Place - The Sea - Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over 2,600 kilometres (1,600 mi) over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres (133,000 sq mi). The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off thecoast of Queensland in north-east Australia.

The Great Barrier Reef can be seen from outer space and is the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms.This reef structure is composed of and built by billions of tiny organisms, known as coral polyps.

The Great Barrier Reef supports a diversity of life, including many vulnerable or endangered species, some of which may beendemic to the reef system.

Thirty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises have been recorded in the Great Barrier Reef, including the dwarf minke whale, Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin, and thehumpback whale. Large populations of dugongs live there.

Six species of sea turtles come to the reef to breed – the green sea turtle, leatherback sea turtle, hawksbill turtle, loggerhead sea turtle, flatback turtle, and the olive ridley. The green sea turtles on the Great Barrier Reef have two genetically distinct populations, one in the northern part of the reef and the other in the southern part. Fifteen species ofseagrass in beds attract the dugongs and turtles, and provide fish habitat. The most common genera of seagrasses are Halophila and Halodule.

More than 1,500 fish species live on the reef, including the clownfish, red bass, red-throat emperor, and several species of snapperand coral trout. Forty-nine species mass spawn, while eighty-four other species spawn elsewhere in their range.

215 species of birds (including 22 species of seabirds and 32 species of shorebirds) visit the reef or nest or roost on the islands, including the white-bellied sea eagle and roseate tern. Most nesting sites are on islands in the northern and southern regions of the Great Barrier Reef, with 1.4–1.7 million birds using the sites to breed. The islands of the Great Barrier Reef also support 2,195 known plant species; three of these are endemic. The northern islands have 300–350 plant species which tend to be woody, whereas the southern islands have 200 which tend to be herbaceous; the Whitsunday region is the most diverse, supporting 1,141 species. The plants are propagated by birds.

Seventeen species of sea snake live on the Great Barrier Reef in warm waters up to 50 metres (160 ft) deep and are more common in the southern than in the northern section. None found in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area are endemic, nor are any endangered.

Threats

Climate change

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority considers the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef to be climate change, causing ocean warming which increases coral bleaching. Mass coral bleaching events due to elevated ocean temperatures occurred in the summers of 1998, 2002 and 2006, and coral bleaching is expected to become an annual occurrence. Climate change has implications for other forms of reef life—some fish's preferred temperature range leads them to seek new habitat, thus increasing chick mortality in predatory seabirds. Climate change will also affect the population and sea turtle's available habitat.

Pollution

Another key threat faced by the Great Barrier Reef is pollution and declining water quality. The rivers of north eastern Australia pollute the Reef during tropical flood events. Over 90% of this pollution comes from farm runoff. Farm run-off is caused byovergrazing, excessive fertiliser use, and pesticide use.

The runoff problem is exacerbated by the loss of coastal wetlands which act as a natural filter for toxins and help deposit sediment. It is thought that the poor water quality is due to increased light and oxygen competition from algae.

<sup>Fishing

The unsustainable overfishing of keystone species, such as the Giant Triton, can disrupt food chains vital to reef life. Fishing also impacts the reef through increased water pollution from boats, by-catch of unwanted species (such as dolphins and turtles) and habitat destruction from trawling,anchors and nets. As of the middle of 2004, approximately one-third of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is protected from species removal of any kind, including fishing, without written permission.
Shipping


Shipping accidents are a pressing concern, as several commercial shipping routes pass through the Great Barrier Reef. Although the route through the Great Barrier Reef is not easy, reef pilots consider it safer than outside the reef in the event of mechanical failure, since a ship can sit safely while being repaired. There have been over 1,600 known shipwrecks in the Great Barrier Reef region. On 3 April 2010, bulk coal carrier Shen Neng 1 ran aground on Douglas Shoals, spilling up to four tonnes of oil into the water and causing extensive damage to the reef.</sup>

Object - Technology - Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope

Organization - NASA / ESA / STScI

Launch date - April 24, 1990, 8:33:51 am EDT

Launch vehicle - Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-31)

Mission length - 21 years, 4 months and 26 days elapsed

De orbited due - 2013–2021

Mass - 11,110 kg (24,500 lb)

Type of orbit - Near-circular low Earth orbit

Orbit height - 559 km (347 mi)

Orbit period - 96–97 minutes (14-15 periods per day)

Orbit velocity - 7,500 m/s (25,000 ft/s)

Acceleration due to gravity - 8.169 m/s2 (26.80 ft/s2)

Location - Low Earth orbit

Telescope style - Ritchey-Chrétien reflector

Wavelength - visible light, ultraviolet, near-infrared

Diameter - 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in)

Collecting area - 4.5 m2 (48 sq ft)

Focal length - 57.6 m (189 ft)

The most impressive attribute 'Hubble' has is how far out to space it can see. There are a few facts you must see before you can truly understand the Hubble's Massive potential.

First of all the universe is so big that when talking about distances in space it is refereed to as lightyears, one lightyear is just under 6 trillion miles, this is calculated by the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year. If you then 9 more zeros on the end of the 6 trillion miles you get 1 billion light years, and the Hubble space telescope has the ability to see objects roughly 10-15 billion light years away.

Something i find very interesting myself is that if these objects, weather they are stars, planets or galaxies are billions of years away that means by the time the light reaches the earth and the Hubble space telescope we are in fact seeing the past. Anything this far into space is known as the 'Hubble Deep Field'.

Hubble Deep Field 

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, two parts in a million of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.

The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known. By revealing such large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe, with the associated scientific paper having received over 800 citations by the end of 2008.

Here is a video explaining the HDF, Hubble Deep Field process.

Place - The Sea - Coral Reefs

Facts -

The world's first coral reefs occurred about 500 million years ago, and the first close relatives of modern corals developed in southern Europe about 230 million years ago. By comparison, the Great Barrier Reef is relatively young at just 500,000 years old. The current reef's structure is much younger at less than around 8,000 years old.

What Is A Coral?

Despite the fact that corals look more like rocks or plants, they are definitely animals. Coral colonies are composed of many tiny, cup-shaped animals called polyps, which are related to jellyfish. A single coral polyp may be as large as a saucer or smaller than the head of a pin. Millions of polyps working together in a cooperative colony generation after generation create the limestone skeletons that form the framework of the beautiful coral reef.

How Do Corals Start Out Life?

Corals begin life in tropical waters as free-floating larvae. After a relatively short period of time, the larva eventually attaches itself to a hard surface and becomes a polyp. Polyps divide asexually and form colonies. Coral colonies reproduce both sexually and asexually. In sexual reproduction, the coral polyps release both eggs and sperm into the water. (This is also known as coral spawning.) One type of asexual reproduction occurs when fragments of coral are broken off as a result of storm action. The broken pieces of corals usually survive and continue to grow and produce a new colony. This process is referred to as “fragmentation”.

What Do Corals Eat?

A coral polyp consists primarily of tentacles, a mouth and a gut (think upside down jellyfish). Many corals are passive feeders on plankton. Most corals also get nutrition from microscopic algae (zooxanthellae) living within their tissue. Coral polyps are generally nocturnal feeders and are provided sugars made by their photosynthetic zooxanthellae during the day.
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Where Does The Framework Of A Coral Reef Come From?

Corals extract calcium and carbonate from seawater to build an inner skeleton that is external to the coral. This external skeleton lies underneath a thin layer of tissue. Over the years millions of coral polyps in colonies create the framework of the coral reef. Coral reefs grow very slowly. It may take up to a hundred years for a coral reef to grow one meter (around three feet).

What Is The Largest Coral Reef In The World?

As the name implies, the Great Barrier Reef, located off Australia’s East Coast is the largest coral reef in the world. This enormous reef is over 2023 kilometers (1257 miles) long and covers more than 300,000 square kilometers (about 186,000 miles). Home to more than 1500 species of fish, dolphins, whales and sea turtles, the Great Barrier Reef is actually a collection of more than 3000 smaller reefs. The second largest reef lies off the coast of Belize, in Central America.

Coral reefs are among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on earth. Second only to tropical rain forests in the number of species they harbor, they are sometimes called the “rainforests of the sea”. Although coral reefs only occupy about 0.07 percent of the ocean floor (an area roughly the size of Texas), they are home to as many as one quarter of the world’s marine species. Coral reefs offer important income sources for their human neighbors through tourism and fishing, which provide both subsistence and trade. Recently, scientists have begun to discover that coral communities may contain valuable medicines that may one day lead to treatments for cancer and HIV. For coastal communities, coral reefs also play an important role in protecting their coastlines from storms.

Object - Technology - Telescope

Galileo Telescope, 1600 - 1610

This was known as the revolutionary stargazing tool that changed Earth's standing in the Universe. Although Galileo didn't invent the telescope he was the first to use it, and from using it made some notes and drawings of what he saw.

Galileo's drawings of the moon saw through his telescope, these are very basic but considering this is back in the 1600's its still quite impressive.


























Here are another two drawings by Galileo, this time of jupiter and its moons, again very basic and not really too impressive, but over the next 400 years technology in telescopes has taken a big leap.


Telescopes work one of Three ways,

Refracting Telescopes use a large objective lens as their primary light-collecting element. Meade refractors, in all models and apertures, include achromatic (2-element) objective lenses, in order to reduce or virtually eliminate the false color (chromatic aberration) that results in the telescopic image when light passes through a lens. 


Reflecting Telescopes use a concave primary mirror to collect light and form an image. In the Newtonian type of reflector, light is reflected by a small, flat secondary mirror to the side of the main tube for observation of the image.
Mirror-Lens (Catadioptric) Telescopes employ both mirrors and lenses, resulting in optical configurations that achieve remarkable image quality and resolution, while housing the optics in extremely short, highly portable optical tubes.


The best Telescope we have to date would have the be the 'Hubble Space Telescope'.

In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope, named in honour of astronomer Edwin Hubble, was launched into orbit around the Earth.

The telescope, a basic Reflector with a 94.5 inch (2.4 meter) mirror, was packed with instruments that would give the astronomers clear views of the universe in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. Without Earth's atmosphere blocking its view, Hubble would be able to observe detail of astronomical objects that had never been seen before.

Here is a simple diagram that explains how the telescope works.

Hubble is a type of telescope known as a Cassegrain reflector. Light hits the telescope's main mirror, or primary mirror. It bounces off the primary mirror and encounters a secondary mirror. The secondary mirror focuses the light through a hole in the center of the primary mirror that leads to the telescope's science instruments.



Every 97 minutes, Hubble completes a spin around Earth, moving at the speed of about five miles per second (8 km per second) — fast enough to travel across the United States in about 10 minutes. As it travels, Hubble's mirror captures light and directs it into its several science instruments.


People often mistakenly believe that a telescope's power lies in its ability to magnify objects. Telescopes actually work by collecting more light than the human eye can capture on its own. The larger a telescope's mirror, the more light it can collect, and the better its vision. Hubble's primary mirror is 94.5 inches (2.4 m) in diameter. This mirror is small compared with those of current ground-based telescopes, which can be 400 inches (1,000 cm) and up, but Hubble's location beyond the atmosphere gives it remarkable clarity.




The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) sees three different kinds of light: near-ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared, though not simultaneously. Its resolution and field of view are much greater than that of Hubble's other instruments. WFC3 is one of Hubble's two newest instruments, and will be used to study dark energy and dark matter, the formation of individual stars and the discovery of extremely remote galaxies previously beyond Hubble's vision.




The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), Hubble's other new instrument, is a spectrograph that sees exclusively in ultraviolet light. Spectrographs acts something like prisms, separating light from the cosmos into its component colors. This provides a wavelength "fingerprint" of the object being observed, which tells us about its temperature, chemical composition, density, and motion. COS will improve Hubble's ultraviolet sensitivity at least 10 times, and up to 70 times when observing extremely faint objects.



The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) sees visible light, and is designed to study some of the earliest activity in the universe. ACS helps map the distribution of dark matter, detects the most distant objects in the universe, searches for massive planets, and studies the evolution of clusters of galaxies. ACS partially stopped working in 2007 due to an electrical short, but was repaired during Servicing Mission 4 in May 2009.



The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) is a spectrograph that sees ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light, and is known for its ability to hunt black holes. While COS works best with small sources of light, such as stars or quasars, STIS can map out larger objects like galaxies. STIS stopped working due to a technical failure on August 3, 2004, but was also repaired during Servicing Mission 4.



The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) is Hubble's heat sensor. Its sensitivity to infrared light — perceived by humans as heat — lets it observe objects hidden by interstellar dust, like stellar birth sites, and gaze into deepest space.



Finally, the Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS) are devices that lock onto "guide stars" and keep Hubble pointed in the right direction. They can be used to precisely measure the distance between stars, and their relative motions.



Here are some images from the Hubble Space Telescopes:

The Crab Nebula,

The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant, all that remains of a tremendous stellar explosion. Observers in China and Japan recorded the supernova nearly 1,000 years ago, in 1054.

Colliding Galaxies,

These two spiral galaxies, drawn together by gravity, started to interact a few hundred million years ago. The Antennae Galaxies are the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies.