Modi’s visit focuses attention on caste discrimination in US


Atul Dev
Thu, June 22, 2023 

Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

Maya K came to the US in 2002. She was born in Hyderabad in India, in a family considered to be untouchable by the upper-caste Hindus.

Castes are the hereditary classes of Indian society, each with its role and status defined in the scriptures of Hinduism. At the top of the ladder are the Brahmins, who claim an exclusive right to perform religious rituals; at the bottom are the Dalits, who were denied the right to education and consigned to the jobs that required hard labour, or were considered impure.

Related: Why California is taking on caste-based discrimination

Caste discrimination was outlawed in India at the time of the country’s independence, but in recent years Hindu mobs have lynched Dalits who try to assert their identity with pride. Earlier this month, in the most recent such killing, a 22-year-old was beaten and stabbed to death in Maharashtra, a state co-ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, for celebrating the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar, the Dalit economist and lawyer who wrote India’s constitution.

Modi, who is currently on a state visit to the US, has faced criticism during his tenure for the persecution of minorities, the collapse of constitutional institutions, and the imprisonment of government critics in India. His party, critics allege, aims to make India a Hindu nation, where Dalits, Muslims and other minorities are treated as second-class citizens. For some in the US, the repercussions continue abroad, making the pomp and circumstance of a Modi state visit feel personal.

“As Indians have come to this country,” Maya (not her real name), who lives in Washington DC, said, “they have brought this discriminatory mindset with them.”

Maya had heard snide comments about her caste and faced discrimination while pursuing her undergraduate studies in India, but she did not imagine that would continue in the US. “When I started working, I had an Indian American manager,” she told me. “As soon as he found out my caste, he started ignoring me completely, it got to a point when he would just pretend to not have heard what I said in a meeting,” she said.

In 2008, Maya founded Ambedkar Association of North America, named after BR Ambedkar. The group now has about 700 members spread across the US and Canada with the goal of helping the underprivileged communities back in India with financial support, and fighting against caste discrimination in the US. According to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace survey about half of all Hindu Americans identify with a caste group.

“Caste is still not a protected category of discrimination in most of the Unites States,” she said.

Modi talks about eliminating caste in his public speeches – he recently said that “Indianness” is the only caste in India – but members of his own party support and protect upper-caste Hindu vigilantes. While hatred against minorities has been a frequent feature of India’s history, Hindu vigilantes have been emboldened by the ascent of Modi, whose political career was launched in 2002 amid a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. Ever since, Modi has been one of the most divisive politicians in India, and those divisions are also beginning to animate the Indian diaspora in the US.

In July 2020, government regulators in California sued Cisco Systems, a tech conglomerate based in San Jose, accusing it of discriminating against an Indian American employee and allowing him to be harassed by two managers because he was from a lower caste. In May 2021, federal law enforcement agents raided a Hindu temple in New Jersey after hundreds of lower-caste workers accused a Hindu sect with close ties to India’s ruling party of luring them from India and forcing them to do unpaid labour. In August 2022, in a parade to mark the occasion of India’s Independence Day in Edison, New Jersey, the upper-caste Hindu organisers deployed a bulldozer tacked with the picture of Yogi Adityanath, a hardliner of Modi’s party and chief minister of the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, where a number of Muslim homes have been razed by bulldozers on his orders. That same month, at another parade in Anaheim, California, Indian Americans charged at protesters who were holding signs that read, “Abolish caste” and “Protect India’s Muslim lives”.

Califiornia state senator Aisha Wahab, center, with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, right, promote a bill which adds caste as a protected category in the state’s anti-discrimination laws, in Sacramento in March. Photograph: José Luis Villegas/AP

Maya has been involved with the gathering movement to ban caste discrimination in the US. In 2019, Brandeis University in Massachusetts added caste to its nondiscrimination policy. Since then, the California State University system; the University of California, Davis; Brown University in Rhode Island; and Colby College in Maine have followed suit. In 2021, Harvard’s graduate student union forced the university to add measures to prevent caste discrimination in their contracts.

Beyond the campuses, in February this year, Seattle added caste to the city’s anti-discrimination laws, becoming the first in the US to do so. Kshama Sawant, the Indian American member of the Seattle city council who wrote, presented and fought for the legislation in the council meetings told the press she had received thousands of emails in support of the bill.

Sawant herself grew up in an upper-caste family in western India, “listening to the pejorative things that are said about the lower castes”, she told me. Fighting caste, she said, was not just about correcting individual behaviour. “It is a societal system of oppression, which needs to be taken up at an institutional level,” she said. “Hence the need to make laws about it.”

Her campaign to outlaw caste discrimination in Seattle, Sawant said, faced widespread backlash from Hindu nationalist organisations in the US, such as the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America. She credited the victory in the city council to the alliance of lower-caste and Muslim activists that supported her – a socialist. “Without that alliance, it wasn’t going to happen,” she said.

Rasheed Ahmed, the executive director of Indian American Muslim Council, told me that he sees an alliance of India’s persecuted minorities forming among Indian Americans. “Our Hindu nationalist opponents have financial backing and diplomatic support, they are probably larger in number and greater in influence, but we are standing together to counter them,” he told me. “Religious fundamentalism in India is something we all have to fight together; it is not the problem of one community.”

“Ambedkarite women have been working on this stuff for years,” Maya said, pointing out that Equality Labs, an organisation run by Thenmozhi Soundararajan, had conducted a quantitative survey in 2017 about caste discrimination in the US, which formed the basis of a 2019 congressional briefing on caste in Washington DC.

In March this year, Aisha Wahab, a member of the California state senate and the first Afghan American woman to be elected to a public office in the US, introduced SB 403, a bill that aims to ban caste-based discrimination in America’s most populous state.

“We will have to make alliances not just with socialists but Democrats and even Republicans, and we are prepared to do that,” Maya said. “Our goal,” she said, “is to outlaw caste discrimination in the entire United States – then we will be able to use our real names in public.”

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for HINDUISM IS FASCISM 

Reddit’s Chief Says He Wants It to ‘Grow Up.’ Will Its Community Let It?

Mike Isaac
Fri, June 23, 2023 

A Reddit logo statue in the social media company’s office in New York on May 23, 2023. 

(Amy Lombard for the New York Times)

SAN FRANCISCO — For the past 11 years, Bucky has put time and effort into stewarding and guiding dozens of communities on Reddit, the sprawling internet message board.

As a “moderator” of roughly 80 different topic-based forums, Bucky — who goes by “BuckRowdy” on Reddit and who asked that his full name not be used to prevent online harassment — and others like him are essential to growing and maintaining the social media site, which is one of the internet’s biggest destinations for online discussion.

Until two weeks ago, when Bucky revolted.

Reddit had just introduced changes that sharply increased its fees for independent developers who build apps using the company’s data. Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, positioned the move partly as a way to shore up the company’s finances as it heads toward a long-awaited initial public offering.

But the changes made it so expensive for some third-party developers that a handful who build tools for Reddit’s moderators had to shut down or significantly alter their apps. In protest, Bucky and other moderators closed down hundreds of forums on the site, effectively making Reddit unusable for many of its 57 million daily visitors. At one point, the site went offline entirely.

“It is really demoralizing,” Bucky said. Being a Reddit moderator and dealing with users is already difficult, he said. “‘I take all this abuse for you, and keep your website clean, and this is how you repay us?’”

Reddit, an 18-year-old site that was part of an early wave of social networking, has been trying to “grow up,” Huffman has said in interviews. What is unclear is whether Reddit’s community will let it.

Reddit, which is based in San Francisco, has in recent years tried to turn from a rough-and-tumble internet message board into a full-fledged social media business by adding executives and strengthening its advertising capabilities. The 2,000-person company — which has repeatedly been mentioned as an IPO candidate — has raised more than $1.3 billion and is valued at more than $10 billion, according to Crunchbase and Reddit’s public statements.

Other social media companies also made similar changes as they grew up. In 2012, Twitter tweaked its rules for how developers could use its data before it went public, outraging users and strangling some popular third-party apps. Facebook has similarly made platform changes that have irked developers and caused backlashes.

But this month’s uprising at Reddit stands out because it shows the outsize power of the site’s community. The day after moderators closed down hundreds of Reddit forums, users spent 16% less time on the site, according to estimates from Similarweb, an analytics company.

“Reddit is basically entirely community led,” said Adrian Horning, a Reddit user and data scientist who built a bot that “scrapes” the site’s data as a response to the fee changes. “The power regular users have is just inherent in the platform.”

In an interview Wednesday, Huffman said his goal had been to make Reddit better for newcomers and veteran users and to build a lasting business. He said he regretted that developers were surprised by the company’s pricing changes and wished he had been more upfront about how the changes would affect them. He added that there was general anxiety over Reddit’s changes as part of a natural “maturation process.”

“We have the same love for Reddit, and the same fear of losing Reddit, that many of our users do,” he said.

Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 as a site with a countercultural attitude toward the internet and its advertising-based economy. Reddit espoused free speech at any cost, zero ads and an insular culture that laid a foundation for Web 2.0’s meme culture.

Its community has long been rambunctious, getting Reddit into hot water many times. In 2013, it was the site where internet sleuths searched for — and misidentified — the Boston Marathon bombing suspect. A year later, it became a dumping ground for nude photos that were hacked from celebrities’ cellphones.

But as the site grew and venture investment poured in, its leaders saw the potential for Reddit to build a business. The company had several chief executives, including the former venture capitalist Ellen Pao, before Huffman — who had left the company for six years — was brought back in 2015.

Huffman eventually embraced the idea that Reddit could make money from advertising, a model he once loathed. He accepted and expanded upon rule changes instituted by Pao to contain some of the toxic content that people posted to the site. By 2021, he had confidentially filed paperwork to take Reddit public.

But when interest rates soared and the stock market wobbled last year, Huffman put Reddit’s IPO plans on hiatus. Since then, he has systematically worked to improve the site, grow the number of users and bolster the company’s bottom line.

In April, Huffman announced that he planned to restrict access to Reddit’s “application programming interface,” which is known in industry parlance as API. The API is the main gateway for outsiders to use the company’s data for different purposes.

In an interview at the time, Huffman said he wanted to charge big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook for access to Reddit data, which has been used to train so-called large language models that are at the heart of artificially intelligent systems.

But Huffman did not detail how the pricing for the API access would change and who would be affected. Then in May, Reddit began telling developers its much higher pricing plans for such access. Early this month, one developer of a popular app, Apollo, announced that he was closing down the app because Reddit’s changes would cost him more than $20 million in annual fees to operate it.

Many Redditors were deeply upset that Huffman had appeared to kill off a beloved app in service of building its business. Old-timers were also angry that the heady days of Reddit’s anti-capitalist roots seemed to be officially over.

Huffman defended the decision, noting that it costs Reddit millions of dollars to support apps such as Apollo, which send no money back to the company and do not display ads from Reddit’s advertising partners.

To express their unhappiness, dozens of “super mods” soon restricted access to hundreds of Reddit’s most popular communities. To kill advertising across those communities, which are known as subreddits, moderators posted pornography and other explicit material to force the forums to be labeled “18+” forums, which are generally not advertiser friendly. Other forms of protest included a move by one subreddit, r/pics, to allow only photos of John Oliver to be shared in the forum. (Oliver embraced the Reddit protest, eventually sharing photos of himself as well.)

Huffman said he did not plan to change course. He said Reddit was enforcing its code of moderator conduct, which prohibits moderators from closing their subreddits and posting pornography and depictions of violence in their forums (unless the forums are designated for such topics of discussion). Reddit also said it would replace moderators who did not abide by the rules after being warned.

Bucky said the protests, which have simmered down this week, have now evolved into more general frustrations that have built up over time.

“Any time we see this kind of blowup, there’s a simmering rage underneath the surface that comes back up,” he said.

For now, subreddits seem to be returning online slowly, though there are still efforts to resist the changes. Bucky said he was active in the “Save3rdPartyApps” subreddit, which was formed to organize protests on the site that are allowed under Reddit’s rules.

Reddit is now further away from a public offering than it was last year, Huffman said, but will continue building its business. He added that the community revolt was a part of what made Reddit Reddit and said he and his team planned to continue engaging with top moderators who were upset with the changes.

“For better or for worse, this is a very uniquely Reddit moment,” he said. “This could only happen on Reddit.”

c.2023 The New York Times Company

From Titanic search to fallout: Who will pay for the attempted sub rescue?


James Cheng-Morris
·Freelance news writer, Yahoo UK
Fri, June 23, 2023 

A US airplane flies over a French research vessel, L'Atalante, during the search for the 21-foot submersible on Wednesday. (Getty Images)

On Thursday, after a massive search operation, the US Coast Guard confirmed the worst news: the five people on board the Titan submersible had died after debris was found near the wreck of the Titanic. The vessel had suffered a “catastrophic implosion”.

On Friday, the fallout commenced.

It has emerged the US Navy had detected a sound consistent with an implosion when communications were lost with the Titan, an hour and 45 minutes into its two-hour descent to the wreckage, on Sunday.

The Navy analysed its acoustic data and found an anomaly that was “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost”, a senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press on Thursday.

According to reports, the information was shared with the US Coast Guard, which decided to continue the search operation and “make every effort to save the lives on board”.

Meanwhile, James Cameron, director of the Titanic movie and a submersible expert who has visited the wreck 33 times, said he had predicted Titan’s fate days before the news was confirmed.

“I felt in my bones what had happened,” Cameron told the BBC.

“For the sub’s electronics to fail and its communication system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously… sub’s gone.

”[It] felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff.”

A number of vessels, aircraft and other pieces of specialist equipment were deployed by the US and Canada as part of the search.

Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a press conference on Thursday that “we were able to mobilise an immense amount of gear to the site in just a really remarkable amount of time”.

But all this will have cost a lot of money.

Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue, told the New York Times: “These people paid a lot of money [£200,000] to do something extraordinarily risky [visit the Titanic wreck, which is at a depth of 3,800m] and hard to recover from”.

He said the search operation would “probably cost millions”.

The search area. (PA)

OceanGate is the controversial company which ran the expedition. It has emerged the company’s CEO, Stockton Rush - who was one of the five on board the Titan vessel - said two years ago that the vessel's design had "broken some rules".

He told a YouTube channel in August 2021: "I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. Carbon fibre and titanium? There's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did."

But, according to Paul Zukunft, a former leader of the US Coast Guard, the company won't have to reimburse the government.

He told the Washington Post this is a basic principle of maritime safety: "It’s no different than if a private citizen goes out and his boat sinks. We go out and recover him. We don’t stick them with the bill after the fact.”

A Royal Air Force plane arrives at St John's International Airport in Newfoundland, Canada, after it received a request for assistance in the hunt for the missing Titan submersible. (PA)

Other countries, including the UK, provided assistance.

Two Royal Air Force planes were used to transfer equipment and personnel to St John’s in Canada to assist with the hunt for the submersible. The C-17 Globemaster and A400 Atlas aircraft departed RAF Lossiemouth in north-east Scotland on Thursday.

Earlier that day, the UK also embedded a Royal Navy submariner at the request of the US Coast Guard.

Yahoo News UK has asked the Ministry of Defence if the UK taxpayer will foot the bill for these deployments.

Assessing the disaster, it was James Cameron who said: “We now have another wreck that is based on unfortunately the same principles of not heeding warnings.”

But Guillermo Sohnlein, co-founder of OceanGate Expeditions, defended the firm from critics.

Read more: All Titanic wreckage trips should be cancelled, says scientist

Sohnlein defended the safety of the submersible, saying he and his co-founder Rush were committed to safety during expeditions.

He told Times Radio on Friday: “He was extremely committed to safety. He was also extremely diligent about managing risks, and was very keenly aware of the dangers of operating in a deep ocean environment.

“So that’s one of the main reasons I agreed to go into business with him in 2009.”

Sohnlein, who no longer works for the company, continued: “I know from first-hand experience that we were extremely committed to safety and safety and risk mitigation was a key part of the company culture.”

He added on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Anyone who operates in that depth of the ocean, whether it is human-rated submersibles or robotic submersibles, knows the risks of operating under such pressure and that at any given moment, on any mission, with any vessel, you run the risk of this kind of implosion.”

How much did Titan search cost? US Coast Guard's bill alone will be in the millions, experts say

DAVID SHARP
Fri, June 23, 2023

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The cost of the unprecedented search for the missing Titan submersible will easily stretch into the millions of dollars, experts said Friday.

The massive international effort by aircraft, surface ships and deep-sea robots began Sunday when the Titan was reported missing. Searchers raced against a 96-hour clock in the desperate hope to find and rescue the vessel's occupants before their oxygen supply ran out.

But all hope was extinguished Thursday when officials announced the submersible had suffered a catastrophic implosion, killing all five aboard.

A scaled-back search remained in place Friday as the robots — remotely operated vehicles, known as ROVs — continued to scan the sea floor for evidence that might shed light on what occurred in the deep waters of the North Atlantic.

The search area spanned thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut and in waters 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) deep — with agencies such as the U.S. Coast Guard, the Canadian Coast Guard, U.S. Navy and other agencies and private entities.

There’s no other comparable ocean search, especially with so many countries and even commercial enterprises being involved in recent times, said Norman Polmar, a naval historian, analyst and author based in Virginia.

The aircraft, alone, are expensive to operate, and the Government Accountability Office has put the hourly cost at tens of thousands of dollars. Turboprop P-3 Orion and jet-powered P-8 Poseidon sub hunters, along with C-130 Hercules, were all utilized in the search.

Some agencies can seek reimbursements. But the U.S. Coast Guard — whose bill alone will hit the millions of dollars — is generally prohibited by federal law from collecting reimbursement pertaining to any search or rescue service, said Stephen Koerting, an attorney in Maine who specializes in maritime law.

“The Coast Guard, as a matter of both law and policy, does not seek to recover the costs associated with search and rescue from the recipients of those services,” the Coast Guard said Friday in a statement.

The first priority in search and rescue is always saving a life, and search and rescue agencies budget for such expenses, said Mikki Hastings, president and CEO of the National Association for Search and Rescue.

“In the end, these people were in distress. We know what the ultimate result was. But during the search operation, there are people who are in distress,” she said of the Titan submersible.

Rescue agencies don’t want people in distress to be thinking about the cost of a helicopter or other resources when a life is in danger.

“Every person who is missing – they deserve to be found. That’s the mission regardless of who they are,” she said.

A boat with the OceanGate logo is parked on a lot near the OceanGate offices Thursday, June 22, 2023, in Everett, Wash. The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that the missing submersible Titan imploded near the Titanic shipwreck site, killing everyone on board. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Titanic sub: John Cusack sparks debate after saying 'no one cares' when refugees capsize

The actor compared the way people responded to the missing Titanic submersible and refugees capsizing

Julia Hunt
·Contributor
Thu, June 22, 2023 

John Cusack has tweeted about the search for the Titanic submersible. (REUTERS)

John Cusack has sparked debate after suggesting that “no one cares” when refugee boats capsize but that things are very different when it comes to the lost Titanic submersible.

The sub went missing in the Atlantic on an underwater journey to the wreck of the Titanic, with five people on board.

A large search is under way, with experts predicting that the vessel will soon run out of oxygen.

Read more: Channel 5 under fire for 'distasteful' show on missing Titanic submersible

Commenting on the search on Twitter, Cusack appeared to reference the migrant boat that recently sank off Greece, leaving 78 dead and hundreds missing.

“All I can think is refugees capsize no one cares - some billionaires on joy rides go missing - it seems like multiple navy’s are instantly searching,” the 56-year-old posted.

Many people chimed in to agree with the actor, who is known for films such as Sixteen Candles and Being John Malkovich.

One person tweeted that it was “infuriating” and another said: “It's really, really sad when it's right in front you. Money people mean more than anyone else.”

“I just got done saying the same thing...” said one fan.

“Five billionaires get lost in a s****** submersible on a $250k per person trip to see the Titanic, and half the US Coast Guard gets mobilised to find them.

The tourist submarine went missing in the Atlantic. (Ocean Gate/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

“Innocent refugees get lost at sea trying to make their way to safety and a better life, and no one can be bothered to give a crap.”

However, another said: “I agree that society is very one-sided but in my mind they're still people.”

“We have to watch the way we refer to people with money,” said someone else.

“It is not fair to think they are less than just because they are rich.”

One fan suggested people have been gripped by the story because “we can see ourselves in a tourist junket that goes awry”.

Several people agreed with the actor. (REUTERS)

“Plausible something like that could happen to us,” they said.

Read more: John Cusack defends speaking out about politics: 'I haven’t really been hot for a long time'

“We don’t really see ourselves in a boat full of other refugees.

"I think people are by and large only empathetic to those with whom they can identify.”

Barack Obama Just Said The Quiet Part Out Loud About The Titan Sub

Story by Kate Nicholson • Yesterday

Former US president Barack Obama spoke about the Titan sub this week in Athens, Greece.© Provided by HuffPost UKFormer US president Barack Obama spoke about the Titan sub this week in Athens, Greece.


Barack Obama hit the nail on the head when he spoke about the “untenable” way the Titan submersible tragedy received more attention than the recent deaths of hundreds of refugees near Greece.

The former US president was speaking during a conference held by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in Athens on Thursday, when he discussed the struggles which asylum seekers face around the world.

Obama called for people to think about the “circumstances which lead desperate people to come here”.

He said: “We can’t ignore it.

“You think about what’s happening this week. There is a potential tragedy unfolding with the submarine that is getting, you know, minute-to-minute, coverage, all around the world.

“And you know it’s understandable, because we all want and pray that those folks are rescued.

“But the fact that that’s got so much more attention than 700 people who sank,” the crowd began to applaud at this, realising where Obama was going with his sentence.

He added: “That’s an untenable situation.”

He was referring to the fishing trawler which sank off the coast of Greece, with 700 asylum seekers on board on June 14.

The International Organisation for Migration called it “the worst sea tragedies in the last decade in Greece”.

However, it received just a fraction of the coverage the submarine crisis did. There were five people on the the tourist submersible, named the Titan, when it went missing while en route to see the Titanic shipwreck.

Regularly news alerts and live blogs were set up in an effort to track the search and rescue mission for the five passengers, stretching on between Sunday and Thursday.

Obama’s comments came hours before the US Coast Guard confirmed that the five people who were on board the Titan died in a “catastrophic implosion”.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Obama repeated his sentiment – and, this time, emphasised how it reflects a larger problem with inequality.

He said: “Our democracy is not going to be healthy with the levels of inequality that we’ve seen, generated from globalisation, automation, the decline in unions, obscene inequality.”

He referenced the “news of the day” had focused on how “the submersible, that tragically is right now lost at the bottom of the sea.”

Obama continued: “At the same time, right here, in just off the coast of Greece, we had 700 people that – 700 migrants who were apparently being smuggled into here, and we’ve made news, but it’s not dominating in the same way.

“And in some ways, it’s indicative of the degree to which people’s life chances have grown so disparate.”

Related...

The Titanic sub disaster was 'clearly preventable' and the vessel wouldn't have been allowed in US, British, or Canadian waters uncertified, expert says

Sinéad Baker
Fri, June 23, 2023 

The Titan submersible in water.OceanGate

The Titan submersible disaster was "clearly preventable," William Kohnen, an industry expert, said.


He said regulations gave the industry a "stellar record of success" but OceanGate bypassed them.


He said the sub would not have been allowed to operated like it did in US, UK or Canadian waters.

The implosion of the Titan submersible en route to the wreckage of the Titanic with five people on board was "clearly preventable" and the vessel would not have been allowed to operated like it did in many countries' waters, including those of the US, an industry expert said.

William Kohnen, chair of the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee of the US-based industry group Marine Technology Society, told the BBC on Friday that industry regulations are strong, but that OceanGate Expeditions got around them by operating in international waters.

"This was clearly preventable. We do have regulations," he said.

Kohnen said that industry rules meant there has been a "stellar record of success."

But he said that OceanGate's Titan submersible was able to avoid those regulations by operating in international waters "where no coast guard has jurisdiction" and because the company made it for themselves.

Kohnen said that a submersible like the Titan, with tourists on board, would not be allowed to operate in US waters by the US Coast Guard.

It would also "not be allowed to work in British coastal waters because it would have required it to be certified. Same thing in Canada," he said.

The vessel lost contact with its mothership an hour and 45 minutes into its dive on Sunday, sparking a major search operation.

But on Thursday the US Coast Guard announced that the sub appeared to have imploded amid a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber." It said all five passengers were believed to have been killed.

Experts raised a raft of safety concerns with the submersible both before and after it went missing.

This included a 2018 letter sent to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was on the submersible when it imploded, that was signed by experts including Kohnen.

In the letter they said that the company's "experimental" approach and its decision not to pay for a leading agency to inspect the Titan could result in "catastrophic" problems.

They also said they had "unanimous concern" about the way the Titan was developed.

Former passengers of the Titan have detailed worrying issues like communication being lost on multiple trips.

One CBS journalist who went on the submersible last year was made to sign a waiver that said the Titan was an "experimental vessel" that had not been "approved or certified by any regulatory body."

Before the accident Rush had repeatedly criticized safety regulations. He also said in a 2021 interview that he had "broken some rules" with the Titan's manufacturing, highlighting the mix of carbon fiber and titanium the company used on its hull, despite solid metals like steel or titanium normally being used.

OceanGate and Rush repeatedly defended the safety of its design.

A spokesman for the mothership that launched the Titan also defended OceanGate during the search, saying the company has an "extremely safe operation."

'Mythbusters' video shows what a deep-sea implosion does to a faux human in a scuba suit

Jessica Orwig
Fri, June 23, 2023 

A US navy diver on a ‘diving stage’ before a dive in 1955

.Al Barry/Three Lions/Getty

A clip from an old episode of the TV show "Mythbusters" has resurfaced on Twitter.

Account @ChudsOfTikTok posted the clip as a comparison of what happened on the Titan submersible.

But what is shown in the video clip is under extremely different circumstances from the lost sub.

Typical diving suits are pressurized so the diver doesn't have to worry about decompression sickness when they resurface.

But if something goes wrong with the suit's pressurization, it could be catastrophic for the diver.

To understand what exactly would happen to a diver in this bleak situation, TV show hosts Jessi Combs, Kari Byron, Tory Belleci, and Grant Imahara conducted a science experiment for season 7, episode 19, of "Mythbusters," according to Newsweek.

They created a human-shaped mannequin from pig parts. The meat dummy came complete with bones, muscle, fat, skin, and a midsection of guts. Then they put the mannequin in an old diving suit and sunk it 300 feet underwater, where the pressure is about nine times great than at sea level.

The Twitter account ChudsofTikTok recently resurfaced the clip from the episode in an attempt to conceptualize what may have happened to the Titan passengers who were recently reported dead after their submersible likely imploded during its descent to the Titanic wreck site.

However, it's worth noting that the passengers were not wearing diving suits and they were likely much deeper than 300 feet when the submersible was thought to have imploded — meaning the implosion that the faux meat mannequin experiences in the "Mythbusters" experiment is probably much slower than what the Titan passengers may have experienced. They likely died within milliseconds.

In the clip below, the rapid change in air pressure once the air supply is cut forces most of the suit's meaty contents into the helmet as the suit itself collapses inward. Warning: seeing the process unfold is a gruesome sight.

What we know about the ocean’s depths — and why it’s so risky to explore it

Jackie Wattles CNN
Fri, June 23, 2023 

The submersible vehicle that was lost at sea is part of a relatively new effort enabling tourists and other paying customers to explore the depths of the ocean, the vast majority of which has never been seen by human eyes.

Though people have been exploring the ocean’s surface for tens of thousands of years, only about 20% of the seafloor has been mapped, according to 2022 figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Researchers often say that traveling to space is easier than plunging to the bottom of the ocean. While 12 astronauts have spent a collective total of 300 hours on the lunar surface, only three people have spent around three hours exploring Challenger Deep, the deepest known point of Earth’s seabed, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

In fact, “we have better maps of the moon and Mars than we do of our own planet,” said Dr. Gene Feldman, an oceanographer emeritus at NASA who spent more than 30 years at the space agency.

There’s a reason deep-sea exploration by humans has been so limited: Traveling to the ocean’s depths means entering a realm with enormous levels of pressure the farther you descend — a high-risk endeavor. The environment is dark with almost no visibility. The cold temperatures are extreme.

The submersible, which is believed to have been destroyed in a catastrophic implosion, killing all five people aboard, was en route to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. The remnants of the ship lie about 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and about 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) underwater. Operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a private company based in Washington state, the tourist vessel lost contact with its mother ship after departing on Sunday.

The US Navy later revealed that it had detected a sound on Sunday that would match an implosion, indicating the vessel, called the Titan, was rapidly destroyed. The disaster could have occurred during the submersible’s descent, as pressure on the vehicle grew.

Many of the factors that made the multiday search for the vessel so difficult are also the reasons a comprehensive exploration of the ocean floor remains elusive.

“Aquatic search is pretty tricky, as the ocean floor is a lot more rugged than on land,” said Dr. Jamie Pringle, a reader in forensic geoscience at England’s Keele University, in a statement.

In the days before the submersible’s likely implosion was confirmed, search and rescue teams relied on sonar, a technique that uses sound waves to explore the opaque depths of the ocean, to attempt to pinpoint the vehicle in case it had been stranded on the seafloor. The challenging process requires a very narrow beam with a high frequency to offer a clear picture of where objects might be.
A history of ocean exploration

The first submarine was built by Dutch engineer Cornelis Drebbel in 1620, but it stuck to shallow waters. It would take nearly 300 years — in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster — before sonar technology began to offer scientists a clearer picture of what lies in the ocean’s depths.

A major step forward in human exploration came in 1960 with the historic dive of the Trieste bathyscaphe, a type of free-diving submersible, to the Challenger Deep, located more than 35,800 feet (10,916 meters) underwater.

Explorer and physicist Auguste Piccard is seen wearing a life jacket as he emerges from the bathyscaphe Trieste, which he designed, after making a world record dive of 10,335 feet (3,150 meters) on October 3, 1953. The dive was made off the west coast of Italy. - Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Only a few missions since have returned to such depths. And the trips are extremely dangerous, Feldman said.

For every 33 feet (10 meters) traveled beneath the ocean’s surface, the pressure increases by one atmosphere, according to NOAA. An atmosphere is a unit of measure that’s 14.7 pounds per square inch. That means a trip to the Challenger Deep can put a vessel under pressure that is “equivalent to 50 jumbo jets,” Feldman noted.

At high pressure, the tiniest structural defect can spell disaster, Feldman added.

During the 1960 dive of the Trieste, passengers Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh said they were stunned to see living creatures.

“Right away, all of our preconceptions about the ocean were blown out the window,” Feldman said.

What lies at the bottom of the ocean

While what’s considered the deep ocean extends from 3,280 feet to 19,685 feet (1,000 meters to 6,000 meters) beneath the surface, deep-sea trenches can plunge to 36,000 feet (11,000 meters), according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. This region, called the hadal or hadalpelagic zone, is named for Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. In the hadal zone, the temperatures are just above freezing, and no light from the sun penetrates.

Scientists were first able to prove that life existed below 19,685 feet in 1948, according to the institution.

Discoveries at the Challenger Deep have been remarkable, including “vibrantly colorful” rocky outcrops that could be chemical deposits, prawnlike supergiant amphopods, and bottom-dwelling Holothurians, or sea cucumbers.

Feldman also remembers his own attempt in the 1990s to catch a glimpse of the evasive giant squid, which lurks in the inky depths of the ocean. The first video of a live creature, which can grow to nearly 60 feet (18 meters) long, was captured in the deep sea near Japan in 2012, according to NOAA.

A new world also opened in the 1970s, Feldman said, when “an entirely alien ecosystem” was discovered by marine geologist Robert Ballard, then with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, within the sea near the Galápagos Rift — “with these giant worms, giant clams, and crabs and things that lived at these … vents under the sea.”

A female deep-sea anglerfish attracts prey with a lure projecting from her head in the Atlantic Ocean. - Bluegreen Pictures/Alamy Stock Photo

The unusual creatures — some of which glow with bioluminescence to communicate, lure prey and attract mates — have carved out habitats within the steep walls of ocean trenches. These life forms have adapted to live in the extreme environment and don’t exist anywhere else on the planet. Instead of relying on sunlight for fundamental processes, they use chemical energy belched out from hydrothermal seeps and vents formed by magma rising from beneath the ocean floor.

The chilly seawater seeps through seafloor cracks and becomes heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius) as it interacts with the magma-heated rocks. The chemical reactions produce minerals containing sulfur and iron, and the vents spew out the nutrient-rich water that supports the ecosystem of unusual marine life clustered around them.

Researchers have used the submersible Alvin to discover strange sea life, study plate tectonics and hydrothermal vents — and to explore the Titanic in 1986 after Ballard located the famed shipwreck.

Researchers from the WHOI and NASA have collaborated to develop uncrewed autonomous underwater vehicles that can descend through the tricky terrain of the trenches and withstand pressures greater than 1,000 times that at the ocean’s surface. The vehicles can investigate the diversity of life within the trenches, and they could also help scientists explore oceans on the moons around Jupiter and Saturn in the future.

A giant isopod is a deep-sea crustacean. 

- Alessandro Mancini/Alamy Stock Photo

Why mapping the ocean is so challenging

From a strictly scientific perspective, touristic trips to the ocean floor do little to advance our understanding of the ocean’s mysteries.

“Humans like superlatives,” Feldman said. “We want to go to the highest, the lowest, the longest.”

But only a “very small percentage of the deep ocean, and even the middle ocean, has been seen by human eyes — an infinitesimal amount. And a very, very small amount of the ocean floor has been mapped,” he added.

The reason, Feldman noted, largely comes down to cost. Boats equipped with sonar technology can rack up exorbitant expenses. Fuel alone can total up to $40,000 per day, Feldman said.

There is, however, currently an effort underway to create a definitive map of the ocean floor, called Seabed 2030.

Still, there are huge gaps in what’s known of the deep sea. Of the 2.2 million species believed to exist in Earth’s oceans, only 240,000 have been described by scientists, according to the Ocean Census, an initiative to record and discover marine life.

However, it’s impossible to know for certain just how many sea creatures exist, Feldman noted.

Most of the seafloor explored during Dive 07 of the 2019 Southeastern US Deep-sea Exploration, conducted by NOAA and its partners, was covered with these manganese nodules, the subject of the Deep Sea Ventures pilot test nearly five decades ago. - Courtesy NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration/Research, 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration

“We can make estimates all the time but then … you go somewhere new and discover an entirely new genus or an entirely new way of living,” he said.

Advances in technology may make human exploration of the ocean depths unnecessary. Innovations such as deep-sea robots, high-resolution underwater imaging, machine learning, and sequencing of DNA contained in seawater will help accelerate the speed and scale of discovery of new life forms.

“We have better maps of the moon’s surface than of the seafloor because seawater is opaque to radar and other methods we use to map land,” said marine ecologist Alex Rogers, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “However, 150 years of modern oceanography have led to better understanding of many aspects of the ocean such as the life it contains, its chemistry and its role in the Earth system.”

Mapping the ocean “helps us to understand how the shape of the seafloor affects ocean currents, and where marine life occurs,” Rogers added. “It also helps us to understand seismic hazards. So it is basic fundamental science of overwhelming importance to human well-being.”
Human health and scientific research

The ocean is thought to be a gold mine of compounds, and its exploration has led to several biomedical breakthroughs.

The first marine-derived drug, Cytarabine, was approved in 1969 for the treatment of leukemia. The medication was isolated from a marine sponge.

Work on bioactive compounds in the venom of cone snails, a type of sea mollusk, led to the development of a potent pain reliever called ziconotide (commercially known as Prialt).

Scientists developed PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, a technique widely used to copy strands of DNA, with the help of an enzyme isolated from a microbe found in marine hydrothermal vents. And a green fluorescent protein observed in jellyfish allows researchers to watch once-invisible processes, including the spread of cancer cells and the development of nerve cells.

These are just a few examples. Researchers say the ocean and the life it contains could provide answers to some of medicine’s biggest challenges, such as antibiotic drug resistance. Studying the sea can also tell us about how life evolved.

“The ocean contains many more of the deep branches of life that have evolved over 4 billion years on Earth and so marine life can tell us a lot about the evolution of both whole organisms and specific biological systems such as developmental genes and immune system,” Rogers said via email.

6 incredible facts about the Challenger Deep, the deepest point on Earth


Jackie Wattles
Fri, June 23, 2023 

Just as Earth’s land surface has enormous peaks and valleys, the oceanic world has similarly varied topography.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these features is the Mariana Trench — a chasm in the western Pacific Ocean that spans more than 1,580 miles (2,540 kilometers) and is home to the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on Earth’s surface that plunges more than 36,000 feet (about 11,000 meters) underwater.

That’s nearly three times deeper than the site where the wreckage of the RMS Titanic lies in the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

Here are some fascinating facts about this deep-sea phenomenon.

1. ‘Titanic’ director James Cameron is one of the few people who have visited

Few human expeditions have ventured to the Challenger Deep.

The first came in 1960 with the historic dive of the Trieste bathyscaphe, a type of free-diving submersible. During the dive, passengers Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh said they were stunned to see living creatures where scientists once imagined it was impossible for anything to survive.

“Right away, all of our preconceptions about the ocean were blown out the window,” Dr. Gene Feldman, an oceanographer emeritus at NASA, previously told CNN. He spent more than 30 years at the space agency.

Deep-sea explorer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Cameron sits in a scale model of the Deepsea Challenger's pilot chamber at an exhibition about his history-making ocean expeditions in Sydney on May 28, 2018. - Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images

James Cameron, director of the 1997 film “Titanic,” was the next deep-sea explorer to follow. He piloted a submersible — one that he personally had helped design — to about 35,787 feet (10,908 meters), setting a world record in 2012.

2. A plastic bag was found in the trench

Another explorer who returned to the site was Victor Vescovo, a Texas investor who journeyed 35,853 feet (10,927 meters) down and claimed a world record in 2019.

Vescovo gave depressing insight into humankind’s impact on these seemingly untouchable remote locations when he observed a plastic bag and candy wrappers at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

A handful of explorers have trekked to the Challenger Deep since then, but the expeditions are not common — and the journey is extremely dangerous.


Explorer and Texas investor Victor Vescovo said he saw a plastic bag and candy wrappers at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. - Atlantic Productions for Discovery Channel

For every 33 feet (10 meters) traveled beneath the ocean’s surface, the pressure on an object increases by one atmosphere, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. An atmosphere is a unit of measure that’s 14.7 pounds per square inch. A trip to the Challenger Deep can put a vessel under pressure that is “equivalent to 50 jumbo jets,” Feldman noted.

3. It lies in the hadal zone, named for the god of the underworld

Much like the Earth’s atmosphere, the ocean can be described in terms of layers.

The uppermost portion is called the epipelagic zone, or the sunlight zone, and extends just 660 feet (200 meters) below the water’s surface, according to NOAA.

The mesopelagic zone, or the so-called twilight zone, stretches from the end of the sunlight zone to about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters).

ROV Deep Discoverer images a newly discovered hydrothermal vent field at Chamorro Seamount, which is located west of the Mariana Trench. - NOAA Office of OER/2016 Deepwater Exploration of the Marianas

Then there’s the bathypelagic zone, also called the midnight zone, and, beneath that, the abyssopelagic zone — as in, the abyssal zone — that extends from 13,100 feet (4,000 meters) to 19,700 feet (6,000 meters). That’s nearly 4 miles underwater. Within the abyssal zone, few life-forms can survive, the water is completely devoid of light, and temperatures are near freezing.

But the Challenger Deep lies even further — in the hadalpelagic zone, or the hadal zone. It’s named for Hades, the Greek god of the underworld thought to rule over the dead.

4. It’s home to unique aquatic life and mud volcanoes

The hadal zone is one of the least explored habitats on Earth. At bone-crushing depths with no sunlight, it was long thought that nothing could survive there.

But that belief has been dispelled.

“Even at the very bottom, life exists. In 2005, tiny single-celled organisms called foraminifera, a type of plankton, were discovered in the Challenger Deep,” according to NOAA.

A hydrothermal-vent chimney belches nutrient-rich fluid, which appears as dark smoke (center) due to its high levels of minerals and sulfides. The chimney is crawling with Chorocaris shrimp and Austinograea wiliamsi crabs. - NOAA Office of OER/2016 Deepwater Exploration of the Marianas

Discoveries at the Challenger Deep have included colorful rocky outcrops and bottom-dwelling sea cucumbers.

A series of undersea mud volcanoes and hydrothermal vents in the Mariana Trench also support unusual life-forms, according to NOAA. Despite the highly acidic and infernally hot water produced by hydrothermal vents in mud volcanoes, exotic species and microscopic organisms there are able to survive.

In the absence of sunlight, the creatures instead benefit from the nutrient-rich waters belched out from hydrothermal vents. The life-supporting medium results from chemical reactions between the seawater and magma rising from beneath the ocean floor.

5. The Mariana Trench was designated as a US national monument in 2009

The Marianas Trench Marine National Monument was established in 2009, in part to protect the rare organisms that thrive within its depths.

Objects of interest include the submerged ecosystem and its life-forms, such as deep-sea shrimp and crabs, and — higher up in the water column — stony coral reefs.

“A great diversity of seamount and hydrothermal vent life (is) worth preservation,” according to NOAA.

The entire national monument protects about 95,000 square miles (246,049 square kilometers).

This stunning sea jelly was seen while exploring the Enigma Seamount at 12,139 feet (3,700 meters) in the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument. - NOAA Office of OER/2016 Deepwater Exploration of the Marianas

6. It’s difficult to know just how deep the trench goes

The ocean floor remains one of the most mysterious places in the universe.

In fact, “we have better maps of the moon and Mars than we do of our own planet,” Feldman previously told CNN.

Though people have been exploring the ocean’s surface for tens of thousands of years, only about 20% of the seafloor has been mapped, according to 2022 figures from NOAA.

Given high interest in the Mariana Trench, however, researchers have made several efforts to give increasingly detailed pictures of its features. But that’s not easy: Due to the vastness and deepness of the bottommost ocean zone, scientists must rely on sonar, or acoustic, technology to attempt to give a full picture of what’s below.

Because instrumentation and technology are constantly improving, the estimated depth of the Challenger Deep has been updated as recently as 2021 to about 35,876 feet (10,935 meters).

How deep is the ocean? Deeper than the highest point on Earth's surface, by more than a mile

Jessica Orwig
Thu, June 22, 2023 

Shot from an underwater cave looking up to the sun at the water's surface.
Most of the ocean is unexplored terrain.

Inusuke/Getty Images

The ocean is significantly deeper than the highest point on Earth's surface.

The Titanic is farther down than the deepest-diving mammal, the Cuvier's beaked whale, ventures.

Even this wreck doesn't come close to the deepest-crewed mission that reached 35,839 feet in 2019.

This article is primarily transcribed from a 2017 Insider video: "This incredible animation shows how deep the ocean really is." Some of the information has been updated.

Just how deep does the ocean go? If you took the highest point on land and submerged it, you would still have more than a mile between you and the deepest point in the ocean.

The oceans harbor 99% of all living space on Earth and have enough water to fill a bathtub that's 685 miles long on each side. To compare, the state of California is about 720 miles long.

For scale, the average height of a human is about one-sixteenth the typical length of a blue whale — the largest animal on Earth. Blue whales usually hunt at depths of around 330 feet, within the well-lit zone of the ocean.

Blue whales can dive to depths of more than 1,600 feet.

Robert Smits/Getty Images

Deeper down, at 700 feet, the USS Triton became the first submarine to circumnavigate the Earth in 1960.

At 831 feet, we reach the deepest free dive in recorded history by the Austrian-born diver Herbert Nitsch. The pressure is 26 times greater here than at the surface, which would crush most human lungs. But blue whales manage it when they dive to a max depth of 1,640 feet to hunt giant squid.

During his descent, Nitsch developed severe decompression syndrome, which led to multiple brain strokes. However, he reached the surface, recovered inside a hyperbaric chamber, and ultimately survived to tell the tale.

At 2,400 feet, we reach the danger zone for modern nuclear-attack submarines. Any deeper and the submarine's haul would implode.

Reaching 2,722 feet down is where the tip of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, would reach. A little farther at 3,280 feet, we're deep enough that sunlight can't reach us. We've now entered the midnight zone.

Many animals down here can't see, such as the eyeless shrimp at 7,500 feet which thrive near scalding hot underwater volcanoes.

Underwater volcanoes are a haven for deep-sea life.

Ralph White/Getty Images

At this depth, temperatures are just a few degrees above freezing, but the water around hydrothermal vents can heat up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Around 9,816 feet is the deepest any mammal has been recorded swimming — the record was set by the Cuvier's beaked whale.

But not even Cuvier's beaked whales could explore the wreck of the Titanic, which rests at a staggering depth of 12,500 feet.

The pressure is now 378 times greater than at the surface. Yet you can still find life like the fangtooth hagfish and dumbo octopus, the deepest-living octopus on Earth.

At 20,000 feet is the hadal zone, an area designated for the ocean's deepest trenches, such as the Mariana Trench.

The Challenger Deep is the deepest point on Earth.

blueringmedia/Getty Images

If you tipped Mount Everest into the Mariana Trench, its summit would reach down to 29,029 feet — that still doesn't compare to the two deepest-crewed missions in history.

In 1960, the oceanographer Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh descended to the lowest point on Earth, the Challenger Deep, at a record 25,979 feet below the surface.

They held the record for decades until the explorer Victor Vescovo came along in 2019. Vescovo made three dives to the Challenger Deep that year and set a new record on the third dive, reaching a depth of 35,839 feet.

Scientists have sent half a dozen unmanned submersibles to explore the Challenger Deep, including Kaiko, which collected more than 350 species on the seafloor from 1995 to 2003. But scientists estimate there are potentially thousands of marine species we have yet to discover.

Humans have explored an estimated 5% to 10% of Earth's oceans. We've only just begun to understand the deep, dark world that flows beneath us.

Watch the original video here:

Did a tsunami hit Florida? Sort of. Here’s what experts are saying about the phenomena.



Samantha Neely, Fort Myers News-Press
Fri, June 23, 2023

For a state that sees natural disasters regularly, the words "Florida" and "tsunami" rarely, if ever, go together within a sentence.

Yet, some residents of Clearwater Beach found themselves at the scene of a small one on Wednesday afternoon, even if they might not realize it.

According to experts, the Gulf of Mexico beach was hit by a meteotsunami, a small type of tsunami. Here's what we know about the situation so far.

Meteotsunmai causes tragedy: A rogue wave caused a cruise ship tragedy. They occur more often than you think.

Did Florida get a tsunami?

Yes, it did, but more of a "tiny" one. According to the Weather Channel's Ari Salsalari, on Wednesday, June 21, Clearwater Beach experienced a meteotsunami.

The meteorologist explained that the strong squall line, known as a line of thunderstorms, showed it was in a small tsunami.

"Before the storms arrived, the wind was pretty light and out of the Southwest … and then sort of like a cold front, the winds switched out of the Northwest, so they kind of switched directions and they became pretty gusty right as the heavy rain arrived," Salsalari said in a video posted to the Weather Channel site. "But here's the thing, unlike a cold front, the pressure actually rose as the squalls made it to the shoreline."

He showed that the pressure picked by around 2 p.m., adding that the rising pressure and changing direction of the wind caused water levels to jump by roughly two and a half feet.

What is a meteotsunami?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration writes that meteotsunamis, unlike tsunamis triggered by seismic activity, are driven by air-pressure disturbances often associated with fast-moving weather events, such as severe thunderstorms, squalls, and other storm fronts. The storm generates a wave that moves toward the shore and is amplified by a shallow continental shelf and inlet, bay, or other coastal features.

These are still being studied and understood by scientists. So far, meteotsunamis have been observed to reach heights of over 6 feet and occur in many places around the world, including the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Coast, and the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.

What is the difference between a meteotsunami and seiches?

NOAA shares that meteotsunamis and seiches will be confused for one another, as winds and atmospheric pressure can contribute to the formation of both.

However, winds are typically more important to a seiche motion, while pressure often plays a substantial role in meteotsunami formation. Seiches are standing waves with longer periods of water-level oscillations, typically exceeding periods of three or more hours. Meteotsunamis are progressive waves limited to the tsunami frequency band of wave periods anywhere from two minutes to two hours.

What is a rip current? How to stay safe in the ocean when risks are high

Has Florida ever had a tsunami?

There have been eight tsunamis in Florida since 1848, with the most recent one being in 2001.
Is it likely for a tsunami to happen in Florida?

Experts claim the Atlantic Ocean has a relatively low rate of tsunami occurrences. Florida very rarely experiences many tsunamis, but it is still at risk.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Tsunami in Florida? What to know about tiny hit to Clearwater Beach

Tonga 2022 eruption triggered the most intense lightning storm ever recorded

Kiley Price
Fri, June 23, 2023 

The underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano eruption on Jan. 15, 2022.

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano in Tonga erupted in 2022, it generated the most intense lightning ever recorded, a new study finds.

Located off the coast of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific, the submarine volcano produced one of the most violent eruptions in history, with more explosive force than 100 simultaneous Hiroshima bombs, according to NASA. The volcano spewed magma that immediately vaporized the seawater, sending a mushroom cloud of ash, gas and more than 50 million tons (45 million metric tons) of water vapor into the sky.

According to the new study, published Tuesday (June 20) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, these conditions produced electrically charged collisions between ash, supercooled water and hailstones in the plume and triggered "a supercharged thunderstorm, the likes of which we've never seen," study lead author Alexa Van Eaton, a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), said in a statement. The storm generated more than 192,000 lightning flashes — composed of nearly 500,000 electrical pulses — and peaked at 2,615 flashes per minute. Some of the lightning reached altitudes of up to 19 miles (30 kilometers) above sea level, the highest lightning flashes ever measured, the researchers said.

Related: Tonga's massive volcanic eruption wiped out unique, never-before-seen life-forms

"With this eruption, we discovered that volcanic plumes can create the conditions for lightning far beyond the realm of meteorological thunderstorms we've previously observed," Van Eaton said. "It turns out, volcanic eruptions can create more extreme lightning than any other kind of storm on Earth." That includes lightning from supercell storms and tropical cyclones, according to the study.

For their analysis, the scientists compiled data from four sources, including the satellite-based Geostationary Lightning Mapper, a NASA tool that tracks lightning from space. When the volcanic plume mushroomed outward after reaching its maximum height, in a pattern known as a gravity wave, some of the lightning followed suit, rippling out around the volcano in concentric rings that expanded and contracted, the study found.

The GOES-17 satellite captured images of an umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022. Crescent-shaped bow shock waves and numerous lighting strikes are also visible.

"It wasn't just the lightning intensity that drew us in," Van Eaton said. "The scale of these lightning rings blew our minds. We've never seen anything like that before; there's nothing comparable in meteorological storms. Single lightning rings have been observed, but not multiples, and they're tiny by comparison."

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The data also revealed that the plumes created by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption grew for at least 11 hours — much longer than original projections of only an hour or two, the researchers said. This method of tracking lightning intensity alongside eruptive activity could enable scientists to better monitor the duration of volcanic eruptions and thus warn people about eruption-related risks.

"These findings demonstrate a new tool we have to monitor volcanoes at the speed of light and help the USGS's role to inform ash hazard advisories to aircraft," Van Eaton said.