Allseas’ dynamically positioned single-lift installation/decommissioning and pipelay vessel “Pioneering Spirit” successfully executed her maiden heavy lift project, removal of the 13,500 t Yme mobile offshore production unit (MOPU) in the North Sea, 100 km off the coast of Norway, on 22 August 2016 for Repsol Norge AS.
The Yme MOPU is a jack-up type platform standing on three steel legs of 3.5 m diameter, which are
inserted approximately 10 m inside the subsea storage tank columns at 93 m water depth.
With this platform removal,
Allseas was able to demonstrate the unique single-lift capabilities of
“Pioneering Spirit”.
The platform was sea-fastened on board and the vessel is currently on her way to the newly
developed dismantling yard in Lutelandet, Norway.
Pioneering Spirit (formerly Pieter Schelte) is the largest construction vessel in the world.
Inspired by the offshore heavy lifting pioneer Pieter Schelte Heerema (1908–81) and designed completely in-house, the vessel is designed for the single-lift installation and removal of large oil and gas platforms and the installation of record-weight pipelines.
The emergence of Pioneering Spirit signifies a step-change in offshore installation and decommissioning.
Capable of lifting entire platform topsides of up to 48,000 t and jackets up to 20,000 t in a single piece, she significantly reduces the amount of offshore work associated with installation and decommissioning, moving the work onshore where it is safer and more cost effective.
“You get to know whether you’re right or not,” Nigel Pickford said, of identifying wrecks. “That doesn’t often happen with history.”
In the course of the maritime researcher Nigel Pickford’s career, the business of prospecting for wealth in the world’s oceans has changed dramatically.
Thanks to advanced technology, now, with enough money and expertise, almost anything can be found.
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure—without leaving dry land.
The wreck was like a bug on the wall, a jumbly shape splayed on the abyssal plain. It was noticed by a team of autonomous-underwater-vehicle operators on board a subsea exploration vessel, working at an undisclosed location in the Atlantic Ocean, about a thousand miles from the nearest shore. The analysts belonged to a small private company that specializes in deep-sea search operations; I have been asked not to name it. They were looking for something else. In the past decade, the company has helped to transform the exploration of the seabed by deploying fleets of A.U.V.s—underwater drones—which cruise in formation, mapping large areas of the ocean floor with high-definition imagery.
Mensun Bound
(image courtesy of FT)
“We find wrecks everywhere, just blunder into them,” Mensun Bound, a maritime archeologist who works frequently with the company, told me. The pressures of time and money mean that it is usually not possible to stop. (Top-of-the-line search vessels can cost about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day to charter.) “Sometimes it’s heartbreaking,” Bound said. A few years ago, he was with a team that stumbled across a wreck in the Indian Ocean. They had a few hours to spare, so they brought a sodden box up to the surface. It was full of books. “That was the most exciting thing I’ve ever found in my life,” Bound said. “But then the question becomes: What do we do with it?”
The seabed is a complicated, as well as an expensive, place to operate in. So they put it back.
This Atlantic wreck was beguiling. An R.O.V.—a remotely operated vehicle, connected by a cable to the exploration vessel—was sent down to take a closer look. It was the remains of an old wooden sailing ship, stuffed with cargo, lying some six thousand metres below the surface—much deeper than the Titanic. The contents seemed to be Asian in origin: intricate lacquered screens and bolts of cloth, thousands of slender rattan canes, and an extraordinary array of porcelain, all preserved in the darkness of the ocean. “It was just cascading in these spills down around the slopes and undulations of the seabed,” Bound recalled. “And there were barrels there, which hadn’t been opened.They were sitting there intact.”
There is something almost dangerously tantalizing about an undiscovered shipwreck. It exists on the edge of the real, containing death and desire. Lost ships are lost knowledge, waiting to be regained. “It’s like popping the locks on an old suitcase and you lift the lid,” Bound told me. Bound grew up on the Falkland Islands in the nineteen-fifties. In 2022, he found the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s polar-exploration ship, under the ice of the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica. “On a shipwreck, everything, in theory, that was there on that ship when it went down is still there,” he said. “It’s all the product of one unpremeditated instant of time.”
What was the ship?
There was an obvious person to ask. In 1993, Bound had been searching for the remains of a nineteenth-century English trading vessel, the Caroline, in the Straits of Malacca, in Southeast Asia, when he and his colleagues pulled up a much older, bronze cannon instead. The cannon was marked with a relief of a sailing ship, the name of the Dutch East India Company, and a date, 1604. “I had no idea what it was doing there or anything,” Bound said. But he had heard of a self-taught shipwreck researcher, based in England, who was said to have an unusually broad grasp of the world’s lost vessels. Bound contacted the researcher, Nigel Pickford, by satellite phone from the ship.
Within twenty-four hours, Pickford replied, saying that Bound and his team were on the site of the Battle of Cape Rachado, which was fought between Portuguese and Dutch fleets over several days in August, 1606.The cannon probably belonged to a ship called the Nassau. “He said, ‘O.K., you found one wreck by itself,’ ” Bound recalled. “ ‘There should be three wrecks nearby.’ And he even gave us a rough direction.”
Just over a kilometre away, Bound and his team found the wreck mounds of three more ships—another Dutch warship, the Middelburg, and two Portuguese vessels, the São Salvador and Dom Duarte de Guerra’s Galleon—which had become tangled together and sunk in flames. “There they were, still tied together on the bottom of the Straits of Malacca, just as they’d gone down,” Bound said. “You could see the violence.”
A Portuguese cannon was bent like an elbow, with fragments of a Dutch cannonball embedded inside it.
Two years later, Bound led an excavation of the site on behalf of the National Museum of Malaysia. “Had it not been for Nigel, that would never have happened,” he said. I asked Bound whether there were any other experts, comparable to Pickford, whom he could have called in that situation. “I can’t think of anybody of his calibre,” he replied. “I can think of one or two others. But they are more swashbuckling, let’s say.”
The shipwreck world swims with hucksters; Pickford deals in facts that you can use. “He is a serious scholar,” Bound said. “His approach, his attention to detail, his note-taking, the insight that he brings.”
News of the Atlantic discovery found its way to Pickford within a few days. Earlier this year, he showed me images taken by the R.O.V. on his laptop, in a modern apartment decorated with contemporary art and Asian ceramics, overlooking the rooftops of Cambridge. Pickford is seventy-eight, with white hair, crooked teeth, and a mild, understated manner that could be mistaken entirely for gentleness, or English politeness, but is also the mark of a lifetime spent among secrets.
“My things are not always well organized. I’ve got so much bloody stuff,” Pickford muttered, clicking around on his desktop. A bookshelf next to him held a seven-volume history of the Royal Navy and a copy of “Dictionary of Disasters at Sea During the Age of Steam.”
“I think it’s this one,” Pickford said. The screen suddenly filled with barrels, china, and chests. A ghostly sword lay on the ocean floor. We stared for a few moments. “It’s incredibly real, isn’t it?” he said.
Pickford is fascinated by the era of early colonial expansion and also, to be frank, by treasure. “There are millions of shipwrecks going back millennia, obviously. From an archeological point of view, I suppose they’re all of interest,” he told me. “From a treasure-hunting point of view, about naught point naught one of them are of interest.”
Pickford nicknamed the unknown wreck Deep Pots and, without anybody ever formally asking him to, he set out to identify the vessel.
Pickford is the purveyor of a singular sort of information. In the course of fifty years, his research has led to the discovery of dozens of shipwrecks, containing more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of recovered cargoes. Clients—specialist salvage companies and their investors—tend to call him, rather than the other way around. “I never really bother to look for people,” he said. His work encompasses every ocean and a time span of roughly five centuries. One day, when we were chatting, Pickford mentioned that he had been hired to investigate a couple of wrecks near the Comoro Islands, off the coast of Mozambique, in East Africa. “I can’t tell you anything about them,” he said, affably enough.
Pickford works on a retainer or for between five and ten per cent of the proceeds of any treasure that is recovered. Because of a medical condition, Mallory-Weiss syndrome, which can lead to severe internal bleeding if he vomits, he does not go to sea. Instead, Pickford is a creature of libraries and maritime archives, which he returns to again and again, a missable figure in a tweed coat with elbow patches, standing aside to let you pass.
In 1994, Pickford published “The Atlas of Shipwrecks and Treasure,” which included a gazetteer of more than fourteen hundred shipwrecks and has become something of a reference work in the field. “As well as greed, there has to be a love of gambling, a strong tendency to dream, a boundless optimism, a passion for quests, an enjoyment of physical risks, and a perverse desire to attempt that which is inherently difficult,” he wrote, of looking for vanished ships. Pickford introduced the gazetteer with a quote from “The Tempest”: “O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish’d!” He dedicated the book to his father, Thomas, who was also a shipwreck researcher.
“He’s not an adventurer,” Pickford’s wife, Rosamund, told me. “He’s a detective.” Other people involved in the shipwreck world—maritime archeologists, divers, treasure hunters—speak of the thrill and addiction of their discoveries. But for Pickford these pangs of elation tend to be private, if not silent: opening an e-mail, taking a phone call, deciphering a centuries-old cargo manifest in a climate-controlled basement somewhere. Pickford enjoys the binary outcomes of his work. The diamonds are in the strong room, or they aren’t. “You get to know whether you’re right or not,” he said. “That doesn’t often happen with history.” The moment that Pickford craves is when the two realms collide—the archive and the artifact—and the years in between suddenly melt away. “I think it’s something fairly embedded in our psyche, actually, this desire,” he said. “It’s connecting with the past, really. It’s all about time.”
A porcelain expert who studied images from the Deep Pots wreck dated the pieces on the seabed to the last twenty years of the seventeenth century. Pickford went to his files and tried to narrow down possible candidates for the vessel. The wreck’s position, in the mid-Atlantic, suggested that he was looking for a ship that had been returning to Europe from Asia via the Caribbean when it sank—a relatively uncommon route. “It was unusual,” Pickford said. He thought of the Azie, a Dutch East India Company ship that sank in 1683 and which he had been curious about for years. He hired a researcher to scour the company’s records, in The Hague, but these revealed that the Azie’s crew was rescued after a storm north of Cape Verde, a thousand miles from the wreck site.
For a time, Pickford considered the Oriflamme, a French trader that disappeared while crossing the Atlantic in 1691, on its way back from Siam. But an account in the French colonial archives, in Aix-en-Provence, indicated that the Oriflamme could have made it as far as the Bay of Biscay. Next, Pickford wondered about the Modena—a grand English ship named after Mary of Modena, the wife of King James II—which traded in Asia for the East India Company. The last credible sighting of the Modena was on October 5, 1694, when passing seamen recognized pieces of her elaborate painted woodwork floating in the ocean after a violent storm. The Modena had set sail for England from Barbados just over a month before.
I had assumed that Pickford would spend most of his time re-navigating old voyages, ruminating on lee shores and the direction of winds. But treasure hunting begins and ends with cargo. “You always start off with ‘What did it have on it?’ ” he told me. “Did it really have that on it?” In the case of the Deep Pots wreck, the only way to offer a tentative identification would be to find a persuasive match between what was lying on the ocean floor and what was loaded onto the vessel when she sailed.
The Modena weighed somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand tons. She was the largest ship in the East India Company’s fleet when she was built, in the Blackwall docks of East London, in 1685. While much of her cargo was recorded in company correspondence, which Pickford could study at the British Library, a lot of it went undocumented, either by accident or as “private trade,” to avoid certain duties.
Colonial trading ships of the period were worlds unto themselves. They went to sea for years at a time, their decks crammed with an improbable medley of people and things. When the Modena left England for India, in February, 1692, she carried soldiers, lascars, sixteen company apprentices, and a group of Armenian merchants among her passengers. Her holds contained lead, iron, a thousand pieces of woollen cloth, eight spare anchors, twenty barrels of tar, two hundred and fifty swords, thirteen chests of silver bars, medicine, and a consignment of unsold coral.
At first glance, the Modena’s likely cargo on her return from Asia didn’t tally with what was found at the Deep Pots site. The most conspicuous objects on the seabed were porcelain and thousands of rattan canes, intended for use as walking sticks or in furniture-making. The Modena’s final trading voyage lasted almost three years—and included stops in the Canary Islands, Cape Town, Ceylon, Bombay, and Persia. But she didn’t visit anywhere known to export porcelain or canes in sizable quantities.
Fortunately for Pickford, however, much of her odyssey was witnessed by Edward Barlow, the chief mate on the Sampson (another ship in the same fleet), who kept a vivid journal. Working from Barlow’s descriptions and the East India Company records, Pickford spent more than two years assembling the story of the Modena. “It surprises me sometimes,” he said. “Why do I enjoy digging around?” Pickford takes copious notes, with half an eye on information that could turn out to be useful on another wreck someday. He circles back to documents that stay in his mind, and photographs them.
One day, about six months into his research, Pickford came across a letter that caught his attention. A twenty-one-year-old apprentice sailing on the Modena missed the ship on its departure from the Canary Islands, in April, 1692, and was left behind. His name was Samuel Causton. When Causton’s father found out, he sent a letter, overland, to Surat, on the east coast of India, asking for his son’s possessions to be unloaded and held for his arrival on a later ship. Causton’s baggage was not unusual for a young administrator of the period, a mixture of gifts and personal goods that might be traded. Pickford wrote them down. The list included two cases of brandy, a box of tobacco, three beaver hats (two white, one black), and two silver watches.
Later that year, Mensun Bound, the archeologist, directed a second survey of the Deep Pots site. He worked from a laptop at the kitchen table of his home, a fifteenth-century manor outside Oxford, while an R.O.V. probed some three and a half miles below the Atlantic. At the far end of the site, among the scattered porcelain, there was a small chest—the kind that might have been used for someone’s luggage.
“The box was open,” Bound said. Inside were some trinkets: two china bowls, beads and buttons, the compressed remains of what might have been leather hats, and two heavily corroded, but recognizably silver, watches.
Bound called Pickford. It was as if he already knew they were there. “Everything seemed to confirm his research,” Bound said. At some point during the surveys of the wreck, a watch was brought up to the search ship and cleaned, revealing elaborate scrollwork, a jewelled interior, and its maker: Edward East, of London. East was a clockmaker to King Charles I. The King gave away one of his watches on the morning of his execution, in 1649. At the time of the Modena’s disappearance, East still had a workshop, on Temple Bar, in the heart of the city. An R.O.V. took the water-blackened watch—and its stopped time—back to the bottom of the sea.
In the course of Pickford’s career, the business of prospecting for wealth in the world’s oceans has changed dramatically. When he started out, in the seventies, commercial salvage firms used explosives and steel claws to rip apart wrecks on the seabed, a technique known as “smash and grab.” Most recoveries were of large, nonferrous cargoes sunk during the First and Second World Wars—tin, copper, gold, and silver—and very few were lifted from more than a few hundred metres of water.
Now the most advanced operations, using technology developed for the oil-and-gas industry or subsea mining, deploy unmanned vehicles—with delicate instruments, suction cups, and laser-scanning capabilities—in waters fifteen times as deep. In 2014, Pickford helped to locate the S.S. Tilawa, a British merchant ship sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Indian Ocean in 1942. Two hundred and eighty people died in the attack. The Tilawa came to rest some four thousand metres below the surface. R.O.V.s brought up all but twenty-seven of the twenty-three hundred and ninety-one silver bars that she was carrying—a recovery rate of 98.9 per cent. (The bullion, which had been on its way to the South African mint, has a current value of about forty-five million dollars.) With enough money and expertise, almost anything can be found.
As the technology has progressed, however, the rules governing shipwrecks have tightened considerably. During the twentieth century, decades of looting by divers and unlicensed salvage companies stripped some seabeds clean. “Once, we had man’s entire history as a seafarer, and everything else, literally spread out before us within easy diving depth around the Mediterranean and elsewhere,” Bound told me. “And now, one by one, they’ve all been just picked out of existence.”
In response, nation-states have toughened laws in order to protect their territorial waters. (The shores of the United Kingdom alone are thought to hold more than fifty thousand shipwrecks.) The open oceans are, in theory, regulated as well. Since 2001, according to the unesco Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, which has been signed by seventy-eight countries, all wrecks more than a century old should be left alone and preserved in situ “as the first option.” Commercial exploitation is banned. Parallel attempts to crack down on antiquities crimes and an increasing awareness of cultural theft mean that it is also harder to sell recovered booty once it comes to the surface.
The result is that Pickford and his clients operate in contested waters. On the one hand, they have the skills and, often, the finances to recover spectacular things. On the other hand, they are ever more likely to be challenged by states and archeologists over their right to do so. (The salvage of the Tilawa led to a five-year legal dispute and a successful appeal by the South African government in the U.K.’s Supreme Court.) When I suggested to Jessica Berry, the founder of the Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust, a British nonprofit that monitors unauthorized salvage operations, that it would be difficult for Pickford and some of his collaborators to start their careers today, she replied, “They would all be nicked.”
As a historian, it is possible for Pickford to stay apart from these matters, to some extent. “The people he’s researching for, they’re the ones that are doing the stuff that’s either right or wrong,” Alex Hildred, the head of research for the Mary Rose Trust, a charity that cares for the remains of Henry VIII’s favorite warship, told me. Others take a harder line. “I absolutely respect the quality of the research that Nigel Pickford does,” another archeologist told me. “I think that some of the people that he works with should not be allowed anywhere near historic wrecks.”
Spending time with Pickford, I couldn’t quite make up my mind. In almost every way, he was a quintessential gentleman scholar: modest, shy, comfortable with silence. Then, one day last January, I saw him crossing Sloane Square, in London, in jeans and with a bag slung over his shoulder, walking with a pair of salvage associates, and he suddenly resembled an aging safecracker, holding out for one last job. Pickford does not disguise where his sympathies lie. If a shipwreck is found, it is human nature to look inside. He sees most archeologists as naïve and utopian. “It’s like they live in this benign world, where everyone is good and, you know, nice to each other. And no one’s at all acquisitive,” he said. Searching for sunken treasure has never been like that. “It’s all thorny questions. It’s the most ridiculous business,” Pickford said. “I don’t know why anyone would get involved.”
On a Sunday afternoon in early December, 1930, an Italian salvage vessel, the Artiglio, was stationed at the entrance of Quiberon Bay, off the coast of Brittany. The Artiglio, whose name means “talon,” was a converted fishing trawler and the flagship of the Società Ricuperi Marittimi (sorima), a Genoese company that pioneered the modern salvage industry. Old pictures of sorima at work look like stills from a Wes Anderson movie. Divers were lowered in large white articulated shells, which were made in Germany. They communicated with the surface by means of a telephone. The Artiglio carried half a ton of macaroni in its hold, for sustenance, and detonators stuffed in its bunk-bed drawers. When the crew struck gold, they celebrated by playing ballads on mandolins. The leader of sorima was Commendatore Giovanni Quaglia, a.k.a. the Quail, who wore a jewelled tiepin in the shape of the bird. No one had ever worked at such depths before.
That afternoon, the crew of the Artiglio was working on the remains of the Florence H., an American munitions ship that had caught fire and sunk in 1918. Because of her volatile cargo, the salvage operation had been slow at first, and nothing had gone wrong. Then, around 2 p.m., Alberto Gianni, sorima’s lead diver, fired six charges that had been laid under the Florence H. to blow the stern apart. The sea erupted. Witnesses saw a crater open and a mushroom cloud rise. The Artiglio disappeared. Twelve of her nineteen crew members were killed.
A salvor is a risktaker. Quaglia hired more divers and bought a new boat, the Artiglio II. There were still fortunes to be found. The shores of Europe were littered with wrecks from the First World War. sorima collected “no cure, no pay” (the equivalent of “no win, no fee”) contracts from governments and insurers, seeking to recoup their losses. In London, the company was represented by Count Giuseppe Buraggi, who lived in Mayfair. Sometime in the thirties, Buraggi hired a young Englishman, Thomas Pickford, to work with him.
Nigel doesn’t know much about his father’s early life. Thomas was born in East London in 1913. He left school at thirteen and apprenticed, for a time, as a tea-maker. But, after working with Buraggi, he was recruited by the Royal Navy. During the Second World War, five salvage firms were appointed to retrieve precious cargoes sunk by the Germans and to keep Britain’s ports accessible. The south coast was covered by Risdon Beazley Ltd., a firm named for its taciturn founder and based in Southampton. Risdon Beazley vessels helped to keep the D Day landing beaches clear, and the firm went on to become the largest salvage company in the world. After the war, Thomas, who was nicknamed the Commander for his time at the Admiralty, became Risdon Beazley’s shipwreck researcher.
Pickford grew up in a quiet, unhappy house near Richmond Park, in southwest London. His father wore a bowler hat and went off to the City each day. Sometimes he travelled overseas. Pickford’s mother, Sylvia, drank and had affairs. She left when he was a teen-ager. Pickford wanted to be a writer. He studied English at Cambridge, where he met Rosamund, who was still in high school. They married when she turned eighteen.
Pickford trained to become a teacher, and, for a time, the young couple lived with Pickford’s father in London. “You would never have guessed that there was any connection with shipwrecks if you went in the house,” Rosamund told me. The rooms were crowded with glass-fronted display cabinets, full of antiques that Sylvia had bought and left behind. Thomas didn’t talk much. “He was an extremely private man, I suppose you’d say,” Nigel observed. Rosamund found Thomas distant, rather than stern, and prone to getting lost in his thoughts—a trait that she has noticed in Pickford, too. “Abstraction seems to run in that family,” she said.
In the seventies, the postwar salvage boom faded. Metal prices were volatile. The easy pickings were gone. Risdon Beazley was acquired by Smit Tak, a Dutch rival, and the fleet was gradually depleted. (Beazley died in 1979.) Thomas was worn out. When he was asked to conduct some research on wrecks in Asia, he handed off the work to his son. There was no particular conversation about it. “I don’t know why,” Pickford recalled. “He suggested I might like to do it instead, rather than him, slightly out of the blue, and I thought, Well, why not?”
Pickford was working as an English teacher and helping out in a couple of youth clubs. I asked whether Thomas had ever given him any advice. “No. Just gave me a load of papers,” Pickford replied. It was his father’s shipwreck archive. “Lots of typed letters. Lots of handwriting,” Pickford said. “Actually quite good handwriting.”
We were in his study in Cambridge. Pickford and his wife had moved into the apartment last year and were still transferring all his files from another property, in Kent. The top shelf of one cupboard was crammed with brown folders—his father’s papers. The Risdon Beazley archive has a near-mythical status among treasure hunters and maritime historians alike. The company’s records were broken up in the late seventies and scattered. But no one did more research for the firm than the Commander, and many of his documents survive.
Pickford handed me a clutch of his father’s letters from 1954, relating to the sinking of the S.S. Juno in the English Channel, in 1917, and the location of its copper cargo (“bottom of No 2 hold, further quantity at bottom of No 3 hold”), as well as a note from Beazley himself. In 1993, Pickford helped to find the R.M.S. Douro—a Victorian transatlantic liner that went down carrying twenty-eight thousand gold coins in 1882—because he was intrigued by a note of his father’s: “Douro (ph), 1882, 53,000 pounds, Bay of Biscay.” Thomas died a few years later.
“You seem nice, but between work, sleep, and the eight hours a day mysteriously lost to my phone, I just don’t have time to date.”
Pickford came to know his father, in a way, by reading his files. “I think I understood him much more,” he told me. Thomas was both more romantic and more pedantic than his son had imagined. “I guess I am as well, on some level,” Pickford said. While his father focussed on twentieth-century wrecks, he also harbored dreams of finding the San José, a legendary Spanish treasure ship that sank off Cartagena in 1708. (It was discovered, in 2015, by the Colombian Navy. Its location is now a state secret.)
“He wasn’t as good as me, I have to say, on the old stuff,” Pickford observed. Taken together, the research of the Pickfords, plus their share of the Risdon Beazley archive, may constitute one of the most valuable repositories of treasure information in the world.
The Deep Pots wreck reminded Pickford of another nameless ship that he identified, a quarter of a century before. Back then, Captain Mike Hatcher, a British-born treasure hunter, was searching for a Portuguese galleon around the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia. Hatcher began prospecting in the seventies, salvaging brass propellers from Second World War wrecks in a yacht that he sailed alone. In the eighties, he found two fabulous porcelain cargoes that, between them, sold for more than seventeen million dollars at auction. But in the spring of 1999 he was in the doldrums. There was violence in East Timor; he had to give up on the Portuguese galleon. “It was a pretty rough setup,” he said. Hatcher had a permit to search in Indonesian waters, so he called Pickford from his motor yacht, the Restless M, and asked him whether he had any other targets to track down.
In England, Pickford had recently been looking at the fifth edition of “Directions for Sailing to and from the East Indies,” published in 1843, by James Horsburgh, a Scottish sailor who became a hydrographer after being shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean. (The first edition appeared in 1809.) Horsburgh described the existence of a “large Chinese junk” on a reef in the Gaspar Strait, about two hundred and fifty miles north of Jakarta. Pickford told Hatcher about it on the phone. “I said, ‘Why don’t we go and look at this large Chinese junk?’ ”
On May 12th, after about a month of searching, two of Hatcher’s divers found three iron rings—each about a metre in diameter—spaced out evenly on the seafloor. The rings would have strengthened the masts of a large oceangoing sailing ship. Then the divers began to find porcelain, more than three hundred and fifty thousand pieces in all, many of them stacked in eerie columns, their wooden crates having rotted away. Hatcher’s team spent the next five months excavating the site, while Pickford tried to figure out what they had found. According to Horsburgh’s commentary, some of the junk’s passengers had been rescued by an English ship. The wreck appeared in the book’s 1827 edition but not in the 1817 printing—giving Pickford a ten-year window to investigate.
By chance, while reading up on the mast rings in “Chinese Junks,” a multivolume work by Louis Audemard, a French navigator known for his exploration of the Yangtze River, Pickford came across a reference to the loss of a large junk in 1822 and a rescue attempt by a ship named the Pearl. Audemard had the rescue ship’s name wrong: it was actually called the Indiana. (The captain was James Pearl.)
But Pickford had the clue he needed. In Dutch colonial archives in The Hague, he learned that the junk was called the Tek Sing. It may have been carrying as many as eighteen hundred people—mostly Chinese migrants—when it hit the reef. Some two hundred survived. Part of the junk’s ballast had been provided by granite gravestones, brought by the migrants from China for use at the end of their lives.
The Tek Sing is, to date, the largest Chinese wooden sailing vessel ever discovered. In the fall of 2000, Nagel Auctions, a German auction house, took the best of the porcelain on a five-city tour, with stops in New York and London. A replica of the Tek Sing went on display at the railway station in Stuttgart, where the auction took place. The weeklong sale brought in slightly more than ten million dollars.
Both Hatcher and Pickford consider the Tek Sing to be a positive example of their work. They used their wits and gumption to find an extraordinary shipwreck; they made some money and added to the historical record. The British Museum holds fifteen objects from the Tek Sing, including a porcelain urinal. “You go to the British Museum ... and there it is, ‘Salvaged by Captain Hatcher,’ ” Hatcher told me. “Most museums in the world have got Hatcher collections, or pieces of Hatcher.... Well, that’s pieces from Nigel and Hatcher. And it wouldn’t be there unless we did it.”
Not everyone sees it that way. In 2000, the Indonesian authorities tried to stop the Tek Sing sale from happening. (Seven containers of porcelain were intercepted by Australian customs officials, but the rest made it to Germany.)
Ten years later, Hatcher was declared persona non grata in Thailand after he tried to salvage a wreck in its territorial waters. When we spoke, he did not deny skirting the edges of the law. “You can’t tell the truth anymore,” Hatcher said. “You can make a deal with the government, Navy people, and pay them off,” he said. “They close their eyes to it.”
Hatcher’s exploits in Southeast Asia in the eighties and nineties are now held up by conservationists as case studies of cultural theft and the careless destruction of historical sites. An archeology professor who has worked with the British government on its handling of wrecks said that what most often gets lost in treasure-hunting expeditions is a fragile archeological record of seafaring: the details of ship construction, ephemeral traces of life and death at sea, which can’t be polished and sold. “You don’t know what you’ve lost,” the professor said.
There are days when Pickford wonders whether the salvage business that he has known is coming to an end. One afternoon, in his study, I asked him how many viable shipwreck targets he had in his files. “Viable is the key word you’ve used there,” Pickford replied. “There’s all sorts of pressures that we shouldn’t be doing it at all.”
Pickford’s status as a freelance researcher makes him vulnerable to being marginalized by sniffy academics or unscrupulous clients, or both. We first met in the summer of 2022, in a café at the back of the British Library, where I often work. A few weeks earlier, the University of East Anglia had announced the discovery of the Gloucester, a three-hundred-and-seventy-year-old royal warship, which had been found, half buried, near a sandbank in the North Sea.
This footage, filmed last summer by experienced divers and brothers Julian and Lincoln Barnwell, shows some of the remains of the Gloucester, which sank off the Norfolk coast in 1682 while carrying the future King of England and Scotland James Stuart, then the Duke of York.
While the Duke survived, hundreds of passengers and crew lost their lives.
The ship is split down the keel and the remains of the hull are submerged in sand, but items including an anchor, rope and cannon are visible in the film, along with glass bottles.
Also visible are fishing nets that have been lost over the years, which the team says highlights the ongoing vulnerability of the site.
After running aground on a sandbank on May 6, 1682, no-one knew the Gloucester’s exact whereabouts until it was found in 2007 by the Barnwells and their friend, retired ex-Royal Navy submariner and diver James Little.
The ship’s identity was confirmed in 2012 and its discovery was made public in June 2022.
The story made international headlines. Claire Jowitt, a history professor at U.E.A. who was researching the find, compared the wreck to the Mary Rose, which was raised from the bottom of the Solent, at fantastic expense, in 1982. The Gloucester holds a notable place in British history because it was carrying a future king, James II of England, who escaped through the window of his cabin while as many as two hundred sailors, servants, musicians, and courtiers perished. John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough and an ancestor of Winston’s, drew his sword to protect the prince from the panicking crowd, and Samuel Pepys, the celebrated diarist and Royal Navy administrator, witnessed the sinking.
The tale of the finding of the Gloucester was picturesque, too. It was said to be the triumph, after years of fruitless searching, of Lincoln and Julian Barnwell, a pair of hobbyist divers who ran a family-owned printing company in Aylsham, a town in north Norfolk. In a promotional film, made by the university, Lincoln recalled how he decided to search for the Gloucester after spotting the name in the “Shipwreck Index of the British Isles” and details of its supposed remains. “The word ‘cannon’ just appeared,” Lincoln said. “I picked the phone up, literally that night, and said to my brother, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat.’ ” Then, after four years, crisscrossing five thousand nautical miles of the North Sea, the Barnwells got lucky. “The visibility was excellent. Lovely white sand, and right in front me,” Lincoln recounted, raising his hands in wonder: “cannon.”
But there were unexplained aspects to the story. The Barnwells said that they had found the Gloucester in 2007, some fifteen years earlier, but kept it secret. The BBC reported that the wreck’s existence had been concealed for “security reasons.”
Hundreds of items—including a cannonball, spectacles, a pewter bowl, and twenty-six unopened bottles of wine—had already been excavated. But the Royal Navy, which claims sovereign immunity over its lost ships, had not given permission for any of this to happen. After the news broke, I received an e-mail from a historian, suggesting that I speak to Pickford. In 2021, Pickford had published “Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester,” a book that had discussed the finding of the wreck, in somewhat cryptic terms, though his account had largely gone unnoticed.
In the library, Pickford told me that he had signed a contract to locate the Gloucester some twenty years earlier and that his analysis had led to the discovery of the wreck. “Very lengthy business,” he said, over a cup of tea. Since the sixties, Pickford explained, divers had been searching for the wreck off the wrong sandbank. Starting about twenty-five miles off the northeastern coast of Norfolk, there are six named sandbanks that run parallel to one another. The Leman and Ower Banks are the closest to shore. Treasure hunters looking for the Gloucester had mostly relied on the account of its captain, John Berry, who wrote, “We run ashore upon the west part of the Lemon [sic] .... Whilst our rudder held, we bore away West,” of the ship’s grounding, early in the morning of May 6, 1682.
Pickford started looking at the case in the eighties. He noticed in contemporaneous accounts that many seventeenth-century mariners did not distinguish accurately between the sandbanks, if they distinguished between them at all. He consulted “The English Pilot,” a set of charts published by John Seller, the king’s hydrographer, in the sixteen-seventies, and found them hopelessly muddled. Moreover, the logbooks of eyewitnesses in the royal fleet suggested that the Gloucester hit the Ower, rather than the Leman. After considering the tide height, the draft of the Gloucester, and the generally acknowledged fact that the ship “beat along the sand” before sinking, Pickford sketched a twenty-square-mile box around the Gloucester’s likely resting place. The target area was “very tiny” in the context of shipwreck research, he said.
In 2003, Pickford entered into an agreement with John Rose, a rakish businessman and treasure hunter from Great Yarmouth who wanted to find the Gloucester. Pickford introduced Rose to an acquaintance who had carried out a magnetometer survey of Pickford’s search area—to detect submerged metal—a few years earlier. The survey had indicated the presence of a wreck. “Bob’s your uncle, for want of a better word,” Rose quipped, when we spoke. “Not that I have got an uncle.”
In the summer of 2005, according to Pickford, the Barnwells got involved. They were younger, fitter divers, with access to a fast boat that could get them out to the Ower Bank in an hour or two. Rose shared Pickford’s search box and the magnetometer survey with them.
“I saw something about how they had spent years going up and down looking for it,” Rose said, of the Barnwells’ supposed quest. “It’s ridiculous.”
In 2007, when the wreck was found, the group was ecstatic. Not long afterward, in the manner of all good treasure-hunting stories, the gang fell apart. Rose ran into money trouble. The Barnwells took charge. Pickford told me that he parted company with the Barnwells after he was asked to sign an N.D.A., which would have stopped him from publishing his book, and when he suspected that they were making plans behind his back. “They want fame,” he said. “They’ve got that. They want control. And I suspect they want payback as well.”
Shipwrecks go weird. They fester. They do strange things to people’s minds. Pickford also feared that his archival work was being superseded. In 2021, Jowitt, at U.E.A., was awarded a £324,028 academic grant to research the history of the Gloucester—work that Pickford thought he had already done in his book. On June 10, 2022, the same day that the find was announced to the world, Jowitt published an article in The English Historical Review about the sinking, in which she accused Pickford of making transcription errors and coming to “spurious conclusions about what happened and why.”
Neither Jowitt nor U.E.A. has ever acknowledged Pickford’s contribution to the ship’s discovery. “I feel I’ve been completely deleted from the historical record,” Pickford said.
People who admire Pickford’s work think that he should have been a professor of maritime history. “That was his proper calling,” Bound said. Others blame him for working as a gun for hire. “His background of dealing with some very, very shady people ... has meant he’s never been really seen as a serious individual,” the professor who has advised the U.K. government said. “That’s not to say his research is bad. I think he produces the goods.”
The search for the Gloucester is a case in point. It was a treasure quest from the start. According to the accounts of Augurship 320, the commercial entity set up to salvage the wreck, the company borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds from investors, in the hope of selling off the Gloucester’s wine, treasure, and other antiquities. A document shared by Julian Barnwell estimated that an auction of the Gloucester treasure could raise twenty million pounds. (Pickford’s cut was put at just over five hundred thousand.) A separate presentation, circulated by Rose and offering a “low risk, high reward and fun” business opportunity, stated, optimistically, that the crown jewels might have been on board.
Treasure hunting is rife with dubious schemes that don’t go anywhere and, ultimately, ruin wreck sites. Seventeen years after the Gloucester was found, the identity of the wreck has still not been conclusively verified by archeologists, and the Receiver of Wreck, the official body that adjudicates salvage cases in the U.K., has yet to make a decision about what to do with the objects recovered by the Barnwells. “In the meantime, H.M.S. Gloucester and her artifacts should remain undisturbed,” a Royal Navy spokesperson told me. The project appears stuck. The Barnwells, the Gloucester 1682 Trust—which is raising money for the preservation of the wreck—and Jowitt, at U.E.A., all declined to comment on Pickford’s version of events. “It’s a mess,” the archeology professor told me. “It’s an absolute mess.”
The silver watches played on Pickford’s mind. At the very least, they suggested that the Deep Pots wreck could be an English ship. But the coincidence with the details of Samuel Causton’s baggage was too striking to ignore. “The watches were the critical point, where it just seemed, Oh, it’s got to be,” Pickford said. And yet what he had actually found in the archives were instructions to take Causton’s possessions off the Modena in India—not to send them back home. “You waver a bit,” Pickford said. “Other days, you think, No, it’s not one hundred per cent.”
There were other problems to solve, too, not least how the bulk of the Deep Pots cargo—the porcelain and the canes on the seafloor—could have been carried by the Modena.
Pickford began to pay more attention to an incident that occurred on the Modena’s outward voyage, in the summer of 1692. The Modena reached Cape Town in July, a little over a month after another English ship, the Orange, had foundered on rocks nearby, in Table Bay. The Orange had been on its way back to England from Madras. Three of her crew had drowned, but much of her cargo had been saved. Divers were sent down for the rest. “We made such shifts that we took up out of the bottom of her ten bales of goods,” Barlow recorded in his journal. It was an early salvage operation. Most of the recovered merchandise was transferred to the Modena.
Pickford had known about the Orange for years. But he had been unaware of the fate of her cargo. About a year into his Deep Pots research, the rest of the puzzle seemed to fall into place. To his delight, Pickford found a letter ordering Causton’s possessions—the hats, the watches, etc.—to be put back on the Modena, after all. Poor Causton had died, and his family asked for his goods to be sent home. “If you wanted a eureka moment, it was those watches going back on the ship,” Pickford told me. He also learned that the ill-fated Orange had been carrying separate consignments of porcelain and canes.
The Orange had been loaded in an unusual way. She had arrived in Madras, a booming English colony, with her holds partially empty after an unsuccessful trading mission. Her chief cargo was rattan canes, from the island of Sumatra. The governor of the settlement at the time was Elihu Yale, one of the East India Company’s richest and most influential officials. Yale was born in Boston but left New England when he was three and spent his childhood in London. He had been working out of Madras for twenty years. A prominent diamond dealer, slave trader, and alleged poisoner of troublesome opponents, he knew an opportunity when he saw one. Yale ordered the Orange’s empty holds to be filled with private cargoes from the colony’s merchants—including “China goods”: porcelain, lacquer, and textiles—a rare relaxation of the East India Company’s rules.
According to Pickford’s calculations, the Orange had space for up to a hundred tons of China goods. Yale himself stood to profit. In the previous two years, he and his brother, Thomas, had run a pair of trading missions to Canton and were looking for a way to get their goods to Europe. Yale consigned other valuables, too. Pickford uncovered a letter to Yale from a passenger who survived the sinking of the Orange, describing “thirty-seven bulses”—purses—of diamonds that had been saved from the wreck.
The Orange left Madras in February, 1692. Later that year, Yale was removed from his role, on charges of corruption. He returned to England in 1699. He spent the rest of his life in increasing seclusion, dividing his time between houses in London and Wales, ensconced in his wealth and collections.
“To my wicked wife ...” he wrote, leaving a memorable blank space in his will. In 1718, three years before his death, he was asked to make a donation to the Collegiate School of Connecticut, in New Haven, which was training young men to work for the Church and the state. He sent nine bales of goods, which were sold for five hundred and sixty-two pounds, along with four hundred and seventeen books and a portrait of King George I. The school became Yale.
Pickford wrote up his research on the Deep Pots wreck. In June, he sent me a manuscript called “Lost Worlds.”
It was three hundred and twenty-six pages of closely typed history, a forensic accounting of broken bowsprits, sudden hurricanes, scurvy outbreaks, and Yale’s missing diamonds. “There’s still a big question mark about those diamonds and where the hell they are,” Pickford said.
He was ninety-per-cent sure that the wreck was the Modena. “That final nailing would only happen with some sort of excavation,” he said. In the two years in which we had talked, there were meetings among investors about a possible salvage attempt in the Atlantic. But nothing ever materialized. The wreck was too deep, the rewards too uncertain, the ethics unclear. The lacquer, the porcelain, the swords, the silver watches are all still there, strewn on the ocean floor. The diamonds, too?
I asked Pickford once whether he would be content if the wreck were left alone. Wasn’t the satisfaction of his work, ultimately, to solve the puzzle, to uncover the secrets of the perish’d souls?
“Not entirely, no,” Pickford said, correcting me gently. “I don’t think for my work that is entirely the point.”
I was forgetting the treasure, which he never does.
SpaceX: "Small-but-meaningful updates" can boost speed from about 100Mbps to 1Gbps.
SpaceX is seeking approval for changes to Starlink that the company says will enable gigabit-per-second broadband service. In an application submitted to the Federal Communications Commission on October 11, SpaceX claims the requested "modification and its companion amendment will enable the Gen2 system to deliver gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to all Americans and the billions of people globally who still lack access to adequate broadband."
SpaceX said it is seeking "several small-but-meaningful updates to the orbital configuration and operational parameters for its Gen2 space station authorization to improve space sustainability, better respond to evolving demand, and more efficiently share spectrum with other spectrum users."
SpaceX wants to lower the altitudes of satellites "at 525 km, 530 km, and 535 km to 480 km, 485 km, and 475 km altitude, respectively." The reconfiguration will increase the "potential maximum number of orbital planes and satellites per plane" while keeping the planned total number of second-generation satellites at 29,988 or less. The FCC has so far approved 7,500 Gen2 satellites.
The world knows Elon Musk as a visionary entrepreneur, the man behind Tesla, SpaceX, and so many cutting-edge technologies that have reshaped industries and even our future on Earth and beyond.
Yet, one area where we haven’t seen Musk’s influence as prominently is the luxury market—until now. It’s finally happening.
Elon Musk's superyacht, priced at a jaw-dropping $700 million, is hitting the market, and the world is buzzing with excitement.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote yesterday that "next generation Starlink satellites, which are so big that only Starship can launch them, will allow for a 10X increase in bandwidth and, with the reduced altitude, faster latency."
SpaceX promised gigabit speeds in 2016, when the satellite system was just in the planning stages and didn't even have a name yet. "Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low-latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally," SpaceX told the FCC in November 2016.
As for actual speeds in 2024, Starlink's website says "users typically experience download speeds between 25 and 220Mbps, with a majority of users experiencing speeds over 100Mbps. Upload speeds are typically between 5 and 20Mbps. Latency ranges between 25 and 60 ms on land, and 100+ ms in certain remote locations."
Changing satellite elevation angles
Another request would change the elevation angles of satellites to improve network performance, SpaceX said. "SpaceX seeks to lower its minimum elevation angle from 25 degrees to 20 degrees for satellites operating between 400 and 500 km altitude," SpaceX told the FCC. "Reducing the minimum elevation angle in this way will enhance customer connectivity by allowing satellites to connect to more earth stations directly and to maintain connections with earth stations for a longer period of time while flying overhead."
Meanwhile, upgrades to Starlink's Gen2 satellites "will feature enhanced hardware that can use higher gain and more advanced beamforming and digital processing technologies and provide more targeted and robust coverage for American consumers," SpaceX said.
SpaceX is also seeking more flexible use of spectrum licenses to support its planned mobile service and the current home Internet service. The company asked for permission "to use Ka-, V-, and E-band frequencies for either mobile- or fixed-satellite use cases where the US or International Table of Frequency Allocations permits such dual use and where the antenna parameters would be indistinguishable."
"These small modifications, which align with Commission precedent, do not involve any changes to the technical parameters of SpaceX's authorization, but would permit significant additional flexibility to meet the diverse connectivity and capacity needs of consumer, enterprise, industrial, and government users," the application said.
SpaceX said it also submitted "an amendment to the pending part of the Gen2 application requesting additional upgrades to its Gen2 system that the Commission has not yet addressed, including SpaceX's orbital shells below 400 km and frequencies beyond those requested in the original application."
FCC doubted earlier speed claims
There's no guarantee the FCC will approve the requests. Other satellite operators and mobile carriers have objected to previous Starlink plans, and the FCC has been skeptical of some of the company's claims.
AT&T and Verizon recently asked the FCC to reject a key part of SpaceX's plan to offer cellular service with T-Mobile. The mobile carriers say a SpaceX-requested waiver of FCC rules on out-of-band emission limits would interfere with and degrade service for terrestrial mobile broadband networks.
In March, the FCC denied a SpaceX application to use certain spectrum bands for mobile service. The decision forces SpaceX to seek changes in a rulemaking process in which the FCC would evaluate whether the spectrum bands can handle the system without affecting existing users.
The FCC questioned Starlink's capabilities in 2022 when the agency denied an application for $886 million in federal funding that is supposed to be used to expand broadband access. The FCC decided that Starlink may not be able to consistently provide low-latency service with the grant program's required download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps.
At the time, The FCC called Starlink a "nascent" technology with "recognized capacity constraints" while pointing to falling speeds and a $600 up-front cost (which has since been lowered). SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk have continued to criticize the FCC for denying the grant.
The application for satellite-system changes is a very different matter than the grant. SpaceX's proposed changes might solve some of the capacity and speed problems the FCC previously identified.
Other companies will have time to file objections. To obtain approval, SpaceX will have to demonstrate that the changes won't negatively affect other spectrum users and satellite operators.
Take a deep dive into the world’s busiest shipping lanes according to the number of vessels passing through them each day
Even with a huge increase in air freight within the last few decades, ocean freight shipping remains the most popular method of transporting goods worldwide, with over 80 per cent of the world’s trade carried by sea.
Connecting manufacturers, producers and consumers all across the globe, natural and manmade shipping lanes are the backbone of maritime trade, and operating them smoothly can be difficult.
Some shipping lanes are far busier than others, particularly if their strategic placement offers a significant reduction in shipping time by offering a shortcut.
But which shipping lanes are the busiest? Find out the top five busiest shipping lanes in the world – according to their number of daily vessels – below, in reverse order.
5. Panama Canal- 32 per day
Image: Shutterstock
The Panama Canal connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, via an 82km long artificial waterway, cutting across the Isthmus of Panama.
The canal has become a primary route for trade, enabling ships to travel between the east and west coasts of the American continents and is also crucial for container ships travelling from the US’s east coast to Asia as it provides a much shorter alternative to sailing around the southern tip of South America.
The canal’s design means that the number of ships passing each day is monitored very carefully. Around 32 vessels are permitted to transverse the waterway each day, taking a whopping 10 hours to complete. This figure used to be closer to 39, but consistent drought conditions have led to the government putting limits on daily crossings.
Similar to the canal network that still operates across England, the Panama Canal is fitted with a series of locks, allowing vessels to change their elevation, operating as a kind of lift system. The 12 locks within the Panama Canal act to raise the ships 26m from sea level to the level of Gatan Lake, and vice versa.
Using the locks, vessels are raised when moving from the Pacific to the Atlantic and lowered when moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
4. Suez Canal – 50 per day
Image: Shutterstock
The Suez Canal connects the Mediterranean and the Red Sea via the Isthmus of Suez, making it a vital shipping lane for goods travelling between Europe and Asia. Without the use of the canal, vessels would have to travel down and around the Cape of Good Hope (the most southern tip of Africa), taking several weeks to complete.
It is also a popular route for oil tankers transporting crude oil between the Middle East and Europe.
When it was first constructed, the canal was 164km in length and was only 8m deep. But after a series of improvements and enlargements, the canal is now 193km long and 24m deep.
Approximately 50 ships pass through the Suez Canal every day, with an average journey time of 12-16 hours.
There are very strict rules on what type of ships can pass through the canal to stop them from becoming stranded due to the shallow water or getting stuck in narrow sections.
In 2021, a ship running aground in the Suez Canal caused global trade chaos.
The Ever Given, one of the world’s largest container ships, got stuck in the canal due to a combination of factors including a sandstorm which reduced visibility, the ship’s enormous size and travelling through a narrow single-lane section.
The container ship was stuck for 6 days before it was finally refloated by 14 tugboats. The incident held up as much as $10 billion of trade per day.
3. Strait of Hormuz – 103 per day
The Strait of Hormuz is the third busiest shipping lane in the world, acting as one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints. Located between the Persian Gulf in Iran and the Gulf of Oman. It is the only shipping lane that offers access to the open ocean from the Persian Gulf.
Around 20 per cent of the world’s sea-faring natural gas travels through the Strait of Hormuz every day, causing politics to have a heavy influence on its operation. Tensions between Iran and Western powers, particularly the United States, mean Iran has threatened to block the strait in response to sanctions or military pressure in the past, and there is currently added pressure in the region due to the ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict.
In March this year, an average of 103 vessels travelled through the 167km-long Strait of Hormuz each day.
2. Strait of Malacca – 300 per day
Image: Shutterstock
The Strait of Malacca is located between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, making it a primary route for the transport of goods between Asia and Europe.
Manufacturing companies in China, Japan, South Korea and lots of other Asian countries, use this shipping lane to pass goods to the Middle East and Europe – one of their biggest consumer markets. The Strait of Malacca also acts as a key route for transporting oil from the Middle East to Asia and Australia.
It is estimated that over 200 ships pass through the strait each day, even though their conditions are dangerous. At its narrowest, the water channel is as thin as a single sea lane, at around 600m and can be just 25m deep. Running aground in the strait is a very real possibility, but that doesn’t stop huge crude and cargo carriers from passing through side by side.
Japan is particularly dependent on the smooth operation of this shipping lane, with more than 80% of its oil imports passing through the water body every day.
1. The English Channel – 500 per day
Image: Shutterstock
While it may seem hard to believe, the English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world, with over 500 vessels passing through it every day.
The English Channel connects the North Sea with the Atlantic Ocean and also provides a key link between the UK and continental Europe.
The English Channel measures around 560km in length, with a width that varies between just 34km at the Dover Strait and 240km at its widest section.
Food, fuel and manufactured goods all cross the Channel, supplying the UK with much of its total imports, but goods also often travel through on their way to the Americas or Europe.
The English Channel isn’t only good for cargo however with a range of passenger ferries, cruise ships, fishing boats, military boats and oil tankers passing through every day, adding to the traffic.
The unique Channel Tunnel rail link which runs beneath the shipping lane also transports nearly 21 million passengers between the UK and Europe every year.
Scientists descend from French research vessel the Marion Dufresne in the Indian Ocean. The high cost of research ships has prompted some scientists to work with cargo ships, fishing boats and private yachts (Image: Benoit Stichelbaut / Hemis / Alamy)
Research
cruises can be prohibitively expensive, so cargo ships, fishing vessels
and yachts are being enlisted to help understand the ocean
Doing science at sea is expensive.
A billion dollars might not be enough to buy a state-of-the-art vessel. Actually running a research ship can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars a day or more, before factoring in submersible trips to the depths or helicopter flights to remote ice floes.
These costs limit the number of hours researchers can spend at sea, and where they can go to gather data on fisheries, climate change, weather and a host of other issues with trillion-dollar consequences. This leaves data on much of the ocean patchy, especially in less wealthy parts of the world.
So scientists are increasingly looking at cheaper options for getting essential and fundamental information including temperature, salinity and depth: so-called “vessels of opportunity”. By piggybacking their work on ships that are already plying the ocean, they can fill some of the huge existing gaps in marine data at a fraction of the cost of hiring a research vessel.
Cold, far away and very, very expensive
One of the most difficult places to work is Antarctica.
Research vessels must first navigate the Southern Ocean’s complex politics and permit systems before they can even hope to navigate its icy waters.
So when one team wanted to hunt for colossal squid in the far south, they found a cheaper option: cruise ships that carry tourists to Antarctica in increasing numbers.
“Research vessels are about USD 100,000 a day, sometimes it can be like USD 22 a second to operate. And it takes so much coordination to just get all the partners involved … to grant this vessel permission,” says Myrah Graham, a marine scientist at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada.
“But the tourism boats already have permission, and they’re already going there.” As well as saving on costs, boarding cruise ships can be greener – Graham’s team estimate that avoiding using their own vessel saved about 417kg of CO2 per researcher involved per day.
A passenger ship moored off Cuverville Island, Antarctica, near a colony of Gentoo penguins. Marine scientists estimate that piggybacking on cruise ships can result in significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions than running dedicated research vessels (Image: David Rowland / One Image / Alamy)
Cruise ships are not without their difficulties. Researchers have no control over where they go, what times they can drop equipment into the sea, and they must shift equipment around guests getting on and off. While those hunting huge squid may want to target little-studied dark ocean areas, tourists are understandably keener on shores that teem with penguins.
But Graham says her trip was “definitely a success” – the team made 36 camera deployments in a little-studied region and even captured footage of what may be a colossal squid. If true, this would be the first footage of the animal in its natural habitat.
“But also we’re just seeing these areas of the seafloor for the first time,” she says.
“Especially with climate change changing things at the poles four times faster [than in other regions], having this baseline knowledge of what’s there right now will allow us to potentially in the future monitor and see what changes are occurring on the seafloor.” On the highways of the sea
While there are only around 100 ocean-going research vessels and a few hundred cruise ships, there are over 50,000 commercial vessels at sea.
One is the CMV Oleander. Every week the freighter travels between New Jersey on the east coast of the United States and Bermuda. Since 1992 it has collected data on the Gulf Stream with every journey.
Ships have been gathering weather data – what happens above the surface – for many years, but Oleander does something far rarer. It was built with a sensor called an ‘Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler’ fitted to it, allowing it to measure currents – what is happening below the surface.
Since 1992, the freighter Oleander has collected data on the Gulf Stream every week as it travels between New Jersey and Bermuda. Commercial ships make repeat visits to the same ocean locations – a luxury research vessels often cannot afford
Research vessel time is so precious that repeat visits to locations may be rare. The Oleander project offers something different and valuable: the ability to gather data on the same patch of sea over and over.
“These ships go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth on the same line. They revisit the same ocean over and over and over again. So you start to build up a database and inventory catalogue of the various states that the ocean can take along that line,” says Tom Rossby, a retired University of Rhode Island professor who was instrumental in instrumenting the Oleander.
Some of those involved in the Oleander work are now steering Science Research on Commercial Ships (Science RoCS), one of several programmes around the world looking to increase the opportunistic use of ships by researchers. Science RoCS wants to build links between the shipping industry and science communities, linking up scientists with instruments and people with ships, enabling repeated measurements on a vast scale in areas rarely visited by research ships.
“There are so many other instruments now that could go on these vessels, including instruments that measure the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. [That’s] really important for understanding what’s happening with the carbon system and the ocean and the atmosphere,” says Alison Macdonald, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US.
Go fish (for science)
While there are tens of thousands of merchant vessels plying the ocean, there are millions of fishing boats.
As well as data gathered in the course of fishing – such as details of what is caught and where – these boats are increasingly being enlisted to measure things specifically for scientists. In the United States, more than 100 boats that work off the coast of New England have been rigged to measure temperature and oxygen levels via sensors attached to lobster pots. New Zealand has gone even further. The Te Tiro Moana (Eyes on the Ocean in Māori) programme now involves 200 vessels, over a third of the country’s fishing fleet.
Cooper Van Vranken is founder and CEO of Ocean Data Network which leads the Fishing Vessel Ocean Observing Network (FVON). He works to match existing sensors with fishing boats, managing and distributing the data generated. “What’s unique about fishing vessels is the opportunity to collect that subsurface data because the traps are already going down. It turns out we have way more subsurface data out in the open ocean than we do in close to shore … where the fishing takes place,” he says.
A fisher attaching a temperature and depth sensor to his fishing net in Ghana. Fishing boats around the globe are increasingly being enlisted to gather subsurface data for scientists (Image: Ocean Data Network, Environmental Defense Fund, Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean, and the University of Ghana)
Cooper’s dream is to create a vastly bigger, globe-spanning network measuring temperature, salinity and other important ocean information, under the banner of the FVON. In a recent research paper, he and others wrote that “the global fishing industry represents a vast opportunity to create a paradigm shift in how ocean data are collected.”
The past year has been a busy one. FVON joined the umbrella body for ocean data gathering, the Global Ocean Observing System, and earned a mention in a white paper for the UN on the need to expand ocean observing.
Cooper told Dialogue Earth that there were probably 2 million fishing vessels around the world that could be harnessed and currently nearing 1,000 were already being utilised for data collection.
“Where we want to be is 10,000 vessels. That would fundamentally change ocean observing and oceanography and coastal resilience,” he says.
Setting sail for science
Fishing boats and freighters travel routes determined by what pays. But some vessels sail where their owners please: private yachts.
Several programmes are now attempting to harness yachts to gather a dizzying variety of ocean information. Yachts for Science is one of them. It has previously put a manta ray researcher on a cruise in the Maldives and helped a scientist studying black coral to work off a super yacht in Indonesian waters.
“If we are to collect all of the data that are needed across the ocean, then we just can’t do that off the fleet of current research vessels,” says Lucy Woodall, who oversees the scientific work of the programme.
The key thing for her organisation is matchmaking between researchers with projects they want to do, and yacht owners who will be in the right place to help them.
I’ve personally done research off everything from paddle boards to the most amazing, really kitted-out research ship. Any platform that floats is usefulLucy Woodall, marine biologist
Acknowledging the privilege of being able to be on a ship, any ship, is something that is important to Woodall, a marine conservation and policy researcher at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and principal scientist at Nekton, the not-for-profit research foundation behind Yachts for Science.
“That’s a privilege that most scientists who are interested in the marine space don’t have, because either their country doesn’t have a vessel or a platform appropriate, or they are not in an institution where they can easily access it,” she says.
A lot of ocean data is biased towards the waters of Global North countries, or areas they are interested in. Vessels of opportunity could help fill many of these gaps for areas governed by countries that lack well-funded national research ships and universities.
“I’ve personally done research off everything from paddle boards to the most amazing, really kitted-out research ship. Any platform that floats is useful,” says Woodall.
If the hopes of those behind these and other vessels of opportunity programmes are realised, one day research at sea will not be so expensive, because nearly every ship will have the ability to do research.
Cell
membranes from comb jellies reveal a new kind of adaptation to the deep
sea: curvy lipids that conform to an ideal shape under pressure.
The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark, and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is greater than the weight of an elephant on every square inch of your body. Yet Earth’s deepest places are home to life uniquely suited to these challenging conditions. Scientists have studied how the bodies of some large animals, such as anglerfish and blobfish, have adapted to withstand the pressure. But far less is known about how cells and molecules stand up to the squeezing, crushing weight of thousands of feet of seawater.
“The animals that live down in the deep sea are not ones that live in surface waters,” said Itay Budin, who studies the biochemistry of cell membranes at the University of California, San Diego. “They’re clearly biologically specialized. But we know very little, at the molecular level, about what is actually determining that specialization.”
In a recent study published in Science, researchers took the deepest look yet at how cells have adapted to life in the abyss. In 2018, Budin met Steve Haddock, a deep-sea biologist, and they combined forces to investigate whether cell membranes—specifically, the lipid molecules that membranes are made of—could help explain how animals have come to thrive in such a high-pressure environment.
To find out, they turned to comb jellies, the simple, diaphanous animals that Haddock studies at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Led by his student Jacob Winnikoff, the interdisciplinary team discovered that the membranes of comb jellies that reside in the depths are made of lipid molecules with completely different shapes than those of their shallow-water counterparts. Three-quarters of the lipids in the deep-sea comb jellies were plasmalogens, a type of curved lipid that is rarer in surface animals. In the pressure of the deep sea, the curvy molecule conforms to the exact shape needed to support a sturdy yet dynamic cell membrane.
“It’s an amazing paper … with quite profound implications,” said Douglas Bartlett, who studies how microbes sustain life at depth and pressure at the University of California, San Diego and was not involved in the new study. “They provide another explanation for how the lipids of deep-sea animals, and likely deep-sea microbes and a range of organisms, are adapted in a way that’s pressure-specific.”
To study the cell membranes of deep-sea animals, the biochemist Itay Budin (center) joined forces with marine biologists Steve Haddock (right) and Jacob Winnikoff (left).
Photographs: From Left: Tamrynn Clegg; Geoffroy Tobe; John Lee
“They are looking into an area that, to a large degree, has not been explored,” said Sol Gruner, who researches molecular biophysics at Cornell University; he was consulted for the study but was not a co-author.
Plasmalogen lipids are also found in the human brain, and their role in deep-sea membranes could help explain aspects of cell signaling. More immediately, the research unveils a new way that life has adapted to the most extreme conditions of the deep ocean.
Insane in the Membrane
The cells of all life on Earth are encircled by fatty molecules known as lipids. If you put some lipids in a test tube and add water, they automatically line themselves up back to back: The lipids’ greasy, water-hating tails commingle to form an inner layer, and their water-loving heads arrange together to form the outer portions of a thin membrane. “It’s just like oil and water separating in a dish,” Winnikoff said. “It’s universal to lipids, and it’s what makes them work.”
For a cell, an outer lipid membrane serves as a physical barrier that, like the external wall of a house, provides structure and keeps a cell’s insides in. But the barrier can’t be too solid: It’s studded with proteins, which need some wiggle room to carry out their various cellular jobs, such as ferrying molecules across the membrane. And sometimes a cell membrane pinches off to release chemicals into the environment and then fuses back together again.
“The membranes are balancing right on the edge of stability … It’s actually a liquid crystal.” JACOB WINNIKOFF, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
For a membrane to be healthy and functional, it must therefore be sturdy, fluid, and dynamic at the same time. “The membranes are balancing right on the edge of stability,” Winnikoff said. “Even though it has this really well-defined structure, all the individual molecules that make up the sheets on either side—they’re flowing around each other all the time. It’s actually a liquid crystal.”
One of the emergent properties of this structure, he said, is that the middle of the membrane is highly sensitive to both temperature and pressure—much more so than other biological molecules such as proteins, DNA or RNA. If you cool down a lipid membrane, for example, the molecules move more slowly, “and then eventually they’ll just lock together,” Winnikoff said, as when you put olive oil in the fridge. “Biologically, that’s generally a bad thing.” Metabolic processes halt; the membrane can even crack and leak its contents.
To avoid this, many cold-adapted animals have membranes composed of a blend of lipid molecules with slightly different structures to keep the liquid crystal flowing, even at low temperatures. Because high pressure also slows a membrane’s flow, many biologists assumed that deep-sea membranes were built the same way.
But it turns out these researchers weren’t getting the full picture. It would take an unexpected collaboration between biochemists and marine biologists, and more advanced technology, to see that deep-sea membranes had evolved a different way of going with the flow.
Going Deep
Comb jellies, or ctenophores, are voracious predators in fragile bodies. They are the largest animals that swim with cilia, which are lined up in rows known as combs, and they feed on a wide range of prey. Genetic evidence suggests that they were the first organisms to branch off the animal tree on their own evolutionary path. Though they resemble jellyfish in some ways, humans are actually more closely related to jellyfish than ctenophores are. And they have successfully colonized all kinds of ocean habitats, from surface waters to ocean trenches, and from the tropics to the poles.
The researchers collected comb jellies by robot arm when exploring the deep ocean with ROV Ventana (left) and by hand when scuba diving in surface waters (right).
PHOTOGRAPHS: JACOB WINNIKOFF
You would expect such a wide-ranging group to be adaptable, and indeed comb jellies from the deep are built differently than those that live near the ocean’s surface. “You collect the deep guys, and you bring them up to the surface, and they just fall apart,” Bartlett said. “They just melt away. It’s really quite dramatic.” Similarly, if the ones adapted to shallow water end up at depth, they beat their cilia faster and faster, and eventually die. But no one really knew the molecular differences that separated them.
In 2018, Haddock, an expert on comb jellies, attended a conference on the origin of eukaryotes. After watching Budin present research on cell membranes’ response to temperature, he approached the lipid expert. Haddock had a graduate student, Winnikoff, who wanted to study adaptations to extreme pressure. It was known that lipids are sensitive to pressure, so cell membranes were a prime target for investigation. They decided to collaborate.
Haddock, Budin, and Winnikoff started by collecting comb jellies from different parts of the ocean. In scuba gear, Winnikoff carefully coaxed comb jellies from Monterey Bay’s surface waters into jars. From one of MBARI’s oceanographic vessels, he helped operate a deep-sea robot to collect comb jellies from depths of 12,000 feet. To control for the effects of the cold temperatures in the deep sea, he and Budin asked friends who were on their own expedition to gather surface comb jellies from frigid Arctic waters. In total, the team collected 66 animals from 17 related species.
Comb jellies have adapted to ocean habitats from the surface to the deep sea and from the cold poles to the warm tropics.
Four of the 17 study species, clockwise from upper left: Beroe cucumis, common in shallow Arctic waters; the shallow-water Leucothea pulchra; Beroe abyssicola, a deep-water relative of B. cucumis; and an undescribed shallow-water mertensiid.
PHOTOGRAPH: JACOB WINNIKOFF
By the time the molecular part of the project was set to begin, the pandemic had hit. So Winnikoff set up an experiment in his garage. Using a fluorescence spectrometer, he sent rays of ultraviolet light into test tubes filled with small globs of membrane material from the creatures they’d collected. The results puzzled him. The deep-sea membranes didn’t become more fluid as he raised the temperature—a response considered universal among lipid membranes.
So he and Budin consulted Gruner, the former director of Cornell’s particle accelerator. If they really wanted to know what was happening in the membranes, Gruner said, they would need powerful, high-energy X-rays. And he knew the perfect source.
Under Pressure
Buried 50 feet beneath the main athletic fields at Cornell is a synchrotron: a particle accelerator that uses a high-frequency electric field and a low-frequency magnetic field to speed up charged particles. Part of the facility, which Gruner fought to establish, may as well have been designed for studying deep-sea cell membranes. Its small-angle X-ray scattering operation, which opened in 2020, can not only distinguish the finer details and shapes of molecules such as lipids, but also increase and decrease the pressure they’re under.
The team experienced some pressure, too, as they had to endure late nights to make the most of their limited time at the facility. The powerful X-rays they shot at their lipid samples revealed the clearest picture yet of cell membranes from the abyss. The deep-sea comb jellies had membrane lipids that, at our standard atmospheric pressure, have a curvier shape than those in surface cell membranes. The animals had especially increased production of the group of lipids known as plasmalogens.
“In these deep-sea comb jellies, [plasmalogens] can make up three-quarters of all the lipids, and we’re talking about all the membrane lipids in the entire body of the animal, which is kind of crazy,” Winnikoff said. “We did a lot of checks to make sure that wasn’t a mistake.”
At the surface, a plasmalogen has a small phosphate head and a pair of wide, flaring tails, resembling a badminton shuttlecock, he said. But at high pressure, the tails squeeze together to form the necessary sturdy yet dynamic structure.
“They start their lipids at a different shape,” Budin said. “So when you compress them, they still maintain the right Goldilocks shape that you see in our own cells, but at these extreme pressures.” Budin and Winnikoff named this novel modification “homeocurvature adaptation.”
ILLUSTRATION: MARK BELAN FOR QUANTA MAGAZINE
Taking a plasmalogen membrane to the deep sea is like pushing down on a spring, Bartlett said. At the surface, when the spring’s tension is released, it extends dramatically. “That’s when you can imagine the cells, their membranes, falling apart.” Meanwhile, if a surface membrane with straighter lipids is brought down to the deep, it compresses too much and becomes too rigid to function properly.
Notably, curvy plasmalogens were not present in comb jellies from the cold, shallow waters of the Arctic. “The composition of the membrane almost restricts the organisms to a particular pressure range,” said Peter Meikle, a lipid biologist who works on plasmalogens at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Australia and was not involved in the study.
But Budin wanted to see these lipids in action, and something occurred to him during a late session at the synchrotron. “In the middle of the night when you’re deliriously tired,” he said, sometimes you have a good idea. He stumbled on a paper with an intriguing approach to studying lipids. The authors had engineered Escherichia colibacteria to produce plasmalogens in their membranes instead of their normal lipids. Budin realized that his team could similarly coax the bacteria to produce more plasmalogens and pressurize them to see how the membranes held up in living cells.
Following the paper’s methods, they showed that the bacteria with plasmalogen membranes could indeed better tolerate pressure than typical ones. These experimental membranes were made up of only 20 percent plasmalogens, but it was “enough to make a difference,” Winnikoff said.
Bartlett was impressed that the effect of the curved lipid shapes occurred in such unrelated species. “What is likely to come out of this is that we’ll find that this principle of homeocurvature adaptation will become a universal property of life,” he said.
Curvy Flexibility
Plasmalogens aren’t limited to the deep sea. They’re also found to varying degrees in other organisms, including humans. The percentage of plasmalogens within humans depends on the cell type. In the liver, plasmalogens make up 5 percent of phospholipids. In muscles, they can range between 20 percent and 40 percent. And in the brain, they make up about 60 percent.
In fact, the deterioration of plasmalogens has been linked to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. “The evidence suggests that the plasmalogens are more protective,” said Meikle, who studies plasmalogens because of their links to mammalian health.
Winnikoff speculates that plasmalogens might give nerve cells the right flexibility for their communication needs. To send signals, neurons fill cellular sacs with neurotransmitters; then those sacs fuse with the cell membrane to release the signaling compounds on to the next neuron. Maybe plasmalogens’ curvy structure makes that possible, Winnikoff suggested.
Meikle likes the idea. “Certainly, they’re the primary sort of cone shape that allows membranes to form those types of curvatures,” he said. As studies better understand the role of lipids in membrane function, the findings could be relevant for a broader range of membranes.
“They’ve opened up more questions than they’ve answered,” Gruner said. “But hopefully it will catalyze people to start thinking about and doing more experiments going deeper into the subject.”
Indeed Winnikoff, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, is looking into how universal this lipid adaptation mechanism is across different organisms. He’s started experiments to figure out whether organisms found at hydrothermal vents—deep ocean areas where magma and seawater meet—have similar adaptations.
What would be really interesting, he added, would be to look at archaea, the third branch of life. Archaea lipids behave differently than those found in bacteria and eukaryotes: They follow different chemistry, Winnikoff said. “Do they follow the same physics?”
Starlink satellites before deployment.
Image: Shutterstock
Image: Shutterstock
Image: Shutterstock
Image: Shutterstock
