Liquid Robotics to launch wave gliders to collect oceanographic data

The Wave Glider is a new technology dedicated to collecting data about the ocean.
The Wave Glider uses solar panels to harvest energy from the sun to propel itself, allowing for the Wave Glider to travel long distance without needing to refuel.
Data collected is transmitted in real time via satellite to shore (video part II).

From Igyaan

Liquid Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup, makes remote controlled robots that cruise the open ocean and gather data.
The company plans to collect this data and offer it up to consumers on the web.
The machines, called Wave Gliders, can keep track of all sorts of data including whale songs, wave heights and the presence of nearby ships.

The company plans to sell these robots to governments, research institutions and energy companies for between $1,50,000 and $500,000 a piece depending on the included components.
Liquid Robotics has deployed nearly 100 Wave Gliders over the past year-and-a-half that have racked up 150,000 miles of ocean travel, according to the company which also expands its cloud services that let customers buy subscriptions to the data gathered by the Wave Gliders.
“Customers can say, ‘I just want to buy data services and I need robots at these locations in the ocean for these things,’ ” said Vass.
“We’ll throw the robots in the ocean and they’ll transmit data in real time. Another option is that we have a group of robots that are pre-deployed and people can set up a data plan for where they happen to be.”
About a third of the company’s clients buy off-the-shelf Wave Gliders, another third order customized robots designed for specific tasks while another third opt for the data subscription model, according to Vass.
Subscriptions run between $300,000 to $500,000 a year.
If that sounds expensive, Vass says consider that it can cost between $30,000 and $70,000 a day to operate a deep-ocean ship. Wave Gliders, on the other hand, can spend years at sea, returning to port periodically for maintenance.

NOAA PMEL wave gliders are a simple and cost-effective platform for collecting ocean data that does not rely on expensive ships or buoys.

The wave glider features a 6-foot, 10-inch-long floating section equipped with solar panels, a battery and sensors (specifications).
Tethered 23 feet below the float in the water is a similarly sized glider with metal wings and a rudder that propel and steer the device.

The inventor of the device, Robert Hine, originally made the device for a friend who wished to study whale songs off the coast of Hawaii.
He started designing and fabricating the machines in 2005, taking every other week off from his job as a semiconductor engineer.
He experimented with different Electric Engine designs, but they all failed.
After much research, he came up with a design that harnesses the natural energy in waves, like a sailboat harnesses the wind.

The gliders ‘wings’ use the up and down motion of the waves to propel the device forward at a pace of around 1.5 miles per hour.
Operators are able to map out a route and have waypoints transmitted to the robot via satellite.
It then uses GPS signals to follow the programmed route.
The robot is unable to remain still but can criss-cross the same area.
Because the gliders are essentially floating platforms that can be programmed to go anywhere, there are many possible uses.
They can measure ocean and air temperature to help predict storms and water currents and wave height for shippers trying to determine the safest route for their vessels.
They also can help oceanographers monitor whales and other aquatic life.
In crowded areas like the Gulf of Mexico, gliders could collect location, speed and destination information for ships—information that now is sent through radio signals—and display the information on a map.
There are less obvious uses as well. Mr. Vass imagines equipping gliders with cellular towers to provide coverage in the middle of oceans.
Also, gliders could be programmed to dispense fish food, creating fish farms that move around at sea.

Liquid Robotics isn’t the only company that makes unmanned sea vehicles for data collection.
iRobot Corp., creator of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, makes a glider that collects information up to 3,000 feet under water, surfacing from time to time to transmit its findings and collect new instructions.
The Slocum glider from Teledyne Technologies Inc. works in a similar way.
Both gliders can collect information from far deeper in the ocean than the one from Liquid Robotics, but aren’t able to transmit data continuously.

Links :

• WSJ : Where data depend on catching a wave
• YouTube : Wave glider, an autonomous wave-powered sensor platform
• Al : BP employing unmanned 'Wave Gliders' to measure oil spill impacts
• NOAA : NDBC deploys first operational wave glider to monitor weather
  

Japan finds rare earths in Pacific seabed

Japanese scientists have found a "huge" quantity of rare earth elements at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that could meet at least one-fifth of the world's demand for materials crucial to the manufacture of high-end electronics.

From BBC

Japanese researchers say they have discovered vast deposits of rare earth minerals, used in many hi-tech appliances, in the seabed.

The geologists estimate that there are about a 100bn tons of the rare elements in the mud of the Pacific Ocean floor.

At present, China produces 97% of the world's rare earth metals.

Analysts say the Pacific discovery could challenge China's dominance, if recovering the minerals from the seabed proves commercially viable.

The British journal Nature Geoscience reported that a team of scientists led by Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo, found the minerals in sea mud at 78 locations.

Distribution of average REY (rare- earth elements and yttrium) contents
for surface sediments (<2 m in depth) in the Pacific Ocean

"The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths.
Just one square kilometre (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo.

The minerals were found at depths of 3,500 to 6,000 metres (11,500-20,000 ft) below the ocean surface.

Environmental fears

One-third of the sites yielded rich contents of rare earths, Mr Kato said.
The deposits are in international waters east and west of Hawaii, and east of Tahiti in French Polynesia.

Mr Kato estimated that rare earths contained in the deposits amounted to 80 to 100 billion tonnes.
The US Geological Survey has estimated that global reserves are just 110 million tonnes, found mainly in China, Russia and other former Soviet countries, and the United States.

China's apparent monopoly of rare earth production enabled it to restrain supply last year during a territorial dispute with Japan.

Japan has since sought new sources of the rare earth minerals.

The Malaysian government is considering whether to allow the construction of an Australian-financed project to mine rare earths, in the face of local opposition focused on the fear of radioactive waste.

The number of firms seeking licences to dig through the Pacific Ocean floor is growing rapidly.

The listed mining company Nautilus has the first licence to mine the floor of the Bismarck and Solomon oceans around Papua New Guinea.

It will be recovering what is called seafloor massive sulphide, for its copper and gold content.

The prospect of deep sea mining for precious metals - and the damage that could do to marine ecosystems - is worrying environmentalists.

Links :

• Mother Nature Network : China defends rare earth quotas as in line with WTO (U.S. makers of high-tech products such as Apple Inc's iPads and various Japanese companies have been scrambling to secure reliable supplies of the minerals outside of China as Beijing steadily reduces export allocations.)
• TheGuardian : Japan discovers 'rare earth' minerals used for iPads
• TheRegister : Pacific rare-earth discovery, actually just gigatonnes of dirt (Take a lot of acid and it might seem valuable)
  

Image of the week : ice island off Labrador

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team

at NASA GSFC. Caption by Michael Carlowicz

From NASA

Nearly 11 months after calving off of the northwestern coast of Greenland, a massive ice island is now caught up in ocean currents off the coast of Labrador, Canada.

>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<
download a KML file for Google Earth

The ice island was formed when a 251-square-kilometer (97-square-mile) chunk of ice broke off the Petermann Glacier on August 5, 2010.
The Canadian Ice Service has since been tracking the ice island, dubbed PII-A, via satellite and radio beacon.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image of the ice island on June 25, 2011.
The northeast-facing coast of Labrador is mostly obscured by thin, wispy clouds, as it has been for much of the past week.
News agencies reported that the ice island stretched roughly 62 square kilometers in area and weighed between 3.5 and 4 billion tons.
The island has been slowly breaking up and melting on its journey—nearly 30 degrees of latitude, or more than 3,000 kilometers—but it could eventually pose a hazard to offshore oil platforms and shipping lanes off Newfoundland

Canadian Port Hope Simpson resident and fishermen captured this close-up video of the ice island, off the shores of Battle Harbour, 3 miles long and 2.8 miles wide, nearly 5 times the size of Battle Island

Environment Canada dropped a beacon on PII-A on September 17, 2010.
You can track the island by clicking here.
Satellite images of the area around Newfoundland are available twice daily from the MODIS Rapid Response System.

Links :

• Canadian Ice Service (n.d.) Petermann Ice Island Updates
• CBC News (2011, June 23) Massive ice island heading for southern Labrador
  
• Regina Global News Online (2011, June 28) Nfld. ice island triggers Arctic ice worries
  

Warming oceans could melt ice faster than expected

Glaciers of Alaska from Abhijit Biswas

From LiveScience

Ice sheets simmering in warmer ocean waters could melt much quicker than realized.
New research is suggesting that as oceans heat up they could erode away the ice sheets much faster than warmer air alone, and this interaction needs to be accounted for in climate change models.

"Ocean warming is very important compared to atmospheric warming, because water has a much larger heat capacity than air," study researcher Jianjun Yin, of the University of Arizona, said in a statement.
"If you put an ice cube in a warm room, it will melt in several hours. But if you put an ice cube in a cup of warm water, it will disappear in just minutes."

The researchers studied 19 state-of-the-art climate models and saw that subsurface ocean warming could accelerate ice-sheet melting over the next century, resulting in greater sea level rise that could exceed 3 feet (1 meter).
Glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt at different rates, though.
[In Photos: Glaciers Before and After]

Given a mid-level increase in greenhouse gases, the ocean layer about 650 to 1,650 feet (200 to 500 meters) below the surface would warm, on average, about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) by 2100, the researchers found.

The actual warming in different regions could differ significantly, though.
They found that temperatures of subsurface oceans along the Greenland coast could increase as much as 3.6 F (2 C) by 2100, but along Antarctica would warm less, only 0.9 F (0.5 C).

"No one has noticed this discrepancy before — that the subsurface oceans surrounding Greenland and Antarctica warm very differently," Yin said.
The discrepancy is caused by different currents in the ocean: The Gulf Stream will send warmer waters toward Greenland, while the Antarctic Circumpolar Current blocks some of the warmer waters from reaching Antarctica.

Warmer waters = melting ice

This satellite image shows Greenland's Helheim glacier where it meets the sea.
The glacier is on the left.
Large and small icebergs pack the narrow fjord in the right part of the images.
Bare ground appears brown or tan, while vegetation appears in shades of red.
CREDIT: NASA images created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

This drastic increase in ocean warming will have a substantial impact on how quickly the polar ice sheets melt, as warmer waters will erode away the ice sheets below the surface.
This is on top of increased melting from warmer air in the region.
As the glaciers' underwater support structures melt, they lose chunks of ice, which become icebergs.

"This does mean that both Greenland and Antarctica are probably going melt faster than the scientific community previously thought," study researcher Jonathan Overpeck, also of the University of Arizona, said in a statement.
"We could have sea level rise by the end of this century of around 1 meter [more than 3 feet] and a good deal more in succeeding centuries."

Previous estimates had projected sea levels to rise by anywhere between 1.5 and 6.5 feet (0.56 and 2 m), and in 2011 a study by Eric Rignot, of the University of California at Irvine, and others projected that sea level rise would reach 12.6 inches (32 centimeters) by 2050 alone.
Overpeck and Yin's study adds to the evidence that sea level rise by the end of the century will be near the high end of these projects.

The study was published (July 3) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Links :

• WashingtonPost : Warming ocean could melt ice faster than thought
  

Sailfish drama

Sailfish Drama from Howard Hall