Joint expeditions performed by scientific scuba divers from MSC Basrah (Iraq) and SDC Freiberg (Germany) carried out in September 2012 and in May 2013, revealed the existence of a true live coral reef in Iraqi coastal waters for the first time ever.

The Iraqi coast at the northern end of the Persian Gulf is dominated by the large swampy river delta of the rivers Euphrates, Tigris and Karun, merging into the Shatt al-Arab that represents the main outflow in the Arabian/Persian Gulf.

At the beginning of World War I the German submarine U-26 disappeared without a trace.

On October 11, 1914, she sank the Russian cruiser Pallada inflicting the first loss of the war on the Russian navy. The boat did not return from sea in August 1915 and is assumed to have struck a mine or suffered a technical failure off the coast of Finland.

The Finnish group of divers who goes by the name Badewanne states on their website:

The animals tagged for this study exhibited profound diving capabilities; however, the dive depths and durations reported here far exceed the prior records for this species. The deepest dive of 2992 m.

Diel patterns in dive behaviour were strongly evident in this dataset, confirming previous observations from short overnight deployments that this whale spends significantly more time in waters above 50 m at night than they do during the day.

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey found that although female humpback whales have crossed from one hemisphere to another at certain times in the last few thousand years, they generally stay in their ocean of birth.

This isolation means they have been evolving semi-independently for a long time, so the humpbacks in the three global ocean basins should be classified as separate subspecies. This has implications for how we think about their conservation and recovery on a regional scale.

“Further genetic sequencing and analysis should also help us to understand more about the pattern of humpback migrations in the past. Big changes in the ocean can leave signatures in the genetic code of marine species. For example, the last glacial maximum caused many to shift southwards until the ice retreated or to find ice-free areas in the north.

Humpbacks are excellent oceanographers; they go where the food is and can travel long distances to get it, so their patterns of past migration can tell us a lot about the ocean thousands of years ago.”