The Rena debacle - Tauranga Cafe Scientifique
Speaker(s): Professor Christopher Battershill, Faculty of Science and Engineering, The University of Waikato, Mr Andrew Berry, Maritime New Zealand, and Professor Mal Heron, James Cook University.
Alimento, 72 First Ave, Tauranga
21st Nov 2011 7:30pm
Four weeks ago the containership RENA ran aground on the Astrolabe reef just 20 km offshore of Mount Maunganui. What followed was one of New Zealand’s biggest environmental incidents, the full extent of which is only now being quantified. Luckily, to date, the impacts of oil have been concentrated mainly on the sandy Mount Maunganui and Papamoa beaches. The long term environmental impact is not fully known at this point in time, particularly as the event is far from over. The effects of oil and other contamination on the rocky reefs of Motiti and adjacent islets, as well as longer term effects in the estuaries (Maketu and parts of Tauranga Harbour) have yet to be identified.
Professor Battershill from the University of Waikato who holds the inaugural Bay of Plenty Regional Council Chair in Coastal Science, will address some of the issues around the particular impacts on the ecosystem of our coastline and the cleanup processes. He will be accompanied by Mr Andrew Berry who leads the Salvage Operations for Maritime New Zealand and who will provide an update on the salvage operation. Also in attendance will be visiting Geophysics Professor Mal Heron from James Cook University, who can comment on Australia’s recent ship grounding incidents. This Café is an opportunity to hear more about the impacts of heavy oil on the ecosystem, and the nature of cleaning up spilled oil.
Speaker Profiles
Professor Chris Battershill took up the position of Chair of Coastal Science with the University of Waikato based at Tauranga in January this year. The role is to expand coastal science endeavour in the region linking with existing expertise to provide integrated education, training, and research effort from the Ranges to the Reef. Prior to this position, Chris Battershill spent 12 years at the Australian Institute of Marine Science where he led teams in biodiversity, microbiology and biodiscovery research throughout Australia. This built on a role at NIWA over 10 years and at the NZ Department of Conservation, also focused on exploring marine biodiversity, examining threats to it and identifying new sustainable resources from it. A presentation is provided that draws from experiences in marine systems from the tropics to the pole and from the offshore shoals of North West Australia to the Chatham Islands. The talk examines the fine ecological edge that much of our coastal marine ecosystem balances on and explores the multiple reasons for enhancing our endeavours to protect it from unsustainable exploitation. Of increasing relevance in the pursuit of biodiversity conservation is the potential for discovery of new medicinally and industrially useful bioresources for the next generations.
Mr Andrew Berry, is the manager of the salvage unit at Maritime New Zealand, and has been dealing with the Rena over the past weeks.
Professor Mal Heron, is Chief Researcher in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. His PhD work in Auckland, New Zealand, was on radio-wave probing of the ionosphere, and that is reflected in his early ionospheric papers. He changed research fields to the scattering of HF radio waves from the ocean surface during the 1980s. Through the 1990s his research has broadened into oceanographic phenomena which can be studied by remote sensing, including HF radar and salinity mapping from airborne microwave radiometers . Throughout, there have been one-off papers where he has been involved in solving a problem in a cognate area like medical physics, and paleobiogeography. Occasionally, he has diverted into side-tracks like a burst of papers on the effect of bushfires on radio communications. His present project of the Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) is about the development of new processing methods and applications of HF radar data to address oceanography problems. He is currently promoting the use of high resolution VHF ocean radars, based on the PortMap high resolution radar.
