iPhone in a Bottle : throw it out to sea to explore oceans

This is the utopian but poetic project from iWeb a small company from Cyprus which wants to study oceans and explore the depths with iPhone placed in a bottle and throwed out to sea...

They want to put an iPhone in a bottle and throw it out to sea. It will take photos and upload them on iphoneinabottle.com for everyone to see!


All our supporters will have the chance to put their name inside the "bottle" and become part of this unique event.

They were inspired last year to do this after a student sent a camera to space using a weather balloon. They want to follow the same concept but with a twist.
The difference is that they will send two iPhone 4's, but not to space.
They will send them out to sea!

The iPhone will be in a custom made "bottle". They will throw it in the sea and wait for it to reach shore in another country. But they will not just sit and wait. They will design a system with which we can monitor the position of the "bottle" using GPS trackers. They will also program the iPhones to take random photos during its journey, and whenever there is GPRS or 3G reception it will upload the photos to the project's website.

They will place 2 iPhones in the bottle.
One will be "Sea View" and will face forward, capturing images of the sea and hopefully some ships and land ahead.
The other will be "Fish View" and it will be facing downwards, hopefully capturing images of some fish which come to eat off the bottle.

Everything will be powered by solar chargers so as to keep the system working (indefinitely I hope). They will track the position live using a GPS tracker which has worldwide signal, and the journey will be plotted on a map and shown on the website in realtime.

They will also build an iPhone application which anyone can download for free and watch the "bottle's" journey.

So make good things happen : visit Ulule online crowd-funding campaign

How turning off the tracking feature on the iPhone/iPad application?

Do you know if there is a way to reset the red tracking line?

Actually the app starts tracking when the GPS signal is received.
There is not any feature to remove the red tracking line (in our TODO list)
The only way is to quit and relaunch the application.

How to force an app to close :

• double click the Home button, multitasking bar opens (displaying recently used apps)
• swipe left or right and locate the app you want use (for example Marine US)
• tap and hold icon in multitasking bar for a second or two until it starts to jiggle : you'll see a little minus badge in top left corner.
• now, you just click that "minus" and app is "really closed"
• double-click the Home button and try opening the app again

As a tiny island nation makes a big sacrifice, will the rest of the world follow suit?

Film about the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, Republic of Kiribati.
A New England Aquarium World of Water film

From Mongabay

Kiribati, a small nation consisting of 33 Pacific island atolls, is forecast to be among the first countries swamped by rising sea levels.
Nevertheless, the country recently made an astounding commitment: it closed over 150,000 square miles of its territory to fishing, an activity that accounts for nearly half the government's tax revenue.

What moved the tiny country to take this monumental action?
President Anote Tong, says Kiribati ("Kir-ee-bas") is sending a message to the world: "We need to make sacrifices to provide a future for our children and grandchildren."

President Tong isn't mincing his words. Kiribati looks to make the ultimate sacrifice by mid-century, when much of the country is projected to be largely uninhabitable.
Rising seas will contaminate freshwater supplies, ruin agriculture lands, and erode beaches and villages, forcing its people to flee.
Kiribati has done nothing to earn this fate—its greenhouse gas emissions are negligible and its population barely tops 100,000.
Yet it is already looking at buying land in other countries for eventual resettlement of a substantial proportion of its population.

Kiribati is among the world's poorest countries.
It has few natural resources other than fish and copra, the dried meat of coconut.
It does however have of some of the world's most pristine coral reefs and healthiest fish stocks, which have now become the basis of its contribution to the well-being of the planet: the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), which at 408,250 square kilometers is the largest marine World Heritage site (see PIPA seamounts fly-through in Google Earth)

PIPA is part of President Tong's bigger, more ambitious initiative, the Pacific Oceanscape—38.5 million square kilometers (24 million square miles) of ocean, an area larger than the land territories of the United States, Canada and Mexico combined.
Over the past two years, President Tong has brought together 16 Pacific Ocean nations to develop the initiative, which seeks to maintain ocean health by improving management of fisheries, protecting and conserving biodiversity, furthering scientific understanding of the marine ecosystem, and reducing the negative impacts of human activities.

President Tong's efforts in the face of incredible adversity has earned him considerable respect in the conservation world.
Dr. Greg Stone, Chief Ocean Scientist and Senior Vice President for Marine Conservation at Conservation International, likens him to the "Teddy Roosevelt of Oceans" in that President Tong is doing for oceans what the 26th president did for land conservation in the United States around the turn of the 20th century.

"What we are seeing here is the dawning of a new era for marine management," he said.
President Tong brought his message to San Francisco last week for the California and the World Ocean 2010 conference.
Presenting along side U.S. Representative Sam Farr (Dem-CA), NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, philanthropist David Rockefeller Jr., oceanographer Sylvia Earle, and hundreds of marine scientists and conservationists, President Tong urged the world to take action to protect oceans and avoid climate change.

"There is obviously a need to consolidate all of the efforts in ocean governance in the Pacific and indeed in the world if we are to successfully manage and conserve these resources for present and future generations," he said.

Following his keynote address at the conference, President Tong discussed climate change and marine conservation with Mongabay.com's Rhett Butler (see the article of Mongabay, a short excerpt of the interview with President Tong).

Links :

• Ecocentric : Oceans, protecting the Pacific
• YouTube : The rising tide, Kiribati
  

Unmapped Northwest Passage proves perilous for ships that stray

CHS catalogue of raster charts in the Marine GeoGarage

From TheGuardian (this article originally appeared in Le Monde)

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.

Links :

• Edmonton Journal : Charting Arctic waters a titanic task worth tackling
• OttawaCitizen : Every Arctic voyage is a potential disaster
• CBCNews : Northwest Passage tanker could be stuck for days, range of Arctic charting may be to blame (shipping official)
• NOAA Ship Fairweather maps aid shipping through Bering Straits, new multi-year effort to update charts of priority Arctic regions
  

New-look America's Cup set for 2013 on catamarans

From AFP

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.

Links :

• NYTimes : Cup race is taking different direction