Remote sea lanes in Canada's Northwest Passage poorly mapped yet increasingly popular with cruise lines
Within the space of a week two ships have been involved in accidents in the Northwest Passage, fuelling debate on the environmental risks associated with shipping north of the Arctic Circle, despite the waters being increasingly ice-free in the summer. Both accidents were blamed on navigation problems, drawing attention to a lack of proper charts for the region.
In late August the cruise ship Clipper Adventurer was heading for Kugluktuk, at the entrance to the passage, when it struck a rock not shown on the map, according to the captain of the ship. The Canadian Coast Guard sent an icebreaker to rescue the 110 passengers, taking them to the ship's next port of call. The condition of the ship – still stuck but said to be "stable" by CCG spokeswoman Chantal Guénette – is being closely watched until it can be refloated.
The MV Nanny, a small Canadian oil tanker, suffered a similar fate on 1 September, running aground on a sandbank in the western part of the passage. Here again a CCG icebreaker soon reached the ship, which was carrying 9m litres of diesel fuel for remote Nunavut communities. An inspection of the vessel confirmed that "no damage has been detected and there are no leaks", said Guénette. The ship's master also blamed the grounding on inaccurate charts.
Louis Fortier, the scientific director of ArcticNet, the main network of Canadian researchers working in the Arctic, is not surprised at the accidents. "Only a tenth of the region is properly mapped," he said.
Dale Nicholson, the head of the Arctic region at Canada's Hydrographic Service, confirmed this figure. He reckons there is no need to map the whole of the Canadian Arctic for it to be possible to navigate the main channels "but we obviously need more than 10%".
Highly specialised, relatively expensive equipment is required to map the seabed. The Hydrographic Service lacks the financial resources to speed up the process, yet time is running out, says Fortier. "Between 1906 – when the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen first negotiated the passage – and 2009, 69 ships took this route. This year, in only seven months, 24 ships have already passed through and most of them are cruise ships. If we want to prevent a rash of accidents, we must make mapping the Arctic a priority," he said.
But it is impossible to control everything. Cruise ships sail too close to the land to give passengers a better view, straying from the properly charted central channel.
In a revamp of the world's oldest international sporting competition, the next America's Cup regatta, in 2013, will use "cutting-edge" catamarans instead of the traditional monohulls.
The new "action-packed" format for the event is designed to appeal to "the Facebook generation, not the Flintstone generation," Russell Coutts, the CEO of America's Cup defenders Oracle, told a news conference here on Monday.
The 72-foot (22-metre) wing-sail catamarans will be "pretty special, very powerful and very demanding," the four-time America's Cup winning New Zealander added.
America's Cup regattas traditionally use the much larger monohulls. But the last edition, held in the Spanish Mediterranean port of Valencia in February, was a best-of-three multihull duel between the US syndicate Oracle and Switzerland's defending champion Alinghi.
That match, won by Oracle, was the result of more than two years of legal wrangling between the two teams -- owned respectively by US software tycoon Larry Ellison and Swiss biotech billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli -- which many felt had tarnished the sport's image.
Coutts said in planning the new-look 34th edition of the Cup, the organisers "looked beyond sailing" and talked to leaders of NBA basketball, Nascar and Formula One auto racing and European Champions League football.
In June, organisers carried out tests off the coast of Valencia involving multihulls and monohulls to see what works best for television audiences.
Coutts said the AC72 catamarans, which can zip round the racecourse with one hull in the air, will "produce great match-racing" and "open the door to other teams from elsewhere in sailing who have never contemplated the America's Cup before". They will "reconnect the America's Cup with young sailors and encourage a new larger audience to turn on and tune in," he said, adding that many of the potential challengers "see it as a chance to level the playing field".
Pete Melvin, a champion multihull sailor, said the new catamarans will produce "competitive, fast high-adrenaline racing, creating a more exciting competition".
As part of the overhaul of yachting's premier event, which dates back to 1851, Coutts also announced that a "new annual America's Cup World Series.., featuring the cutting-edge catamaran, will deliver exciting racing to new audiences" from 2011.
He also said a new "Youth America's Cup" will take place from 2012 and "media output will be revolutionised" with "on-board cameramen".
The regatta itself will feature a "shorter action-packed race format" and 11 crewmen per yacht, six fewer than in the monohulls.
"We need to capture and communicate the excitement that our sport can produce," Coutts said. "We could have pressed the repeat button and organised the 34th America's Cup much the same" as the 32rd America's Cup, held in Valencia in 2007, the last edition of the event to follow the traditional, multichallenger format. "Then, the boats were relatively even and some of the racing was great. Even so, when we looked into it deeply, the commercial and media returns fell well short of a coherent and cohesive model that would create sustainable teams and encourage sponsors to plan for the long term."
He said limits on the numbers of boats, sails and equipment will also bring down costs for the competitors.
Coutts, one of the world's most successful sailors, said Oracle would announce the host city for the 34th edition by the end of the year. San Francisco, where Oracle is based, is widely seen as the preferred venue, but Valencia and a port near Rome as well as a site in the Middle East have also been cited in press reports as possibilities.
He also confirmed that the protocol for the next edition envisages an "independent body that will run the competition", the America's Cup Race Management. This "international jury" will have "wide-ranging powers" and "will quickly end any of the show-stopping disputes that we have seen in the past," he said, referring to Oracle's legal battle with Alinghi.
The official race protocol for the 34th America's Cup was signed Monday by Oracle and Italian syndicate Mascalzone Latino, the official "challenger of record", which has the right to help organise the event.
Hollywood director James Cameron is preparing to dive to the deepest point of the oceans, it was revealed Sunday, as part of his research for a sequel to "Avatar," his 3D epic.
He has commissioned Australian engineers to build a deep sea submersible which can reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench - 36,000ft (10.9km) down in the western Pacific (Marine GeoGarage position)- after deciding to set the film in the turbulent waters of Pandora, an alien moon.
The vessel will be fitted with 3D cameras designed by Cameron so that he can take unprecedented footage of such depths and, if he wants to, fill it with digitally created monsters for Avatar 2.
The muddy, rocky Mariana Trench, which could swallow Mount Everest, has been visited by man only once.
In May 1960, a submersible called the Trieste took nearly five hours to descend to its floor. Its passengers, Jacques Piccard, a Swiss scientist, and Don Walsh, a US navy lieutenant, were able to spend 20 minutes at the bottom of the world.
In the cold and darkness, eating chocolate bars, they were joined by flounder, sole and shrimp, proving that some vertebrate life can exist at such extraordinary depths. Although remote-controlled vessels have gone back to the Challenger Deep, a valley at the bottom of the trench, no humans have been so deep again.
However, Cameron, who reportedly earned $US350 million ($377.84m) from Avatar, has the money and passion to return. His obsession with the waters that cover two-thirds of the world’s surface has been manifested not only in his blockbuster Titanic and a spin-off documentary, but also in his 1989 film The Abyss.
Last month, Cameron spent his 56th birthday in a Russian deep sea submersible called the Mir-1, descending more than 1.5km into Lake Baikal in Siberia, the deepest freshwater lake in the world. (see video above) Cameron told Russian journalists that he had come to the Siberian lake to draw attention to its pollution problems. He says his descent into the Mariana Trench would be a similar environmental mission.
“We are building a vehicle to do the dive,” he said. “It’s about half-completed in Australia.”
He hopes to start preparing for the dive later this year.
Australian scientists believed to be working for Cameron have visited the San Francisco headquarters of Hawkes Ocean Technologies, which has been building a submersible capable of settling at the bottom of the trench. Cameron’s new vessel is expected to be a two-seater, finned cylinder fitted with the latest 3D cameras and a heating system largely missing from the Trieste.
Some of his footage from the depths may end up in Avatar 2 - which is not expected to reach cinemas before 2014 - or possibly in two other deep-sea adventures that the director is considering turning into movies.
Times Online builds on that story by announcing that the X Prize Foundation announced a new challenge: Later this year the X Prize Foundation will offer at least $10 million (£6 million) for the first privately funded craft to make two repeat visits to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. The foundation now aims to change deep ocean exploration by inspiring companies to develop technologies that will “significantly increase our ability to explore, gather information, and map the ocean’s depths”.
The latest stories throw English Billionaire Richard Branson into the mix, as he has announced his plans at the beginning of the year to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench using a jetfighter-like submarine being built in the United States.
So the director of the two most successful films ever made and the owner of one of the world's most visible airlines are vying for the title of first human in fifty years to dive to the deepest, darkest point in the Mariana Trench all while a third party, the X Prize Foundation, is offering a $10 million prize for whoever gets their not first, but twice.
One-hundred-foot-tall waves can be nightmarish ship-swallowing monsters — or seductive sirens that tempt the adventurous. But it wasn't until 15 years ago that scientists were even able to prove that such giant rogue waves actually existed.
Susan Casey, whose book The Wave tells the story of great waves and those who seek to solve and ride them, says people were skeptical of 100-foot waves because weather patterns don't seem to predict them.
Casey says she first became interested in learning about monster waves after hearing a story about the British research vessel Discovery, a 230-meter-long ship that became trapped in a vortex of giant waves for several days. The waves, Casey says, ranged from 60 to 100 feet tall and were not predicted by weather models.
"I just wanted to find out more about that, and yet there had been nothing written," she tells NPR's Scott Simon. "So I began to investigate."
'Avalanches Of Water'
Casey says that physics principles don't seem to allow for huge waves to exist in certain sea conditions. Yet, "for decades and even centuries, boats had been disappearing, and mariners had said, 'You know, there were these incredibly big waves, and we just escaped,' and nobody believed them."
"It was only in 1980 that we got satellites, and it was 15 years after that that it was proved that there are these 100-foot waves that can actually appear in, say, a 38-foot sea," Casey says. "But that made no sense at all."
The number of super-large waves is likely on the rise, Casey says, as a result of more climatic extremes, which in turn lead to feistier seas, tougher ocean conditions and bigger storms. The waves form as a result of these large storms, and the inherent instability of the waves — the steepness of the face — lead them to "sort of freaking out and becoming these rogue waves that are very unstable," she says.
"They're almost like avalanches of water, where one wave will all of a sudden grab the energy from, say, three or four waves around it and become this teetering monster that doesn't act like a normal wave."
Waves 'Going To Waste'
While some people fear these waves, others want to get as close to them as possible.
"I was very interested in anybody who had been in a position to tell me more about waves this size," Casey says. She found such people in "a very rarefied group of extreme surfers who seek them out."
Chief among them is Laird Hamilton, who invented a special kind of surfing just to tackle these mega waves. At some point, Casey says, the waves move too fast for anyone to be able to paddle into them. "The best waves in the world were going to waste," she said Hamilton once told her.
So Hamilton and some surfing friends began tinkering and came up with a technique involving jet skis and water ski ropes that enabled surfers to ride large waves.
Hamilton insists he's not nuts: "I would think [I'm] more on the sane side than most of the people that live in cities. And really, I'm doing it — not only because we're able to — but because for us, it's like an exploration. What can we do? How far can we go?"
Hamilton says his pursuit of giant waves really has to do with developing a "more intimate" relationship with the ocean. Being in the presence of a giant wave, he says, is to "experience something that is unexperienced by normal man or by any man."
Trying to describe the experience of surfing a huge wave is as difficult as trying to describe a color, Hamilton says. "It's something all-consuming. It's an experience that changes who you are. I just feel so alive from doing it. I feel like I get such great power."
And to wipe out?
"It's the moment where you totally relinquish any true control over what you're doing," he says. "There's no place really in life that does it quite like that — when you do fall and you do get hit by [the water], you're just at the mercy of the wave and it dictates. And sometimes those are the most thrilling rides of all. Unfortunately."
About 70 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, but so little is known about the oceans, Casey says. "This is, to me, the amazing thing: This spectacular force of nature, these rogue waves that can take out an 850-foot ship were, up to 15 years ago, considered not to exist. The most important thing about the ocean is that we explore it. It's our own planet — it's spectacularly beautiful, and it's really, really powerful."
BiG wave Surf in TEahupOO , Tasmania ... too the best wieaput's. all in 2010
Teahupoo 2010 : some of the best big waves riders were there on this first 2010 big swell (the biggest since 5 years). Manoa Drollet certainly surfed the best wave of the day
In July French rower Mathieu Bonnier started rowing from Qaanaaq in Greenland towards Resolute Bay in the north of Canada where he arrived a week ago. He has left again over the weekend to carry on with his Northwest Passage row.
During his row from Qaanaaq to Resolute Bay Mathieu encountered sea ice that blocked his way, and icebergs and colonies of walruses that were best avoided.
Coast guard ships
On the way to Resolute the lone rower met with two Canadian coast guard ships, the ‘Henry Larsen’ and the ‘Terry Fox'. The ’Terry Fox’ helped Mathieu after he had a very difficult night with little sleep while the tide was pushing his boat against the rocks.
Ice cold sea and wind
His home team said during his row he slept for one or two hours at a time, interrupted by weather issues and drift control through surrounding icebergs.
The wind was not always in favor of the rower. The home team once reported, "Mathieu had headwinds for 5 days, which prevented him from making a direct route. He struggled to paddle like hell as long as possible each day against the wind. You have to imagine waves of 1 to 2 meters hitting the boat with the spray at 0°C. He rowed 12-15 hours per day in these conditions. When he stopped, he put out a para anchor to avoid drifting. He has managed very well and rested when the wind was at its strongest.”
Baffin Bay crossing
Bonnier’s home team says his crossing of Baffin Bay is the first since the Vikings “and again, they had sails and oars and probably crossed South. Alone, no one has ever done it.”
There were a lot of ice in this area and big icebergs were seen from afar.
On July 28 his home team reported that Mathieu has crossed Baffin Bay in 12 days, after a brave effort in difficult conditions. He encountered a lot of ice during the last miles. He arrived in the middle of seals and he met his first Polar Bear, a male who was swimming about fifty yards from the boat. So he rows with his rifle on his shoulders, but the risk was minimal when it moves away from the ice floes, reported the home team.
Blocked before Resolute Bay
The sea ice was a big challenge up to the last minute of his arrival in Resolute Bay. Mathieu crossed the Strait of Wellington, but was blocked by ice and 70km/h winds near Cape Dungeness only 20 minutes from Resolute Bay.
After a week’s stay in Resolute Bay, waiting for good conditions, he departed over the weekend, reported Maurice Uguen to ExplorersWeb. His latest position according to his map is 73° 51.45 N, 95° 30.55 W (Marine GeoGarage). No new updates since his departure.
When he left Resolute Bay the coast guard warned Mathieu about ice between Resolute and Cambridge Bay and they asked him to stay in daily contact with them.
Mathieu Bonnier is a veterinary surgeon who has skied across Alaska in the winter of 2006 with his dog Tico. He participated in the 2007 World Rowing Championships and in 2009 rowed the Bouvet Rames Guyane Transatlantic Rowing Race. Mathieu rowed the 4700 solo and came second after being 43 days at the oars.
Mathieu Bonnier plans to transit the Northwest Passage in a rowboat. He started from Greenland in the summer of 2010 and plans to complete the row in the summer of 2011 when he reaches Alaska. During the Arctic winter months he will take a break and wait for daylight again. His dog Tico will meet up with him along the route.
