Syndicated cartoonist Jim Toomey is best known for his daily comic strip “Sherman’s Lagoon,” which explores themes ranging from pop culture to ocean conservation through the eyes of a cast of sea creatures living in an imaginary lagoon.
In June of 2014, Jim was invited by the Duke University Marine Lab to be a “cartoonist-in-residence” aboard the famed deep submersible vehicle Alvin.
“Two Miles Deep” is an account of his dive to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
In this 27-minute film, we discover, from the perspective of a cartoonist, through video and animation, that the deep ocean is a world full of beauty and complexity.
On January 29 2016, it is exactly 400 years ago that a Dutch merchant ship, the Eendracht, sailed by Cape Horn, the southern-most point of South America.
When Fernando Magallanes discovered and sailed the Strait of Magellan
in 1520 it was still assumed that Tierra del Fuego, the southern bank
of the Strait, was part of Terra Australis, the unknown continent. Maps
of the era show no passage south of the Strait of Magellan.
Some 80 years later, in 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) and granted
it a monopoly to trade with the “Spice Islands” east of Cape of Good
Hope and west of the Strait of Magellan.
One of the founders and the first president of the VOC was Isaac Le Maire.
He soon fell out with the board and was expelled in 1605 with the
prohibition never to trade in VOC territory.
For a number of years he
complied, but then the temptation became too great and he got permission
to establish an “Australische Compagnie” or “South Company” and to
launch an expedition to investigate the possibility of trade with the
unknown Southern Continent.
His intention, from the start, was to find a new way to the East Indies, bypassing the exclusive routes of the VOC.
He purchased two vessels, the Eendracht (about 40m (130 feet) long with a crew of 65) and the Hoorn (about 30m (98 feet) long with a crew of 22) and had them fitted out by Captain Willem Schouten.
Jacob Le Maire
Le Maire appointed his son Jacob as leader of the expedition.
They
sailed from the city of Hoorn, which was an important investor in the
adventure, in June 1615. After calling at Cape Verde and Sierra Leone in
Africa to replenish stores, water in particular, they arrived at what
is today Puerto Deseado in the South of Argentina early December.
It is a protected inlet with a tidal range of over five meters, ideal
to ground the vessels and clean their hulls of molluscs and other
growth.
The cleaning was done by scratching the hulls with burning grass
and scrubs.
During this work the Hoorn caught fire, and when
the flames reached the gunpowder room, the vessel exploded and was
irretrievably lost.
All of the crew survived and they then spent some
weeks recovering was could be saved to put it on board Eendracht.
Beagle canal (SHN nautical charts)
On January 13, 1616, they set sail on the next leg of the trip.
They
continued south past the latitude of the Strait of Magellan.
Here the
coast of Tierra del Fuego forced them to sail eastbound in bad and cold
weather.
Captain Schouten was tempted to abandon the search and set sail
for Cape of Good Hope, unconvinced of the existence of a passage to the
east and less secure without the assistance of his support vessel
Hoorn.
Jacob Le Maire insisted, and they continued.
On January 24, they
found an opening and against current, waves and wind they managed to
sail through.
Isla de los Estados with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO chart)
To the west was Tierra del Fuego, to the east there was
land which they called Staten Land, not knowing it was an island.
Today
it is called Staten Island, just like the island at the entrance of the
Hudson River in New York, both named in honor of the General Staten of
Holland, the Dutch government at the time.
1633 map of Strait of Magellan, showing Strait Le Maire at the right, marked Fretum le Maire (Latin) and Straet Le Maire (Dutch)
They called the passage “Strait Lemaire.”
Continuing south, they
sailed by various islands, some of which still today carry the names
they were given then.
On the afternoon of January 29, 1616, they came by
a cape which they realized was the southernmost of all and called it
Kaap Hoorn in honor of the city they had sailed from.
They crossed the Pacific Ocean and arrived in Djakarta on the island of Java at the end of October 1616.
Instead of congratulating them with their discovery, the
VOC-appointed governor did not believe their story and confiscated their
ship and the goods on board.
Le Maire, Schouten and some of the crew
were shipped to Holland as criminals for having infringed the monopoly
of the VOC.
Jacob Le Maire died on board at the end of December.
The others
arrived in Holland by July 1617. Isaac Le Maire was of course most
distressed for having lost his son and his ships.
He claimed against the
VOC for the confiscated vessel.
He won the case and recovered 65,000
florins.
But in the meantime the Dutch set up a new company, the West India
Company, which they granted the monopoly of trading with the Americas,
including the route via Cape Horn.
As a result Le Maire could not take
advantage of his son’s discovery.
He died a bitter man in 1624, but his name lives on, 400 years later.
What if everything we know about the amount of fish in the ocean isn't true? What if the quantity of fish we catch is much higher than we realize? What if we're heading for a global fishing catastrophe that could trigger a food crisis for millions? In a multi-year investigation, an international team of scientists led by Dr. Daniel Pauly has set out to challenge dangerous assumptions about the amount of fish we remove from the oceans. Dr. Pauly contends that as governments and regulators report on commercial fishing, and claim the oceans can handle the huge catches - they're wrong. The official data fails to account for entire categories of fishing, including small-scale, recreational, and illegal fishing (collectively known in the industry as IUU fishing). If we don't know how many fish we catch? How can we know that there are enough left? The fate of one of humanity's most important food sources depends on convincing governments and industry to finally take stock of the missing fish. "The Missing Fish" film will follow the journey of Dr. Daniel Pauly and his team as they gather information to calculate the world’s total fish catch. The film is scheduled for release later this year.
The state of the world’s fish stocks
may be in worse shape than official reports indicate, according to new
data — a possibility with worrying consequences for both international
food security and marine ecosystems. A study
published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that
the national data many countries have submitted to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) has not always accurately reflected the amount of fish actually
caught over the past six decades. And the paper indicates that global
fishing practices may have been even less sustainable over the past few
decades than scientists previously thought.
The
FAO’s official data report that global marine fisheries catches peaked
in 1996 at 86 million metric tons and have since slightly declined. But a
collaborative effort from more than 50 institutions around the world
has produced data that tell a different story altogether. The new data
suggest that global catches actually peaked at 130 metric tons in 1996
and have declined sharply — on average, by about 1.2 million metric tons
every year — ever since.
In this April 27, 2011 photo, Atlantic bluefin
tuna are corralled by fishing nets during the opening of the season for
tuna fishing off the coast of Barbate, Cadiz province, southern Spain.
(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
The effort was led by researchers Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller
of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project. The two
were interested investigating the extent to which data submitted to the
FAO was misrepresented or underreported. Scientists
had previously noticed, for instance, that when nations recorded “no
data” for a given region or fishing sector, that value would be
translated into a zero in FAO records — not always an accurate
reflection of the actual catches that were made. Additionally,
recreational fishing, discarded bycatch (that is, fish that are caught
and then thrown away for various reasons) and illegal fishing have often
gone unreported by various nations, said Pauly during a Monday
teleconference. “The result of this is that the catch is
underestimated,” he said.
So
the researchers teamed up with partners all over the world to help them
examine the official FAO data, identify areas where data might be
missing or misrepresented and consult both existing literature and local
experts and agencies to compile more accurate data. This is a method
known as “catch reconstruction,” and the researchers used it to examine
all catches between 1950 and 2010. Ultimately,
they estimated that global catches during this time period were 50
percent higher than the FAO reported, peaking in the mid-1990s at 130
million metric tons, rather than the officially reported 86 million. As
of 2010, the reconstructed data suggest that global catches amount to
nearly 109 million metric tons, while the official data only report 77
million metric tons.
Overfishing causing global catches to fall 3X faster than estimated
This
news can be interpreted as both good and bad news. On the one hand, “it
means that fisheries are more important than we think,” Pauly said — in
other words, when catches were at their highest, they were producing
more food for the world than scientists previously thought. This is a
plus for global food security in the authors’ eyes. Overfishing and the
subsequent decline of the world’s fish stocks can be a threat to the
food security of cultures that rely heavily on fish — but Pauly suggests
that if we implement better management techniques in the future that
allow these stocks to replenish themselves, we may be able to feed more
people than we thought, as the new data suggest.
On
the other hand, the higher catch numbers also suggest that fishing has
been even more unsustainable in the past than scientists thought. And
the world is now suffering the consequences, as the authors point out.
Their
second major finding was that fish catches have been sharply declining
from the 1990s up through 2010 — much more severely than the FAO has
reported. At first, the authors thought that these declines might be due
to increased restrictions by certain countries on fishing quotas in
recent years. But when the researchers removed those countries from
their calculations, they found that the catch data was still caught up
in a downward trend. “Our
results indicate that the declining is very strong and the declining is
not due to countries fishing less,” Pauly said during the
teleconference. “It is due to the countries fishing too much and having
exhausted one fish after the other.” The data indicate that the largest
of these declines come from the industrial fishing sector. To
be clear, the research is not meant to assess the state of the world’s
fisheries, Pauly added — but, nonetheless, the study does raise some
important questions about fisheries management moving forward.
Russia saw the giant ships drains tons of fish in the coast of Morocco Dakhla
The
authors suggest that, in the future, the FAO might consider requiring
nations to submit catch statistics separately for both large-scale and
small-scale fisheries in order to ensure that small-scale fisheries
don’t fly under the radar. They also point out the importance of stock
rebuilding — that is, enacting fishing quotas to cut down on overfishing
and allow fish stocks to replenish themselves. Such
action may become even more important in the future, as additional
factors — most notably, the effects of climate change — place even more
pressure on global fish stocks, Pauly noted. “In the future there will
be another mechanism that will begin to play a role [in catch declines] —
that is global warming — and it will be very difficult to separate from
the effects of fishing,” he said.
So
while a few countries have already implemented fishing caps, he
predicted that the world will continue to see a sharp and continual
decline in catch until better practices are enacted worldwide. And this
will be important to consider, not only for the health of the oceans,
but for the health of the millions of people worldwide who depend on
fish for their food and their livelihoods. With
good management, though, there’s room for optimism, Pauly suggested. “The fact that we catch far more than we thought is, if you like, a
positive thing,” he said during the teleconference. “If we rebuild
stocks, we can rebuild to more than we thought before. Basically, the
oceans are more productive than we thought before.”
-> FAO’s response to the Nature Communications article “Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining"
Cold, bleak and deadly: Antarctica is little changed since the days of Scott and Shackleton
Photo: Global Book Publishing Photo Library
From The Telegraph by Paul Rose (Base Commander of Rothera Research Station, Antarctica, for the British Antarctic Survey for 10 years)
In Antarctica, making the slightest
mistake can put your life at risk.
It is an unforgiving place.
Colder
than cold, bleak, a vast wasteland of iciness, its deadliness stretches
for thousands of miles.
That’s why Henry Worsley’s attempt to follow in Shackleton’s footsteps and travel across the Antarctic alone,
pulling his own supplies, was so impressive.
He was a formidable
explorer: well-organised, determined and incredibly powerful – not one
of those people who just goes off with a dream and not much of a plan.
His was a good expedition, and I followed him all the way.
It looked as
if he was cruising it and sometimes he was even going like the clappers.
Antarctica from space (NASA)
But you’ve got to remember those conditions.
Even walking outside at
minus 40 degrees when you’re well-rested is a very, very cold,
potentially deadly experience.
For Henry to face those conditions alone
every day would have been incredibly tough.
Pulling a sledge full of supplies is brutal Photo: PA The
former Army officer turned explorer died just 30 miles short of his
attempt to become the first person to cross the Antarctic alone
The final expedition:
A solo 943 mile
coast-to-coast trek across the Antarctic, pulling a sledge with
everything he needed. He collapsed 71 days into the anticipated 80 day journey, and later died of organ failure
Bear in mind that he had to carry everything he needed.
He couldn’t
take anything that would add unnecessary weight – such as a spare pair
of gloves.
And everything you do in those bitter conditions takes
effort.
Say you’re thirsty and want to get some water out of your bag.
You’ve got to get the bag off the sledge and unzip it.
But you’re
wearing thick mittens for travelling – warmer than gloves, but offering
less dexterity – and you’ve got to take the outer mitten off to reach
the zip.
Where do you put that outer mitten to make sure it doesn’t blow
away?
Even the simplest task can be fraught with danger, and the only
way to stay alive is with a severe amount of discipline.
His lifelong hero was Ernest Shackleton and it was his journey across the Antarctic that Henry Worlsley was trying to recreate - with the huge, added challenge that Worsley was entirely alone.
Like Shackleton, his bravery and his willingness to endure endless, uncharted terrain led him into a desperate race for survival that ended in his death
The British explorer died of organ failure - tragically - when the end of the mission was almost in sight - just 30 miles remained of his 1,000 mile journey.
It’s bloody hard at the end of a long day spent pulling that sledge.
All you want to do is get the tent up, get in and have a warm drink.
But the tent doesn’t go up by magic.
First you’ve got to secure the
sledge, skis and poles so they don’t blow away.
You also have to
bear in mind that the moment you stop you are instantly cold, so you
have to put on a thicker, insulating down layer.
Then you find the tent
and secure it – but it’s still just a shelter and minus 40 inside.
So
you put the sleeping bag in, find the stove and melt some snow.
From
stopping to getting a cup of instant soup takes an hour and a half.
Mornings are the worst, as you lie there, very hungry, tired and cold
and have to force yourself to get up and start the routine over again:
melt snow, make food, load sledge.
You love the sledge – because all
that equipment is keeping you alive – but you are also beginning to hate
the thing, the feeling of it rubbing on your hips as you struggle to
put one foot in front of the other.
For all its harshness, though, Antarctica has something we love.Frank Wild, Shackleton’s right-hand man said that it calls you back with
little white voices, and he was spot on.
Once you’ve worked there, it’s
hard to resist its siren call.
Some people may say that Henry’s
journey was foolhardy.
But it wasn’t.
For me it is only natural that we
should want to explore new ground, no matter the dangers.
It is good
for us to discover the “ground truth” of the planet for ourselves.
Henry’s was a tremendous journey and he very nearly made it.
For that, I salute him.
Did a secret search for Marco Polo’s islands of gold lead Portuguese
explorers to be the first Europeans to discover Australia?
According to some theories, the Dieppe maps, a series of artful 16th century maps say yes.
Operating in the mid-1500s, the Dieppe mapmakers created elaborate,
hand-made world maps for wealthy patrons and royals.
The French artists
who created the maps were just that, leaving the actual exploration to
others and simply translating more utilitarian nautical charts into
things of beauty.
The surviving maps are beautifully rendered, although
their exact cartographic sources seem to have been lost to time.
This
becomes most problematic in the case of "Java la Grande", a giant
landmass unique to the maps that was drawn between Antarctica and what
we would today consider to be Indonesia.
According to some modern
researchers, this mystery island is actually the first record of
Europeans seeing Australia.
The map has been inverted to represent the modern view, but Java la Grande can be found where Australia would be.
The maps, with their fancy compass roses and detailed illustrations,
were intended to be pieces of art, rather than navigational aids, but
their information had to come from somewhere.
The names and script on
the charts are written out in a mix of French and Portuguese, giving
rise to the theory, which was popularized in Kenneth McIntyre's 1977
book, The Secret Discovery of Australia, that
the mapmakers of Dieppe were getting their view of the world, at least
in part, from Portuguese expeditions.
In particular, one of the maps
that came out of Dieppe, (and is survived by a faithful recreation)
depicts the east coast of the fabled Java la Grande with place names
almost exclusively in Portuguese.
Given the vagaries of the Dieppe map
sources, this has led to the theory that it was the Portuguese who were
the first Europeans to spy the Australian coast.
In addition to the general location of Java la Grande on the maps,
there are certain features that adherents to the theory claim are
unmistakably bits of Australia, such as an inlet that looks like Botany
Bay and the Abrolhos island chain.
Java la Grande was thought to be so big the map was awkwardly extended.
As to what expedition could have seen the coast, it is suggested by
McIntyre that it was a search for Marco Polo’s fabled Isles of Gold that
led to the discovery.
Wealthy Portuguese explorer Cristóvão de Mendonça
is recorded as having been tasked by King Manuel with sailing out in
search of Polo’s treasure islands, but actual record of this voyage has
been lost, if there ever was one.
Manuel was notoriously secretive about
the findings of his exploration teams.
According to popular history,
Australia was first visited by Europeans when Dutch explorer Willem
Janszoon “discovered” the continent in the early 17th century, and later
fully explored by Captain Cook.
On the left, first Portuguese chart designed in Dieppe by Jean Rotz in 1542.
On the right, Australia seen by Dutch in 1628...
While no direct evidence of Portuguese
discovery exists, there have been other findings that seem to support
the theory of their early Australian discovery.
Various ruins, cannons,
and other archeological artifacts have been found on the Australian
continent that believers say point to Portuguese discovery, but the
Dieppe maps remains the prime source of speculation.
A riverine patrol boat from Costal Riverine Squadron 2 escorts the
guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill (CG 52) while in the Arabia Gulf
in this November 15, 2014 handout photo, provided by the U.S. Navy,
January 12, 2016.
Ten sailors aboard two U.S. Navy riverine patrol boats
were seized by Iran in the Gulf on Tuesday, and Tehran told the United
State the crew members would be promptly returned, according to U.S.
Officials.
REUTERS/Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class LaTunya
Howard/U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters
From CSMonitor by Dana A. Goward In 2011, Iran spoofed – or faked – Global Positioning System signals to send a CIA drone off course. Did it do the same to trick Navy vessels into Iranian waters?
As images of captured American sailors competed with those of the President Obama during the State of the Union address Tuesday, viewers across the world asked: "How could this happen?"
The world’s most powerful nation with the most advanced navy had been embarrassed on the same day as the president's speech.
After a series of other
implausible explanations, the Department of Defense settled on the
explanation that the crews on both boats "misnavigated."
That in the
middle of their trip between Kuwait and Bahrain the two boats
accidentally went more than 50 miles out of their way to venture into
Iranian waters.
But were they really that poorly trained and
inattentive?
Is the navigation equipment in the world’s best navy that
poor?
And was it just a coincidence it all happened on the day of the
president’s address?
Or was something much more deliberate – and
potentially troubling – to blame?
Iran has demonstrated in the past that it has the capability – and the
will – to exploit a critical and broad vulnerability in our key
navigation system – the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
In 2011, Iran
manipulated GPS systems on a CIA surveillance drone to send it off course and capture it.
Now, at a time when elements in Iran are feeling their power and
prestige diminish after Tehran agreed to the US-led pact to limit the
country's nuclear program, the Islamic Republic could once again flex
its muscles and show it has the wherewithal to toy with nearby Navy
crews.
And, as the US government is well aware, the GPS network that both drivers and sailors rely on remains vulnerable to attacks.
Powered
by solar panels and some 12,000 miles above the earth, GPS satellites
broadcast very weak signals that are easy to block or jam.
Over the past
few years, illegal jamming by criminals and terrorists trying to hide
their whereabouts has become an increasing threat to those signals.
But perhaps more worrisome, GPS signals and receivers can also be spoofed, or faked.
This involves the spoofer sending a bogus signal that
can fool GPS receivers, allowing the attacker to trick the device into
thinking it's in another location.
Iran claims to have used that
technique in 2011 to redirect a CIA surveillance drone from Afghanistan.
Their claim was credible at the time as they clearly had possession of
the undamaged drone.
Demonstration of a Remote Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Hijacking via GPS Spoofing
Military Global Positioning System (GPS) signals have long been encrypted to prevent counterfeiting and unauthorized use.
Civil GPS signals, on the other hand, were designed as an open standard, freely-accessible to all. These virtues have made civil GPS enormously popular, but the transparency and predictability of its signals give rise to a dangerous weakness: they can be easily counterfeited, or spoofed. Like Monopoly money, civil GPS signals have a detailed structure but no built-in protection against counterfeiting.
Civil GPS is the most popular unauthenticated protocol in the world. The vulnerability of civil GPS to spoofing has serious implications for civil unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.
This was demonstrated in June, 2012 by a dramatic remote hijacking of a UAV at White Sands Missile Range.
The demonstration was conducted by the University of Texas Radionavigation Laboratory at the invitation of the Department of Homeland Security.
It became much more credible several months
later when Prof. Todd Humphreys and his students at the University of
Texas showed how it was done.
In a live demonstration in 2013, they took
over the navigation system of a large yacht in the Mediterranean.
Now,
hackers are even selling spoofing kits.
For the 2015 DEF CON hacking
conference in Las Vegas, a Chinese researcher sold equipment and
published step-by-step instructions for building a spoofing device for
about $300.
The loss of the CIA drone in 2011 should have been a
wake-up call for the US military that GPS needs more safeguards.
That
incident was yet another warning sign that's gone ignored.
But
even presidential mandates meant to protect GPS have been ignored over
the years.
In 1998, President Clinton became concerned about America’s
growing reliance on GPS for navigation.
He directed the Department of
Transportation to study the issue and make recommendations.
Those
recommendations, which called for improving receivers, developing
interference detection networks, and developing non-satellite navigation
systems for use alongside GPS, came out just 12 days before 9/11.
Most
of them, understandably, were tabled.
Then, in 2004, the Bush
administration began to focus on GPS's other functions – providing
highly precise timing signals for synchronizing telecommunications and
IT networks, financial systems, and power grids.
President Bush issued a presidential directive that
identified GPS services as essential to the nation’s critical
infrastructure, security, and economy.
Among its provisions to protect
GPS, it directed acquisition of a "back-up system" to serve the nation
in the event of a GPS disruption.
President Obama later reaffirmed
that directive and has issued several additional presidential orders
designed to make the nation’s critical infrastructure more resilient.
The
Obama administration has also continued to voice significant concerns
about GPS vulnerability. Department of Homeland Security officials have
called GPS "a single point of failure for critical
infrastructure."
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has said he wants to
"unplug the military from GPS."
But plans to construct a land-based GPS backup system remain dormant.
Studies have shown that, for about $50 million a year, a system known as
eLoran could provide a signal more than 1.3 million times stronger than
GPS.
And, importantly, the signal is incredibly difficult to jam or spoof.
The deputy secretaries of both the Department of Defense and Department
of Transportation have spoken out in favor of such a system.
Yet
nothing has been done.
Similar systems are currently being used by Russia, China, South Korea,Britain, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran.
We
may never know what truly led two Navy vessels into Iranian waters –
the Iranians confiscated the boat’s GPS navigation suites before they
were released.
But all the reasons that have been offered to the press
seem unlikely.
Small Navy vessels like these have multiple and redundant
systems, and usually travel in pairs or small groups specifically to
avoid having a single point of failure threaten their mission.
But the
incident is once again an important reminder that GPS as a single point
of failure can cause significant problems for America, the least of
which are minor embarrassments like this one.
Officials in the
Obama administration have said they are going to act and address this
problem.
Let’s hope that they – and the administration that comes next –
follow through on presidential commitments and finally do something to
safeguard GPS for everyone.
