Happy New Year! The New Year 2014 begins with both a new moon and a supermoon. The month also ends with a both a new moon and and a supermoon on the 30th. A supermoon is the term applied when the moon is at perigee, the closest approach the Moon makes to the Earth on its elliptical orbit. A supermoon during a full moon will cause the moon to appear up to 16% bigger than usual. A supermoon during a new moon will, of course, not appear larger, as the moon is in the shadow of the earth during a new moon and is not visible at all. Tides are usually higher during a supermoon.
According to Earth Sky: “..The year 2014 will have five supermoons: two January new moons, and the full moons of July, August and September. The full moon on August 10, 2014, is the closest supermoon of the year (356,896 kilometers or 221,765 miles).
In the list of the world’s 
MSC Monterey
Two recent items on sharks in the news — a photobombing shark off the coast of California and Australian sharks posting warnings on Twitter.
By definition, shipping is the ultimate offshore industry. For most, the business of shipping is largely invisible, literally beyond the horizon. I recently came across two representations of global shipping – a plot developed from ship’s logs from the 18th and 19th centuries and an animation of a week’s shipping traffic using AIS and satellite technology from 
The Chinese icebreaker 
On July 9, 1866, Captains Hudson and Fitch with their dog, Fanny, sailed from New York in a three masted full-rigged 26 foot long boat named “Red, White, and Blue.” They arrived in Margate in in East Kent, UK on August 16th. While the rigging was conventional, if diminutive, “Red, White, and Blue’s” hull was a galvanized metal lifeboat. The trip was intended to publicize a new metal lifeboat design by New York boat builder, O.K. Ingersoll. The words “Ingersoll’s Improved Metallic Life Boat” were written on both sides of the hull.
The brochure for for the cruise liner 
There was a 
President Obama recently nominated 
A recent article in 
Got a minute? Here is an animation of the world’s weather across the globe, showing the winds blowing across our ocean planet, as forecast by supercomputers and updated every three hours. You can also rotate the globe in any direction or zoom in and out by clicking and dragging with your mouse, so if you want to look specifically at the North Atlantic or the Southern Ocean, you can do do so. Be careful, however. The display can be mesmerizing.
This year,