Saturday, July 20, 2024

Ocean Exploration with Saildrone and Norbit Subsea


How Saildrone's Voyager USV uses NORBIT's high-resolution multibeam sonar system for detailed seabed mapping.
The WINGHEAD sonar provides accurate data for informed decisions and scientific advancements in ocean exploration.
This technology is crucial for coastal surveys, offshore wind development, marine research, and environmental monitoring.

Friday, July 19, 2024

Are weather forecasts better with artificial intelligence?

A stratospheric forecast diagram of Europe from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
Credit: European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)


From MeteoTechInt by

The Finnish Meteorological Institute produces real-time forecast data on weather, sea, climate and space conditions and their impacts.
Physical weather, sea and climate models are a key part of the forecast value chain.
Statistical methods, including artificial intelligence (AI), have long been part of this chain.
AI has been used to enhance the use of weather observations in forecast models, for example, or to create new impact forecasts so that they identify links between meteorological phenomena and their impacts.

The atmosphere can already be modeled with data-driven AI models.
For example, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has developed a prototype of a data-driven global weather model that is no longer directly based on physical equations but on dependencies that the AI model has learned from a long data time series of atmospheric history, produced with a traditional weather model.





In recent years, large technology companies have taken steps forward in the development of data-driven weather forecasting methods.
The advantage of AI forecasts is their speed, compared to traditional methods.
The pre-trained AI forecast can be calculated much faster than the weather model forecast requiring a supercomputer.
In terms of quality, the weather forecasts of AI models have been at the same level as forecasts of weather models, or even better, for a few parameters and on some indicators.
The amount of data available is large and computing technology has developed

What has enabled the rapid development of data-driven forecasts? Firstly, the amount of data available nowadays is immense and it is easier to access.
For example, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) produces global re-analysis data, based on weather models and observations over several decades, which is well suited for AI methods’ training material.
Weather observations and data produced by weather models are the most important fuel in the AI forecast value chain.

Secondly, computing technology based on graphics processing units (GPU) that is well suited for training AI methods has become more common.
However, there are still shortcomings and development potential in AI forecasts.
The locally accurate re-analysis data needed to predict extreme weather phenomena, such as storms and thunderstorms, is not yet available to the same extent as ‘sparser’ global data.
The number of parameters produced by AI forecasts is also limited, compared to forecasts produced by weather models.
To mend both of these shortcomings, the inclusion of new data sources in the training of AI methods will be a key development target.

Will AI change weather forecasting?


AI has the potential to speed up weather forecasting.
Artificial intelligence can also make it possible to integrate weather impacts, such as energy production or the amount of storm damage, into the weather forecast in a completely new way.
Weather observations and weather models capable of local accuracy, which are already in operational use by the FMI and other national meteorological services, are likely to play a key role in producing new training data.
In addition, the enormous speed of data-driven forecasting methods attracts research into how the uncertainty of the forecast could be assessed more cost-effectively, using data-driven methods compared to the current ensemble forecasting technology.

However, AI models and their quality do not happen in a vacuum; they are only as good as the data used for training the methods.
Re-analysis data and the underlying weather models must continue to be developed to improve the quality of data-driven forecasting methods.
Creating and updating data, as well as training AI forecasting methods, are all computationally highly intensive activities that will continue to require supercomputer capacity.

Depicted is an eight-day forecast of 10-meter winds and surface pressure
using HR-Stormer running at 30-km.
(Video by Troy Arcomano/Argonne National Laboratory.)
 
It is clear that the new possibilities offered by AI will also change weather forecasting, but the possibilities and limitations of the methods and data must be understood.
The pace of development of artificial intelligence methods and their application is tremendous right now, so it is challenging to assess how great the ultimate transformation will be.

Together with its European partners, the FMI is contributing to this transformation, by developing and testing data-driven forecasting methods.
At the moment, it seems that the best results can be achieved by combining observations, physical models and AI methods to achieve more accurate and especially faster forecasts.
Investments in methodological research, as well as data and computing infrastructure, are essential to achieve the expected benefits.
 
Links :

Thursday, July 18, 2024

Spain (IHM) layer update in the GeoGarage platform

225 nautical charts based on rasterized ENC updated

Confrontations in South China Sea surge, raising fears a miscalculation could lead to conflict

Philippine Coast Guard personnel prepare rubber fenders after Chinese Coast Guard vessels blocked their way to a resupply mission at the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea in March 2024.
Photograph: Adrian Portugal/Reuters


From The Guardian by Rebecca Ratcliffe

Vessels have been rammed, punctured with knives, damaged by water cannon and targeted by military-grade lasers.
Now the Philippines’ US ambassador has warned the aggression must be reduced to avoid conflict


Reports of aggressive and dangerous conduct by Chinese vessels in the fiercely contested South China Sea have surged over the past 17 months, as tensions mount in one of Asia’s biggest flashpoints.

Since February 2023, the Philippines has accused China of unsafe behaviour on at least 12 occasions, often within the water of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), according to Philippine government data compiled by the thinktank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which tracks incidents as part of its regional Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment.

It comes as the Philippines marked the eight-year anniversary of a Hague tribunal ruling that overwhelmingly backed the Philippines, and rejected China’s sweeping claims over the South China Sea.

The Philippine ambassador to the United States, Jose Manuel Romualdez, told the Guardian tensions and “aggressive movements” needed to be reduced to “avoid a situation where something really major, conflict, can happen”.

Guardian graphic.
Source: Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans.
Note: the map shows economic exclusive zones as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, not the overlapping claims of individual countries
 
On Friday, the Philippines national security adviser, Eduardo Ano, said the country would not back down.
“We will continue to stand our ground and push back against coercion, interference, malign influence and other tactics that seek to jeopardise our security and stability,” Ano said.

Reported incidents include accusations China has rammed Philippine vessels, used water cannon on them, damaging their ships, deployed amilitary-grade laser against its coast guard, and, most recently, used knives to puncture its rubber boats.

Previous years might see fewer or more minor incidents recorded, although Meia Nouwens, senior fellow for Chinese security and defence policy and head of the China Programme at IISS, said collating data on confrontations was difficult as it was possible that some incidents were not publicly disclosed by past governments.

The frequency of encounters between Chinese and Philippine coast guard or navy personnel that involve contact is also higher than in recent years, when reports of rammings or water cannon deployment were rare, and analysts say the current tensions have risen to levels not seen over the past 10 years.

“The recent tensions have been much more physical, there’s been a lot more contact between Philippine and Chinese ships,” said Harrison Prétat, deputy director and fellow with the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, who added that while there have previously been spikes in tensions between Vietnam and China, the Philippines is a US treaty ally.
“One factor that makes this situation perhaps even more concerning is that there is this treaty obligation of the United States to the Philippines.”

The US has pledged to defend Manila in the event of an armed attack, and as reported incidents become more frequent and more intense, there are growing concerns that a miscalculation could pull the US into direct confrontation with Beijing.

The dispute over the South China Sea is long-running and volatile, and China has for years been accused of aggressive acts against neighbouring country’s vessels.

China has repeatedly denied acting unprofessionally, saying its coast guard operates legally and with restraint.
However, video and images released by the Philippines coast guard has frequently appeared to support its allegations, as has independent media reporting.

Chinese Coast Guard vessels fire water cannon towards a Philippine resupply vessel in May 2024 on its way to Second Thomas Shoal.
Photograph: Adrian Portugal/Reuters


The South China Sea is one of the world’s most important trade routes, and a strategically important waterway, but it is at the centre of a fierce dispute.
Beijing claims the majority of the sea through a controversial demarcation known as the nine-dash line – despite a ruling by a Hague tribunal finding such claims to be without legal basis.
Its claims not only clash with those of the Philippines, but also Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

Dangerous confrontations have mostly occurred when Philippine vessels attempt to conduct resupply missions to a small contingent of troops based at Second Thomas Shoal, a submerged reef in the Spratly Islands that sits within the Philippines’ EEZ.
The soldiers are based at a rusting and dilapidated ship, BRP Sierra Madre, which was deliberately grounded at the shoal in 1999 by the Philippines to underline its claim to the shoal, and which continues to serve as an unlikely military outpost.

China has demanded the ship’s removal and argues that Manila’s resupply mission are trying to deliver construction materials to reinforce the ship.

Analysts say Beijing has essentially imposed a blockade on the Sierra Madre, which is severely degraded after more than two decades at sea, and warn China could take the shoal in the event the ship crumbles.

Romualdez said the Philippines “cannot and will not” abandon its presence at the shoal, but he added that its coast guard was committed to acting with restraint. 
 
The BRP Sierra Madre, a marooned transport ship which Philippine Marines live on as a military outpost, in the disputed Second Thomas Shoal.
Photograph: Erik de Castro/Reuters


Deliveries had been “misconstrued as construction material”, he said, adding the purpose was not offensive in nature but intended to make the Sierra Madre safe for those who are based there.
“It’s the typhoon season right now, a big typhoon can very well happen, and then our soldiers who are there can obviously be in harm’s way,” he said.
Facing China’s ‘monster’ ship

In addition to unsafe conduct, the Philippines has also accused China of wider intimidation tactics, including the anchoring of a 12,000-ton Chinese coast guard, known as “the monster”, due to its size, inside Manila’s EEZ, just 730 metres (800 yards) away from a Philippine coast guard ship at Sabina shoal.
A state’s EEZ extends 370km (200 nautical miles) from the coast, and it has special rights to exploit resources and construct in this area.

In June, China also introduced a new regulation that empowers its coast guard to detain foreigners accused of trespassing, and detain them for up to 60 days without trial, a move that has created greater anxiety among Filipino fishing communities.

 Beijing claims the majority of the South China Sea through a controversial demarcation known as the nine-dash line – despite a ruling by a Hague tribunal finding such claims to be without legal basis.
Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock


The Philippines has insisted it will not relent in defending its waters, however it faces a difficult decision about how to continue resupplying the Sierra Madre.

“It’s getting more and more clear that this is a blockade,” said Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project at Stanford University.
“China’s got almost a semi-permanent [presence], they’ve their own small boats in and around the Sierra Madre, with a tight cordon.”

Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos said last month that if any Filipino serviceman or citizen were killed by a wilful act in the South China Sea, this would be “very, very close to what we define as an act of war, and therefore, we would respond accordingly”.
 
Links :

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Polynesians steering by the stars met Native Americans long before Europeans arrived

1789 Djurberg Map of Polynesia with indigenous name for Australia (Ulimaroa) 
This important 1789 Djurberg map of Australia and Polynesia is one of the very few maps to use the Indigenous terms for Australia and New Zealand: Ulimaora (Australia), Tavai-Poenammoo (New Zealand South Island), and Ealiei-Nomauwe (North Island).
All three of these terms are extracted from accounts of Capt. James Cook's epic voyages of discovery.

From Science by Lizzie Wade
 
Study of modern DNA shakes up ideas of when and where contact happenedIt opens our minds.

By about 1200 C.E., Polynesians were masters of oceanic exploration, roaming 7000 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean in outrigger canoes.
Guided by subtle changes of wind and waves, the paths of migrating birds, bursts of light from bioluminescent plankton, and the position of the stars, they reached and settled islands from New Zealand to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, the closest Polynesian island to South America.

So it's natural to wonder: Did these world-class explorers make it the last 3800 kilometers to South America?
A genomic study of more than 800 modern Polynesians and Native Americans suggests they did.

The work strengthens earlier evidence that somewhere—perhaps on the northern coast of South America—the two groups met and mixed well before the era of European colonialism.
And it shakes up the most popular model of where Native American genes first took root in Polynesia, shifting the focus from Rapa Nui to islands farther west.

Polynesians on Nuku Hiva, an island in the North Marquesas, carry traces of Native American ancestry.
Dmitri Alexander/National Geographic
 
"This is an excellent, exciting study," says Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropological geneticist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz.
Expanding genomic research to islands beyond Rapa Nui "was what was missing from the whole picture."

Earlier hints of contact between the two regions included the sweet potato, which was domesticated in the Andes but grown and eaten all over Polynesia for hundreds of years before Europeans arrived.
And a 2014 study of 27 modern people from Rapa Nui found they had Native American ancestry dating back to between 1300 C.E.
and 1500 C.E.—at least 200 years before the first Europeans landed there in 1722 C.E.
But a 2017 ancient DNA study, led by Fehren-Schmitz, found no sign of Native American ancestry in five people who lived on Rapa Nui before and after European contact.

Population geneticist Andrés Moreno-Estrada and anthropologist Karla Sandoval, both at Mexico's National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity, traveled to Rapa Nui in 2014 and invited the community to participate in a study.
They analyzed genome-wide data from 166 people from the island.
Then they combined those data with genomic analyses of 188 Polynesian people from 16 other islands, whose genetic samples had been collected in the 1980s.

"It's an amazing data set," says Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, a population geneticist at the University of Lausanne who led the 2014 work that found evidence for contact.
 
X.Liu/ Science
 
Moreno-Estrada, Sandoval, and their team found that people on many islands had both Polynesian and European ancestry, reflecting their colonial histories.
But they were also able to detect a small amount of Native American ancestry in people from the eastern Polynesian islands of Palliser, the Marquesas, Mangareva, and Rapa Nui.
The Native American sequences were short and nearly identical—seemingly a legacy of one long-ago meeting with a Native American group, rather than sustained contact over generations, Moreno-Estrada says.

Comparing those sequences with genomes from people from 15 Indigenous groups from the Pacific coast of Latin America, researchers found most similarity to the Zenu, an Indigenous group from Colombia, the team reports today in Nature.

Analyses of the length of the Native American sequences show this ancestry appeared first on Fatu Hiva in the South Marquesas roughly 28 generations ago, which would date it to about 1150 C.E.
That's about when the island was settled by Polynesians, raising the possibility the contact happened even earlier.
The genetic legacy of that mixing was then carried by Polynesian voyagers as they settled other islands, including Rapa Nui.

Where exactly the first encounter took place, the team can't say.
Modern Latin American fishermen lost at sea have been known to drift all the way to Polynesian islands.
"It could have been one raft lost in the Pacific," Moreno-Estrada says.

But it's more likely that Polynesians traveled to the northern coast of South America, says Keolu Fox, a genome scientist at UC San Diego.
Polynesian voyagers frequently traveled between islands and could have journeyed to South America and back, perhaps multiple times, Fox says.
"In the process, these Polynesians bring back the sweet potato, and they also bring back a small fragment of Native American DNA" from relationships on the mainland.
"The ocean is not a barrier" for Polynesians, he says.

Fehren-Schmitz and other researchers agree contact is likely, but stress that only ancient DNA can provide direct evidence of an encounter.
But DNA degrades quickly in the tropics—and Polynesian communities that remember being disrespected by Western scientists in the past may be reluctant to grant permission for genetic studies of their ancestors, says Fox, who is Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian).
To move forward, he says, researchers need to deeply engage on an ongoing basis with descendant communities on many islands.

For now, "This study shows us a new path to follow," says Francisco Torres Hochstetter, an archaeologist at the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum in Hanga Roa on Rapa Nui.
"It opens our minds."

Links :

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

A subsea cable went missing. Was Russia to blame ?


Illustration by Irene Suosalo

From Bloomberg by Jordan Robertson and Drake Bennett

Norway has always relied on the sea.
Fish long dominated the country’s diet, and in the 19th century the bloody harvest from Norwegian whalers provided much of the world’s lamp oil.
Then came the discovery of an even more lucrative source of energy in the depths: massive petroleum and natural gas deposits in Norway’s sovereign waters, which turned it into the world’s most progressive petrostate.
All of this has left the country with a great interest in understanding what happens off its famously wrinkled coast.

That’s why the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research exists.
Headquartered in the city of Bergen on Norway’s southwestern coast, the government institute’s 1,100 employees monitor the health of the country’s salmon and cod stocks, measure the environmental impact of deep-sea drilling platforms and offshore wind farms, and chart how climate change is altering the northern oceans.
One of its acoustic engineers, Guosong Zhang, works out of an office cluttered with cables and devices and computers of various vintages, or on one of the institute’s eight ships, spending weeks at a time at sea.


Watch: Is Russia Waging War Under the Seas?

Born in Norway and educated in China, Zhang is brusquely matter-of-fact in a way that feels true to both cultures—in conversation, he doesn’t fill silences.
Much of his work involves a set of five powerful microphones strung along a 31-mile cable on the floor of the Norwegian Sea called the Lofoten-Vesterålen Ocean Observatory.
Known as LoVe to the researchers who run and maintain it, it’s mostly a scientific tool, but it’s also used by Norway’s military, which removes sensitive information before releasing the rest to the public.
The government is vague about how it uses the data but acknowledges it could serve to identify specific ships in the area, whether those of Norway’s own military, its NATO allies or its adversaries.
That also makes it an unorthodox part of the surveillance apparatus monitoring the increasingly provocative activities of Norway’s neighbor to the east, Russia.


Zhang.
Photographer: Benjamin Fredriksen/NRK


The cable that carries the data from the microphones back to shore is a capillary in a global circulatory system.
Hundreds of underwater communications cables circle the planet.
Fiber optics jacketed in steel and plastic to protect against breakage and corrosion, they’re often barely an inch in diameter.
They trace coastlines, traverse oceans and carry 99% of the world’s international data.
They are at once vital and vulnerable.

In April 2021, Zhang was just back from Easter break when he noticed the LoVe observatory had gone quiet.
It wasn’t unusual for the cable to have problems—the isolated northern region where it leaves the shore often has power outages.
But when Zhang rebooted the computers remotely, there still wasn’t any data coming in.
When he contacted technicians from the IT company that had installed the equipment, they didn’t have any luck either.

That meant the problem probably lay out at sea.
Zhang hired engineering firms to do various tests of the cable’s electrical and optical systems; they eventually zeroed in on a segment some 17 miles offshore.
It was just past one of the cable’s relay units, which serve to amplify the light pulses carrying information, ensuring the signal doesn’t die.
Finding out more would mean getting access to the equipment itself, an expensive and time-consuming process requiring specialized ships and trained operators of submersible drones—both in short supply in the Arctic from the spring through early fall, when oil and gas companies take advantage of the sea ice thaw to repair their equipment, and when the institute’s own research vessels are booked for fish population surveys and other expeditions.
So Zhang’s investigation stalled.

Finally, five months after the outage, Equinor ASA, Norway’s state-owned petroleum company and a partner on the observatory, informed the institute it would sponsor a mission to examine the cable.
The company offered Zhang and his colleagues the use of the Havila Subsea, a 321-foot-long support vessel Equinor had chartered for an unrelated job.

On Sept. 10, the researchers gathered around a computer in Bergen, watching a live video feed from one of the drones—a boxy 8,000-pound robot measuring 6 feet by 6 feet by 10 feet with a pair of hermit-crab-like arms.
As it descended, the glare of its lights caught krill jackknifing past its camera lens.
The observatory’s yellow data cable soon emerged out of the blue-green haze, then the relay unit: a van-size metal cage, also yellow, protecting the equipment inside.
At the approach of the submersible, fish that were sheltering inside the cage drifted lazily out.

Then the drone circled the cage, and Zhang had trouble believing what he saw.
The output side should have been identical to the unit’s input side—the same machinery, the same cable extending north toward the next relay unit.
But there was none of that.
The equipment on that side had been ripped out, and the 12-ton section of cable attached to it was missing.


Source: Lofoten-Vesterålen Ocean Observatory

“It had been there for three years, and suddenly it’s gone,” he recalls.
The cable hadn’t malfunctioned; it had disappeared.
Someone, or something, had taken it.

"There’s this conception that the ocean is quiet,” says Geir Pedersen, a physicist and the manager of the LoVe observatory.
He points out that Jacques Cousteaucalled his pioneering 1956 undersea documentary The Silent World.
But the ocean is actually noisy.
“When you start to look into it,” Pedersen says, “you see that everything makes sound, and sound is critical for the survival of everything that inhabits the ocean.” It’s also critical to how we’re coming to understand that world.
“One of the things about the ocean is that light doesn’t travel far underwater,” he says.
“Using cameras, you’re not able to see very much around you.
But listening, or sending out pulses of sound, then you’re able to truly see what happens underwater.” A growing, disruptive share of that noise comes from human activity.

The five microphones of the LoVe observatory are spaced along a curve that extends northwest on the seafloor from a tiny fishing village in far northwestern Norway called Hovden.
Because sound waves can travel hundreds or thousands of miles underwater, these sensitive mics—hydrophones, technically—can detect sounds in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
In his office in Bergen, Pedersen plays samples of the cacophony LoVe has captured: the reedy glissandos of humpback whales; a tanker ship propeller’s thrum; the hoarse, rhythmic roar of seismic air guns used to detect oil and gas deposits under the seabed.
From up toward the polar ice cap, the hydrophones record the steady drumbeat of icebergs crumbling into the water as they melt.


“Sound is critical for the survival of everything that inhabits the ocean,” Pedersen says. 
Photographer: Andrea Gjestvang/Bloomberg

Usually, when an undersea cable is damaged, it’s an accident or an act of nature.
A ship drops anchor in the wrong place; an undersea earthquake wrenches apart a cable.
Fishing trawlers dragging bottom nets are often to blame.
In February 2024, internet traffic in Africa slowed when Houthi rebels in Yemen hit a cargo ship with rockets, causing it to drag its anchor across three cables as it sank.

Sometimes, though, the cables themselves are targets.
In the early 1970s the US Navy and intelligence agencies successfully attached a giant recording device to an undersea Soviet cable in the Sea of Okhotsk—divers had to descend every month to change the tapes.
And more recently, cables and other pieces of undersea infrastructure have been damaged in the waters along NATO’s rim.

The modern world turns out to rely greatly on unprotected bits of equipment in remote places.
“We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe and the United States and Asia,” says Katarzyna Zysk, a professor of international relations and contemporary history at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo.
“This is a network that is extremely hard to surveil, to monitor and to protect.
This is infrastructure that is highly vulnerable to sabotage.”


The remote fishing village of Hovden in northwestern Norway.
Photographer: Benjamin Fredriksen/NRK

Completed in 2018 at a cost of $10 million, the LoVe observatory’s cable enters the ocean beneath a beach 600 miles north of Bergen in the Norwegian archipelago of Lofoten.
It’s a wild, stirring landscape of rock pinnacles and fjords.
In the fishing villages dotting the coast, colorful houses alternate with wooden racks called hjell, where cod cure in the open air.
The LoVe’s local caretakers, brothers Jan-Tore and Wilhelm Enoksen, are shark fishermen who live, with fewer than a dozen others, in nearby Hovden.
During a recent visit, Jan-Tore, 58, showed Bloomberg Businessweek a red wooden hut above the beach.
Inside, a rack of computer servers and several desktop PCs process the data from the cable’s sensors.
The caretaking job consists mainly of turning the power back on after winter storms, Jan-Tore says.
He and his brother, who’s a year younger, have never seen anyone suspicious, but if anyone did try to break in, they’re prepared: “We’d shoot them,” he deadpans, “with harpoons.”


Wilhelm Enoksen, one of the cable’s caretakers.
Photographer: Benjamin Fredriksen/NRK

From shore, the cable runs across a shallow coastal shelf before dropping into the Norwegian Sea’s depths.
There the Gulf Stream, intermingling with frigid, nutrient-rich currents from the Arctic, creates a rich spawning ground and a favored migration route for fish and whales.
Nestled in their own protective cages, the hydrophones placed along the way are roughly the dimensions of a handheld mic.
The sounds they pick up are augmented by other tools: echo sounders that ping off passing fish, profilers to gauge wave height, sensors that measure acidity, clarity and carbon dioxide levels.
All that information is sent back to shore, becoming the basis for a steady stream of research papers.

Other sounds picked up by the hydrophones garner less public discussion.
Norway and Russia share both a land border and the rich fishing waters of the Barents Sea.
In recent years, Norwegian officials have charged Russia with using its submarine fleet—one of the world’s largest—to surveil and threaten critical NATO subsea infrastructure.
Last year the Norwegian military released videos showing Russian nuclear attack subs patrolling off Norway’s coast and following the routes of undersea gas pipelines and telecommunications cables.


The red wooden hut above the beach in Hovden housing the observatory’s technical equipment.
Photographer: Tom Gibson


The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (the Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt, or FFI), which serves as the chief adviser to the Ministry of Defence and the Norwegian Armed Forces on defense-related science and technology research, was involved in the LoVe project from its earliest days, Pedersen says.
And while he says he doesn’t know how the military uses the information it scrubs from the LoVe feed, he notes that all ships have unique acoustic signatures that can be used to identify and track them.
Sea mines can even be programmed to detonate when vessels bearing specific acoustic signatures pass by.

In a statement, the FFI confirmed its involvement with the observatory, while emphasizing that its efforts focus not on detecting Russian vessels, but on obscuring the movements and acoustic signatures of its own military vessels and those of NATO allies.
The FFI scrubs any such incriminating information before the LoVe data is made available to the public.
“If there has been an exercise with Norwegian or allied ships nearby, we also do not publish data from the period the vessels have been there,” the institute specifies on its website.

In the fall of 2021, after determining that LoVe had lost a segment of cable, Zhang confronted the next question: Where was it? At that point he still thought that whatever happened had likely been inadvertent.
A fishing trawler’s net is often framed by weighty metal “doors” that keep it open as it drags through the water.
If one of those had snagged the cable by accident and pulled it out of place, the crew might not even have noticed.
Nonetheless, if Zhang could identify the ship and trace its path, he might have an idea of where to look for the missing equipment.

To do that, he contacted the Norwegian Coastal Administration and requested the automatic identification system (AIS) data of all ships that had been above that stretch of cable when it went dark on April 3, 2021.
(International law requires fishing vessels and other large ships to have transponders constantly transmitting their speed, location and other information.) Zhang imported those AIS results into a software program that let him create interactive maps charting each ship’s course on the morning of the incident.

The maps showed about a dozen ships.
Most of them had spent that April 3 tracing long arcs through a fishing ground a little to the southwest of the two relay units bracketing the missing segment.
But one ship, a 197-foot-long, Russian-flagged trawler called the Saami, had behaved differently.
Traveling at about 10 knots, it had passed back and forth over the LoVe cable at least four times.
“I saw this boat, only this one boat, cross the cable at this time,” Zhang says.
“I locked my suspicion on this one boat.” Once he’d narrowed his parameters to the span of time when the cable disappeared, the paths of the other ships dropped away on his computer screen, leaving just the tight scribble traced by the Saami.
At the precise moment the cable went dead, the ship was right above it.

In late November, Zhang got a chance to trace the Saami’s route in person.
With the Arctic winter beginning and oil and gas work slowing, he was able to book a drone operator and time on one of the institute’s own vessels, the G.O.
Sars
.
He and his colleagues took the ship out from Tromsø, a city of 78,000 inside the Arctic Circle, and headed for the map coordinates marked by the Saami’s AIS track from months before.


The Saami, photographed near the Barents Sea in 2023.
Photographer: Wolfgang Fricke


The team on the G.O. Sars was prepared for a long search.
Once they arrived at the first set of coordinates and deployed the ship’s drone, however, it came upon the missing cable almost immediately, six miles from its original location.
Watching over the shoulder of the operator, Zhang saw the yellow line emerge out of the drab seafloor just 18 minutes after the craft dropped into the water.
At the cable segment’s end was the ripped-out equipment from the relay unit.

The following day, the ship’s crew deployed the drone again to recover the cable.
In a feat of robotic dexterity, the operator used the remote-controlled arms to knot a large chain around the cable, attaching it to a powerful pulley that slowly hoisted it and winched it into a large drum on the G.O. Sars.

Police officers joined Zhang a week after the recovery at a storage facility the institute uses in Bergen.
It was the first time he was taking a close look at the end where the cable had been separated from the relay unit, and he noticed something significant.
If the cable had been torn apart or cut by a trawl door, the break would have been jagged and uneven.
But instead it had been sliced through cleanly, with some kind of power saw.
That was hard to square with the idea of an accident.


The cable’s clean cut.
Source: Troms Police District


At this point the police officially took over the investigation.
Sissel Rogne, then the marine institute’s managing director, also alerted Norway’s domestic intelligence and security agency.
In an interview with the Norwegian business magazine DN Magasinet, the publication that originally broke the news of the cable cut, she emphasized the implications for Norway’s military and intelligence agencies: “We are not concerned with submarines.
But they are concerned about it.”

In the end, and to Rogne’s disappointment, the incident was treated as a criminal case, not a national security matter.
It fell under the jurisdiction of the Troms Police District, which covers a huge, sparsely populated swath of northern Norway and the waters stretching north into the Arctic.
A local police prosecutor named Ronny Jørgensen got the assignment.
He’s based in Tromsø, and most of his caseload is taken up with incidents of suspected overfishing.
He knew little about undersea cables, except that they were marked on nautical maps so fishermen could avoid them.
“Normally you would want to stay clear of any object that can keep you from fishing,” he points out dryly.


Jørgensen.
Photographer: Tom Gibson


Zhang’s findings were Jørgensen’s jumping-off point.
Vessels such as the Saami are required to supply crew lists to the Norwegian authorities when operating in the nation’s waters or docking at its ports.
Using that database, Jørgensen flagged all the crew members who’d been on the Saami while it lingered over the LoVe cable.
Police investigators managed to interview several of the seamen when their work brought them back to Norwegian waters over the next few weeks.
All were Russian, and all gave the same response: They hadn’t seen or heard anything to suggest the ship had hit the cable.

Given that the Saami had been the only ship in the cable’s vicinity when it was damaged, Jørgensen was skeptical.
The most generous interpretation he could see was that its net had gotten tangled in the cable, and cutting it had been the only way to free them.
He believed the crew members weren’t being completely candid.
“The fishermen would definitely remember if a catch had included a marine cable,” he says.
But because they were Russians, and because Jørgensen didn’t have a crime to charge them with, there was little he could do beyond having them questioned.


Zhang (right) identified the outage and, later, its potential cause.
Photographer: Geir Pedersen

Jørgensen did order tests on the severed cable, which confirmed it had been cut by a power tool.
“The people that cut this cable,” he says, “they wanted this cable to be cut.”

And there his investigation, like Zhang’s, ran into a wall.
Soon thereafter, however, he got another, similar case.
Around 5 a.m. on Friday, Jan. 7, 2022, a 900-mile communications cable running from the Norwegian mainland to the far northern island of Svalbard stopped working.
It was one of two cables servicing the Svalbard Satellite Station, the world’s largest ground station for collecting data from polar-orbiting satellites, including meteorological and other imagery that has dual civilian and intelligence uses for American and European government agencies.
The technicians from Space Norway, the company that operates the cables, determined later that water had somehow gotten into one of the cables, causing an electrical short, and the power had gone out.

The incident could have been an accident.
However, when the cables had been laid in 2004, Space Norway had taken the precaution of burying them beneath the seafloor in shallow areas where there was a risk of damage by fishing trawlers.
Cutting the cables, in other words, meant first digging through 6 feet of protective mud.
On Jan. 30, 2022, three weeks after the outage, when an underwater drone went down to investigate the damage, the cameras revealed deep trenches through the seafloor above the cables.
Jørgensen says the gashes could have been dug by the steel doors of a fishing net.
Finding the exact coordinates of the cable and digging down to the cables themselves, as someone had in this case, would take many passes—sustained activity that suggested intent.

Journalists with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp.
later determined that a Russian-flagged fishing trawler, the Melkart-5, had crossed the cable’s path 130 times around the time it was damaged.
One expert, speaking in a documentary film jointly produced by a group of Nordic public broadcasters, described the ship’s pattern of movement as “completely illogical.” Murman SeaFood Co., the Russian company that owns and operates the Melkart-5, said the captain and crew were interviewed twice by Norwegian authorities and released without charges.
The ship was trawling in a permitted fishing zone when the cable was damaged, and its movements that day were “totally normal,” says Andrei Roman, a legal and economic aide to the company’s director.
“We have nothing to do with this. Our ship didn’t violate any laws.”

according to Nils Andreas Stensønes, a vice admiral who heads the Norwegian Intelligence Service and formerly was chief of the Royal Norwegian Navy, Russia has long prioritized underwater operations.
Even during the Soviet Union’s fall, as its military was atrophying and its funding collapsing, Moscow never stopped investing in submarine warfare and developing techniques to map and potentially sabotage adversaries’ subsea critical infrastructure.
One of the main vehicles for this work, Stensønes says, is a secretive agency called the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known by its Russian acronym, GUGI.

Norway has seen all of this up close.
Unlike land borders, maritime ones tend to be porous: Fishing trawlers and other ships travel relatively freely between Norwegian and Russian waters.
That provides opportunities for information gathering.
“We know that Russia is using civilian vessels for covert intelligence operations,” Stensønes says.
“We’re also monitoring ships related to Russia that have undersea capabilities to see if they’re being used for reconnaissance or more malign activities.”

Those fears have only grown since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
In November of that year, journalists with the Danish Broadcasting Corp.
used a speedboat to approach the Admiral Vladimirsky, a Russian research vessel that had been lurking in the waters of Denmark and patrolling around wind farms off the coasts of the UK and Scandinavia with its transponders off.
The journalists had tracked the vessel by listening in on radio communications relaying its location back to a naval base in Russia.
In footage that aired in April 2023, they come alongside the Admiral Vladimirsky and notice it has abnormally large antennae and other communications equipment incongruous for a civilian boat.
Then a man in a balaclava and tactical vest holding a military-style rifle appears on deck.
After a few tense moments, the journalists return to shore.

The past two years have seen other suspicious cable outages.
In October 2023, two telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged, along with a gas pipeline in what authorities from the affected countries said was potential sabotage.
In that case, a Hong Kong-flagged ship called the Newnew Polar Bear—which was accompanied by a Russian icebreaker and had only stopped at Russian ports since sailing from China a month earlier—dragged its anchor hundreds of miles along the seafloor en route to Saint Petersburg.
Investigators in Estonia, Finland and Sweden suspect that strange act wasn’t accidental.
Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation released pictures of the damage, and Risto Lohi, chief of homicide and other serious crime investigations, said in a statement to Businessweek that the case is being investigated as “aggravated criminal mischief.”

The statement also read: “The investigation is still ongoing and final conclusions about what was behind these incidents—technical failure, negligence or poor seamanship, or a deliberate act—can be made only after all necessary investigative measures have been finalized and this will still take some time.” Businessweek was not able to reach the owner of the Newnew Polar Bear for comment.
(The best-known instances of suspected undersea sabotage, of course, were the September 2022 damage to the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipelines, which have spawned a dizzying variety of conflicting theories but remain unsolved.)

To Zysk, the researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, the slicing of the marine institute’s cable and the damage to the Svalbard cable bear the hallmarks of Russian intelligence operations.
She hypothesizes they could have been relatively simple—and deniable—ways to try and weaken parts of Norway and NATO’s intelligence-gathering infrastructure, while also potentially serving as training exercises for Russian operatives specializing in sabotage of subsea infrastructure.
Or they could simply have been a way for Moscow to demonstrate to officials in Oslo that their underwater infrastructure—from data cables and power lines to petroleum drilling platforms and pipelines—is vulnerable.
That type of behind-the-scenes signaling and posturing is common for spy services, which do things like openly trail suspected spies to send a message that they’re being watched, she says.
Both incidents involved cables with specific significance to the Norwegian military, rather than transcontinental ones that might provoke a more forceful NATO response.
In Zysk’s description, that’s a sign of calibrated provocation.

The “extremely unlikely and unconventional” behavior of Russian-flagged ships in both cases, she says, combined with “our knowledge about Russia using civilian trawlers for intelligence operations,” make the incidents highly suggestive.
“The probability that this was intentional damage is very high.”


Pedersen inspecting the damaged cable.
Photographer: Andrea Gjestvang/Bloomberg

Nonetheless, the evidence remains incomplete and circumstantial.
For his part, Sergei Tsyganov, the Saami’s owner, denies that his ship was involved in cutting the cable.
According to him, Norwegian police boarded the Saami and spent 12 hours questioning the captain and crew but made no arrests, and his ships still enter Norwegian waters and dock at Norwegian ports.
“We’re not guilty of anything; we didn’t do anything illegal,” he says.
(Jørgensen says the interviews with the Saami’s crew took about an hour.)

In June 2023, Space Norway, the company that operates the Svalbard cables, was finally able to send a ship out on a mission to recover and replace the damaged section, a year and a half after the short occurred.
(They’d found a workaround to get the cable operating only a couple of weeks later.) Photos released by police show the damaged cable’s protective outer coating stripped off like a snake’s molted skin, and rods of coiled metal armoring twisted and bent apart, revealing the fiber optics within.

In October 2022, Jørgensen closed the LoVe case, declaring it officially unsolved.
He did the same with the Svalbard case the following March.
“The investigation has stopped,” he says.
Either one could be reopened if new evidence is found, but he thinks that’s unlikely.
Stensønes, the head of Norway’s intelligence service, declined to comment about the cases or about the findings of any parallel investigations conducted by his agency or others in the Norwegian government.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to messages seeking comment for this article.

Rogne, the former head of the Institute of Marine Research—she now has a different role there—remains unsatisfied with the investigation into the LoVe incident.
She told Businessweek the institute’s parent agency in the Norwegian government should have sued the owner of the Saami and its insurance provider to pay to repair the cable.
By not pressing the matter, she says, officials are conveying that they don’t want to antagonize Russia.

“It’s an issue for the ministry and the security services to take on, and they haven’t,” she says.
“It is not a closed case for us—the cable is not there, it’s not functioning.”

In a statement, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries said it didn’t pursue a claim against the Saami’s owner because the police investigation failed to determine who was responsible.
At the same time, it did approve 57.8 million Norwegian kroner ($5.4 million) for LoVe repairs.

Zhang and his colleagues have decided not to use the money to replace the damaged section of their cable, however.
Instead they’re planning to circumvent it, replacing the silenced listening posts beyond that section with battery-powered modules with wireless transmitters.
Much will be lost: The wireless modules will be able to transmit only a fraction of the data the fiber optics once carried from those depths.
Most of the information will have to be collected physically, by sending ships out to haul the devices up from the seafloor and connect them to a computer to manually download the information.
But at least there will no longer be a cable to cut.

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Monday, July 15, 2024

Map shows where Chinese ships spotted off U.S. Coast

see video
 
From Newsweek by Ryan Chan

The United States Coast Guard spotted four Chinese naval ships near an archipelago in Alaska over the weekend, at least the fourth encounter between the two sides near the "Last Frontier" state in recent years.

China's military ships were sailing in the Bering Sea on Saturday and Sunday, north of the Amchitka Pass and the Amukta Pass of the Aleutian Islands, according to the Coast Guard's statement, which did not identify the types of Chinese naval vessels it detected.

The islands lie between the south of Bering Sea and the north of Pacific Ocean.
The Amchitka Pass is a 50-mile wide strait while the Amukta Pass is 43 miles wide.
The Bering Sea is the doorway to the strategic Arctic region, separating Russia's Far East and Alaska.

China's vessels were sailing in international waters but within the U.S. exclusive economic zone (EEZ), the Coast Guard said.
They responded to radio communications and said they were conducting freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs), according to the agency.

The U.S. EEZ extends 200 nautical miles offshore and is the largest in the world, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spanning over 13,000 miles of coastline and containing 3.4 million square nautical miles of ocean.
This zone extends beyond the seaward boundary of the 12-nautical mile territorial sea.

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea grants a coastal state the sovereign right to exploit natural resources within its EEZ, and it shall have due regard to the rights and duties of other states.

During a routine maritime patrol in the Bering Sea and Arctic region, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf spotted and established radio contact with a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy task force in international waters within the U.S.
exclusive economic zone on August 30, 2021
Ensign Bridget Boyle/U.S.Coast Guard

The U.S Navy routinely conducts FONOPs in waters near China, including in the contested South China Sea.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Tom Shugart, a defense analyst and former Navy submariner, noted differences between the two countries' FONOPs.

"U.S. FONOPs are conducted to challenge excessive maritime claims made contrary to international law," he wrote.
But the U.S.—unlike China in the South China Sea—does not restrict operations within its EEZ.

U.S.Coast Guard cutter Kimball was tasked with shadowing the Chinese ships until they departed waters around the Aleutian Islands and transited into the North Pacific Ocean.

The U.S.Coast Guard cutter Healy, bottom, steams alongside the cutter Kimball, top, near Unimak Pass in Alaska on July 3.
Healy, a polar icebreaker, and Kimball, a national security cutter, patrol the waters around
U.S. Coast Guard/Chief Warrant Officer Brian Williams

A Coast Guard photo released by the U.S.Defense Department showed the Kimball operating alongside the polar icebreaker Healy on July 3 near the Unimak Pass in the Aleutian Islands.

Both ships "patrol the waters around Alaska to maintain maritime safety, security, and stability in the region," the Coast Guard said.

The Kimball is a multi-mission national security cutter operating from its homeport in Honolulu, Hawaii, according to the Coast Guard.
It has a displacement of 4,500 tons and a range of 13,000 nautical miles—and is equipped with automated weapons systems.

A Chinese military observer on X noted that, based on bulletins released by the Japanese Defense Ministry's Joint Staff Office, four Chinese naval ships transited near northern Japan and entered the North Pacific Ocean from June 30 to July 1.

It was not immediately clear whether they were the same ships spotted by the Coast Guard in the Bering Sea.

China's Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a Newsweek email seeking comment.

It was not the first time China had sent an armada to the Alaska coast.
In the third encounter last August, 11 Russian and Chinese ships sailed close to the Aleutian Islands, where they were monitored by four U.S. destroyers and maritime patrol aircraft.
 
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