UFO Info Week-End

For small spills the best environmental option is thought to be letting them disperse naturally

For small spills, the best environmental option is thought to be letting them disperse naturally.Conoco says it has searched for Lophelia, the deep, cold water coral found along the Atlantic frontier which Greenpeace says is at risk from oil exploitation, and on which it based its court case. So far, using side-scan sonar and remote-control submarines with cameras and bright lights, the company has found none of the coral around the Sovereign Explorer. But the television pictures reveal plenty of other life swimming and crawling along the muddy, sunless seabed, including a five-ft shark. Dolphins and pilot whales have been seen from the rig at the surface.As for the dangers of extreme wind and wave, the rig has encountered two gales with wind of more than 70 mph since arriving on station in August.

It heaved up and down 30 feet but stayed in place, thanks to eight 12- tonne anchors attached to one and a half miles of chain and cable.Ian Blood, Conoco’s UK head of exploration, accepts that the increasing use of oil and gas was likely to alter climate and that alternatives had to be developed. “They will take their place in the market eventually, 20 to 30 years out,” he said. In the meantime, it was up to voters and politicians to decide if they wanted the very significant changes in lifestyles and abandoning fossil fuels involved, he said. “It’s not for a company like us to tell the public what to do.”. A provocative experiment is under way marrying scientific theories with radical garden design. Stephen Goodwin, Heritage Correspondent, went to south-west Scotland to see how creation is being represented through landscape and lettuces.

What will archaeologists in centuries to come make of a conical grass-covered mound that stands 50ft high in well-tended parkland? Two paths spiral upwards to its summit without crossing. For stretches the visitor has the curious sensation of walking down when the path is supposed to be going up. On descent, the confusion is reversed.
A religious significance would be the archaeologist’s first surmise. There is just room for two people to stand on the flattened summit with a panorama of distant hills and more intriguing earthworks in the foreground. A place designed, it seems, for worship or sacrifice.The cone, however, and the 400ft-long earth barrow which twists away in an S by a lake are not the work of priests but features in a “garden of cosmic speculation”, created by the architect Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie Keswick. Covering 30 acres on the Keswick family estate, it is intended as a metaphor for scientific theories on the creation of the universe, though it can be enjoyed on the simpler level of startlingly innovative garden design.A leading post modernist – he defined the term – Mr Jencks, an American, sums up the 15 billion years of creation as a “noble and delirious drama” in four parts – the “misnamed” Big Bang created energy; this dynamic pulse partly froze into matter; matter jumped into life; and life begat sentient creatures – “creative, reflective, clever and stupid”.Each jump was the coming forth of the unexpected, Mr Jencks argued in his book The Architecture of the Jumping Universe.

“The Universe is as unpredictably creative as a mad, nineteenth century inventor: it changes its mind and jumps.”To find the unexpected in such a garden should be no surprise. In a damp, wooded corner known as the Paradise-Hell Garden is a low ring of upside-down trees, roots in the air; step back before ascending a stairway and you see it has been constructed to give an extended perspective.The two motifs which recur throughout, whether in the ha-ha by the Victorian house, hedges, brick walls and paving are the wave and the twist – are pulses of energy folding in on themselves to create a single force and unravelling in new directions.”I have never understood why architects, painters and philosophers – following Plato – have thought that the ultimate reality behind things lies in straight lines, right angles and perfect geometric solids,” Mr Jencks said. “Nature is basically curved, warped, undulating, jagged, zig-zagged and sometimes beautifully crinkly. It never looks like a Platonic temple of a railroad.”This approach has caused some headaches for Alistair Clark, the head gardener, whose task it is to give physical expression to the architect’s scientific notions.