The ship that was in two places at once, and what it doesn't prove

AIS SPOOFING. A Chinese research vessel identified as “JIA HAI KE 7” holds position approximately 38 nautical miles off Itbayat, Batanes in this photo taken during a Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) Maritime Domain Awareness flight on Monday (Sept. 28, 2026).

The PCG confirmed the vessel was falsifying its Automatic Identification System data to conceal its true movements near a corridor hosting critical undersea communication cables

GMA news 

From BusinessUpTurn by Vaibhav Agrawal

On Monday, the PCG said a Chinese-flagged seabed survey vessel, identified as JIA HAI KE 7, was loitering about 38 nautical miles northwest of Itbayat in the Batanes island group, the Philippines' northernmost province.
Itbayat lies roughly 160 km from Taiwan.
According to the PCG, the ship ignored repeated radio challenges asking it to identify its intentions and stop any unauthorised activity.
The agency also said the vessel appeared to be broadcasting false Automatic Identification System (AIS) positions.
Tracking data, it said, placed the ship off Xiamen and off Papua New Guinea on the same day, and then northwest of Itbayat, a sequence the PCG called physically impossible.

“Jiahai Ke 7” is classified by China Classification Society and is the first private scientific research vessel equipped with DP-2 system in China.

The vessel has a total length of 70.26m, a beam of 13.30m, a depth of 5.60m and a designed draft of 4.10m. 

 

It adopts a steel welded structure, is equipped with an advanced electric propulsion system, and has DP-2 dynamic positioning function. 
It is mainly used for offshore marine geological surveys and offshore marine scientific investigations.

It is a comprehensive survey vessel with marine geological survey and research functions.

 

Citing open-source information, the PCG described the ship as a 2,000-ton, 70-metre vessel built for marine geological surveys and precise station-keeping.
It said the ship's behaviour matched marine scientific research rather than transit, and that it would keep monitoring.
The Chinese Embassy in Manila had not responded when the report was published.

PCG aircraft confirms the presence of Jia Hai Ke 7 northwest of Itbayat, Batanes, on September 28.

(Photo courtesy of PCG)

 

The allegation bundles three claims that deserve separate treatment, because each rests on a different kind of evidence.
The first is the AIS spoofing claim, which is the most testable.
AIS is a broadcast system, and a vessel's positional history can be checked against simple physics.
If the same 70-metre ship appears in two different seas on the same day, at a distance no such ship could cover, then the data is false.
The cause could be deliberate manipulation, a transmitter fault, or an error in how a tracking service aggregated the data.
The PCG's reasoning that impossibility implies manipulation is sound as an inference, but the report does not say who recorded each position or from which data source.
It also does not say how the ship's true location was established, though the radio challenges suggest the PCG had some independent means of locating it.
Comparing raw tracking records would settle the question either way.

The second claim is that the ship was conducting unauthorised marine scientific research.
This rests on behaviour and design: the vessel held its position instead of proceeding on a steady course, and it is built for survey work.
The PCG's wording is careful, saying the behaviour was "consistent with" such research, which is weaker than confirming it.
Station-keeping fits a seabed survey, but it also fits weather avoidance, mechanical trouble, or simply waiting.
The report cites no sampling gear deployed and no data collected.

 

The third claim is the security concern about undersea communications infrastructure and the potential military use of collected data.
This is a risk assessment, not an observed fact.
It is credible in context, since the waters off Batanes and the Luzon Strait host key submarine cable corridors linking the Philippines with Northeast Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific.
Still, a concern about what a survey could enable is not evidence that any cable was surveyed or targeted, and the report does not say a cable lies near the vessel's position.

The legal framing also needs care.
The report contrasts the vessel's behaviour with innocent passage, but under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), innocent passage is a right exercised in another state's territorial sea, which extends up to 12 nautical miles.
Article 19 lists research and survey activities among those that make passage non-innocent.

 

PH2NLZ40 ENC 

 

At 38 nautical miles from Itbayat, the vessel was well outside 12 nautical miles of that island.
Depending on how Philippine baselines apply, the position could fall in the country's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) or in archipelagic waters, and the report does not say which.
That distinction matters.
In an EEZ, other states enjoy freedom of navigation, but UNCLOS Article 246 requires the coastal state's consent for marine scientific research.
So the PCG's case is stronger when framed as unauthorised research in the EEZ than as a breach of innocent passage.
This is an observation about framing, not a claim that the PCG is wrong.
China has historically taken a different view of some survey activity in EEZs, so part of this dispute is about legal interpretation and not only about facts.

The spoofing allegation also matters beyond this one ship.
Under the International Maritime Organization's SOLAS regime, many vessels must carry and operate AIS, though exemptions exist.
Broadcasting false positions undermines the system's purposes of collision avoidance and monitoring.
Spoofing by various vessels has been reported in several regions, which is why analysts routinely cross-check AIS against satellite radar and radio-frequency detection.
The phenomenon is well documented, but whether this particular vessel engaged in it remains, for now, the PCG's assertion.

Geography explains why the incident draws attention.
The Luzon Strait, including the Bashi Channel between Batanes and Taiwan, is a chokepoint for both shipping and data.
Subsea cables carry the large majority of international data traffic, and concentrated cable corridors are natural targets for surveying, since routes and seabed conditions change little over time.
The source report also ties the incident to a wider strategic debate by referencing a Reuters investigation into U.S. plans concerning China's navy and this narrow Pacific waterway.

The report also mentions that scholars at Jinan University have previously argued that Batanes belonged to China.
That is the view of individual academics, and nothing in the report shows it to be an official Chinese government position.
It is relevant only as context, since Batanes is unambiguously Philippine territory under current international recognition, and the report offers no evidence connecting those scholars to this vessel.

Several questions remain open.
It is not yet clear whether independent tracking data confirms the impossible track, or from which sources.
The vessel's registered owner or operator is unknown, and the report gives only its flag, so state affiliation cannot be assumed.
No one has said whether survey equipment was seen operating, which maritime zone the ship occupied under Philippine baselines, or whether any cable runs near its position.
China's response is also missing, so any official explanation, such as a permitted activity or a transit issue, is unrepresented.

Taken together, the strongest element of the PCG's account is the physically impossible AIS track, which is checkable and, if confirmed, hard to explain innocently.
The weakest link is the chain from loitering to confirmed survey activity to military use, which stacks inference on inference.
The episode is best read as a test of how a coastal state can document and publicise grey-zone activity when direct enforcement options are limited, and its credibility will depend on whether the evidence is released for others to verify.

Links :

• GlobalTimes : Hurling insults will never win the Philippines any advantages in the South China Sea 
• MarineInsight : Philippines Accuses Chinese Vessel Of Location Falsification Near Undersea Cables

 

Navy drones found with Chinese parts but MoD says no data breach

Image:A component in the K3 Scout drone was found to be sending a signal back to China.

Image: Kraken Technology Group

From Computing by Dev Kundaliya

Shows risks of long supply chains 

The Ministry of Defence says there is no evidence that sensitive data or military systems were compromised, after a Chinese-made component was discovered in new Royal Navy surveillance drones.

The issue was identified during a routine cybersecurity assessment of the K3 Scout uncrewed surface vessels, which are operated by the Special Boat Service from its headquarters in Poole.

The £12m fleet of 20 drones has been in operation since March.

The vessels can conduct surveillance remotely and are designed to carry out a range of missions, from maritime surveillance and force protection to logistics and precision strikes.

Cameras fitted to the drones were found to send a "squark" – sometimes described as a heartbeat communication – to an IP address in China.

Such signals can indicate that a device has been switched on and is operating correctly. Depending on the system, they can also contain information such as location data.

However, the MoD said an investigation had found no evidence that its data or systems had been accessed, compromised or transmitted outside authorised channels.
"Our assurance and testing processes are designed to identify and address potential vulnerabilities early," an MoD spokesperson said.

The drones were supplied by British defence company Kraken Technology Group, which obtained the cameras from a third-party supplier.
Kraken said it had carried out a full audit with the Royal Navy and was confident that no sensitive information had been shared.

Security concerns over Chinese technology

The discovery is nevertheless embarrassing for the MoD, particularly because Nato countries have increasingly sought to remove Chinese-made components from sensitive military systems due to concerns over espionage and cybersecurity.

The specific camera used had been approved under the US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which restricts the use of equipment from certain Chinese manufacturers.

NDAA compliance is widely used as a procurement standard across the uncrewed systems industry, including by the US Navy.

Lee Hannaford, director of defence, national security and intelligence at consultancy Larkspur International, said Chinese-made devices could create risks because some were designed to maintain connections with their manufacturers.

"Once established, these channels can be leveraged…for data collection, command-and-control, or pre-positioning for disruption," he said.

China-linked cyber threats have become an increasing concern in recent years.

In April the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued a warning about covert networks built using compromised routers and other internet-connected devices.

In January, a group linked to China was accused of targeting the mobile phones of aides to former UK prime ministers.

Supply chains remain a challenge

The episode points to a broader supply-chain challenge for Western defence industries, which are under pressure to reduce Chinese reliance while keeping technology and components affordable.

Even equipment designed for military use can contain components sourced through several layers of suppliers, making it difficult to establish exactly where every part originates.

Alessio Patalano, Professor of War and Strategy in East Asia at King's College London, said the episode demonstrated the security risks created by highly interconnected supply chains: "This incident does highlight one specific challenge: the downside of deeply interdependent supply chains in which China sits at the core of elements of our everyday life.”

Governments should seek to ensure that vulnerabilities could not easily be exploited by Beijing, Patalano added.

 

Links :

• How do Chinese-made components create security risks in military surveillance drones?
• Can the Ministry of Defence better protect data held by contractors?
• How does Chinese cyber-espionage impact Downing Street government decision-making?
• What are the implications of China centralizing its cloud computing infrastructure?
• Why do state-sponsored hackers frequently target third-party services? 

Seven years of coastal cleanups reveal the persistence of marine litter

 

From Safety4Sea

Seven years of monitoring and clean-up work along Greece’s coastline are highlighting the persistence of marine litter — and the difficulty of removing it once it enters the marine environment.

The findings point to a wider challenge for coastal and maritime pollution management: understanding where waste comes from, how it moves, where it accumulates and how it changes over time is as important as removing it from the shoreline.

The Typhoon Project, operated by the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation, has carried out year-round clean-up operations along the Greek coast since 2019.

During that period, more than 25.8 million items of waste, weighing over 1.1 million kg, have been collected from nearly 5,000 beaches, providing a substantial body of data on the distribution and persistence of coastal litter.

Consistency matters more than one-off action

Coastal pollution is a continuing process, not a one-time problem. Waste can accumulate again after a beach has been cleaned, particularly where currents, weather and human activity continue to bring new material ashore.

The project reports an average improvement of around 80% on beaches where repeated cleanups have taken place.

The wider lesson is that environmental interventions need continuity. Monitoring and remediation should be planned as ongoing activities rather than isolated campaigns.

For maritime stakeholders, the principle is familiar: a control is only effective if it is maintained over time.

The same applies to pollution prevention.

Pollution does not respect boundaries

What reaches a coastline is not necessarily generated there.

Marine currents and weather systems can transport waste over considerable distances, meaning that the source of pollution may be far removed from where it is eventually found.

This makes local cleanup important, but also highlights the limits of purely local solutions.

Marine litter needs to be treated as a connected system, involving ports, vessels, coastal communities, waste-management systems and activities on land.

The condition of one beach can therefore provide clues about pressures elsewhere in the marine environment.

Small plastics create a bigger problem

One of the more difficult challenges is what happens after larger plastic items enter the marine environment.

As plastics degrade, they can fragment into increasingly smaller pieces that are more difficult to identify, recover and remove.

This reinforces the importance of preventing plastic waste from entering the marine environment in the first place.

Once material has dispersed or fragmented, the cost and complexity of remediation increase significantly.

For operators and other maritime stakeholders, containment, proper waste handling and prevention at source remain more effective than relying on recovery after pollution has occurred.
Waste can reveal where the pressure is coming from

The composition of litter is not uniform from one coastline to another.

The material found on a beach can reflect surrounding human activity, consumption patterns, shipping and fishing activity, tourism and the influence of currents.

That makes litter collection more than a removal exercise.

Properly recording what is found can turn a cleanup operation into a source of environmental intelligence.

In practice, this means that what is collected should be measured and classified, not simply removed and discarded.

Consistent data can help identify recurring pollution sources and determine where preventative action is likely to have the greatest effect.

Data turns cleanups into evidence

One of the most significant outcomes of the seven-year programme is the accumulation of a large body of field data.

According to the project, its records now constitute the largest coastal-litter database in the Mediterranean.

That illustrates an important best practice for environmental programmes: every intervention should generate information that can improve the next one.

Long-term datasets can help researchers identify trends, compare locations and assess whether interventions are producing lasting improvements.

They can also provide evidence for policymakers when deciding where prevention measures or infrastructure investment are most needed.

Collaboration extends the value of the work

Marine pollution rarely falls neatly within the responsibility of a single organisation.

Researchers, universities, local authorities, communities and maritime stakeholders each hold part of the picture.

Sharing environmental data and combining operational experience with scientific expertise can therefore produce results that a standalone cleanup cannot.

Collaboration can also help turn field observations into research, monitoring tools and practical prevention measures.

For maritime organisations, this points to another useful principle: environmental data becomes more valuable when it can be shared, compared and applied beyond the organisation that collected it.
Cleanup should be the starting point, not the end goal

Removing waste from the marine environment remains essential, particularly in areas where pollution threatens ecosystems and coastal communities.

But recovery alone does not address why the waste entered the environment.

The longer-term objective is therefore prevention: understanding the sources of pollution, changing practices that allow waste to escape, improving waste management and building greater awareness of the consequences of marine litter.

The collapse of the AMOC would be catastrophic. How will we know when it’s coming?

Doug Chayka

 

From New Scientist by Alec Luhn

Europe faces incredibly harsh winters and unrelenting droughts if the vital AMOC ocean current fails – but when disaster will strike and how bad it will be remains uncertain.
Now there is an ambitious plan to give us a warning

 

On a sunny evening in July, a research ship called the Sir David Attenborough was working near the Sorgenfri glacier in south-eastern Greenland when a kilometre-long wall of craggy, bulging ice collapsed into the fjord.
The scientists on deck watched in stunned silence as an estimated 18 million tonnes of ice slowly flipped over, sending up vast plumes of spray.
Iceberg calving on this scale was once relatively rare – but it has become commonplace in recent years as Earth warms.
And that acceleration could have catastrophic impacts that extend far beyond Greenland.
It is weakening a system of ocean currents in the North Atlantic that is vital to societies in Europe and around the world.
If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) were to shut down, the continent would plunge into “ice age” winters with year-round long droughts, and agriculture would become close to impossible.
Yet whether the AMOC really will fail, when that might happen and how quickly – these points all remain highly uncertain.
And because of that, the threat remains a distant one in policy-makers’ minds.
That is why an £81 million plan is now afoot to build an early warning system that could alert humanity if AMOC is nearing a dangerous tipping point.

Data now being collected by the Attenborough research ship is core to that plan.
“We might be committed to centuries of change without knowing it,” said ocean scientist Paul Holland at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) as he prepared to set sail from the port of Harwich, UK, some weeks earlier.
“We might be passing these tipping points without realising.”
So how worried should we be about the AMOC collapsing, what will it take to build an early warning system, and will the alarm bells persuade governments to pull back from the point of no return – or at least to prepare for the consequences?
The AMOC is a crucial section of an undulating but well-established conveyor belt of ocean currents that flow around the globe.
Traversing the entire belt takes a typical “parcel” (about 1 cubic metre) of water about 1000 years.

 

The Sir David Attenborough research ship monitors melting glaciers in Greenland’s fjords
Richard Dale/British Antarctic Survey

 

Like the rest of this conveyor belt, the AMOC, which circulates between North America and Europe, is driven by temperature and salinity.
Around the Gulf of Mexico, the harsh sun heats the ocean and drives evaporation.
The resulting warm, salty water flows towards the seas between Greenland and the UK in a part of the AMOC called the Gulf Stream.
As the circulation pushes north, the atmosphere cools the salty water, so that it becomes denser and cascades towards the ocean floor like a subsurface waterfall.
From there, water flows southward along the seafloor back towards the Americas.
To replace the water sinking in the North Atlantic, more warm water must then flow from the Gulf of Mexico, powering the circulation.
Without the AMOC, models predict that sea ice would cover the North Sea down to Norfolk in the UK and Friesland in the Netherlands.
London would experience an average winter temperature of 2°C (36°F), with cold snaps of -20°C (-4°F).
Similar cold would descend on Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin and Paris.
Oslo would see deep freezes of -48°C (-54°F) or below at least every 10 years.
“The winter is like being in the ice age, and in Scotland, it’s in the ice age for half the year,” says Earth system scientist Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, UK.

 

 

Yet this vital circulation is also the section of the global conveyor belt most likely to slow down, or shut down completely, in the coming decades or centuries due to climate change.
This possibility was first suggested in a 1987 paper by geochemist Wallace Broecker at Columbia University in New York.
Fluctuations in Earth’s climate aren’t always gradual, he wrote, and human-made “global warming”– a term he popularised – could disrupt the feedbacks fuelling the AMOC.
At the time, evidence was mounting that AMOC had shut down in the past because of natural changes in the planet’s temperature.
About 12,900 years ago, as the last glacial period was ending, the northern hemisphere suddenly slipped back into near-glacial conditions for 1300 years – a period called the Younger Dryas, after an Arctic flower that spread through Europe then.
Shortly after Broecker’s paper was published, geochemists studying the composition of shells trapped in marine sediments found that the AMOC was sending less surface water to the seafloor during the Younger Dryas.

Broecker and others argued that the melting of an ice sheet over North America had injected fresh water into the North Atlantic, diluting the salty water arriving via the Gulf Stream and slowing its cascade towards the seafloor.
“We play Russian roulette with the climate,” he wrote at the time.
Today, a similar process may be happening again, only with fresh water from Greenland.
“There are 200 fjords around Greenland… pumping out icebergs and gushing out meltwater five times faster than they were 30 years ago,” says marine geophysicist Kelly Hogan, who is part of the BAS mission.

 

White dryad flowers, also known as mountain avens, adapted to thrive in freezing environments
Arterra/Sven-Erik Arndt/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Since 2004, sensors measuring water flow have been anchored across the Atlantic as part of the Rapid Climate Change programme.
Although it has found early indications that AMOC is weakening, it will take several further decades of data collection to confirm this.
Alongside this monitoring, an analysis of how historical Atlantic surface temperatures have shifted concluded that AMOC has slowed 15 per cent since 1950.
And the appearance of a “cold blob” in the North Atlantic – the only part of Earth’s surface that has been cooling over the past 150 years – suggests the AMOC is delivering less warm water to the area than before.
These aren’t good omens.
Yet climate models still vary hugely in terms of how soon they predict the AMOC could reach a tipping point, and how soon after that it would shut down.
In June, for instance, a study found a 10 to 20 per cent chance the AMOC has already crossed the point of no return, in which case it could collapse as soon as 2060.
But other research this year found the AMOC would weaken only gradually or, if humanity emits carbon at a lesser rate, not at all.

Building an early warning system

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), a UK government-backed science agency, is building an early warning system to improve these forecasts and update them in almost real time – rather than waiting years, or decades, for studies to come to fruition.
To do this, researchers first need to figure out the amount of meltwater from Greenland that is entering the AMOC, what form it is in and how that is altering its flow.
On the Attenborough research ship before the expedition, Holland pulled up a map of results from the UK government’s flagship climate model on a screen.
Red pixels south of Greenland indicated where dense, salty water is sinking in the AMOC today.
Then Holland switched to a forecast for intense global warming in 2090.
The red sinking pixels had almost completely disappeared.
“This is a really terrifying prospect.
So the question is, is this realistic?” he said.
Roughly half of the fresh water from Greenland comes from the surface of the ice sheet, which is being melted by warming air temperatures.
The other half comes from the fjords, where warming ocean waters melt the glaciers from below, and where icebergs calve off, like the enormous ice face that toppled in front of the ship.
The second half is difficult to model.
For instance, many fjord glaciers rest on relatively shallow sills of bedrock.
If they recede into deeper regions of the fjord, the calving can speed up.
“It’s an unstable, self-sustaining process,” says oceanographer Pierre Dutrieux at BAS.
“It’s going to retreat like crazy until it finds another sill.”

 

The DriX surface vessel collects data at the Sorgenfri glacier in Greenland
Richard Dale/British Antarctic Survey

As a result, the UK’s top climate model may be either under- or overestimating the fresh water coming from Greenland.
And because icebergs can float thousands of kilometres before they melt, it may be incorrectly predicting where and when that fresh water hits the AMOC.
“We need to measure the entire chain of processes,” said Holland.
To do that, researchers on the ARIA-funded Greenland Ice to Atlantic (or GIANT) mission have a suite of gadgets at their disposal.
“GIANT is the James Bond of science projects,” joked Athena Dinar, head of communications at BAS.
Boaty McBoatface, an autonomous underwater vehicle shaped like a fat yellow torpedo, will scan the position of icebergs and bergy bits in the fjords; DriX, a red surface robot with a sonar pod underneath it, will map the geometry of ice sheet faces; and small bundles of sensors will, once delivered by a robot, automatically drill themselves into glacier fronts, all to measure how much of the retreat is due to calving versus ice melt.
This information will then be fed into ice-sheet models, which will be included in climate models to improve AMOC tipping-point forecasts.
The next phase of the ARIA project will focus on finding a way to give routine updates about these risks.
One idea is to build an AI model that can reproduce these forecasts without weeks or months of supercomputing time.
The AI would automatically analyse satellite imagery of ice fronts to spot accelerations in glacier loss that could increase the freshwater input to the AMOC.
As a side point, regular warnings like these would be valuable to local Inuit who fish and hunt seals and whales in Greenland’s coastal fjords.
They would know that an outpouring of meltwater or icebergs was coming that might affect these crucial hunting grounds.

An early warning system would also need to analyse changes in AMOC ocean circulation.
Climate scientist Jon Robson at the University of Reading, UK, is on one of several ARIA-funded teams that are focusing on a crucial part of the AMOC called the subpolar gyre, a vast swirl of ocean currents south of Greenland where warm, salty water is cooled by the atmosphere and sinks.

The ice sheet’s melt is expected to slow down the rotation and sinking of that water.
Then, a sudden shock could push the weakened AMOC past its tipping point.
Because we have never directly observed AMOC collapse – or any climate tipping point – we need to figure out what to look for, says Robson.
He and his colleagues are trying to find potential shocks, such as a sudden influx of fresh water from disintegrating Arctic sea ice.
“It may be that there is a very definite threshold in the system,” he says.
“But it could be that it’s much more blurry.”

Preparing for AMOC collapse

Although it is challenging to pin down exactly when the AMOC could shut down, its impacts are more certain.
Besides lowering winter temperatures across Europe, AMOC collapse would amplify the North Atlantic storm track, bringing more frequent winter storms and causing wild swings between these cold snaps and warm spells.
European summers would be almost as hot as today, thanks largely to continued global warming.
But the weather would be drier year-round, especially in southern Europe.
Droughts like the one that has helped fuel record wildfires in France and Spain this summer would become more frequent and intense.
The cold and especially the dryness would wipe out agriculture in some places.
Only 7 per cent of the UK would be arable, down from 32 per cent today.
AMOC collapse would also diminish monsoon rainfall by almost 30 per cent in West Africa and 20 per cent in India.
This could undermine food supplies not only in these areas, where most agriculture relies on the annual rains, but also around the world, since India is the biggest producer of rice and the Ivory Coast of cocoa.
“You’re getting a whole-system shock,” says René van Westen at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
“Our global society is built around a strong AMOC.”

The ARIA team is aiming to have a prototype early warning system ready by 2030.
They hope that by giving governments and key industries an evolving forecast of how imminent a tipping point is, it could spur them to invest in adapting to the potential consequences, as well as in trying to avoid collapse altogether.
Discussions about how this would work in practice are only just beginning.
Each year, the Met Office, the UK’s weather service, issues a forecast of global temperature and weather trends over the next decade, such as the per cent chance that global warming will exceed 1.5°C.
That could be expanded to include the latest probability of AMOC collapse, says Robson.
In addition, an early warning system could issue monthly reports of the risks.
These could range from a level one, representing no elevated threat, to level three, indicating imminent subpolar gyre collapse, to level five, showing the AMOC tipping point has been crossed, says Lenton.
In July, ARIA met with representatives from the UK and other European governments, as well as from industries like water, insurance and finance, to ask what information they would find useful.
One idea is that the system could give a running menu of the options available for adapting to AMOC collapse, such as building reservoirs or desalination plants, and insulating houses.
“[We could put] it in terms of, well, in 10 years’ time, those opportunities might be more limited or more expensive,” says Gemma Bale, programme director at ARIA.

Researchers’ biggest fear isn’t that the ARIA programme will fail to build an early warning system, but that governments and industry will fail to heed the warning.
They have been alerting politicians to the dire consequences of climate change, including AMOC collapse, for almost 40 years.
Other attempts to warn of risk thresholds, such as the goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, have failed.
Even today, in the UK’s relatively mild and stable climate, 13 per cent of households have trouble keeping their homes warm, while the government doesn’t keep grain reserves and no new water reservoirs have been built since 1992.
Van Westen sees little point in building an early warning system.
“The risk of reaching the tipping point… is too high to ignore,” he says.
“That should be already enough motivation.”
But Hogan argues that the ARIA programme is our best hope of avoiding these catastrophic outcomes before it’s too late.
She has a 16-year-old daughter who could live to see the societal upheaval caused by a slowing AMOC.
“I look at her future and think, what’s it going to be like for them?”

 

Links :

• New Scientist : Oceans are darkening all over the planet – what’s going on?  / The Climate Disaster That May Have Already Begun  / The secret weapon that could finally force climate action / An ambitious form of climate modelling aims to pin the blame for disasters – from floods to heatwaves – on specific companies.
  Is this the tool we need to effectively prosecute the world’s biggest carbon emitters?

Whitbread: How did the Mor Bihan sailboat take on the giants of the round-the-world race?

 

They built their sailboat themselves and set out to compete in the Whitbread, the toughest round-the-world race.

The true story of the Mor Bihan, mythic racing sailboat of 14,81 m designed par the team of architects Joubert-Nivelt when daring was worth more than money.

 

 

On August 29, 1981, the Glandos (the team’s nickname) would be on the starting line in Portsmouth. Joining them were three professional sailors—Philippe Poupon, Halvard Mabire, and Jean-François le Menec—who came to lend their experience.

When they rounded Cape Horn and won the third leg, Eugène Riguidel was at the helm and claimed one of his greatest victories alongside them.

Finishing seventh in this massive 50,000-kilometer race, the Mor Bihan would never have been able to make it to the starting line without the help of the entire population of the department, who rallied to support this challenge.