Thursday, November 14, 2024

Surfboards and submarines: the secret escape of East Germans to Copenhagen


On his arrival in West Germany, Peter Döbler reconstructed his adventure for a German tabloid.
The incredible story of Peter Döbler, who swam away from the GDR 
“Only the tube of my snorkel was emerging”.

From The Guardian by Philip Oltermann

Tales of Berlin Wall escapes are well known – but those daring East Germans who fled across the ‘invisible border’ into Denmark using kayaks, surfboards or home-built submarines are only now coming to light

In the north-western corner of Bispebjerg cemetery, a leafy graveyard on the outskirts of Copenhagen, lies a plot of land with a secret.
An old rumour has it that it contains the bodies of 12 East German citizens who were mysteriously washed up on Denmark’s coast in the late 1970s.

More than 5,600 East Germans tried to escape the GDR via the Baltic Sea between 1961 and 1989, aiming either for Danish soil some 40km away, or the nearer West German coastline.
Less than 1,000 made it, and scores are believed to have died.
Yet many of their stories remain untold.

Refugees on the Gedser Rev in 1968.
The Danish ship rescued dozens of East Germans in the cold war. Photograph: Niels Gärtig/Jesper Clemmensen
 
As Germany gears up to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there will be numerous anecdotes about those who jumped over the top or dug tunnels underneath, and commemorations for those who were killed while trying to cross the death strip that divided the capital.

But the tales of those East Germans who tried to flee across the “invisible border” on the Baltic coast – on kayaks, surfboards, lilos or home-built submarines – have mostly vanished into the watery depths.

Only recently has the Baltic sea’s role during the cold war attracted new interest in Germany.
This year’s winner of the German equivalent of the Booker prize, Lutz Seiler, has dedicated an entire chapter chapter of his novel Kruso to the Bispebjerg graveyard mystery.
And the director of Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie Museum hopes to raise funds for DNA tests on the buried bodies.

The total number of victims of the Berlin Wall is widely known: 138 people died trying to cross the border in the German capital.
Exactly how many people were killed while attempting to pass from one state to the other in the whole of Germany remains far from clear, however.

 
The most extraordinary story ...
GDR escapee Manfred Burmeister with his homebuilt ‘underwater scooter’. 
Photograph: Niels Gartig/Jesper Clemmensen

Two separate Berlin institutions are currently trying to come up with a total figure.
The director of the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, Alexandra Hildebrandt, keeps a tally started by her late husband Rainer, the museum’s founder, which currently lists 1,720 victims.

A team of academics at Berlin’s Technical University lead by historian Klaus Schröder has since 2012 been trying to come up with a more academically credible total, by comparing records from the east and western side of the Wall, many of which were until recently blocked because of ongoing trials against border staff.
Their project, too, yields a much higher number than previously assumed: out of around five million people who tried to cross the border between 1949 and 1989, it says 1,128 lost their lives in the process.

The vast majority of border victims were male manual labourers under the age of 25, Schröder explains in his office in Berlin Dahlem, “which is ironic given that the GDR styled itself as a workers’ state”.
While many intellectuals or doctors could find ways of leaving the countries by official means, workers who had fallen out with the regime often had no other means of escape than a desperate dash across the border.

Yet even this latest research is unlikely to clear up the Bispebjerg graveyard mystery: researching the human cost of the Baltic border, Schröder said, would have exploded his team’s budget.

On a map, the stretch of water that separated the East German coastline from the West looks deceptively narrow.
The distance between the southernmost tip of Denmark and the coast near Rostock barely measures 40km.

Yet the little patch of sea between East and West Germany by Travemünde was fiercely guarded by watchtowers with radar systems, coastal patrol boats and keen informants in the fishing industry.
According to the Stasi archive’s research centre at Rostock, more than two thirds of escapees, around 4,500, were captured and sent straight back to prison.


Many of those who tried to evade the patrol boats by taking a less direct route were caught out by the elements.
Low salt levels make the water in the Baltic sea light and prone to high waves during bad weather.
The lowest figure for those who drowned at sea is 174.

The around 900 East Germans who managed to successfully escape across the Baltic sea did so thanks to either extraordinary determination or moments of rare ingenuity.
In July 1971, Peter Döbler swam for 24 hours without break to cover the 48km between Kühlungsborn in the GDR and Fehmarn island in West Germany, using weight-loss tablets and chocolate bars as energy boosters.

In November 1986, East Berliners Karsten Klünder and Dirk Deckert entered the waters off Hiddensee on surfing boats with handmade sails.
Separated in the rough sea off the island, Klünder managed to make his way to the Danish island of Møn, while his friend Deckert was rescued by a Danish fishing boat more than 24 hours after leaving East Germany.

Many of the stories of failed and successful escapes have only surfaced in recent years, thanks to the investigative work of Danish journalist Jesper Clemmensen, who interviewed a large number of German refugees and their Danish helpers for his 2012 book Escape Route: Baltic Sea.

One his key sources is Niels Gärtig, a former captain of the Gedser Rev, a lightship stationed about 17km from the East German coast, which served as a de facto extension of the Danish border.
Between 1962 and 1972, Gärtig managed to pull at least 50 East Germans out of the Baltic sea.

“August to October were always the busiest periods for us: the water would still be warm, but the nights would be still be long,” he said.
Once on board, the refugees would be given dry clothes and kept under deck, to hide them from the patrol boats and helicopters that liked to inspect the Gedser Rev up close.
Then Gärtig would radio the local post boat to bring his stowaway to safety, using a pre-agreed codeword in case the Stasi was intercepting his call: “We’ve run out of water.”

Museum ship ...
the plaque on the Gedser Rev in Copenhagen harbour makes no mention of its heroic role during the cold war.
Photograph: Philip Oltermann

His most extraordinary visitor, he recalled, arrived on 10 October 1969.
Engineer Manfred Burmeister had decided to leave East Germany after hearing about the violent crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968.
But since he worked on a radar factory in Berlin, he knew leaving the GDR over the sea wasn’t as easy as some thought.
He needed to be be able to travel underwater.

Over the coming months, he combined a chimney tube and the motor of an old moped with a propeller from a car’s heating-cooling unit to create a “submarine scooter” that would be able to pull him out to sea while he was breathing through a snorkel.

After a series of test dives in Berlin’s Müggelsee lake, he packed his invention in two suitcases, travelled to the seaside resort of Wustrow and slipped into the water in the early hours of the morning.
When Burmeister reached the Gedser Rev, he made sure the device that had pulled him to freedom was lifted on to the ship before him.

Unlike West Germany, Denmark often played down its role in helping East Germans to flee the GDR.
“The Danish government seemed to be a bit worried about damaging its good trade relations with the GDR,” said Clemmensen.
As a result, the monumental rescue effort played by Danish rescuers has been nearly lost to history.

Decommissioned in 1972, the Gedser Rev now lies in Copenhagen’s Nyhavn harbour as a museum ship.
A plaque on its side tells some of the ship’s adventures, but makes no mentions of its heroic role during the cold war.

 
Lost to history ...
German graves in Bispebjerg cemetery, where it is said GDR refugees may be buried.
Photograph: Philip Oltermann

A visit to Bispebjerg cemetery, a mere 6km up the road, also reveals no further clues.
The north-western corner of the graveyard, so large that it can be accessed by car, may have a section with German war graves, and a plaque that references “594 refugees”, but there is no indication that they were buried any later than 1944.

The main source behind the legend is Erik Jensen, a former harbour master at Klintholm.
In 1992, he told a German journalist that fishermen between Møn and Rügen used to frequently catch the bodies of East German refugees in their nets: “I can remember 12 of them.” Yet Jensen now suffers from dementia and is unavailable for interview.

Bispebjerg’s grave supervisor, Stine Helweg, said she could find no reference to GDR refugees in her records.
Copenhagen police stated it was far more likely that the bodies had been buried in local graveyards on the coast.
Some of the stories may be forever lost in the fog over the Baltic sea.
 
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Wednesday, November 13, 2024

New video shows sharks making an easy meal of spiky sea urchins, shedding light on an undersea mystery

New video shows sharks making an easy meal of spiky sea urchins, shedding light on an undersea mystery

From The Conversation by Jeremy Day

Long-spined sea urchins have emerged as an environmental issue off Australia’s far south coast. Native to temperate waters around New South Wales, the urchins have expanded their range south as oceans warm. There, they devour kelp and invertebrates, leaving barren habitats in their wake.

Lobsters are widely accepted as sea urchins’ key predator. In efforts to control urchin numbers, scientists have been researching this predator-prey relationship. And the latest research by my colleagues and I, released today, delivered an unexpected result.

We set up several cameras outside a lobster den and placed sea urchins in it. We filmed at night for almost a month. When we checked the footage, most sea urchins had been eaten – not by lobsters, but by sharks.

This suggests sharks have been overlooked as predators of sea urchins in NSW. Importantly, sharks seem to very easily consume these large, spiky creatures – sometimes in just a few gulps! Our findings suggest the diversity of predators eating large sea urchins is broader than we thought – and that could prove to be good news for protecting our kelp forests.

A puzzling picture

The waters off Australia’s south-east are warming at almost four times the global average. This has allowed long-spined sea urchins (Centrostephanus rodgersii) to extend their range from NSW into waters off Victoria and Tasmania.

Sea urchins feed on kelp and in their march south, have reduced kelp cover. This has added to pressure on kelp forests, which face many threats.

Scientists have been looking for ways to combat the spread of sea urchins. Ensuring healthy populations of predators is one suggested solution.

Overseas research on different urchin species has focused on predators such as lobsters and large fish. It found kelp cover can be improved by protecting or reinstating these predators. 

 
Sea urchins feed on kelp. Nathan Knott

In NSW, eastern rock lobsters are thought to be important urchin predators. The species has been over-fished in the past but stocks have significantly bounced backin recent years.

But despite this, no meaningful reduction in urchin populations, or increase in kelp growth, has been observed in NSW.

Why not? Could it be that lobsters are not eating urchins in great numbers after all? Certainly, there is little empirical evidence on how often predators eat urchins in the wild.

What’s more, recent research in NSW suggested the influence of lobsters on urchin populations was low, while fish could be more important.

Our project aimed to investigate the situation further.

Eastern rock lobsters are thought to be major urchin predators. Flickr/Richard Ling, CC BY
 
 What we did

We tied 100 urchins to blocks outside a lobster den off Wollongong for 25 nights. This tethering meant the urchins were easily available to predators and stayed within view of our cameras.

Then we set multiple cameras to remotely turn on at sunset and turn off after sunrise each day, to capture nocturnal feeding. We used a red-filtered light to film the experiments because invertebrates don’t like the white light spectrum.

We expected our cameras would capture lobsters eating the urchins. But in fact, the lobsters showed little interest in the urchins and ate just 4% of them. They were often filmed walking straight past urchins in search of other food.

Sharks, however, were very interested in the urchins. Both crested horn sharks (Heterodontus galeatus) and Port Jackson sharks (H. portusjacksonii) entered the den and ate 45% of the urchins.

As the footage below shows, sharks readily handled very large urchins (wider then 12 centimetres) with no hesitation.

Until now, it was thought few or no predators could handle urchins of this size. Larger urchins have longer spines, thicker shells and attach more strongly to the seafloor, making them harder to eat.

But the sharks attacked urchins from their spiny side, showing little regard for their sharp defences. This approach differs from other predators, such as lobstersand wrasses, which often turn urchins over and attack them methodically from their more vulnerable underside.

In fact, some sharks were so eager to eat urchins, they started feeding before the cameras turned on at sunset. This meant we had to film by hand.
Footage captured by the researchers showing crested horn sharks eating sea urchins. Horn sharks generally do not pose a threat to humans.
 
Footage captured by the researchers showing crested horn sharks eating sea urchins.
Horn sharks generally do not pose a threat to humans.
 
A complex food web

Our experiment showed the effect of lobsters on urchins in the wild is less than previously thought. This may explain why efforts to encourage lobster numbers have not helped control urchin numbers.

We also revealed a little-considered urchin predator: sharks.

Lobsters are capable but hesitant predators, whereas sharks seem eager to eat urchins. And the shark species we filmed are abundant, hardy and not not actively fished.

When interpreting these findings, however, a few caveats must be noted.

First, sharks (and lobsters) are not the only animals to prey on urchins. Other predators include bony fishes, and more are likely to be identified in future.

Second, other factors can control urchin numbers, such as storm damage and the influx of fresh water.

And finally, it is unsurprising that we found a key predator when we intentionally searched for it by laying out food. Tethering urchins creates an artificial environment. We don’t know if the results would be replicated in the wild.

And even though we now know some shark species eat sea urchins, we don’t yet know if they can control urchin numbers.

But our research does confirm predators capable of handling large urchins may be more widespread than previously thought.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Philippines : new map redraws maritime boundaries

NAMRIA nautical raster chart

The Philippines will release soon a new map that will include the West Philippine Sea within its jurisdiction, the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (Namria) said Friday.

 
A new Philippine map that includes the West Philippine Sea (WPS) as part of its jurisdiction will be released soon, the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (Namria)
This map is not to scale and is for visual representation purposes only.
Graphics by: Samuel Yap / INQUIRER.net


Speaking during a press conference in Malacañang, Namria Administrator Peter Tiangco said the map will be published after the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) for the newly signed Republic Act (RA) 12064, or the Philippine Maritime Zones Act, is released.

"We already have the maps prepared. We are just waiting for the implementing rules and regulations in order for us to modify or revise the maps we have prepared accordingly until its final publication," Tiangco said.

Asked to compare the new map with that one issued by China in August 2023, which incorporates Taiwan and most of the West Philippine Sea, Tiangco said: "The big difference here is that our map has a legal basis supported by existing laws."

Earlier on Friday, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed the Philippine Maritime Zones Act that aims to declare the country's maritime zones in accordance with the standards set by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos).
 

 
The Maritime Zones Law uses the archipelagic baselines under the 2009 Philippine Baselines Law as the basis upon which the country's maritime zones are measured.

Apart from identifying the Philippine internal waters, the law also defines the archipelagic waters, full entitlement of a 12 nautical miles territorial sea, declaration of a 24 nautical miles contiguous zone from the baselines, and the 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zone and continental shelf where the Philippines can exercise sovereign rights and jurisdiction.


During the same press briefing, Sen. Francis Tolentino said the signing of the Philippine Maritime Zones Act was an enforcement of the 2016 arbitral ruling that invalidated China's massive claims in the South China Sea.

Tolentino, who sponsored the measure in the Senate, also expressed elation over the enactment of the law as well as the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act.

He said the newly inked law would also mean "legislating the West Philippine Sea."
 
Philippines EEZ in the GeoGarage platform
 
 
NAMRIA including outer limits of the Extended Continental Shelf in the Benham Rise Region
 
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Sunday, November 10, 2024

Vendée Globe 2024 : the 10th edition is coming


 
The Vendée Globe covers 45,000 km (24,300 miles) around the world! 
Starting from Les Sables d'Olonne, the race passes through the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, before returning to Vendée.
To protect marine wildlife (whales, sharks...), Biodiversity Protection Zones have been established by the Share the Ocean consortium with support from the Vendée Globe Foundation.
The goal? To minimize the risk of collisions between IMOCA yachts and marine megafauna in these crucial feeding and breeding areas.
 
40 Skippers 6 Women, 34 Men
Average age: 42 
(Youngest Violette Dorange 23 with oldest boat Devenir FRA 1 (2006), 
oldest Jean Le Cam 67 with newest boat Virgile FRA 29 (2023)
16 IMOCA daggerboards / 24 IMOCA foils  (13 boats have not made a VDG)

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