tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66596092478161064472024-03-19T09:48:23.471+01:00GeoGarage blogDaily press & media panorama with maritime thematicgeogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.comBlogger5119125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-55687919170222262472024-03-19T01:02:00.001+01:002024-03-19T01:02:00.131+01:00Turning tides: climate change watershed prompts reevaluation of nuclear energy and deep-sea mining<div style="text-align: center;"><img height="385" src="https://moderndiplomacy.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/deep-sea-mining-1068x643.jpg" width="640" /><i>Image credit: The Metals Company</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br />From <a href="https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2024/03/15/turning-tides-climate-change-watershed-prompts-reevaluation-of-nuclear-energy-and-deep-sea-mining/">Modern Diplomacy</a> by James Borton</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br />The continuously evolving misleading narratives, which inaccurately
depict the risks associated with nuclear energy, share notable
similarities with ongoing polarized debates surrounding deep-sea mining.</b><i> </i><br /><br />Energy policy and environmentalism have long proven to be ideological battlegrounds, with frequent rifts over offshore drilling, gas pipelines, wind farms, hydropower, and nuclear energy standing as divisive roadblocks in a widening partisan debate.<br /><br />Amidst the persisting climate protests targeting the combustion of fossil fuels and worldwide shift toward sustainable energy alternatives, a paradox emerges in the current focus of Greenpeace activism on deep-sea mining.<br />Namely, their intervention with research vessels engaged in authorized scientific data exploration supervised by the <a href="https://www.isa.org.jm/">International Seabed Authority</a> raises questions.<br />This form of protest appears at odds with the overarching goals of the environmental movement, which advocates for the adoption of renewable energy sources.<br />The situation also draws striking parallels to historical protests against nuclear plants.<br /><br />Opponents of deep-sea mining, akin to early critics of nuclear energy, often rely on speculative concerns and employ fear-driven communication when discussing potential environmental consequences.<br />This approach hinders the overarching goal of advancing renewable solutions to combat climate change.<br />The profound effects of climate change, combined with actions by nations possessing abundant energy resources, such as England and Germany back-sliding toward more coal-fired plants and expansive gas export terminals, are reshaping the risk landscape associated with nuclear energy and deep-sea mining.<br /><br />The sea change in attitudes toward low-carbon energy consumption commenced more than a decade ago, spurred by environmentalist advocates like Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenger, co-founders of the <a href="https://thebreakthrough.org/">Breakthrough Institute</a>—a Bay Area think tank that initially championed the adoption of nuclear energy.<br />Schellenberger, a fervent proponent, played a pivotal role in the ‘Saving Diablo Canyon’ campaign, focused on preserving a nuclear reactor responsible for approximately nine percent of California’s electricity.<br />Efforts to rebuild trust in nuclear energy have involved advancements in safety technologies, improved regulatory frameworks, and the development of newer, safer reactor designs.<br />Those who had once contributed to an atmosphere of mistrust and who initially embraced a scorched earth ethos have begun to recant their positions, prompted by significant advances in the development of next generation reactors.<br /><br />The surge in climate change awareness even brought activists like Carol Browner, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Clinton, to the forefront.<br />In an interview with Forbes magazine, she stated, “Several years ago I had to reevaluate my thinking because if you agree with the world’s leading climate scientists that global warming is real and must be addressed immediately then you cannot simply oppose clean, low-carbon energy sources.”<br /><br />The continuously evolving misleading narratives, which inaccurately depict the risks associated with nuclear energy, share notable similarities with the ongoing polarized debates surrounding deep-sea mining.<br />Remarkably, the scientific discussion supporting deep-sea mining emerged prominently in 2016 when the <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2016/06/precautionary_approach_needed_for_for_deep_sea_mining.pdf">Pew Seabed Mining Project</a> advocated for science-based precautionary regulations to protect underwater ecosystems.<br />Simultaneously, numerous scientific publications advocated for nuclear energy as a vital and secure remedy to address the challenges posed by climate change.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.wsj.net/im-937080" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://images.wsj.net/im-937080" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Patania II, a seabed mining robot, is lowered into the Pacific Ocean to begin a descent to the sea floor.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>photo : GSR / Reuters <br /></i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); color: #555555; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Retina, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 300; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br />However, the public’s ignorance of advances in upstream energy mineral and power generation has been exacerbated by social media misinformation campaigns and media coverage of protests.<br />The general alarmism that once replaced reasoned conversation and scientific knowledge around nuclear has similarly extended to seabed mining.<br />Unbothered by such domestic and international concerns, China has established itself as the front-runner in the nuclear reactor construction industry, with 21 reactors under construction, as the US attempts to revive its nuclear industry, mostly through the development of new, safer, smaller modular reactor designs.<br />Author, environmentalist, entrepreneur, and economist <a href="https://paulhawken.com/">Paul Hawken</a> sees this a different way, stating via email “These issues are entirely different.<br />Those who lack knowledge of marine ecology and ecosystems will oppose ocean mining, and opposition to nuclear power is predicated on cycle analysis and fear.”<br /><br />Deep-sea minerals, particularly nodules containing nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, present a level of complexity similar to terrestrial deposits.<br />It’s crucial to acknowledge that not all deposits and extraction methods are equal.<br />Nodules, rock formations about the size of potatoes, have advanced the most in terms of commercial viability.<br />This progress is attributed to both their economic potential and the relatively lower environmental impact associated with their collection.<br /><br />While some environmentalists express concerns about the potential impact on marine ecosystems, others can see a potential for responsible use of nodules to drive the energy transition.<br />Dr.<br />Gregory Stone, chief ocean scientist for The Metals Company, an advocate for ocean conservation and co-founder of the <a href="https://oceanhealthindex.org/">Ocean Health Index</a>, claims that the emerging scientific evidence from the Company’s <a href="https://oneoceanhub.org/defining-the-environmental-impact-assessment-process-for-deep-sea-mining/">Environmental and Social Impact Assessment</a> (ESIA) and peer-reviewed studies, leads him to believe that if deep-sea mining is done responsibly, “it is by far the best and most viable option for meeting the base metal demands of the world in the coming decades.”<br /><br /> <a href="https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/1ccz/background/mining/mining.html">The Clarion-Clipperton Zone</a> (CCZ), an area that spans more than 4.5 million square kilometers, situated between Hawaii and Mexico, is the most researched area under the <a href="https://www.isa.org.jm/">International Seabed Authority</a>.<br />According to <a href="https://pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2022/03/01/more-science-is-needed-to-manage-deep-seabed-mining-and-minimize-its-impact">Pew Trusts</a>, the energy-rich expanse still requires more research on oceanographic, biological, and ecological linkages between deep-ocean habitats and the rest of the ocean and planet.<br />The knowledge base is well on its way: the ISA and UNESCO Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) now house the largest repository of deep-ocean data ever compiled from institutions worldwide.<br /><br />As countries increasingly look to the ocean as a frontier for economic development, plans to utilize critical minerals from the deep-seabed are gathering pace.<br />The transition to a green economy has brought about an urgency now seen in Norway announcing its intention to open nearly 108,600 square miles of its deep-sea territory for mineral exploration and environmental impact assessment.<br />“We need minerals to succeed in the green transition,” emphasized Terje Aasland, Norway’s Minister of Petroleum and Energy, in a government <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/the-government-is-facilitating-a-new-ocean-industry-seabed-mineral-activities/id295941/">statement.</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">He highlighted the importance of Norway facilitating a new ocean industry, asserting that no other country is better situated to responsibly and sustainably lead in the management of such resources.<br />But drawing parallels to the widespread anti-nuclear protests observed in the United States, the <a href="https://savethehighseas.org/">Deep-sea Conservation Coalition</a>, has amplified its strong stance against seabed mining in the Arctic.<br />This advocacy has sparked a wave of opposition from various organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund, which is actively challenging Norway through its ‘No Deep-seabed Mining’ initiative.<br /><br />Since the 1970s, nations like the US, Canada, Germany, France, and Japan have been collecting baseline data and developing the necessary technology.<br />For the first time since, TMC subsidiary Nauru Ocean Resources Inc.’s (NORI), piloted an integrated nodule collection system.<br />Findings have challenged the prevailing belief that seafloor plumes generated during the extraction process rise into the water column and travel considerable distances via ocean currents.<br />These disclosures directly counter the claims of protestor groups, which erroneously assert that the release of plumes—containing sediment and other materials—can elevate water turbidity.<br />Furthermore, a plume study conducted jointly by <a href="https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/study-gives-new-insights-nature-deep-sea-sediment-plumes">MIT/Scripps</a>, utilizing field data acquired during collector trials conducted by Belgian contractor GSR, also challenges activist speculation and misleading media narratives.<br />The study indicates that 92-98% of sediment mobilized at the seafloor does not rise more than 2 meters above the seafloor—a finding starkly at odds with assumptions made by anti-seabed mining campaigners.<br />“Greenpeace once called for more science but have since turned their back on evidence-based decision-making and are of the view that their voice is the only one that matters, superseding those of all the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) 169 members,” claims The Metals Company Chairman and CEO, Gerard Barron.<br /><br />At the 28th <a href="https://unfccc.int/cop28">Conference of the Parties</a> (COP) in Dubai, participants criticized the slow pace and depth of progress on climate change, highlighting The Paris Agreement’s failure to limit global temperatures and the urgent need to act on a global scale because of the mounting severe droughts, heat waves, and escalating floods making frequent headlines.Bottom of Form The UN deserves credit for popularizing the concept of net-zero goals.<br />This initiative has prompted environmentalists and several non-government organizations (NGOs) to reevaluate their views, emphasizing the adoption of scientific advancements and emerging technologies as essential tools for to achieving net zero emissions.<br /><br />In support of the alignment of parallels drawn between nuclear energy and deep- sea mining adoption among non-government organizations (NGOs), consider the following example: Patrick Moore, a former director and founding member of Greenpeace, strongly disagreed with the organization’s anti-nuclear energy position.<br />“Nuclear energy is the safest of all the electricity technologies we have,” Dr.<br />Patrick Moore told NewsNation’s “<a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/tech/greenpeace-co-founder-ex-director-calls-nuclear-safest-energy/">Special Report</a>.” Despite all the protests and noise about nuclear energy, Moore, like the author Michael Schellenberger, posits that technological innovation, if allowed to continue and grow, will remedy environmental issues as outlined in his iconic book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.<br /><br />Most assuredly, the public requires an unbiased evaluation of both costs and benefits, free from corporate bias and alarmist media coverage.<br />The emerging consensus among well-informed environmentalists is evident: the imperative for low-carbon energy technologies as an urgent and essential response to the climate crisis.<br />Michael Lodge, the secretary general of the International Seabed Authority, the UN-mandated mining regulator, is cognizant of the urgency to explore new technologies and to identify the needed transition to critical minerals required for the manufacture of batteries that will be key to the reducing greenhouse gas emissions.<br /><br />During last fall’s program held at the Washington D.C.-based <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/regulatoon-seabed-mining-conversaton-michael-lodge-secretary-general-international-seabed">Wilson Center</a>, Lodge, delved into the ISA’s commitment to embracing a precautionary stance in safeguarding the marine environment against potential adverse effects of mining activities.<br />The presentation reiterated ISA’s goal of collecting essential scientific data to share with the constellation of stakeholders comprised of public, and private, as well as national, international actors, including non-government organizations.<br />The emphasis on science–driven explorations underscores the organization’s dedication to fostering a sustainable global environment.<br />Recent advancements in reactor technology have underscored the importance of safety measures, especially in the aftermath of incidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima.<br />The recognition of nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source is gradually reshaping perceptions within various environmental groups.<br />This evolving perspective anticipates that ongoing technological progress, with a focused emphasis on minimizing impacts on ocean ecosystems, could pave the way for increased acceptance of deep-sea mining for metal-rich nodules.<br /><br />These altered views on nuclear energy provide valuable lessons for the deep-sea debate.<br />Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced and evidence-based discussion, they highlight the need for an open dialogue and collaboration between scientists, industry stakeholders, and environmental advocates in shaping responsible supply chains and resource policies.<br />A promising trend is the proactive involvement of companies, governments, and civil society in global deliberations aimed at establishing a regulatory structure for deep-sea mining.<br /> While there is a consensus on the imperative for greener technologies and a sustainable future, a resounding demand for research and caution in the face of oceanic mining persists.<br /><br />“Deep-sea mining has not yet occurred but will be heavily regulated once it begins.<br />This presents an opportunity to establish adaptive management for environmental protection and for the establishment of green technologies for mining and mineral processing,” claims Dr.<br />James Hein, a retired senior scientist at the <a href="https://www.usgs.gov/">United States Geological Survey</a> (USGS) and a member of the Deep Ocean Mining and Environmental Studies (DOMES) team, the original impact studies conducted by the US in the <a href="https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/18ccz/background/mining/minig.html">Clarion Clipperton Zone</a> (CCZ) throughout the 70s and 80s.<br />Precautionary regulatory guidelines and a dedication to international collaboration are prompting a noteworthy discussion within an informed environmentalist community.<br /><br />The International Seabed Authority (ISA) boasts nearly 100 Observer parties, with approximately half comprising non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that actively engage in ISA negotiations.<br />This unique scenario allows NGOs to endorse initiatives prioritizing cooperative endeavors in ocean science diplomacy.<br />Such efforts encompass collaboration with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), all of which provide crucial scientific guidance.<br />“I expect that some opponents of deep-sea mining may adjust their way of thinking and accept a certain ecological impact of deep-sea mining to avoid worse impacts from other activities, especially because in international waters governance, safe supply chains, and resource security may be easier to achieve” asserts Dr.<br />Andrea Koschinsky of Constructor University in Bremen.<br /><br />Scientists are calling for increased scientific data gathered from explorations in the resource-rich CCZ.<br />However, just how much data would be sufficient has not been specified.<br />On the contrary, over 300 research campaigns have occurred in the CCZ since interest in the area began in the 1960s.<br />Exploration contractors alone have invested over $2 billion in research in this area.<br />All data from these endeavors is publicly accessible through the Regulator and UNESCO databases.<br />The Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian-based company, has already completed an extensive decade-long environmental impact assessment to quantify impacts to the environment from nodule collection.<br />While there remain some gaps in environmental knowledge, there are many studies conducted by a coalition of leading researchers on the measurement of <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2022/sediment-deep-sea-mining-0921">sediment plumes</a> associated with collector vehicles in the deep-sea.<br /> These tractor-sized vehicles sent to the bottom of the sea will vacuum up the nodules.<br /><br />The findings reveal that ocean nodules, as opposed to land mining for battery metals, lead to substantial environment benefit reducing CO2 emissions to produce battery grade chemicals by over 70% on average, a 94% decrease in stored carbon at risk, and essentially eliminating solid processing waste, according to independent reports.<br />Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI), a subsidiary of TMC, is bolstering transparency in deep-sea mining research by integrating novel data streaming during deep-sea operations.<br />These streams provide a near real time view of the integrated collection system and environmental effects of its activity.<br /> One would be hard pressed to find this level of access to any mine on land.<br /><br />The distribution of research data across explorers, along with workshops held with scientists and NGOs, may prove instructive in closing the loop on scientific knowledge available, impact quantification, and the ability to assess whether commercial activity should move forward.<br />Even Avatar director and oceanographer, James Cameron, believes harvesting for raw materials on the seabed is ‘less wrong’ than environmental damage caused on land.<br />Certain marine scientists and their research findings affirm the environmental impact on the deep-sea is comparatively lower than that of land-based mining.<br />An MIT study found that the sediment plume kicked up by mining harvester vehicles did not disperse as widely as others thought it would.<br /><br />The lessons learned from the nuclear energy debate suggest that proactive engagement with stakeholders, transparent communication, and a commitment to continuous technology innovations are essential components of responsible resource development.<br />These aspects are explicitly present in deep-sea mineral exploration and future commercial collection.<br />With the increasing demand among the public for green technologies to power the world, deep-sea mining offers a pathway towards a net-zero transition.<br />In the midst of shifting perspectives and controversies surrounding both nuclear and deep-sea mining, there is substantial potential to rely on data versus emotion, to chart the optimal strategy that weaves together scientific research, stringent regulation, and international collaboration, laying the foundation for a sustainable future.</div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>BBC : <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68576735">Greenpeace could be thrown out of UN deep-sea mining body</a></li><li>WSJ : <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-the-deep-sea-to-d-c-how-china-fears-have-put-ocean-floor-mining-on-washingtons-radar-f7bd2ace">From the Deep Sea to D.C.—How China Fears Have Put Ocean-Floor Mining on Washington’s Radar</a> / <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-u-s-military-and-political-leaders-call-on-senate-to-ratify-law-of-the-sea-87a6d33b">Former U.S. Military and Political Leaders Call on Senate to Ratify Law of the Sea</a> / <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-political-support-for-deep-sea-mining-is-growing-despite-pushback-from-allies-80f8d60f">U.S. Political Support for Deep-Sea Mining Is Growing Despite Pushback From Allies</a> </li><li>Vox : <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24047941/marine-protect-areas-united-nations-oceans-conservation-blue-economy-mining">Can we protect and profit from the oceans?</a></li><li>Reuters : <a href="https://www.reuters.com/graphics/MINING-DEEPSEA/CLIMATE/zjpqezqzlpx/">The promise and risks of deep-sea mining </a></li><li>The Guardian : <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/09/deep-sea-mining-why-is-interest-growing-and-what-are-the-risks">Deep-sea mining: why is interest growing and what are the risks? </a></li><li>GeoGarage blog : <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2024/01/really-sad-day-as-norway-votes-to-allow.html">'Really a sad day' as Norway votes to allow deep-sea ...</a> / <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/07/cook-islands-deep-sea-mining">Future of deep-sea mining hangs in balance as opposition grows</a> / <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2023/08/deep-sea-mining-could-begin-soon.html">Deep-sea mining could begin soon, regulated or not</a> </li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-42464691229583656862024-03-18T01:39:00.001+01:002024-03-18T01:39:00.119+01:00Scientists confirm underwater mountains harbor abundant life off Chile’s coast<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n-ORwB_-rzg?si=Vsl-j9FsSSwVX2Nq" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>An international group of scientists, led by Dr. Javier Sellanes of the Universidad Católica del Norte, may have discovered more than 100 new species living on seamounts off the coast of Chile.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The recent Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition resulted in identifying deep-sea corals, glass sponges, sea urchins, amphipods, squat lobsters, and other species likely new to science.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href="https://oceanroboticsplanet.com/scientists-confirm-underwater-mountains-harbor-abundant-life-off-chiles-coast-04-03-2024">OceanRoboticsPlanet</a></i></div><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: "Segoe UI", Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><img class="img-responsive center-block imgshadow" data-name="pic4" height="427" src="https://oceanroboticsplanet.com/tportal_upload/md_weblap_tartalom/pic4_4434.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgb(119, 119, 119) 6px 6px 8px 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; border-radius: 10px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); box-shadow: rgb(119, 119, 119) 6px 6px 8px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; cursor: pointer; display: block; font-family: "Segoe UI", Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; height: auto; image-orientation: from-image; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 100%; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: middle; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" width="640" /><p><br />The team explored seamounts along the Nazca and Salas y Gómez Ridge, both inside and outside Chile’s jurisdiction, to collect data that could support the designation of an international high-seas marine protected area.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh50ssjksmzkugugmgBfkdUDKjetWaMFSGLcjgumfpU-bl3zGzH4Bupw3IZmTuT-MPZSCXuZ3aZoReaFOFn_Dr4S5HGVQMzgW9BJ3ikJW0QF0dDchy1gZUQbgAmhh9rSyG74fR0f6hSovZ7x2Y-z2khoDNz9J3Uh9plL242suZVYGHIyoRquQ0VcLTbS-E/s1911/Salas%20y%20Go%CC%81mez%20Ridge.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="949" data-original-width="1911" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh50ssjksmzkugugmgBfkdUDKjetWaMFSGLcjgumfpU-bl3zGzH4Bupw3IZmTuT-MPZSCXuZ3aZoReaFOFn_Dr4S5HGVQMzgW9BJ3ikJW0QF0dDchy1gZUQbgAmhh9rSyG74fR0f6hSovZ7x2Y-z2khoDNz9J3Uh9plL242suZVYGHIyoRquQ0VcLTbS-E/w640-h318/Salas%20y%20Go%CC%81mez%20Ridge.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Salas y Gomez Ridge with the GeoGarage platform (STRM bathymetry)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">The Salas y Gómez Ridge is a 2,900-kilometer-long underwater mountain chain comprising more than 200 seamounts that stretch from offshore Chile to Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island.<br />The majority of the ridge exists outside national jurisdiction.<br />Additionally, the scientists explored two of Chile’s marine protected areas, the Juan Fernandez and Nazca-Desventuradas marine parks.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">During the expedition, scientists used an underwater robot, capable of descending to depths of 4,500 meters, to collect data from ten seamounts that will be used to advance Chile’s marine protection efforts.<br />The scientists found that each seamount hosted distinct ecosystems, many of which are vulnerable, including thriving deep-sea coral reefs and sponge gardens.<br />The scientists are analyzing the physiology and genetics of the specimens they suspect are new to science to confirm if they are new species.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><img class="img-responsive center-block imgshadow" data-name="pic2" height="360" src="https://oceanroboticsplanet.com/tportal_upload/md_weblap_tartalom/pic2_4434.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgb(119, 119, 119) 6px 6px 8px 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; border-radius: 10px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); box-shadow: rgb(119, 119, 119) 6px 6px 8px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; cursor: pointer; display: block; font-family: "Segoe UI", Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; height: auto; image-orientation: from-image; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 100%; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: middle; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" width="640" /><div style="text-align: left;"> </div></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">Experts on board the ship mapped 52,777 square kilometers of seafloor, resulting in the discovery of four seamounts within Chilean waters.<br />The fourth seamount, the tallest mountain at 3,530 meters, was explored for the first time, mapped, and unofficially named Solito by the science team.<br />“We far exceeded our hopes on this expedition. You always expect to find new species in these remote and poorly explored areas, but the amount we found, especially for some groups like sponges, is mind-blowing,” said Sellanes.</div><div style="text-align: left;">“These thriving and healthy ecosystems indicate that the Nazca-Desventuradas and Juan Fernández Marine Parks effectively protect delicate marine habitats.” </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><img class="img-responsive center-block imgshadow" data-name="pic1" height="360" src="https://oceanroboticsplanet.com/tportal_upload/md_weblap_tartalom/pic1_4434.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgb(119, 119, 119) 6px 6px 8px 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; border-radius: 10px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); box-shadow: rgb(119, 119, 119) 6px 6px 8px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; cursor: pointer; display: block; font-family: "Segoe UI", Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; height: auto; image-orientation: from-image; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 100%; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: middle; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" width="640" /><p>A second expedition along the Salas y Gomez Ridge will begin aboard research vessel Falkor (too) on 24 Feb.</p><div style="text-align: left;">Underwater dives will be livestreamed on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1m5LdKP0m64n8nY3NhK6Zg">Schmidt Ocean Institute’s YouTube channel</a> as scientists explore areas deeper than 600 meters depth for the first time.<br />Schmidt Ocean Institute will be operating in the Southeast Pacific, exploring the waters off Peru and Chile throughout 2024.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">“Full species identification can take many years, and Dr. Sellanas and his team have an incredible number of samples from this amazingly beautiful and little-known biodiversity hotspot,” said Schmidt Ocean Institute Executive Director Dr. Jyotika Virmani.<br />“ Schmidt Ocean Institute is a partner with the Nippon Foundation – Nekton Ocean Census Program, which has set a target of finding 100,000 new marine species in the next ten years and, once identified, these new species will be a part of that.” </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><img class="img-responsive center-block imgshadow" data-name="pic3" height="360" src="https://oceanroboticsplanet.com/tportal_upload/md_weblap_tartalom/pic3_4434.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgb(119, 119, 119) 6px 6px 8px 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; border-radius: 10px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); box-shadow: rgb(119, 119, 119) 6px 6px 8px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; cursor: pointer; display: block; font-family: "Segoe UI", Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; height: auto; image-orientation: from-image; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 100%; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: middle; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" width="640" /><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: "Segoe UI", Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> </b></div><i>Links :</i><br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>GeoGarage blog : <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2024/02/four-new-seamounts-discovered-in-high.html">Four new seamounts discovered in the high seas</a><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: "Segoe UI", Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> </b></li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-60452329701596990832024-03-17T01:41:00.005+01:002024-03-17T01:41:00.127+01:00The world according to fish<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGeaC34XwAAXSby?format=jpg&name=orig" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="800" height="376" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGeaC34XwAAXSby?format=jpg&name=orig" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i> (Elastic II projection) </i><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.imgur.com/xDVe8Tc.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="513" data-original-width="800" height="410" src="https://i.imgur.com/xDVe8Tc.png" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Here are the connections that can teleport fish (missing sea connections)<br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>And green for the Panama and Suez canals</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://kunimunehome.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/shaded-relief-elastic-ii.png">source </a></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i></i>GeoGarage blog :<i> </i><a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2023/02/image-of-week-ocean-currents-in-global.html">Image of the week : ocean currents in a global ocean view</a></li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-85045796293715975682024-03-16T01:48:00.025+01:002024-03-16T01:48:00.232+01:00Women and the wind: crossing the Atlantic in a 50-year-old catamaran <div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jOydodbdXWw?si=yUwwclvL3qFAbVaS" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Three women ignite the flames of curiosity and adventure which lay dormant within so many of us, by deepening our understanding of the synergy between nature and humanity—and by doing so radically, through a voyage across the North Atlantic on Mara Noka, a 50-year-old wooden catamaran.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i><br /></div><div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href=" https://www.fieldmag.com/articles/women-and-the-wind-documentary-sailing-across-atlantic">FieldMag</a> by Ellen Eberhardt</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>In 2022 three women crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a wooden catamaran
to document plastic pollution and find adventure, here's how</b><i> </i><br /><br />In June 2022, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/alizejireh/">Alizé Jireh</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/laerke.fun.heilmann/?hl=en">Lærke Heilmann</a> were at Red Beard Farm in Wilmington, North Carolina buying 15 pounds of sweet potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and other sea-worthy produce.<br />They even got to pull some vegetables straight from the earth, a memory that brought Heilmann comfort when cooking with them in a tight galley kitchen a month later, miles away from land, with nothing green in sight.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/7DiaaW9VEJ70ZhBtB1KD1K/986697c93f336bc0920c92300b0d83a0/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-hero.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/7DiaaW9VEJ70ZhBtB1KD1K/986697c93f336bc0920c92300b0d83a0/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-hero.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <i>Photo by Alizé Jireh</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;">At the farm, Heilmann and Jireh were completing one task in a long line of chores to prepare for a voyage like neither had embarked on in their lives.<br />Instead of taking the veggies home to a refrigerator, they brought them back to a 50-year-old catamaran called Mara Noka, and the boat's owner and captain, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/whereskiana/">Kiana Weltzien</a>.<br />The three women had been living on the vessel for a month, preparing the ship—and themselves—to sail across the Atlantic Ocean from Beaufort, North Carolina, to Flores, Portugal for a project called <a href="https://www.womenandthewind.com/">Women and the Wind.</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">But they had to wait for the right conditions.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> <br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/5W0ymoLUdFZmQ7bLwUtwo0/86b8ef0403528f6d4c95be30bf3bf5ae/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-group-deck.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <i>From left: Kiana Weltzien, Lærke Heilmann, and Alizé Jireh</i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />When the right winds did strike, Weltzien, Heilmann, and Jireh planned to make the crossing in 30 days.<br />They would document the journey in order to study and highlight plastic pollution throughout the Gulf Stream and to inspire others, especially women, to undertake momentous journeys of their own.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/3dJW026p7QZXHhF0huYJzf/7f7bfa4f6285e960238eec40fc8da6c0/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-group.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo by Alizé Jireh</i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The first roots of the idea came up in 2017, when Weltzien discovered Mara Noka floating in a Panamanian bay.<br />She bought the boat on a whim, upending plans for a solo backpacking trip through South America.<br />She'd already been traveling the world by boat for more than two years after quitting a career in real estate; she had been exposed to life at sea first by a family she worked as an au pair for and then again as a crew member on a 70-foot-long Polynesian voyaging canoe.<br />Growing up between Brazil and Florida exposed her to various water sports, but it was only after those formative years as an adult that Weltzien embraced a dream of becoming a fortified, professional sailor.<br />Buying Mara Nokawas another dream realized—now she was the captain of her own ship.<br /> <div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TZBTXS65zfw?si=pYvMtBO2cPJQt1YJ" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The <a href="http://www.cleanoceanproject.org">Clean Ocean Project</a>
is a non-governmental organization based on Fuerteventura, Canary
Islands. It was founded in 2002 by Wim Geirnaert with a simple approach:
everybody is part of the problem - and the solution.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>For
the last 20 years, the organization has removed tons of trash from
beaches all over Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, Morocco, Brazil, El Salvador,
and Belgium.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Besides
cleaning the beaches, the goal of the Clean Ocean Project is to
educated people about the issue of ocean waste and create awareness
towards more sustainable solutions. <br /></i></div><br />Weltzien was living and sailing on Mara Noka in January 2020 when she arrived in the Canary Islands, where she met Heilmann at a party.<br />Beyond a shared passion for the ocean and its care, both women spoke Portuguese, and both had a fake tooth; coincidences that cemented a fast bond.<br />Heilmann was born and raised in a hippie commune in Denmark, where she spent summers sailing with family.<br />While she wasn't particularly interested in the sport, she grew passionate about the ocean, and eventually, she moved to the Canary Islands after falling in love with the surf and the slower way of life.<br />At the time of their meeting, Heilmann was working as a Project Coordinator for the <a href="https://cleanoceanproject.org/pages/about">Clean Ocean Project</a>, an organization dedicated to beach clean-ups and ocean conservation education worldwide.<br /><br />It wasn't long after that first meeting that they began dreaming of a transatlantic voyage drawn from a desire to shine a light on plastic pollution in the ocean and, of course, a natural call toward adventure.<br />The first step would be to repair Mara Noka—the old boat required lots of TLC after years at sea.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/5jay5X4m2cjfTGLxSXV4HK/8e9f181b5c555939222d007526953346/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-storm-cloud.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo by Alizé Jireh</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i><br /><div style="text-align: left;">"I thought I was going to die on this trip.<br />I was very certain of that." <br /></div><br /><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/6G9LMosNoEjPcyJVe9FDJY/53d1dbbf7ca86a2dead2bb50e4994f76/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-sleeping-deck.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /><i>Photo by Lærke Heilmann</i><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">When the pandemic hit, dreams of going anywhere came to a screeching halt worldwide, but it gave Weltzien and Heilmann more time to plan.<br />Finally, in February of 2021, Weltzien took Mara Noka out of the water and into a boatyard in St.<br />Augustine, Florida, where her grandmother lives.<br />Heilmann joined her four months later, and they planned to repair Mara Noka and set sail in a few weeks.<br /><br />In actuality, the repairs took a full year.<br />With no prior experience in shipbuilding besides Weltzien's knowledge of mixing epoxy, the pair trialed and errored their way through the process, documenting it through photos and reels on the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/womenandthewind/?hl=en">Women and the Wind Instagram page</a>.<br />Friends and family visited to help and offer advice, and one experienced shipbuilder shared his expertise, making occasional appearances to offer advice, sometimes sage, like "listen to the boat."</div><div style="text-align: left;">As they deconstructed the boat, they began to understand its structure, and rebuilt from there.<br /><br />After a year of sanding, sawing, painting, and gluing in the hot Florida sun, in May 2022, Mara Noka was finally ready for the water, complete with a fresh coat of paint and a hand-carved nameplate on a repurposed blank of original Panamanian sour cedar decking.<br />At the end of the month, Mara Noka, Weltzien, and Heilmann sailed from St. Augustine to Beaufort, North Carolina, to prepare for their final departure and to pick up their third crew member, photographer and filmmaker Alizé Jireh.<br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/11oqgxJvlBU2nPMTnIhqCD/65d8417895a3fbf29f1a037d05d99bab/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-sunset.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /><i>Photo by Alizé Jireh</i><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">All while Weltzien and Heilmann were remaking Mara Noka, Jireh was keeping up over Instagram, and she became enchanted by the two women restoring a 50-year-old catamaran by hand.<br />Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, she too had spent her childhood around the water and had vivid dreams of sailing.<br />At 16, she started shooting documentary photo work and started traveling with it, eventually connecting with Weltzien while working at a production company in South Africa.<br />The two stayed in contact, and during a trip to St. Augustine in 2021, Weltzien invited her to the boatyard to check out the progress on Mara Noka.<br />Jireh was smitten with the whole operation.<br />Half a year later, Weltzien sent her a message asking if she'd not only like to come along for the voyage, but also capture the experience for a planned documentary.<br />With no prior sailing experience save those childhood dreams, Jireh responded with a resounding yes.<br />"For me, it was no question about it," she says.<br /><br />With Mara Noka repaired and Jireh on board, the small crew spent most of the early summer waiting to set sail and growing accustomed to the boat, and each other.<br />For Weltzien, who had been happily sailing solo on Mara Noka for years, adjusting to traveling with others would be one of the most challenging aspects of the journey ahead.<br />"I'm a solo sailor," Weltzien explains.<br />"So to sail with people, I needed a purpose. And the purpose is to spread this message of 'if we can do anything, you can do anything.'"</div><div style="text-align: left;">Although Heilmann and Jireh were equally dedicated to spreading their intended message, simply surviving the trip proved the tallest hurdle.<br />"I thought that it would be my last time on earth," Jireh says.<br />"I thought I was going to die on this trip. I was very certain of that." <br />"To sail with people, I needed a purpose. And the purpose is to spread this message of 'if we can do anything, you can do anything.'"<br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/0106NOJz2jzcRnxRulgWkm/cedd09326b1774553a91b056243cdd03/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-mara-noka-2.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /><i>Photo by Alizé Jireh</i><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">On June 27, 2022, Mara Noka officially set sail.<br />For the next 30 days, the women went without technology, the only connection to the outside world via a satellite phone and a friend, who posted updates to Instagram on behalf of the crew.<br />Even Jireh, who kept her camera rolling for the better part of the voyage, waited until landfall to review more than 100 hours of footage captured during the trip.<br />For 30 days, it was just Weltzien, Heilmann, Jireh, Mara Noka, and the sea.<br /><br />In the beginning, the ocean welcomed them with calm conditions, but still, each crew member battled personal challenges.<br />Jireh fell seasick almost immediately and remained so for two weeks.<br />Heilmann tested positive for COVID just a few days in.<br />And Weltzien was navigating living with two inexperienced sailors on a boat and in an ocean that had previously brought her seclusion and peace.<br /><br />The women adjusted to their new reality slowly.<br />"I feel like we didn't talk much for those first two weeks," Heilmann says.<br />"We were all in our little zone."</div><div style="text-align: left;">They remained distant throughout the beginning of the journey, in part as a natural reaction to a new lifestyle, and then later they were forced to due to two weeks of bad weather.<br />But there were moments of connection, too.<br />They shared all their meals, a ritual that remained with them through the duration of the voyage.<br />"One thing I think we always did together—except for during the peak of the storm when [Heilmann and Jireh] were my prisoners locked below in the dungeon—was eat together," Weltzien explains.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/16SsjG9NjkzjVArdw16TLp/7a0c03ef6ec06ae345e5d65633ff0228/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-fish.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo by Lærke Heilmann</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/3GanckHxkUMM7nRENWzbDf/1cc85d00537ab4eedb509e420d81f55f/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-storm-talking.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo by Alizé Jireh</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />On the seventh day, the winds started to pick up and were followed by weeks of rain, 10-20 foot waves, torn sails, and gear tossed overboard.<br />The three women rotated between sleepless nights in water-soaked beds, sticky and wet from the constant saltwater leaking through the ½-inch plywood into their sleeping quarters.<br />Weltzien was often busy manning the boat in the swell, while Heilmann and Jireh rotated between helping with tasks on board and taking shelter in the cabin below, intimated by the full force of the weather.<br /><br />Throughout it all, Jireh kept her Panasonic GH 5 camera rolling in 4K (between taking breaks to throw up).<br />Her equipment survived the trip, but barely.<br />"That shit dropped so many times," she says.<br />"The screen stopped working." Both Weltzien and Heilmann were impressed with Jireh's abilities to create in an environment that was literally shifting below her feet.<br />"It's so impressive having seen the other side," Heilmann says.<br />"Seeing her with her camera, throwing up."</div><div style="text-align: left;">To the crew, the camera started to develop a personality of its own, an electronic Wilson to their collective Tom Hanks.</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Being a tiny little speck of a boat in the middle of the ocean, seeing trash every day makes you realize that the trash is absolutely everywhere."<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/EbcpbvbwjSL1QmL0V1cdS/c1246c0236765a944c9e5726c0f4f0cb/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-storm.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo by Alizé Jireh</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Another constant was the trash they saw in the water.<br />Even out to sea, pieces of plastic would float by every day.<br />Between collecting what they could and their own gear lost during storms, it was hard not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount going into and coming out of the sea.<br />"Being a tiny little speck of a boat in the middle of the ocean, seeing trash every day makes you realize that the trash is absolutely everywhere," Weltzien says.<br />They did what they could before, during, and after the voyage, fishing trash out of the ocean and participating in beach clean-ups when on land.<br />"You just have to focus on one solution to the problem at a time," says Heilmann.<br /><br />On their 19th day at sea, just over halfway through the voyage, the sun reappeared with a small swell and light winds.<br />To celebrate, the crew broke out a bottle of red and their lingerie, a ritual they had planned before setting sail.<br />Buoyed by the shifting seas, amidst clothing and blankets hung to dry, they looked ahead to the remainder of the voyage in good spirits.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/7ya6GbcGzROzujSw8TGzuU/f4cf9e6baff78afbca5a907b155590b4/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-shell-phone.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/5ogYmN24PuXoWrKyqFoyMT/890567f1ac4e977d28ce9382d6a4a26c/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-storm-sleeping.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;">Photos by Alizé Jireh<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />And the ocean seemed to reward them for surviving those initial trials; the remaining 10 days held with good weather, and after surviving the turbulent seas together, they experienced its bounty.<br />They talked more, slept on the deck under the night skies, listened to music, read, journaled, and above all else, indulged in the vastness of their surroundings and the lessons of life on the water.<br />Dolphins, whales, and seabirds paid visits.<br />Heilmann caught her first fish, a mahi-mahi, and spent two days crafting a pirate flag emblazoned with a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CjVGBVjLVw1/?hl=en">skeleton mermaid</a>.<br />Weltzien moved back to her normal sleeping quarters from the 12-inch wide bench in the galley she'd been using, and Jireh finally managed to keep food down.<br /><br />One day out from landfall, all three women anticipated their arrival with a flood of emotions.<br />"I hate arriving," Weltzien says.<br />"It's exciting. It's great, it's beautiful, but it's just like it's your bubble bursting. It's your reality that you thought was real for so long. Just poof."</div><div style="text-align: left;">During their month at sea, the boat and their life aboard it had been a departure from the burdens of modern living, a gateway to complete symbiosis with nature.<br /><br />Yes, certain parts of the voyage had been extremely challenging, but they had all consciously agreed to the perils the Atlantic might present.<br />Life at sea was expansive and vast, and their lifestyle reflected the same.<br />Reaching land, where rigid thoughts, schedules, and structures rule life suddenly seemed more daunting than 15-foot waves.<br />"Everything has to be explained in words that are somehow not enough to explain what you felt," Heilmann shares.<br />"It's very overwhelming."<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/1JwzSBDDorCmzQRTU7nLG7/debf84c3d3f11e16efa1c12924f209c1/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-mirror.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/5bDqaCH6SXBHvTxlyJT8jL/9735f8d25b895b01a8277e5ce4459d48/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-fishing.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/r7p9m4b1iqbp/2I6hAEpXjEJJjwoaADt7gl/35e8ce9e9f49ae34c0e0265f77f3d7f4/women-and-the-wind-weltzien-heilmann-jireh-sail.jpg?w=600&q=85&fm=jpg&fl=progressive" /><br /><i>Photos by Alizé Jireh</i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: left;">On the night of July 25, 2022, cell phones buzzing with incoming messages from the past month, Mara Noka cruised past other moored boats and dropped anchor in a harbor off Flores, an island in Portugal's Azores archipelago.<br />The voyage was complete.<br /><br />For the next month, the crew debriefed while sailing around the Azores together, and waited for the right conditions to deliver Heilmann and Jireh to their departing flights.<br />After goodbyes, Weltzien sailed by herself to Brazil, a crossing that lasted 43 days, realizing along the way that she missed their company.<br /><br />Today, the three women are spread between Brazil, the Canary Islands, and the US, but led by Jireh, they're editing and producing the <a href="https://www.womenandthewind.com/">Women and the Wind documentary</a>.<br />They plan to overlay Jireh's ethereal footage with journal entries from the trip, and they've also set up a <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/womenandthewind/women-and-the-wind-the-documentary">Kickstarter to help meet production costs</a>.<br /><br />Weltzien, Heilmann, and Jireh are still processing the voyage.<br />They share what they can put into words about how it changed them.<br />"I feel a lot of little things that maybe mattered before, I really don't think they matter at all," Heilmann explains "I think I've never done anything that long with so many uncertainties and so many reasons that you shouldn't. And it feels really powerful."</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>YouTube : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsUUqW7wtLc">Across Atlantic sailing Mara Noka</a> / <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCBjAQ5FUg8">Solo Atlantic Crossing on a Wharram</a> / <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5DBMLrVCwY">Wharram women - then and now </a><i> </i></li></ul></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div> </div></div></div></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-35968670341796079762024-03-15T01:54:00.002+01:002024-03-16T12:45:42.243+01:00High waves, high claims: new study on container losses<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Container_stability.jpg"><img height="453" src="https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Container_stability-750x531.jpg" width="640" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Credit: Gard Club</i><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href="https://safety4sea.com/high-waves-high-claims-new-study-on-container-losses">Safety4Sea</a> by Kunal Pathak, Team Leader, Claims, Arendal; Siddharth Mahajan, Loss
Prevention Manager Asia, Singapore; Helge A. Nordahl, Vice President,
Analytics, Oslo; Are Solum, Team Leader, Claims, Arendal, of Gard
P&I Club explore the subject of container losses, in relation to
insurance claims. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />In a comprehensive new study, we delve into the impact of weather on container stack collapses.<br />Our findings show the impact of progressively increasing wave height, the quantified risk of high waves, and variance in weather exposure among different operators.<br />Hopefully, the study sets the stage for a deeper dialogue within the industry about mitigating the impact of adverse weather on container safety.<br /><br />As the world economy develops, the volume of containerized trade increases steadily.<br />Last year, the global container shipping fleet grew by almost four per cent according to UNCTAD, and in Gard’s P&I portfolio, the segment has increased by as much as 16 per cent over the past five years.<br />It currently makes up 18 per cent of our insured vessels.<br /><br />With more container shipping comes also a higher risk of casualties.<br />Certain incidents, such as stack collapses or containers lost at sea, are monitored closely as they tend to be relatively more severe.<br />Container losses also have the IMO’s attention, and they are working on making reporting of lost containers mandatory.<br />Meanwhile, insurers and other key stakeholders are involved in detailed work such as the Top Tier project to investigate the causes of stack collapse and seek solutions.<br /><br /><b>Data analytics</b><br /><br />To contribute to the industry understanding and to help prevent losses, we have studied all cases of stack collapse where Gard was involved as a P&I insurer.<br />These cases occurred between 2016-2021 and we have looked at the weather data to make sure we understand the factors contributing to these incidents.<br />More specifically, we have combined Gard claims data with geographical and meteorological data from Windward which includes estimated wave height and wind strength on an hourly basis.<br />When it comes to waves, several measures are common.<br />For this study, we have used the maximum wave height.<br /><br />Our claims data includes a wide selection of cases, both when it comes to severity, vessel size, and geographical location.<br />For each claim we have collected meteorological data for the incident date as well as the six days leading up to the day of the incident.<br />This allows us to analyse how the weather progressively worsened over a period of time.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/WaveHeight2.png"><img height="549" src="https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/WaveHeight2-1024x878.png" width="640" /></a><i>Credit: Gard Club</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>Impact of vessel’s size</b><br /><br />Weather needs to be seen in context with ship’s design and size, of course, although we do see that container stack collapses happen across different size segments.<br />This just underscores the fact that there are usually several causative factors involved in these incidents, as highlighted in our article Why do containership stacks collapse and who is liable?<br /><br />Analysing incident numbers relative to number of vessels in our portfolio provides valuable insights on claims frequency across different size segments, which can range from feeders (less than 3,000 teu) to ultra-large container vessels (ULCVs) exceeding 15,000 teu where the stack heights can exceed 10 high on deck.<br />Despite a higher number of incidents on smaller vessels, there is a clear correlation between incident frequency (or likelihood) and vessel size, as depicted in the graph below.<br />The 6-year average claims frequency for stack collapses on feeder vessels is 1%, whereas for ULCVs, it rises to 9%.<br /><br /><b>Impact of progressively increasing wave height</b><br /><br />When looking at a 7-day period before the incident, we noticed that on Day 1, vessels are on average experiencing wave heights of 2.5m, which corresponds to wind force 5 on the Beaufort scale.<br />The weather then progressively worsens, and this increase in wave height is more pronounced from Day 6 onwards.<br />The average wave height peaks on Day 7 at 6.5m which corresponds to gale force winds.<br />The duration for which the vessels were exposed to sea conditions with wave heights of 4m and above (corresponding to near gale force winds or stronger) was 72 hours.<br /><br />We underline that these are average wave heights of all vessels that had a stack collapse incident.<br />If we look at each vessel separately, many of them were exposed to these conditions for a much longer duration of time.<br />During the 7-day period we examined (which is also shown in the graph below), the “incident zone” for majority of the incidents was a 24-hour window on the last day.<br /><br />It was therefore evident that the vessels experienced average wave heights which progressively increased by two and a half times during the 7-day period.<br />Interestingly, the incidents did not always happen when the wave height was the highest, but after the weather had started to subside.<br />This might be partly due to the fact that the time of reporting the incident to Gard may not always coincide with the time of the incident itself.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/wave_height.png"><img height="440" src="https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/wave_height.png" width="640" /></a><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Average maximum wave heights during the 7 days leading up to the incident</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Credit: Gard Club</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>Higher waves – higher risks</b><br /><br />To further study the exposure to high waves, we looked at vessels that are exposed to a wave height of 7m (corresponding to Bf 8 gale force winds) or above.<br />An observation of interest was that while vessels involved in incidents spent only 5% of their time in wave heights exceeding 7 meters during the incident year, half of all incidents occurred during such conditions.<br />Analysing the maximum wave heights experienced by vessels on the day of the incident, as shown in the graph below, reveals a similar pattern.<br />Essentially, despite spending 95% of their time in calmer waters, the relatively small percentage spent in adverse conditions significantly amplifies the risk of incidents, potentially up to 20 times higher, as indicated by our study.<br /><br />Another finding we had was that among the vessels that had a stack collapse incident, the share of vessels exposed to such high waves increased by almost 12 times from day 1 to day 7.<br />This suggests that these vessels may not have been able to avoid such heavy weather in spite of the advanced weather routeing tools available.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/WaveHeight3.png"><img height="440" src="https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/WaveHeight3.png" width="640" /></a><i>Credit: Gard Club</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>*This chart shows the maximum wave height experienced by the vessels on the day of the incident, whereas the previous graph showed the average of the maximum wave heights to which the vessels were exposed over a 7-day span.</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Examining the global container fleet, roughly 3.4 per cent are exposed to such weather at any given time.<br />Interestingly, among various size segments, the new Panamax 1 segment (8,000 – 12,000 teu) appears to have a higher exposure to wave heights of 7 meters and above compared to any other size category.<br />This trend is also evident for wave heights around 4 meters.<br /><br /><b>Differing risk profiles</b><br /><br />The variation in exposure to adverse weather is not only limited to different size segments in our container fleet.<br />From our study for the period 2016-2022 for the global container fleet, we also see that some container operators or owners are more exposed to the risk of adverse weather than others.<br /><br />In essence, this discrepancy likely stems from differences in operators’ risk tolerance and the internally defined weather thresholds for the vessels.<br />However, the consequences of decisions made in the chartering or the operator’s desk are quite evident in the safety of the vessel and the cargo.<br /><br /><b>Reflections</b><br /><br />Exposure to progressively worsening weather poses a clear risk, and our studies highlight two crucial aspects in this regard.<br />The first involves the duration of exposure, while the second concerns weather thresholds, such as maximum wave height for a vessel, influenced by factors like stability, stack height, and physical condition of the securing equipment.<br />Based on our study findings there are key questions to be considered by the various stakeholders working in the liner industry.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Conflicting priorities on weather thresholds</i><br /><br />Does the understanding of the weather limiting factors, such as maximum wind and wave height for a voyage, vary among different stakeholders, and if so, why?<br /><br />Conflicting priorities may arise between a commercial operator and a vessel’s master regarding voyage routing.<br />While a master might prefer a slightly longer route with less exposure to adverse weather, a commercial operator might prioritize time and fuel savings, potentially pushing the limits.<br />Additionally, we’ve noted that routeing advice to a vessel could vary based on whether their principal is a charterer or owner.<br />Another variable to consider when determining weather thresholds is the vessel’s stability, which may be different from the loading computer calculations, given the misdeclaration of weights and/or a mismatch in stowage location.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Suitable tools for complex rolling phenomena</i><br /><i><br /></i>Do seafarers have access to suitable digital / automated tools for evaluating the risk of intricate phenomena like resonant, synchronous, and parametric rolling?<br /><br />The term “adverse weather” is subjective to seafarers.<br />Often, advice on mitigating the risk is either oversimplified (by recommending avoidance of adverse weather altogether) or overly complicated (by suggesting calculations for resonant, synchronous, and parametric roll risks based largely on estimates).<br />While assessing the influence of weather on a vessel’s motions may seem straightforward in theory, it is much more challenging for seafarers in practice, due to numerous unknowns and estimations.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Slackening of lashings in heavy weather</i><br /><br />Whether there is indeed a progressive deterioration of the lashing efficacy that leads to failure beyond a certain time period?<br /><br />The constant motion of a vessel in heavy seas can exert loads on container stacks, leading to the potential loosening of lashings.<br />The loosening process can start early in heavy weather conditions, especially if the ship is navigating through rough seas for an extended period.<br />In theory, routine lashing checks may seem as an appropriate preventive measure, but in practice, this could pose safety concerns, as the crew would then be exposed to adverse weather during lashing checks.<br />This risk would be even greater onboard larger vessels where there are a lot more lashings to be checked.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Tighter weather routeing for vessels with deteriorated securing equipment</i><br /><br />Should weather routeing considerations be tightened for vessels with deteriorated container sockets and lashing eyes?<br /><br />Experience shows that condition of lashing and securing equipment degrades over time due to usage and inadequate maintenance.<br />It is no surprise that stack collapse incident investigations often emphasize poorly maintained lashing and securing equipment as contributing factors.<br />In fact, corroded sockets and lashing eyes rank among the top 3 findings in Gard’s condition survey data for container ships.<br />Despite these issues, containers continue to be loaded in affected slots, and repairs are postponed until drydock for commercial reasons.<br />Our recommendation is of course that affected slots be taken out of service until repairs are carried out, but from a pure routeing perspective, weather thresholds might need to be adjusted for such vessels.<br />We understand that a few liner operators already have such procedures in place on this for both owned and chartered in tonnage.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Impact of weather on cargo securing inside a container</i><br /><br />To what extent can the securing of cargoes inside containers endure movement caused by adverse weather?<br /><br />Prolonged exposure of the vessel to rough weather could lead to deterioration of cargo securing within the container, potentially leading to cargo breaking loose and shifting within the container.<br />This, in turn, adds additional forces on the container stack.<br />The ship’s crew lacks visibility and control over this aspect.<br />The solution involves engaging in dialogue with and educating shippers, along with implementing improved Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Broadening KPIs for weather routeing</i><br /><br />Should safe weather routeing and the avoidance of adverse weather be included as components of internal key performance indicators (KPIs)?<br /><br />Modern digital tools make it much easier to assess a vessel’s or fleet’s exposure to weather over a specific timeframe.<br />This assessment not only helps a company determine if its vessels encountered weather conditions exceeding internally defined thresholds but also facilitates benchmarking against other vessels of similar size and on similar routes, whether under the same management/ownership or different.<br />Given that most liner operators already have dedicated teams focusing on vessel routing for efficiency and scheduling purposes, expanding their focus to include the aforementioned aspects could enhance safety.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Maritime Executive : <a href="https://maritime-executive.com/article/industry-launching-study-into-containers-lost-overboard">Industry Launching Study into Containers Lost Overboard </a></li><li>GeoGarage blog : <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2022/01/shipping-containers-overboard.html">Shipping containers overboard</a> / <a href="http://blog.geogarage.com/2014/08/ship-loses-more-than-500-containers-in.html">Ship loses more than 500 containers in heavy seas</a> / <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2011/03/secret-life-of-container-lost-at-sea.html?m=1">The secret life of a container lost at sea</a> </li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-85969152565457471852024-03-14T01:29:00.001+01:002024-03-14T01:29:00.238+01:00 Pumped up: will a Dutch startup’s plan to restore Arctic sea-ice work?<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/79447ead253b5e680085e58991de6818411c9d0a/0_354_5306_3183/master/5306.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="800" height="384" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/79447ead253b5e680085e58991de6818411c9d0a/0_354_5306_3183/master/5306.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A polar bear on the sea ice in Naujaat, or Repulse Bay, Nunavut, Canada. </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Arctic ice is shrinking at a rate of almost 13% a decade, and climate scientists are warning that ice-free summers in the Arctic are inevitable by 2050. </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photograph: Paul Souders/Getty Images<br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i><div style="text-align: left;"><i> From <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/27/climate-crisis-arctic-ecosystems-environment-startup-plan-pump-restore-melting-sea-ice-caps">The Guardian</a> by Senay Boztas</i><br /><br />As the Arctic warms, devastating the climate and ecosystems, an old idea used to create skating rinks could be deployed to restore melting ice caps, despite scepticism from some experts<br /><br />Every winter when the temperatures drop, the IJsmeester (ice master) in villages around the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/netherlands">Netherlands</a> carefully starts to flood a field with water to form enough thin layers of ice to create a perfect outdoor skating rink.<br /><br />Now a Dutch startup wants to use <a href="https://arcticreflections.earth/who-we-are/">the same technique</a> to help solve a major ecological problem: melting Arctic ice and its devastating effect on the <a href="https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sea-ice-climate.html#:~:text=Warmer%20water%20temperatures%20delay%20ice,to%20changes%20in%20global%20climate.">climate</a>.<br /><br />“In cold weather, the IJsmeesters start a frantic race to be the first village that can organise an ice-skating marathon,” says Fonger Ypma, chief executive of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/arctic">Arctic</a> Reflections. </div><div style="text-align: left;">“They flood a meadow with a thin layer that becomes ice, and every night they apply more thin layers on top of it. And then, once it’s thick enough, they start skating. It’s our cultural heritage.”<br /> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The ice is about a metre thick.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>By refreezing the top layer, where there is snow, we will add 10-20cm</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Andrea Ceccolini</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Arctic ice is <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/six-ways-loss-of-arctic-ice-impacts-everyone">shrinking by almost 13% a decade, </a>according to WWF, prompting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/06/too-late-now-to-save-arctic-summer-ice-climate-scientists-find">warnings from climate scientists</a> that ice-free summers in the Arctic are <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38511-8">inevitable by 2050</a>. </div><div style="text-align: left;">This, coupled with the very visible evidence of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/24/arctic-ice-loss-forces-polar-bears-to-use-four-times-as-much-energy-to-survive-study">polar bears’ habitat melting</a>, and the threat to the <a href="https://academic.oup.com/hrlr/article/23/3/ngad020/7237938">Indigenous people</a> who rely on the Arctic ecosystems for survival, gave Ypma a wild thought.<br /><br />“The Arctic acts as a <a href="https://www.eea.europa.eu/articles/the-melting-arctic">sort of mirror or heat shield for the Earth</a> and a substantial part of global warming comes from the Earth’s surface becoming darker,” he says.<br />“And so I thought: isn’t there some way to maintain that ice sheet for a bit longer until CO2 levels come down and the ice becomes regenerative? I had this naive idea: why not pump water on top of it?”</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5393244b7c3699193728c2d3436adde1780848df/475_0_3078_1848/master/3078.jpg?width=1300&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="481" data-original-width="800" height="385" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5393244b7c3699193728c2d3436adde1780848df/475_0_3078_1848/master/3078.jpg?width=1300&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Real Ice’s experiment in flooding part of Iqaluktuuttiaq in the Canadian Arctic.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photograph: Arctic Reflections</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Ypma was not the only person to be considering this, he realised, after checking with experts. </div><div style="text-align: left;">“I took the fact that it had been researched already as a positive sign, because then you’re not the only crazy person!” he says.<br /><br />Arctic Reflections is just one company looking to use a technique that is already being employed in several places for other purposes, such as creating <a href="https://aidc.uaf.edu/media/1580/ice-road-manual_final.pdf">ice roads in Canada and Finland</a> and for <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40509280">oil exploration in the Arctic</a> (typically using diesel pumps). In 2016, the physicist Steven Desch and colleagues from Arizona State University proposed building <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/12/plan-to-refreeze-arctic-before-ice-goes-for-good-climate-change">10m wind-powered pumps</a> over the Arctic ice cap to bring water to the surface in winter, <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016ef000410">potentially adding a metre</a> of ice.<br /><br />Ypma recently joined a separate <a href="https://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/2021-05-06-bangor-teams-real-ice-machine-featured-as-part-of-global-for-tomorrow-initiative">Bangor University spinoff, Real Ice</a>, which has a similar idea, for <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrea-ceccolini_it-is-official-real-ice-will-be-in-cambridge-activity-7127654943401873408-XCQy/">a series of field tests</a> in Iqaluktuuttiaq (the Inuit name for Cambridge Bay), Nunavut, Canada, with a 600-watt, hydrogen fuel-cell-powered water pump.</div><div style="text-align: left;">This not-for-profit company has drilled through the ice, pumped up seawater and let temperatures approaching -50C (-58F) refreeze it at the surface.<br /><br />“At the moment the ice is about a metre thick,” says Real Ice’s co-chief executive, Andrea Ceccolini. “By refreezing the top layer, where there is snow, we will add 10-20cm. After that, the ice will grow thicker because we are removing the snow insulation, which is constraining further growth.”<br /><br />Ceccolini hopes to develop an underwater drone that could navigate the -1.5C water, detect the thickness of the ice, pump up water as necessary, refuel and move on to the next spot. </div><div style="text-align: left;">“If we demonstrate [this over] 100 sq km a day with 50 drones, then we can show that this can actually scale [up] to a much larger area,” says Ceccolini.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The only real solution is to either pull carbon out of the air or cut our emissions in half</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Prof Julienne Stroeve</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The goal is also local, to restore sea ice at a site whose Inuit name means a place of good fishing. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRg2zEr7KB73QIdAe8UPYx0WKJtXBCYa9e4vKpR-c4uPkzcjfx2o4ZrFunStSg9RYWUHi-z6iDKnnyKkKWLv3sEkStB4Q1Q5MRkKy3Kze7xeUsKOF0LnACohwE8fEn4kt_z9Zhsd782TUfB5mhVA6-ScBIn-rOT9YVtixI5RHc-ihrNEhMgtO784C_y4X8/s632/Pumped_up__will_a_Dutch_startup%E2%80%99s_plan_to_restore_Arctic_sea-ice_work____Polar_regions___The_Guardian.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="632" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRg2zEr7KB73QIdAe8UPYx0WKJtXBCYa9e4vKpR-c4uPkzcjfx2o4ZrFunStSg9RYWUHi-z6iDKnnyKkKWLv3sEkStB4Q1Q5MRkKy3Kze7xeUsKOF0LnACohwE8fEn4kt_z9Zhsd782TUfB5mhVA6-ScBIn-rOT9YVtixI5RHc-ihrNEhMgtO784C_y4X8/s16000/Pumped_up__will_a_Dutch_startup%E2%80%99s_plan_to_restore_Arctic_sea-ice_work____Polar_regions___The_Guardian.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Guardian graphic. Source : Real Ice</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i><br /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">“A large part of our success will be determined by how well we engage with the local community,” says the co-chief executive, Cian Sherwin, who envisages giving the technology to Indigenous landowners with some form of philanthropic part-funding.<br />“Local people have started to notice differences when it comes to wildlife patterns, migration routes, and we hear locals have to travel almost 300km to hunt their ‘country food’: caribou, elk, moose,” he says.<br />“We’ve also heard accounts of how elders, the resident experts, now can’t actually predict when the ice will be safe, which is shocking to members of the community.”</div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a9bae45b779a551a562b5bbc190ea66f9c541eab/789_0_3056_1834/master/3056.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="800" height="384" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a9bae45b779a551a562b5bbc190ea66f9c541eab/789_0_3056_1834/master/3056.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>One of the Arctic Reflections team measures a layer of new ice laid on top of older, darker ice in Iqaluktuuttiaq, or Cambridge Bay. </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photograph: Arctic Reflections</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />For Arctic Reflections, however, the key aim is to boost the <a href="https://www.npolar.no/en/fact/albedo/#:~:text=Albedo%20is%20an%20expression%20of,the%20sun%20(low%20albedo).">“albedo” – the whiteness of the ice</a> – and its ability to reflect the sun’s rays back to the atmosphere. </div><div style="text-align: left;">The Dutch startup’s other idea is to explore whether Arctic currents could spread ice thickened at strategic locations. </div><div style="text-align: left;">So instead of needing as many pumps, they could potentially save 100,000 sq km of ice from melting in the summer with just 100 to 1,000 installations.<br /><br />Another Dutch project, the <a href="https://dezandmotor.nl/en/">Sand Motor</a>, illustrates this perfectly, says Ypma. Known as “beach nourishment”, it uses sea currents to spread sand naturally to bolster the Netherlands’ coastal defences.<br /><br />“I live in Delft and I go with my kids and my wife quite often to the Zandmotor project: it’s a really good analogy,” he says. </div><div style="text-align: left;">“If you’re positioning your ice-making sites in the right locations, then you can really leverage those flows.”<br /><br />But there are still unanswered questions, such as how ice thinner than three metres will react to flooding and whether thicker ice will last, says Hayo Hendrikse, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, who has <a href="https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:1880b7bf-c115-4c4c-9e6e-33425933cdad">worked on lab and real-life trials</a> with Arctic Reflections.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>We have to resort to these kinds of crazy measures to buy time <br />Maurits Groen</i><br /></div><br />“We know we can just pump water on top of ice, flood it and then it will freeze,” he says. </div><div style="text-align: left;">“But can we also do it with a positive gain in the end?<br /><br />“I see a potential for this <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019EF001230">on a smaller scale</a>, for example, if you want to strengthen natural habitats for polar bears and seals, where the sea ice in summer could survive a bit longer if we target specific fjords or bays.<br />But Hendrikse adds: “It’s not a solution – it’s a sticking plaster.”<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/earth-sciences/people/academic/prof-julienne-stroeve">Julienne Stroeve, professor of polar observation</a> and modelling at University College London, says it would probably be impossible to act on a large-enough scale to have a real impact on the climate. </div><div style="text-align: center;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/af6c119186dc185585aae65fddd140fb9f5ef30e/0_0_5472_3648/master/5472.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/af6c119186dc185585aae65fddd140fb9f5ef30e/0_0_5472_3648/master/5472.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>An IJsmeester on the rink of the Winterswijk Ice Club in the eastern Netherlands. Layering ice for skating is a cherished Dutch tradition.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photograph: ANP/Alamy</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i><br />“I agree that the sea ice is worth protecting, since it helps to keep our planet cool, but the entire Arctic Ocean is about 14m sq km,” she says. </div><div style="text-align: left;">“The only real solution is to either pull carbon out of the air or cut our emissions to half of what they currently are.”<br /><br />Maurits Groen, a jury member of the Dutch Wubbo Ockels innovation prize, which recently <a href="https://www.wubboockelsinnovatieprijs.nl/nieuws/interview-winnaar-fonger-ypma-van-arctic-reflections-een-fantastische-erkenning-van-ons-werk">gave an award to Arctic Reflections</a>, agrees that tackling the causes of the climate crisis is preferable.<br />“But the speed at which things are going wrong is such that we have to resort to these kinds of crazy measures to at least buy some time,” he says.<br />“It’s a proven technology and cost-effective compared with alternatives – we have to start somewhere.”<br /></div></div><br /></div></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-5770081616479201652024-03-13T01:33:00.004+01:002024-03-13T01:33:00.123+01:00World on brink of fourth mass coral reef bleaching event, NOAA says<div style="text-align: center;"><img height="495" src="https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/B6NYJ4SAYVJGLAR2CSXV5G2MOU.jpg" width="640" />A <i>Healthy brain coral rests under Port of Miami regardless of extreme heat in Miami, Flordia, U.S., July 14, 2023. REUTERS/Maria Alejandra Cardona/File Photo</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/world-brink-fourth-mass-coral-reef-bleaching-event-noaa-says-2024-03-05/">Reuters</a> by Gloria Dickie</i><br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Southern Hemisphere reefs set to bleach in coming months</li><li>Follows heat records fuelled by climate change and El Nino</li><li>Scientists conduct fly-overs at Australia's Great Barrier Reef</li><li>Previous mass bleaching events in 1998, 2010 and 2014-2017</li></ul></div><div style="text-align: left;">The world is on the verge of a fourth mass coral bleaching event which could see wide swathes of tropical reefs die, including parts of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.<br />Marine biologists are on high alert following months of record-breaking ocean heat fuelled by climate change and the El Nino climate pattern.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/103e13fc5f0c09a6bb818eab5441f7d2433e0dd5/0_0_3115_1346/master/3115.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="346" data-original-width="800" height="277" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/103e13fc5f0c09a6bb818eab5441f7d2433e0dd5/0_0_3115_1346/master/3115.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Images showing the bleaching and death of coral off Heron Island from 2021 through to February. Photograph: <a href="https://coralwatch.org">CoralWatch</a></i><br /></div> </div><div style="text-align: left;">"It's looking like the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere is probably going to bleach this year," said ecologist Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch which serves as the global monitoring authority on coral bleaching risk.<br />"We are literally sitting on the cusp of the worst bleaching event in the history of the planet," he said.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><iframe height="360" src="https://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/product/vs/map_full.html?lat=10.971520198189316&lng=133.92569679362262&zoom_level=2" width="640"></iframe></i> </div><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/product/vs/map.php">NOAA Coral Reef Watch 5km regional virtual stations</a><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">These details have not previously been reported.<br />Triggered by heat stress, coral bleaching occurs when corals expel the colourful algae living in their tissues.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Without these helpful algae, the corals become pale and are vulnerable to starvation and disease.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Coral bleaching can be devastating for the ocean ecosystem, as well as
fisheries and tourism-based economies that depend on healthy, colourful
reefs to attract scuba divers and snorkellers.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/5AE2/production/_132866232_0v3a1863.jpg.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/5AE2/production/_132866232_0v3a1863.jpg.webp" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A recent photo of the bleaching damage on the Great Barrier Reef</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>courtesy of Climate Council <br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br />Ominous signs</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The last global mass coral bleaching event ran from 2014 to 2017, during which time the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/great-barrier-reef-hit-by-bleaching-unesco-weighs-danger-listing-2022-03-18/">Great Barrier Reef</a> lost nearly a third of its corals.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Preliminary results suggest that about 15% of the world's reefs saw large coral die-offs in this event.<br />This year is shaping up to be even worse as observations trickle in.<br />Following the Northern Hemisphere summer last year, the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/cuban-scientists-hunt-clues-save-coral-reefs-ocean-temperatures-soar-2023-09-01/">Caribbean</a> registered its worst coral bleaching on record.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Now at the end of its summer, "the Southern Hemisphere is basically bleaching all over the place," Manzello said. </div><div style="text-align: left;">"The entirety of the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching. We just had reports that American Samoa is bleaching."<br />Previous global bleaching events occurred in 2010 and 1998.<br />Coral bleaching is often tied to the naturally occurring El Nino climate phenomenon which leads to warmer ocean waters.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The Conversation : <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-barrier-reefs-latest-bout-of-bleaching-is-the-fifth-in-eight-summers-the-corals-now-have-almost-no-reprieve-225348">The Great Barrier Reef’s latest bout of bleaching is the fifth in eight summers – the corals now have almost no reprieve</a></li><li>BBC : <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68508423">Great Barrier Reef: New mass bleaching event hits World Heritage site </a></li><li>CNN : <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/07/australia/mass-coral-bleaching-event-great-barrier-reef-intl-hnk-scn/index.html">Australia’s Great Barrier Reef hit once more by mass coral bleaching</a></li><li>The Guardian : <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/08/coral-bleaching-great-barrier-reef-australia">Fifth mass coral bleaching event in eight years hits Great Barrier Reef, marine park authority confirms</a></li><li>YaleEnvironment360 : <a href="https://e360.yale.edu/digest/climate-change-great-barrier-reef-bleaching-2024">Great Barrier Reef Sees Mass Bleaching as Ocean Temperatures Hit </a></li><li>Axios : <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/coral-reef-bleaching-great-barrier-ocean-warming-noaa">"Widespread" coral bleaching threatens iconic reefs, NOAA warns</a></li><li>Phys : <a href="https://phys.org/news/2024-03-great-barrier-reef-latest-bout.html">The Great Barrier Reef's latest bout of bleaching is the fifth in eight summers—the corals now have almost no reprieve </a> </li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-15733019361922000862024-03-12T01:32:00.001+01:002024-03-12T01:32:00.129+01:00Opinion – Keep an eye on Djibouti<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH6OmXtXcAAu4s3?format=jpg&name=orig" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="751" data-original-width="800" height="601" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH6OmXtXcAAu4s3?format=jpg&name=orig" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Djibouti's president has authorized Beijing to build a surveillance system, managed from Shanghai.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A veritable listening and spying center, aimed at the French, American, German and Japanese Western bases, which are all located within a handkerchief's reach. <br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4os8QeJsDImIQKw_XU5G-xRXvPtneYDLXyvnHx5Rd2TSrZxSAOwE3zIjT6CYCmWh56p10Q0KfGWGsFc_P7ifwACRB5dUwIiJZoqSr_49yuEYmDz6Q03fmKd47iYoDxCOI5mJMhIixY9t-1hbj1adVCUExO6o8o7l3c84qgrmRiUlMXyUjR8km1fLSwBYO/s1917/Djibouti_Chinese_Base_SHOM_GeoGarage.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="947" data-original-width="1917" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4os8QeJsDImIQKw_XU5G-xRXvPtneYDLXyvnHx5Rd2TSrZxSAOwE3zIjT6CYCmWh56p10Q0KfGWGsFc_P7ifwACRB5dUwIiJZoqSr_49yuEYmDz6Q03fmKd47iYoDxCOI5mJMhIixY9t-1hbj1adVCUExO6o8o7l3c84qgrmRiUlMXyUjR8km1fLSwBYO/w640-h316/Djibouti_Chinese_Base_SHOM_GeoGarage.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>According to satellite images, the gigantic Chinese base, most of which is underground, can already accommodate 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers.<br />With its airstrip, railroad and jetty designed for large-tonnage ships,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>it is in reality "a platform for preparing for war". <br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center" data-media-max-width="640"><p dir="ltr" lang="fr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Djibouti?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Djibouti</a> qu'un centre logistique de lutte contre la piraterie.<br />Ils ont menti." <br /><br />Dans le très bon documentaire "Chine : opérations secrètes" de… <a href="https://t.co/XpXXDVGTDr">pic.twitter.com/XpXXDVGTDr</a></p>— OpexNews (@OpexNews) <a href="https://twitter.com/OpexNews/status/1764993131877949498?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 5, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href="https://www.e-ir.info/2023/11/03/opinion-keep-an-eye-on-djibouti/">E-IR</a> by <br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;">Here is a quiz for our times.<br />Think of a nation through the mouth of which passes 10–15 per cent of the world’s oil and commercial trade (20–25 per cent for Europe).<br />Also, the undersea cables that transmit data between three continents including nearly all internet access to some territories.<br />Besides being the life-giving conduit with 95% of goods to and from a giant landlocked neighbour.<br />Further visualise that nation marooned within a tempestuous region of perpetually-conflicted neighbours.<br />With piracy rampant along its 314 km waterfront.<br />Finally, consider the cheek-by-jowl military bases of eight great powers in a tiny territory of 23,000 square km.<br />This is <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13231761">Djibouti</a> where, aeons ago, the earth split to create the Red Sea.<br />It is still at the centre of tectonic shifts, but of the geo-political type.<br />But this is not much talked about.<br />Is Djibouti the calm centre of the violent political storms buffeting our world, or will it become the epicentre of the next global war?<br /> <br />The question stems from Djibouti’s location overlooking the Bab al-Mandab Strait that connects the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and Mediterranean.<br />The economic security of the world’s most populous regions from China and India to Middle East, Horn of Africa, and Europe depend on free passage across this 28 km wide chokepoint.<br />It is a rough neighbourhood.<br />Across the water is the Houthi-dominated part of Yemen, torn by a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.<br />And bordering Djibouti are totalitarian Eritrea, dysfunctional Somalia, and restive Ethiopia.<br />The longstanding conflicts within and across their borders are accompanied by massive human rights abuses, hunger, disease, and climate and environmental catastrophes.<br />As well as population dislocations: some 5 million refugees and 16 million displaced.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The troubles of the Horn of Africa cannot be kept bottled therein.<br />Perhaps why the French retained a military base in Djibouti after its independence in 1977.<br />The United States has its only African base there.<br />The Italian, Japanese, German, Spanish, Japanese and Saudi military are also present.<br />China opened its first overseas naval base in Djibouti as a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/in-strategic-djibouti-a-microcosm-of-chinas-growing-foothold-in-africa/2019/12/29/a6e664ea-beab-11e9-a8b0-7ed8a0d5dc5d_story.html">critical hub</a> in its ‘Belt and Road’ penetration of Africa.<br />Russia and India want to come too.<br /><br />It appears that defenceless Djibouti welcomes all <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S3PhfNHclU">foreign militaries</a> as a form of self-protection.<br />Who will threaten it, bristling as it is with the world’s most sophisticated armaments and best-trained soldiers?</div><div style="text-align: left;">Besides, renting out its unproductive real estate brings useful income.<br />Meanwhile, the foreign militaries are mutually deterred to keep peace while going about their normal business of spying on each other.<br /> In that respect, is Djibouti playing a useful geo-political role, somewhat akin to Switzerland in the Second World War and Vienna in the Cold War?</div><div style="text-align: left;">Perhaps, but the Achilles Heel is Djibouti’s internal dynamics.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />With a GDP of around US$3500 per capita, Djibouti is lower-middle income.<br />But a quarter of its 1.13 million population endure extreme poverty and a third are unemployed.<br />The <a href="https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Countries-Regions/International-Statistics/Country-Profiles/djibuti.pdf?__blob=publicationFile">country ranks</a> a lowly 171st on the Human Development Index, reflecting its bad governance.<br />Nominally a multiparty system, the same president has ruled with a rod of iron since 1999 thanks to flawed or boycotted elections.<br />Classified by <a href="https://freedomhouse.org/country/djibouti/freedom-world/2023">Freedom House</a> as “not free”, Djibouti does not allow freedom of expression or association, not to mention fair judiciary or media freedom, ranking 162nd out of 180 on the <a href="https://rsf.org/en/index">World Press Freedom Index</a>.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The <a href="https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/djibouti/#:~:text=The%20law%20prohibits%20arbitrary%20arrest,government%20seldom%20respected%20these%20provisions.">US State Department</a> has called out its arbitrary detentions under harsh and abusive conditions including torture and a <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/djibouti/djibouti-repression-reigns-human-rights-under-attack">climate of fear</a> is perpetrated by Djibouti’s security forces.<br />Transparency International’s <a href="https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/djibouti">Corruption Perception index</a> ranks Djibouti as the 130th most corrupt nation while neighbouring Somalia occupies the bottom 180th slot.<br />Djibouti’s location does double service as a criminal hub.<br />Lucrative <a href="https://borgenproject.org/human-trafficking-in-djibouti/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20U.S.%20Department,trafficked%20through%20Djibouti%20each%20year.">human trafficking</a> for labour and sexual exploitation are <a href="https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-trafficking-in-persons-report/djibouti/">systematically overlooked</a>.<br />Irregular Somali and Ethiopian migrants are most impacted with transhipment to Yemen and on to Saudi Arabia.<br />Hostage taking for ransom is documented.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Djibouti is an arms trafficking hub with weaponry and munitions from Yemeni and Iranian sources fuelling all conflicts in the Horn and beyond.<br />Unsurprisingly, there is a parallel gold smuggling trade.<br />Tragically, endangered animals are not spared.<br />There is illicit trade in ivory, rhino horn, skins, as well as wild animals for exotic pet markets.<br />They originate, for example, from the Eritrean desert and transit through Djibouti where they are joined by nesting seabirds and marine turtles.<br /><br />The country is a waypoint for illicit drugs, such as heroin and cannabis from Asia.<br /> At the same time, Djibouti has its own <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20180706-reporters-djibouti-khat-problem-drug-addiction-state-monopoly-health-poverty">addiction with khat</a>, an amphetamine-like stimulant that wastes 40% of household budgets with devastating health, social, and productivity consequences.<br />Banned in most developed countries but not in Djibouti, khat contributes 15% of the government budget with trading cartels seeding corruption along the way.<br /> Djibouti’s khat economy invites comparisons with Afghanistan’s poppy business or Latin America’s narco-trade.<br />This is just one of several channels for Illicit financial transactions, as anti-money laundering regulations are not implemented.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The <a href="https://africa.ocindex.net/country/djibouti#:~:text=While%20there%20is%20no%20evidence,Southern%20Asia%20to%20East%20Africa.">Organised Crime Index</a> indicates how multiple criminal networks are comfortable on Djibouti, their impunity apparently linked to profit-sharing Djiboutian actors.<br /> Ironically, the <a href="https://igad.int/">Intergovernmental Authority on Development</a> (IGAD), a regional grouping for good governance, peace and prosperity is headquartered in Djibouti but has little influence.<br />Djiboutian plunder comes in various forms.<br />Take stewardship of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pDSuIlqBnA">Lake Assal</a> that provides gourmet-quality <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/3/4/modern-life-fails-to-intrude-on-djiboutis-white-gold-miners">“white gold”</a>.<br />Chinese companies have extracted opaque concessions to exploit six million tons of salt.<br />The industrial commodification of a millennia-old livelihood resource does little for locals while adding to <a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DJI/djibouti/external-debt-stock#:~:text=Data%20are%20in%20current%20U.S.,a%209.96%25%20increase%20from%202018.">Djibouti’s external debt</a> of over 3 billion dollars, <a href="https://adf-magazine.com/2023/01/inflation-drought-push-djibouti-to-suspend-loan-payments-to-china/">nearly half</a> of which is held by China.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Corruption is bringing Djibouti to its knees as it struggles to service its mushrooming debts.<br />That risks its biggest money-spinner, its strategic port and free trade zone.<br />These were Chinese financed, and are now Chinese-managed, after the Djibouti government abruptly nationalised it and terminated its management contract with the Dubai-based shipping giant <a href="https://www.dpworld.com/">DP World</a>.<br />The legality of that is disputed as also whether such nationalisation serves the Djiboutian public interest.<br />DP World has won rulings in courts in <a href="https://www.africanews.com/2018/07/13/dubai-s-dp-world-threatens-legal-action-against-china-over-djibouti-trade-zone/">London</a> and <a href="https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-africa-china-hong-kong-e01b827fd55dd5fba9d13f5e5baabade">Hong Kong</a> against being muscled out by Djibouti and its Chinese collaborator under highly dubious circumstances.<br />But there is no restitution and billions of dollars are at stake.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Meanwhile, an independent assessment by specialist <a href="https://www.pangea-risk.com/">Pangea-Risk Insight</a> highlights rampant corruption “at the highest echelons of the port’s administration” and alleges “exploiting financial institutions” for money laundering, frauds and illicit fund diversions.<br />There are close parallels with the Chinese financing of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap">Hambantota Port</a> in Sri Lanka that corrupted the country’s politics and bankrupted its government – leading to China taking over port ownership.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> Will Djibouti Port go the same way?</div><div style="text-align: left;">If that happens, what will that mean for Djibouti’s strategic open hub status.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />With Djibouti’s fragile rule-of law corroded by astounding magnitudes of corrupt plunder, what is the impact on the security of the state?</div><div style="text-align: left;">As France knows from its experiences of several ex-colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa, corrupt and authoritarian governance eventually implodes.<br />The Western militaries also discovered that their military strength could not stop their expulsion from the Sahel.<br /> The consequent instability including potentially resurgent terrorism has already rippled across the African continent and threatens wider consequences in our globalised world.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwAemJAux4hgJGyfwRO8ewshSJlJP6TYuUhcssrCoXVEAacZ1TatUJtqL_y6E62uN_jhDhWwQIsU4x9tAXdCr8fvcp9B9rwTobkAALAYydCCTuNbgPb3FWBWxM9G4g7dxgFjmItpBfe_QBV5hZ6hlPBlTeE-pprmUQ1cfwX-UiVt1D9S8OtrfcVRmjk1aJ/s1916/Djibouti_French_Base_GeoGarage.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="949" data-original-width="1916" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwAemJAux4hgJGyfwRO8ewshSJlJP6TYuUhcssrCoXVEAacZ1TatUJtqL_y6E62uN_jhDhWwQIsU4x9tAXdCr8fvcp9B9rwTobkAALAYydCCTuNbgPb3FWBWxM9G4g7dxgFjmItpBfe_QBV5hZ6hlPBlTeE-pprmUQ1cfwX-UiVt1D9S8OtrfcVRmjk1aJ/w640-h316/Djibouti_French_Base_GeoGarage.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Djibouti other international bases with the <a href="http://geogarage.com">GeoGarage</a> platform (SHOM nautical raster chart)</i><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The world’s most powerful militaries camped in Djibouti cannot be unaware of distress signals emanating around them.<br />Their governments are distracted by more pressing wars in the Middle East and Europe, and rising tensions in the Pacific.<br />But they would be rash to ignore Djibouti – for the same reason that took them there in the first place.<br />Djibouti’s dangerous downward slide has serious consequences for stability, far beyond its own tiny footprint on the planet.<br />Our common interest suggests that it should not be a place for destructive rivalry or greedy exploitation from within or by outsiders.<br />Djibouti needs the international community to come together to help it become a decent, democratic, developed nation.<br />It will be a win-win if Djibouti is properly enabled to fulfil its geographical destiny as the connection to all corners.<br />But only if it can always stay the calm centre of gathering global storms.<br />That cannot be taken for granted. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>IR : <a href="https://www.e-ir.info/2023/09/12/locating-africa-in-the-indo-pacific-the-case-of-djibouti/">Locating Africa in the Indo-Pacific: The Case of Djibouti</a></li><li>US Institute of Peace : <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/01/china-eyeing-second-military-base-africa">Is China Eyeing a Second Military Base in Africa?</a></li><li>MidShipNews : <a href="https://www.midshipnews.org/blog/chinese-naval-strategy-the-go-boardgame">Chinese naval diplomacy and the game of GO</a></li><li>The Guardian : <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/27/china-building-overseas-naval-bases-across-asia-and-africa-say-analysts">China may be planning overseas naval bases in Asia and Africa, say analysts</a></li><li>AAWsat : <a href="https://english.aawsat.com/business/4880296-red-sea-unrest-revives-djibouti-ports">Red Sea Unrest Revives Djibouti Ports </a> </li></ul><p> </p><p> </p></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-88148357446517961622024-03-11T01:13:00.006+01:002024-03-15T16:31:57.172+01:00Looking at the world horizontally and vertically, what's the big difference? ——Interview with Hao Xiaoguang, the compiler of the vertical world map<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hxgmap.com/imag3/1309dst.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="592" height="800" src="http://www.hxgmap.com/imag3/1309dst.jpg" width="592" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://preview.redd.it/vertical-world-map-designed-by-the-chinese-academy-of-v0-0xqggvzgzjec1.jpeg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=a7a71b509fcbf7764f558dcf5bcdd6109bf3f2ca"><i>Reddit</i></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> From <a href="https://www.tellerreport.com/life/2021-04-14-looking-at-the-world-horizontally-and-vertically--what-s-the-big-difference--%E2%80%94%E2%80%94interview-with-hao-xiaoguang--the-compiler-of-the-vertical-world-map.rJVIEj2E8d.html">Tellereport</a> by Sun Zifa</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">More than 400 years ago, the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci drew the "Kunyu World Map" centered on China.<br />The traditional horizontal version of the world map has been "rampant" for more than 400 years, and it has imprinted the public's perception of world geography.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Twenty years ago, Chinese scholar Hao Xiaoguang began to study and compile a vertical version of the world map, aiming to more clearly describe the geographic relationship between the northern and southern hemispheres and the world based on the traditional horizontal version highlighting the world map of the eastern and western hemispheres.<br />After more than 10 years of hard work, he innovatively compiled a vertical version of the world map in 2013 "turned out."</div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div style="text-align: left;"><b>Looking at the world horizontally and vertically, what's the big difference? </b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b> </b></div>Researcher Hao Xiaoguang of the Institute of Precision Measurement Science and Technology Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently
accepted an exclusive interview with a reporter from China News Agency
to elaborate on his indissoluble bond with the vertical world map.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Why compile a vertical world map?</b> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Hao Xiaoguang introduced that the traditional
horizontal map of the world that people are accustomed to was originally
drawn by the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci in 1584.</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Although
this version is suitable for expressing the geographical relationship
between the eastern and western hemispheres, the disadvantage is that
the deformation of the northern and southern hemispheres is relatively
large and the relationship with the peripheral regions is not clear."</div><div style="text-align: left;">For example, on a horizontal map, Antarctica shows 3.8 times the area of Australia.<br />Moreover, Antarctica seems to have a parallel relationship with the three continents of South America, Africa, and Australia.</div><div style="text-align: left;">But on the vertical map, Antarctica is only 1.8 times the area of Australia, and it is surrounded by three contine </div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><img class="i-amphtml-fill-content i-amphtml-replaced-content" height="454" src="https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://i2.chinanews.com/simg/cmshd/2021/04/14/a3edcc2fee9b4b7298cca8196f9051b1.jpg" width="640" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Horizontal World Map (Eastern Hemisphere Edition)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Edited by Hao Xiaoguang, published by Hunan Map Publishing House in 2014)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;">Visual errors like this are not only easy to cause
misunderstandings among the general public, but also some professional
fields are also affected.</div> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> Hao Xiaoguang believes that if the world map has an east-west
hemisphere version, it should have a north-south hemisphere version,
otherwise it will be difficult to fully show the face of the earth.<br />His
research and compilation of vertical world maps is to make the facts
hidden by traditional world maps obvious, and at the same time use
multiple and multi-angle methods to fully show the geographic
relationship between China and the world.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-map-high-res.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="800" height="406" src="https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-map-high-res.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> The Chinese word for China fuses two characters, 中 (zhōng) meaning middle or central, and 国 (guó) meaning kingdom or country.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Together, these characters form 中国: Middle Kingdom.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The maps of China and, no doubt, much of its sense of history and place in the world can be deduced from these two characters.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>courtesy of <a href="https://studycli.org/fr/chinese-culture/china-world-map/">CLI</a></i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div style="text-align: left;"><b>Is the globe not obvious enough? </b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b> </b></div><div style="text-align: left;">With a globe, why bother to draw a flat world map? </div><div style="text-align: left;">This is the question that Hao Xiaoguang has faced the most.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">He
said: "The globe can accurately grasp the world, but it is not at a
glance, because no matter from which angle you look at the past, you can
only see half of the earth."</div><div style="text-align: left;">The traditional horizontal version of the world
map, whether the Asia-Pacific version centered on the Pacific Ocean or
the European and American version centered on the Atlantic Ocean,
belongs to the "Warp World Map", which is suitable for expressing the
geographic relationship between the eastern and western hemispheres.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div>Hao Xiaoguang pointed out that “the projection method of dividing the globe by the meridian is like cutting an apple longitudinally and flattening it.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It will inevitably cause deformation of the north and south poles and blur the relationship with the surrounding areas.” <br /><br />Therefore, it is not only necessary but also necessary to compile a vertical map that can accurately and clearly express the geographical relationship between the northern and southern hemispheres, solve the problem of deformation of the north and south poles, and be acceptable to most countries and people.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div style="text-align: center;"><img height="453" src="https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://i2.chinanews.com/simg/cmshd/2021/04/14/ca2ca06a455646f99c0078d1724fe053.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Horizontal Map of the World (Western Hemisphere Edition)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(edited by Hao Xiaoguang, published by Hunan Map Publishing House in 2014)</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>How to compile a vertical world map?</b><br /> </div><div style="text-align: left;">After more than 10 years of exploration and research, Hao Xiaoguang proposed a "double warp and double latitude" design plan for the compilation of the "series of world maps". </div><div style="text-align: left;">One set consists of four editions, including the traditional horizontal version of the eastern hemisphere (Asia-Pacific version) and the western hemisphere version (European and American version). </div><div style="text-align: left;">"Warp World Map", he creatively compiled the vertical northern hemisphere version and southern hemisphere version as the "latitude world map".</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />"Just like a set of clothes and pants is different and symmetrical, it can fully dress up a person. The earth should also be described by combining four maps of east, west, north and south to form a combination that meets the standards of truth and beauty." Hao Xiaoguang said.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">In Hao Xiaoguang’s eyes, the four horizontal and vertical maps constitute the “family portrait” of the earth, which fully demonstrates the geographical relationship between the countries in the east, west, north and south, and between the ocean and the land, with the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Arctic Ocean as the center.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The way of thinking out of the center of the ocean.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://i2.chinanews.com/simg/cmshd/2021/04/14/aeeb9c2953f145a6b429c70b4fd1a23e.jpg" /><br /></div> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Vertical World Map (Northern Hemisphere Edition) </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(edited by Hao Xiaoguang, published by Hunan Map Publishing House in 2014)</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />In contrast to the horizontal version of "cutting" the warp, the vertical version of the northern and southern hemispheres is the "cutting" through the latitude. <br />"Theoretically, there are countless ways to'cut' the earth, and countless maps of the world can be drawn, but it is not easy to find the'perfect cutting line' and be accepted by all parts of the world." <br /><br />Hao Xiaoguang pointed out that a universally accepted map of the world should not cut a certain continent or a certain country as much as possible, and ensure the integrity of the time zone.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">After continuous research and trial and error, Hao Xiaoguang finally found the "perfect cutting line" in his mind-on the northern hemisphere version, the earth was "cut" along 60 degrees south latitude, and on the southern hemisphere version, this tangent line It is 15 degrees north latitude. <br /><br />The two vertical world maps drawn in this way do not cut continents at all. <br />In particular, the 15-degree north latitude tangent line passes through almost the narrowest point between North and South America, fully retaining the morphology of the North and South America continent.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">In the vertical version of the Northern Hemisphere map, the Arctic Ocean, which was originally on the edge of the world map, is surrounded by Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and other countries.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It is like a large "Mediterranean Sea" and its geographic location is extremely important.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Hao Xiaoguang said that on the four horizontal and vertical maps, every continent, continent, and country in the world, no matter how big or small, is fully presented, which is equivalent to "the first time that all members of the land on the surface of the earth have taken a family portrait.</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Standard photo".<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div style="text-align: center;"><img height="640" src="https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://i2.chinanews.com/simg/cmshd/2021/04/14/d7cea2bc4d6b4cd4b3f95dc457f3d35b.jpg" width="450" /><br /></div> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Vertical World Map (Southern Hemisphere Edition)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(edited by Hao Xiaoguang, published by Hunan Map Publishing House in 2014)</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>What are the advantages of the vertical world map?</b><br /><br />In Hao Xiaoguang's view, the biggest advantage of the vertical version of the world map is that it overcomes the defect that traditional horizontal version maps are not suitable for expressing the geographical relationship between the northern and southern hemispheres. <br /><br />Specifically, 2/3 of the land in the world is in the northern hemisphere, and 4/5 of the countries are in the northern hemisphere.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The vertical map makes the geography of the northern and southern hemispheres more clearly expressed, has a more thorough understanding of land and countries, and can better promote inter-state Exchanges.<br /><br />Airplane routes are generally land-to-land and country-to-country.</div><div style="text-align: left;">In the northern hemisphere, which occupies 2/3 of the land and 4/5 of the world, the advantages of the vertical map are even more obvious. <br /><br />For example, Hao Xiaoguang said that from Beijing, China to New York, the range of the Arctic Ocean route using the vertical map is about 11,000 kilometers, while the Pacific route through the traditional horizontal map is about 19,000 kilometers.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The difference between the two is 8,000 kilometers, and the one-way flight time is greatly shortened. <br /><br />On the vertical map of the northern hemisphere, the Arctic Ocean has become the shortest air route connecting Asia, Europe, and North America.<br /><br />In addition, on the vertical map of the northern hemisphere, the Arctic Ocean becomes the center and is surrounded by North America and Eurasian continents. <br /><br />Undoubtedly, this can more intuitively reflect the formation and development of the "Ice Silk Road", and it will surely promote and serve the construction and cooperation of the "Ice Silk Road" more effectively in the countries surrounding the Arctic Ocean.<br /><br />In response to the saying that "the vertical version of the world map seems to narrow the distance between China and the United States", Hao Xiaoguang emphasized that it is the vertical version of the world map that subverts people's customary thinking mode of horizontal maps, and presents the true relationship of world geography from a new perspective.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EWcQZGoXQAELZdq?format=jpg&name=orig" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="503" data-original-width="800" height="402" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EWcQZGoXQAELZdq?format=jpg&name=orig" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="http://www.hxgmap.com/imag3/1106north.jpg">Hao Xiaoguang's first world map</a>, 2002</i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Coming out, the north-south crossing of the Arctic Ocean is actually the closer route between China and the United States, much closer than the traditional east-west crossing of the Pacific Ocean.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Hao Xiaoguang also recalled that at a design seminar on the second-generation Beidou satellite navigation system many years ago, he proposed "the United States in the north of China" and corrected the design plan based on the horizontal world map, so that the demand for the Arctic Ocean direction was caught in the eyes of the designer. <br /><br />The relevant Chinese authorities promptly adopted his opinions and re-planned the design scheme of the second-generation Beidou satellite navigation system.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">It is understood that it is precisely because of the outstanding advantages of the vertical world map that Hao Xiaoguang's newly edited "Series of World Maps" obtained internal applications in professional fields such as aerospace and scientific investigation before obtaining the "birth certificate", and was widely praised.<br /><br />Among them, according to the vertical version of the northern hemisphere world map, the Beidou system revised the coverage of the Beidou satellite; the China Polar Research Center used the vertical version of the southern hemisphere world map as an indication map in 2004 to carry out the 21st Antarctic scientific expedition ocean voyage.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div style="text-align: center;"><img height="640" src="https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://i2.chinanews.com/simg/cmshd/2021/04/14/d86e63a7fec54e2dacb74d38796fd55f.jpg" width="475" /><br /></div> <br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Made in China" vertical world map (edited by Hao Xiaoguang, published by Hunan Map Publishing House in 2014)</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>How do the horizontal and vertical versions of the map complement each other?</b><br /><br />Since the vertical version of the world map has outstanding advantages, will it replace the traditional horizontal version of the world map?<br /><br />"(The vertical version replaces the horizontal version) That is incredible. It is not a vertical version. The horizontal version will not work. It is threatened. The two complement each other, each has its own strengths and complementary advantages." Hao Xiaoguang said,</div><div style="text-align: left;">The horizontal version of the world map, which has a history of more than 400 years, expresses the geography of the eastern and western hemispheres very well, but the geographic expression of the northern and southern hemispheres has major defects. <br /><br />Similarly, the vertical version of the map shows a good geographical expression in the northern and southern hemispheres, but not in the eastern and western hemispheres.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim8aap3Fha7ogqB1u1Hppbja4JuBlEGIlTBwG8V0TPkaMuDQ1KktuvIHf2KF3aWUZ4AJhC3WYX92GA0ZNe7vAyt70PfpLEKeQ4_pcSdCms3lMGChenUBo_iHsWQdmD5CVjRn8LbwmZj7sjUzLkJyOBVE3KS7xWUbT5UKQsSuPgl-OIb33D_UdDOD9856wM/s836/1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="836" data-original-width="639" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim8aap3Fha7ogqB1u1Hppbja4JuBlEGIlTBwG8V0TPkaMuDQ1KktuvIHf2KF3aWUZ4AJhC3WYX92GA0ZNe7vAyt70PfpLEKeQ4_pcSdCms3lMGChenUBo_iHsWQdmD5CVjRn8LbwmZj7sjUzLkJyOBVE3KS7xWUbT5UKQsSuPgl-OIb33D_UdDOD9856wM/w490-h640/1.jpg" width="490" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK6EoOTnyQAHklbwvRZAN_XA8Qg_Dr-njACHAYDejBOLw1xTm6792rsEmzqnBQby1qeeKQ40rOe2ErTDORkFGwZ_xqRevCvxGYOlo9Ywv_qfihLovub_hgnXZ6g5xwBbCfFOOFTsoND9Ah4GrPLgh5Iol3z12WjgZ3RoWBU8-xJt_-1I-vgSXSMcwRGs3_/s874/2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="874" data-original-width="629" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK6EoOTnyQAHklbwvRZAN_XA8Qg_Dr-njACHAYDejBOLw1xTm6792rsEmzqnBQby1qeeKQ40rOe2ErTDORkFGwZ_xqRevCvxGYOlo9Ywv_qfihLovub_hgnXZ6g5xwBbCfFOOFTsoND9Ah4GrPLgh5Iol3z12WjgZ3RoWBU8-xJt_-1I-vgSXSMcwRGs3_/w460-h640/2.jpg" width="460" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Generalized Equip-Difference Parallel Polyconical</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> Projection Method for the Global Map</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>source : <a href="https://icaci.org/files/documents/ICC_proceedings/ICC2001/icc2001/file/f08034.pdf">Hao Xiaoguang & </a><a href="https://icaci.org/files/documents/ICC_proceedings/ICC2001/icc2001/file/f08034.pdf">Xue Huaiping</a>, 2001 </i><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">He said that from the perspective of application, the horizontal and vertical versions of the world map have more advantages on land and air routes, while the horizontal version is more advantageous for ocean and maritime navigation, and clearly reflects the complementary effects of the two.<br /><br />He also added that in the past, because of the influence of the traditional horizontal version of the eastern and western hemisphere world map, most people had a prominent understanding of the Pacific Rim and the Atlantic Rim, but they did not know enough about the Arctic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. <br /><br />After the vertical version of the northern and southern hemisphere world map was compiled and launched, in addition to the land expression is very good, there is also an emphasis on the Arctic Ocean and the Indian Ocean, thus making up for the shortcomings of the traditional world map.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">"From the vertical map of the northern hemisphere, we can see that 2/3 of the land and 4/5 of the countries surround the Arctic Ocean. Except for China and the United States, the positional relationship between China and other countries has also changed greatly, which can better show the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind."</div><div style="text-align: left;">Hao Xiaoguang Said that the two high-profile countries of China and the United States across the Arctic Ocean and are closer together, it should be like the horizontal and vertical versions of the world map that complement each other's advantages and strengthen exchanges and cooperation for a win-win situation.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div style="text-align: center;"><img height="484" src="https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://i2.chinanews.com/simg/cmshd/2021/04/14/86179ccc7a984201afc51b578d772f2f.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div> <div style="text-align: center;"><i>A vertical world map created by researcher Hao Xiaoguang of the Institute of Precision Measurement Science and Technology Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and him.</i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> In February 2021, 8 years after the vertical version of the world map compiled by Hao Xiaoguang was officially published, American scholars used the new double-sided projection technology to draw a similar map. </div><div style="text-align: left;">They also used the latitude division method to divide the earth in half to obtain a double-sided circle. . <br /><br />"The US version of the vertical version of the world map is the same as ours, obviously it is the northern and southern hemispheres, but it is seven or eight years later than the Chinese version." </div><div style="text-align: left;">He said.</div><div style="text-align: left;">"The revolution of the map means the rediscovery and re-understanding of world geography. A good world map can cultivate a more comprehensive world view, stimulate people's imagination of the world, and give birth to the desire to explore the world."</div><div style="text-align: left;">Hao Xiaoguang said, at present, He is planning to let the new "Series of World Maps" with the innovative features of the vertical world map enter the school and textbooks, to display the three-dimensional earth most comprehensively on the plane, so that the "other face" of the world can better serve Accepted and known by the world.<br /><br />Hao Xiaoguang believes that although the vertical version of the world map that has subverted hundreds of years of traditional cognition has been published and widely used in the industry, there is still a long way to go before it is accepted by the public.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Looking at the concept of the northern and southern hemispheres, it may take a long time.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>BigThink : <a href="https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/how-high-and-low-you-can-go-heres-a-vertical-map-of-earth/">A vertical map of Earth: How high or low can you go? </a></li><li>GeoGarage blog : <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2023/02/the-world-map-of-future-might-be.html">The world map of the future might be vertical</a> </li><li>SIPRI : <a href="https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/files/insight/SIPRIInsight1002.pdf">China prepares for an ice free Arctic</a></li><li><a href="http://bzdt.ch.mnr.gov.cn">Maps from China </a> </li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-34434009362954149592024-03-10T01:39:00.001+01:002024-03-10T01:39:00.124+01:00Smallest boats to sail the 7 Seas<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6Zx9p0r_l5E?si=HiDybXrGGB-RzBKK" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe> </div><div style="text-align: center;"> </div><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9e/a1/0a/9ea10a075ab3a2548ae703da7946c75a.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="565" height="640" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9e/a1/0a/9ea10a075ab3a2548ae703da7946c75a.jpg" width="452" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> Tom McNally</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Microcruising : F<a href="http://www.microcruising.com/famoussmallboats.htm">amous small boats</a><br /></li><li>Liverpool Echo : <a href="https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/crazy-sailor-who-quit-teaching-13181462">Crazy sailor whoi quit teaching </a></li><li><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Testa">Serge Testa</a> / <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYt0XmFIMXA">YouTube </a><br /></li><li><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Vihlen">Hugo Vihlen</a></li><li><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_McClean">Tom McClean </a></li><li><a href="http://www.asalives.org/ASAONLINE/amz01.htm">Wayne "Sailor"Dickinson </a><br /></li><li>UPI : <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/02/09/Man-claims-to-cross-Atlantic-in-barrel/2639413614800/">Man claims to cross Atlantic in barrel </a></li><li>Facebook : <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=345643005808736">1984 : Eric Peters, barrel boat man set off round the world </a></li><li>GeoGarage blog : <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2019/01/jean-jacques-savin-man-barrel-and.html">Jean-Jacques Savin: a man, a barrel and a bottle of wine</a><br /> </li></ul></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-15115716041191928062024-03-09T01:16:00.002+01:002024-03-09T09:46:15.078+01:00Bowline knot<blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center" data-media-max-width="560"><p dir="ltr" lang="fr">Nœud de chaise : niveau boss 💪 <a href="https://t.co/GYzC9rZ8n5">pic.twitter.com/GYzC9rZ8n5</a></p>— Actualité Maritime ⚓ (@ActuMaritime) <a href="https://twitter.com/ActuMaritime/status/1765084566094492026?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 5, 2024</a></blockquote> <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowline"><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></a><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowline">Bowline</a> for masters</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><a class="css-175oi2r r-1wbh5a2 r-dnmrzs r-1ny4l3l r-1loqt21" href="https://twitter.com/ActuMaritime" role="link" tabindex="-1"><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">@ActuMaritime</span></a> <br /></i></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-57540529472169392892024-03-08T01:33:00.053+01:002024-03-08T01:33:00.124+01:00History hidden within NOAA’s ‘Inland Water Wind Reports’<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://mynorthwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/01-Smith-Island-Lighhouse.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://mynorthwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/01-Smith-Island-Lighhouse.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Smith Island Lighthouse was built in 1858,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>it was decommissioned in the 1950s and eventually crumbled into the sea.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Photo courtesy US Coast Guard)</i><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href="https://mynorthwest.com/3953116/history-hidden-within-noaa-inland-water-wind-reports/">MYNorthWest</a> by Feliks Banel </i></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Though it’s not quite as iconic and beloved as the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfvv">BBC Shipping Forecast</a> in the U.K., the handful of spots along the shores of the Puget Sound, for which the <a href="https://www.weather.gov/nwr/sites?site=KHB60">National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Radio</a> often gives windspeed reports, have their own history and charm.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihfOZNZxpHuKshCPHltveeHlSx_s-R5d6YosihY_9JqFBkJFcoqfx0ToHkNPklr1HHE-T9lyPRadhBZ7dKtCWM2THTSncKJ0HQnZacudNNS-faMF-Gqf7Yj3H3sc3i59ShSsT_yk4OdWtEATmspq2h7Pt7csG9GlosiJjars9gn5mV5I5SdX7hTryuLObl/s1535/Lighthouses_of_Washington_by_Kraig_-_Google_My_Maps.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="948" data-original-width="1535" height="396" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihfOZNZxpHuKshCPHltveeHlSx_s-R5d6YosihY_9JqFBkJFcoqfx0ToHkNPklr1HHE-T9lyPRadhBZ7dKtCWM2THTSncKJ0HQnZacudNNS-faMF-Gqf7Yj3H3sc3i59ShSsT_yk4OdWtEATmspq2h7Pt7csG9GlosiJjars9gn5mV5I5SdX7hTryuLObl/w640-h396/Lighthouses_of_Washington_by_Kraig_-_Google_My_Maps.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1DMWycLAWFRHx2HbNpkegdQZ7oHQ&ll=47.65489668835555%2C-123.5213076&z=8">WA lighthouses viewer</a></i><br /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />So far, it’s hard to tell whether March 2024 came in like a lamb or a lion, but just a few days ago, late February was here with a pretty darn lion-y windstorm.<br />The gusts and gales created the perfect occasion to tune in to NOAA Weather Radio.<br />The commercial-free, government weather radio channel is heard on specially dedicated radios or special bands on some kinds of AM/FM radios.<br />In the Seattle area, that station is known officially as <a href="https://www.weather.gov/nwr/sites?site=KHB60">KHB-60</a> and is found at 162.55 MHz on the radio dial, or channel 7 on dedicated weather radios.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Smith_Island_Lighthouse_and_other_buildings_looking_east%2C_1948._-_NARA_-_298210.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="698" data-original-width="800" height="558" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Smith_Island_Lighthouse_and_other_buildings_looking_east%2C_1948._-_NARA_-_298210.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Smith Island Lighthouse and other building looking East, 1948</i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>History of NOAA Weather Radio</b><br /><br />Back in the 1970s, when NOAA Weather Radio was becoming a national system of antennas and transmitters, broadcasting local forecasts and updates on current conditions, the voices heard on-air were actual humans.<br />Local staffers at many National Weather Service offices would record a forecast along with a list of recent temperatures and windspeeds, for a total of maybe three or four minutes worth of material.<br />That tape would then play on a loop and be sent out over a nearby antenna until a new one was recorded (either on a regular schedule or when changing conditions warranted).<br /><br />To streamline the operation and reduce costs back in the 1990s, those local stations began switching over to computer-generated voices that could convert a written script into an audio file with no live and local weather forecaster required to spend time in front of a microphone or tape recorder.<br /><br />While costs may have been reduced, one price to be paid was the local forecasts lost some of their humanity and simple charm, as those local voices, of often untrained broadcasters, were literally silenced.<br />What those human voices were replaced by was software that generated a voice – known as “Paul” – which was not unlike the voice adapted for use by the late physicist Stephen Hawking.<br /><br />Fast forward to 2016, and NOAA cycled through successors to Paul (named Donna, Craig, Tom and Javier), a new and updated “Paul” came on the job, sounding much different than the original automated voice, if not quite yet fully human.<br /><br />For anyone listening during Wednesday’s windstorm, the new and improved Paul would, every few minutes or so, give the current windspeed for five locations around the shores of the Puget Sound.<br />In between, were updates on watches and warnings and updated forecasts about what was ahead.<br /><br />“Inland water wind reports in knots,” the new Paul intoned.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">“<a href="https://www.dnr.wa.gov/managed-lands/aquatic-reserves/smith-and-minor-islands-aquatic-reserve">Smith Island</a>, south 24. <a href="https://www.pointwilsonlighthouse.org/">Point Wilson</a>, south 8. <a href="https://www.kitsap.gov/parks/Pages/PointNoPointPark.aspx">Point No Point</a>, wind calm. <a href="https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=wpow1">West Point</a>, south 34. <a href="https://vashonparks.org/point-robinson">Point Robinson</a>, south 24,” he continued, only rarely pausing for a digital breath.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>Why does NOAA use those five specific locations?</b><br /><br />The not-so-casual listener might wonder, “Why those five specific locations?” </div><div style="text-align: left;">And then, that same listener might think, “Wait, wind calm at Point No Point? How could that be?"<br />That second question? Nobody knows.<br />But it turns out the first question is easy to answer because those places all have something in common.<br /><br />As explained by <a href="https://mynorthwest.com/author/tbuehner/">KIRO Newsradio Meteorologist Ted Buehner</a>, those places are all long-time locations of federal government lighthouses.<br />And all now have automated weather stations that report data back to the central forecast office.<br />Even Smith Island, which lost its lighthouse back in the 1950s, is now part of something called the <a href="https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/metadata/landing-page/bin/iso?id=gov.noaa.nodc:NDBC-CMANWx">Coastal Marine Automated Network</a> (CMAN) and has a set of instruments mounted on a tower.<br /><br />In hopes of creating a mystique around the Puget Sound’s <a href="https://marine.weather.gov/MapClick.php?zoneid=pzz133">“Inland Water Wind Reports,”</a> that might someday match the fervor surrounding the BBC Shipping Forecast, here’s a little background and mostly non-Indigenous place-name history on each of the five sites mentioned in Paul’s reports.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://mynorthwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/02-location-of-Smith-Island-Point-Wilson-and-Point-No-Point-.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://mynorthwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/02-location-of-Smith-Island-Point-Wilson-and-Point-No-Point-.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A vintage 1948 nautical chart shows the location of Smith Island, Point Wilson and Point No Point, places called out in NOAA Weather Radio's "Inland Water Wind Reports." </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbmYk4OR6XDKhp_68qmr2NMtOAezcB8Qhiz_Tc1zmhyLUwdhjcoJGJlK7Hj6X9u3AjoTNPE5T5W2iaDdCTsWFco93aHA0OUcB62AgtujUbIdL9VWSOYHMXETYRj2divaZCNSDPz7wedxH0tpzdGAE3bqWwlV9hAOGrpH7LgnrsYgpGX6PI9Mg-PCQmPm8p/s1919/Pudget%20Sound%20N.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="946" data-original-width="1919" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbmYk4OR6XDKhp_68qmr2NMtOAezcB8Qhiz_Tc1zmhyLUwdhjcoJGJlK7Hj6X9u3AjoTNPE5T5W2iaDdCTsWFco93aHA0OUcB62AgtujUbIdL9VWSOYHMXETYRj2divaZCNSDPz7wedxH0tpzdGAE3bqWwlV9hAOGrpH7LgnrsYgpGX6PI9Mg-PCQmPm8p/w640-h316/Pudget%20Sound%20N.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>Visualization with the <a href="http://geogarage.com">GeoGarage</a> platform (NOAA nautical raster chart)<br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://mynorthwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/03-location-of-West-Point-and-Point-Robinson.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://mynorthwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/03-location-of-West-Point-and-Point-Robinson.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>A vintage 1948 nautical chart shows the location of West Point and Point Robinson, places called out in NOAA Weather Radio's "Inland Water Wind Reports."</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Photos courtesy NOAA Archives)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQRncpVMCDcuAX3NHEDPAS0xsRWIxBNpNMCB_MkTXyDCzsi-d4rfZ5BC_9PA_Yj1TZj9_i5sWP2NOmk0AdCkn00Rw7VUatpH2Zr87BLUVFvOoGS8w__6lhHG88Abjdd9daQOHvCfaERiibhn6XqYpAu3rTvLVSqtHZeo44ieYre6_8KPwP4fnz36XDsfVa/s1919/Pudget%20S.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="946" data-original-width="1919" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQRncpVMCDcuAX3NHEDPAS0xsRWIxBNpNMCB_MkTXyDCzsi-d4rfZ5BC_9PA_Yj1TZj9_i5sWP2NOmk0AdCkn00Rw7VUatpH2Zr87BLUVFvOoGS8w__6lhHG88Abjdd9daQOHvCfaERiibhn6XqYpAu3rTvLVSqtHZeo44ieYre6_8KPwP4fnz36XDsfVa/w640-h316/Pudget%20S.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></i><i>Visualization with the <a href="http://geogarage.com">GeoGarage</a> platform (NOAA nautical raster chart)</i><br /><i> </i><i> </i><br /></div><b>Background of the locations</b><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><a href="https://www.dnr.wa.gov/managed-lands/aquatic-reserves/smith-and-minor-islands-aquatic-reserve">Smith Island</a> is west of Whidbey Island at the east end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and, with adjacent <a href="https://www.dnr.wa.gov/managed-lands/aquatic-reserves/smith-and-minor-islands-aquatic-reserve">Minor Island</a>, has been declared a State Aquatic Reserve off limits to the public.<br />It’s believed to have been named for a <a href="https://mynorthwest.com/1855230/powerful-hudsons-bay-company/">Hudson’s Bay Company</a> staffer named Smith, perhaps in the 1840s or 1850s.<br />In 1841, U.S. Naval Commander <a href="https://mynorthwest.com/1353367/all-over-the-map-charles-wilkes-elliott-bay/">Charles Wilkes, of the Wilkes Expedition,</a> had called it Blunt’s Island for Midshipman Simon F. Blunt – but that didn’t stick.<br />A <a href="https://www.history.uscg.mil/Browse-by-Topic/Assets/Land/All/Article/1989190/smith-island-lighthouse/">lighthouse</a> was first established there in 1858 and was shut down in the 1950s before eventually crumbling into the sea.</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.lighthousefriends.com/PointWilson_1916_cg.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="545" height="700" src="https://www.lighthousefriends.com/PointWilson_1916_cg.jpg" width="545" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Point Wilson</i><br /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.pointwilsonlighthouse.org/">Point Wilson</a> is at Fort Worden State Park near Port Townsend.<br />It was named in 1792 by <a href="https://mynorthwest.com/989825/monument-captain-vancouver/">Captain Vancouver for his friend Captain George Wilson</a> of the Royal Navy, who fought against our great allies the French during the American Revolutionary War.<br />“The Clallam Indian name for the point was Kam-kun, the Chimacum name was Kam-kam-ho,” wrote <a href="https://www.postalley.org/2021/11/06/old-news-robert-hitchman-armchair-historian/">Robert Hitchman</a>, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Place-Names-Washington-Robert-Hitchman/dp/0917048571">“Places Names of Washington.”</a><br />The <a href="https://www.history.uscg.mil/Browse-by-Topic/Assets/Land/All/Article/1976601/point-wilson-lighthouse/">lighthouse</a> was first built in 1879 and was rebuilt in 1913.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.kitsap.gov/parks/Pages/PointNoPointPark.aspx">Point No Point</a> is near the northern tip of the Kitsap Peninsula and is west across the water from the southern tip of Whidbey Island.<br />It was named in 1841 by US Naval Commander Charles Wilkes, perhaps after one of ten other locations called “Point No Point,” and listed by the US Board of Geographic Names around the United States.<br />The name here in the Northwest is said to come from the distance, the point can look more prominent than it actually is once you get closer to it.<br />“The Indian name was Hahd-skus, meaning long nose,” wrote Robert Hitchman.<br />The <a href="https://www.history.uscg.mil/Browse-by-Topic/Assets/Land/All/Article/1975997/point-no-point-lighthouse-wa/">lighthouse</a> at Point No Point was built in 1879.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://media.defense.gov/2019/Oct/01/2002188816/1920/1080/0/170603-G-0Y189-222.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="800" height="502" src="https://media.defense.gov/2019/Oct/01/2002188816/1920/1080/0/170603-G-0Y189-222.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Point No Point lighthouse</i><br /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />West Point was named because it’s a point, and it’s a point that points west.<br />See my point?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.lighthousefriends.com/westpoint_old.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="434" data-original-width="700" height="397" src="https://www.lighthousefriends.com/westpoint_old.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>West point lighthouse</i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=wpow1">West Point</a> is in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood, at the far northwest part of Discovery Park, and <a href="https://mynorthwest.com/3898734/giant-forgotten-sign-said-welcome-home-returning-veterans/">functions as something of a northern entrance to Elliott Bay</a>.<br />West Point was named in 1841, once again, by US Naval Commander Charles Wilkes because it’s a point, and it’s a point that points west.<br />See my point?</div><div style="text-align: left;">Aerial photographs, as well as nautical charts, confirm it is a very pointy point.<br />“The Duwamish Indian name was Oka-dz-elt-cu, meaning ‘thrust far out,'” writes Robert Hitchman.<br /><a href="https://www.history.uscg.mil/Browse-by-Topic/Assets/Land/All/Article/1995441/west-point-light-wa/">The much-photographed lighthouse</a> was built at West Point in 1881.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://media.defense.gov/2019/Oct/01/2002188983/1920/1080/0/170603-G-0Y189-230.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="579" data-original-width="800" height="463" src="https://media.defense.gov/2019/Oct/01/2002188983/1920/1080/0/170603-G-0Y189-230.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Point Robinson lighthouse</i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><a href="https://vashonparks.org/point-robinson">Point Robinson </a>(aka “Robinson Point” for place-name purists) is on Maury Island, which is functionally part of Vashon Island and is not far from the <a href="https://mynorthwest.com/329740/momentous-occasion-on-vashon-island-during-world-war-ii-is-reason-to-celebrate/">SeattleSports 710 transmitter and original 1941 KIRO Radio transmitter building</a>.<br />This spot is right across the water from Des Moines.<br />It was named by, you guessed it, good old U.S. Naval Commander Charles Wilkes in 1841 for R.P.<br />Robinson, purser’s steward on the <a href="https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-020/h-020-1-uss-vincennes-tragedy--.html">USS Vincennes</a>, the lead ship of the <a href="https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/navigating-at-sea/us-goes-to-sea/wilkes-expedition">Wilkes Expedition</a>.<br />The <a href="https://www.history.uscg.mil/Browse-by-Topic/Assets/Land/All/Article/1976541/point-robinson-lighthouse/">lighthouse</a> was built in 1885 and rebuilt in 1915.<br /><br />And, while those non-human weather broadcasts are all fun to listen to and talk about, let’s hope a certain pair of weekly history radio segments are many years away from becoming even partially automated.</div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Links :</div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>NOAA NWS : <a href="https://www.weather.gov/nwr&ln_desc=NOAA+Weather+Radio/">NOAA weather radio all hazard </a></li></ul></div></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-70262198957586281582024-03-07T01:03:00.001+01:002024-03-07T01:03:00.123+01:00Iridium buys service that uses L-Band satellites for GPS-like positioning<p><a href="https://www.maritime-executive.com/media/images/PR2021/Iridium-Constellation_NEXT_Globe.547257.png"><img border="0" src="https://www.maritime-executive.com/media/images/PR2021/Iridium-Constellation_NEXT_Globe.547257.png" /></a><br /><br />From <a href="https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/iridium-buys-service-that-uses-l-band-satellites-for-gps-like-positioning">Maritime Executive</a><br /><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;">L-band satcom provider Iridium has reached a deal to acquire <a href="https://satelles.com">Satelles</a>, a company that provides resilient navigation and timing to supplement GPS. <br />The vulnerabilities of GPS are well known: the signal strength of the satellite service is low, and can be readily "spoofed" by terrestrial jamming.</div><div style="text-align: left;">GPS spoofing has been spotted with some frequency in parts of the Black Sea and near some Chinese ports. <br /><br />Satelles uses the Iridium satellite network to broadcast its own timing and positioning signals.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The signal strength in its STL service is about 1,000 times stronger than GPS, according to Iridium, and it is "highly secure," the firm says. <br /><br />Satelles' service has been in use since 2016, and its original target market is digital infrastructure installations that require precise timing services - like 5G base stations and commercial data centers.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The world has about 10,000 data centers and growing, and they require time synchronization to operate, Iridium says.</div><div style="text-align: left;">For applications like this, the Iridium signal is powerful enough to serve indoor receivers, eliminating outdoor antennas.</div><div style="text-align: left;">There is enough potential in this market (and other applications) that Iridium thinks the business line will be worth $100 million a year by 2030. <br /><br />Maritime isn't the first market for Satelles' solution, but it could be the next.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://news.satnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Iridium-Network-b-L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="800" height="260" src="https://news.satnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Iridium-Network-b-L.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;">STL is also good at providing a hardened positioning signal, Iridium says - the other half of GPS' "positioning and timing" service. <br /><br />Iridium is working on miniaturizing the technology and making it less expensive, which would open up new positioning applications in road transport, autonomy, maritime and aviation. Existing Iridium partners - which can be found in all of these sectors - may be able to integrate Satelles into their products as well. <br /><br />"This solution solves a problem for critical industries better than anything else," said Iridium CEO Matt Desch. "Acquiring Satelles makes perfect sense for Iridium and is consistent with what our strategy has always been, which is to take advantage of our unique network to do what others can't or do it better than anyone else can."<br /><br />Iridium has invested in Satelles for years, and already had a 20 percent stake in the company.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It is buying the other 80 percent for about $115 million. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li style="text-align: left;">SpaceNews : <a href="https://spacenews.com/space-force-eyes-smaller-cheaper-gps-satellites-to-augment-constellation/">Space Force eyes smaller, cheaper GPS satellites to augment constellation</a></li><li style="text-align: left;">GPS Wordfld : <a href="https://www.gpsworld.com/iridium-acquires-satelles-to-boost-pnt-capabilities/">Iridium acquires Satelles to boost PNT capabilities</a></li><li style="text-align: left;">SatNews : <a href="https://news.satnews.com/2024/03/05/iridium-to-acquire-satelles/">Iridium to acquire Satelles</a></li><li style="text-align: left;">SpaceNews : <a href="https://spacenews.com/iridium-to-take-over-gps-backup-provider-for-115-million/">Iridium to take over GPS backup provider for $115 million</a></li><li style="text-align: left;">Inside GNSS : <a href="https://insidegnss.com/washington-view-making-gps-more-resilient/">Washington View: Making GPS More Resilient</a> </li></ul>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-87927802098332751002024-03-06T01:45:00.001+01:002024-03-06T01:45:00.243+01:00Making sense of holes in the clouds<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/152000/152486/florida_holepunchclouds_tmo_20240130_lrg.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="720" height="427" src="https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/152000/152486/florida_holepunchclouds_tmo_20240130.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>January 30, 2024</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS <a href="https://earthdata.nasa.gov/lance">LANCE</a> and <a href="https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/">GIBS/Worldview</a></i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> <i>From <a href="https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152486/making-sense-of-holes-in-the-clouds">NASA</a> by Adam Voiland</i><br /><br /><a href="https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/clouds-supplementary-features-cavum.html">Cavum clouds</a>, also called hole-punch clouds and fallstreak holes, look so odd that people sometimes argue they are <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article282415668.html">signatures of flying saucers</a> or other <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/uap/">unidentified anomalous phenomena</a>.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Seen <a href="https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2022/03/fallstreak-hole-and-circumzenithal-arc-over-hong-kong.html">from below</a>, they can look like a large circle or ellipse has been <a href="https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2013/04/hole-punch-cloud-and-fallstreak-over-gold-river-california.html">cut neatly</a> from the clouds, with <a href="https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2008/09/fall-streak-and-hole-punch-in-florida.html">feathery wisps</a> left in the middle of the hole.<br /><br />They are equally impressive when seen from above.</div><div style="text-align: left;">This image shows a cluster of cavum over the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida’s west coast on January 30, 2024.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It was captured by the <a href="https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/">MODIS</a> (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s <a href="https://terra.nasa.gov/">Terra</a> satellite.<br /><br />Otherworldly explanations are not required to explain the eye-catching cloud formation.</div><div style="text-align: left;">While scientists have periodically mentioned the phenomena in scientific journals and speculated about their cause since the 1940s, a pair of studies published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1175/2009BAMS2905.1">2010</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1202851">2011</a>, led by University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) scientists, laid out an explanation that put other theories to rest. They are caused by airplanes moving through banks of altocumulus clouds.<br /><br />These mid-level clouds are composed of liquid water droplets that are <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-freaky-physics-of-supercooled-water">supercooled</a>; that is, the droplets remain liquid even when temperatures are below the typical freezing point of water (32 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0 degrees Celsius).</div><div style="text-align: left;">Supercooling happens when water droplets are exceptionally pure and lack <a href="https://doi.org/10.1029/2021RG000745">small particles</a>, such as dust, fungal spores, pollen, or bacteria, around which ice crystals typically form.<br /><br />Supercooling may sound exotic, but it occurs routinely in Earth’s atmosphere.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/wxfacts/Altocumulus.htm">Altocumulus clouds</a>, which cover about 8 percent of Earth’s surface at any given time, are mostly composed of liquid water droplets supercooled to a temperature of about -15°C.<br /><br />But even supercooled clouds have their limits. As air moves around the wings and past the propellers of airplanes, a process known as <a href="https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=adiabatic">adiabatic expansion</a> cools the water by an additional 20°C or more and can push liquid water droplets to the point of freezing without the help of airborne particles. Ice crystals beget more ice crystals as the liquid droplets continue to freeze.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The ice crystals eventually grow heavy enough that they begin to fall out of the sky, leaving a void in the cloud layer.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The falling ice crystals are often visible in the center of the holes as wispy trails of precipitation that never reach the ground—features called <a href="https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/clouds/other-clouds/virga">virga</a>.<br /><br />Unlike previous attempts to explain the phenomena, the UCAR researchers, with colleagues from several other institutions, including NASA’s Langley Research Center, made use of a combination of aircraft flight data, satellite observations, and weather models to explain how the clouds form and to track how long they lasted.</div><div style="text-align: left;">When planes passed through clouds at a fairly sharp angle, the researchers found that small, circular cavum appeared.</div><div style="text-align: left;">If they passed through the clouds at a shallow angle, longer <a href="https://doi.org/10.1175/2009BAMS2905.1">“canal clouds”</a> with lengthy virga trails, like the one shown above, became visible.<br /><br />Other factors that can affect the length of these clouds include the thickness of the cloud layer, the air temperature, and the degree of horizontal <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Wind_shear">wind shear</a>, the researchers reported.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Their analysis showed that a full spectrum of aircraft types including large passenger jets, regional jets, private jets, military jets, and turboprops can produce cavum and canal clouds. With more than 1,000 flights arriving at Miami International Airport each day, there are many opportunities for planes to encounter the atmospheric conditions needed to produce cavum clouds.<br /><br /><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>NASA : <a href="https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150847/when-clouds-cave">When Clouds Cave</a></li><li>Business Insider : <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-space-photo-shows-sky-holes-near-florida-2024-3">NASA space photo shows odd-looking sky holes near Florida</a></li><li>Earth : <a href="https://www.earth.com/news/cavum-clouds-nasa-captures-mysterious-holes-cloud-formation-florida/">NASA captures mysterious holes in cloud formations that resemble UFOs</a></li><li>BBC : <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/68460465">Fallstreak holes: Nasa spots rare 'UFO' cavum clouds from space </a></li><li>DailyMail : <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13146873/NASA-captures-eerie-holes-clouds-Florida-linked-UFO-reports-seen-SPACE.html">NASA captures 'eerie' holes in clouds over Florida that have been linked to UFO reports and can be seen from SPACE </a> </li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-44894516628676575872024-03-04T01:00:00.001+01:002024-03-04T01:00:00.138+01:00The Arctic is a freezer that’s losing power<div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="427" src="https://media.wired.com/photos/64af132320abe9537824f900/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/island_science_GettyImages-1242451466.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Photograph: Sebnem Coskun/Getty Images</i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><i>From <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-arctic-is-a-freezer-thats-losing-power">Wired</a> by Matt Simon <br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>As glaciers retreat, methane-rich groundwater is bubbling to the
surface.<br />That may be warming the climate, accelerating the Arctic’s
rapid decline.</b><br /><br />THE ISLAND OF Svalbard, about halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is warming twice as fast as the rest of the Arctic, which itself is warming up to four <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-arctic-is-warming-4-times-as-fast-as-the-rest-of-earth/">and a half times faster</a> than the rest of the planet.<br />Scientists just discovered that the island’s retreating glaciers are creating a potentially significant climate feedback loop: When the ice disappears, groundwater that’s supersaturated with methane bubbles to the surface.<br />Methane is an <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-ipcc-reports-silver-lining-we-can-tackle-methane-now/">extremely potent greenhouse gas</a>, 80 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.<br />This groundwater can have more than 600,000 times the methane of a cup of water that’s been sitting with its surface exposed to air.<br /><br />“What that means is that once it hits the atmosphere, it’s going to equilibrate, and it’s going to release as much methane as it can—quickly,” says Gabrielle Kleber, a glacial biogeochemist at University of Cambridge and the University Centre in Svalbard and lead author of a new <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01210-6">paper</a> describing the discovery in Nature Geoscience.<br />“It’s about 2,300 tons of methane that’s released annually from springs just on Svalbard.<br />It’s maybe equivalent to something like 30,000 cows.” (Cows burp methane—a <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-controversial-quest-to-make-cow-burps-less-noxious/">lot of it</a>.) </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><img height="427" src="https://media.wired.com/photos/64af488920abe9537824f902/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/science_Picture12.jpg" width="640" /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Sampling waters under sea ice on Svalbard</i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />“These numbers, I honestly thought that they were even wrong, but they cannot be wrong,” says Carolina Olid, who studies Arctic methane emissions at the University of Barcelona but wasn’t involved in the work.<br />“Wow, they are really, really high.” <br /><br />The methane is also coming out of the ground in some places as pressurized gas that Kleber can actually light on fire, as you can see in the video below.<br />“This is a widespread methane emission source that we previously just hadn’t accounted for,” says Kleber.<br />“We can safely assume that this phenomenon is happening in other regions in the Arctic.<br />Once we start extrapolating that and expanding it across the Arctic, we’re looking at something that could be considerable.”<br /><br />As the Arctic warms rapidly, scientists are finding ways that it’s both suffering from climate change and contributing to it.<br />Like a freezer that’s lost power, the Arctic is thawing, and the stuff inside it is rotting, releasing clouds of greenhouse gasses.<br />When frozen ground known as permafrost thaws, it creates pools of oxygen-poor water, where microbes chew on organic material and burp methane.<br />The warmer it gets up there, the happier these microbes are and the more methane they produce.<br />(In some places, the permafrost is thawing so quickly that it’s even <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/abrupt-permafrost-thaw/">gouging methane-spewing holes in the landscape</a>.)<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3pcEJXe9axU" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A methane spring spotted in Svalbard, an archipelago of Norway in the Arctic Ocean.Scientists are raising alarm bells as springs emerging from icebergs retreating in Svalbard, Norway, were found to contain high levels of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/47GlXblCWD4">methane</a>, a damaging greenhouse gas.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The scientists believe this methane comes from large underwater reserves that could exacerbate feedback loops worsening the climate crisis.</i><br /><i>Methane gas is in such high concentrations here that you can set it on fire <br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Credit: courtesy of Gabrielle Kleber </i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Elsewhere, vast deposits of the gas are hidden in the ground beneath glaciers.<br />When temperatures get low enough and pressures get high enough, the gas freezes into solid methane hydrate—basically, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/methane-hydrate">methane trapped in a cage of ice</a>.<br />That ice, of course, can melt as temperatures rise.<br />The melting of the glaciers also exposes darker-colored land, which <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-arctic-is-warming-so-fast/">absorbs more of the sun’s energy</a> and accelerates the warming of the terrain—a dreaded climatic feedback loop.<br /><br /><img height="427" src="https://media.wired.com/photos/64af4888e416fd283a85c571/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/science_IMG_3141.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Glacier caves form when glacial meltwater flows during the summer </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Credit: courtesy of Gabrielle Kleber </i><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;">Methane is a fundamental component of buried fossil fuels—the “natural gas” we burn contains methane, in fact—which can migrate through cracks in rock.</div><div style="text-align: left;">When it reaches groundwater, the liquid readily absorbs the geologic gas.<span face="BreveText, helvetica, sans-serif" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(26, 26, 26); color: #1a1a1a; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 19px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: 0.108px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />“We find that the higher-concentrated springs are much more prevalent in regions that have really high organic-containing rocks, such as shale and coal,” says Kleber.<br />“This is millions-of-years-old methane that’s been trapped in the rocks and is now finding a way to come out by exploiting these groundwater springs.<br />And so that means that the capacity for these emissions is quite large, since it’s being fed by this very large reservoir.” </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><img height="480" src="https://media.wired.com/photos/64af48898d6da8ab812d8649/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/science_IMG_3609.jpg" width="640" /><br /><i>Groundwater gushes at the surface </i><br /><i>Credit: courtesy of Gabrielle Kleber </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;">But it’s hard for researchers to quantify how much methane and carbon dioxide are coming off the warming landscape.<br />For one thing, it’s extremely difficult to do fieldwork in Svalbard and the rest of the Arctic.<br />For another, some of the microbes that inhabit the region might be methane producers, but others could be methane consumers, which help sequester it.<br />Methane-producing microbes love thawing permafrost because conditions are wet and oxygen-poor, or anoxic.<br />But when a glacier disappears and the land dries out, microbes that eat methane might proliferate instead.<br /><br />“In some cases, it can be a small sink of methane in the landscape,” says Gerard Rocher-Ros, an ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who studies Arctic methane but wasn’t involved in the new paper.<br />Because there’s a lot of land in the Arctic, those small sinks might add up to some significant sequestering.<br />Plus, as the north warms, it’s <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/arctic-greening/">greening with new vegetation</a>, which <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-rich-peat-is-disappearing-but-is-it-also-growing/">absorbs carbon dioxide as it grows</a>.<br />Scientists <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/melting-glaciers-are-helping-capture-carbon/">have also found</a> that watersheds fed by glacial meltwater can soak up CO2.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><img height="427" src="https://media.wired.com/photos/64af488988479249e0cc2b54/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/science_Picture3.jpg" width="640" /><br /><i>Icing in the riverbed of a glacier</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Credit: courtesy of Gabrielle Kleber </i><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It’s not clear whether the natural mechanisms that trap these greenhouse gasses can keep up with the ones that are releasing them, including the newly discovered geological methane bubbling up from groundwater.<br />The Arctic isn’t an easily characterized monolith: Scientists <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/arctic-permafrost-obsessed-methane-detectives/">have to do meticulous fieldwork</a> to figure out how one area might produce and sequester methane differently than even a neighboring ecosystem.<br /><br />But it is now becoming evident that an environment that was once reliably glaciated is thawing out as the Arctic freezer wavers.<br />“People studying carbon cycling have long hypothesized that basically unavailable methane—that is capped or locked or frozen in permafrost or below glaciers—at some point may become available to the surface environment,” says Emily Stanley, a biogeochemist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who wasn’t involved in the research.<br />“What I find depressing is that this is one of a handful of <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1480">papers</a> that are saying: ‘Yep, here we go.<br />It’s coming out.’” <br /><br />The release of groundwater methane is a bad sign that more warming is ahead.<br />“It’s happening now,” Stanley says.<br />“We are beginning to see this positive feedback loop.”</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>WP : <span class="PJLV" data-qa="headline-text" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/09/06/ukraine-war-climate-change-spell-trouble-for-the-arctic/bce0ca82-4cc4-11ee-bfca-04e0ac43f9e4_story.html">Why the Arctic Is Being Threatened by War and Climate Change</a></span></li><li><span class="PJLV" data-qa="headline-text" style="box-sizing: border-box;">NASA : </span><a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-announces-launch-service-for-arctic-warming-experiment">NASA Announces Launch Service for Arctic Warming Experiment</a><span class="PJLV" data-qa="headline-text" style="box-sizing: border-box;"> </span></li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-86101881137680056962024-03-03T01:43:00.003+01:002024-03-03T11:37:55.835+01:00Follow the move<div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0" height="640" scrolling="no" src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?height=476&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FMilleLieuxNature%2Fvideos%2F334794378931521%2F&show_text=false&width=267&t=0" style="border: none; overflow: hidden;" width="480"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanderling">Sanderling</a> Calibris alba or beach runners : </i><i>a sandpiper like no other</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>In winter and spring, on the gently sloping sandy beaches of the Atlantic coast, the sight of small flocks of sanderlings never ceases to amaze and delight.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>As the tide comes in, you'll see them running up and down the beach, accelerating at full speed before the wave crashes on the sand, moving all together to suddenly climb to the top of the beach, feverishly visiting the debris deposited at the previous tide, then scurrying back down again, trotting on their short black legs, towards the waves and the foam.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>They look like graceful, elegant little mechanical toys.<br />Among the sandpipers (genus Calidris), the sanderling occupies a special place in several respects.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>It's the only sandpiper to feed on damp sandy beaches during ebb and flood tides; its short beak means it can't probe deeper than 2 or 3cm, a far cry from the elongated or arched beaks of its cousins such as the Dunlin or the Curlew; and its black legs have all the characteristics of a good long-distance runner on hard (because damp) sand: only three toes instead of four (no toes to the rear); completely free toes with no webbing at the base; and fairly short legs.</i><br /></div></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-38405492984903465712024-03-02T01:50:00.001+01:002024-03-02T01:50:00.127+01:00Learn to draw wind lines in the style of portolan charts from the 13th-15th centuries<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527848373944462/photo/1"><img height="480" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMLLhXsAAn47H?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"> <i>Acquire a skill that will probably be of no use to you: </i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>“Learn to draw wind lines in the style of portolan charts from the 13th-15th centuries”. </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>It's really not complicated and it does magical things!</i></div><br /><i>From <a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527848373944462">@SavoirsEnBulles</a></i><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527851314233433/photo/1"><br /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527851314233433/photo/1"><img height="473" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMOWmXYAAu9t2?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a><br /><i> Three brief words of introduction: portulan charts are marine maps that
appeared from the 13th century onwards, depicting mainly (at first) the
Mediterranean and its shores.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Maps packed with fascinating details!</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Map: Dulcert Angelino, 1339, detail.)</i></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527854552178856/photo/1"><img height="431" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMVEPWwAAJD_m?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>But today, we're going to talk about the background: the "wind lines" or "Rhumb". </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>These
lines indicate the points of the compass, and were theoretically used
to determine the direction from one point to another.</i></div><i>(Map: Benincasa Grazioso, 1467, detail.)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMZIGW4AANDlz?format=jpg&name=orig" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="560" data-original-width="800" height="448" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMZIGW4AANDlz?format=jpg&name=orig" width="640" /></a></div> This
type of map therefore developed at the same time as the arrival of the
compass, around the 12th or 13th century, since the compass offered the
luxury of indicating North by day and night.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="css-175oi2r r-18u37iz r-1h0z5md r-13awgt0" style="align-items: stretch; background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: row; flex: 1 1 0%; justify-content: flex-start; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-decoration: none; z-index: 0;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(ps: the image is totally anachronistic, but I couldn't resist)</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>And I don't know about you, but once we get there, we're already on to something very satisfying.</i></div><i> </i></div><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMdsaWIAARUGx?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMdsaWIAARUGx?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /> </a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Let's move on to the practical side: although it may look very complex, the system of wind lines on a portolan is actually very simple. </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMipzXkAAXixM?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMipzXkAAXixM?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a></div>Next, use the compass to draw a circle (or circles) with a radius of two squares.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>For this example, I've used two complete squares.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMnjOXoAAPJn4?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMnjOXoAAPJn4?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a></div><i>Note the 12 points where the first circle intersects the grid.</i><i><br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMqekXQAARtzM?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlMqekXQAARtzM?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a></div>Connect a first crossing point to all other points on the same circle.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center" data-media-max-width="640"><p dir="ltr" lang="fr"><a href="https://t.co/zVqRpqX8Bo">pic.twitter.com/zVqRpqX8Bo</a></p>— Les Savoirs Ambulants (@SavoirsEnBulles) <a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527878489071719?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 1, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>And do it for all the points. The first ones are the longest, since the further you go, the fewer strokes you have to do per stitch. I swear it's quick to do!<br /></i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles"></a><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlN9esXQAAo8u6?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlN9esXQAAo8u6?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /> </a></div> <i>And I don't know about you, but once we get there, we're already on to something very satisfying.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOACEW4AA5AkQ?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOACEW4AA5AkQ?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a></div><i> </i><i>For reasons unknown to me, some beautiful geometrical shapes appear,
including a beautiful dodecagon in the middle (polygon with 12 vertices /
12 sides), or curious squares.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center" data-media-max-width="640"><p dir="ltr" lang="fr"><a href="https://t.co/MtqXoonTBI">pic.twitter.com/MtqXoonTBI</a></p>— Les Savoirs Ambulants (@SavoirsEnBulles) <a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527889977278860?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 1, 2024</a></blockquote><div style="text-align: center;"><i>At
this stage, you've done the same preparatory work as Pietro Vesconte
around 1321, for this map of the Iberian Peninsula (South-facing map, so
North is at the bottom!).</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Well done! <br /></i></div><i> <br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOO4bW0AAcOl8?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOO4bW0AAcOl8?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>It gets even more fun when you realize that the circles are
connected... start, for example, by connecting the 11 points of the
first circle to the one that touches the circle next to it (the 12th
point). </i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOSWMWEAAnu1e?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOSWMWEAAnu1e?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>So, if from the outset, rather than limiting ourselves to a circle, we draw straight lines rather than segments...</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOUyXWEAA-rV7?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="679" height="384" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOUyXWEAA-rV7?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The result is rhumb lines</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOWZDWgAAGFZN?format=jpg&name=small" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="510" data-original-width="680" height="480" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOWZDWgAAGFZN?format=jpg&name=small" width="640" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> As in the Pisan chart (circa 1290), the oldest known portolan (and probably the only one to have actually sailed, the others being mainly maps for drawing-room chic).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center" data-media-max-width="640"><p dir="ltr" lang="fr"><a href="https://t.co/Q1mn6PPZSW">pic.twitter.com/Q1mn6PPZSW</a></p>— Les Savoirs Ambulants (@SavoirsEnBulles) <a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527909011013925?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 1, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOjX3X0AAE8Ab?format=jpg&name=orig" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="261" data-original-width="800" height="209" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlOjX3X0AAE8Ab?format=jpg&name=orig" width="640" /></a></div><i>Or, of course, the extraordinary Catalan Atlas (1375).<br />On this one,
it's easy to get lost as the 8 panels overlap a little, but I swear the
structure is exactly the same, in 4 circles!</i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlO4suXgAAZ0ko?format=jpg&name=orig" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlO4suXgAAZ0ko?format=jpg&name=orig" width="480" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>In short, you now know how to create a Rhumb line background to enhance your own map, whether realistic or imaginar<br />Granted, it's unlikely to save your life one day.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>But you never know!</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/SavoirsEnBulles/status/1763527920449179914/photo/1"><br /><img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHlO73FXYAAYLdc?format=jpg&name=small" /></a><br /><i>All the old maps used are available in high definition</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>on the incredible site of @laBnF: <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr">https://gallica.bnf.fr</a></i><br /><br /></div></div><br /><br />geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-25698112973560285602024-03-01T01:52:00.013+01:002024-03-01T01:52:00.121+01:00Enhancing maritime security: Unseenlabs’ RF data collection campaign in the Southern Red Sea <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E12AQFIsbZX_ABwfQ/article-cover_image-shrink_720_1280/0/1709213663662?e=1714608000&v=beta&t=bDZps9o6aeoJxoGRONrA_9avQMre-DlmW58KLQCfIRc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E12AQFIsbZX_ABwfQ/article-cover_image-shrink_720_1280/0/1709213663662?e=1714608000&v=beta&t=bDZps9o6aeoJxoGRONrA_9avQMre-DlmW58KLQCfIRc" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enhancing-maritime-security-unseenlabs-rf-data-collection-campaign-bvzte/">Pulse</a> by <a href="https://unseenlabs.space">UnseenLabs<br /></a></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"> <br />Between November 20 and December 29, 2023, Unseenlabs conducted a focused ten-day RF data collection—with an average of one revisit per day—covering an area of 300,000 km² in the Southern Red Sea.<br />During this time, we successfully detected and tracked a number of dark vessels[1] in the area.<br />Amidst the turmoil in the Red Sea, largely due to Houthi attacks, it appears that some ships are exploiting the chaotic situation by turning off their AIS transponders, effectively rendering themselves invisible.<br />Here is where Unseenlabs enters the picture…<br />In this specific use case, we demonstrate how Unseenlabs' advanced space-based RF detection technology not only facilitated the detection but also enabled the tracking of these dark vessels in the Southern Red Sea.<br />This operation underscores the significant value of our innovative space technology for governments, offering them a comprehensive perspective on maritime traffic.<br />Our efforts once again highlight the pivotal role of Unseenlabs in enhancing maritime surveillance and security.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br />The context</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The region our data collection campaign targeted is the Red Sea.<br />It is an inlet of the Indian Ocean nestled between Africa and Asia, and a region of first-level strategic and economic significance.<br />It connects the Bab el Mandeb strait and the Gulf of Aden in the south with the Sinai Peninsula and the Gulf of Suez in the north.<br />This area is pivotal due to its high concentration of commercial maritime traffic, playing a crucial role in the global economy, especially via the Suez Canal.<br />This canal "[...] handles about 12% of global trade and is accessed by vessels travelling from Asia via the 30km wide Bab-el-Mandeb strait"[2].<br />With over 6 million barrels of crude oil passing daily through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, its security and surveillance are of paramount importance.<br />Recently, maritime trade in the Red Sea has been significantly impacted by the activities of the Yemen Houthi movement.<br />Disruptions in the region have affected vessel safety and maritime operations, necessitating enhanced measures for security.<br />Consequently, a new maritime military force has been established to strengthen the protection of these vital waterways, ensuring the continuity of trade and navigation.<br />An increase of unrevealed activities<br />Upon examining the maritime traffic data from November to December, it's observed that the maritime environment in the Southern Red Sea has grown significantly more hazardous: “Major shipping companies have stopped using the Red Sea - through which almost 15% of global seaborne trade usually passes - and are using a much longer route around southern Africa instead.”[3]</div><div style="text-align: left;">This decline is primarily attributed to the heightened risk for vessels navigating these waters due to the presence of the Houthis in the region.<br />However, Unseenlabs' satellite observations reveal another trend: an uptick in RF-only emitter detections.<br />On November 29, a significant presence of ships was noted in the Southern Red Sea, with our satellites detecting 212 RF emitters.<br />Of these, 208 correlated with AIS data, leaving only 4 as RF-only ships, or dark vessels.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><img height="465" src="https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E12AQEbbVm8eDhUXQ/article-inline_image-shrink_1000_1488/0/1709213733225?e=1714608000&v=beta&t=NTfrQbAgODfn00KYLy4TclPr4wAnbqhQc_9lsvVcj9k" width="640" /><br /> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Fast forward to December 26, and the picture changes markedly.<br />The region saw a decrease in overall maritime activity, largely due to the Houthi attacks on vessels.<br />Our satellites registered 187 emitters through RF signals, a decline of nearly 12% from the November 29 figures.Out of these, 159 were correlated with AIS, while 28 were identified as RF-only emitters.<br />This represents a staggering 600% increase in dark vessel activity between the two RF data collections.The implication is clear: more vessels are opting to navigate without their AIS transponders, effectively becoming invisible to standard monitoring systems.<br />These dark vessels are likely ships that have deactivated their AIS transponders to remain undetected and avoid encounters with the Houthis.<br />There's a possibility that among the vessels, some could be military ships; however, this cannot be confirmed as the AIS system is not mandatory for such vessels.<br /><br /><img height="472" src="https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E12AQFtV7Qcz5vE0w/article-inline_image-shrink_1000_1488/0/1709213833235?e=1714608000&v=beta&t=wS3Y7K4MQCR9OXbv56bUqAcHnkLiPsSTmlxdEY7tgvw" width="640" /><br /> </div><div style="text-align: left;">In this challenging environment, Unseenlabs' space-based RF detection technology emerges as a mission-critical asset in maritime surveillance.<br />Its ability to detect and track RF-only emitters offers a significant advantage in conflict zones where defense maritime forces are primarily engaged in peacekeeping.<br />We provide a more exhaustive view about the real maritime traffic.<br />Our technology not only enhances the capabilities of maritime authorities in monitoring vessel movements but also serves as a vital support system in monitoring and countering potential illegal activities in such high-tension areas.<br /><br /><b>Conclusion</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Unseenlabs' RF data collection campaign in the Southern Red Sea from November 20 to December 29, 2023, has effectively showcased the capabilities of advanced space-based RF detection technology in maritime surveillance.<br />Our unique technology has been instrumental in offering a comprehensive view of maritime activities, especially in monitoring and tracking dark ships—vessel not broadcasting AIS signals.<br />Throughout the campaign, dark vessels account for 9% of the total maritime traffic observed, highlighting the effectiveness of our methodology.<br />Our approach involved detecting and geolocating RF signals from electromagnetic patterns and correlating them with AIS data, leading to the interception of 1,650 emitters, including 145 RF-only emitters.<br />These findings indicate a substantial presence of vessels operating covertly, likely in response to the heightened regional conflict and instability.<br />The significant increase in dark vessel activity, with many ships choosing to navigate without AIS transponders, underscores the critical role of Unseenlabs' technology in enhancing maritime security.<br />Our ability to track these vessels, demonstrated through 20 detailed data collections, not only aids in maintaining maritime safety but also assists authorities in identifying potential illicit activities.<br />The Unseenlabs campaign has demonstrated the vital importance of innovative RF detection technology in providing detailed insights into maritime traffic and security, especially in regions experiencing conflict and heightened maritime risks.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><i>Links :</i><br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67614911">Who are the Houthis and why are they attacking Red Sea ships?</a>, BBC News</li><li><a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/who-are-yemens-houthis">Who are Yemen’s Houthis?</a>, Wilson Center</li><li><a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Red-Sea">Red Sea</a>, Britannica</li><li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/03/what-is-the-red-sea-crisis-and-what-does-it-mean-for-global-trade">What is the Red Sea crisis, and what does it mean for global trade?</a>, The Guardian</li><li><a href="https://sinay.ai/en/which-ship-can-we-track-at-sea/">Which ship can we track at sea?</a>, Sinay</li><li>RFI : <a href="https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20220504-french-bro-7-satellite-constellation-unseenlabs-tracks-criminal-dark-ships-at-sea-arianespace">French satellite constellation tracks criminal 'dark ships' at sea</a></li><li>GeoGarage blog : <a href="https://www.navalnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/unseenlabs-maritime-surveillance-1024x607.jpg">Unseenlabs reveals ships that vanished from conventional geolocation systems</a> </li></ul></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>[1] Dark vessels, or dark ships, are ships that are not equipped with AIS system or manipulate it to evade traditional surveillance systems to become invisible.<br />[2] What is the Red Sea crisis, and what does it mean for global trade?, The Guardian<br />[3] Who are the Houthis and why are they attacking Red Sea ships? - BBC NEWS</i></div><p style="text-align: left;"> <br /></p>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-74016130586663493302024-02-29T01:54:00.002+01:002024-02-29T09:57:51.480+01:00Uncovering dark vessels with fusion technology <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/MicrosoftTeams-image-46.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/MicrosoftTeams-image-46.png" width="640" /></a></div><i><br /></i><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href=" https://spire.com/case-study/maritime/uncovering-dark-vessels-with-fusion-technology/">Spire </a></i><b><br /><br />Spire Maritime partnered with Ursa Space to explore how shipping behavior related to Venezuela’s oil exports changed in response to US sanctions.</b><br /><br />US sanctions were imposed on Venezuela’s oil exports in 2019.<br />This set the stage for a widely chronicled practice by which Caracas employed a “dark fleet” of oil tankers intent on evading detection, allowing Venezuela to keep exports afloat and generate revenue for its economy.<br /><br />When vessels turn off their transponders, significant gaps in maritime coverage are created impacting the Maritime Domain Awareness for industries such as Defense and Security, Commodities, Insurance, etc.<br /><br />Collaborating with Ursa Space, Spire Maritime addresses these challenges.<br />The fusion of Spire Maritime’s AIS data and SAR imagery from Ursa’s virtual constellation allows the detection and tracking of ships that go ‘dark,’ (i.e., not broadcasting AIS signals).<br />Going ‘dark’ does not always imply nefarious activity but may indicate that a vessel is hiding its location and identity to conceal illicit activities.<br />By detecting and tracking dark vessels, Spire and Ursa are enhancing efforts to enforce international sanctions, prevent illegal activities, and track commodity cargoes.<br /><br />Ursa Space is an analytics-as-a-service provider whose platform orchestrates satellite data and delivers analytic services at scale.<br />In this scenario, we’ll focus on Ursa’s maritime solutions which can detect and identify vessels using SAR (synthetic aperture radar) imagery and AIS fusion.<br />SAR is well suited as it can penetrate clouds and capture data day or night.<br />This provides enhanced situational awareness at ports and seas, delivering reliable insights into the locations and identifications of vessels.<br /><br />Spire Maritime has the largest proprietary satellite constellation, tracking over 600,000 vessels and 250,000 active vessels daily, providing the most comprehensive AIS data on the market dating back to 2010.<br />Users can track vessels anywhere and at any time, enhancing situational awareness, and leverage precise and actionable data for well-informed decision-making, even in congested traffic areas.<br /><br />Using tipping and cueing for stronger global maritime defense and security<br /><br />Analyzing data from Spire Maritime and Ursa Space, we have chosen to showcase oil exports dynamics from Venezuela during US sanctions and from the short period since the sanctions were lifted in October 2023.<br /><br />It is crucial to note that the United States retains the ability to reimpose sanctions, if Venezuela fails to abide by the terms of the agreement, underscoring the delicate nature of this new chapter in international relations.<br />Sanctions can be reimposed if the government of President Nicolas Maduro fails to abide by the terms of an agreement signed last year for a fair presidential election.<br />Whatever the outcome, Venezuela’s oil exports are a critical source of income.<br /><br />Tipping and cueing employ satellite monitoring to detect and monitor large objects.<br />Initially, a broad scan is conducted using a low-resolution satellite sensor, covering extensive areas in the ocean.<br />Once a “tip” is generated, the information is transmitted to the Ursa team for “cueing.” Subsequently, the high-resolution sensor is activated to obtain detailed information about the identified object.<br />We compare the scan with Spire Maritime’s AIS data to check the ship’s location.<br />This helps us find and track ships that turn off their transponders.<br /><b><br />Understanding dark shipping detection methods with examples in action</b><br /><br />The analysis involved examining shipping channels both inbound and outbound from Venezuela over the period of two years.<br />By pinpointing vessels that activated their AIS in the middle of the ocean, we were able to uncover unusual routes.<br />There was heavy shipping traffic along the northern coast of South America, but unusually, AIS tracks are much lighter-than-expected along the routes into Venezuelan ports.<br /><br />To examine the situation closer, the specific process involves taking a geographical slice by utilizing Spire Maritime’s <a href="https://spire.com/maritime/solutions/standard-ais/">Standard AIS data</a> and applying a filter1 on the minutes since the last AIS contact (set to 24 hours), to identify ships that turned their AIS transponders on within the given geographic range but previously had their AIS off for an extended period.<br />(See figure 1)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="278" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/geographical-slice-in-venezuelan-waters-1024x444.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Figure 1: Geographical slice in the Venezuelan waters</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />A total of 23 ships were identified through this process, signaling potential anomalies in the shipping channel.<br />One particular vessel drew attention during the analysis (an MMSI search indicates it as a known bad actor, sparking further interest).<br /><br />Zooming in on the selected vessel’s tracks: A suspicious event was identified, and the ship’s track abruptly turned on in the middle of the ocean.<br />(See figure 2)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="299" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/vessel-tracks-dashboard-1024x479.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Figure 2: Selected vessel’s tracks dashboard</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />On the same day, the vessel entered Venezuelan waters, lost contact, and reappeared in a different location after a considerable gap (14,171 minutes later or around 10 days).</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="384" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/mmsi-time-stamp-1024x614.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Figure 3: MMSI and time stamp</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>Cracking the code using Spire Maritime data and satellite imagery from URSA Space</b><br /><br />The image below shows vessels near the Venezuelan ports of El Jose and Puerto La Cruz identified using Spire Maritime AIS data.<br />Ursa Space’s satellite images confirm the presence of vessels, including those with turned-off AIS transponders.<br />There is a combination of ships with AIS turned on (green) and off (red).</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="494" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/identified-vessel-detections-and-suspected-dark-vessels-1024x791.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Figure 4: El Jose & Puerto La Cruz Vessel detections – identified (green) and suspected dark vessels (red) – 2023<br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> <br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="330" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/identified-vessel-detections-and-suspected-dark-vessels2-1024x528.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div><i>Figure 5: Puerto La Cruz Vessel detections – identified (blue) and suspected dark vessels (red) – 2019</i><br /><br /><b>Ship-to-ship oil transfers: A closer look at unidentified vessels</b><br /><br />Once a tanker departs, then it’s a question of where it is headed, or more specifically where the cargo it’s carrying is going.<br />This isn’t always straight-forward because ships will sometimes transfer their cargoes to other ships at sea.<br /><br />Moreover, this event – called a ship-to-ship transfer – may occur while one or both of the ships go dark.(see Figure 6)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="266" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/dark-vessel-detection-image-1024x425.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Figure 6: Active ship-to-ship oil transfer</i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>Impact on dark vessel detection changes since lifting US sanctions</b><br /><br />When the US imposed sanctions in 2019, Venezuela responded by trying to conceal the identities and whereabouts of oil tankers in an effort to maintain exports.<br />These efforts continued until October 18, 2023, when the US eased sanctions on a conditional basis, and appear to have persisted afterwards.<br /><br />By examining AIS and SAR imagery, we found a decrease in the number of detected dark vessels in the weeks after sanctions were lifted, from 71% to 58%.<br />Meanwhile, the percentage of AIS-correlated ships increased from 32% to 47%.<br /><br />Close monitoring will continue in April to observe the impact if sanctions are reimposed.<br /><br /><i>Vessel detections in El Jose & Puerto La Cruz:</i><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="246" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/vessel-detections-venezuela-2023-1024x628.jpg" width="400" /><br /></div><br /><br /><i>Dark ships decrease post-sanctions eased:</i><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="180" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pre-post-sanctions-ease-chart-1024x461.jpg" width="400" /><br /></div><br /><br />Oil inventories also help understand import and export volumes out of Venezuela.2<br /><br />In Venezuela, the country’s main oil export terminal is El Jose.<br />It is one of 11 Venezuelan storage locations Ursa Space monitors on a weekly basis.<br />In October 2023, when sanctions were lifted, Ursa’s data for El Jose, and nearby Puerto La Cruz, both saw sharp declines in inventory levels which is consistent with reports of more exports, perhaps in anticipation of sanctions being lifted.<br /><br /><i>Venezuela Oil inventories in El Jose and Puerto La Cruz:</i><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="369" src="https://spire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/venezuela-oil-inventories-graph-1024x591.jpg" width="640" /><br /></div><br />In summary, by the fusion of AIS data and SAR imagery, it is possible to tip and queue, to focus your tracking, saving you time and money.<br /><br /> <i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>ViaSatellite : <a href="Unseenlabs Secures $92M in Fundraising for Maritime Surveillance Constellation">Unseenlabs Secures $92M in Fundraising for Maritime Surveillance Constellation</a></li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-51595298842965656422024-02-28T01:15:00.001+01:002024-02-28T01:15:00.123+01:00‘Spoon worms lick the seabed with a metre-long tongue’: a voyage into a vanishing Arctic world <div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ac8f60e98958e6933867542d88092c893e3e5568/0_441_7728_4637/master/7728.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="800" height="384" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ac8f60e98958e6933867542d88092c893e3e5568/0_441_7728_4637/master/7728.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Polarstern, a German icebreaker, on a ice thickness survey in the Arctic Ocean</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><i>From <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/03/spoon-worms-lick-the-seabed-with-a-metre-long-tongue-a-voyage-into-a-vanishing-arctic-world">The Guardian</a> by Tim Kalvelage (photos included)</i><br /></div><b><br /></b><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Sea ice around the north pole is disappearing at an alarming rate.<br />A group of scientists are on a mission to investigate the effects of the climate crisis on the region</b><br /><br />It is summer and the air temperature is just below freezing.<br />Fog has crept in, blurring the outline of Polarstern, the German icebreaker moored to a kilometre-long ice floe at 85 deg N latitude.<br />Next to a hole we have just drilled through 1.4 metres of ice, Morten Iversen, who studies the flow of carbon around the ocean, has attached several plastic containers to a rope secured by ice screws.<br />They will be left hanging in the water under the ice for a day to catch marine snow – clumps of dead algae and zooplankton faeces that sink from the upper ocean to the deep sea.<br /><br />A few metres away, a team of biologists perforate the ice floe with a core drill.<br />They are looking for algae that grow at the bottom of sea ice, which play an important role in the <a href="https://poseidonexpeditions.com/about/articles/arctic-food-web/">Arctic Ocean food web</a>.<br />Metre-long ice cores are pulled up, packed in plastic sleeves and stacked on a sledge to be processed in the ship’s laboratories.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f770d6adf509670d466596cf7cac27322a0a3863/0_0_7571_5047/master/7571.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f770d6adf509670d466596cf7cac27322a0a3863/0_0_7571_5047/master/7571.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Daniel Scholz, an engineer for the Alfred Wegener Institute, lowers an instrument that measures temperature, salinity and nitrate – an important nutrient for algae and phytoplankton – through an ice hole</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0c99178cfff42febd4051df8d1754e2b4264e80d/0_217_5003_6254/master/5003.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0c99178cfff42febd4051df8d1754e2b4264e80d/0_217_5003_6254/master/5003.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" width="512" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Nets are lowred into the water to collect zooplankton</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5be11544e913b4405e6d94d94fa72e377ff60661/0_894_4700_5875/master/4700.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5be11544e913b4405e6d94d94fa72e377ff60661/0_894_4700_5875/master/4700.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" width="512" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The ship’s helicopter carries a sensor to measure ice thickness</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2263852047e7bdded7c7ff2dfe1cf9fc8a95c4a1/1350_0_3760_4700/master/3760.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2263852047e7bdded7c7ff2dfe1cf9fc8a95c4a1/1350_0_3760_4700/master/3760.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" width="512" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Frederik Bussmann, a marine chemist and PhD student at the Alfred Wegener Institute, measures the salinity at the edge of an ice floe.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ec612a77a858a997ab7b944e528ad8270b59d988/34_0_4013_5016/master/4013.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ec612a77a858a997ab7b944e528ad8270b59d988/34_0_4013_5016/master/4013.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" width="512" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Emiliano Cimoli, a researcher at the University of Tasmania, right, and an Alfred Wegener Institute technician Erika Allhusen, drill an ice core to look for sea-ice algae</i><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />One of the scientists is keeping watch, with a rifle slung over her shoulder and a flare gun on her belt.<br />This is, after all, a polar bear habitat – albeit a shrinking one.<br /><br />Our group is part of a 100-strong expedition – half of them scientists, half ship’s crew – that set out from the Norwegian harbour of Tromsø in early August 2023 to investigate the rapid melting of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/arctic">Arctic</a> sea ice.<br />The team is investigating the consequences for the marine ecosystem: from nutrient cycling to ice algae and plankton productivity to seafloor animal communities that live on organic material raining down from the surface ocean.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4d9dce2653f5cf783ab139e8ed6eea9afd5e911f/0_512_7728_4637/master/7728.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="800" height="384" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4d9dce2653f5cf783ab139e8ed6eea9afd5e911f/0_512_7728_4637/master/7728.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>An ice core drilled from sea ice in the central Arctic Ocean</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The central Arctic is heating up much faster than most of the world.<br />The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer <a href="https://zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/">has shrunk</a> by <a href="https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/climate/climate-change-impacts">about 40%</a>, or 2.5m square kilometres – roughly the size of the Mediterranean Sea – since satellite observations began in the late 1970s.<br /><a href="https://zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-ice-volumethickness/">The remaining ice is getting thinner</a> and multi-year floes – ice that has survived at least one summer – are becoming rarer.<br />The waters around the north pole could be virtually free of ice at the end of the summer as early as the 2030s, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38511-8">according to a recent study</a>.<br /><br />Shrinking ice cover means not only the loss of hunting grounds of polar bears or resting places and nurseries for seals, but also of an entire under-ice ecosystem: meadows of filamentous ice algae, algae-grazing zooplankton, and juvenile polar cod, which find food and shelter in the cracks and crevices beneath the floes and, when grown up, feed larger predators such as ringed seals or beluga whales.<br />In the short term, sea ice productivity could increase as more sunlight passes through thinner floes, boosting ice algae growth, but only as long as there is a sufficient supply of nutrients in the overall nutrient-poor central Arctic Ocean.<br /><br />The same goes for planktonic algae, or phytoplankton, which profit from higher light availability and a longer growth season in the expanding open-water areas, as satellite data shows.<br />Changes in productivity and a shift from ice algae to phytoplankton at the base of the food web will probably have major effects on the marine ecosystem as whole.<br />Also, the native flora and fauna are facing new competition from invasive species, from plankton to fish, that are moving in from the Atlantic and Pacific as the oceans warm.<br />Predictions of the future Arctic Ocean are, however, highly uncertain due to a general lack of observation.<br />That is why the scientists have come here.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Tiny Arctic life : <br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b76b5ce0d74633cf88f9e14bbadc547f0c4f3d1e/0_0_4000_4000/master/4000.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b76b5ce0d74633cf88f9e14bbadc547f0c4f3d1e/0_0_4000_4000/master/4000.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A 3cm-long ice amphipod (Onisimus)</i></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1ec7ca7149c3743bbb403ba818cba62acc10c776/1228_0_4000_4000/master/4000.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1ec7ca7149c3743bbb403ba818cba62acc10c776/1228_0_4000_4000/master/4000.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A 4cm pelagic sea slug, or sea angel (Clione limacina) found under the sea ice</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/21dd20af47e20ac5adf4d50b2667350c74412240/1247_0_3800_3800/master/3800.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/21dd20af47e20ac5adf4d50b2667350c74412240/1247_0_3800_3800/master/3800.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A 1cm copepod (Paraeuchaeta) caught in aplankton net</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d6fa615585b4e014de194e6efbdc1e76d2b12716/126_126_4874_4874/master/4874.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d6fa615585b4e014de194e6efbdc1e76d2b12716/126_126_4874_4874/master/4874.jpg?width=1140&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div>A 2cm jellyfish (Botrynema brucei)</i><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The chief scientist of the expedition, Antje Boetius, has been exploring the frigid waters of the Arctic for three decades.<br />In summer 2012 her team witnessed the lowest sea-ice minimum on record, in the Arctic Ocean’s Eurasian Basin.<br /><br />“Now, we are following the same route to repeat previous measurements on the ice-ocean system all the way down to the seabed,” says the deep-sea ecologist, who is also director of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.<br /><br />The ice-covered Arctic Ocean, especially its deeper realms, is one of the least explored regions on Earth.<br />To catch a glimpse of larger creatures inhabiting the abyssal plains on the ocean floor and uncharted underwater mountains, the deep-sea ecologists have brought a camera system that is towed behind Polarstern.<br /> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c4ef1832e1aa9f6455b3f05bd29760d6ef7c4da8/0_0_7200_4800/master/7200.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c4ef1832e1aa9f6455b3f05bd29760d6ef7c4da8/0_0_7200_4800/master/7200.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Polar bears are an occupational hazard on the Arctic ice</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The abundance and diversity of life in this cold, dark and food-scarce environment is truly astonishing: in places, large numbers of sea cucumbers and huge colonies of filter-feeding feather stars appear in the spotlights.<br />We marvel at basketball-sized sponges flickering across the scientists’ screens, at apricot-coloured anemones and star-shaped patterns extending around the burrows of spoon worms, which lick the seabed for food particles with a metre-long tongue.<br /><br />Polarstern regularly moors alongside large floes and part of the science team heads out on to the sea ice, pulling sledges heavily loaded with drilling tools and other equipment.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c4c51470ce60a3ea3524c1e451c5d72d0186aa9f/0_0_7123_4749/master/7123.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c4c51470ce60a3ea3524c1e451c5d72d0186aa9f/0_0_7123_4749/master/7123.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The expedition leader, Antje Boetius, on Polarstern’s bridge</i><br /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Flags on bamboo poles set up by a scouting party mark routes to different research sites.<br />Meanwhile, the ship’s helicopter passes over them, with a torpedo-shaped sensor suspended below it that measures the thickness of the sea ice.<br /><br />The rhythm of life onboard is determined by how fast the ship gets through the ice, the schedule for the research expeditions, and, most reliably, meal times: breakfast at 7.30am, lunch at 11.30am, coffee at 3.30pm, dinner at 5.30pm.<br /><br />The scientists work around the clock, and often use any time off to catch up on sleep after a long night in the lab or outside on deck in freezing temperatures.<br />Yet they still find time for social activities in the evenings, be it card games in the cosy red salon, water basketball in the ship’s swimming pool, or a pub quiz in the bar.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c16f93793872c86d3b685a83f8b329ea0945d571/0_0_7728_5152/master/7728.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c16f93793872c86d3b685a83f8b329ea0945d571/0_0_7728_5152/master/7728.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Towards the end of the expedition, when Polarstern is going south and the sun disappears below the horizon again after weeks of polar day, powerful spotlights are used to navigate through the ice</i><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Although the sea ice coverage in the study area and in the Arctic Ocean overall is higher in 2023 than in previous years, the expedition makes good progress.<br />We encounter thicker – but quite old and rotten – ice that Polarstern easily breaks through, and large gaps of open water between the floes.<br /><br />And so, on 7 September, almost effortlessly, the ship reaches the northernmost point of the planet: the geographic north pole.<br /><br />For most onboard, it is the first time; for Polarstern it is the seventh time.<br />In 1991, with the Swedish ship Oden, it was the first conventional icebreaker to reach the latitude 90 deg N.<br /><br />The Arctic Ocean has changed dramatically since that first arrival, says the captain, Stefan Schwarze.<br />“Three decades ago, we needed two icebreakers to fight our way through the pack ice,” he says.<br />“Today, we have reached the north pole with 30% of our engine power.”</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8e7c7167db56a03a7756e5b37b51625f8577b8bf/0_0_7368_4144/master/7368.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8e7c7167db56a03a7756e5b37b51625f8577b8bf/0_0_7368_4144/master/7368.jpg?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Armed guards keep a lookout for polar bears while their colleagues work</i><br /></div></div><div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The Guardian : <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/11/polar-challenge-as-the-sea-ice-melts-can-countries-come-together-to-protect-the-arctic-ocean">The desperate race to create a protection zone around the rapidly melting Arctic</a></li></ul><br /></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-19274319724928911052024-02-27T01:18:00.050+01:002024-02-27T01:18:00.121+01:00From the sky to the sea: using satellites to map the world’s unidentified reefs<div style="text-align: center;"><img height="448" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.australiangeographic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2.-A-shallow-coral-reef-in-Fiji.-Credit-Chris-Roelfsema.jpeg?fit=900%2C629&ssl=1" width="640" /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Coral reefs possess a quarter of all marine life and contribute to the well-being and livelihoods of a billion people worldwide.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Image credit: Chris Roelfsema.</i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>From <a href="https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2024/02/from-the-sky-to-the-sea-using-satellites-to-map-the-worlds-unidentified-reefs/">National Geographic</a> by Elisabeth Marie</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br />Detailed satellite mapping of the world’s reefs has revealed there is more coral reef area across the globe than previously thought – information that’s aiding conservation efforts of these environment</b>s.<br /><br />Scientists have identified 348,000 square kilometres of shallow coral reefs up to 20 to 30 metres deep thanks to new technology.<br /><br />“The total area of coral reef ecosystems is more extensive than previously thought,” said Dr Mitchell Lyons from the University of Queensland’s School of the Environment, working as part of the Allen Coral Atlas project.<br />“We can now confidently say there are almost 350,000 square kilometres of coral reef, which is about 50 to 100,000 kilometres more than previous estimations.”</div><div style="text-align: left;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://allencoralatlas.org/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.cosmicjs.com%2F76e3e2d0-d222-11ec-9f12-9bd712c1ee68-2.png&w=2048&q=75" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://allencoralatlas.org/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.cosmicjs.com%2F76e3e2d0-d222-11ec-9f12-9bd712c1ee68-2.png&w=2048&q=75" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Dive under the waves and explore our global habitat maps.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The maps classify reefs into benthic and geomorphic zones to support reef restoration and protection.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://allencoralatlas.org/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.cosmicjs.com%2F9466aa40-d222-11ec-9f12-9bd712c1ee68-1.png&w=2048&q=75" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://allencoralatlas.org/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.cosmicjs.com%2F9466aa40-d222-11ec-9f12-9bd712c1ee68-1.png&w=2048&q=75" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Identify reefs experiencing low, moderate, and severe bleaching with the Atlas monitoring system.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Know when and where to focus restoration efforts.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://allencoralatlas.org/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.cosmicjs.com%2F6fe96b00-5182-11ed-89d4-853fd6bb9a28-Screen-Shot-2022-10-21-at-1.53.25-PM.png&w=2048&q=75" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="398" data-original-width="800" height="318" src="https://allencoralatlas.org/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.cosmicjs.com%2F6fe96b00-5182-11ed-89d4-853fd6bb9a28-Screen-Shot-2022-10-21-at-1.53.25-PM.png&w=2048&q=75" width="640" /></a></div><i>Monitor changes in water quality over time by identifying turbidity in your area.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Use it to identify sources of land-based pollution and prioritize action.<br /></i> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Dr Mitchell said researchers also found that about 80,000 square kilometres of reefs have a hard bottom, where coral tends to grow, as opposed to soft bottoms like sand, rubble or seagrass.<br />“This specialised data on area and composition will allow scientists, conservationists and policymakers to better understand and manage reef systems,” he said.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="477" src="https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-1.15.38-pm-1800x1342.png" width="640" /> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A map showing coral reefs around Australia.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Image credit: <a href="https://allencoralatlas.org/atlas/#9.32/-16.4485/179.1095">Allen Coral Atlas</a><br /> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Making the map</b><br /><br />The map, known as the <a href="http://allencoralatlas.org/">Allen Coral Atlas</a>, was developed by the late Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. and is managed by Arizona State University and the University of Queensland along with partners Planet and Coral Reef Alliance.<br /><br />Using fine-scale, high-resolution pictures from Planet Dove cubesat satellites and scientific-grade information from the Sentinel-2 satellite, scientists processed 100 trillion pixels to produce a global map of coral reefs.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The satellite images were then put through a machine-learning algorithm along with more than 1.5 million training samples curated from data collected by over 480 contributors identifying types of reefs, and the system then predicted any unmapped information to fill in data gaps.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="422" src="https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/A-diver-on-a-shallow-coral-reef-off-Fiji-Credit-Chris-Roelfsema-1.jpeg" width="640" /><i>Thousands of people and organisations are using the Allen Coral Atlas to help direct conservation efforts.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Image credit: Chris Roelfsema.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><b>Conserving coral</b><br /><br />According to Dr Mitchell, although coral reefs account for only a small proportion of the ocean, they provide tremendous biodiversity that humans rely on for culture, commerce, scientific output and medicine.<br /><br />“Coral reefs possess a quarter of all marine life and contribute to the wellbeing and livelihoods of a billion people worldwide,” Dr Mitchell said.<br />“Maps of ecosystems underpin many science and conservation activities, but until recently, there were no consistent high-resolution maps of the world’s coral reefs.<br />“Hundreds of thousands of people have already accessed the maps, and they are already being used directly around the world for marine spatial planning, marine protected areas, environmental accounting and assessments, restoration, and education.”<br /><br />In 2022, more than 80,000 people accessed the Allen Coral Atlas, including conservation groups using the technology to advance their initiatives.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KZo5WCHO12w?si=7YhwBR7Dj6gYDiiY" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>From geospatial data scientists to directors of conservation to fisherman, “we are all integrated in this effort”</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>In Indonesia, teams are using the Allen Coral Atlas to inform the country's reef management strategies.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i>Groups include the <a href="https://coralreefrescueinitiative.org/coral-reef-rescue-initiative">Coral Reef Rescue Initiative</a>, a global programme of scientists, NGOs and partners working in collaboration with governments and communities to safeguard reefs, food security and livelihoods against climate change; and the <a href="https://prrcf.org/">Philippine Reef and Rainforest Conservation Foundation</a>, a non-profit organisation focused on environmental conservation on Danjugan Island.<br /></div><br />The <a href="http://coraltriangleinitiative.org/">Coral Triangle Initiative</a>, a multilateral partnership between Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste working to sustain marine and coastal resources by addressing food security, climate change and marine biodiversity, is also accessing the Allen Coral Atlas.<br /><br />The information provided by the map will also have broader uses for Australian researchers and conservationists.<br />“We tend to be really interested in coral bleaching, so the map can help target locations where we know the reefs have hard substrate for coral to grow,” Dr Mitchell said.<br />“The Allen Coral Atlas also has a tool that allows pinpointing of areas affected by coral bleaching to help alert to the potentially growing issue.<br />“It’s more than just maps,” he said. “It’s a tool for positive change for coral reefs, and coastal and marine environments at large.”</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>National Geographic : <a href="https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2023/12/world-first-trials-begin-to-seed-the-threatened-great-barrier-reef-with-thousands-of-healthy-new-baby-corals/?utm_source=website_cta&utm_medium=post_highlight&utm_campaign=on_site_links">World first: trials begin to seed the threatened Great Barrier Reef with thousands of healthy baby corals</a></li><li>Mongabay : <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2021/05/satellites-keep-watch-over-global-reef-health-in-a-world-first/">Satellites keep watch over global reef health in a world first</a></li><li>GeoGarage blog : <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2021/06/real-time-satellite-system-to-monitor.html">Real-time satellite system to monitor global reef bleaching</a> / <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2021/01/the-plan-to-map-every-coral-reef-on.html">The plan to map every coral reef on Earth – from space</a> / <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2020/12/the-nature-conservancy-publishes-first.html">The Nature Conservancy publishes first-ever detailed ...</a> / <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2019/05/eomap-completes-first-3d-habitat-map-of.html">EOMAP completes first 3D habitat map of Great Barrier Reef</a> / <a href="http://blog.geogarage.com/2015/07/exploring-reefs-from-space.html">Exploring reefs from space</a> / <a href="http://blog.geogarage.com/2018/07/theres-never-been-map-of-coral.html">There's never been a map of the coral reefs—Until Now</a></li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-34172731231744184152024-02-26T01:18:00.006+01:002024-02-26T01:18:00.234+01:00Colossal underwater canyon discovered near seamount deep in the Mediterranean Sea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/wd5u7G73bD8i9G7GFW9wP6-650-80.jpg.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="650" height="360" src="https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/wd5u7G73bD8i9G7GFW9wP6-650-80.jpg.webp" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A newly discovered underwater canyon was carved out of the seabed by
extremely salty currents. (Image credit: Jason Edwards via Getty Images)</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br />From <a href="https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/colossal-underwater-canyon-discovered-near-seamount-deep-in-the-mediterranean-sea">LiveScience</a> by Sascha Pare </i><br /><b><br />Researchers have discovered a 33,000-foot-wide (10 kilometers) underwater canyon that was carved out of the Mediterranean seabed shortly before the sea dried up around 6 million years ago.</b><br /><br />Scientists have discovered a giant underwater canyon in the eastern Mediterranean Sea that likely formed just before <a href="https://www.livescience.com/42115-giant-salt-crisis-explained.html">the sea transformed to a mile-high salt field</a>.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The canyon formed around 6 million years ago, at the onset of the Messinian salinity crisis (MSC), when the Gibraltar gateway between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea narrowed and eventually pinched shut due to shifts in tectonic plates.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The Mediterranean Sea became isolated from the world's oceans and dried up for roughly 700,000 years, leaving behind a vast expanse of salt up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) thick in some places.<br /><br />As sea levels dropped, increasingly salty currents eroded the seabed and incised gullies several hundred feet deep along the steepest edges of the Mediterranean Sea.</div><div style="text-align: left;">In a study published in the January issue of the journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2023.104318">Global and Planetary Change</a>, researchers now describe a giant U-shaped canyon located 75 miles (120 km) south of Cyprus, in the depths of the Mediterranean's Levant Basin.<br /><br />The 1,640-foot-deep (500 meters) and 33,000-foot-wide (10 km) canyon, which the researchers named after the nearby <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes_Seamount">Eratosthenes seamount</a>, likely formed underwater shortly before salt piled onto the seabed.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Unlike the more coastal gullies, the canyon had no older "pre-salt" roots, according to the study."</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">To explain the submarine formation of the Eratosthenes Canyon, we suggest incision by dense gravity currents scratching and carving the deep-water seafloor," the researchers wrote in the study.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/AwWBtVTQU27R7FWPQfcVJY.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="684" data-original-width="800" height="547" src="https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/AwWBtVTQU27R7FWPQfcVJY.png" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The newly discovered Eratosthenes Canyon sits close to the Eratosthenes seamount in the eastern Mediterranean sea.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Image credit: </i><i>Geological Survey of Israel</i><i>)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwZgvx8120fxbDAvAJx83BOxi1IwvmP__Fu8h3Et90epZ8RJzAl2gp-2zb5CfuQTFkmkiDRN0GYPthIna3NLj4zMdjl8ciJH0gPmCtk7ForDB4gqnpU7CNHEHO5KPOxMPSe46bSHmWpIV19zGwNYJ3CfyY5mUFpxXhMgL2EzIgkS3eSftwVIDTD8BXKhQX/s1917/GeoGarage_Google_Maps_JavaScript_API_Example__Map_Simple.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="949" data-original-width="1917" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwZgvx8120fxbDAvAJx83BOxi1IwvmP__Fu8h3Et90epZ8RJzAl2gp-2zb5CfuQTFkmkiDRN0GYPthIna3NLj4zMdjl8ciJH0gPmCtk7ForDB4gqnpU7CNHEHO5KPOxMPSe46bSHmWpIV19zGwNYJ3CfyY5mUFpxXhMgL2EzIgkS3eSftwVIDTD8BXKhQX/w640-h316/GeoGarage_Google_Maps_JavaScript_API_Example__Map_Simple.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>STRM bathymetry off of the Levant Basin with the <a href="http://geogarage.com">GeoGarage</a> platform</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_H27Ge4hahatLW7Quvd7LxPTcq5nOcDKewhc5Bpmbg1x6Oc-AbqY-AdHJCSLtJxxNLic64CCQQhdMcCO3FkC9QimXC-sF-5IIUSKs9jlb7iRVlYc6bjLTlshEMp8k6QKcRcklvjzCXuo0t_HaA-5iLW0wBiClbZvO5TvPxb5-9lmL8a9aJhXhBifta6Xs/s1915/SHOM_Eratosphene.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="949" data-original-width="1915" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_H27Ge4hahatLW7Quvd7LxPTcq5nOcDKewhc5Bpmbg1x6Oc-AbqY-AdHJCSLtJxxNLic64CCQQhdMcCO3FkC9QimXC-sF-5IIUSKs9jlb7iRVlYc6bjLTlshEMp8k6QKcRcklvjzCXuo0t_HaA-5iLW0wBiClbZvO5TvPxb5-9lmL8a9aJhXhBifta6Xs/w640-h318/SHOM_Eratosphene.jpg" width="640" /></a></i></div><i>Visualization with nautical map (SHOM)</i><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Weighed down with salt and sediment, these currents rushed along faster than the surrounding water and gradually scooped out enough of the seabed to form the colossal canyon.</div></div><div style="text-align: left;">Precisely when this occurred remains unclear, but it likely coincided with the beginning of the MSC — between 5.6 million and 6 million years ago, according to the study.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The incision process may have lasted anywhere from tens of thousands to half a million years.<br /><br />The discovery sheds light on a decades-long debate over whether Messinian gullies and canyons that now lie underwater formed above or below the sea surface.</div><div style="text-align: left;">"This new evidence strengthens the arguments that at least part of the erosion across continental margins occurred [below water]," the researchers wrote.<br /><br />The newly discovered canyon sits within a wider network of canyons and channels in an area known as <a href="https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3014/pdf/FS10-3014.pdf">the Levant Basin</a>, which extends from the coast of Syria in the north to Gaza in the south, and northwest toward Cyprus.<br /><br />To the northwest of the canyon, beyond the Eratosthenes seamount, sits the much deeper and older Herodotus basin, which receives currents loaded with sediment from the southeast.</div><div style="text-align: left;">These currents may have crossed the area that now boasts the Eratosthenes Canyon long before it was incised, according to the study.<br /><br />"The absence of older roots under the Eratosthenes Canyon does not rule out the possibility that a shallow pre-MSC channel system predated the Eratosthenes Canyon," the researchers wrote.</div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>GeoExPro : <a href="https://geoexpro.com/no-walkover-but-no-walking-away/">No walkover but no walking away, The Eratosthenes Seamount (ESM) to the south of Cyprus is still in the exploration game thanks to SAR oil seeps</a></li><li>ScienceDirect : <span class="title-text" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967064517301005">Deep-water archaeological discoveries on Eratosthenes Seamount</a></span> </li><li>LiveSciences : —<a href="https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/volcanos/supervolcano-megabeds-discovered-at-bottom-of-sea-point-to-catastrophic-events-in-europe-every-10000-to-15000-years">Supervolcano 'megabeds' discovered at bottom of sea point to catastrophic events in Europe every 10,000 to 15,000 years</a> / <a href="https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/volcanos/underwater-santorini-volcano-eruption-520000-years-ago-was-15-times-bigger-than-record-breaking-tonga-eruption">Underwater Santorini volcano eruption 520,000 years ago was 15 times bigger than record-breaking Tonga eruption</a> / <a href="https://www.livescience.com/mediterranean-volcano-growing-magma-chamber">Never-before-seen volcanic magma chamber discovered deep under Mediterranean, near Santorini</a> / <a href="https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/6-million-year-old-fossil-groundwater-pool-discovered-deep-beneath-sicilian-mountains">6 million-year-old 'fossil groundwater pool' discovered deep beneath Sicilian mountains</a> </li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-33760677064444361952024-02-25T01:45:00.017+01:002024-02-25T01:45:00.240+01:00Mesoscale Convective Systems : Lightning megaflash<div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center" data-media-max-width="560"><p lang="en"><i><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SATELLITE?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#SATELLITE</a> SPOTLIGHT: <a href="https://twitter.com/NOAA?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NOAA</a>'s <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GOES16?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GOES16</a>🛰️ used its Geostationary Lightning Mapper (<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GLM?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GLM</a>) to track the very intense <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/lightning?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#lightning</a> associated with last night's <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/severe?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#severe</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/thunderstorms?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#thunderstorms</a> across the Central U.S. Very high <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/instability?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#instability</a> likely contributed to the light show. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/OKwx?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#OKwx</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TXwx?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TXwx</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MOwx?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MOwx</a> <a href="https://t.co/NsSfujI5qT">pic.twitter.com/NsSfujI5qT</a></i></p><i>— NOAA Satellites - Public Affairs (@NOAASatellitePA) <a href="https://twitter.com/NOAASatellitePA/status/1255534389104119808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 29, 2020</a></i></blockquote></div> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW3tVhNKHcathowLbftOdWF8ff8VprWFGoLqrWcsYkzCu3W2kLtrSiOTuL4589uvN8C0is1DiUA6ugzUEA8hbpgCv4MUHYoNqmiFwjA2Or_Q6V-fa__45VhylwAHuuPkmB9Py3PzZIRdBqw4hp2T713Gk0iON0Y3uVEtYznd0JPEAaxHK7oLZ1BSyFc5OE/s1280/megaflash.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW3tVhNKHcathowLbftOdWF8ff8VprWFGoLqrWcsYkzCu3W2kLtrSiOTuL4589uvN8C0is1DiUA6ugzUEA8hbpgCv4MUHYoNqmiFwjA2Or_Q6V-fa__45VhylwAHuuPkmB9Py3PzZIRdBqw4hp2T713Gk0iON0Y3uVEtYznd0JPEAaxHK7oLZ1BSyFc5OE/w640-h360/megaflash.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://wmo.int/sites/default/files/styles/prose_1x/public/image_3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="529" data-original-width="768" height="441" src="https://wmo.int/sites/default/files/styles/prose_1x/public/image_3.jpg" width="640" /></a><i><a href="https://wmo.int/media/news/wmo-certifies-two-megaflash-lightning-records">WMO certifies two megaflash lightning records</a></i></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div style="text-align: left;">A continuous <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Mesoscale">mesoscale</a> <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Lightning_flash">lightning flash</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoscale_convective_system">MSC</a>) with a horizontal path length of approximately 100 km or greater.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The tremendous distances covered by megaflashes necessitate long flash durations as well, typically 5 s or greater.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://wmo.int/sites/default/files/styles/featured_image_x1_768x512/public/news/featured_media/Jairo_Valverde_Bermudez.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="427" src="https://wmo.int/sites/default/files/styles/featured_image_x1_768x512/public/news/featured_media/Jairo_Valverde_Bermudez.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Megaflashes typically occur in the <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Stratiform">stratiform</a> regions of <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Mesoscale_convective_system">mesoscale convective systems</a> (MCSs).</div><div style="text-align: left;">These expansive flashes can produce one or more <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Cloud-to-ground_flash">cloud-to-ground</a> (CG) strikes along their paths.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Some CGs associated with megaflashes have large charge moment changes and/or peak <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Current">currents</a> resulting in lightning <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Superbolt">superbolts</a>, <a href="https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Sprite">sprites</a>, and/or lightning-triggered upward lightning discharges (LTULs) from tall structures.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uQdCO6baDLE?si=Rv9kCEFy6YWu3ocI" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <i>A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) committee of experts has established two new world records for the longest reported distance and the longest reported duration for a single lightning flash in, respectively, Brazil and Argentina</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;">In June 2020 the <a href="https://wmo.int/media/news/wmo-certifies-megaflash-lightning-extremes">World Meteorological Organization announced</a> the certification of new global lightning extreme records for megaflashes after the identification of megaflashes in excess of 700 km in length and 16 s in duration over Argentina and southern Brazil.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>WP : <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/06/25/lightning-megaflash-world-record/">Lightning Megaflash world record</a></li><li>The Hearty Soul : <a href="https://theheartysoul.com/lightning-megaflash/">World record lightning ‘megaflash’ in South America — 440 miles long — confirmed by scientists</a> </li><li>GeoGarage blog : <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2023/05/how-ships-are-protected-from-lightning.html">How ships are protected from lightning – ships earthing ...</a> / <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2023/11/do-you-know-how-ships-are-protected.html">Do you know how ships are protected from lightning?</a> / <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2022/08/when-it-comes-to-lightning-dont-pass.html">When it comes to lightning, don't pass the salt</a> / <a href="http://blog.geogarage.com/2017/09/ship-exhaust-makes-oceanic.html">Ship exhaust makes oceanic thunderstorms more intense</a> / <a href="https://blog.geogarage.com/2017/01/the-first-images-from-new-weather.html">The first images from the new weather satellite just arrived, ...</a></li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-68555499144879544382024-02-24T01:24:00.002+01:002024-02-24T01:24:00.238+01:00Image of the week : whales bones<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGxu-n2XIAA-LHc?format=jpg&name=orig" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="800" height="440" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGxu-n2XIAA-LHc?format=jpg&name=orig" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Incredibly moving photograph of a whale skeleton in Greenland. </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Alex Dawson, winner of the <a href="https://underwaterphotographeroftheyear.com">Underwater Photographer of the Year 2024</a></i></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6659609247816106447.post-49963530506231972332024-02-23T01:24:00.033+01:002024-02-23T01:24:00.232+01:00How to use AI to talk to whales—and save life on Earth<div 560="" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N34ZK6QLWbE?si=XJ_PzfkAOVTWIdgN" title="YouTube video player"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hph9OeKjg3w?si=qoCRR3ZU08A9_a5L" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><i>From <a href=" https://www.wired.com/story/use-ai-talk-to-whales-save-life-on-earth">Wired</a> by Ramin Skibba </i><br /><br />With
ecosystems in crisis, engineers and scientists are teaming up to
decipher what animals are saying.<br />Their hope: By truly listening to
nature, humans will decide to protect it.<br /><br />Before Michelle Fournet moved to Alaska on a whim in her early twenties, she’d never seen a <a href="https://www.wired.com/tag/whales/">whale</a>.<br />She took a job on a whale watching boat and, each day she was out on the water, gazed at the grand shapes moving under the surface.<br />For her entire life, she realized, the <a href="https://www.wired.com/tag/nature/">natural world</a> had been out there, and she’d been missing it.<br />“I didn’t even know I was bereft,” she recalls.<br />Later, as a graduate student in marine biology, Fournet wondered what else she was missing.<br />The humpbacks she was getting to know revealed themselves in partial glimpses.<br />What if she could hear what they were saying?</div><div style="text-align: left;">She dropped a hydrophone in the water—but the only sound that came through was the mechanical churn of boats.<br />The whales had fallen silent amid the racket.<br />Just as Fournet had discovered nature, then, she was witnessing it recede.<br />She resolved to help the whales.<br />To do that, she needed to learn how to listen to them.<br /><br />Fournet, now a professor at the University of New Hampshire and the director of <a href="https://soundsciencecollective.org/">a collective of conservation scientists</a>, has spent the past decade building a catalog of the various chirps, shrieks, and groans that humpbacks make in daily life.<br />The whales have huge and diverse vocabularies, but there is one thing they all say, whether male or female, young or old.<br />To our meager human ears, it sounds something like a belly rumble punctuated by a water droplet: whup.<br /><br />Fournet thinks the whup call is how the whales announce their presence to one another.<br />A way of saying, “I’m here.” Last year, as part of a series of experiments to test her theory, Fournet piloted a skiff out into Alaska’s Frederick Sound, where humpbacks gather to feed on clouds of krill.<br />She broadcast a sequence of whup calls and recorded what the whales did in response.<br />Then, back on the beach, she put on headphones and listened to the audio.<br />Her calls went out.<br />The whales’ voices returned through the water: whup, whup, whup.<br />Fournet describes it like this: The whales heard a voice say, “I am, I am here, I am me.”</div><div style="text-align: left;">And they replied, “I also am, I am here, I am me.”<br /><br />Biologists use this type of experiment, called a playback, to study what prompts an animal to speak.<br />Fournet’s playbacks have so far used recordings of real whups.<br />The method is imperfect, though, because humpbacks are highly attentive to who they’re talking to.<br />If a whale recognizes the voice of the whale in the recording, how does that affect its response?</div><div style="text-align: left;">Does it talk to a buddy differently than it would to a stranger?</div><div style="text-align: left;">As a biologist, how do you ensure you’re sending out a neutral whup?<br /><br />One answer is to create your own.<br />Fournet has shared her catalog of humpback calls with the Earth Species Project, a group of technologists and engineers who, with the help of <a href="https://www.wired.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/">AI</a>, are aiming to develop a synthetic whup.<br />And they’re not just planning to emulate a humpback’s voice.<br />The nonprofit’s mission is to open human ears to the chatter of the entire animal kingdom.<br />In 30 years, they say, nature documentaries won’t need soothing Attenborough-style narration, because the dialog of the animals onscreen will be subtitled.<br />And just as engineers today don’t need to know Mandarin or Turkish to build a <a href="https://www.wired.com/tag/chatbots/">chatbot</a> in those languages, it will soon be possible to build one that speaks Humpback—or Hummingbird, or Bat, or Bee.<br /><br />The idea of “decoding” animal communication is bold, maybe unbelievable, but a time of crisis calls for bold and unbelievable measures.<br />Everywhere that humans are, which is everywhere, animals are vanishing.<br />Wildlife populations across the planet have dropped an average of nearly 70 percent in the past 50 years, according to one estimate—and that’s just the portion of the crisis that scientists have measured.<br />Thousands of species could disappear without humans knowing anything about them at all.<br /><br />To decarbonize the economy and preserve ecosystems, we certainly don’t need to talk to animals.<br />But the more we know about the lives of other creatures, the better we can care for those lives.<br />And humans, being human, pay more attention to those who speak our language.<br />The interaction that Earth Species wants to make possible, Fournet says, “helps a society that is disconnected from nature to reconnect with it.” The best technology gives humans a way to inhabit the world more fully.<br />In that light, talking to animals could be its most natural application yet.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N34ZK6QLWbE?si=XJ_PzfkAOVTWIdgN" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="yt-core-attributed-string yt-core-attributed-string--white-space-pre-wrap"><span class="yt-core-attributed-string--link-inherit-color" style="color: #131313;"><i>Sperm whales communicate through sound, using echolocation to navigate the deep ocean.</i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="yt-core-attributed-string yt-core-attributed-string--white-space-pre-wrap"><span class="yt-core-attributed-string--link-inherit-color" style="color: #131313;"><i>Different whale clans use their own patterns of clicks – or “codas” – much in the same way humans use language.</i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="yt-core-attributed-string yt-core-attributed-string--white-space-pre-wrap"><span class="yt-core-attributed-string--link-inherit-color" style="color: #131313;"><i>The meaning behind whale language is a fascinating mystery.</i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="yt-core-attributed-string yt-core-attributed-string--white-space-pre-wrap"><span class="yt-core-attributed-string--link-inherit-color" style="color: #131313;"><i>But could scientists be about to solve it? Find out how researchers are using AI, visual data, and sound recordings to try to understand the ocean’s biggest enigma.</i></span></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Humans have always known how to listen to other species, of course.<br />Fishers throughout history collaborated with whales and dolphins to mutual benefit: a fish for them, a fish for us.<br />In 19th-century Australia, a pod of killer whales was known to herd baleen whales into a bay near a whalers’ settlement, then slap their tails to alert the humans to ready the harpoons.<br />(In exchange for their help, the orcas got first dibs on their favorite cuts, the lips and tongue.) Meanwhile, in the icy waters of Beringia, Inupiat people listened and spoke to bowhead whales before their hunts.<br />As the environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth writes in her book Floating Coast, the Inupiat thought of the whales as neighbors occupying “their own country” who chose at times to offer their lives to humans—if humans deserved it.<br /><br />Commercial whalers had a different approach.<br />They saw whales as floating containers of blubber and baleen.<br />The American whaling industry in the mid-19th century, and then the global whaling industry in the following century, very nearly obliterated several species, resulting in one of the largest-ever losses of wild animal life caused by humans.<br />In the 1960s, 700,000 whales were killed, marking the peak of cetacean death.<br />Then, something remarkable happened: We heard whales sing.<br />On a trip to Bermuda, the biologists Roger and Katy Payne met a US naval engineer named Frank Watlington, who gave them recordings he’d made of strange melodies captured deep underwater.<br />For centuries, sailors had recounted tales of eerie songs that emanated from their boats’ wooden hulls, whether from monsters or sirens they didn’t know.<br />Watlington thought the sounds were from humpback whales.<br />Go save them, he told the Paynes.<br />They did, by releasing an album, Songs of the Humpback Whale, that made these singing whales famous.<br />The Save the Whales movement took off soon after.<br />In 1972, the US passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act; in 1986, commercial whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission.<br />In barely two decades, whales had transformed in the public eye into cognitively complex and gentle giants of the sea.<br /><br />Roger Payne, who died earlier this year, spoke frequently about his belief that the more the public could know “curious and fascinating things” about whales, the more people would care what happened to them.<br />In his opinion, science alone would never change the world, because humans don’t respond to data; they respond to emotion—to things that make them weep in awe or shiver with delight.<br />He was in favor of wildlife tourism, zoos, and captive dolphin shows.<br />However compromised the treatment of individual animals might be in these places, he believed, the extinction of a species is far worse.<br />Conservationists have since held on to the idea that contact with animals can save them.<br /><br />From this premise, Earth Species is taking the imaginative leap that AI can help us make first contact with animals.<br />The organization’s founders, Aza Raskin and Britt Selvitelle, are both architects of our digital age.<br />Raskin grew up in Silicon Valley; his father started Apple’s Macintosh project in the 1970s.<br />Early in his career, Raskin helped to build Firefox, and in 2006 he created the infinite scroll, arguably his greatest and most dubious legacy.<br />Repentant, he later calculated the collective human hours that his invention had wasted and arrived at a figure surpassing 100,000 lifetimes per week.<br /><br />Raskin would sometimes hang out at a startup called Twitter, where he met Selvitelle, a founding employee.<br />They stayed in touch.<br />In 2013, Raskin heard a news story on the radio about <a href="https://www.wired.com/2013/04/geladas-language-origins/">gelada monkeys in Ethiopia</a> whose communication had similar cadences to human speech.<br />So similar, in fact, that the lead scientist would sometimes hear a voice talking to him, turn around, and be surprised to find a monkey there.<br />The interviewer asked whether there was any way of knowing what they were trying to say.<br />There wasn’t—but Raskin wondered if it might be possible to arrive at an answer with machine learning.<br />He brought the idea up with Selvitelle, who had an interest in animal welfare.<br /><br />For a while the idea was just an idea.<br />Then, in 2017, new research showed that machines could translate between two languages without first being trained on bilingual texts.<br />Google Translate had always mimicked the way a human might use a dictionary, just faster and at scale.<br />But these new machine learning methods bypassed semantics altogether.<br />They treated languages as geometric shapes and found where the shapes overlapped.<br />If a machine could translate any language into English without needing to understand it first, Raskin thought, could it do the same with a gelada monkey’s wobble, an elephant’s infrasound, a bee’s waggle dance? A year later, Raskin and Selvitelle formed Earth Species.<br /><br />Raskin believes that the ability to eavesdrop on animals will spur nothing less than a paradigm shift as historically significant as the Copernican revolution.<br />He is fond of saying that “AI is the invention of modern optics.”</div><div style="text-align: left;">By this he means that just as improvements to the telescope allowed 17th-century astronomers to perceive newfound stars and finally displace the Earth from the center of the cosmos, AI will help scientists hear what their ears alone cannot: that animals speak meaningfully, and in more ways than we can imagine.<br />That their abilities, and their lives, are not less than ours.<br />“This time we’re going to look out to the universe and discover humanity is not the center,” Raskin says.<br /><br />Raskin and Selvitelle spent their first few years meeting with biologists and tagging along on fieldwork.<br />They soon realized that the most obvious and immediate need in front of them wasn’t inciting revolution.<br />It was sorting data.<br />Two decades ago, a primate researcher would stand under a tree and hold a microphone in the air until her arm got tired.<br />Now researchers can stick a portable biologger to a tree and collect a continuous stream of audio for a year.<br />The many terabytes of data that result is more than any army of grad students could hope to tackle.<br />But feed all this material to trained machine learning algorithms, and the computer can scan the data and flag the animal calls.<br />It can distinguish a whup from a whistle.<br />It can tell a gibbon’s voice from her brother’s.<br />At least, that’s the hope.<br />These tools need more data, research, and funding.<br />Earth Species has a workforce of 15 people and a budget of a few million dollars.<br />They’ve teamed up with several dozen biologists to start making headway on these practical tasks.<br /><br />An early project took on one of the most significant challenges in animal communication research, known as the cocktail party problem: When a group of animals are talking to one another, how can you tell who’s saying what? In the open sea, schools of dolphins a thousand strong chatter all at once; scientists who record them end up with audio as dense with whistles and clicks as a stadium is with cheers.<br />Even audio of just two or three animals is often unusable, says Laela Sayigh, an expert in bottlenose dolphin whistles, because you can’t tell where one dolphin stops talking and another starts.<br />(Video doesn’t help, because dolphins don’t open their mouths when they speak.) Earth Species used Sayigh’s extensive database of signature whistles—the ones likened to names—to develop a neural network model that could separate overlapping animal voices.<br />That model was useful only in lab conditions, but research is meant to be built on.<br />A couple of months later, Google AI published a model for untangling wild birdsong.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Sayigh has proposed a tool that can serve as an emergency alert for dolphin mass strandings, which tend to recur in certain places around the globe.<br />She lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, one such hot spot, where as often as a dozen times a year groups of dolphins get disoriented, inadvertently swim onto shore, and perish.<br />Fortunately, there might be a way to predict this before it happens, Sayigh says.<br />She hypothesizes that when the dolphins are stressed, they emit signature whistles more than usual, just as someone lost in a snowstorm might call out in panic.<br />A computer trained to listen for these whistles could send an alert that prompts rescuers to reroute the dolphins before they hit the beach.<br />In the Salish Sea—where, in 2018, a mother orca towing the body of her starved calf attracted global sympathy—there is an alert system, built by Google AI, that listens for resident killer whales and diverts ships out of their way.<br /><br />For researchers and conservationists alike, the potential applications of machine learning are basically limitless.<br />And Earth Species is not the only group working on decoding animal communication.<br />Payne spent the last months of his life advising for Project CETI, a nonprofit that built a base in Dominica this year for the study of sperm whale communication.<br />“Just imagine what would be possible if we understood what animals are saying to each other; what occupies their thoughts; what they love, fear, desire, avoid, hate, are intrigued by, and treasure,” he wrote in Time in June.<br /><br />Many of the tools that Earth Species has developed so far offer more in the way of groundwork than immediate utility.<br />Still, there’s a lot of optimism in this nascent field.<br />With enough resources, several biologists told me, decoding is scientifically achievable.<br />That’s only the beginning.<br />The real hope is to bridge the gulf in understanding between an animal’s experience and ours, however vast—or narrow—that might be.<br /><br />Ari Friedlaender has something that Earth Species needs: lots and lots of data.<br />Friedlaender researches whale behavior at UC Santa Cruz.<br />He got started as a tag guy: the person who balances at the edge of a boat as it chases a whale, holds out a long pole with a suction-cupped biologging tag attached to the end, and slaps the tag on a whale’s back as it rounds the surface.<br />This is harder than it seems.<br />Friedlaender proved himself adept—“I played sports in college,” he explains—and was soon traveling the seas on tagging expeditions.<br /><br />The tags Friedlaender uses capture a remarkable amount of data.<br />Each records not only GPS location, temperature, pressure, and sound, but also high-definition video and three-axis accelerometer data, the same tech that a Fitbit uses to count your steps or measure how deeply you’re sleeping.<br />Taken together, the data illustrates, in cinematic detail, a day in the life of a whale: its every breath and every dive, its traverses through fields of sea nettles and jellyfish, its encounters with twirling sea lions.<br /><br />Friedlaender shows me an animation he has made from one tag’s data.<br />In it, a whale descends and loops through the water, traveling a multicolored three-dimensional course as if on an undersea Mario Kart track.<br />Another animation depicts several whales blowing bubble nets, a feeding strategy in which they swim in circles around groups of fish, trap the fish in the center with a wall of bubbles, then lunge through, mouths gaping.<br />Looking at the whales’ movements, I notice that while most of them have traced a neat spiral, one whale has produced a tangle of clumsy zigzags.<br />“Probably a young animal,” Friedlaender says.<br />“That one hasn’t figured things out yet.”<br /><br />Friedlaender’s multifaceted data is especially useful for Earth Species because, as any biologist will tell you, animal communication isn’t purely verbal.<br />It involves gestures and movement just as often as vocalizations.<br />Diverse data sets get Earth Species closer to developing algorithms that can work across the full spectrum of the animal kingdom.<br />The organization’s most recent work focuses on foundation models, the same kind of computation that powers generative AI like ChatGPT.<br />Earlier this year, Earth Species published the first foundation model for animal communication.<br />The model can already accurately sort beluga whale calls, and Earth Species plans to apply it to species as disparate as orangutans (who bellow), elephants (who send seismic rumbles through the ground), and jumping spiders (who vibrate their legs).<br />Katie Zacarian, Earth Species’ CEO, describes the model this way: “Everything’s a nail, and it’s a hammer.”<br /><br />Another application of Earth Species’ AI is generating animal calls, like an audio version of GPT.<br />Raskin has made a few-second chirp of a chiffchaff bird.<br />If this sounds like it’s getting ahead of decoding, it is—AI, as it turns out, is better at speaking than understanding.<br />Earth Species is finding that the tools it is developing will likely have the ability to talk to animals even before they can decode.<br />It may soon be possible, for example, to prompt an AI with a whup and have it continue a conversation in Humpback—without human observers knowing what either the machine or the whale is saying.<br /><br />No one is expecting such a scenario to actually take place; that would be scientifically irresponsible, for one thing.<br />The biologists working with Earth Species are motivated by knowledge, not dialog for the sake of it.<br />Felix Effenberger, a senior AI research adviser for Earth Species, told me: “I don’t believe that we will have an English-Dolphin translator, OK? Where you put English into your smartphone and then it makes dolphin sounds and the dolphin goes off and fetches you some sea urchin.<br />The goal is to first discover basic patterns of communication.”<br /><br />So what will talking to animals look—sound—like? It needn’t be a free-form conversation to be astonishing.<br />Speaking to animals in a controlled way, as with Fournet’s playback whups, is probably essential for scientists to try to understand them.<br />After all, you wouldn’t try to learn German by going to a party in Berlin and sitting mutely in a corner.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.wired.com/tag/birds/">Bird</a> enthusiasts already use apps to snatch melodies out of the air and identify which species is singing.<br />With an AI as your animal interpreter, imagine what more you could learn.<br />You prompt it to make the sound of two humpbacks meeting, and it produces a whup.<br />You prompt it to make the sound of a calf talking to its mother, and it produces a whisper.<br />You prompt it to make the sound of a lovelorn male, and it produces a song.<br /><br />No species of whale has ever been driven extinct by humans.<br />This is hardly a victory.<br />Numbers are only one measure of biodiversity.<br />Animal lives are rich with all that they are saying and doing—with culture.<br />While humpback populations have rebounded since their lowest point a half-century ago, what songs, what practices, did they lose in the meantime? Blue whales, hunted down to a mere 1 percent of their population, might have lost almost everything.<br /><br />Christian Rutz, a biologist at the University of St.<br />Andrews, believes that one of the essential tasks of conservation is to preserve nonhuman ways of being.<br />“You’re not asking, ‘Are you there or are you not there?’” he says.<br />“You are asking, ‘Are you there and happy, or unhappy?’”<br /><br />Rutz is studying how the communication of Hawaiian crows has changed since 2002, when they went extinct in the wild.<br />About 100 of these remarkable birds—one of few species known to use tools—are alive in protective captivity, and conservationists hope to eventually reintroduce them to the wild.<br />But these crows may not yet be prepared.<br />There is some evidence that the captive birds have forgotten useful vocabulary, including calls to defend their territory and warn of predators.<br />Rutz is working with Earth Species to build an algorithm to sift through historical recordings of the extinct wild crows, pull out all the crows’ calls, and label them.<br />If they find that calls were indeed lost, conservationists might generate those calls to teach them to the captive birds.<br /><br />Rutz is careful to say that generating calls will be a decision made thoughtfully, when the time requires it.<br />In <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg7314">a paper published in Science</a> in July, he praised the extraordinary usefulness of machine learning.<br />But he cautions that humans should think hard before intervening in animal lives.<br />Just as AI’s potential remains unknown, it may carry risks that extend beyond what we can imagine.<br />Rutz cites as an example the new songs composed each year by humpback whales that spread across the world like hit singles.<br />Should these whales pick up on an AI-generated phrase and incorporate that into their routine, humans would be altering a million-year-old culture.<br />“I think that is one of the systems that should be off-limits, at least for now,” he told me.<br />“Who has the right to have a chat with a humpback whale?”<br /><br />It’s not hard to imagine how AI that speaks to animals could be misused.<br />Twentieth-century whalers employed the new technology of their day, too, emitting sonar at a frequency that drove whales to the surface in panic.<br />But AI tools are only as good or bad as the things humans do with them.<br />Tom Mustill, a conservation documentarian and the author of How to Speak Whale, suggests giving animal-decoding research the same resources as the most championed of scientific endeavors, like the Large Hadron Collider, the Human Genome Project, and the James Webb Space Telescope.<br />“With so many technologies,” he told me, “it’s just left to the people who have developed it to do what they like until the rest of the world catches up.<br />This is too important to let that happen.”<br /><br />Billions of dollars are being funneled into AI companies, much of it in service of corporate profits: writing emails more quickly, creating stock photos more efficiently, delivering ads more effectively.<br />Meanwhile, the mysteries of the natural world remain.<br />One of the few things scientists know with certainty is how much they don’t know.<br />When I ask Friedlaender whether spending so much time chasing whales has taught him much about them, he tells me he sometimes gives himself a simple test: After a whale goes under the surface, he tries to predict where it will come up next.<br />“I close my eyes and say, ‘OK, I’ve put out 1,000 tags in my life, I’ve seen all this data.<br />The whale is going to be over here.’ And the whale’s always over there,” he says.<br />“I have no idea what these animals are doing.”<br /><br />If you could speak to a whale, what would you say? Would you ask White Gladis, the killer whale elevated to meme status this summer for sinking yachts off the Iberian coast, what motivated her rampage—fun, delusion, revenge? Would you tell Tahlequah, the mother orca grieving the death of her calf, that you, too, lost a child? Payne once said that if given the chance to speak to a whale, he’d like to hear its normal gossip: loves, feuds, infidelities.<br />Also: “Sorry would be a good word to say.”<br /><br />Then there is that thorny old philosophical problem.<br />The question of umwelt, and what it’s like to be a bat, or a whale, or you.<br />Even if we could speak to a whale, would we understand what it says? Or would its perception of the world, its entire ordering of consciousness, be so alien as to be unintelligible? If machines render human languages as shapes that overlap, perhaps English is a doughnut and Whalish is the hole.<br /><br />Maybe, before you can speak to a whale, you must know what it is like to have a whale’s body.<br />It is a body 50 million years older than our body.<br />A body shaped to the sea, to move effortlessly through crushing depths, to counter the cold with sheer mass.<br />As a whale, you choose when to breathe, or not.<br />Mostly you are holding your breath.<br />Because of this, you cannot smell or taste.<br />You do not have hands to reach out and touch things with.<br />Your eyes are functional, but sunlight penetrates water poorly.<br />Usually you can’t even make out your own tail through the fog.<br /><br />You would live in a cloud of hopeless obscurity were it not for your ears.<br />Sound travels farther and faster through water than through air, and your world is illuminated by it.<br />For you, every dark corner of the ocean rings with sound.<br />You hear the patter of rain on the surface, the swish of krill, the blasts of oil drills.<br />If you’re a sperm whale, you spend half your life in the pitch black of the deep sea, hunting squid by ear.<br />You use sound to speak, too, just as humans do.<br />But your voice, rather than dissipating instantly in the thin substance of air, sustains.<br />Some whales can shout louder than a jet engine, their calls carrying 10,000 miles across the ocean floor.<br /><br />But what is it like to be you, a whale? What thoughts do you think, what feelings do you feel?</div><div style="text-align: left;">These are much harder things for scientists to know.<br />A few clues come from observing how you talk to your own kind.<br />If you’re born into a pod of killer whales, close-knit and xenophobic, one of the first things your mother and your grandmother teach you is your clan name.<br />To belong must feel essential.<br />(Remember Keiko, the orca who starred in the film Free Willy: When he was released to his native waters late in life, he failed to rejoin the company of wild whales and instead returned to die among humans.) If you’re a female sperm whale, you click to your clanmates to coordinate who’s watching whose baby; meanwhile, the babies babble back.<br />You live on the go, constantly swimming to new waters, cultivating a disposition that is nervous and watchful.<br />If you’re a male humpback, you spend your time singing alone in icy polar waters, far from your nearest companion.<br />To infer loneliness, though, would be a human’s mistake.<br />For a whale whose voice reaches across oceans, perhaps distance does not mean solitude.<br />Perhaps, as you sing, you are always in conversation.<br /><br />Michelle Fournet wonders: How do we know whales would want to talk to us anyway?</div><div style="text-align: left;">What she loves most about humpbacks is their indifference.<br />“This animal is 40 feet long and weighs 75,000 pounds, and it doesn’t give a shit about you,” she told me.<br />“Every breath it takes is grander than my entire existence.” </div><div style="text-align: left;">Roger Payne observed something similar.<br />He considered whales the only animal capable of an otherwise impossible feat: making humans feel small.<br /><br />Early one morning in Monterey, California, I boarded a whale watching boat.<br />The water was slate gray with white peaks.<br />Flocks of small birds skittered across the surface.<br />Three humpbacks appeared, backs rounding neatly out of the water.<br />They flashed some tail, which was good for the group’s photographers.<br />The fluke’s craggy ridge-line can be used, like a fingerprint, to distinguish individual whales.<br /><br />Later, I uploaded a photo of one of the whales to Happywhale.<br />The site identifies whales using a facial recognition algorithm modified for flukes.<br />The humpback I submitted, one with a barnacle-encrusted tail, came back as CRC-19494.<br />Seventeen years ago, this whale had been spotted off the west coast of Mexico.<br />Since then, it had made its way up and down the Pacific between Baja and Monterey Bay.<br />For a moment, I was impressed that this site could so easily fish an animal out of the ocean and deliver me a name.<br />But then again, what did I know about this whale? Was it a mother, a father? Was this whale on Happywhale actually happy?</div><div style="text-align: left;">The AI had no answers.<br />I searched the whale’s profile and found a gallery of photos, from different angles, of a barnacled fluke.<br />For now, that was all I could know.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Links :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The New Yorker : <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/can-we-talk-to-whales">Can we talk to whales ? </a></li><li>Scientific American : <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-intelligence-could-finally-let-us-talk-with-animals/">AI could finally talk with animals </a></li><li>Earth : <a href="https://www.earth.com/news/scientists-have-20-minute-conversation-with-a-humpback-whale-named-twain/">Scientists have a 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale named Twain</a></li><li>ScienceNews : <a href="https://www.snexplores.org/article/artificial-intelligence-animal-language-technology">How artificial intelligence could help us talk to animals </a></li><li>Dazed : <a href="https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/60093/1/google-translate-for-whales-ai-speak-understand-animals">Google Translate for whales? How AI is being used to speak with animals </a></li><li>SETI : <a href="https://www.seti.org/press-release/whale-seti-groundbreaking-encounter-humpback-whales-reveals-potential-non-human-intelligence"><span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; outline: currentcolor; padding: 0px;">Whale-SETI: Groundbreaking Encounter with Humpback Whales Reveals Potential for Non-Human Intelligence Communication</span> </a></li><li>DW : <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/will-ai-help-us-talk-to-animals/a-67900188">Will AI help us talk to animals? </a></li><li>Newsweek : <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/first-whale-human-chat-practice-communicating-aliens-seti-1852893">Scientists Talk With Whales for First Time in Practice for Meeting Aliens </a></li><li>FT : <a href="https://ig.ft.com/ai-animals/">How AI is decoding the animal kingdom </a></li><li>The Guardian : <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/18/talking-to-whales-with-artificial-enterprise-it-may-soon-be-possible">Talking to whales: can AI bridge the chasm between our consciousness and other animals?</a></li><li>Inquirer : <a href="https://technology.inquirer.net/127771/ai-whale-translator-app">AI makes whale translator app possible </a> </li></ul></div>geogaragehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131510609947462613noreply@blogger.com0