Month: December 2021

We have started designing boats to see which one will be the best. So far, the half ‘elongated’ sphere boat floats (just), but it definitely wouldn’t survive the sea… We will use the final product for research purposes by taking pictures of the wildlife near the coast. I will keep all of you readers informed and send out the pictures. One of my ideas that I didn’t try out yet was a coracle, one of the earliest boat shapes from Britain 1900 years ago. The app I will be using is Tinkercad, so if you want to start building, give us a heads up to get some tips. The next thing that we did was trying a boat with 2 hollow cylinders and a flat square on top. It made an amazing improvement on how it floats. We are thinking of how it will be powered (first idea batteries and solar panels). So far, we have tested our best float design. It flipped onto its back because it had no weights pulling it down. I am learning about coding from my dad step by step.

Websites:

https://www.tinkercad.com

https://www.boatbuilding.xyz/sailing-management/the-coracle-1.html

http://hvartial.kapsi.fi/coracle/coracle.htm

For the time being, this project is cancelled…

The Mariana Trench is the deepest trench in the ocean. It is located in the western Pacific Ocean, 200 kilometres east from the Mariana Islands. It is crescent shaped and is all together 5,238 kilometres squared without counting the depth. The deepest depth that is known by us is 10,984 metres. It is known as challenger deep because, the ship that found it was called the Challenger. It was measuring the depth of the sea with a long rope, then when it got to the Mariana Trench (they didn’t know about it back then), it used all of the rope. Anyone who tries to go down the trench will either want to go up or too late, they are squeezed to death by the pressure. Also, there are mud volcanoes coming from it. When the underwater mud volcanoes erupt, they release gas, mud and water. There are at least 10 currently active volcanoes leading from the giant trench.

websites used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Mud_Volcanoes

Dolphins are intelligent and playful Cetaceans that like to interact with each other and other species, like humans. These are just some of the 100s of dolphins/dolphin family members in the world.

• The killer whale or Orca, can be friendly to humans in a few situations, but other than that, stay away from them. Orcas live in pods with a male, females and young Orca calves. Even when a calf dies, the mother will not abandon it, she will instead, in most cases, bring her calf with her, wherever her pod goes. One of the things that they eat are stingrays, if you turn a stingray upside down underwater for long enough, it will fall asleep, helpless.
• The Bottle-nosed dolphin is playful, and can be trained. Their main diet is fish and squid. Their Genus name is Tursiops and their Species is Truncatus, Genus + Species = their Scientific name. So their Scientific name is Tursiops Truncatus.
• Tucuxi, or River dolphins, can live in freshwater or brackish water. They are albino (white). Their Scientific name is Sotalia fluviatilis.

• An extinct type of dolphin is called the Baiji River dolphin. It was thought to be a river monster, so humans killed them all. Its scientific name is Lipotes vexillifer.

The dolphins that I mentioned in dot point 1 and 2 are from the Delphinidae family.

Also, dolphins shed their skin every 2 hours.

Pollution doesn’t always have to be people’s rubbish, it can be oil too. These are some of the oil spills and their catastrophic effects on the ocean’s creatures:

• Oil spills:
• Exxon Valdez Disaster: In 1989, the oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez ran aground, killing 250,000 Sea birds, 2800 Sea Otters and 302 harbour seals. When it ran aground, it damaged 1770km of Alaskan coastline.

• 2005: Hurricane Katrina caused an oil spill near New Orleans, Louisiana. It wrecked pipelines, storage tanks and caused oil plants to leak about 26 million litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, hurting and possibly killing marine wildlife.
• 2006: An oil tanker that carried 2 million litres of oil sank near the coast of Guimaras Island in the Philippines, no oil got out, but it was too deep to reach.
• 2007: A barge (a flat bottomed boat) came loose from its tug-boat and made a big gash in the Hebei Spirit oil tanker close to South Korea, which spilled 10 million litres of crude oil.
• 2010: An explosion on a BP platform offshore, drilling for oil, killed 11 workers and spilled millions of Litres of oil, which killed creatures like sea birds and turtles. It also affected the Sea food industry.
  Scientists from the United Kingdom found a new way to monitor the pollution. It’s robot fish. These robots can swim around natural habitats of the sea and measure the amount of pollution. If the level is high, the scientists are planning on making a difference.