luminoussea

‘Above Iliamna’ a video by Jason Ching of Lake Iliamna in Southwest Alaska

The Sea Women of South Korea

photographs by Hyung S. Kim

“For hundreds of years, women in the South Korean island province of Jeju have made their living harvesting seafood by hand from the ocean floor. Known as haenyeo, or sea women, they use no breathing equipment, although a typical dive might last around two minutes and take them as deep as ten metres underwater. Wearing old-fashioned headlight-shaped scuba masks, most dive with lead weights strapped around their waists to help them sink faster. A round flotation device called a tewak, about the size of a basketball, sits at the surface of the water with a net hanging beneath it to collect the harvest. Some use a sharp tool to dig conch, abalone, and other creatures from the crevices on the seafloor. ... “For me, the photos of the haenyeo reflect and overlap with the images I have of my mother and grandmother,” Kim says. “They are shown exactly as they are, tired and breathless. But, at the same time, they embody incredible mental and physical stamina, as the work itself is so dangerous; every day they cross the fine line between life and death. I wanted to capture this extreme duality of the women: their utmost strength combined with human fragility.” ”

Acoustics at the ice-ocean boundary: Glaciers as the noisiest places in the sea

“The noise starts with a “relatively loud background hissing sound,” Pettit said. “Then you add on a not-very-good chorus of triangle players -- 1,000 triangles that aren’t working at all.” Much of the noise is generated by air bubbles that are popped open as the ice melts, the researchers found. As pieces of ice calve off glaciers, more noise is added.” -Alaska Dispatch News

Read: “Unusually loud ambient noise in tidewater glacier fjords: A signal of ice melt” 

Listen: “How will retreating glaciers affect whales, seals?”

Seascapes by Hiroshi Sugimoto silver gelatin prints

“Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention―and yet they vouchsafe our very existence

The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there be water and air. Living phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let's just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example.

"The sea is near my house. If the wind isn't blowing in it takes me less then 20 minutes on bicycle to reach it.

Unlike the subjects for my portraits the sea has always plenty of time. It never comments, is never unwilling, has no retouche demands. Only one thing, It just can't sit still. Everything moves, all the time. Even the clouds on their way to somewhere don't pause.

I shoot these seascapes on film with a pinhole camera. It's aperture is F235. On a bright day that can still result in an exposure time of one second and when cloudy exposure times rapidly increase."

Joni Sternbach's photographic portraits of surf and surfers

"Returning year after year to the same location has led me to examine the juncture between land and sea, exploring subject matter in a constant state of transition. Surfers are an integral part of this liminal state. I am fascinated by the physical and poetic way that they inhabit America's watery landscapes." --artist's statement from SurfLand

From home to home

Flying to Bristol Bay tomorrow for another season of this.

EPA Draft Watershed Assessment public comment period extended to June 30.

Pebble Mine is the largest proposed open pit mine in North America, proposed to be dug out at the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak Rivers in an area where the land is like a sponge and water moves through everything. The rivers and lakes of this region host the largest run of wild, sustainable sockeye salmon in the world. The salmon bring together thousands of fishermen and processors from all walks of life and all regions of the world to migrate together in the rush from deep salt seas to the muddy, tidal rivers. Salmon in this region is economy, food, but it is also spirit. For local Alaska Natives who rely most on the red flesh of dried, canned, smoked and frozen sockeye for winter sustenance, subsistence is not a way of life, but is life. Pebble proposes not only the largest open pit mine in North America, but the largest dam in the world, and requires that the toxic mine tailings be stored in perpetuity ... in a seismic zone in remote Alaska where a failure could compromise the salmon's hatchery habitats potentially forever. 

ocean photo references

photos from a friend

beach finds:

a film about the changing Arctic: its ice, water, wildlife and human culture

timelapse video of a 2-month summer cruise aboard an icebreaker in the Antarctic by scientist/writer Cassandra Brooks

Motion in Ice:

"As ice crystals form on the sea's surface, salts separate from the water, and create a dense brine, which sinks below the regular sea-water. The scientists studying the Antarctic seas are trying to understand how far down that water sinks, in the hopes of solving the mystery of where all that brine -- "a vast submarine waterfall" -- goes. "All the water in the bottom of every ocean around the globe has its start within six miles of the Antarctic continent," says NASA oceans scientists David Adamec in the NOVA documentary. If we're to understand how a changing climate will play with that circulatory system, we need to first know how it works.

"To build a wooden boat is the closest thing you can do to give life to an inanimate object...The way that the hull works with itself and with its crew and with the rig and with the water is pleasing, is infinitely pleasing to me."

"Shaped on all Six Sides"