Free Republic

NATO warships, which passed through Istanbul's Bosporus Strait Thursday, entered the Black Sea for long-planned exercises and routine visits to ports in Romania and Bulgaria, the alliance said. A U.S. Navy warship entered Turkey's Dardanel Strait on Friday taking relief supplies to Georgia. Three warships - from Spain, Germany and Poland - sailed into the Black Sea on Thursday. The move is not linked to the tensions over Russia's invasion of Georgia, which lies on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, about 900 kilometers (550 miles) from the Romanian coast, said officials at NATO's military command in southern Belgium....

President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday. As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn't cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits. Pentagon officials told McClatchy...

Link post, to provide a link to the post in the FR "chat" section, where any discussion should take place (i.e., post it there, not here): Geology Pictures of the Two Weeks, May 2-16, 2004

The Bosporus fascinates me. Click the link for related article and link to a slightly larger image. Istanbul, Turkey: The Crossroads of Europe and Asia Nyamuragira (Zaire) is currently erupting. Here's a picture of what it looked like in 2002. (It's also spelled Nyamulagira.) Here's the report from May 8: Goma Volcano Observatory is announcing the beginning of a new eruption of Nyamulagira. Strong volcanic tremor signalled the onset of eruptive activity on May 8. Activity seems to have begun in the summital caldera of Nyamulagira and later propagated on the North flank. This volcano had shown several seismic swarms...

Link post: go to HERE for the original thread and image

The Bosporus is a strait that connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara in the center of this view of northwest Turkey, taken during the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The water of the Black Sea at the top of the image and Sea of Marmara below the center are colored blue in this image, along with several large lakes. The largest lake, to the lower right of the Sea of Marmara, is Iznik Lake. The Bosporus (Turkish Bogazici) Strait is considered to be the boundary between Europe and Asia, and the large city of Istanbul, Turkey...