Saturday November 20th, we have spent time working on the boat to get it ready for the Yangtze River project in 2010. A big group of volunteers from BEAN Shanghai decided to join us. BEAN is a networking, volunteering, and social group for young professionals in Shanghai. Their members can sign up for different volunteering events, and this day they chose to help us out.

The boat was docked at the Shanghai Sailing Club, where we arrived around 11 am, ready for some sanding action! We sanded off the orange paint and some of the handy men got into the boat and took off all parts of the boat that will not be used during the Yangtze River trip. The boat used to be a lifeboat, so it still had all kinds of life saving gear required to survive at sea (life vests, seatbelts, etcetera). This took up precious space that we will need for the projects’ equipment.

Shanghai Sailing Club has given us the possibility to leave the boat with them during the winter. In March we will move it to a workshop in Shanghai, which will make it easier to get to. At the moment we are putting together a team of handy men who will continue working on the boat in Spring.

A big thanks to all volunteers who helped us during this day!

We were in Wuhan to kickstart the project team for the Yangtze River and we combined it with being a guest speaker for the Wuhan AIESEC conference on Saturday November 14th. Around 150 people gathered together and enjoyed the lecture and workshop. As we are looking for trees for the freetrees website - AIESEC Wuhan has donated 20 trees.

On November 13 - 15 2009 we kickstarted our project teams from AIESEC to start calling schools if there was an interest to join the Green Power program in 2010. We selected 28 cities from Ybin to Shanghai.

The teams were very excited and in total we have 40 volunteers in Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan and Chonqing reaching out to 150 schools,

Helen from SISU is the national coordinator for AIESEC, Julie is the program Director for Marinedream Foundation.

Picture: team SISU

TESSA BICKFORD / AFP/Getty Images

SYDNEY: A large iceberg was spotted off an island about halfway between Antarctica and Australia, a rare sight in waters so far north, Australian scientists said yesterday. It could be headed for New Zealand.

Australian Antarctic Division researchers working on Macquarie Island, about 1,500 km southeast of Tasmania, first saw the iceberg last Thursday about 8 km off the northwest coast of the island.

“I’ve never seen anything like it - we looked out to the horizon and just saw this huge floating island of ice,” said fur seal biologist Dean Miller.

The iceberg, about 50 meters high and 500 meters long, is probably part of one of several larger icebergs that broke off Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf between 2000 and 2002, Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist Neal Young said.

Several icebergs have been drifting slowly northward with the coean current toward the island over the past year, but it is uncommon for them to move so far into warmer northern waters, he said.

The scientists believe the iceberg will break up and melt rapidly as it continues its journey north. Before it melts, however, it could present a danger to ships navigating the region, Young said.

In 2000, several massive icebergs broke off from Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf and the Ronne Ice Shelf. The first iceberg was about 300 km long and 37 km wide. Those icebergs are now drifting away from Antarctica.

Icebergs are formed as the ice shelf develops. Snow falls on the ice sheet and forms more ice, which flows to the edges onto the floating ice shelves. Eventually, pieces around the edge break off.

AP-AFP

The Leoclub The Hague together with kids from Blaise Pascal College and Stichting Mooi collected rubbish on the beach of The Hague. Reason to collect litter is to protect our ocean wildlife that they won’t get enstrangled or die because they mistook a piece of plastic for food.

Part of the project was also to get funding for our freetrees project and Yangtze River project.
Thanks so much for your participation and donations.

Marinedream was yesterday invited to come to the shipping wharf to select the boat for the Yangtze River trip! MAERSK work together on this shipping yard with the Chinese owner to dismantle old boats in an environmentally friendly way. First the chemical waste gets removed and asbestos and then the boats are cut up in pieces and sorted into piles of iron, aluminium etc for recycling. The lifeboat that has been donated to us come from the old Asian Panama.

Our team from Tongji University had the kickoff meeting last Sunday. Together with engineer Jean Nicolaas we will redesign this life vessel to a climate/energy friendly boat.

On Sunday we have had our workshop meetings with our volunteer groups of 3 universities: Shanghai International studies university, China Eastern Normal University and Tongji University.

Projects that they are working on:
- Fishmenu
- Outreach: blog
- Treecard Project
- Yangtze River Boat Project

Marinedream has been invited by AIESEC to give a workshop on environmental sustainability on Friday October 16th.

In total of the 300 delegates of ten universities from the Southern part of China joined this event and 65 of them joined our workgroup session. The conference was about UN Millenium goals, how students can play a role to help achieve these goals. Three of the 8 millenium goals were focus of this conference which were: environmental sustainability, HIV and social entrepeneurship.  In our workshop the students got an insight in how the three major themes of environmental degradation: climate change, pollution and biodiversity were related to our oceans and rivers and why we need to start taking action now. Second part of the workshop the students needed to think of ideas what they can do to protect our oceans and rivers. In total 8 groups presented their projects and many of their ideas were creating awareness, which is a great first step to achieve our goals of a cleaner ocean. They came up with ideas like photographing their environment and locate where the issues are and use internet as a medium.

I also met the presidents of the local chapter of AIESEC Nanjing, Wuhan and Chongqing and we will start preparing the arrangements for next year project the Yangtze River. Next week we will visit MAERSK and check the boat

We were very pleased to hear from Eelco from Stichting de Noordzee that we can use the old lifevessel from MAERSK for our Yangtze River trip in 2009. After our trip Stichting De Noordzee will use the vessel for research on the Northsea.

This is the first step to make that trip a reality!

AIESEC SISU will start on the 26^th of September to organize the Yangtze River Coordinators and 10 schools in 28 cities along the Yangtze River to join the program.

Further we found a Chinese hosting company willing to look after our hosting necessities. This is great news, because we will launch our outreach campaign after the October holidays.