New expedition to Titanic site will create 3D map of wreck

RMS Titanic 2004 expedition

From Steve Szkotak, The Associated Press

A team of scientists will launch an expedition to the Titanic next month to assess the deteriorating condition of the world's most famous shipwreck and create a detailed three-dimensional map that will “virtually raise the Titanic” for the public.

The expedition to the site four kilometres beneath the North Atlantic is billed as the most advanced scientific mission to the Titanic wreck since its discovery 25 years ago.
(Titanic position in the Marine GeoGarage)

The 20-day expedition is to leave St. John's, Newfoundland, on Aug. 18 under a partnership between RMS Titanic Inc., which has exclusive salvage rights to the wreck, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The expedition will not collect artifacts but will probe a 3-by-5 kilometre debris field where hundreds of thousands of artifacts remain scattered.

Some of the world's most frequent visitors to the site will be part of the expedition along with a who's who of underwater scientists and organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Organizers say the new scientific data and images will ultimately will be accessible to the public.

“For the first time, we're really going to treat it as an archaeological site with two things in mind,” David Gallo, an expedition leader and Woods Hole scientist, told The Associated Press on Monday. “One is to preserve the legacy of the ship by enhancing the story of the Titanic itself. The second part is to really understand what the state of the ship is.”

The Titanic struck ice and sank on its maiden voyage in international waters on April 15, 1912, leaving 1,522 people dead.

Since oceanographer Robert Ballard and an international team discovered the Titanic in 1985, most of the expeditions have either been to photograph the wreck or gather thousands of artifacts, like fine china, shoes and ship fittings. “Titanic” director James Cameron has also led teams to the wreck to record the bow and the stern, which separated during the sinking and now lie one-third of a mile apart.

RMS Titanic made the last expedition to the site in 2004. The company, a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions Inc. of Atlanta, conducts traveling displays of the Titanic artifacts, which the company says have been viewed by tens of millions of people worldwide.

“We believe there's still a number of really exciting mysteries to be discovered at the wreck site,” said Chris Davino, president of and CEO of Premier Exhibitions and RMS Titanic. “It's our contention that substantial portions of the wreck site have never really been properly studied.”

The “dream team” of archaeologists, oceanographers and other scientists want to get the best assessment yet on the two main sections of the ship, which have been subjected to fierce deep-ocean currents, salt water and intense pressure.

Mr. Gallo said while the rate of Titanic's deterioration is not known, the expedition approaches the mission with a sense of urgency.

“We see places where it looks like the upper decks are getting thin, the walls are thin, the ceilings may be collapsing a bit,” he said. “We hear all these anecdotal things about the ship is rusting away, it's collapsing on itself. No one really knows.”

The expedition will use imaging technology and sonar devices that never have been used before on the Titanic wreck and to probe nearly a century of sediment in the debris field to seek a full inventory of the ship's artifacts.

“We're actually treating it like a crime scene,” Mr. Gallo said. “We want to know what's out there in that debris field, what the stern and the bow are looking like.”

“Never before have we had the scientific and technological means to discover so much of an expedition to Titanic,” said P.H. Nargeolet, who is co-leading the expedition. He has made more than 30 dives to the wreck.

Bill Lange, a Woods Hole scientist who will lead the optical survey and will be one of the first to visit the wreck, said a key analysis will be comparing images from the first expedition 25 years ago and new images to measure decay and erosion.

“We're going to see things we haven't seen before. That's a given,” he said. “The technology has really evolved in the last 25 years.”

“I'm sure there will be future expeditions because this is the just the beginning of a whole new era of these kind of expeditions to Titanic – serious, archaeological mapping expeditions,” Mr. Gallo said.

Tip of the day : how to create a link to the Marine GeoGarage

Geo link to the Marine GeoGarage

If you need to send the display of a specific area containing the nautical map at the scale of your choice :

• move the cursor of the mouse to the left bottom corner of the map
• a small window appears (show in red above)
• click once on the first line (Link) to copy and paste the html address for sending this link via Email or Instant Messaging (IM)

For 'Public' layers (NOAA US, Linz NZ, DHN Brazil ), select at first the chart layer, and this one will be automatically recorded in the Marine GeoGarage link.
Ex.: Fort Lauderdale, Bahia Mar Yacht Club
http://marine.geogarage.com/routes?anonmap=eyJtdCI6MSwicG9zIjp7ImxsIjoiMjYuMTEzMTgsLTgwLjEwNjU1IiwieiI6MTd9LCJvIjp7Ijk1MyI6eyJ0Ijo2OX19fQ==

For 'Private' chart layers (UKHO, CHS Canada, SHN Argentina) , you need to be registered with 'Chart Premium' access
Ex. : Bassin Louise, Quebec ( to view the above CHS chart)
http://marine.geogarage.com/routes?anonmap=eyJtdCI6MSwicG9zIjp7ImxsIjoiNDYuODIwNDYsLTcxLjE5OTM5IiwieiI6MTZ9LCJvIjp7IjEwN2EiOnsidCI6NTh9fX0=

Note : you can eventually use the service of some URL shortening services (bit.ly ...) in order to insert your Marine GeoGarage link in a short form for Twitter
Ex. : http://bit.ly/doluXW / http://bit.ly/aV47Zk tied to the above examples

Work underway to resolve Beaufort Sea boundary dispute

NOAA chart of the Yukon-Alaska border

CHS chart of the Yukon-Alaska border

From VancouverSun

Canadian and U.S. government experts met quietly in Ottawa last week to begin trying to resolve a long-standing boundary dispute in the Beaufort Sea, a Canadian diplomat revealed Monday.

News of the surprise talks was disclosed during a briefing by Canadian and U.S. officials on a bi-national seabed mapping mission to be conducted next month in the Beaufort region.

This summer's joint Canada-U.S. survey, the third consecutive year in which researchers from the two countries have agreed to collaborate on mapping the Beaufort sea floor, will also include a sonar probe of the contested area itself for the first time.

The Ottawa talks on the Beaufort controversy, held July 22, followed a pledge earlier this year by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon that Canada intends to actively pursue an agreement with the U.S. over where the maritime boundary should be drawn in an unresolved, Lake Ontario-sized section of the Arctic Ocean north of the Yukon-Alaska border.

Allison Saunders, deputy director of the continental shelf division at the Department of Foreign Affairs, said the gathered specialists in international law, hydrography and other fields had a productive discussion on the technical aspect related to the boundary and that a second meeting has been scheduled to take place in Washington next year.

Beginning Aug. 2, scientists aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy and the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent will co-operate in a 42-day mission aimed at generating seabed data across a wide swath of the southern, central and northern Beaufort Sea.

The information is intended to help the two countries prepare their respective claims under a UN treaty for extended authority over submerged territory as well as potential petroleum deposits and other seabed resources.

Canada's submission to the UN agency on continental shelves is due in 2013.

Until now, the two countries have avoided conducting survey work in the disputed zone in the southern Beaufort.

But the federal scientist leading Canada's offshore mapping mission, Natural Resources Canada geologist Jacob Verhoef, said Monday that mapping within the contested area has become necessary to complete each country's broader claims for undersea territory beyond the Beaufort's southern waters.

To secure extensions to their authority over extended stretches of undersea territory, countries must prove that clear geological connections exist between the continental mainland and adjacent stretches of sea floor.

Historically, the key area of dispute was a triangle-shaped, 21,500-sq.-km section of the Beaufort Sea close to the Yukon-Alaska shore. But the joint Canada-U.S. seabed surveys in 2008 and 2009 showed each country's claims could extend much farther toward the North Pole than previously imagined, doubling or even tripling the ultimate size of the dispute zone once continental shelf submissions are made.

The two countries have disagreed since the 1970s over where to draw the ocean border. It's a conflict that flares whenever fisheries management, oil-and-gas exploration or other resource development issues arise in the region.

Canada's position is based on an 1825 treaty between Russian and Britain that was transferred to the U.S. and Canada when the two countries acquired Alaska and the Yukon respectively in the latter half of the 19th century.

That treaty suggests the Beaufort Sea maritime boundary is an extension of the arrow-straight land border between Yukon and Alaska, which follows the 141st meridian.

The U.S. argues the offshore boundary is defined by an "equidistance" principle: the demarcation line at any point is drawn halfway between each country's nearest stretch of coastline.

But because the two countries are working to expand their seabed domains in the central and northern Beaufort — also potential petroleum targets — an area much larger than the traditional dispute zone is coming into play.

Under the U.S. formula for determining the maritime boundary, the looming presence of Canada's Banks Island on the Beaufort's eastern side radically alters where the border between the two countries would be drawn in areas farther out to sea.

According to the U.S. position, Alaska's northward-sloping coastline means the sea's southern maritime boundary veers slightly eastward of the Yukon-Alaska land boundary, giving the U.S. a greater amount of marine jurisdiction.

But the overlap in the northerly expanse of the Beaufort would be much larger and reversed, with the boundary under the U.S. formula swinging far to the west because of Banks Island, giving Canada a greater share of the potentially resource-rich seabed.

Meanwhile, Canada's longitude-line formula for determining the boundary would give the U.S. more seabed territory in the outer Beaufort.

Canada also recently began talks with Denmark to try to resolve an offshore territorial dispute in the eastern Arctic Ocean.

In March, Canwest News Service revealed that the two countries were now actively working to end a decades-old disagreement over a 200-square-kilometre section of the Lincoln Sea, north of Canada's Ellesmere Island and Danish-controlled Greenland.

Crazy-looking new deep-sea creatures

"An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep."
John Steinbeck

From Wired

Ten new possible species could change everything about the way we think about deep-sea life in the Atlantic Ocean.

Most of the creatures are so strange, it is hard to know which direction they swim or where their mouths are.

The images were captured by researchers from the University of Aberdeen during more than 300 hours of diving with a remotely operated vehicle between 2,300 feet and 12,000 feet deep along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the largest mountain range on Earth, which runs down the center of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and Africa on the east and the Americas on the west.

Three of the species, which look like colorful wavy worms, belong to a group of creatures called Enteropneust, which is believed to be the evolutionary link between backbone and invertebrate animals. Previously only a few specimens of the group, from the Pacific Ocean, were known to science.

“They have no eyes, no obvious sense organs or brain but there is a head end, tail end and the primitive body plan of backboned animals is established,” said Monty Priede, one of the lead researchers on the project, part of the Census of Marine Life.

One of the most surprising observations by the researchers was how different the species are on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, just tens of miles apart. “[The two sides of the ridge are] mirror images of each other,” Priede said. “but that is where the similarity ended.”

“It seemed like we were in a scene from Alice Through the Looking Glass,” Pried said. “This expedition has revolutionized our thinking about deep-sea life in the Atlantic Ocean. It shows that we cannot just study what lives around the edges of the ocean and ignore the vast array of animals living on the slopes and valleys in the middle of the ocean.”

Links :

• Toronto Sun : New creatures found off Newfoundland coast
• BBC News / DailyMail : New sea creatures found on Barrier Reef
  

Respect : round the world solo non-stop without assistance, on a sailing boat of 6.5

I had to go there.

It was a sort of mystic conviction - something in the nature of a call.
But it was difficult to state intelligibly the grounds of this belief to that man of rigorous logic...
Joseph Conrad, The mirror of the sea

From OceanExplorers

Franco-Italian Alessandro Di Benedetto has spent the last 268 days circumnavigating the world in a 6.5 meter yacht solo. The last part, the whole Atlantic, of it with a jury rig.

Alessandro Di Benedetto arrived in Les Sables d’Olonne, France on Thursday July 22nd, where he started nearly nine months ago. Hundreds of friends, family and followers had gathered to meet the solo sailor.

It was really fantastic for me. It was a dream I've always thought was feasible. However, there are plenty of people told me I was crazy and that I would die, Alessandro said when he finally could set his feet on shore again.


The boat he used, though modified, is by no means designed for a world circumnavigation. The 6.5 meter long boat is designed for fast solo sailing over the Atlantic in warm down wind. Not for sailing in house high waves in the harsh Southern Ocean conditions. But the 40 year old solo sailor managed to control both his boat and himself during the 24,000 miles nonstop and without assistance.

It’s a first for such a small boat.
His record, as the smallest boat to complete a circumnavigation in such a time, have been approved by the World Speed Sailing Record Council (WSSRC). The official time is 268 days, 19 hours, 36 minutes and 12 seconds as the official time.

"Keeps going anyway"
The accomplishment becomes even bigger when considering that the Franco-Italian sailor dismasted just before rounding Cape Horn. He made a jury rig and after some thinking decided to carry on to Les Sables d’Olonne. That’s seamanship and persistence few can do after him.
The distance under jury rig alone must be close to a world record in jury rigged sailing--if such a category exists.

Alessandro had rather lofty goals for his project which range beyond simply being the 'first' to achieve something. In his words (from his website) some of the aims of the project were :

• to accomplish a unique feat which would be recognized as World Record.
• to be ambassador and international testimonial for sponsors taking part into the event.
• to contribute to the scientific research in several fields (renewable energy, environment protection, medical researches, new technologies, clothing, materials).
• to promote extraordinary experience to be shared with people from different cultures in order to make them feel citizens of the world.
• to be a source of inspiration and motivation for children and young people and to educate them to consider themselves citizens of the world in order to sustain the protection of both natural and artistic earth heritage, with special regard to the next generations.

Links :

• Other circumnavigations
• Alain Maignan solo RTW in a Jeanneau Sun Rise 34 (2007)
• Jacques Riguidel solo RTW, without assistance, sithout motors, without fossil fuel, in harmony with ocean with 'Fréquence Jazz' 9,7 m (2008)