affects what happens in the lake in terms of water movement, deposition and so on. So just because I’ve dived in Lake Baikal for example doesn’t mean I don’t have to dive here. I’ve done both, and I can say it’s different.”

For Lemmin, who will be going down in the submersibles, the most interesting part of the project is the collaboration between a very broad spectrum of scientific disciplines.

“The point here is that we do our experiments at the same time, so later we can interpret the data of one scientific field within the view of another field,” he said.



The Mir submersible (EPFL)

Community gift
The dives, which are being financed by Ferring Pharmaceuticals and the Russian honorary consulate in Lausanne, will take place from June to August.

Michel Pettigrew, president of Ferring, which was founded in Sweden, told swissinfo.ch that the reason for their involvement was altruistic.

“Six years ago we moved our headquarters to Saint-Prex, on the lakeshore. We were extremely well received – the Swiss people were very kind to us – and it’s our way of giving back to the population, letting them get a better understanding of their lake,” he said.

“If by pure luck somebody found something at the bottom of the lake that could be of interest to us, of course we would look at it, but that is absolutely not our objective today.”

Patrick Aebischer, president of EPFL, also admitted to being a bit claustrophobic but was happy about the international cooperation, adding that they had sought to boost relations with Russia over the past ten years.

“We believe it is an important country – it’s one of the BRIC countries [alongside Brazil, India and China] where we would like to develop more interaction,” he told swissinfo.ch.

Unanswered questions

In addition to Russia, the elemo project is attracting geologists, biologists, physicists, chemists and general limnologists – lake experts – from Switzerland, French, Britain and the United States.

They have plenty of questions to think about as they float to the bottom: which pollutants are found in the lake’s waters, and how do they circulate in the water flows? How are bacterial populations distributed on the lake bed? What dynamics govern the settling of the sediments brought in by the many tributaries?

The mouth of the Rhone at the east end of the lake is another area of interest. The sediments washed down by the river form unstable submarine canyons more than 30 metres high. The dives should provide a better understanding of this unstable environment.

The researchers will also explore the Vidy Bay area by Lausanne, where the shores are densely populated, to learn more about the impact of micro-pollutants.

“Ultimately what we want to do is to predict what happens in the lake in response to certain events. To do that, we have sophisticated models of the hydrodynamics of the lake, but to make those models work properly we need good data,” Andrew Barry said.

And should a long-necked sea creature swim by, the scientists – and the region’s tourism office – will be on the phone to Loch Ness for tips within seconds.

Underwater ‘kites’ set to power Northern Ireland homes by 2020

Belfast Telegraph: Underwater ‘kites’ set to power Northern Ireland homes by 2020

Underwater ‘sea kites’ could power a city the size of Belfast by 2020, according to the team behind a groundbreaking tidal energy device.

Tidal energy developer Minesto UK Ltd has just been awarded a Carbon Trust grant of up to £350,000 to install the first seagoing prototype of its innovative sea -kite technology ‘Deep Green’.

The device works like a kite tethered to the seabed, which flies through the sea currents carrying a turbine. The planned scheme will see a one-tenth size version of the Deep Green device put through its paces off the coast of Northern Ireland.

If the trials prove successful, Minesto — a spin-off of the Saab group — will deploy enough devices around the UK coastline to generate up to 530GWh a year by 2020, enough to power the annual electricity needs for households the size of the city of Belfast.

The turbine can operate in slower currents than any other known tidal energy technology, with the kite flying a figure of eight steered by a rudder, allowing it to effectively accelerate the speed of the water entering the turbine by up to 10 times. This allows more power to be generated, leading to a step-change reduction in the cost of tidal energy.

It could potentially unlock whole new areas of low-speed tidal stream around the coastline to produce electricity.

Minesto will work with the Global Maritime Alliance over the next 18 months to test the new tidal technology.

Minesto CEO Anders Jansson said: “Northern Ireland has the natural resources we need in terms of the depths of water and suitable geographic locations to install our technology.

“Northern Ireland also has a strong academia base and it is heavily involved with marine |renewable energy, which is a key developer in this industry. The Global Maritime Alliance is a valuable partner for us and we are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead.”

Benj Sykes, director of innovations at the Carbon Trust, said: “The UK boasts some of the best tidal resources in the world and we are focused on bringing down the cost of extracting that energy.

“Minesto’s Deep Green is a very exciting technology as it could provide a step change reduction in the cost of tidal energy.”

Background
The Deep Green kite has a 39-foot wingspan and 328-foot cable tethering it to the ocean floor — yet it is small compared to other tidal energy designs and can operate at greater depths, where currents are slower. When anchored, Deep Green can be steered into a figure of eight like a sport kite, its turbine capturing tidal energy at 10 times the speed of the actual stream velocity, according to Minesto, the Swedish developers of Deep Green.

[Whether this will ever get off the ground - or under the water - is debatable. It would require a no fishing zone - the lines attaching the kits would get caught - and as for animals....]

Captain Morgan's lost cannon recovered in Panama's waters

The Independent: Captain Morgan's lost cannon recovered in Panama's waters

An international team of marine archaeologists has recovered six iron cannon from a reef in shallow waters not far from the mouth of the Panama Canal. They believe the weapons were lost during one of the less glorious chapters of British adventurism in the 17th-century featuring Captain Henry Morgan.


The cannon were prised from the reef a week ago amid fears that they might be plundered by treasure-hunters and could be the only physical evidence tying Capt Morgan to the region upon which he had such an impact more than 300 years ago. He remains a legend thanks to the brand of rum named after him. "Every school kid learns about Morgan's activities, but we have never seen any of his materials," said archaeologist Tomas Mendizibal, of Patronato Panama Viejo, a government agency that is overseeing excavation of the original site of Panama City. "If these are indeed his cannon, it would be a first."

A privateer for the Crown sent to protect trade routes to the Americas, Capt Morgan was seeking to capture the Castillo de San Lorenzo, at the mouth of the Chagres River, from the Spanish when his command ship, the Satisfaction, foundered on the reef with three other ships that were following him.

The fort, as it happened, had already been taken by a forward party of his own men. But Capt Morgan was not quite done. His ships sinking in the shallow waters behind him, he paddled upriver with his soggy men in search of Spanish gold in Panama City.

He inadvertently burned the town to the ground in violation of a treaty between Britain and Spain. Capt Morgan, who was from South Wales, was eventually forgiven by King Charles II for his carelessness and sent to Jamaica where he became Lieutenant-Governor.

The cannon are among various artefacts found on the reef in 2008 thought to have been spilled by Capt Morgan's ships, much of them encrusted in sediment that has turned to rock. They were first studied and measured at the site by Ruth Brown, an acknowledged expert in cannon formerly of the Royal Amouries in London. The decision to remove them from the reef was taken after divers found evidence of gouging and digging around them, presumably by treasure-hunters.

Research at the site has been led by the Waitt Institute, the Texas State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States in conjunction with the Panamanian government.