In the Gulf’s depths, a rare time capsule

NOAA's Seirios Camera Platform, operating above the Little Hercules ROV, images the ROV and an anchor inside the hull of a copper-sheathed shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico.

The wood has nearly all disintegrated after more than a century on the seafloor.

From NYT

Four thousand feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and 200 miles south of Louisiana’s marshy coastline, a machine called Little Hercules levitates in the darkness above the bow of a decaying wooden ship.
Much of the wreckage has disintegrated over the many decades that the ship has soaked on the ocean floor, but Little Hercules’ lights illuminate a skeletal scrub forest of sea creatures thriving on what remains.
Little Hercules, a remotely operated vehicle, was put to work a few months ago by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to search the nooks and crannies of the Gulf of Mexico’s depths.

From March to April 2012, a team of scientists and technicians both at-sea and on shore will conduct exploratory investigations on the diversity and distribution of deep-sea habitats and marine life in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

The video footage was captured by the Little Hercules ROV and Seirios Camera Sled platform during the April 3rd ROV dive.

Using bright lights and an assortment of high-definition video and still cameras, the R.O.V. has been exploring deep-sea habitats and possible shipwrecks and reporting back to members of a NOAA expedition onboard the ship, the Okeanos Explorer.

While most of the ship's wood has long since disintegrated, copper that sheathed the hull beneath the waterline as a protection against marine-boring organisms remains, leaving a copper shell retaining the form of the ship.

The copper has turned green due to oxidation and chemical processes over more than a century on the seafloor.

Oxidized copper sheathing and possible draft marks are visible on the bow of the ship.

On the night of April 26, Little Hercules’ high-definition cameras revealed the exciting wreckage of the copper-hulled ship, which archaeologists think probably dates from the early 1800s.

“This wreck is from a period very critical to the history of the Gulf of Mexico,” said Jack Irion, a maritime archeologist with the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a partner in the expedition. He said that because the wreck laid so deep underwater, “it’s virtually untouched by any sort of storm or human activity.”
Dr. Irion has dated the wreckage primarily on the basis of a ceramic plate he saw in the photographs and videos of the wreckage.
He said that this sort of “pearlware,” with a green strip around the scalloped outer edge of the plate, was highly popular from around 1800 to 1830.

An anemone lives on top of a musket that lies across a whole group of muskets at the site of the shipwreck.

Early in the 19th century, many empires – Spanish, French, British, the United States – were vying for power in the Americas, and the Gulf of Mexico brimmed with vessels out to pirate, battle and trade, Dr. Irion said.
Riches taken from Central and South America were often shipped from the Mexican port of Veracruz, where the ships caught a loop current sweeping along the rim of the gulf toward the Florida Keys, he said.
“Little is known about the gulf and the cultural resources that exist there,” said Frank Cantelas, a maritime archaeologist with NOAA who will continue analyzing imagery from the wreckage.
He said that researchers can learn a lot about the people who lived in a specific time and place through the remains of a sunken ship.
“Wrecks are like a time capsule,” Mr. Cantelas said. So far, he has  seen a variety of hourglasses, navigational tools, cannons, muskets and glass bottles, some holding their original contents, in ship wreckage.

Researchers are not yet sure of this ship’s national origin or mission.
At the suggestion of the ocean energy bureau, Little Hercules and the researchers aboard the Okeanos Explorer investigated five different shipwrecks during the expedition, which ended on April 29.
Oil companies and other businesses that wish to develop parts of the ocean floor must first get permission from the bureau.
Usually those companies will use sonar equipment to independently explore the places they would like to develop.

 A map produced by NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer's sonar shows the West Florida Escarpment, a steep undersea cliff.

The base of the escarpment (2,600 meters deep) is shown in blue with the upper rim more than 600 meters above.

ROV dives explored the physical structure of the seafloor and biodiversity on soft and hard bottom areas.

They create basic bathymetric maps of the sea floor and then submit their maps to the bureau.
The agency used the maps to pick out areas on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that seemed out of the ordinary – perhaps a shipwreck, but maybe just a pile of sediment – so that NOAA could look more closely.
The oil giant Shell was the first to notice the strange bathymetric blip that proved to be the exceptional wreckage of the 19th-century ship.

SuperMoon rising on the ocean

The SuperMoon is rising on the ocean, near the lighthouse of "La Perdrix" in Brittany.

When it appears at the horizon, a green flash is visible (only in one frame).

One of the Glénan islands is visible on the right.

 The Full Moon is rising beside the lighthouse of "La Perdrix"

(between the little town of Loctudy and Île-Tudy).

video

Google can track ships at sea ; detailed maps planned of sea bottom

Satellite AIS detection (source ExactEarth)

From AOL

• Search engine has plans to map the entire ocean floor over next five year
• Google has spent $3million on satellite technology and claims it is better at tracking ships than most governments

Google paid several million dollars for the satellite technology to pinpoint ships' locations.
"These things cost three million dollars for the whole program," Michael Jones, "Chief Technology Advocate" at Google Ventures, said at the annual Joint Warfighting Conference held by the US Naval Institute and the electronics industry group AFCEA (see article).
Google has talked to representatives of 50 navies worldwide about their new technology and has discovered it tracks ships better than their own commanders can.
"I watch them and they can't see themselves," Jone said. "It angers me as a citizen that I can do this and the entire DoD can't."
While none of this makes Google an intelligence agency, it certainly highlights a trend of great interest to the intelligence community and the military.

Michael Jones, Chief Technology Advocate at Google, makes a presentation to the 2012 Joint Warfighting Conference.

(see minute 23:40 for AIS satellite vessel traffic)

"I think the macro level issue here is: Welcome to the new age of transparency," said Keith Masback, president of the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation."
Access to data from space-based and airborne commercial remote sensing from has become relatively ubiquitous; GPS is ubiquitous and the Chinese and Europeans are also launching their own PNT [positioning, navigation and timing] systems.
This announcement by Google regarding ship tracking and collection of bathymetric data, along with the current discussion of the potential of proliferation of unmanned aerial systems in the skies over the United States is the natural extension of the transparency we've seen coming for years."

Like its nascent project to map the ocean floor, Google's new technology to track ships on the surface takes advantage of prior investments by others.
In this case, it's the Maritime Automatic Identification System, known as AIS, a system of transponders installed in all legitimate seagoing vessels that periodically transmit their position to avoid collisions even when the crews can't physically see each other due to darkness or heavy weather.

AIS signals are only designed to be detectable up to 20 nautical miles away, but researchers led by Greece's University of the Aegean developed larger (Marine Traffic), land-based antenna that can pick up the signal over greater distances -- but that still only picks up vessels relatively close to shore.
From overhead, however, the two satellites Google is using can detect ships anywhere on the ocean.
The company is already working with governments around the world to help them track fishing vessels poaching in their exclusive economic zones and plans to make the data available to an estimated billion users of Google Maps.

While the ship tracking maps are interesting, this is not a new technology although Google has apparently improved it.
Google's involvement will mean, of course, that virtually anyone in the world can access the information.
Still, there are very clear limits to the technology.

Most important, any ship can turn off its transmitter, meaning that Google's tool probably doesn't pose any threat to critical military operations.
As an intelligence source noted, Google's shipping data faces important limits. "It's not the ships you can see, but the ships you can't see that matter," this source said.

However, the technology clearly could be useful for practitioners of change detection, people looking for patterns to US and other seaborne operations.
It could conceivably be useful to terrorists and pirates looking to plan attacks on commercial shipping, for example.

A longer term project may pose graver risks.
Google has a five-year project to map the entire ocean floor using an unmanned seagoing sensor, whose accuracy -- within "a few centimers" might discover the resting places of top-secret spy satellites and other sunken wreckage national security authorities had thought was hidden forever, potentially triggering a "treasure hunt" by foreign powers, Jones warned.
"ONR [Office of Naval Research] had done research on this but they had run out of funding," Jones said.
So Google tracked down 17 people who had worked on the project before their contracts were cancelled, hired them, and has restarted the initiative itself.
"The Navy's tested it, it works great; [but] they got too poor. They just couldn't do it," said Jones, himself the proud son of a Navy sailor. "That's just not right."

The Lamont Seamounts are an example of the view from the seafloor with Google Earth

Detailed knowledge of the sea bottom has historically been the purview of those relatively few countries with submarine fleets and deep sea submersibles.

These programs are just examples of the kind of intelligence data available to anyone with a modest investment "instead of a huge 20-year national program," Jones said.
Google already uses the 20 billion photos publicly available on the internet to generate uncannily accurate three-dimensional composite images of cities and individual buildings around the world, even including the interiors of major landmarks like St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. said Jones, "Don't sit idly by while adversaries use new technology and you just sleep."

However, several intelligence experts noted that, while Google's data possesses enormous commercial appeal, its military and intelligence utility is limited.
Most Google images are weeks or months old, at least, making them problematic for that most rarified and demanding use -- targeting. And as one intelligence source noted: "Just because you have the data, doesn't mean you can analyze the data or know how to use it."intelligence source noted: "Just because you have the data, doesn't mean you can analyze the data or know how to use it."ean you can analyze the data or know how to use it."

Links :

• YouTube : Michael Jones, Chief Technology Advocate at Google, makes a presentation to the 2012 Joint Warfighting Conference.

The call

Inspired by the works of Jack London.
Shot on the coast of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.
Narration from The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Tales of ice-bound wonderlands : haunting photos of polar ice

Diving under the Antarctic ice to get close to the much-feared leopard seal, photographer Paul Nicklen found an extraordinary new friend.
Share his hilarious, passionate stories of the polar wonderlands, illustrated by glorious images of the animals who live on and under the ice.
Paul Nicklen photographs the creatures of the Arctic and Antarctic, generating global awareness about wildlife in these isolated and endangered environments.

Photographer Camille Seaman shoots icebergs, showing the world the complex beauty of these massive, ancient chunks of ice.
Dive in to her photo slideshow, "The Last Iceberg" (see pictures / Dark ice)