Ξεκίνησαν σήμερα, Δευτέρα 20 Ιουνίου οι εργασίες της Αγίας και Μεγάλης Συνόδου στις εγκαταστάσεις της Ορθοδόξου Ακαδημίας της Κρήτης, στο Κολυμπάρι των Χανίων.
Την έναρξη της Αγίας Συνόδου έκανε ο Οικουμενικός Πατριάρχης κ. Βαρθολομαίος, ο οποίος στην ομιλία του μεταξύ άλλων ανέφερε ότι "ως Εκκλησία Θα ήμασταν υπόλογοι ενώπιον Θεού και ιστορίας εαν αναβάλαμε εκ νέου την Σύνοδο."
Επίσης ο Πατριάρχης Βαρθολομαίος τόνισε ότι από την πρώτη ημέρα της εκλογής του, εργαζόνταν για την σημερινή σύγκληση αυτής της Συνόδου, ενώ αποκάλεσε συντηρητικούς όλους εκείνους που απουσιάζαν από την Κρήτη.
Image copyrightGOKTAY KORALTANImage captionNo fights necessary over sun beds at hotels in Antalya
The group of British tourists playing water polo in the pool could shriek as loudly as they liked: there were virtually no other guests they'd disturb.
The four-star Garden Resort Bergamot Hotel in Kemer, just outside Antalya, should be 70% full at this time of year. But just 25 of the 233 rooms are taken.
"We've had to reduce our staff from 80 to 50 and prices have dropped by a third," says Suha Sen, the owner.
"If it goes on like this next year, we may have to close."
Around the pool, the few guests soaking up the sun say they clinched bargains.
"We paid just over £500 (€630) for two of us for a week, an all-inclusive package," says Diane Roberts from North Wales. "Most of the cheap deals now are for Turkey - we didn't expect it, but people are too afraid to come here."
It is a picture repeated across Antalya and throughout the country: Turkish tourism is in crisis. A country that welcomed 37 million visitors in 2014 - then the sixth most popular tourist destination in the world - is expected to see a drop of at least 40% this year.
Image copyrightGOKTAY KORALTANImage captionAmid the downturn, tourists are being offered cheap deals for holidays in TurkeyImage copyrightGOKTAY KORALTANImage captionA former hotspot for Russian tourists now empty - the Delphin Imperial in Antalya
The main decline is the Russian market, the four-and-a-half million Russian tourists who were coming have fallen in number by around 95%. The trigger was Turkey shooting down a Russian military jet which violated Turkish airspace last November, sparking a diplomatic crisis between the two countries.
The Kremlin seethed, barring Russian tour companies from selling package deals to Turkey. President Vladimir Putin told Russians to holiday elsewhere.
The two strongmen leaders - Mr Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan - are still at loggerheads, although Mr Erdogan did send a note to his counterpart this week to mark Russia's national day, in the hope of healing wounds.
What's more, a series of bombings across Turkey in the past year has scared off many others. Since violence resumed with the PKK Kurdish militants last summer, attacks by them and by the Islamic State group have occurred nationwide, some targeting tourists in Istanbul.
Image copyrightAFP/GETTY IMAGESImage captionTensions between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured) and Russian President Vladimir Putin has led to a steep decline in Russian visitors
British and German visitors are down by a third.
Political instability, with a president who makes the headlines for lambasting the West, prosecuting critics and labelling birth control "treason", hasn't helped.
It's not just the 8% of the workforce directly employed in tourism that are affected but also those that depend on the custom from foreign visitors.
In the old town of Antalya, shopkeepers sit idly in front of their businesses in the hope of passing trade, which simply isn't coming. Bright bougainvillea is draped over stone shops selling carpets and leather bags. But the streets are quiet.
Image copyrightGOKTAY KORALTANImage captionJewellery shop owner Istiklal Sevuk says President Erdogan is hurting Turkey's imageImage copyrightGOKTAY KORALTANImage captionRepeated terror attacks on major cities in recent months have played an important part in deterring tourists
Istiklal Sevuk has run his jewellery shop for almost 30 years and says it's never been so bad. "Yes we have terror attacks in the main cities - but our biggest problem is our government and President Erdogan," he says.
"He doesn't follow peace with our neighbours and he's damaging the image of the country. We don't have a government anymore - we have one man who does everything. Erdogan is why we're in this mess."
Mr Erdogan has blamed the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) for Turkey's current instability and rejected Western criticism of his policies.
In the once Russian-dominated area of Belek, businesses have been crushed. One tour operator, Pegas, used to bring 19 planes a day to Antalya, full of Russians. Now the company has had to ditch the fleet and fire 3,000 staff.
Image copyrightGOKTAY KORALTANImage captionTourism is at 'rock bottom', Delphin Imperial hotel director Tolga Comertoglu saysImage copyrightGOKTAY KORALTANImage captionGeo-political and security factors are both responsible for the decline in Turkey's tourism
At the flashy Delphin Imperial hotel and private beach, where Russians used to flock, it's hard to hear a word of Russian spoken.
The place screams lavishness, from the design - modelled on New York's Chrysler Tower - to the giant crystal chandelier in the lobby to the neo-Baroque gold-plated furniture.
But wealthy Russians are staying away and it's less than 40% full.
Its director, Tolga Comertoglu, is also on the board of the Antalya Hotel Association. With dyed blonde hair and tight-fitting suits, he fits into the Delphin's eccentric style. And he says he's deeply worried about the empty beaches, which he scans from above in his private helicopter.
"My family has had 40 years in tourism and I've never seen it like this", he says. "We've hit rock bottom - I don't want to think what will happen if it gets worse."
And then what, I ask?
"It could mean the whole tourism sector could virtually end here," he says. "And that means minus $28bn."
Image copyrightGOKTAY KORALTANImage captionClaire Smith, from Blackpool, says tourists shouldn't be scared off by terror attacks in Turkey
Strolling through Antalya old town is an English couple from Blackpool, Mark and Claire Smith. The souvenir shopkeepers jump on them - but today they're not buying. "It's incredibly sad to see what's happening," she says. "Turkey is such a wonderful country but people aren't visiting. How can they survive?"
I ask whether they had concerns about booking here. "My husband plays golf with someone who said 'oh I wouldn't go to Turkey right now'. So he went off to Orlando instead. And look what happened there! We have to come - or the terrorists will just win."
On the quiet beaches of Antalya, the June sun has warmed the Mediterranean, the sand is soft and the mountains silhouetted in the distance give a picturesque backdrop.
But the tide of tourism has turned in Turkey - and with attacks continuing and an increasingly unpredictable president, there's little sign of improvement on the horizon.
Venus has an “electric wind” strong enough to remove the components of water from its upper atmosphere, which may have played a significant role in stripping Earth’s twin planet of its oceans, according to new results from ESA’s (European Space Agency) Venus Express mission by NASA-funded researchers.
“It’s amazing, shocking,” said Glyn Collinson, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We never dreamt an electric wind could be so powerful that it can suck oxygen right out of an atmosphere into space. This is something that has to be on the checklist when we go looking for habitable planets around other stars.” Collinson is lead author of a paper about this research published June 20, 2016, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The space environment around a planet plays a key role in determining what molecules exist in the atmosphere — and whether the planet is habitable for life. New NASA research shows that the electric fields around Venus helped strip its atmosphere of the components needed to make water.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Genna Duberstein
Venus is in many ways the most like Earth in terms of its size and gravity, and there’s evidence that it once had oceans worth of water in its distant past. However, with surface temperatures around 860 F (460 C), any oceans would have long since boiled away to steam and Venus is uninhabitable today. Yet Venus’ thick atmosphere, about 100 times the pressure of Earth’s, has 10,000 to 100,000 times less water than Earth’s atmosphere. Something had to remove all that steam, and the current thinking is that much of the early steam dissociated to hydrogen and oxygen: the light hydrogen escaped, while the oxygen oxidized rocks over billions of years. Also the solar wind — a million-mile-per-hour stream of electrically conducting gas blowing from the sun — could have slowly but surely eroded the remainder of an ocean’s worth of oxygen and water from Venus’ upper atmosphere.
“We found that the electric wind, which people thought was just one small cog in a big machine, is in fact this big monster that’s capable of sucking the water from Venus by itself,” said Collinson.
This graphic compares surface temperatures and gravity on Earth and Venus. The two planets are similar sizes and have similar gravity — but Venus is bone dry and more than 10 times as hot as our home planet. Recent NASA research describes a key process that removes water from the Venusian atmosphere.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/Conceptual Image Lab, Brian Monroe
Just as every planet has a gravity field, it is believed that every planet with an atmosphere is also surrounded by a weak electric field. While the force of gravity is trying to hold the atmosphere on the planet, the electric force (the same force that sticks laundry together in a drier and pushes electricity through wires) can help to push the upper layers of the atmosphere off into space. At Venus, the much faster hydrogen escapes easily, but this electric field is so strong that it can accelerate even the heavier electrically charged component of water — oxygen ions — to speeds fast enough to escape the planet’s gravity. When water molecules rise into the upper atmosphere, sunlight breaks the water into hydrogen and oxygen ions, which are then carried away by the electric field.
“If you were unfortunate enough to be an oxygen ion in the upper atmosphere of Venus then you have won a terrible, terrible lottery,” said Collinson, “You and all your ion friends will be dragged off kicking and screaming into space by an invisible hand, and nothing can save you.”
The team discovered Venus’ electric field using the electron spectrometer, a component of the ASPERA-4 instrument, aboard the ESA Venus Express. They were monitoring electrons flowing out of the upper atmosphere when it was noticed that these electrons were not escaping at their expected speeds. The team realized that these electrons had been tugged on by Venus’ potent electric field. By measuring the change in speed, the team was able to measure the strength of the field, finding it to be much stronger than anyone had expected, and at least five times more powerful than at Earth.
“We don’t really know why it is so much stronger at Venus than Earth,” said Collinson, “but, we think it might have something to do with Venus being closer to the sun, and the ultraviolet sunlight being twice as bright. It’s a challenging thing to measure and even at Earth to date all we have are upper limits on how strong it might be.”
This graphic compares the atmospheric composition and electric field strength on Earth and Venus. New research suggests that the electric field around Venus may be a key factor in shaping what molecules exist in the Venusian atmosphere — including its lack of the molecules needed to make water.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/Conceptual Image Lab, Brian Monroe
Such information also helps us understand other worlds around the solar system.
“We’ve been studying the electrons flowing away from Titan [a moon of Saturn] and Mars as well as from Venus, and the ions they drag away to space,” said Andrew Coates, who leads the electron spectrometer team at University College London in the U.K. “The new result here shows that the electric field powering this escape is surprisingly strong at Venus compared to the other objects. This will help us understand how this universal process works.”
Another planet where the electric wind may play an important role is Mars. NASA’s MAVEN mission is currently orbiting Mars to determine what caused the Red Planet to lose much of its atmosphere and water. “We are actively hunting for Mars’ electric wind with MAVEN’s full arsenal of scientific instruments,” said Collinson. “MAVEN is a robotic detective on this four-billion-year-old mystery of where the atmosphere and oceans went, and the electric wind has long been a prime suspect.”
This is an artist's concept of the electric wind at Venus. Rays represent the paths that oxygen and hydrogen ions take as they are pulled out of the upper atmosphere.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/Conceptual Image Lab, Krystofer Kim
Taking the electric wind into account will also help astronomers improve estimates of the size and location of habitable zones around other stars. These are areas where the temperature could allow liquid water to exist on the surface of alien worlds, making them places where life might be found. Some stars emit more ultraviolet light than the sun, so if this creates stronger electric winds in any planets orbiting them, the habitable zone around such stars may be farther away and narrower than thought. “Even a weak electric wind could still play a role in water and atmospheric loss at any planet,” said Alex Glocer of NASA Goddard, a co-author on the paper. “It could act like a conveyor belt, moving ions higher in the ionosphere where other effects from the solar wind could carry them away.”
ESA’s Venus Express was launched on Nov. 9, 2005, to study the complex atmosphere of Venus. The electron spectrometer was built by the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and is led by University College London. The spacecraft orbited Venus between 2006 and December 2014. After a successful mission that far exceeded its planned life, the spacecraft exhausted its fuel supply and burned up upon entry into Venus’ dense atmosphere. The research was funded by NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission and NASA’s Solar System Workings program.
