Gulf oil now in powerful Loop Current, scientists say

The first oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill has entered an ocean current that could take it to Florida and up the east coast of the US, scientists say.

The European Space Agency said satellite images suggested oil could reach the coral reefs of the Florida Keys within six days.

"We have visible proof that at least oil from the surface... has reached the current," said Dr Bertrand Chapron.

Meanwhile, the US said it was having talks with Cuba over the spill.

Observers say the talks demonstrate a concern that the oil may be carried by currents far from the site of the Deep Horizon disaster.

A BP executive said this week that the company had paid out $15m (£10.4m) in claims, much of it to shrimpers and commercial fishermen who have little or no income because of the spill.

Meanwhile, astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station have said they could see the oil spill while passing over the Gulf of Mexico.

"It looks very scary," Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov told reporters via a video link.

Dark roads will lead to brighter future says pollution commission

Street and motorway lights should be dimmed or switched off to save energy and let people see the stars, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution says.

It says there is little evidence that such lighting significantly cuts accidents or crime. It recommends the removal of thousands of motorway lights, possibly even at junctions. The report says that since 1993 most of the UK has become brighter, obscuring the stars, and it backs a recent paper in the scientific journal Nature that said: “Without a direct view of the stars, mankind is cut off from most of the Universe, deprived of any direct sense of its huge scale and our tiny place in it.”

The commission proposes “dark- sky parks” all over Britain, with planning restrictions on outdoor lighting. The Galloway Forest Park in southern Scotland this month became Britain’s first official dark-sky park, with 7,000 stars visible there, compared with 500 in Glasgow.

It says that the planned replacement of 2.3 million of Britain’s 7.4 million road lights in the next two years is “a real opportunity for local authorities to think about minimising the negative impacts of stray light”.

It says motorway lighting reduces crashes by about 10 per cent and that this may be too low to justify the costs. It welcomes the Highways Agency’s trials of switching off lighting on six stretches of motorway between midnight and 5am. The trials began in March and have so far reduced carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 230 tonnes, equal to 100 cars’ annual emissions

Arctic heads for ice-free summer

The Arctic Ocean near the North Pole could be ice-free in the summer in around 10 years time, a top polar specialist has said.
Professor Peter Wadhams, who took part in a massive ice survey in the area, said for the first time it might be possible for ships to cross the area.
The team found floating ice that was around 1.8m thick, which means it's probably 'first year' ice.
That means it's more likely to melt again in the summer months.

The team brought their own equipment to dig into the ice but that quickly froze up so they had to do everything by hand. Where the ice had melted they had to swim.
Further investigation

Travelling to the North Pole and working in temperatures as cold as -70C is the only way scientists can really find out how the area has been affected by climate change.
If these ice sheets do melt it's not clear what the effects could be, so it looks like these results are the start of even more work in the Arctic.

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