Atlantic Ocean

After cutting a destructive path through the Caribbean, Hurricane Sandy caused extensive damage along the East Coast this week. Sandy made landfall in southern New Jersey and brought with it major flooding, travel disruption, structural damage, and power outages. New York City was especially hard hit. The storm system was so large ­-- nearly 1,000 miles wide at times -- it brought blizzard conditions to West Virginia and 20 foot waves to Lake Michigan. It is projected Sandy will have caused about $30 billion in damages in the United States. To date, the storm claimed more than 100 lives. -- Lloyd Young ( 57 photos total)
Flooded homes in Tuckerton, N.J., on Oct. 30 after Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the southern New Jersey coastline on Oct. 29. (US Coast Guard via AFP/Getty Images)

Millions of people from Maine to the Carolinas awoke Tuesday without power, and an eerily quiet New York City was all but closed off by car, train and air as superstorm Hurricane Sandy steamed inland, still delivering punishing wind and rain. The full extent of the damage in New Jersey, where the storm roared ashore [...]

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Our obsession began a century ago, unfolding in just 160 terrifying minutes, on a supposedly unsinkable ship, as more than 1,500 souls slipped into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. The approaching 100th anniversary of the sinking has merely magnified the Titanic’s fascination. The 882-foot long Titanic steamed from Queenstown, Ireland, on April 11 [...]

Punishment is a new series of works by Julius von Bismarck. He traveled to Switzerland, South America and the United States to whip mother nature or certain landmarks, like the Atlantic ocean, a glacier or the Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro. He made beautiful video documentations of each whipping, unfortunately I could only find the video of the whipping of the Jesus statue in Brazil. Tonight I had the chance to see a few other ones and the one where’s whipping the waves of the Atlantic was definitely my favorite one.

The Caspian Sea is bordered by five countries, Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. The Caspian Sea is what remains of the ancient ocean. Around 60 million years ago the this ancient ocean connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Due to shifting of continents it lost its connection with the Pacific Ocean and then with the Atlantic Ocean. Chloe Dewe Mathews’ work on the Caspian Sea recently won the British Journal of Photography’s International Photography Award and will be exhibited in London at the Foto8 Gallery from Nov 22nd until Dec 5th. David Land of f2 Magazine caught up with Mathews as she hitchhiked her way back to Britain from China.

Mathews:

“.. I was mostly shooting in Central Asia (Xinjiang China, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) but now I´m only weeks away from home. My boyfriend (who is also an artist) and I, wanted to do a substantial journey from Asia to Europe without flying, to get a sense of the gradual changes that occur as you move from East to West. We’ve been primarily hitchhiking, and crossing the seas by boat, to get a more immediate sense of the places we are traveling through. Although I did preliminary research, I didn’t want preconceived projects to dictate the way I worked. Rather I wanted to respond to whatever situations we found ourselves in, and once an idea had struck, I could go deeper from there. It´s been a real reconnaissance trip for a lifetime’s work ahead and an education, of course.

One of the biggest challenges has been knowing when to take photographs and when not to. There were periods when I didn’t take out my camera at all, which made me worry that I was wasting opportunities. I had to remind myself that sitting, listening, talking, watching, gathering is as important a part of being a photographer as shooting. Besides, sometimes if you are too busy taking pictures within the boundaries of a certain project, you are blind to what is happening right in front of you. I didn’t want that to happen during this trip.”

All images courtesy Chloe Dewe Mathews/Panos

A woman bathes in a bath of oil at the Naftalan sanatorium. Each session, patients bathe for ten minutes in a tub of crude oil. The oil is heated to 37 degrees for optimum effectiveness, Azerbaijan.

The SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic) oil fields in Ramana on the Absheron Peninsula. Wells in the Caspian were being hand-dug in the region as early as the 10th century and the world’s first offshore and machine drilled wells were built on the Absheron Peninsula during the 1870′s, Azerbaijan.

Boys splash in the Caspian Sea, in the shadow of oil rigs at Sixov beach in Baku, Azerbaijan.

A mother and daughter sit on the artificial sea wall in Astara, near the border with Iran. The Caspian Sea borders are still unresolved between these two countries, almost twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Both countries claim ownership of lucrative oil fields in the southern waters, which has led to a series of confrontations, as each side has forged exploratory missions to profit from the region, Azerbaijan.

Two sisters run down to the underground mosque in Beket-Ata near the Caspian Sea. They have come on a pilgrimage with their family from Aktau, to pray for the recovery of their uncle, Kazakhstan.

In a coastal cemetery, Uzbek migrant workers wear makeshift masks and sunglasses to protect themselves from the sun’s glare, reflecting off the mussel-chalk they work with. They are building elaborate mausoleums for the newly rich middle class. These grave builders work from dawn til dusk, sleeping on site for months at a time, Kazakhstan.

An Uzbek migrant worker pastes plaster into the cracks of a mausoleum. When the Koshkar-Ata cemetery was first established mausoleums were reserved for local saints, a status that was obtained through wisdom and benevolence, through contributions to the well being of the community. Today the splendid tombs belong to the local oil barons. These grave builders work from dawn til dusk, sleeping on site for months at a time, Kazakstan.

Behind the madcap, pinup quality of pictures taken in the 1920s and 1930s of female pilots were stories of great courage, tenacity and heroism.

Jim Seida writes

Ships and aircraft have been ordered to stay away from the bubbling waters around La Restinga, and the Port's 600 residents have been evacuated.  Read more here...

Spanish government handout / AFP - Getty Images

This image released Nov. 3, shows green and brown stains at sea off the coast of the Spanish Canary Island of El Hierro. A series of quakes including one measuring 4.0 on the Richter scale shook Hierro island in Spain's Canaries, three weeks after a nearby undersea volcanic eruption. The 4.0-magnitude quake struck at 0755 GMT in the Atlantic about five kilometres (three miles) northwest of the town of Frontera, population 4,000, said a report by the National Geographical Institute.

Spanish Institute of Oceanograph / EPA

This computer-genereated image shows the underwater volcano in the southern area of El Hierro Island, in the Canary Islands, Spain, on Oct. 31.

Canary Regional Goverment handout / EPA

This image made available on Nov. 4 shows volcanic activity on Nov. 3 from underwater volcano at El Hierro island coast, Canary Islands, Spain. The volcano has being erupting and causing the ground to shake several times a day since July 2011.

 Follow the volcano's activity blow-by-blow on Earthquake Report

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A half-century ago, much of the world was in a broad state of change: We were moving out of the post-World War II era, and into both the Cold War and the Space Age, with broadening civil rights movements and anti-nuclear protests in the U.S. In 1961, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th president of the United States, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly in space, Freedom Riders took buses into the South to bravely challenge segregation, and East Germany began construction of the Berlin Wall. That year, Kennedy gave the okay to the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion into Cuba and committed the U.S. to "landing a man on the Moon" with NASA's Apollo program. JFK also oversaw the early buildup of a U.S. military presence in Vietnam: by the end of 1961, some 2,000 troops were deployed there. Let me take you 50 years into the past now, for a look at the world as it was in 1961. [50 photos]

John F. Kennedy speaks for the first time as President of the United States in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 1961, during the inaugural ceremonies. (AP Photo)

Look at the very bottom of the food chain and you will find them. Plankton are organisms with a name derived from the Greek adjective planktos, meaning “errant”, “wanderer” or “drifter”. Plankton include microscopic plant-like cells (phytoplankton) and the tiny animals that eat them (zooplankton), and they typically flow with ocean currents. Though diminutive, their impact on ocean health is monumental– they remove carbon dioxide from the sea and provide our atmosphere with oxygen. The plankton food web extends from photosynthesizing phytoplankton to whales, seabirds, crabs, worms and starfish of the seabed and thus supports the entire marine food chain. Despite this important role in the ecosystem, plankton remain mysterious to scientists who have not charted the full extent of their adaptations and biodiversity. As the plankton habitat alters with sea surface temperatures warming due to global climate change, the plankton are changing their locations with ramifications for the marine food chain.

A glossy new photography book, Ocean Drifters, by Richard R. Kirby, from Firefly Books explores this rarely seen world. Dr. Kirby and his team collected samples from the Northeast Atlantic and examined them once back in the laboratory. The plankton are collected in a fine net that can be towed vertically through the water column, or towed obliquely just below the surface. A bottle at the end of the net collects the plankton. In the lab the samples were photographed, alive, using a Zeiss microscope. To create these dramatic photographs, Dr. Kirby utilized dark field microscopy, an illumination technique that highlights the specimen and allows the surrounding area to go dark. All photographs courtesy Dr Richard Kirby, Royal Society Research Fellow at Plymouth University/Firefly Books.

Single-celled Acantharea and their zooxanthellae. The zooxanthellae live inside the Acantharea and provides the Acantharea with carbon food source from their photosynthesis, and in return the microalgae gain nutrients from their host. Although Acantharea can be very abundant in the plankton, little is known about their ecology because they are fragile and difficult to sample.

The eye of this young rockling fish will help it find its food and avoid predators during its short life in the plankton, before it swims to the sea bed where it will live its adult life beneath a rock.

The by-the-wind sailor, Velella velella seen in a side view, bird’s eye view, and fish’s-eye view. The V. velella is a predatory jellyfish that uses it’s stiff vertical vane of chitin as a diminutive sail to catch the wind. Air filled tubes form an oval float below the vane that provide bouyancy. In some V. velella the vane, which makes the animal sail at 45 degrees to the wind, is angled to the right, and in others it is angled to the left. The prevailing winds sort these two forms so that a particular variant dominates on opposite sides of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The larva of Luidia sarsi (starfish). When the yellow-orange juvenile starfish detaches from the larval body and sinks to the sea bed, the rest of the larval body may then continue to swim in the plankton for more than a month before it dies.

A dragonet larva, Callionymus lyra. Plankton is a critical food source for young fish like this one.

Larvae of a sea anemone