Sailboat mystery, ocean winds and currents blend

A mysterious sailboat drifts abandoned in the Kaua'i channel.

(Photo: The stricken Bug Trap at the Coast Guard dock in Nāwiliwili.)

A longtime resident is thrilled to find a glass ball floating off the coast of Maui.

A turtle off Wai'anae mistakes a drifting plastic bag for a jellyfish.

A giant cluster of net and ropes tears up coral heads as the surf pounds it across a French Frigate Shoals reef.

What do these things have in common?

The north Pacific's currents and winds.

They are a vast interconnected network of water and air moves like a living thing.

This is the system that Spanish navigators used to carry gold from Acapulco to Manila, taking a southern route that took them westward between Hawai'i and the Equator, and returning on a northerly route that carried them eastward in the region a few hundred miles north of the Hawaiian archipelago.

It is the system that carries glass fishing floats from the Chinese and Japanese coasts to Hawaiian shores. The system that drifts cargo, storm-washed off trans-Pacific ships, round and round the ocean until it disintegrates or washes up on some coast.

In addition to the clockwise flow of the North Pacific Current, between California and Hawai'i there is the wind system sometimes known as the Pacific High, a clockwise air flow that Transpac sailors use to most quickly accomplish the downhill ride to the Islands.

These winds and currents also carry a lot of junk, littering our reefs and beaches with nets, ropes, plastic cups, bottles, fishing floats and lots more.

It can be tough to identify the source of some of that material, but occasionally the debris flow is punctuated by a poignant item.

In the most recent example, it was the Catalina 30 sloop, Bug Trap.

Kaua'i fisherman Henry Zeevat and his father Hans were out fishing about 20 miles east of Nāwiliwili when they came across the stricken vessel, its mast missing, rigging hanging over the side, a barnacle-encrusted nylon line dragging from the bow and a sail flapping on the deck.

“We started yelling and screaming to see if there was anybody aboard,” said Hans Zeevat. There wasn't. After consulting the Coast Guard by radio, they towed the sloop into port.

The Bug Trap had left Dana Point Harbor on the coast of California Oct. 3, 2007, headed south to San Diego, a 100-mile trip, with its new owner, Darrin Bunker, an inexperienced sailor, at the helm.

When it was found Jan. 6, 2008, the boat had evidence of a fire, perhaps an explosion, in the cabin. At least some of the wire rigging had been cut. There was still gasoline for the engine, along with food, cigarettes, beer, personal computer and Bunker's personal effects. No notes indicating what might have happened to the boat and its skipper, or when it might have happened.

Law enforcement authorities, including the Coast Guard and Kaua'i police, are investigating. Some folks discussing the mystery on the Web have suggested pirates, but it seems doubtful a self-respecting pirate would take a boat and then leave beer, cigarettes and a computer behind.

More likely some kind of catastrophe, although it's difficult to imagine a single scenario that combines a cabin fire with a lost mast.

In any case, the inexorable winds and currents took over, pushing Bug Trap south and east until it drifted, rolling in calm weather last Sunday, in the Ka'ie'iewaho Channel, a third of the way from Kaua'i to O'ahu.

Like another piece of marine debris.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

LEDs: Still kinda dim, but the future looks bright.

With nations, including the U.S., sounding the death knell for energy inefficient incandescent light bulbs, folks are actively expressing concerns over the heir apparent, compact fluorescents.

Among the problems: toxic mercury in the fixtures that can spread when they break, and which may require special treatment when it's time to dispose of burned-out fixtures.

(Photo: Three LED puck lights, each using a dozen independent LED units.)

Fortunately, the next lighting advance is already in place, and it doesn't have any mercury.

It's LED lighting, the acronym for light-emitting diodes.

These are the low-wattage lights that glimmer on the fronts of your computer to indicate its status, on your video camera to tell you it's operating and on your phone that tells you you have a message.

They work very differently from incandescents and fluorescents. Here's how the U.S. Department of Energy describes an LED's mechanics:

“It consists of a chip of semiconducting material treated to create a structure called a p-n (positive-negative) junction. When connected to a power source, current flows from the p-side or anode to the n-side, or cathode, but not in the reverse direction. Charge-carriers (electrons and electron holes) flow into the junction from electrodes. When an electron meets a hole, it falls into a lower energy level, and releases energy in the form of a photon (light).”

LEDs, which have been in flashlights for a while now, are being fine-tuned to act as area lights as well.

Among the key issues with LEDs is getting a nice white natural light out of them—white is not a natural color for this technology.

“Red LEDs are based on aluminum gallium arsenide (AlGaAs). Blue LEDs are made from indium gallium nitride (InGaN) and green from aluminum gallium phosphide (AlGaP). "White" light is created by combining the light from red, green, and blue (RGB) LEDs or by coating a blue LED with yellow phosphor,” says the Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office website.

A second challenge is getting them bright enough, but there's been plenty of research into that, and it's resulting in dramatic advances. It used to be that LED flashlights were kind of a joke. Today, you can actually make your way with them, and they're easily bright enough to read by.

Energy savings are already impressive, and they're growing. Lighting efficiency is mentioned in lumens per watt (amount of light divided by amount of energy required). Your grandmother's incandescent lightbulb gets 10 to 18 lumens per watt. Compact fluorescents get 35 to 60. As of late in 2006, LED lights were rated as anywhere from 22 to 59 lumens per watt, but it's estimated that with further technological advances, those numbers could nearly triple.

The Department of Energy figures the national energy savings in lighting from LEDs could run into the high tens of billions of dollars.

Also, they can handle vibration and rough treatment. And they don't burn out with nearly the frequency of other lights. (They can last 25 times longer than incandescents and 5 times longer than compact fluorescents, according to the energy department.)

The bad news: They are expensive, although energy savings, long life and lack of pollution problems could balance that.

Too, they do produce heat, and that heat needs to be dissipated to prevent changes in color, and reduced life of the fixture.

A key researcher in making LEDs brighter, Faiz Rahman of the University of Glasgow, said the future looks...well, you know.

“LEDs not only use less power than current energy efficient light-bulbs but they are much smaller and can last years without needing to be replaced. This means the days of the humble light-bulb could soon be over,” Rahman said.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Emissions aren't just about climate--they're still killing us

In all the furor over carbon dioxide and global warming, many folks have lost sight of some of the other impacts of air pollution.

It's still killing us.

A simple search found a pile of recent research, linking air pollution to low sperm counts, low birth weights, asthma and other health problems in kids, heart and blood pressure issues in adults and on and on.

Do you need another reason to be unhappy with the neighbor who climbs into her/his SUV or high-powered truck, or zoom-zoom luxury sedan (read: toxic emission pumpers)?

Do you need something besides envy to inform your dismay with folks building ridiculously appointed, energy-inefficient luxury homes?

Do you need a reason to think twice when you pile clothes in the dryer that could be air-dried, flick on the air-conditioning, fail to use public transportation or neglect to insist your lawmakers pay immediate attention to these issues?

How about this: It's making you, and your children, and your neighbors sick.

There's plenty of evidence of it, much of it brand new, but lots more that's been around for years.

The carbon dioxide that comes out of tailpipes and smokestacks can be associated with a lot of compounds in addition to carbon dioxide—sulfur compounds, nitrogen compounds, benzene, formaldehyde and the like—which aren't good for humans or the environment.

Even in places like Hawai'i, where in most places, tradewinds appear to blow the skies clean. More on that later in this article.

“Primary care physicians should be aware of the acute and chronic deleterious clinical effects of diesel exhaust,” says an article in the Journal of Family Medicine, “The Toxicity of Diesel Exhaust: Implications for Primary Care,” dated Jan. 1, 2008.

“Urban air pollution is associated with inflammation, oxidative stress, blood coagulation and autonomic dysfunction simultaneously in healthy young humans, with sulfate and O3 as two major traffic-related pollutants contributing to such effects,” says an article in The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, “The Effect of Urban Air Pollution on Inflammation, Oxidative Stress, Coagulation, and Autonomic Dysfunction in Young Adults,” published in 2007.

A 2004 study found correlations between exposure to auto pollution and both blood pressure and heart rate variability in Brazilian traffic controllers. (European Heart Journal, “Effects of air pollution on blood pressure and heart rate variability: a panel study of vehicular traffic controllers in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.”)

Air pollution is having a significant impact on male fertility, according to a recent study by the Academy of Science's Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine, which looked at the health of Prague police officers who worked outdoors. Many other studies have shown that globally, male sperm counts are down by half over the past century, a reduction linked to pollution, cigarettes, diet and other issues.

A 2005 article in the journal Epidemiology found that kids were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with asthma if they lived hear freeways in Los Angeles. The culprit seems to be compounds from vehicle exhaust.

A 10-year Queensland, Australian, study, just published in the journal Environmental Health Perspective, shows that fetal size and infant birth weight is reduced when mothers are exposed to air pollution.

“"When analysing scans from women at different distances to monitoring sites, we found that there was a negative relationship between pollutants such as sulphur dioxide found in diesel emissions, and ultrasound measurement. If the pollution levels were high the size of the foetus decreased significantly,” said Dr. Adrian Barnett, who helped do the study.

"Birth weight is a major predictor of later health, for example, bigger babies have been shown to have higher IQs in childhood and lower risk of cardiovascular disease in adulthood," he said in a Jan. 6, 2008, press release from the Queensland University of Technology.

Perhaps the interesting thing about this study for people in Hawai'i is that the research was done in Brisbane, a coastal city like Honolulu.

“While some people may think there is no air pollution in Brisbane because the air looks so clean, you have to remember that most air pollutants are not visible to the naked eye, people do have a very outdoor lifestyle, and homes are designed to maximise airflow. So although the actual levels of pollution are low our exposure to whatever is out there is relatively high,” Barnett said.

Folks in Kona know that being coastal isn't enough, since they've lived with pollution, vog, from Kïlauea's eruption for more than two decades. A 2005 article in the journal Geology, Oregon State researchers reported sulfur dioxide levels in Ka'u were sufficient to cause lung health problems and were nearly double the standard set by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

For Hawai'i residents, it's also no longer just about our smokestacks, our tailpipes and our volcano.

An indication of the global nature of pollution is that you're breathing Beijing's air. Research is showing that air pollutants are traveling around the planet. Ozone levels higher than EPA standards have been found moving from Asia to the Americas at high elevation. West Coast instruments have detected the byproducts of combustion in Asia.

“Pollution from megacities and biomass burning, including precursor gases to hydrogen oxides such as acetone and formaldehyde, lofted into the troposphere...these compounds can...be transported great distances before descent, possibly influencing the chemistry of remote regions,” said Penn State meteorology professor William Brune, after taking measurements over Hawai'i and other Pacific regions and finding pollution from industrialized nations to the west of us.

At some level, this discussion recalls the “tragedy of the commons,” which suggests that we will ignore long-term, widely dispersed bad things in our drive to grab immediate, personal, short-term gains.

In view of all this, one wonders how the owners of megahomes and urban tanks justify their behavior:

I've heard these arguments:

“To hell with the rest of the world, this makes me feel safe;” and “I can afford this, and that's what matters;” and frighteningly, “I don't believe in global warming and I don't care about pollution, and I'm making a statement.”

It's easy to blame them, because their behavior is a toxic drag on the community.

But how about the behavior of those of us who drive more fuel efficient cars, who live in moderate-sized homes and who use compact fluorescent lighting. Is our overall behavior adequate in other respects?

If it's not, this is what we're saying: “I'm clueless, and I don't care enough to get one.”

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Using fuzzy logic to get miles out of hybrids and electric cars

Folks have a distressing tendency to believe that things once true will always remain true.

In the energy field, that kind of thinking is being turned on its head all the time.

(Photo: A deep cycle battery and a car, neither representative of the batteries and cars discussed in this story, but there just for illustrative purposes.)

New research, new technologies, new applications and changes in the price of oil—they all work to change the mix of what works, how well and how much better or cheaper than the next thing.

University of Hawai'i researchers Bor Yann Liaw and Matthew Dubarry, who are both engineers and materials scientists, are working on improving our understanding of how electric vehicles work, and how to make the battery banks last longer.

The two work with the Electrochemical Power Systems Laboratory at the Hawai'i Natural Energy Institute, which is in the university's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. Their most recent paper, “From driving cycle analysis to understanding battery performance in real-life electric hybrid vehicle operation,” was published in the Journal of Power Sources.

Liaw and Dubarry have been working with a fleet of 15 Hyundai Santa Fe electric SUVs operated by Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaiian Electric, the City and County of Honolulu and the Hawai'i Electric Vehicle Demonstration Project, studying how people use the cars, and how ways of using them affect their performance.

The cars were used for errands and commuting, some at highway speeds and others—notably the military base cars—kept operating at lower speed limits. How to combine information from all those different driving styles into something that can help improve performance is the challenge, the researchers said.

“Conducting driving cycle analysis with trip data collected from (electric and hybrid vehicles) is very difficult and challenging,” they wrote.

The researchers combined something called fuzzy logic and pattern recognition to track the behavior of the vehicles. Fuzzy logic is a system for getting useful information out of complex systems that don't produce simple yes-no or true-false answers.

They used equipment tracking speed and time to measure how the cars were being driven, and looked at the pattern of battery discharge.

“Our ultimate goal is to use real-life data and laboratory testing to establish a realistic model for battery performance and life prediction,” they wrote.

In an email, Liaw conceded that some scientists question the viability of fuzzy logic in such issues, and he said his and Dubarry's work has not yet yielded specific recommendations for improving battery performance. But he said he is convinced the process will work.

“Yes, we have found an interesting way to quantify such influences in using the battery for portable applications by the users, but we need more efforts to make such understanding useful for implementation into practical devices to improve the battery life and efficiency," Liaw said.

It is the kind of work that, if successful, will yield improved electric vehicle performance—perhaps refuting the assumption that electric cars can never be use for more than short-hop driving.

And it's an example of how new research has the potential to significantly change our understanding of whether what used to be true, still is true.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Black coral: old threats, some good news

Hawai'i's deepwater black corals have been declining in population, due to fishing for the precious coral industry and an invasive white coral, the snowflake coral.

(Photo: Black coral "tree" with oysters attached. This is Antipathes grandis, one of the prime precious corals harvested for jewelry in Hawai'i. Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory photo.)

But there is hope that tougher fishing regulations and the reduced spread of the snowflake coral—at least in the prime black coral habitat of the 'Au'au Channel, between Maui and Lāna'i—will help preserve the coral beds.

The snowflake coral problem is yet another example of the threats of invasive alien species in the Islands, even in the dark depths around 200 feet below the ocean's surface, although recent surveys seem to indicate that at least off Maui, snowflake coral expansion seems to have stopped.

Black corals have declined 25 percent over several decades in the 'Au'au Channel, wrote Willow Hetrick, a University of Hawai'i Marine Option Program graduate and editor of the program's newsletter, Seawords, in its December 2007 issue.

Of 200 species of black corals worldwide, 15 are found on Hawai'i's deep reefs and two of these are the primary targets of the black coral jewelry industry: Antipathes dichotoma and Antipathes grandis.

She said the snowflake coral Carijoa riisei, was first spotted in the Islands in Pearl Harbor in 1972, and may have arrived growing on the bottom of a ship. It is now found throughout the main Hawaiian Islands, but not yet in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

The invasive white soft coral moved rapidly through the waters of the main islands.

“Evidence shows that snowflake coral is accelerating its spread and exploding in abundance,” Hetrick writes.

She said that deepwater surveys from 2001 to 2004 using the Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory's submersible Pisces V showed that more than half the black coral colonies deeper than 230 feet were covered with snowflake coral.

But in a report last year to the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council, University of Hawai'i researcher Samuel Kahng said that a follow-up survey in 2006 showed that the invasive expansion had stopped and perhaps snowflake corals had dropped somewhat.

“It is possible that the situation at the Keyhole Pinnacle (in the 'Au'au Channel) has stabilized or even improved,” he wrote in “Ecological impacts of Carijoa riisei on black coral habitat.”

But researchers have not published their thoughts on what's causing the possible decline, and Kahng cautioned that the survey results are not as thorough as they could be, since it is difficult to be certain that precisely the same areas were being surveyed in 2006 as in earlier assessments.

Kahng said the threat of the snowflake coral partly a result of its weed-like growth habit. Its growth is 10 times faster than the black coral Antipathes dichotoma, he said.

But fishing is a significant threat as well, in part because the precious black corals are slow-growing and are not aggressive re-seeders. NOAA Fisheries in October 2007 issued a new regulation to protect the corals from overfishing. It limits all fishing to coral “trees” at least four feet tall and at least an inch thick at the stem. Previous regulations had allowed some harvesters to take smaller corals.

In the Federal Register, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council said the regulations are not expected to bear immediate fruit in terms of restoring coral populations.

“A long period of reduced fishing effort is required to restore the ability of the stock to reproduce at the maximum sustainable yield if a stock has been over-exploited for several years,” the report said.

Copies of the rule and associated information on the fishery are available at www.wpcouncil.org/hawaii/PreciousCorals.htm.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate