Free Republic

A lone swimmer in the Gulf of Mexico was circled by a shark without her knowing, according to a frightening video. Stan Battles reportedly took the video Wednesday morning from his balcony on the 28th floor of a resort at Panama City Beach, Fla., according to the Panama City News Herald. The outlet reported Battles had been watching the shark for a couple of hours in murkier waters until it swam into a clearer area, which is when the woman swam by. That’s when he started filming the shark. “The woman swims directly over this thing,” he told the outlet....

Mexicans have endured a week of gas shortages as the government takes drastic action to combat narco fuel thieves. Several states in the center of the country, including the capital Mexico City, have seen hundreds of petrol stations closed and long lines at those left open. {snip} The government of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, has cut off the gas supply in a number of key pipelines transporting fuel from refineries. The aim is take the fight to the "huachicoleros" as the fuel thieves are known. Many are affiliated with larger drug cartels, who for years have been...

More than 65 million years ago, a six-mile wide asteroid smashed into Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, triggering earthquakes, tsunamis and an explosion of debris that blanketed the Earth in layers of dust and sediment. Now analysis of commercial oil drilling data—denied to the academic community until recently—offers the first detailed look at how the Chicxulub impact reshaped the Gulf of Mexico. Figuring out what happened after these types of impacts gives researchers a better idea of how they redistribute geological material around the world. It also gives scientists an idea of what to expect if another such impact were to occur...

A rare deep-sea creature dubbed the 'headless chicken monster' has been filmed for the first time by Australian researchers. The elusive Enypniastes eximia sea cucumber, which is usually only found in the Gulf of Mexico, was spotted in the Southern Ocean in the East Antarctic using camera technology developed by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). 'Some of the footage we are getting back from the cameras is breathtaking, including species we have never seen in this part of the world,' AAD Program leader Dr Dirk Welsford said.

National Hurricane Center is forecasting the possibility of a Hurricane in the NE Gulf of Mexico by Tuesday or Wednesday. It would be Hurricane Michael. Landfill is uncertain, but appears to be headed toward Florida Panhandle/Alabama Coasts.

The strange squid was captured on April 17 by the crew of NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer during a scientific voyage studying an ocean area never explored before. The mission has been conducting both scientific research and capturing images of deep-sea habitats in the western Gulf of Mexico that likely found nowhere else. “Dive 04 targeted an unnamed mound in East Breaks (EB) 1009, an area of the Gulf of Mexico that had never before been explored using deep-sea submersibles. The closest historical dive to the site was a single 2009 survey that autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry conducted over 12 kilometers...

SpaceX is seeking permission to perform splashdowns of its Dragon spacecraft in the Gulf of Mexico, part of a shift in spacecraft recovery operations from the Pacific Ocean. In a draft environmental assessment prepared by the Federal Aviation Administration, SpaceX proposes to conduct up to six Dragon landings a year in waters off the Gulf coast, between Texas and Florida. The assessment, completed in March, was published in the Federal Register April 5. According to the report, the Gulf of Mexico would serve as a contingency landing site for both cargo and crewed Dragon missions should the primary landing zone...

HOUSTON - U.S. Coast Guard officials are trying to make contact with a Texas-bound, single-engine plane they say is missing. Officials say the plane took off from Oklahoma City Wednesday and was headed to Georgetown Municipal Airport but diverted at some point and headed south. Coast Guard officials say they lost contact with the pilot after the plane flew past Freeport. The New Orleans Coast Guard is sending a plane to make communication with the aircraft. Officials have not said at this time whether the plane crash. They are labeling the incident an "aircraft emergency." It is unknown at this...

The Trump administration is proposing to rewrite or kill rules on offshore oil and gas drilling that were imposed after the deadly 2010 rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration says the rules are an unnecessary burden on industry, and rolling them back will encourage more energy production. An offshore-drilling group is welcoming the rollback, while environmentalists say President Donald Trump is raising the risk of more deadly oil spills. …

According to the U.S. Geological Center, an earthquake happened just off the coast of South Padre Island on Saturday. The USGS says that the earthquake hit 103 kilometers (about 64 miles) east-northeast of South Padre around 6:15 p.m. local time. It was a 3.0-magnitude earthquake, which is relatively small. Local reports say that first-responders are standing by in case they're needed to cover any damage but so far they say that no damage has been reported. Local officials say that they don't expect anything further to come of the earthquake either.

The Trump administration is putting more than 76 million acres of federal water up for lease in the largest offshore drilling initiative in American history. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced the massive lease sale, slated for March 2018, on Tuesday morning, and said the move is a key component of the administration’s effort to tap U.S. energy reserves and reap the economic benefits that come along with them.

Tropical Storm Nate is emerging from Honduras into the Western Caribbean. Forecast models are in agreement that Nate will continue into the Gulf of Mexico. Oil companies have begun evacuations of offshore platforms. Nate is forecast to reach the northern Gulf Coast this weekend as a hurricane, and the threat of direct impacts from wind, storm surge, and heavy rainfall is increasing from Louisiana through the western Florida Panhandle. Hurricane and tropical storm watches, as well as a storm surge watch, have been issued for a portion of the northern Gulf Coast, and residents in these areas should monitor the...

The floor of the Gulf of Mexico is one of the most geologically interesting stretches of the Earth’s surface. The gulf’s peculiar history gave rise to a landscape riddled with domes, pockmarks, canyons, faults, and channels — all revealed in more detail than ever before by a new 1.4 billion-pixel map. This striking view of the ocean floor off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas was created by a government agency you’ve likely never heard of called the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The bureau’s job is to manage exploration and development of the country’s offshore mineral and energy...

The Department of the Interior will include “all available” federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico that have not already been leased out for offshore oil drilling. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Monday 73 million acres off the coast of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida would be offered at a lease sale in August as part of the Interior Department’s five-year leasing plan. “Opening more federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling is a pillar of President Trump’s plan to make the United States energy independent,” Zinke said in a statement. Interior finalized its current five-year offshore...

Lake Sediments Record Climate Change At Cahokia INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA —National Public Radio reports that climatologist Broxton Bird of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and colleagues analyzed layers of calcite crystals interspersed with layers of mud on the bottom of Indiana’s Martin Lake in order to learn about historic rainfall levels at Cahokia. The study suggests that beginning in the 900s, the Central Mississippi Valley received more rain than usual. And carbon isotopes found in skeletons at Mississippian cities indicate that people ate a lot of corn. “That comes at right around 950, and that’s around the time the population at Cahokia...

Scientists say they can now describe in detail how the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs produced its huge crater. The reconstruction of the event 66 million years ago was made possible by drilling into the remnant bowl and analysing its rocks. These show how the space impactor made the hard surface of the planet slosh back and forth like a fluid. At one stage, a mountain higher than Everest was thrown up before collapsing back into a smaller range of peaks. "And this all happens on the scale of minutes, which is quite amazing," Prof Joanna Morgan from Imperial...

MEXICO CITY, Sept 24 (Reuters) – A fire broke out on an oil tanker of Mexican state oil company Pemex in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, forcing all the crew to be evacuated in the latest accident to plague the struggling firm.

A fire broke out on an oil tanker of Mexican state oil company Pemex in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, forcing all the crew to be evacuated in the latest accident to plague the struggling firm. The blaze on the tanker “Burgos” occurred off the coast of Boca del Rio in Veracruz state and all the crew were safe, Pemex said in a tweet. Mexico’s Navy said there were 31 crew members and that all had returned to port. […] The tanker was carrying 80,000 barrels of diesel and 70,000 barrels of gasoline, Mexico’s Communications and Transport Ministry said....

Geologists studying a region in the Mexican state of Veracruz have discovered evidence to explain the origin of the Wilcox Formation, one of Mexico's most productive oil plays, as well as support for the theory that water levels in the Gulf of Mexico dropped dramatically as it was separated from the rest of the world's oceans and Earth entered a period of extreme warming. The drop in water levels and the warming, known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), occurred around 55.8 million years ago. The Gulf refilled about 850,000 years later. Van Nieuwenhuise, director of professional geoscience programs at...

The reputation of a disgraced wartime navy captain has been restored, thanks to the discoveries of a documentary featuring the finder of the Titanic. For more than 60 years, Captain Herbert G. Claudius was blamed for letting a Nazi U-boat ‘get away’, after it sank the Robert E. Lee passenger freighter in the Gulf of Mexico in 1942. But an undersea expedition – aided by Dr Robert Ballard who rediscovered the Titanic 30 years ago – has revealed the first published pictures of the submarine’s wreckage, showing how bombs dropped by Cpt Claudius’ crew successfully sunk the attacker U-166. ........