Off the coast of South Africa, seals risk their lives every time they go to eat.
But in recent years, they've developed a behaviour to protect themselves from one of the most fearsome predators of the ocean – the Great White Shark.
Saturday, June 15, 2024
Friday, June 14, 2024
Westarctica: The micronation with a real-world purpose
Westarctica in relation to the rest of the frozen continent.
A map of Westarctica, or if you’re not into the whole micro nation
thing: Marie Byrd Land.
(Credit: Travis McHenry, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
(Credit: Travis McHenry, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
(Credit: Travis McHenry, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
From Big Think by Frank Jacobs
The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 prohibited nations from making new land claims on the continent.
But it never mentioned claims from private individuals.
- Seven countries each have staked a
claim to a slice of Antarctica, but all those claims were by the
Antarctic Treaty of 1959.
- In 2001, however, naval intelligence specialist Travis McHenry found a loophole in the Antarctic Treaty.
- So began Westarctica — a micronation with its own flag, currency, and Grand Duke.
Marie Byrd Land, in Antarctica, was named after the wife of the American explorer Richard E.
Byrd Jr.
He must not have liked her very much, because even by the harsh standards of the South Pole, this land is inaccessible and inhospitable, cold, and unforgiving.
The desolation of Marie Byrd Land.
Image taken by NASA during Operation IceBridge (2018/19), the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown.
Image taken by NASA during Operation IceBridge (2018/19), the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown.
(Credit: NASA/Michael Studinger, public domain).
The wedge-shaped area, bounded by 60 degrees south, 90 degrees west, and 150 degrees west, is about 620,000 square miles (1.6 million km2), more than twice the size of Texas.
Yet it hosts no permanent research stations and is not claimed by any nation.
Seven countries each have staked a claim to a slice of Antarctica, but all those claims have been frozen by the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, an international agreement to use the continent for peaceful scientific research and not military purposes.
Together, those claims cover most of the continent at the bottom of the world — except Marie Byrd Land, which is the largest unclaimed territory in the world.
At least, it was until 2001, when naval intelligence specialist Travis McHenry said he found a loophole in the Antarctic Treaty: While it prohibits countries from laying claim to parts of Antarctica, it says nothing about private individuals.
The seven recognized (but frozen) territorial claims on Antarctica.
The claims of Chile, Argentina and the UK overlap.
Australia’s claim is split in two by the French claim.
In addition to a contiguous slice, Norway also claims Peter I Island, located near the border of the Chilean claim with Marie Byrd Land.
Brazil also claims a sector, but this is not recognized under the Antarctic Treaty.
The claims of Chile, Argentina and the UK overlap.
Australia’s claim is split in two by the French claim.
In addition to a contiguous slice, Norway also claims Peter I Island, located near the border of the Chilean claim with Marie Byrd Land.
Brazil also claims a sector, but this is not recognized under the Antarctic Treaty.
(Credit: A loose necktie, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
So, McHenry proclaimed himself consul-general of this freezing no man’s land (or terra nullius, in Latin), which he initially dubbed “the Achaean Territory of Antarctica.” He duly notified the other claimants to the continent.
They never replied.
In 2004, McHenry upgraded the territory to a grand duchy and renamed it Westarctica, a nod to the Kingdom of Westphalia, a Napoleonic creation.
And then, in another imitation of Bonaparte, McHenry crowned himself.
Long live Grand Duke Travis I!
Many people will find this behavior exceedingly strange.
For some, however, it will ring a bell — me included.
I must have been about 12 years old when I declared my room independent.
My own private kingdom didn’t last long: It rapidly balkanized into a medley of minuscule republics, empires, and emirates.
But that was part of the fun: It meant more flags and maps to draw, more stories to invent, more wars to wage.
Grand Duke Travis I of Westarctica (left) receives an award from Emir Charles of Raphania at the 2022 MicroCon in Las Vegas.
(Credit: BestOnLifeForm, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
My secession might have been private, but it is hardly unique.
At this very moment, an incalculable number of bedrooms, garden sheds, and haylofts have parted ways with their drab geopolitical realities, under the inspired leadership of their various Dear Leaders.
Having lived it, I understand this urge to role-play with the trappings of statehood, also known as micronationalism.
While my micronation eventually merged back into the real world, as most others do, some self-proclaimed micronations not only stand the test of time but also solidify into something more than half-serious.
Over the years, these micronations devise elaborate backstories, print their own money and stamps, often finding an online following and granting grandiose titles to those willing to pay the right amount of doubloons.
The flag of Westarctica, displayed on Antarctica itself, with a real-life penguin colony at the back.
Picture taken on D’Hainaut Island off the northwest coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, so not in Westarctica itself.
Picture taken on D’Hainaut Island off the northwest coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, so not in Westarctica itself.
(Credit: Encyclopedia Westarctica)
Depending on your source, there are anywhere between 100 and 140 of these “advanced micronations” active at any one time.
Many are uniquely weird.
Some examples:Headquartered in Nevada, the Republic of Molossia also claims territory on the planet Venus.
Guns are banned in Molossia, as are walruses, catfish, onions, and anything from Texas (except Kelly Clarkson).
Molossia maintains a state of war with East Germany, even though that country no longer exists.
The Kingdom of Talossa, near Milwaukee, boasts its very own invented language.
With a vocabulary of 35,000 root words and 121,000 derived words, Talossan is one of the most detailed artificial languages ever developed.
The Republic of Kugelmugel is located in Vienna’s famous Prater park.
It consists of a single, spherical building.
When the Austrian authorities informed the architect that round shapes were not allowed, he declared the building’s independence rather than tear it down.
Ironically, the building (and the republic) are now administered by the city of Vienna.
In 2004, gay rights activists in Australia declared the independence of the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands, as a protest against their government’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriages.
The Kingdom was dissolved in 2017 when those unions became legal in Australia.
A note for 10 ice marks, the national currency of Westarctica.
Not clear how many iced lattes this buys you.
Not clear how many iced lattes this buys you.
(Credit: Encyclopedia Westarctica, CC-BY-NC-ND)
Grand Duke Travis’s fictional empire has the distinction of being one of the largest such projects in existence, so large that it can hardly be called a “micronation,” except by virtue of its virtuality.
Virtual is not the same as non-existent.
For proof, a bit of Westarctic history: In 2006, McHenry’s then-employer — the U.S.
Navy — requested that he cease communicating with foreign governments.
McHenry gave up his throne and was succeeded first by Philip Karns (a.k.a.
the Duke of Ravenscroft) and later by Jon-Lawrence Langer (a.k.a.
the Duke of Moulton-Berlin).
But Westarctica was wilting: its web presence spluttering, its virtual population plummeting, the few remaining citizens disagreeing on what to do next.
So in 2010 McHenry, now out of the Navy, staged a coup, reclaiming his title and eventually revitalizing his nation.
Today, Westarctica has about 2,300 citizens, although only a few hundred are “active.”
If Westarctica is still an ongoing concern, it’s thanks in large part to its revamped raison d’être.
Once, McHenry dreamed of establishing a physical presence in his fictional monarchy, but that task has proved all too daunting.
Westarctica is now a nonprofit organization, focused on raising awareness about the effects of climate change, even doling out small grants for conservation scholarships.
Westarctica (or Marie Byrd Land, to be a bit more exact) is one of the fastest warming parts of the planet — warming roughly five times faster than the mean global rate, raising potentially serious consequences for the local wildlife and ice and snow cover.
Conservation is not the only way Westarctica is reaching out to the world.
The Grand Duchy is a member of the Antarctic Micronational Union (AMU), an association of nine micronations with claims on Antarctica.
The AMU aims to protect the claims of its members against those of other claimants.
By “other claimants,” we may assume that refers to other micronations, not the seven actual claimants to chunks of Antarctica.
Micronations exist only if they don’t endanger the sovereignty of actual states.
The King of Molossia, for example, duly pays his state and federal taxes, and just thinks of them as “foreign aid.”
As a nature conservancy nonprofit, Westarctica may have found an unobtrusive niche that ensures its continued survival, even as Marie Byrd Land itself rapidly melts away.
Links :
- For more on Westarctica, check the official Westarctica website and the Encyclopedia Westarctica.
- MicroCon is a biennial meeting of micronations.
Another forum is PoliNation, meeting more sporadically.
Thursday, June 13, 2024
The US buried nuclear waste abroad. Climate change could unearth It
US military officers watch nuclear waste being dumped on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands.
Cortesy of Dpt of Defense
Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaii in 2017 when she saw the photo online: a black-and-white picture of a man holding a baby.
The caption said: “Nelson Anjain getting his baby monitored on March 2, 1954, by an AEC RadSafe team member on Rongelap two days after ʻBravo.’”
Tibon had never seen the man before.
But she recognized the name as her great-grandfather’s.
At the time, he was living on Rongelap in the Marshall Islands when the US conducted Castle Bravo, the largest of 67 nuclear weapon tests there during the Cold War.
The tests displaced and sickened Indigenous people, poisoned fish, upended traditional food practices, and caused cancers and other negative health repercussions that continue to reverberate today.
Tibon had never seen the man before.
But she recognized the name as her great-grandfather’s.
At the time, he was living on Rongelap in the Marshall Islands when the US conducted Castle Bravo, the largest of 67 nuclear weapon tests there during the Cold War.
The tests displaced and sickened Indigenous people, poisoned fish, upended traditional food practices, and caused cancers and other negative health repercussions that continue to reverberate today.
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A figure from the paper details the locations of radioactive contamination abroad from U.S. activities during the Cold War. GAO; Republic of the Marshall Islands: National Museum of Nuclear Science and History; Greenland: Bryan Ambrust / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center; Spain: National Museum of Nuclear Science and History; Map Resources
A federal report by the Government Accountability Office published last month examines what’s left of that nuclear contamination, not only in the Pacific but also in Greenland and Spain.
The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands.
“Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the US Department of Energy,” the report says.
In Greenland, chemical pollution and radioactive liquid are frozen in ice sheets, left over from a nuclear power plant on a US military research base where scientists studied the potential to install nuclear missiles.
The report didn’t specify how or where nuclear contamination could migrate in the Pacific or Greenland, or what if any health risks that might pose to people living nearby.
However, the authors did note that in Greenland, frozen waste could be exposed by 2100.
“The possibility to influence the environment is there, which could further affect the food chain and further affect the people living in the area as well,” said Hjalmar Dahl, president of Inuit Circumpolar Council Greenland.
The country is about 90 percent Inuit.
“I think it is important that the Greenland and US governments have to communicate on this worrying issue and prepare what to do about it.”
The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands.
“Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the US Department of Energy,” the report says.
In Greenland, chemical pollution and radioactive liquid are frozen in ice sheets, left over from a nuclear power plant on a US military research base where scientists studied the potential to install nuclear missiles.
The report didn’t specify how or where nuclear contamination could migrate in the Pacific or Greenland, or what if any health risks that might pose to people living nearby.
However, the authors did note that in Greenland, frozen waste could be exposed by 2100.
“The possibility to influence the environment is there, which could further affect the food chain and further affect the people living in the area as well,” said Hjalmar Dahl, president of Inuit Circumpolar Council Greenland.
The country is about 90 percent Inuit.
“I think it is important that the Greenland and US governments have to communicate on this worrying issue and prepare what to do about it.”
The authors of the GAO study wrote that Greenland and Denmark haven’t proposed any cleanup plans, but also cited studies that say much of the nuclear waste has already decayed and will be diluted by melting ice.
However, those studies do note that chemical waste such as polychlorinated biphenyls, man-made chemicals better known as PCBs that are carcinogenic, “may be the most consequential waste at Camp Century.”
The report summarizes disagreements between Marshall Islands officials and the US Department of Energy regarding the risks posed by US nuclear waste.
The GAO recommends that the agency adopt a communications strategy for conveying information about the potential for pollution to the Marshallese people.
Nathan Anderson, a director at the Government Accountability Office, said that the United States’ responsibilities in the Marshall Islands “are defined by specific federal statutes and international agreements.”
However, those studies do note that chemical waste such as polychlorinated biphenyls, man-made chemicals better known as PCBs that are carcinogenic, “may be the most consequential waste at Camp Century.”
The report summarizes disagreements between Marshall Islands officials and the US Department of Energy regarding the risks posed by US nuclear waste.
The GAO recommends that the agency adopt a communications strategy for conveying information about the potential for pollution to the Marshallese people.
Nathan Anderson, a director at the Government Accountability Office, said that the United States’ responsibilities in the Marshall Islands “are defined by specific federal statutes and international agreements.”
He noted that the government of the Marshall Islands previously agreed to settle claims related to damages from US nuclear testing.
“It is the long-standing position of the US government that, pursuant to that agreement, the Republic of the Marshall Islands bears full responsibility for its lands, including those used for the nuclear testing program.”
To Tibon, who is back home in the Marshall Islands and is currently chair of the National Nuclear Commission, the fact that the report’s only recommendation is a new communications strategy is mystifying.
She’s not sure how that would help the Marshallese people.
“What we need now is action and implementation on environmental remediation.
We don’t need a communication strategy,” she said.
“If they know that it’s contaminated, why wasn’t the recommendation for next steps on environmental remediation, or what’s possible to return these lands to safe and habitable conditions for these communities?”
The Biden administration recently agreed to fund a new museum to commemorate those affected by nuclear testing as well as climate change initiatives in the Marshall Islands, but the initiatives have repeatedly failed to garner support from Congress, even though they’re part of an ongoing treaty with the Marshall Islands and a broader national security effort to shore up goodwill in the Pacific to counter China.
“It is the long-standing position of the US government that, pursuant to that agreement, the Republic of the Marshall Islands bears full responsibility for its lands, including those used for the nuclear testing program.”
To Tibon, who is back home in the Marshall Islands and is currently chair of the National Nuclear Commission, the fact that the report’s only recommendation is a new communications strategy is mystifying.
She’s not sure how that would help the Marshallese people.
“What we need now is action and implementation on environmental remediation.
We don’t need a communication strategy,” she said.
“If they know that it’s contaminated, why wasn’t the recommendation for next steps on environmental remediation, or what’s possible to return these lands to safe and habitable conditions for these communities?”
The Biden administration recently agreed to fund a new museum to commemorate those affected by nuclear testing as well as climate change initiatives in the Marshall Islands, but the initiatives have repeatedly failed to garner support from Congress, even though they’re part of an ongoing treaty with the Marshall Islands and a broader national security effort to shore up goodwill in the Pacific to counter China.
Links :
- Interesting Engineering : US nuclear waste skeletons could tumble out of closets in Greenland
- Smithsonian : Climate Change May Unearth Cold War-Era Nuclear Waste Stored by the U.S. in Other Countries
- Popular Mechanics : Buried Nuclear Waste May Soon Rise From the Grave
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
The Titan submersible disaster shocked the world. The exclusive inside story is more disturbing than anyone imagined
Illustration: James Marshall
A year after OceanGate’s sub imploded, thousands of leaked documents and interviews with ex-employees reveal how the company’s CEO cut corners, ignored warnings, and lied in his fatal quest to reach the Titanic.
THE OCEAN SCIENCES Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.
On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.
Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies.
Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.
In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist on the ceiling.
About 3 feet long, it was a scale model of a submersible called Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate.
The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, had cofounded the company in 2009 as a sort of submarine charter service, anticipating a growing need for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor.
At first, Rush acquired older, steel-hulled subs for expeditions, but in 2013 OceanGate had begun designing what the company called “a revolutionary new manned submersible.”
Among the sub’s innovations were its lightweight hull, which was built from carbon fiber and could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used in deep-sea diving.
By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers down to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic, 3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid.
Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive.
If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi).
The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanic’s depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi.
Soon, the pressure gauge on UW’s test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up—2,000 psi, 5,000 psi.
At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.
“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night.
“The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.”
“Scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.
The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.
In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test.
Rush’s company didn’t do either of those things.
Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model.
This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021.
It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years.
But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself.
The disaster captivated and horrified the world.
Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation.
Organizations that had worked with OceanGate, including the University of Washington as well as the Boeing Company, released statements denying that they contributed to Titan.
A trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to WIRED by anonymous sources sheds new light on Titan’s development, from its initial design and manufacture through its first deep-sea operations.
The documents, validated by interviews with two third-party suppliers and several former OceanGate employees with intimate knowledge of Titan, reveal never-before-reported details about the design and testing of the submersible.
They show that Boeing and the University of Washington were both involved in the early stages of OceanGate’s carbon-fiber sub project, although their work did not make it into the final Titan design.
The trove also reveals a company culture in which employees who questioned their bosses’ high-speed approach and decisions were dismissed as overly cautious or even fired.
(The former employees who spoke to WIRED have asked not to be named for fear of being sued by the families of those who died aboard the vessel.)
By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers down to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic, 3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid.
Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive.
If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi).
The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanic’s depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi.
Soon, the pressure gauge on UW’s test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up—2,000 psi, 5,000 psi.
At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.
“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night.
“The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.”
“Scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.
The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.
In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test.
Rush’s company didn’t do either of those things.
Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model.
This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021.
It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years.
But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself.
The disaster captivated and horrified the world.
Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation.
Organizations that had worked with OceanGate, including the University of Washington as well as the Boeing Company, released statements denying that they contributed to Titan.
A trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to WIRED by anonymous sources sheds new light on Titan’s development, from its initial design and manufacture through its first deep-sea operations.
The documents, validated by interviews with two third-party suppliers and several former OceanGate employees with intimate knowledge of Titan, reveal never-before-reported details about the design and testing of the submersible.
They show that Boeing and the University of Washington were both involved in the early stages of OceanGate’s carbon-fiber sub project, although their work did not make it into the final Titan design.
The trove also reveals a company culture in which employees who questioned their bosses’ high-speed approach and decisions were dismissed as overly cautious or even fired.
(The former employees who spoke to WIRED have asked not to be named for fear of being sued by the families of those who died aboard the vessel.)
Most of all, the documents show how Rush, blinkered by his own ambition to be the Elon Musk of the deep seas, repeatedly overstated OceanGate’s progress and, on at least one occasion, outright lied about significant problems with Titan’s hull, which has not been previously reported.
A representative for OceanGate, which ceased all operations last summer, declined to comment on WIRED’s findings.
A representative for OceanGate, which ceased all operations last summer, declined to comment on WIRED’s findings.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush aboard the Cyclops 1 in 2015.
Photograph: courtesy Of Mark Harris
I MET STOCKTON Rush on June 24, 2015, while reporting on OceanGate for New Scientist magazine.
A former flight engineer and tech investor, Rush was already styling himself a subaquatic Musk.
“I wanted to be the first person on Mars until I realized there was nothing there,” Rush told me at a city center dock in Seattle.
“But in the ocean, there are new life-forms, things people have never discovered.” Rush believed that Earth’s oceans, not outer space, were where humanity would find refuge from existential risks like climate change.
“My goal is to move the needle,” he told me.
Around us, employees were prepping OceanGate’s prototype submersible, the Cyclops 1, for its deepest dive to date.
The sub was a cylindrical, steel-hulled design rated for dives up to 500 meters.
OceanGate had acquired it a few years earlier and refurbished it, adding LEDs and a PlayStation controller for easy steering, and replacing an ugly exterior cabin with a sleek white plastic fairing to protect components outside the hull.
Together with the large acrylic viewport, the effect was a sort of one-eyed robot shark.
Up to five people could squeeze inside—which is what Rush and I were about to do, for a test dive in Seattle’s Elliott Bay.
Ninety minutes later and 130 meters deeper, we were totally lost.
First the thruster software had glitched, leaving us floating just above the seafloor.
Now the sub’s compass was acting up.
The shipwreck we aimed to explore, a rail ferry that had once carried Teddy Roosevelt, was nowhere to be seen.
All I could spy outside the Cyclops’ forward dome was the occasional salmon dancing in the frigid water.
As I began to feel the chill seeping through the sub’s steel hull, Rush asked me to open my iPhone’s compass app.
He wanted to compare it to the one on his phone.
The headings did not match, but he rebooted the thrusters and we set off in what he was pretty sure was the right direction.
“You’re heading in exactly the wrong direction,” said a faint voice transmitted via an acoustic link from the support ship tracking us on the surface.
We eventually located the sunken ship, its rotting bow emerging into the Cyclops’ headlight.
It was an otherworldly experience, made more thrilling by the hint of danger.
Back at the dock, Rush brushed off the problems we had encountered.
This is exactly why OceanGate started with the Cyclops 1, he said, rather than anything capable of diving deeper.
“I could have built a multimillion-dollar version and all of a sudden I’ve got to figure out really stupid stuff like the magnetic compass,” he told me.
“The Cyclops 1 is getting us ready. When we do the Cyclops 2, then all these bugs will be out.”
The Cyclops 2, which Rush renamed Titan in 2018, was already on the drawing board.
And Rush believed he had the biggest bug—how to make a vessel that could safely dive 20 times deeper than America’s nuclear subs—worked out.
He would use a modern wonder material: carbon fiber.
Carbon-fiber composites are some of the strongest materials available to engineers.
They are formed of thin strands of atomic carbon within plastic resins, layer upon layer, then cured carefully at high temperatures.
The resulting composites can be both stronger and lighter than titanium, and it was this combination that caught Rush’s attention.
A carbon-fiber Titan could be roughly the same size and weight as the steel Cyclops and yet be able to dive up to 12 times deeper.
It would be much cheaper for a support vessel to carry and deploy at sea than a metal sub, and would also be more buoyant, reducing the risk of getting stranded on the ocean floor.
While carbon fiber has been used in everything from cars to rockets, no one had ever dived in a deep-water carbon-fiber submersible.
Rush wanted to be the first.
In 2013, OceanGate struck up a partnership with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory to develop the new sub.
The university has a long history of working with composites and designing its own underwater vehicles.
It also already had a relationship with OceanGate, after using its subs for research; the physics lab helped write the software used by Cyclops 1.
The university touted the arrangement in press releases at the time: “UW, Local Company Building Innovative Deep-Sea Manned Submarine,” read one headline from October 2013.
The story was updated with a note in 2023 saying that “the vessel that resulted from this partnership” was the Cyclops 1.
Emails from OceanGate leaked exclusively to WIRED indicate that UW researchers provided hundreds of detailed 3D CAD drawings of components for a carbon-fiber sub between 2013 and 2016, as part of a $5 million contract.
But the relationship between the lap and OceanGate was contentious, according to emails.
UW claims that OceanGate and the lab parted ways after just $650,000 worth of work, and former OceanGate employees told WIRED that none of UW’s hardware or software work wound up in the finished sub.
OceanGate also announced that Boeing Research & Technology was helping with the project.
In October 2013, two engineers at Boeing, Mark Negley and William Koch, produced a detailed 70-page preliminary design containing renderings, manufacturing advice, and technical analysis.
These details of Boeing’s involvement have not been reported before.
“Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it,” Jessica Kowal, a spokesperson for Boeing, said in a statement.
The company declined to answer on the record any other questions from WIRED.
Negley and Koch, who are still employed by Boeing, did not respond to LinkedIn messages.
“The more innovative you get, the more testing you’ve got to do.
It was pretty obvious that OceanGate wasn’t going to do the testing.”
WILL KOHNEN, DEEP-SEA SUBMERSIBLES EXPERT
It was pretty obvious that OceanGate wasn’t going to do the testing.”
WILL KOHNEN, DEEP-SEA SUBMERSIBLES EXPERT
Even at this early stage, these engineers were warning of potential problems ahead.
Negley and Koch pointed out that although composites can be stronger than any metal, they have other challenges.
Carbon fiber can get progressively weaker, sometimes in unexpected ways.
The manufacturing process can introduce defects if the resin is cured too long or not long enough, if debris gets in, or if the material is laid or wound unevenly.
And the more layers a structure has, the engineers wrote, the greater the risk of a defect that would weaken it.
Titan would ultimately have 660 layers of carbon fiber.
To mitigate these risks, the Boeing engineers suggested a rigorous quality assurance process during manufacture and ultrasound testing of the hull after it was made.
Ultrasound scans could find defects or delaminations in the hull—places where the carbon-fiber layers had separated.
To manufacture the hull, Rush turned to a company called Spencer Composites.
First, though, OceanGate needed a scaled-down model of the hull to test how it would fare against the intense pressures at the bottom of the sea.
By 2015, according to a design document written by Spencer, OceanGate wanted its hull to be rated up to 6,000 meters and have a safety factor of up to 2.25—meaning that it should be stable to two and a quarter times that depth, or 13,500 meters.
James Cameron’s record-setting Deepsea Challenger had a safety factor of 1.36.
Alvin, the submersible that originally explored the Titanic, had a 1.8 or higher.
(Spencer Composites did not respond to requests for comment.)
In June 2015, just before my trip in Cyclops 1, engineers placed a one-third scale model of Titan in an 8-foot-long testing tank at APL-UW for its first pressure test.
This model was built entirely of carbon fiber, including the end domes, which ended up failing at pressures equating to around just 3,000 meters, according to a report written by Rush.
OceanGate commissioned Spencer to make more domes, but these would take months to arrive.
Meanwhile, the cylinder was tested again, this time with solid aluminum discs on the ends, and reached 4,100 meters without incident.
But when OceanGate received the new carbon-fiber domes and tested the hull in March 2016, the new domes again imploded at 3,000 meters.
The test that “scared the shit out of everyone,” in one engineer’s words, was OceanGate’s fourth.
This time, the hull (again with aluminum caps) reached the equivalent of 4,500 meters before imploding, giving it a miserly 1.18 safety factor for any dives to Titanic depths.
Damage to the scale model after imploding in the testing tank.
Photograph: courtesy of a former oceangate employee
“Over the next months we will analyze the data in detail … and then run a test with a new cylinder through at least 1,000 cycles to confirm its durability,” Rush wrote to shareholders at the time.
That replacement scale model was not made, and the new tests never happened, former employees tell WIRED, in part because Rush trusted OceanGate’s computer models.
Even when OceanGate decided to change the domes in the final design from carbon fiber to titanium, Rush didn’t commission models to test the interactions between the new materials; one former employee who was familiar with Rush’s decision says the CEO balked at the high price tag.
“The modeling says it’s OK.The analysis says it’s OK,” one former employee says.
“We build airplanes on the same type of analysis and then we go throw people in them.”
But a low-pressure environment, like flying, is different from a high-pressure one.
Carbon fiber is inherently stronger when holding pressure in, like what happens with an aircraft in the stratosphere, than when keeping pressure out, as happens underwater.
And all cylindrical vessels resist buckling better when the air pressure is higher inside.
Submersible experts not associated with OceanGate told WIRED that they would do much more testing on a new design.
“We did at least 10 scale-model pressure hulls that we tested to destruction,” says Adam Wright, an engineer who had worked on explorer Steve Fossett’s 2005 carbon-fiber sub, which was shelved after Fossett died in a plane crash.
And that was for a submersible that would only be used for a single mission.
OceanGate was planning to use its submersible repeatedly—up to 10,000 times, according to internal design documents.
“Carbon fiber is a very sensible material if it’s been engineered correctly and manufactured in a controlled way,” says Chase Hogoboom, president and cofounder of Composite Energy Technologies, which has successfully tested small carbon-fiber vessels to the equivalent of 6,000 meters hundreds of times.
“It takes millions of dollars and many years, but it’s not rocket science. It’s just connecting the dots.”
OceanGate tested the model hull to destruction only once, and never used the titanium components that would become fixtures on the final sub.
Instead, the company simply increased the thickness of the carbon-fiber hull in its design specs from 4.5 to 5 inches, and commissioned Spencer to build the real thing.
(Later, OceanGate engineers found that Titan’s full-size hull was too thick for portable ultrasonic scanners, and a coating Spencer had applied to it would further block the signals.
Rush decided that moving the entire sub to a lab for scanning would be too expensive, says a former employee who was familiar with Rush’s thinking.
As a result, no scans were made—going against the advice of both Boeing and OceanGate engineers.)
.jpg)
Key components of the Titan submersible
Unlike Cyclops 1, with its large, 180-degree viewing dome, Titan’s front dome was made of solid titanium, with a smaller 23-inch viewport in the center.
The viewport, made from 9-inch-thick acrylic, was an entirely new design by Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s director of engineering, and it was going to be manufactured by a company called Hydrospace Group.
Will Kohnen, Hydrospace’s CEO, told WIRED that he had originally expected Rush to thoroughly test the viewport according to rigorous standards set by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Under those standards, OceanGate would test at least five windows to destruction at high pressure, cycle a viewport from low to high pressure a thousand times, and subject another viewport to five times the intended pressure for 300 consecutive hours to see how much the plastic slowly shrank under pressure, says Kohnen.
“The more innovative you get, the more testing you’ve got to do,” Kohnen says.
“Over a period of years, it was pretty obvious that OceanGate wasn’t going to do the testing.” The former employees who spoke to WIRED also said that OceanGate wasn’t testing the viewport to the society’s standards.
By the fall of 2017, Kohnen was getting worried.
As a last-ditch effort, in November he sent Rush an email offering “a serious discount” to build a second viewport using a design that had been tested and certified to 4,000 meters.
It could be swapped out for the experimental window within 24 hours, he wrote.
Kohnen says that Rush told him he wasn’t interested.
Kohnen delivered OceanGate’s viewport in December.
He would rate it to only 650 meters—one-sixth of the depth to the Titanic.
He also shared an analysis, done pro bono by an independent expert, concluding that OceanGate’s design might fail after only a few 4,000-meter dives.
OceanGate nevertheless installed the viewport in Titan later that month.
Construction on the sub was almost complete, and the company was already advertising its first expedition to the Titanic in May.
IT WAS TIME for the engineers to hand it over to OceanGate’s operations team for testing at sea.
But there was another snag.
David Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe.
In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull.
Rush fired him the next day.
(Although Lochridge later made a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about Titan, Rush sued him for breach of contract. The settlement of that lawsuit resulted in Lochridge dropping his complaint, paying OceanGate nearly $10,000, and signing an NDA. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED.)
Will Kohnen also couldn’t forget about Titan, and the foreboding he had about the whole enterprise.
“We have a rogue element within the submersible industry,” he remembers thinking.
If something went wrong with Titan, it might scare people off deep-sea exploration more widely.
In March 2018, he drafted a letter, signed by more than 30 crewed submersible experts, urging Rush to test the vessel with an accredited outside group.
(The letter was earlier reported by the New York Times.)
Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear.
It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price.
“[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.
“Titan and its safety systems are way beyond anything currently in use … I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market,” Rush wrote to McCallum.
“Since [starting] OceanGate we have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often.”
Days later, Rush received an even more pointed warning from Boeing’s Mark Negley, who had stayed in contact with the CEO after he helped with a preliminary design.
Negley had recently carried out an analysis of Spencer Composites’ hull based on information Rush had shared.
He did not mince words when sharing his findings, which WIRED is reporting for the first time.
“We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters.
We do not think you have any safety margin,” he wrote in an email on March 30.
“Be cautious and careful.”
Negley provided a graph charting the strain on the submersible against depth.
It shows a skull and crossbones in the region below 4,000 meters.
The viewport, made from 9-inch-thick acrylic, was an entirely new design by Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s director of engineering, and it was going to be manufactured by a company called Hydrospace Group.
Will Kohnen, Hydrospace’s CEO, told WIRED that he had originally expected Rush to thoroughly test the viewport according to rigorous standards set by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Under those standards, OceanGate would test at least five windows to destruction at high pressure, cycle a viewport from low to high pressure a thousand times, and subject another viewport to five times the intended pressure for 300 consecutive hours to see how much the plastic slowly shrank under pressure, says Kohnen.
“The more innovative you get, the more testing you’ve got to do,” Kohnen says.
“Over a period of years, it was pretty obvious that OceanGate wasn’t going to do the testing.” The former employees who spoke to WIRED also said that OceanGate wasn’t testing the viewport to the society’s standards.
By the fall of 2017, Kohnen was getting worried.
As a last-ditch effort, in November he sent Rush an email offering “a serious discount” to build a second viewport using a design that had been tested and certified to 4,000 meters.
It could be swapped out for the experimental window within 24 hours, he wrote.
Kohnen says that Rush told him he wasn’t interested.
Kohnen delivered OceanGate’s viewport in December.
He would rate it to only 650 meters—one-sixth of the depth to the Titanic.
He also shared an analysis, done pro bono by an independent expert, concluding that OceanGate’s design might fail after only a few 4,000-meter dives.
OceanGate nevertheless installed the viewport in Titan later that month.
Construction on the sub was almost complete, and the company was already advertising its first expedition to the Titanic in May.
IT WAS TIME for the engineers to hand it over to OceanGate’s operations team for testing at sea.
But there was another snag.
David Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe.
In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull.
Rush fired him the next day.
(Although Lochridge later made a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about Titan, Rush sued him for breach of contract. The settlement of that lawsuit resulted in Lochridge dropping his complaint, paying OceanGate nearly $10,000, and signing an NDA. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED.)
Will Kohnen also couldn’t forget about Titan, and the foreboding he had about the whole enterprise.
“We have a rogue element within the submersible industry,” he remembers thinking.
If something went wrong with Titan, it might scare people off deep-sea exploration more widely.
In March 2018, he drafted a letter, signed by more than 30 crewed submersible experts, urging Rush to test the vessel with an accredited outside group.
(The letter was earlier reported by the New York Times.)
Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear.
It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price.
“[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.
“Titan and its safety systems are way beyond anything currently in use … I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market,” Rush wrote to McCallum.
“Since [starting] OceanGate we have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often.”
Days later, Rush received an even more pointed warning from Boeing’s Mark Negley, who had stayed in contact with the CEO after he helped with a preliminary design.
Negley had recently carried out an analysis of Spencer Composites’ hull based on information Rush had shared.
He did not mince words when sharing his findings, which WIRED is reporting for the first time.
“We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters.
We do not think you have any safety margin,” he wrote in an email on March 30.
“Be cautious and careful.”
Negley provided a graph charting the strain on the submersible against depth.
It shows a skull and crossbones in the region below 4,000 meters.
The chart Mark Negley shared with Stockton Rush
Chart: courtesy of a former oceangate employee
Despite repeated warnings, Rush seemed unfazed.
His confidence in Titan was based in part on the new safety systems OceanGate had designed.
“A lot of risk mitigation was supposed to ride on the real-time health monitoring,” says one former employee.
The heart of that system, designed by an experienced electrical engineer and OceanGate board member named Mike Furlotti, was a suite of sensors and microchips that analyzed the hull’s acoustic emissions—the little pops made by carbon fibers as they break under compression.
OceanGate’s theory was that the hull would be fairly noisy on its first few dives but would get quieter when taken to the same depths over and over, one former employee explains.
If the acoustic monitoring system started getting really loud on a dive, that would be a clear indication to surface immediately.
(Multiple attempts to contact Furlotti for comment were unsuccessful.)
Wright and other industry experts have been extremely critical of this setup.
“I’m sure you can pick up these acoustic events fine, but you just don’t know when the end point is,” he says.
“You don’t know how many pops is too many, and it could be different for every vessel.”
There was even skepticism within OceanGate itself.
In September 2017, the engineer responsible for integrating Furlotti’s design into Titan sent an anxious email to management expressing concerns about the system’s ability to accurately track fiber breakage over time.
OceanGate hired an outside consultant named Allen Green to assess the acoustic monitoring.
Green, an authority on the sounds that materials make under stress, endorsed the system in 2018.
Later, though, when Green saw how Rush was describing the system to the public—the CEO claimed it could detect the sound of “micro-buckling” in the sub’s hull “way before it fails”—he wrote a concerned email to an OceanGate employee, reported here for the first time.
Rather than warning of failure, Green explained that the sounds indicated “irreversible” damage.
“It is my belief, substantiated by many years of experience, that composite structures all have a finite lifetime,” wrote Green, who died in 2021.
“While I do not intend to be an alarmist, I did not sleep well and arose early to send this message.”
RUSH HAD PITCHED OceanGate’s board and investors on a grand vision of what his company could be.
By 2018, that included a fleet of self-driving Titans that could dive to 6,000 meters, and satellite offices in Croatia, Israel, and the South Pacific.
He imagined a world whose oceans were populated by OceanGate’s crewed underwater bases, which could be used for data storage or even “Plan B habitats” for billionaire preppers.
Reality was more prosaic.
Like most startups, OceanGate was in constant need of funds.
Rush was trying to save money wherever he could.
Interns, who made up around a third of the engineering team, were paid as little as $13 an hour.
(When a manager pointed out in 2016 that Washington’s minimum wage was just $9.47 an hour, Rush responded, “I agree we are high. $10 seems fair.”)
Rush also downgraded the sub’s titanium components from aerospace grade 5 quality to weaker and cheaper grade 3, says one former employee.
According to internal documents, by 2018 the company had raised around $9 million in venture capital and another $4 million from subsidiary companies that profited off OceanGate’s research and scientific missions.
But the real business opportunity would be trips to the Titanic.
Rush had planned six missions to visit the legendary shipwreck in the summer of 2018, each with nine people paying $105,000.
With every mission bringing in nearly a million dollars in revenue but costing OceanGate only an estimated $333,000, the more visits Titan could make to the bottom of the North Atlantic, the better.
Although the plan was for the finished sub to make more than 30 dives in shallow water before going to deeper waters, OceanGate managed just 18.
In mid-April, Titan was transported to Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas, where deep water could be found very close to land.
But before Titan was even moved into the water, it was hit by lightning, damaging its electronics.
Some of the damaged equipment was replaced, but the sub was without many components for weeks.
Rush nevertheless insisted on attempting a shallow dive during high, rolling seas.
Choppy waves ripped fairings and foam from Titan as it was being towed back from the dive site, causing it to sink.
“I was merely ‘spam in the can’ with no comms for 9+ hours inside the sub,” Rush wrote the next day.
“I could see parts of the sub floating away on my cameras, but could not communicate to the tow team—a remarkably surreal and frustrating experience.”
Rush had to face facts: There was now no chance of OceanGate reaching the Titanicin 2018.
Eager ticket holders (and investors) would have to wait another year.
While they were still in the Bahamas, the team did manage to lower Titan on a series of uncrewed dives, eventually reaching 4,000 meters.
But engineers found the hull was warping more under compression than it was meant to, by perhaps as much as 37 percent.
Nevertheless, Rush wanted to keep diving deeper with Titan, with himself at the helm.
When one engineer expressed concern about performing crewed tests at this point, Nissen wrote to him, “Yesterday I told you if you don’t have the stomach for this type of engineering then OceanGate isn’t for you.”
On December 10, Rush successfully dove Titan to a depth of 3,939 meters—just enough to get to the Titanic.
Nissen wrote to the engineering team: “Diving to such deep depths is extremely complicated if you want to be untethered, communicate with the surface, be location tracked with reasonable accuracy, and monitor the health of your vehicle.
And, we have delivered.
You all have a lot to brag about.”
Titan reached a similar depth again in April, with a crew of four including Rush.
While OceanGate touted the dive as history-making proof of its submersible’s bona fides, even Rush was getting worried about loud noises the hull was making at depth.
Then on June 7, three weeks before Titan’s maiden voyage to the Titanic, an OceanGate pilot inspecting the interior with a flashlight noticed a crack in the hull.
He sent Rush an email warning that the crack was “pretty serious.” A detailed internal report later showed that at least 11 square feet of carbon fiber had delaminated—meaning the bonds between layers had separated.
This time, Rush couldn’t ignore the data.
The hull that was meant to last for 10,000 dives to the Titanic had made fewer than 50—and only three to 4,000 meters.
It would have to be scrapped, and the Titanic missions would be delayed for yet another year.
When Rush shared the news with GeekWire a few days later, however, he blamed the delay on legal complications with Titan’s support vessel.
It’s true that OceanGate ran into issues with maritime law, says one former employee: “The lie is that it was not the reason we delayed.”
AFTER THE CRACK was found in Titan’s hull, OceanGate started searching for a new carbon-fiber contractor.
By early 2020, many OceanGate engineers had been laid off or had left the company, insiders say.
Tony Nissen was out, and a team that had once numbered more than 20 was reduced to just a handful.
“Stockton never really wanted an engineering team, but he needed somebody to build it,” says one insider.
“We were down to a skeleton team,” says another.
Rush then announced that the company had inked a partnership with NASA to “collaborate on the development, manufacturing, and testing” of a new carbon-fiber cylinder.
(Covid-19 had other plans, shutting down NASA for months.
Ultimately, the agency told ABC, “NASA did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities.”)
The new hull would instead be made by two aerospace firms in Washington state, Electroimpact and Janicki Industries.
Electroimpact laid the carbon fibers, and Janicki cured the material in its ovens, confirmed one former employee.
Electroimpact did not provide a response to questions about its role, and Janicki declined to comment.
This time, OceanGate had two scale models made, which were once again tested at the University of Washington.
Once again, the models imploded early, possibly due to warping of the hulls during manufacturing, says a former employee.
OceanGate scrambled to solve the issue.
One idea: Rather than cure all the layers at once, they would cure the hull in stages.
Electroimpact would wind about 100 layers of the hull, then ship it to Janicki to cure and settle.
Then Janicki would send the hull back to Electroimpact to repeat the process.
They were running out of time, so they went for it—skipping tests of the new procedure on samples and going straight to manufacturing the second hull.
“The first time we did multiple cures was when we did the full hull,” says one former employee.
The new hull was finished by January 2021.
It passed pressure testing, similar to what was done at the University of Washington, but at a facility in Maryland that could accommodate the full-size cylinder.
OceanGate’s engineers now needed to integrate the new hull with the rest of Titan.
But Titan’s two titanium domes were still attached to each end of the old hull, sitting on titanium rings glued to the carbon fiber with aerospace-grade epoxy adhesive.
Commissioning new titanium interface rings and domes was ruled “an absolute no” by Rush, one former employee says, because of the extra cost and delay.
The company that made the original titanium components told WIRED that it did not make new rings for Rush, and three former employees say that OceanGate did, in fact, salvage and reuse the originals.
But staff had difficulty working out how to separate the old hull from the interface rings without damaging even a sliver of titanium.
Gaps or bumps could have weakened the join with the new hull, say the sources.
On dives, the hull and the rings needed to compress under pressure in perfect harmony.
“I can’t imagine a situation where you could reuse the titanium rings,” Wright, the independent engineer, says.
OceanGate somehow managed it.
By February 2021, photos of the newly reconstructed Titan were popping up on OceanGate’s Facebook page and other social media.
After the implosion in 2023, one ex-employee looked back at these and noticed an unexpected addition: The company had added metal lifting points to both interface rings, apparently to provide a new way to hoist Titan into and out of the water.
The addition of the lifting rings, reported by WIRED for the first time, was confirmed by a former employee who saw the engineering drawings, and by another source.
Previously, OceanGate had lifted Titan using a sling beneath the sub to avoid putting stress on the critical joins between the rings and the carbon-fiber hull.
As far back as 2017, when the original Titan was first shipped to OceanGate, Nissen had warned the operations team to use only the sling: “The titanium cannot take load/tension.”
“Lifting points are a very serious part of a pressure vessel design and must be considered carefully, tested, and qualified,” says Will Kohnen.
“Any lifting arrangement may impose loads and stresses into the pressure vessel, and this must be mitigated by analysis and test.” It is unclear whether such analysis or tests were carried out.
According to internal documents, by 2018 the company had raised around $9 million in venture capital and another $4 million from subsidiary companies that profited off OceanGate’s research and scientific missions.
But the real business opportunity would be trips to the Titanic.
Rush had planned six missions to visit the legendary shipwreck in the summer of 2018, each with nine people paying $105,000.
With every mission bringing in nearly a million dollars in revenue but costing OceanGate only an estimated $333,000, the more visits Titan could make to the bottom of the North Atlantic, the better.
Although the plan was for the finished sub to make more than 30 dives in shallow water before going to deeper waters, OceanGate managed just 18.
In mid-April, Titan was transported to Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas, where deep water could be found very close to land.
But before Titan was even moved into the water, it was hit by lightning, damaging its electronics.
Some of the damaged equipment was replaced, but the sub was without many components for weeks.
Rush nevertheless insisted on attempting a shallow dive during high, rolling seas.
Choppy waves ripped fairings and foam from Titan as it was being towed back from the dive site, causing it to sink.
“I was merely ‘spam in the can’ with no comms for 9+ hours inside the sub,” Rush wrote the next day.
“I could see parts of the sub floating away on my cameras, but could not communicate to the tow team—a remarkably surreal and frustrating experience.”
Rush had to face facts: There was now no chance of OceanGate reaching the Titanicin 2018.
Eager ticket holders (and investors) would have to wait another year.
While they were still in the Bahamas, the team did manage to lower Titan on a series of uncrewed dives, eventually reaching 4,000 meters.
But engineers found the hull was warping more under compression than it was meant to, by perhaps as much as 37 percent.
Nevertheless, Rush wanted to keep diving deeper with Titan, with himself at the helm.
When one engineer expressed concern about performing crewed tests at this point, Nissen wrote to him, “Yesterday I told you if you don’t have the stomach for this type of engineering then OceanGate isn’t for you.”
On December 10, Rush successfully dove Titan to a depth of 3,939 meters—just enough to get to the Titanic.
Nissen wrote to the engineering team: “Diving to such deep depths is extremely complicated if you want to be untethered, communicate with the surface, be location tracked with reasonable accuracy, and monitor the health of your vehicle.
And, we have delivered.
You all have a lot to brag about.”
Titan reached a similar depth again in April, with a crew of four including Rush.
While OceanGate touted the dive as history-making proof of its submersible’s bona fides, even Rush was getting worried about loud noises the hull was making at depth.
Then on June 7, three weeks before Titan’s maiden voyage to the Titanic, an OceanGate pilot inspecting the interior with a flashlight noticed a crack in the hull.
He sent Rush an email warning that the crack was “pretty serious.” A detailed internal report later showed that at least 11 square feet of carbon fiber had delaminated—meaning the bonds between layers had separated.
This time, Rush couldn’t ignore the data.
The hull that was meant to last for 10,000 dives to the Titanic had made fewer than 50—and only three to 4,000 meters.
It would have to be scrapped, and the Titanic missions would be delayed for yet another year.
When Rush shared the news with GeekWire a few days later, however, he blamed the delay on legal complications with Titan’s support vessel.
It’s true that OceanGate ran into issues with maritime law, says one former employee: “The lie is that it was not the reason we delayed.”
AFTER THE CRACK was found in Titan’s hull, OceanGate started searching for a new carbon-fiber contractor.
By early 2020, many OceanGate engineers had been laid off or had left the company, insiders say.
Tony Nissen was out, and a team that had once numbered more than 20 was reduced to just a handful.
“Stockton never really wanted an engineering team, but he needed somebody to build it,” says one insider.
“We were down to a skeleton team,” says another.
Rush then announced that the company had inked a partnership with NASA to “collaborate on the development, manufacturing, and testing” of a new carbon-fiber cylinder.
(Covid-19 had other plans, shutting down NASA for months.
Ultimately, the agency told ABC, “NASA did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities.”)
The new hull would instead be made by two aerospace firms in Washington state, Electroimpact and Janicki Industries.
Electroimpact laid the carbon fibers, and Janicki cured the material in its ovens, confirmed one former employee.
Electroimpact did not provide a response to questions about its role, and Janicki declined to comment.
This time, OceanGate had two scale models made, which were once again tested at the University of Washington.
Once again, the models imploded early, possibly due to warping of the hulls during manufacturing, says a former employee.
OceanGate scrambled to solve the issue.
One idea: Rather than cure all the layers at once, they would cure the hull in stages.
Electroimpact would wind about 100 layers of the hull, then ship it to Janicki to cure and settle.
Then Janicki would send the hull back to Electroimpact to repeat the process.
They were running out of time, so they went for it—skipping tests of the new procedure on samples and going straight to manufacturing the second hull.
“The first time we did multiple cures was when we did the full hull,” says one former employee.
The new hull was finished by January 2021.
It passed pressure testing, similar to what was done at the University of Washington, but at a facility in Maryland that could accommodate the full-size cylinder.
OceanGate’s engineers now needed to integrate the new hull with the rest of Titan.
But Titan’s two titanium domes were still attached to each end of the old hull, sitting on titanium rings glued to the carbon fiber with aerospace-grade epoxy adhesive.
Commissioning new titanium interface rings and domes was ruled “an absolute no” by Rush, one former employee says, because of the extra cost and delay.
The company that made the original titanium components told WIRED that it did not make new rings for Rush, and three former employees say that OceanGate did, in fact, salvage and reuse the originals.
But staff had difficulty working out how to separate the old hull from the interface rings without damaging even a sliver of titanium.
Gaps or bumps could have weakened the join with the new hull, say the sources.
On dives, the hull and the rings needed to compress under pressure in perfect harmony.
“I can’t imagine a situation where you could reuse the titanium rings,” Wright, the independent engineer, says.
OceanGate somehow managed it.
By February 2021, photos of the newly reconstructed Titan were popping up on OceanGate’s Facebook page and other social media.
After the implosion in 2023, one ex-employee looked back at these and noticed an unexpected addition: The company had added metal lifting points to both interface rings, apparently to provide a new way to hoist Titan into and out of the water.
The addition of the lifting rings, reported by WIRED for the first time, was confirmed by a former employee who saw the engineering drawings, and by another source.
Previously, OceanGate had lifted Titan using a sling beneath the sub to avoid putting stress on the critical joins between the rings and the carbon-fiber hull.
As far back as 2017, when the original Titan was first shipped to OceanGate, Nissen had warned the operations team to use only the sling: “The titanium cannot take load/tension.”
“Lifting points are a very serious part of a pressure vessel design and must be considered carefully, tested, and qualified,” says Will Kohnen.
“Any lifting arrangement may impose loads and stresses into the pressure vessel, and this must be mitigated by analysis and test.” It is unclear whether such analysis or tests were carried out.
OceanGate originally used a sling system to lower its sub into the water, shown here.
Photograph: courtesy of a former oceangate employee
The diving season was about to begin, and after three years of expensive delays, OceanGate desperately needed income from the Titanic missions (whose tickets now cost $125,000 per person).
“We were running out of time,” says a former OceanGate employee.
Titan had only a few relatively shallow dives in Puget Sound before the company put it on a truck and sent it all the way across Canada to Newfoundland, the port closest to the Titanic wreck.
On July 13, 2021, OceanGate’s Titan made its first successful dive to the Titanic, with Rush serving as the pilot.
“We had to overcome tremendous engineering, operational, business, and finally Covid-19 challenges to get here, and I am so proud of this team and grateful for the support of our many partners,” Rush said in a press release.
After the 2021 expedition, OceanGate was flush with success.
The company announced plans for the following year’s expedition to document the wreck “in more detail than ever before” and urging “aspiring mission specialists” to get in touch.
The successes and warm media coverage continued in 2022.
OceanGate was profiled by CBS Sunday Morning, which accompanied one of the missions that summer.
When reporter David Pogue noticed how improvised the setup on the sub was, Rush reassured him.
“The pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all, because that’s where we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington.
Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go.
You’re still going to be safe.” The rest of Pogue’s mission was sort of a farce—the sub got lost, things broke—but he came back safely.
That’s not what happened the following year.
In June 2023, five eager people got ready to dive back down to the Titanic.
They were Rush; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a deep-sea explorer; and three paying passengers: a businessman named Hamish Harding and a father-son duo, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood.
On June 18, they sealed Titan and dove.
Within two hours, the support ship had lost contact with them.
Their disappearance set off a media frenzy.
People speculated how long the crew might be able survive without power or aid.
A massive search-and-rescue operation spent four days combing the sea before finding debris from the sub.
The US Navy later confirmed it had detected loud sounds “consistent with an implosion” shortly after contact with Titan ended.
OceanGate ceased its commercial and exploration activities a few weeks later.
The US Coast Guard is currently leading an international investigation into the deaths.
Several former employees said they were neither shocked nor surprised at OceanGate’s deadly accident.
Three had left the company on safety grounds, and two separately described Titan as a ticking time bomb.
One former employee remembers preparing Titan for multiple successful Titanicmissions, prior to 2023.
“I put my heart and soul into building that sub,” he says.
“Many, many hours inside the sub, outside the sub, building and testing it. She was my baby.”
Each time Titan was about to dip beneath the waves, he would pat her hull lightly.
“I’d say, ‘Come on back to me baby, you’ll make it, you can do it.’ And when she’d come back up to the surface, I’d say, ‘Good job. You got everyone back up safe.’”
Until one day, she didn’t.
Now the bottom of the North Atlantic is littered with more evidence of human hubris, tiny pieces of a plastic video-game controller nestling among the barnacle-encrusted gold fixtures of the Titanic.
Both vessels were at the cutting edge of technology, both exemplars of safety in the eyes of their overconfident creators.
And in both cases, their passengers paid the price.
Links :
- DailyMail : Hollywood director James Cameron reveals his theory on the doomed Titan submersible and slams Coast Guard investigation / Terrifying Titan communication logs that 'detailed chaos between the doomed submersible and its mother ship' revealed to be fake following year-long investigation
- The Independant : How doomed Titan sub ‘solved’ Titanic mystery a year before fatal implosion
- NYTimes : Frightening Log From Titan Submersible’s Fatal Dive Declared a Fake
- Interesting Engineering : Titan submersible transcript proven fake, passengers were unaware of danger
- GeoGraage blog : The Titan submersible disaster was years in the making ... / The last 96 hours of the Titan tragedy / Titanic sub: Safety concerns raised about missing ...
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
The end of El Niño might make the weather even more extreme
Palms are hit by strong wind and rain from Hurricane Hilary in the deserts of Southern California on August 20, 2023.
Photograph: David Mcnew/Getty Images
From Wired by Sachi Mulkey
Summers keep getting hotter, and the consequences are impossible to miss: In the summer of 2023, the northern hemisphere experienced its hottest season in 2,000 years.
Canada’s deadliest wildfires on record bathed skylines in smoke from Minnesota to New York.
In Texas and Arizona, hundreds of people lost their lives to heat, and in Vermont, flash floods caused damages equivalent to those from a hurricane.
Forecasts suggest that this year’s upcoming “danger season” has its own catastrophes in store.
On May 23, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season could be the most prolific yet.
A week earlier, they released a seasonal map predicting blistering temperatures across almost the entire country.
The driving forces behind these projections include the alternating Pacific Ocean climate patterns known as El Niño and La Niña, which can create huge shifts in temperature and precipitation across the North and South American continents.
After almost a year of El Niño, La Niña is expected to take the reins sometime during the upcoming summer months.
As climate change cooks the planet and the Pacific shifts between these two cyclical forces, experts say the conditions could be ripe for more extreme weather events.
“We’ve always had this pattern of El Niño, La Niña.
Now it’s happening on top of a warmer world,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, an environmental data science nonprofit.
“We need to be ready for the types of extremes that have not been tested in the past.”
During an El Niño, shifting trade winds allow a thick layer of warm surface water to form in the Pacific Ocean, which, in turn, transfers a huge amount of heat into the atmosphere.
La Niña, the opposite cycle, brings back cooler ocean waters.
But swinging between the two can also raise thermostats: Summers between the phases have higher-than-average temperatures.
According to Hausfather, a single year of El Niño brings the same heat that roughly a decade of human-caused warming can permanently add to the planet.
“I think it gives us a little sneak peek of what’s in store,” he said.
Since the World Meteorological Organization declared the start of the current El Niño on July 4, 2023, it’s been almost a year straight of record-breaking temperatures.
According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, there’s a 61 percent chance that this year could be even hotter than the last, spelling danger for areas prone to deadly heat waves during the summer months.
An estimated 2,300 people in the US died due to heat-related illnesses in 2023, and researchers say the real number is probably higher.
All this heat has also settled into the oceans, creating more than a year of superhot surface temperatures and bleaching more than half of the planet’s coral reefs.
It also provides potential fuel for hurricanes, which form as energy is sucked up vertically into the atmosphere.
Normally, trade winds scatter heat and humidity across the water’s surface and prevent these forces from building up in one place.
But during La Niña, cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean weaken high-altitude winds in the Atlantic that would normally break up storms, allowing hurricanes to more readily form.
“When that pattern in the Pacific sets up, it changes wind patterns around the world,” said Matthew Rosencrans, a lead forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
“When it’s strong, it can be the dominant signal on the entire planet.”
This year’s forecast is especially dangerous, as a likely swift midsummer transition to La Niña could combine with all that simmering ocean water.
NOAA forecasters expect these conditions to brew at least 17 storms big enough to get a name, roughly half of which could be hurricanes.
Even a hurricane with relatively low wind speeds can dump enough water to cause catastrophic flooding hundreds of miles inland.
“It’s important to think of climate change as making things worse,” said Andrew Dessler, climate scientist at Texas A&M University.
Although human-caused warming won’t directly increase the frequency of hurricanes, he said, it can make them more destructive.
“It’s a question of how much worse it’s going to get,” he said.
Over the past 10 months, El Niño helped create blistering temperatures in some parts of the United States, drying out the land.
Drought-stricken areas are more vulnerable to severe flooding, as periods without precipitation mean rainfall is likely to be more intense when it finally arrives, and soils may be too dry to soak up water.
As desiccated land and soaring temperatures dry out vegetation, the stage is set for wildfires.
While the National Interagency Fire Center expects lower-than-average odds of a big blaze in California this year, in part due to El Niño bringing unusually high rainfall to the state, other places may not be so lucky.
The agency’s seasonal wildfire risk map highlights Hawaii, which suffered the country’s deadliest inferno partly as a result of a persistent drought in Maui last August.
Canada, which also experienced its worst fire season last summer, could be in for more trouble following its warmest-ever winter.
This May, smoke from hundreds of wildfires in Alberta and British Columbia had already begun to seep across the Canadian border into Midwestern states.
“We are exiting the climate of the 20th century, and we’re entering a new climate of the 21st century,” Dessler said.
Unfortunately, our cities were built for a range of temperatures and weather conditions that don’t exist anymore.
To get ready for hurricanes, Rosencrans said people who live in states along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Ocean should go to government disaster preparedness websites to find disaster kit checklists and advice about forming an emergency plan.
“Thinking about it now, rather than when the storm is bearing down on you, is going to save you a ton of time, energy, and stress,” he said.
Links :
Monday, June 10, 2024
Navy expeditionary forces eye counter-drone, offensive unmanned ops
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Sailors from EOD Mobile Unit 5's Expeditionary Mine Countermeasures (ExMCM) company 5-1 recover a Mk-18 Mod 2 unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) following a mine hunting mission in Apra Harbor, Guam, on Dec. 6, 2023.(Lt. Dustin Lawson/US Navy)
Navy expeditionary forces eye counter-drone, offensive unmanned ops
The
Navy Expeditionary Combat Command enables the rest of the fleet,
providing port security, naval construction, mine clearance, salvage diving and more.
But as the community thinks about how to modernize to keep up with evolving technology and unpredictable threats, it’s mulling adding a new tool to the toolkit: operating offensive, lethal drones.
Rear Adm. Brad Andros, the commander of NECC, told Defense News he’s been tasked with drawing up ideas for the “NECC of the future,” in line with a broader Navy Force Design 2045 effort.
Using the Maritime Expeditionary Security Forces as an example, he said over the last two decades they evolved from a riverine force into one that now conducts escort missions and port security operations.
“They’ve got to develop into creating a bastion for the ships and submarines” on patrol or even in combat overseas.
The 2000 attack on Arleigh Burke-class destroyer Cole highlighted the importance of scanning the waters for asymmetric threats — in that case, a bomb-laden small boat — but current events show this maritime security force will have to keep an eye out for unmanned boats as well as unmanned drones in the air and unmanned craft under the water, too.
If the Maritime Expeditionary Security Forces will have to become counter-unmanned experts to conduct their mission, “while I’m at it, why don’t I just be able to do the offensive side of it as well?”
But as the community thinks about how to modernize to keep up with evolving technology and unpredictable threats, it’s mulling adding a new tool to the toolkit: operating offensive, lethal drones.
Rear Adm. Brad Andros, the commander of NECC, told Defense News he’s been tasked with drawing up ideas for the “NECC of the future,” in line with a broader Navy Force Design 2045 effort.
Using the Maritime Expeditionary Security Forces as an example, he said over the last two decades they evolved from a riverine force into one that now conducts escort missions and port security operations.
“They’ve got to develop into creating a bastion for the ships and submarines” on patrol or even in combat overseas.
The 2000 attack on Arleigh Burke-class destroyer Cole highlighted the importance of scanning the waters for asymmetric threats — in that case, a bomb-laden small boat — but current events show this maritime security force will have to keep an eye out for unmanned boats as well as unmanned drones in the air and unmanned craft under the water, too.
If the Maritime Expeditionary Security Forces will have to become counter-unmanned experts to conduct their mission, “while I’m at it, why don’t I just be able to do the offensive side of it as well?”
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Data captured by unmanned aircraft systems is examined during an Expeditionary Airfield Damage Repair (ExR-ADR) exercise at Marine Corps Outlying Field Oak Grove in North Carolina, June 23, 2022, as Naval Construction Group 2 and other sailors map runway damage and the location of unexploded ordnance.(Jeffrey Pierce/US Navy)
Andros said this led to a larger conversation about NECC’s role, partially inspired by current events.
“Taking what we’re seeing in the Black Sea, taking what we’re seeing in the Red Sea: how do we become that dilemma-creator?” he said.
Ukrainian forces have been able to alter what activities Russian ships can conduct in the Black Sea based on their shore-based drone operations.
Similarly, the Houthi forces ashore in Yemen have severely restricted shipping in the Red Sea due to their shore-based attacks.
In both cases, the forces didn’t need to be at sea on expensive ships; they have been effective controlling a confined body of water from land.
Andros said the Marine Corps is pursuing its own version of this with the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations concept.
He said NECC wants to find a way for its force to be additive to what the Marines are doing.
If done right, though, he said NECC could free up a capital ship from having to protect a confined body of water, assuming the U.S.
had the right agreements in place to put NECC forces on the ground.
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U.S. Navy Sailors with Maritime Security Squadron Eight, currently deployed to Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, make their way home after a seaward security mission in the Gulf of Tadjoura, on March 14, 2023.
(MC1 Randi Brown/US Navy)
(MC1 Randi Brown/US Navy)
Andros acknowledged this is a departure from NECC’s traditional work, but it may be necessary to have offensive capabilities in order to adequately create a safe haven for U.S. ships and subs overseas.
Navy Expeditionary Combat Command today is “built on protect: law enforcement and patrolling,” the admiral said.
To go after these offensive capabilities, he said the command would have to look into what technical skills the sailors would need for this work, ensure the right ratings and structures are in place to man these units, and realign resources to equip these sailors with offensive drones and other systems.
“It’s not a wholesale change, but it’s enough of a tweak that it’s got to be very deliberate, and it’s going to probably be a good five- to seven-year process to get after it,” Andros said.
Equipment reset
As part of the modernization effort, Andros is looking at NECC’s mismatched gear and considering resetting the inventory.
The force has done a lot of acquisition outside the formal capability development process so it could move fast, he said.
It typically bought things that were commercial-off-the-shelf, not expensive, and in small quantities.
As a result, there’s not always commonality throughout the whole NECC force, creating a particular challenge for the sailors tasked with maintaining them.
Asked what he wanted from industry as NECC considers this equipment reset, Andros said the two most important things are that capabilities are packaged into small form factors, and that unit-level sailors can repair themselves.
Andros anticipates increasingly operating in locations without a mature logistics infrastructure, which makes the ability for the sailors to fix their own gear pivotal.
He noted that configuration management — ensuring all the radios are common, all the drones are common, and so on — is important for maintainability and one of the reasons NECC is considering this gear reset.
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Sailors onboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Porter conduct a VLS Rearm event alongside Military Sealift Command dry cargo ship USNS William Mclean during Large-Scale Exercise 2023 on Aug. 3, 2023.
(Interior Communications Electrician 3rd Class Hailey Servedio/US Navy)
(Interior Communications Electrician 3rd Class Hailey Servedio/US Navy)
Rearming ships at sea
NECC already has the ability to reload missiles into ships’ vertical launching system cells from ashore or from a barge at the pier, through its Navy Expeditionary Logistics Support Group.
But the idea of being able to reload VLS cells at sea has taken on a new importance in the last year, after Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro highlighted it as a key gap the Navy needed to fill to prepare for a potential war in the Pacific.
So expeditionary reload teams from NECC have been called in as subject matter experts during testing, including an August 2023 demonstration involving destroyer Porter and Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship William McLean.
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Sailors onboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Porter guide a missile canister with stimulated ordinance during a VLS Rearm event as part of Large-Scale Exercise (LSE 2023) on Aug. 3, 2023.
(Interior Communications Electrician 3rd Class Hailey Servedio/US Navy)
This took place during the Large Scale Exercise 2023 event, which Andros said was important.
“At the tactical level — the humans doing it, taking an object, swinging it over and putting it in — we’re good,” he said, even if the specific systems being tested as part of Del Toro’s effort are new.
But who would command and control this evolution — who would call for the rearm-at-sea to take place, who would be in charge of safety, who would actually operate the cranes and more — still hasn’t been decided.
Incorporating this evolution into a major fleet exercise allowed fleet leaders to start working through some of those questions, he said.
As for whether his NECC sailors would ultimately be the ones to embark on Military Sealift Command ships and conduct the rearming themselves, or if MSC would train its crews to operate the cranes, Andros said, “either way is fine by me, just as long as whoever does it is certified to operate the equipment.”
Links :
- CIMSEC : A concept of operations for the US Navy hybrid fleet
- Maritime Executive : Op-Ed: Unmanned Naval Vessels Will Take Long-Term Development
Sunday, June 9, 2024
Image of the week : the map of famous pirates, bucanneers & freebooters
From GeographicusDescription :
This is a 1938 Darby Harbold pictorial map of the world romanticizing the age of global piracy.
The map celebrates the 'luminaries' of the era, including Blackbeard, Jean Lafitte, and Samuel Burgess.
Pirate ships attack and conquer vessels on the open ocean throughout the world and then take their 'booty' and either bury it (banners proclaiming sites of buried treasure appear all over the world) or sell it.
Short histories of pirate exploits dot the map and provide some understanding of the era's most successful brigands.
Also, Harbold comments (in passing) on the different names given to pirates, such as 'buccaneers,' 'corsairs,' 'rovers,' and 'freebooters.'
The map celebrates the 'luminaries' of the era, including Blackbeard, Jean Lafitte, and Samuel Burgess.
Pirate ships attack and conquer vessels on the open ocean throughout the world and then take their 'booty' and either bury it (banners proclaiming sites of buried treasure appear all over the world) or sell it.
Short histories of pirate exploits dot the map and provide some understanding of the era's most successful brigands.
Also, Harbold comments (in passing) on the different names given to pirates, such as 'buccaneers,' 'corsairs,' 'rovers,' and 'freebooters.'
Harbold references the controversy surrounding Captain William Kidd, pirate or pirate-hunter?
Her short text states that some believe Kidd to have been unjustly accused of being a pirate because he threatened the business interests of wealthy English citizens.
Nonetheless, Kidd was tried and convicted of piracy and executed.
Perhaps this episode suggests that piracy is all in the eye of the beholder as it were, and is not as black and white as history suggests.
Nonetheless, Kidd was tried and convicted of piracy and executed.
Perhaps this episode suggests that piracy is all in the eye of the beholder as it were, and is not as black and white as history suggests.
The Geography of Piracy :
The map states that Madagascar and New York were the best markets for the pirates' ill-gotten gains.
An inset off the coast of New England focuses on the region and emphasizes the pirate's affinity for cruising off its coast in the summer.
However, Boston proved 'unpopular with pirates' because they 'disliked her gallows.'
An inset off the coast of New England focuses on the region and emphasizes the pirate's affinity for cruising off its coast in the summer.
However, Boston proved 'unpopular with pirates' because they 'disliked her gallows.'
This point is reinforced in inset by the small icon of a gallows in Boston.
Specific islands were favored by specific pirates, while others were plundered.
An inset of the West Indies in the lower-left corner details pirate activities in the Caribbean, notorious for piracy.
This area included the fabled Spanish Main, where treasure galleons carrying gold and other minerals mined in the New World set sail for the mother country.
These fortunes were too good for many pirates to overlook, and thus a deadly game of cat and mouse ensued.
Specific islands were favored by specific pirates, while others were plundered.
An inset of the West Indies in the lower-left corner details pirate activities in the Caribbean, notorious for piracy.
This area included the fabled Spanish Main, where treasure galleons carrying gold and other minerals mined in the New World set sail for the mother country.
These fortunes were too good for many pirates to overlook, and thus a deadly game of cat and mouse ensued.
Publication History and Census :
This map was designed by Darby Harbold and published by the Lebaron-Bonney Company in 1938.
Since the Lebaron-Bonney Company produced their maps as main-order products, it is likely that not many were made.
We are aware of only two other known examples, which are part of the collections at the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford University.
Since the Lebaron-Bonney Company produced their maps as main-order products, it is likely that not many were made.
We are aware of only two other known examples, which are part of the collections at the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford University.
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