Mapping the Arctic missions

From The Globe&Mail / NOAA

Coast Guard sets sail on joint Arctic-mapping mission with U.S. cutter

A Coast Guard vessel is heading to the Arctic where scientists will map out another section of the continental shelf, staking out the undersea territory and resources that belong to Canada.

The Louis St-Laurent will be accompanied on its four-month mission by the United States Coast Guard cutter Healy.

This photo, taken by a crew member aboard the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis St. Laurent, shows the Canadian ship sailing beside the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy. (Courtesy Kelly Hansen)

This is the fourth year that a Canadian ship has spent mapping the shelf that lies below the Arctic waters to determine where it extends beyond the limit of 200 nautical miles from shore over which Canada already has exclusive jurisdiction to exploit and explore.

The aim is to have complete data to present to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf by December 2013.
The commission was struck in 2003 under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Canada ratified in 2003.

The UNCLOS uses a complicated formula based upon the geological characteristics of the sea floor to determine the outer limits of national boundaries beyond the 200-mile limit.

Fisheries Minister Keith Ashfield said in a release issued Monday the Arctic is a strategic piece of Canada’s future that must be sustained and protected.

“The Canadian Coast Guard, its exceptional fleet and skilled personnel are instrumental in our government's successful arctic missions as they lay the groundwork for our Northern Strategy,” Mr. Ashfield said.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is conducting the survey in collaboration with the Ministry of Natural Resources.

In addition to providing a platform for the scientific work, the Louis S. St-Laurent will provide assistance to commercial shipping, which becomes viable during the summer months.

It will also support a multi-national project studying the oceanography of the currents in the Beaufort Sea to understand accumulation and release of fresh water, as well as to enhance understanding of environmental change in the Arctic.

The ship is not expected to return back to Newfoundland until Nov. 18.


NOAA Ship Fairweather sets sail to map areas of the Arctic

NOAA Ship Fairweather, a 231-foot survey vessel, departed Kodiak, Alaska, today on a mission to conduct hydrographic surveys in remote areas of the Arctic where depths have not been measured since before the U.S. bought Alaska in 1867.

NOAA will use the data to update nautical charts to help mariners safely navigate this important but sparsely charted region, which is now seeing increased vessel traffic because of the significant loss of Arctic sea ice.

Over the next two months, Fairweather will conduct hydrographic surveys covering 402 square nautical miles of navigationally significant waters in Kotzebue Sound, a regional distribution hub in northwestern Alaska in the Arctic Circle.

“The reduction in Arctic ice coverage is leading over time to a growth of vessel traffic in the Arctic, and this growth is driving an increase in maritime concerns,” explained NOAA Corps Capt. David Neander, commanding officer of the Fairweather. “Starting in 2010, we began surveying in critical Arctic areas where marine transportation dynamics are changing rapidly. These areas are increasingly transited by the offshore oil and gas industry, cruise liners, military craft, tugs and barges and fishing vessels.”

Fairweather and her survey launches are equipped with state-of-the-art acoustic technology to measure ocean depths, collect 3-D imagery of the seafloor, and detect underwater hazards that could pose a danger to surface vessels.
The ship itself will survey the deeper waters, while the launches work in shallow areas.

The city of Kotzebue, located on the shores of Kotzebue Sound at the tip of Baldwin Peninsula, serves as a supply hub for eleven Arctic villages and cannot currently accommodate deep draft vessels.
Those vessels must now anchor 15 miles offshore, and cargo is brought to shore by shallow draft barges.
This summer’s survey will also address a request for bathymetry to support navigation and installation for an offshore lightering facility used for heating and fuel oil.
An up-to-date NOAA chart, using data acquired from surveys with modern high-resolution sonar technology, can improve the efficiency – and safety – at this important location.

NOAA Ship Fairweather in the Gulf of Alaska with namesake Mt. Fairweather.

Modern U.S. navigational charts are the best in the world, and are updated regularly by NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey.
However, they are only as good as the data available, and many of the soundings on today’s Arctic charts were acquired in the 1800’s with a weighted lead line, an antiquated technique.
In addition to surveying critical areas with modern multibeam sonar technologies, NOAA has initiated a major effort to update nautical charts that are inadequate for today’s needs, such as the deep draft vessels looking to exploit an open trade route through the Arctic.
NOAA’s Arctic Nautical Charting Plan, issued last month, prioritizes charts that need updating.

“NOAA’s Arctic surveys and charting plan identify the additional hydrographic coverage necessary to support a robust maritime transportation infrastructure in the coastal areas north of the Aleutian Islands,” said NOAA Corps Capt. Doug Baird, chief of NOAA’s Marine Chart Division in the Office of Coast Survey.
“With the resources we have available, we are building the foundation to meet the burgeoning demands of ocean activities around Alaska’s waterways.”

Fairweather, one of NOAA’s three ships dedicated to hydrographic surveying, is part of the NOAA fleet of research ships operated, managed and maintained by NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which includes commissioned officers of the NOAA Corps, one of the seven uniformed services of the United States, and civilian wage mariners.
The public can track the ship’s progress by visiting the NOAA Ship Tracker.

NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey, originally formed by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807, updates the nation’s nautical charts, surveys the coastal seafloor, responds to maritime emergencies and searches for underwater obstructions and wreckage that pose a danger to navigation.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources.

Links :

• Fisheries & Oceans Canada : Canadian Coast Guard Ship Louis S. St-Laurent Departs for Arctic Supporting Science and Northern Shipping
  
• NOAA : Join us on Facebook, Twitter and our other social media channels (Flickr)
• Extended continental shelf project
  

Diver snaps first photo of fish using tools

Lucky shots. The first photos of a tool-using fish in the wild show a blackspot tuskfish

banging a clam against a rock to crack it open. Credit: Scott Gardner

From ScienceMag

While exploring Australia's Great Barrier Reef, professional diver Scott Gardner heard an odd cracking sound and swam over to investigate.
What he found was a footlong blackspot tuskfish (Choerodon schoenleinii) holding a clam in its mouth and whacking it against a rock.
Soon the shell gave way, and the fish gobbled up the bivalve, spat out the shell fragments, and swam off.
Fortunately, Gardner had a camera handy and snapped what seem to be the first photographs of a wild fish using a tool.

Tool use, once thought to be the distinctive hallmark of human intelligence, has been identified in a wide variety of animals in recent decades.
Although other creatures don't have anything quite like a circular saw or a juice machine, capuchin monkeys select "hammer" rocks of an appropriate material and weight to crack open seeds, fruits, or nuts on larger "anvil" rocks, and New Caledonian crows probe branches with grass, twigs, and leaf strips to extract insects.
In addition to primates and birds, many animals, including dolphins, elephants, naked mole rats, and even octopuses, have shown forms of the behavior.

Tool-using fish have been few and far between, however, particularly in the wild.
Archerfish target jets of water at terrestrial prey, but whether this constitutes tool use has been contentious.
There have also been a handful of reports of fish cracking open hard-shelled prey, such as bivalves and sea urchins, by banging them on rocks or coral, but there's no photo or video evidence to back it up, according to Culum Brown, a behavioral ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a co-author of the present paper, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Coral Reefs.

The tuskfish caught on camera was clearly quite skilled at its task, "landing absolutely pinpoint blows" with the shell, Brown says. A scattering of crushed shells around its anvil rock suggests that Gardner didn't just stumble upon the fish during its original eureka moment.
In fact, numerous such shell middens are visible around the reef.
Blackspot tuskfish, members of the wrasse family, are popular food fish, so it's surprising that its shell-smashing behavior has remained unknown, Brown says.
"My feeling is that when we go out and really look for it, it'll turn out to be common."

"I absolutely loved it," says ethologist Michael Kuba of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem of the finding.
Last year, Kuba and two colleagues documented stingrays in a laboratory forming jets of water with their bodies to flush food out of a pipe.
But solid external objects like rocks are harder to dismiss as tools than water jets, Kuba says, and examples from the wild avoid concerns about whether a behavior elicited in the lab is "natural."

Primatologist Elisabetta Visalberghi of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome is less convinced.
Visalberghi, who documented the hammer-wielding monkeys, adheres to a stricter definition of tool use that requires the animal to hold or carry the tool itself, in this case the rock.
"The form of tool use described [in tuskfish] is cognitively little demanding and present in a variety of species.
Often it has been labeled as proto-tool use because the object used to open the shell is still, fixated to the sea bottom, and not portable as stone tools used to crack open nuts by chimpanzees or capuchin monkeys are," she writes in an e-mail.
Seagulls dropping shellfish onto hard surfaces to crack them or lab rats pushing levers to get rewards would join tuskfish in the category of proto-tool—but not true tool—users.

Brown acknowledges that exactly what constitutes tool use is controversial.
But he argues that it's not logical to apply the same rules to fish as to primates or birds.
For one thing, fish don't have anything but their mouths to manipulate tools with, and for another, water poses different physical limitations than air.
"One of the problems with the definition of tool use as it currently stands is it's totally written for primates," he says.
"You cannot swing a hammer effectively underwater."

Links :

• Springerlink : Tool use in the tuskfish Choerodon schoenleinii?
• CQUniversity : Researcher helps shine light on tool-using tuskfish
  

Understanding a nautical chart : a practical guide to safe navigation

We all rely on charts to navigate at sea - but are we missing essential information?
A mass of data is included on each chart and deciphering the many symbols and abbreviations can be complicated.
The accuracy of some charted depths can be trusted entirely while others should be treated with caution.

This book will tell you where to find - and how to understand - this vital knowledge.
'Understanding a Nautical Chart' from Paul Boissier explains how charts are compiled before guiding you through the elements that make up these vital navigational tools.
In addition to a wealth of practical advice there is a key to all the chart symbols and abbreviations.

• Includes information on electronic charts
• How to update a chart
• Establish the accuracy of each chart
• Ideal for professional mariners and leisure sailors
• Includes a key to every Admiralty chart symbol and abbreviation.
• No chart table should be without it.

Navigation and charts fascinate novice and experienced seamen alike, and this book is the easiest way to gain an immediate and clear understanding of the wealth of information available on a nautical chart.
There is a full explanation of how to establish the accuracy of charts to allow you to navigate with confidence and safety.
Learning the abbreviations and symbols are critical to anybody using a chart and before you can use one, you must know them or at have easy access to the definitions, all of which are included in a full copy of the key to UKHO charts (Chart 5011).
50 pence from the sale of each book will be donated to the RNLI.

The chart information included is presented in the following sections:

• General: Chart Number, Title, Marginal Notes, Positions, Distances, Directions, Compass
• Topography: Natural Features, Cultural Features, Landmarks, Ports, Topographic Terms
• Hydrography: Tides, Currents, Depths, Nature of the Seabed, Rocks, Wrecks, Obstructions, Offshore Installations, Tracks, Routes Areas, Limits, Hydrographic Terms
• Aids and Services: Lights, Buoys, Beacons, Fog Signals, Radar, Radio, Electronic Position-Fixing Systems, Services, Small Craft Facilities
• Alphabetical Index: Index of Abbreviations, International Abbreviations, List of Descriptors, IALA Maritime Buoyage.

Spectacular time-lapse video of Australian night sky over the ocean

Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney

An amateur astronomer from Australia created this stunning time-lapse video of the night sky over the ocean.

It shows clouds streaming across the sky, star-spangled heavens and the oscillations of the tide.

It took Alex Cherney of Victoria, Australia almost 1.5 years of work, 31 hours of taking images during six nights on Southern Ocean Coast in Australia.

"At a star party in August 2009 I took my first long exposure photograph of the night sky. I was so thrilled with the results that I dedicated most moonless weekends since then to photographing two things I love the most in nature - the night sky and the Ocean.

Taking a series of images and combining them into a time lapse video sequence made it even more interesting. I have since experimented with all-night time lapses, panning motion, etc. But most importantly I've enjoyed the journey immensely."

Clouds and sky both show illuminating changes during this time lapse video from the south of Australia.

In the foreground are scenes visible over a rocky coastline toward the Southern Ocean.

Dark clouds flow across the sky, sometimes from different directions, sometimes blocking background starlight, but other times causing stars to appear to flare as they move in front.

In the first sequence, looking toward the southwest, a nearly vertical band of zodiacal light is seen at sunset just before the band of the Milky Way Galaxy appears to settle into the sea.

Soon the unusual dark patch of the Coal Sack Nebula can be seen on the Milky Way band, near the famous Southern Cross.

Later, looking toward the southeast at about 2:10 in the video, Orion can be seen rising appearing nearly perpendicular to how it rises in northern skies.

Mini-mystery: what are those lights moving along the horizon?

Ocean Sky was awarded the overall winner prize at STARMUS astrophotography competition.

Aboard the ship that launched a thousand ocean liners

This is the SS Great Britain, the world's first great ocean liner.
When it launched in 1843, it changed the way transatlantic ships were seen, as well as how fast they crossed.
It is now on display in Bristol, England.

From CNET

Imagine being a wealthy traveler in the early 1840s and thinking about whether to buy a ticket aboard the brand-new SS Great Britain, an iron-hull giant of an ocean liner.
It promised a speedy crossing from the U.K. to New York, but to your skeptical eyes, it probably also promised a speedy split in half and an agonizing drowning on the high seas.

That was the dynamic that awaited Isambard Kingdom Brunel's great new ship when it was launched in 1843 by England's Prince Albert.
Brunel, a famous engineer responsible for, among other things, the Great Western Railway, several iconic bridges, other ships, and more, and who is said to be today considered the second-most important Briton (after Winston Churchill), saw his new ship as the answer for wealthy travelers wishing to cross the Atlantic, but who worried that it would take too long or that their sail ships would get becalmed if there was no wind.

The SS Great Britain had an iron hull, a steam engine, and a huge propeller--it was the world's first great ocean liner--and when it launched it was called "the greatest experiment since the creation."
It slashed the trans-Atlantic trip from 21 days to 14 and was 100 feet longer than any other ship.
For well-to-do Victorians, said Dagmar Smeed, the head of marketing and communications at the Brunel's SS Great Britain museum here, it was a "startling change" in travel and was truly the forerunner of all modern liners.
But rich travelers worried that the iron hull would snap in rough seas and stayed away. Ironically, the ship proved its seaworthiness on its fifth journey, when it ran aground in Ireland and didn't break up. But the company that owned it went bankrupt salvaging it.
The experiment looked to be over.

Yet, the ship quickly took on a new life when it was bought and converted into a ship renowned for ferrying fortune seekers after newly discovered gold to Australia.
Over the years, with its giant sails and its 1,000-horsepower engine, it made 32 trips around the world, accumulating more than a million miles along the way.
Eventually, though, the ship outlived its usefulness as a liner and was sold again, this time to the Falklands Company, which turned it into a floating warehouse.
In 1937, it beached and was stranded in the Falklands, where it lay fallow for some time.
And finally, in 1970, it was raised from the sea, towed 7,600 miles across the sea and brought home to Bristol to serve as a museum ship.

And that's where the SS Great Britain is today--in Bristol, where it is the heart of one of the most popular attractions in the U.K.: a fully restored ocean liner that treats visitors to the taste of luxury ocean travel--and to some of its deprivations as well.
The full ship is open for exploration, from its vast top deck, to its multiple below-deck levels complete with first-class, crew, and steerage cabins, and even the first-class dining area.
There's also a look at the giant engine, and on the outside of the ship, the beautiful adornments Brunel added to the star iron hull as marketing to attract the wealthy customers he sought.

I got a chance to visit the SS Great Britain as part of Road Trip 2011 and it was a quick education in the lifestyles of the rich and famous and the poor but gold-struck of the 19th century.
Walking through the spacious decks, peering into the cabins, complete with realistic dioramas of scenes that would have been typical aboard the ship, and glimpsing the vast engine room, I couldn't help but sense the adventure the ship's many passengers would have experienced.

These days, you can fly from New York to England in six hours.
And you can even do so in luxury.
Or you can take a ship across the Atlantic that likely would put the richness of the SS Great Britain to shame.
But without Brunel's giant masterpiece, today's vessels might not be what they are.
We take for granted that its safe and easy to cross the oceans, but in 1843, the rich worried that this newfangled liner would crack open and lead to their painful deaths.
Little did they know the history-making innovation that was staring them right in the face.