Hidden ice canyons in the making

ESA’s CryoSat and the Copernicus Sentinel-1 missions have been used to measure subtle changes in the elevation and flow of ice shelves that, in turn, reveals how huge canyons are forming underneath. Warm bottom ocean water is entering the cavity under Antarctica’s Dotson ice shelf and is stirred by Earth’s rotation.

This is causing one side of the ice shelf to melt.

The canyon, which has formed over 25 years, is now 200 m deep in places and the ice just above it is heavily crevassed, affecting the shelf’s future ability to buttress the ice on land. 

From ESA 

We are all aware that Antarctica’s ice shelves are thinning, but recently scientists have also discovered huge canyons cutting through the underbelly of these shelves, potentially making them even more fragile. Thanks to the CryoSat and Sentinel-1 missions, new light is being shed on this hidden world.

Antarctica is surrounded by ice shelves, which are thick bands of ice that extend from the ice sheet and float on the coastal waters.
They play an important role in buttressing the ice sheet on land, effectively slowing the sheet’s flow as it creeps seaward.

 Some fast-thinning glaciers drain into the Amundsen Sea

(Pine island, Twaites, Haynes & Pope, Smith, Kohler and Dotson Ice shelf in the Admunden Sea)

with the GeoGarage platform (NGA chart)

The ice sheet that covers Antarctica is, by its very nature, dynamic and constantly on the move. Recently, however, there has been a worrying number of reports about its floating shelves thinning and even collapsing, allowing the grounded ice inland to flow faster to the ocean and add to sea-level rise.

While scientists continue to study the changing face of Antarctica, monitor cracks in the surface of the ice that might signal the demise of a shelf and learn how these changes are affecting the biology of coastal waters, they are also aware of dramatic changes taking place below the surface, hidden from view.

Ice shelf appears flat

There are huge inverted canyons in the underside of ice shelves, but little is known about how they form and how they affect the stability of the ice sheet.

One type is thought to be caused by subglacial water that drains from beneath the ice sheet and runs into the ocean.
In this region, the ocean water is stratified, with the warmer water at the bottom.
However, as the colder meltwater pours down into the ocean it then rises because it is less dense than the seawater – but as it rises it drags up the warm bottom water which causes the underbelly of the floating ice shelf to melt.

Another type is thought to be caused by the way ocean water circulates under the shelf.
Scientists have been using ESA’s CryoSat to study changes in the surface of the ice shelf and the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission to study how shelves flow to learn more about what’s going on hidden from view.
Their focus has been on the Dotson ice shelf in West Antarctica.

 Dotson ice shelf from Sentinel-1

Noel Gourmelen from the University of Edinburgh said “We have found subtle changes in both surface elevation data from CryoSat and ice velocity from Sentinel-1 which shows that melting is not uniform, but has centred on a 5 km-wide channel that runs 60 km along the underside of the shelf.

“Unlike most recent observations, we think that the channel under Dotson is eroded by warm water, about 1°C, as it circulates under the shelf, stirred clockwise and upward by Earth’s rotation.
“Revisiting older satellite data, we think that this melt pattern has been taking place for at least the entire 25 years that Earth observation satellites have been recording changes in Antarctica.
“Over time, the melt has calved in a broad channel-like feature up to 200 m deep and 15 km across that runs the entire length of the underside of Dotson ice shelf.
“We can see that this canyon is deepening by about 7 m a year and that the ice above is heavily crevassed.

A figure showing Dotson Ice Shelf and the Amundsen Sea Sector of West Antarctica.

Colors show ice flow of grounded ice across the grounding line (white line) feeding floating ice shelves (DIS and Crosson Ice Shelf (CIS)), as well as ocean regions of high annual primary productivity (APP) (Arrigo et al., 2015).

(Image credit: Noel Gourmelen)

“Melt from Dotson ice shelf results in 40 billion tonnes of freshwater being poured into the Southern Ocean every year, and this canyon alone is responsible for the release of four billion tonnes – a significant proportion.
”The strength of an ice shelf depends on how thick it is. Since shelves are already suffering from thinning, these deepening canyons mean that fractures are likely to develop and the grounded ice upstream will flow faster than would be the case otherwise.
“It is the first time that we’ve been able to see this process in the making and we will now expand our area of interest to the shelves all around Antarctica to see how they are responding. We couldn’t do this without CryoSat and the European Commission’s Copernicus Sentinel missions,” added Dr Gourmelen.

Links :

• Washington Post : Worrying new research finds that the ocean is cutting through a key Antarctic ice shelf
• BBC : Satellites spy Antarctic 'upside-down ice canyon'

There’s enough wind energy over the oceans to power human civilization, scientists say

Open-ocean wind farms

From Washington Post by Chris Mooney

New research published on Monday finds there is so much wind energy potential over oceans that it could theoretically be used to generate “civilization scale power” — assuming, that is, that we are willing to cover enormous stretches of the sea with turbines, and can come up with ways to install and maintain them in often extreme ocean environments.

It’s very unlikely that we would ever build out open ocean turbines on anything like that scale — indeed, doing so could even alter the planet’s climate, the research finds.
But the more modest message is that wind energy over the open oceans has large potential — reinforcing the idea that floating wind farms, over very deep waters, could be the next major step for wind energy technology.

“I would look at this as kind of a greenlight for that industry from a geophysical point of view,” said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif.
The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Carnegie researcher Anna Possner, who worked in collaboration with Caldeira.

An offshore wind farm stands in the water near the Danish island of Samso, May 19, 2008. Reuters/Bob Strong

The study takes, as its outset, prior research that has found that there’s probably an upper limit to the amount of energy that can be generated by a wind farm that’s located on land.
The limit arises both because natural and human structures on land create friction that slows down the wind speed, but also because each individual wind turbine extracts some of the energy of the wind and transforms it into power that we can use — leaving less wind energy for other turbines to collect.

“If each turbine removes something like half the energy flowing through it, by the time you get to the second row, you’ve only got a quarter of the energy, and so on,” explained Caldeira.

The ocean is different.
First, wind speeds can be as much as 70 percent higher than on land.
But a bigger deal is what you might call wind replenishment.
The new research found that over the mid-latitude oceans, storms regularly transfer powerful wind energy down to the surface from higher altitudes, meaning that the upper limit here for how much energy you can capture with turbines is considerably higher.

“Over land, the turbines are just sort of scraping the kinetic energy out of the lowest part of the atmosphere, whereas over the ocean, it’s depleting the kinetic energy out of most of the troposphere, or the lower part of the atmosphere,” said Caldeira.

 Wind farms offshore British coast with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO ENCs)

The study compares a theoretical wind farm of nearly 2 million square kilometers located either over the U.S. (centered on Kansas) or in the open Atlantic.
And it finds that covering much of the central U.S. with wind farms would still be insufficient to power the U.S. and China, which would require a generating capacity of some 7 terawatts annually (a terawatt is equivalent to a trillion watts).

But the North Atlantic could theoretically power those two countries and then some.
The potential energy that can be extracted over the ocean, given the same area, is “at least three times as high.”

It would take an even larger, 3 million square kilometer wind installation over the ocean to provide humanity’s current power needs, or 18 terawatts, the study found.
That’s an area even larger than Greenland.

Hence, the study concludes that “on an annual mean basis, the wind power available in the North Atlantic could be sufficient to power the world.”

It is not just utility companies racing to respond to the rise of renewable energy.

Oil and gas giant Statoil is building on four decades of offshore experience to erect its first floating wind farm.

But it’s critical to emphasize that these are purely theoretical calculations.
They are thwarted by many practical factors, including the fact that the winds aren’t equally strong in all seasons, and that the technologies to capture their energy at such a scale, much less transfer it to shore, do not currently exist.

Oh, and then there’s another large problem: Modeling simulations performed in the study suggest that extracting this much wind energy from nature would have planetary-scale effects, including cooling down parts of the Arctic by as much as 13 degrees Celsius.

“Trying to get civilization scale power out of wind is a bit asking for trouble,” Caldeira said.
But he said the climate effect would be smaller if the amount of energy being tapped was reduced down from these extremely high numbers, and if the wind farms were more spaced out across the globe."
“I think it lends itself to the idea that we’re going to want to use a portfolio of technologies, and not rely on this only,” said Caldeira.

Energy gurus have long said that among renewable sources, solar energy has the greatest potential to scale up and generate terawatt-scale power, enough to satisfy large parts of human energy demand.
Caldeira doesn’t dispute that.
But his study suggests that at least if open ocean wind becomes accessible someday, it may have considerable potential too.

 Wind farms projects in Europe

blue : authorized / green : operational / grey : planned /

 brown : production / red : under construction

source : EMODNET

Alexander Slocum, an MIT mechanical engineering professor who has focused on offshore wind and its potential, and who was not involved in the research, said he considered the paper a “very good study” and that it didn’t seem biased.

“The conclusion implied by the paper that open ocean wind energy farms can provide most of our energy needs is also supported history: as a technology gets becomes constrained (e.g., horse drawn carriages) or monopolized (OPEC), a motivation arises to look around for alternatives,” Slocum continued by email.
“The automobile did it to horses, the U.S. did it to OPEC with fracking, and now renewables are doing it to the hydrocarbon industry.”

“The authors do acknowledge that considerable technical challenges come into play in actually harvesting energy from these far off-shore sites, but I appreciate their focus on the magnitude of the resource,” added Julie Lundquist, a wind energy researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“I hope this work will stimulate further interest in deep water wind energy.”

Underscoring the theoretical nature of the calculations, Lundquist added by email that “current and foreseeable wind turbine deployments both on- and off-shore are much smaller than would be required to reach the atmospheric energy limitations that this work and others are concerned with.”

The research points to a kind of third act for wind energy.
On land, turbines are very well established and more are being installed every year.
Offshore, meanwhile, coastal areas are now also seeing more and more turbine installations, but still in relatively shallow waters.

But to get out over the open ocean, where the sea is often well over a mile deep, is expected to require yet another technology — likely a floating turbine that extends above the water and sits atop some kind of very large submerged floating structure, accompanied by cables that anchor the entire turbine to the seafloor.

Each wind turbine is taller than Big Ben and the farm can power 20,000 homes.

Experimentation with the technology is already happening: Statoil is moving to build a large floating wind farm off the coast of Scotland, which will be located in waters around 100 meters deep and have 15 megawatts (million watts) of electricity generating capacity.
The turbines are 253 meters tall, but 78 meters of that length refers to the floating part below the sea surface.

“The things that we’re describing are likely not going to be economic today, but once you have an industry that’s starting in that direction, should provide incentive for that industry to develop,” said Caldeira.

Links :

• OilPrice : Can Deep Water Wind Farms Power The World?
• GeoGarage blog : Offshore wind power cheaper than new nuclear /  North Sea wind power hub: A giant wind farm to power all ... / Wind power takes to the seas / Image of the week : Offshore wind farms ... / The new Viking invasion: How Denmark's offshore wind giant ...
• YouTube : The innovations and projects transforming wind power | Sustainable Energy (part I / II)

Greenland’s coasts are growing as seas rise

Saunders Island and Wolstenholme Fjord with Kap Atholl in the background are seen in an image taken during an Operation IceBridge survey flight of Greenland in April 2013.

(Michael Studinger/NASA/Reuters)

From Scientific American by Chelsea Harvey E&E News reporter

Melting glaciers are causing Greenland’s delta regions to expand

Around the world, from Alaska's remote North Slope to the island nations in the South Pacific, coastal communities are watching their shorelines slip away into the rising seas.
But in an unexpected discovery, scientists have found one place where the effects of climate change are having the opposite impact.

Meet Helheim, a glacier in Greenland of exquisite beauty at every scale. 

It seems that river deltas on the coast of Greenland are actually growing bigger at a time when many deltas elsewhere around the world—and even elsewhere throughout the Arctic—are eroding away.
The finding is all the more surprising considering that Greenland is home to the world's second-largest ice sheet, whose melting glaciers are among the planet's biggest potential contributors to future sea-level rise.

Breakdown of an Ice Arch

NASA

Here's the surprise: It's the melting glaciers that are causing these delta regions to expand, scientists say.

In their findings published Tuesday in the journal Nature, the researchers note that as glaciers melt, they send fresh water and loose sediment flowing out toward the ocean.
The sediment is then deposited along the coastline where the rivers meet the sea, causing the delta to expand outward.

"We were surprised to see that in Greenland we had the exact opposite trend of what is going on in the rest of the Arctic," said Mette Bendixen of the University of Copenhagen, the study's lead author.

4. Besætnings sommertogt i Grønland 2017 from NICK LEVIN

The researchers had expected the ocean to play a bigger role in eroding away the coastline, as it has elsewhere—especially as climate change is causing more Arctic sea ice to melt away, leaving the surface of the water exposed.
Instead, they found that Greenland's deltas are largely shielded from the ocean's waves by the presence of large, steep-cliffed fjords.

The researchers made their discovery by examining aerial imagery from the 1940s and 1980s—including photographs taken on flights by the U.S.
Army during World War II—and Google Earth satellite imagery from the 2000s to see how Greenland's deltas had changed over time.
They found that the deltas remained mostly static between the 1940s and the 1980s, but expanded from the 1980s on.

 Topographic figure from the new study.

On the left (a), the figure is color coded between -1500 m and +1500 m with respect to mean sea level, with areas below sea level in blue.

On the right (b) the figure shows regions below sea level (light pink), that are connected to the ocean and maintain a depth below 200 m (dark pink), and that are continuously deeper than 300 m below sea level (dark red).

The thin white line shows the current ice sheet extent.

(Mathieu Morlighem)

These findings suggest that Greenland's glaciers have been experiencing increasing ice loss for at least three decades—a result that may reinforce scientists' concerns over the stability of the melting ice sheet.
The research also suggests that areas with more intense meltwater runoff are seeing the most expansion along the coastline.

It may seem like the Greenland coast is catching a rare break, while other coastal regions throughout the Arctic are slipping away.
According to Bendixen, it's been well-documented that shorelines in Alaska, Canada and Russia are "generally eroding," and there's great concern about what will happen to the human communities in these places.
Multiple Alaskan villages have already begun preparing for the need to relocate.

 Several open-fan deltas are located along the coast within the narrow fjord in Greenland.

(Anders Anker Bork)

But Bendixen cautioned that Greenland's expanding deltas are not necessarily a good thing for nearby human communities either.
They rely heavily on fishing and tourism, she noted—but as the deltas push outward, the harbors that these industries depend on become sandy and difficult to navigate.
And if ice loss continues to accelerate in the warming Arctic, this effect may only become more pronounced in the future.

 Two open-fan deltas located in a narrow fjord in Greenland.

In the distal part of the image, a restricted delta and its plume of sediment is visible.

(Anders Anker Bjork)

But these changes send another message, as well, one that reverberates far beyond the Greenland shore.
The shifting coastline is a sobering reminder that Greenland's ice sheet is changing, as well, in ways that could have dramatic consequences throughout the rest of the world.

Links :

• Washington Post : Scientists mapping Greenland have produced some surprising – and worrying – results
• NASA : NASA flights map summer melt of Greenland ice sheet / NASA UCI reveal new details of Greenland ice loss
• The New Yorker : Greenland is melting
• Wired :  Science Torpedoes Reveal How Greenland Is Melting From Below 
• PBS : First data in from nasas oceans are melting greenland mission
• The Guardian : OMG measurements of Greenland give us a glimpse of future sea rise 

An ingenious use of big data helped expose a Chinese company illegally poaching thousands of sharks

Hammerheads were among 150 tons of illegally caught sharks in the hold of the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999.

(Reuters/Jorge Silva)

From Quartz by Gwynn Guilford

Last month, Ecuadorian authorities busted a ship carrying one of the largest caches of illegally caught sharks in history.
The crew of the ship has now been tried, fined, and sentenced.
Yet the plot of this complicated tale—a rare glimpse into the black market trade made possible by industrialized global fishing—just keeps on thickening.

First a rundown of what happened.
On Aug. 13, Ecuadorian coast guards intercepted the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 with 300 tons of fish—more than half of which was sharks, including babies and endangered species—crammed in its hold.

The FYY Leng 999 (as we’ll abbreviate it, since other ships with “Fu Yuan Yu” in their names are about to enter the picture) is a Chinese-flagged refrigerated-cargo vessel, one of the key technologies underlying the industrialization of marine fishing.
These “reefers,” as they’re sometimes known, don’t catch fish.
Instead they buy them from other fishing vessels, storing them in their massive refrigerated holds while the other boats head back out to catch more.

The FYY Leng 999 obviously didn’t catch the sharks.
But who, then, did?
A new report out today by Caixin (paywall), a leading Chinese financial magazine, gets us a step closer to the answer.

Chinese authorities insist that the ships that poached the sharks are two Taiwan-flagged vessels named Hai Fang 301 and Hai Fang 302, citing receipts reported by Ecuadorian authorities that were found onboard the FYY Leng 999 and China’s fishery administration’s conversation with that ship’s captain.
This implies that Chinese involvement was limited to transshipment, and not actual poaching—something the government might want to emphasize given increasing attention to its subsidizing fishing fleets accused of depleting other countries’ marine resources.
(Technically, China claims Taiwan as its sovereign territory, but never mind that.)

There’s a catch, though.
Neither Hai Fang 301 nor Hai Fang 302 are registered with any country.
Meaning, they don’t exist.

So who, then, did catch the 150 tons of sharks?

SkyTruth, a nonprofit, retraced FYY Leng 999‘s journey from China to Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands using Global Fishing Watch, a platform that employs artificial intelligence to collect and analyze ships’ satellite data, which SkyTruth created in collaboration with Google and another nonprofit, Oceana, in 2014.
After departing on July 7, it chugged steadily across the Pacific for a month and then, on Aug.
5, suddenly stopped.
But it wasn’t alone in the vast emptiness of the eastern Pacific.
Soon, four vessels joined the FYY Leng 999, each sidling up to the reefer for about 12 hours at a time.
“These lengthy rendezvous at sea suggest a substantial transfer of cargo was possible,” said Skytruth.

Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 meets up with the four other Fu Yuan Yus.

(Global Fishing Watch)

The four ships are—and this is where it gets confusing—Fu Yuan Yu 7861, Fu Yuan Yu 7862, Fu Yuan Yu 7865, and Fu Yuan Yu 7866.
They’re supposed to be catching tuna.

Was this quartet of “Fu Yuan Yu” the culprit?
Two of the vessels are owned by NASDAQ-listed Pingtan Marine Enterprises, China’s second-biggest marine-fishing company, according to the company’s website.
And Pingtan has a special relationship with Fuzhou Hong Long, the company that owns FYY Leng 999.
The CEO and majority owner of Pingtan is Zhuo Xingrong.
His wife, Lin Ping, happens to be the biggest shareholder of Fuzhou Hong Long, according to Pingtan’s financial statements.
She may, however, have recently shifted ownership to a company owned by Zhuo’s brother, who also happens to be a director of Pingtan, reports Caixin.

Despite all this, the Chinese fisheries authority doubled down on blaming the fictitious Taiwanese ships, telling Caixin they may have traveled undetected by turning off their satellite positioning systems.
Since to do so, these ghost ships would have had to travel the Pacific without satellite navigation for the entirety of their journey, this conjecture is highly unlikely, fishing experts told Caixin.

And while Pingtan CEO Zhuo wouldn’t comment on the alleged involvement of his tuna FYYs, he told Caixin that the captain of FYY Leng 999 is an old friend of the captain of the two Taiwanese boats that supposedly caught the sharks.

But, wait—if Hai Fang 301 and Hai Fang 302 don’t exist, where’d the receipts onboard FYY Leng 999 come from?

It turns out when reporting the incident, the Ecuadorian authorities misspelled the ships names; the receipts cited in court were for Hai Feng 301 and Hai Feng 302, reports Caixin. Doh.

Weirdly, a vessel named Hai Feng 301—but renamed Hai Fa in 2009—was convicted of illegal trade in 66 tons of hammerheads and whitetip sharks (both protected species) in Indonesia in 2015, according to Greenpeace.
That vessel—which, like FYY Leng 999, is a reefer—is owned by a Hong Kong-registered company that Caixin links to Pingtan.
But in July and August of this year, Hai Fa was nowhere near the eastern Pacific.

The remaining unsettled question is where the FYY Leng 999 was ultimately headed when Galapagos authorities apprehended it.

SkyTruth has a hunch.
It turns out FYY Leng 999 has a history of operating near where suspicious fishing activity is afoot.
This includes palling around with an unregulated squid fleet in the northwest Indian Ocean in 2016.
And—what do you know?—around the corner from where the FYY Leng 999 was busted, there it is: a cluster of squid ships, bobbing just beyond Ecuador’s territorial waters, near a critical hammerhead breeding ground.



Links :

• Bloomberg : Paul Allen Wants to Use Satellites and Software to Fight Illegal Fishing
• Dataconomy : When data science alone won't cut it
• Science : Illegal fishing on the Galápagos high seas 
• GeoGarage blog : China's appetite pushes fisheries to the brink / Nations will start talks to protect fish of the high seas / Getting serious about overfishing / Fighting illegal fishing with Big Data / Just where exactly did China get the South China Sea ...  / Green groups are harnessing data from space / Global Fishing Watch lets you track 35000 ... / Google's global fishing watch is using ...   

SS Thistlegorm images released by Nottingham University

It is the first time the shipwreck has been viewed in this way

From BBC by

New 3D images of one of the world's best known World War Two dive sites have been released to the public.

British merchant steam ship SS Thistlegorm was hit by a German bomber in 1941 and lies on the bed of the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt.

 SS Thistlegorm position in Egyp with the GeoGarage platform (NGA chart)

(British ship launched on the 9th April 1940, 126.5 m lenght, 4.898 tons,

sunk on the 6th of October 1941)

The Thistlegorm Project, led by the University of Nottingham, could help to preserve its valuable remains.



Director Dr Jon Henderson said the shipwreck deserved to be seen by the wider public.

Divers had to take part in 12 dives to gather enough images

Some of the Thistlegorm's original features can still be see

A website has been launched to enable people to view the images.

SS Thistlegorm was carrying trains, aircraft parts, trucks and motorbikes, and heading to Egypt to support the allied war effort when it was hit.
Five Royal Navy gunners and four merchant sailors lost their lives.

The wreck has become one of the most famous dive sites in the world due to the clear water and military equipment still on board.
Dr Henderson, from the university's School of Archaeology, said: "The thing about underwater sites and the importance of underwater cultural heritage is that the only people who've ever seen it are divers.
"However, we are now at a point where we have the technology to reconstruct these sites."

The ship is popular with divers in the Red Sea

The university said the photogrammetric survey was one of the largest ever carried out on a shipwreck, with 24,307 high resolution pictures taken during 12 dives at the site.
"The Thistlegorm is an amazing resource, it's a remarkable snapshot in history, it's got all this material from World War Two sitting on it and so there is a lot to learn from the wreck," said Dr Henderson.

Dr Henderson said much could be learned from the wreck

The university said the underwater archaeological project was one of the first to utilise 360 video, which will allow people to experience what it is like to dive to the wreck.
Dr Henderson said the wreck had no legal protection and needed to be properly recorded.
"Carrying out a baseline survey (such as this) of exactly what's there is the first step in doing that," he said.
We can then chart changes over time and look at what we need to protect."

Links :

• The Guardian : Virtual tour of second world war shipwreck goes online
• DailyMail : Explore the looted wreck of the SS Thistlegorm from your desktop: Virtual tour reveals Merchant Navy ship that sunk in 1941 in stunning detail
  

1539 Agnese atlas containing the first map to show Magellan’s voyage around the world

The oval world map (no. 10) shows Magellan's route around the world and a route

from Spain to Peru. 
The 12 wind cherubs on this map are named.

source LOC

Between 1536 and 1564 an enterprising Genoese chartmaker, Battista Agnese, produced in Venice a number of remarkably accurate and beautifully decorated nautical or "portolan" atlases on vellum for merchant princes and ranking officials.
A version of this oval world map appeared in each of the seventy-one such atlases that have survived.

Agnese liked to show new discoveries and explorations of his maps, and this one includes the route that Magellan took around the world, inscribed in pure silver that later tarnished.
He also traced, in pure gold, the route from Cadiz, Spain, to Peru, with overland portage across the Isthmus of Panama.
This was the route of the treasure ships -- heavily armed galleons that carried vast amounts of silver from Peru to Spain.

On the Agnese map continents are in yellow and green watercolors, mountains in brown, white, and silver, rivers (including the legendary sources on the Nile) in blue, and the Red Sea and Gulf of California in red.
(In 1539 the explorer Francisco de Ulloa, noting that the water in the Gulf of California had a reddish tint, named it the Vermilion Sea to distinguish it form the Red Sea.)

In the blue-and-gold clouds surrounding the oval world are cherubs, or wind heads, representing the classical twelve-point winds from which modern compass directions evolved.
The symbolic treatment of winds first occurred in world maps of the tenth century on which the windblowers are portrayed as human figures seated on Aeolus bags.
With one hand they hold trumpets or horns, and with the other they squeeze the wind out of the bags.
This symbolism was at least as old as Homer, who wrote of Aeolus, the son of Hippotes, god and father of the winds and ruler of the island of Aeolia.
Figures of old men, cherubs, or angels as windblowers, with or without Aeolus bags, were popular illustrations on maps up to the eighteenth century.
In some cases the facial expression and size of the blast emerging from the mouth told a great deal about the wind, without further explanation.

The portolan atlas containing this world map was drawn in Venice in 1543-44.
It was originally prepared for and dedicated to Hieronimus Ruffault, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of St. Vaast and St. Adrian in Arras, a French city of Gallo-Roman origin.
The map is also known to have been in the library of the old Hanseatic League town of Wernigerode, Germany, in 1916, to have subsequently been offered for sale by Otto Lange in Florence, and to have been in the possession of Lathrop Harper in New York.
It was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1943.

The true story of legendary sailor Mike Plant

The inspiring true story of legendary sailor, Mike Plant, the “Saltwater Cowboy” (Sailing World) who completed three solo circumnavigations and set the American record for the fastest lap of the planet.
His adventurous spirit and colorful past make Plant “as close as yachting gets to a James Dean character” (The New York Times) with a universal story about daring to dream.

From SailUniverse

25 years after solo navigator Mike Plant's death, his life becomes a documentary, titled Coyote

Spanning the decade from Mike Plant’s arrival in professional offshore sailing in the mid 80’s, Coyote follows Plant’s daring spirit as he challenges both Mother Nature – around the world alone on a sailboat – and French dominance in the sport.
Chronically underfunded and undermanned, Plant’s thirst for adventure and fearless belief in his dreams drive him to become an American hero of the sea.

His blue eyes and boyish good looks make it hard to consider Plant’s life before competitive sailing included a solo trek of South America, an escape from Greek authorities on a drug trafficking charge and time behind bars in a Portuguese prison.

Yet, these exploits and others reveal the type of restless soul willing to conquer the world’s oceans alone.
Despite all that he accomplishes, Plant’s heart is never satisfied.
His final creation, Coyote, a radically designed vessel built on the edge of speed and safety, symbolizes Plant’s course in life: running before the wind, always with an eye to the sea.

Director Thomas Simmons says: “When I was seven years old I watched my uncle, Mike Plant, sail into Newport, Rhode Island after 157 days at sea. Family and friends gathered aboard an old tug to watch him win the 1986-87 BOC Challenge, a singlehanded sailboat race around the world. He became my hero – and a hero in the eyes of many, especially those close to the American sailing community. Today, I recognize that Mike was an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. His story proves that we can all be dreamers of the day… that it’s never too late to find your calling and chase something that you believe in“.

Links :

• SailingBreeze : The Passion of Mike Plant
• SailingScuttleButt : Guy Bernardin: Lost at Sea

Image of the week : A-68 Adrift

acquired September 16, 2017

 

From NASA

A lot happened on the Antarctic Peninsula under the cloak of the 2017 polar night—most notably, the calving of a massive iceberg from the Larsen C ice shelf.
At the time (July), scientists had to rely on thermal imagery and radar data to observe the break and to watch the subsequent motion of the ice.
By August, scientists started getting their first sunlit views of the new iceberg, which the U.S. National Ice Center named A-68.

An animation of the progress of A-68A and A-68B, since they emerged from polar night.
After initially rocking back and forth in the cavity it formed at the end of Larsen C, A-68 has since drifted away from the ice shelf, with the gap in between being filled with mélange - smaller chunks of ice that broke off from the edges of A-68A and the face of the ice shelf, mixed with sea ice that slipped in as the larger iceberg moved farther out. 

Credit: NASA/Aqua MODIS/Scott Sutherland
(other animated picture from ESA)

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured a wide view of the berg on September 11.
A few days later, on September 16, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) on Landsat 8 captured these detailed images.
The image on the left shows the icebergs in natural color.
The rifts on the main berg and ice shelf stand out, while clouds on the east side cast a shadow on the berg.
The thermal image on the right shows the same area in false-color.
Note that the clouds over the ice shelf do not show up as well in the thermal image because they are about the same temperature as the shelf.
Thermal imagery has the advantage of showing where the colder ice ends and “warm” water of the Weddell Sea begins.
It also indicates differences in the thickness of ice types.
For example, the mélange is thicker (has a colder signal) than the frazil ice, but thinner (warmer signal) than the shelf and icebergs.

Larsen Ice Shelf, Released 06/10/2017 10:00 am
Copyright contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2017), processed by ESA
The Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite takes us over the Antarctic Peninsula and the adjacent Larsen Ice Shelf, from which a massive iceberg broke off in July.
The image has been manipulated, so clouds appear pink while snow and ice are blue to help us differentiate between them.

The only land clearly visible is the tip of the Peninsula in the upper left, while sea ice covers the Weddell Sea to the right.
Captured on 25 September, the image shows the iceberg near the centre.

The A68 berg had been jostling back and forth against the ice shelf, but more recent satellite imagery revealed that the gap between the berg and the shelf is widening – possibly drifting out to sea.
An iceberg’s progress is difficult to predict.

It may remain in the area for decades, but if it breaks up, parts may drift north into warmer waters. Since the ice shelf is already floating, this giant iceberg does not influence sea level.
A68 is about twice the size of Luxembourg and with its calving has changed the outline of the Antarctic Peninsula forever – about 10% of the area of the Larsen C Ice Shelf has been removed.
The loss of such a large piece is of interest because ice shelves along the peninsula play an important role in ‘buttressing’ glaciers that feed ice seawards, effectively slowing their flow.
Previous events further north on the Larsen A and B shelves, captured by ESA’s ERS and Envisat satellites, indicate the flow of glaciers behind can accelerate when a large portion of an ice shelf is lost, contributing to sea-level rise. 

Both images show a thin layer of frazil ice, which does not offer much resistance as winds, tides, and currents try to move the massive iceberg away from the Larsen C ice shelf.
In a few weeks of observations, scientists have seen the passage widen between the main iceberg and the front of the shelf.
This slow widening comes after an initial back-and-forth movement in July broke the main berg into two large pieces, which the U.S. National Ice Center named A-68A and A-68B.
The collisions also produced a handful of pieces too small to be named.

The primary reason for A-68 drifting away from Larsen C is apparently winds blowing off the ice shelf, which forced sea ice farther into the Welland Sea, opening up an area for A-68 to move into.
The motion of the iceberg, after this, will depend on how the sea ice moves and melts as the south polar region progresses into spring.

acquired September 16, 2017

One unnamed iceberg, shown in detail above, has been drifting northward in the passage since the break.
Notice how the edges of this piece appear much sharper than the edges of the shelf or A-68A.
Those edges have already been rounded by blowing snow and gravity, but the smaller piece has been battered and reshaped by recent collisions, resulting in its highly defined edges.

 Sentinel-1 (02-10-2017)

Links :

• NASA : Rift and Calving at Larsen Ice Shelf
• Nature : Giant iceberg’s split exposes hidden ecosystem
• BigThink : Wait a Minute, How Big is that Iceberg?
• GeoGarage blog : The crack in this Antarctic ice shelf just grew ... / Close look at a crack on Larsen C / Giant iceberg in the making / 

The US Navy has created its first ever underwater drone squadron

From The Drive by Joseph Trevithick

The service expects to have fully operational units specifically for unmanned undersea missions by 2020.

The U.S. Navy has created its first ever dedicated underwater drone unit, Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Squadron One, or UUVRON 1, splitting it off from a secretive submarine unit in the process.
The decision highlights the steadily growing importance of unmanned craft within the service, which hopes to have dedicated operational unmanned undersea elements by the end of the decade, and across the U.S. military in general.

The Navy formally activated UUVRON 1 at a ceremony at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Keyport, Washington.
At the same time, the new organization replaced a smaller detachment that had been part of Submarine Development Squadron Five (DEVRON 5).
This unit still contains a variety of unique elements, including the USS Jimmy Carter spy sub, which recently returned from a shadowy, but apparently successful mission, as well as the Detachment Undersea Research and Development, which has been associated with those covert activities in the past.

“Today we are transitioning our UUV detachment into the first UUV squadron,” U.S.
Navy Captain Robert Gaucher, the outgoing head of DEVRON 5 said during the event.
“Why is this historical? It's because in standing up UUVRON 1, it shows our Navy's commitment to the future of unmanned systems and undersea combat.”

The previous Detachment Unmanned Undersea Vehicles was already a relatively young unit.
It only received its first underwater drone, a torpedo shaped vehicle known as a Large Training Vehicle 38, in August 2014.

USN The Large Training Vehicle 38.

“This is certainly a key milestone,” U.S. Navy Lieutenant Brian Nuss, then the officer in charge of the detachment, said at the time.
“The future large-diameter vehicles will come in 2020 and in order for the detachment to fully prepare for the delivery of those vehicles we have to start with the tactics, training and procedures now to make it a successful program in the future.”

The implication here would be that, at least for a period, the Navy planned for UUVRON 1 to reach its full operational capability at some point in 2020.
It is possible that the service may be able to get the squadron fully up and running sooner, depending on how the state of the training pipeline to staff the necessary slots and what additional equipment it needs to acquire.

Another possibility is that UUVRON 1 will continue to focus on research and development and test evaluation, while the Navy works to establish operational unmanned undersea units.
It could be those organizations that the service expects to be ready to go by 2020.

Whatever the case, the capability is important and it’s a long time coming.
By 2020, the Navy will have spent two decades working on achieving the broad goals outlined in its unmanned undersea vehicle master plans.

USN Sailors prepare to deploy a King Fish counter-mine drone.

The service published the first of these white papers in 2000 and issued a new version in 2004.
Seven years later, Seapower Magazine reported there was another updated document, but that it was classified.
“We actually have action plans on all the missions we are trying to achieve,” U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, then the director of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities within the Navy’s Information Dominance unit, told Seapower about the new plan.
It “covers every spectrum,” from a military missions, such as mine hunting and surveillance, to humanitarian assistance and research roles.

It’s very likely that some of all of the missions in the 2011 roadmap were the same or similar to the nearly a dozen roles outlined in the 2004 document, which is publicly available.
Some of these were intelligence gathering, time critical strike, anti-mine warfare, anti-submarine warfare, communication relaying, and force protection against enemy special operations forces and combat divers and terrorists.
In addition, the Navy said it could be possible that a final unmanned undersea vehicle design could be modular, able to carry a number of payloads, including expendable weapons or remote sensors, depending on the needs of the mission.

A graphic discussing possible underwater drone payloads from the US Navy's 2004 roadmap.

In a speech on Feb. 3, 2016, and in line with the so-called “Third Offset” strategy to stay technologically ahead of potential enemies, then Secretary of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said the U.S. military as a whole would be investing $600 million in a variety of unmanned undersea systems.
It’s “a new capability you’ll be seeing a lot more of” and would be part of larger plans for “making our ships and aircraft work together in ways that they haven’t before but technology makes possible,” he told sailors during the event in San Diego, California.

This suggested a significant increase over the Navy’s budgeting at the time.
In the fiscal year 2016 budget proposal, the service asked for just shy of $5 million for various undersea drone projects, less than five percent of the annual expenditure Carter was suggesting.

At present, the majority of the Navy’s existing underwater drones fall into one of two categories, either being focused on mine hunting or employed in oceanographic mapping and research roles.
In a bizarre episode in December 2016, members of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) snatched one of the latter vehicles, commonly known as gliders, out of the water in the South China Sea, before unceremoniously returning it days later.

Underwater glider research is currently underway in the physics department at the naval postgraduate in Monterey Ca.

Dr. Kevin Smith is a specialist in underwater acoustics and sonar systems.

He and his team are currently focused on autonomous underwater gliders and developing systems capable of detecting parameters in the ocean and listening for various sources of sound.

The benefits in both of these cases are relatively clear cut.
Gliders can help gather information about the ocean and sea floor faster and cheaper than sailing a large research vessel along the same routes.
It is possible that they may be able to get into areas that would be too shallow or narrow for a larger ship, as well.
They are far more persistent than a manned vessel as well, allowing for collection of data over a far larger timeframe.

When it comes to mines, on land or at sea, using a remote sensor of some kind to identify an object help keeps personnel away from danger.
A drone can move in very close to an object to examine it with relatively little risk and possibly disarm it without having to send out a specialized team.
All of this helps commanders maneuver safely through potentially contested and congested waterways.
Naval mines, including improvised ones that non-state actors are crafting, are a serious threat to both commercial shipping and naval vessels.

USN Sailors release a Swordfish mine-hunting underwater drone.

At the same time, the Navy is working on a so-called Large Displacement Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (LDUUV), as part of a program known as Snakehead.
Detachment Unmanned Undersea Vehicles’s Large Training Vehicle 38 had been a surrogate for this vehicle, the first prototypes of which are expected to be in the water by 2019, according to USNI News.

Not surprisingly, UUVRON 1 is slated to receive the first experimental LDUUV.
There are also future plans for extra large systems that could operate as either a remote controlled or autonomous mini-submarine or even have the ability to be optionally manned if need be.
In 2015, a team of Huntington Ingalls Underwater Solutions Group, Bluefin Robotics, and Battelle demonstrated on such vehicle Proteus.
The next year, Boeing showed off the huge Echo Voyager, claiming it could operation underwater for up to six months.

There's no real definitive idea of what these vehicles might look like in the end, those most of the notional concepts are shaped like little subs.
In 2014, though, the U.S. Navy showed off a underwater drone that looked and moved like a shark.

The GhostSwimmer vehicle developed by the Chief of Naval Operations' Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) project Silent NEMO undergoes testing during an event at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek - Fort Story.

Project Silent NEMO is an experiment to explore the possible uses for a biomimetic device developed by the Office of Naval Research.

As of earlier in 2017, the Office of Naval Research was working on an unmanned flying craft that could hit the water and then turn into a subsurface vehicle, though purely as a proof of concept.
A number of private companies are also working on similar convertible water craft that are both manned and unmanned.

The Office of Naval Research's Flying Sea Glider. Joseph Trevithick

Whatever it looks like, the Navy’s initial goal for the final Snakehead is a design that can conduct a variety of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance functions.
This could include gathering intelligence on enemy ships or facilities ashore, patrolling waterways for items of interest, or gathering information about a body of water, beach, or other landing side ahead of an attack naval or amphibious operation.

Again, the benefit of a using a drone for these functions it that it offers a lower cost and reduced risk option, especially when attempting to gather information about heavily defended or otherwise restricted areas.
With regards to unmanned undersea vehicles, it also reduces the burden on larger submarines, allowing them to focus on higher priority missions that requirement their more expansive intelligence gathering and weapon systems.

The option to use a unmanned vehicle for these jobs will likely only become more important in the coming years, as well.
Though we at The War Zone more often talk about concepts such as “anti-access and area denial” in terms of integrated air defense networks, many of the U.S. military’s potential opponents are exploring similar arrangements at sea.

In May 2017, the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) said it was beginning construction of an expansive sensor net in the South China Sea for “environmental” purposes.
Of course, these nodes could just as easily end up configured to keep watch for submarines and in a conflict, it would be especially useful to be able to find the exact locations of the nodes and attempt to size up their capabilities without risking detection in a manned boat in the process.

The Navy takes a trip under the sea to test its newly developed Common Control System (CCS) with a submersible unmanned vehicle at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Keyport in Puget Sound, Washington.

Learn how data collected from this series of successful underwater missions will help operators eliminate redundant efforts and reduce cost when operating unmanned vehicles in sea, land or air.

Further versions of Snakehead could carry actual weapons or electronic warfare payloads, to disable underwater sensors and mines or attack other undersea vessels, surface ships, or targets on land, depending on the final configuration.
Though not mentioned specifically, it is possible that multiple LDUUVs could operate as a single swarm to confuse, distract, or overwhelm enemy defenses, or operate in combination with small underwater drones for that purpose.
Networked together and connected to manned submarines, surface ships, or even aircraft, one or more of these unmanned underwater craft could just extend the situational awareness for the whole group along a broad front.

“I can think of so many missions that unmanned systems can help out,” U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Robert Girrier, then Director of Unmanned Warfare Systems within the Navy’s top Unmanned Systems Office, said during a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in February 2016.
Citing a desire for unmanned systems to be more of an integral part of operations in general, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mike Manazir, then Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfare Systems, shut down the office, also known as N99, in January 2017.

Exactly what sort of systems and tactics will work or not is likely to be UUVRON 1’s primary concern regardless of whether it is considered an operational or trials unit.
If the Navy sticks to its existing plans, we should start seeing some clues about what conclusions they’ve arrived at in the next few years.

Links :

• The Drive: The Future of Naval Warfare Will Have a Lot More Spy Submarines
• Defense systems : Navy accelerates Orca undersea drone program
• National Interest Online : How the US Navy Plans to Win the Wars of the Future
• GeoGarage blog : Lockheed launches a flying drone from a ... / Boeing unmanned undersea vehicle can operate ... / Underwater drones being used to detect enemy ... / Sophisticated unmanned submarines investigate ... / Year of the drone: new underwater drone developed by U.S ...

After the tsunami, Japan’s sea creatures crossed an ocean

Oregon State University scientists and a team of others have discovered plastic marine debris played a key role in transporting non-native species after the March 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The findings suggest that expanded coastal urbanization and storm activity, including the recent hurricanes and floods around the world, and predicted future enhanced storm activity due to climate change, could mean that the role of marine debris as a novel vector for invasive species may be increasing dramatically.

From NYTimes by Martin Fackler

The towering tsunami that devastated Japan six years ago also unleashed a very different sort of threat onto the distant coastline of North America: a massive invasion of marine life from across the Pacific Ocean.

Hundreds of species from the coastal waters of Japan — mostly invertebrates like mussels, sea anemones and crabs — were carried across the Pacific on huge amounts of floating debris generated by the disaster, according to a study published Thursday in Science.
Less than a year and a half after the enormous earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, left more than 18,000 dead or missing in Japan, the first pieces of wreckage began washing up on the shores of Canada and the United States.

To the surprise of scientists, the debris was covered with sea creatures that had survived crossings that in some cases had taken years.

Sea slugs brought to Oregon by a Japanese derelict vessel from the Iwate Prefecture.

Credit John W. Chapman

The study’s authors say it is too early to tell how many of these tiny invaders have gained a foothold in North American waters, where they could challenge or even displace native species.
While such “rafting” of animals across oceans happened in the past, the authors say the Japanese tsunami is unprecedented because of the sheer number of organisms that it sent across the world’s largest ocean.

And this points to one of the main findings of the study: that this mass migration was the result of not just the huge natural disaster, but changes in human behavior.
Such large numbers of marine animals were able to cross the Pacific because they rode on debris — made of materials like plastic and fiberglass — that proved durable enough to drift thousands of miles.

These synthetics, the use of which has taken off around the world, can stay afloat for years or even decades.
The debris that was dragged out to sea by the 2011 tsunami formed an unsinkable flotilla capable of transporting a large population of organisms across the world’s largest ocean.

Debris thought to have floated from Japan was prepared for inspection at Hatfield Marine Science Center at Oregon State University in Newport, Ore.

Credit John W. Chapman

“We have created a new ecological process, the process of mega-rafting,” said Steven L. Chown, a professor of biology at Monash University in Australia, who was not involved in the report, but wrote a commentary that also appeared in Science.
“The development of materials that can float for ages, and the rising levels of seas due to climate change, make the possibility of these events larger and larger.”

This flotsam ranged in size from coolers and motorcycle helmets to entire fishing boats and even larger objects, teeming with living sea animals that were native to the coastal waters of Japan, but foreign to North America.

John Chapman inspected a derelict vessel from Japan that had washed ashore on Long Beach, Wash. Hundreds of species from Japanese coastal waters were carried across the Pacific on floating debris generated by the 2011 tsunami.

Credit Russ Lewis

The larger the object, the more animals it carried.
One of the first pieces of tsunami debris that appeared was a 180-ton floating dock that washed ashore in Oregon in June 2012.
It was carrying a diverse mini-ecosystem of more than 120 different species.

“This was our first heads up, that this was the vanguard of what might be coming from Japan,” said one of the report’s co-authors, James T. Carlton, a professor emeritus of marine sciences at Williams College.
“After that, we got a steady stream of reports of boats, buoys and other debris, all with Japanese markings, and all carrying an amazing cross section of Japanese sea life.”

Dr. Carlton called it remarkable that such a wide range of species — which also included barnacles, worms and tiny filter-feeders called bryozoans — could survive the journey across the northern Pacific.
In many cases, these passages took years, longer than the life spans of the individual organisms.
The authors concluded that not only did these creatures adapt to an open ocean where food was scarcer than in rich coastal waters, they were also able to reproduce, in some cases for at least three generations, before reaching the North American coast.
“We found that hundreds of species could survive for multiple generations at sea,” said Dr. Carlton, who is a former director of William’s Maritime Studies Program in Mystic Seaport, Conn.
“They could do this so long as their rafts did not dissolve or sink.”

The 2011 tsunami, sweeping shores along Iwanuma in northern Japan, left more than 18,000 dead or missing, and sent an unprecedented number of organisms across the world’s largest ocean. CreditKyodo News, via Associated Press

To conduct the study, the authors relied on more than 200 volunteers, including state park rangers and beachcombers, to find and examine some 634 pieces of debris that washed ashore from 2012 to earlier this year.
While there was concern in the early days that some debris might have been contaminated from the nuclear accident at Fukushima that was caused by the tsunami, Dr. Carlton said such worries quickly eased after tests showed no traces of radioactive contamination.

The washed up objects were found to carry 289 invasive species from the western Pacific.
While most were invertebrates, a few vertebrates survived the journey, including a small number of emaciated fish that were trapped inside the water-filled hulls of half-sunken fishing boats.

Researchers tracked invertebrates and fish that traveled thousands of kilometers across the Pacific on debris such as boats, buoys, and fragments of docks.

All told, thousands of pieces of debris from Japan washed up on North American coasts from Sitka, Alaska, to Monterey, Calif., and as far afield as Hawaii.
Since the authors and volunteers were only able to inspect a fraction of these objects, Dr. Carlton said he believes hundreds more species likely made the crossing.

It is unclear how many of these will actually gain a foothold in North America.
It takes years for an invasive species to establish a viable population, and these may be hard to spot on so long a stretch of coastline.
Most of the newcomers will simply vanish in a Darwinian process of selection that Dr. Carlton likened to “a game of ecological roulette.”

Species that do prosper can cause enormous environmental and economic damage, especially if they supplant native species upon which coastal communities depend for livelihoods.
The study concluded that such disruptions will become more frequent as the use of plastics and other synthetics proliferates.
Nor does it take an event as rare as a giant tsunami to launch the next invasion fleet.
Dr. Carlton pointed to Hurricane Irma, which blew large amounts of plastic debris from devastated Caribbean islands onto Florida’s beaches.
“We have loaded the coastal zones of the world with massive amounts of plastic and materials that are not biodegradable,” he said.
“All it takes is something to push this into the ocean for the next invasion of species to happen.”

Links :

• The Guardian : Tsunami carried a million sea creatures from Japan to US west coast
• Washington Pots : A tsunami's worth of sea creatures landed along the Pacific Coast
• Mother Nature Network : Sea creatures from Japanese tsunami are just now arriving on ...
• Quartz : Sea creatures fled the Japanese tsunami on plastic rafts and ...
• Popular Science : Tons of animals have floated from Japan to Oregon on plastic junk
• The Verge : Almost 300 marine species hitched a ride on tsunami debris from Japan to the US