Mapping the Earth’s Polar Regions

Ross Island with Beaufort & Francklin islands

From GISLounge

The Earth’s Polar Regions, Antarctica and the area within the Arctic Circle, are the most inhospitable places on the planet for humans.
Yet, scientists and researchers continue to explore and map these regions in order to get a better understanding of their importance.
It is widely believed that the Polar Regions hold keys to unlocking other scientific mysteries and can reveal what the future holds for the Earth and all of its inhabitants.
In order to better understand the Arctic and Antarctica, there is a constant need for better-quality maps to be produced.

Southern Hemisphere, NGA

One of biggest steps taken towards supplying better maps of the Polar Regions has been recently completed by the Polar Geospatial Center (PGC).
The center, located at the University of Minnesota, has released and made available a series of web-based applications using high-resolution images and maps showing the Arctic and Antarctica in unparalleled detail.
These images are of an improved resolution and more up-to-date than earlier mapping projects of the Earth’s extremities.

Previous mapping projects of Antarctica include LIMA, a mosaic of Antarctic images based on NASA’s Landsat satellite program.
High-quality images of the continent were compiled into an all-encompassing satellite view and released in 2007 as The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA).
LIMA was the result of collaborative efforts from the U.S. Geological Society, NASA, The British Antarctic Survey, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
What is distinctive about LIMA was the quality of its images.
The project brandished images in 15-meter resolution, and it was the first true color, seamless map of Antarctica that was virtually cloudless.

The LIMA mosaic is based on approximately 1,100 images taken from 1999 to 2001 from the Landsat-7.
The project was developed as part of the International Polar Year back in 2007-2008 in order to educate people about Antarctica and demonstrate how scientists use GIS data to study the continent.
One disadvantage, however, is that the LIMA mosaic does not cover the whole continent.
A portion is left off of its satellite view from the South Pole at 90 degrees latitude to 82.5 degrees south latitude because of gaps in Landsat’s coverage.

Franklin Island to McMurdo Sound

Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO)

Nevertheless, the Polar Geospatial Center has taken polar mapping to the next level with their web-based applications.
Using commercial imagery from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, these maps of Antarctica offer a resolution 900 times better than that from LIMA and come within thirty kilometers of the geographic South Pole.
According to the PGC’s director Paul Morin, their maps and applications can show every rock outcropping, every penguin colony, and every crevasse.
Moreover, the Polar Geospatial Center has the ability to shoot images of Antarctica that are at a 50-centimeter resolution every forty-five days.

 Map of South Pole (1843)

In 2007, the Polar Geospatial Center was established in order to provide geospatial services to Antarctica. It mainly supported the U.S. Antarctic Program and was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Since then, the PGC has expanded into doing its own fieldwork using geospatial data for the purpose of solving critical questions concerning the Polar Regions.
The PGC also produces geospatial products for individual use.
Their Imagery Viewers allow its users to create their own maps of locations in Greenland and Alaska as well as Antarctica.

US Navy Operation Deep Freeze IV 1958-59

Web applications based on those types of high-resolution maps have incredible, almost limitless potential.
The Polar Geospatial Center’s online maps can handle just about any request they get from scientists and researchers.
The project was hardly simple, however.
It took the PGC over eighteen months to complete, and one of the biggest challenges was fixing the orientation on an immense number of images.
Instead of being shot at a vertical, these images were shot at an angle from commercial satellites owned by DigitalGlobe, Inc. and had to be corrected.

PGC Antarctic viewer

To make these images of the Polar Regions more accessible to scientists and researchers, the Polar Geospatial Center has developed several web-based mapping applications, and they can be utilized in GIS software.
The Imagery Viewers are three such mapping applications which cover much of Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica.
Some of the features of the maps include placename search, satellite imagery basemaps, and georeferenced maps.
Unfortunately, the Imagery Viewers are only accessible to federal government employees and researchers with federal funding, not to the general public.

Rapid Ice viewer

However, the PGC offers other web based applications.
One of them, called the Antarctic Air Photo Viewer, enables users to search, view, and download Antarctic aerial photography.
These photos are offered in two different resolutions.
Plus, users of PGC’s RapidIce Viewer can search for and download over 500,000 unique satellite images of pre-set places in Greenland and Antarctica.
These web-based mapping applications can provide a large variety of uses.
For example, Joe Levy, a scientist at the University of Texas at Austin used the images to study the melting of buried ice at a specific location in Antarctica.

Overall, the hope is that improved maps of the Polar Regions will give scientists and researchers enhanced tools for solving the mysteries of the planet.
Tools like LIMA and the web-based mapping applications from the Polar Geospatial Center proves that remote sensing technology can greatly increase our understanding of even the most forbidding and barren areas on the Earth.

The monthly Sea Ice Index provides a quick look at Arctic-wide changes in sea ice.

From the National Snow and Ice Center.

Links :  Polar Mapping Resources:

• The Polar Geospatial Center
• Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica
• National Snow and Ice Data Center – 
• Geographic Information Network of Alaska

Inside the secret shipping industry

Almost everything we own and use, at some point, travels to us by container ship, through a vast network of ocean routes and ports that most of us know almost nothing about.
Journalist Rose George tours us through the world of shipping, the underpinning of consumer civilization.

Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything

In this fascinating book, Rose George explores the hidden world of shipping.
Once a major part of our national identity, the seafaring world is now obscure, badly regulated and yet, with more than 100,000 freighters on the seas carrying 90 percent of world trade, far more influential to our daily lives than at any time in history.
George’s pursuit of the shadowy truths behind the industry that brings us almost everything we eat, wear and work with takes her across the globe, from Felixstowe to Singapore via the Bay of Biscay, Suez Canal, Gulf of Aden and the Malacca Straits.
She follows the vast and circuitous routes travelled by mercantile and naval fleets, pirate gangs and illegal floating factories, meeting seafarers, dockworkers, tycoons, missionaries, stevedores, ship-spotters, beachcombers, environmentalists and even whales along the way.
She reports on those who spend their working lives on ships, their experience at sea burdened by boredom and loneliness but tempered by the occasional survival story.
She investigates the poor regulation endemic in the shipping industry which leaves crews with little protection and allows companies to deny their responsibilities.
With stories of pirates, pollution, wreckage, rescue, whales and dolphins, mapping, navigation and invisibility, this is essential reading for anyone curious about the complex systems behind our convenient modern world.

Links :

• The Guardian : book review
• Forbes : Shipping: Globalization's Lifeblood

Don Walsh: "Going the Last Seven Miles"

Captain Don Walsh stops by the Googleplex to discuss: "Going the Last Seven Miles - a Personal Odyssey."
Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard were the first people to go to the Marianas Trench over 50 years ago.
Only James Cameron has been back since.
Don jokes that he should have written a book called "The Right Stuff, Wrong Direction", alluding to how much public interest space has generated related to the deep ocean, our own innerspace.
He advises the XPRIZE, is an Ocean Elder, and has captained a nuclear submarine.
Next year he'll be on a National Geographic Lindblad expedition through the Northwest Passage.

Flying Phantom January sailing session

Flying Phantom One design from Jeremie Eloy/ Wanaii Films
"It's crazy, it's noiseless, fast, and it never ends"
"Foiling cats are the future of our Sport"

Flying Phantom One Design January Sailing Session

After three years of research and development, the Flying Phantom is world’s first series foiler catamaran thanks to the combination of L-shaped foils and T-shaped rudders.
Sailing session with Gurvan Bontemps and Benjamin Amiot between Saint Lunaire and Saint Malo - Brittany - France.

Flying Phantom OD: Francois Gabart takes off 

from Jeremie Eloy/ Wanaii Films.

François Gabart, Vendée Globe 2013 winner and Macif skipper, takes off for a flying sailing session on the Flying Phantom OD.
Crew: Gurvan Bontemps and Benjamin Amiot

Clamp down on illegal fishing to curb human trafficking

Thailand's seafood exports are the third most valuable in the world, supplying markets in the US, Europe and Asia but far from the attention of consumers vulnerable migrants in search of a better future are being trafficked, exploited, abused and even murdered aboard Thai fishing vessels.

- see ESJ report -

From TheWashingtonPost

If most people think human trafficking is all about sexual exploitation, the mistake is understandable. After all, last year’s State Department report on trafficking noted that 85 percent of prosecutions for this crime worldwide — and more than 89 percent of convictions — were for sex-related offenses.
But, as an International Labor Organization study found in 2012, more than three-quarters of trafficking victims in the global private economy are exploited for labor. And the world is just starting to learn how much of this is tied to fishing.
Yes, fishing.

Not some reality TV show about stout-hearted seafarers, but the grim world of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Vessels engaged in illegal, unregulated fishing not only steal precious food resources off the coasts of poor countries, engage in drug smuggling and damage marine ecosystems — they also prey on human beings, trapping workers on boats as slaves.

For purposes of indictment, it is hard to beat a conclusion in a 2011 paper by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime: “Perhaps the most disturbing finding of the study was the severity of the abuse of fishers trafficked for the purpose of forced labor on board fishing vessels. These practices can only be described as cruel and inhumane treatment in the extreme. . . . A particularly disturbing facet of this form of exploitation is the frequency of trafficking in children in the fishing industry.”

As it happens, when it comes to IUU fishing, Congress has an opportunity to make a real difference in preventing this harsh treatment of workers who had no idea how they would be trapped at sea.
And it need not cost any money.
All legislators have to do is ratify and implement an international agreement.

 

Even considered only as an economic and environmental problem, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is serious business.
A 2009 peer-reviewed scientific study estimated that the worldwide annual value of losses from illegal and unreported fishing could reach $23.5 billion.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found that by “adversely impacting fisheries, marine ecosystems, food security and coastal communities around the world, IUU fishing undermines domestic and international conservation and management efforts.”

Yet that is far from the whole story.
Fishing boats are much less carefully regulated than other ships: Because fishing vessels are not required to have identification numbers, enormous ships are known to change names and flags of registration to stay a step ahead of authorities.
Interpol issued two worldwide alerts last year for vessels that had done just that.
Fishing vessels are not required to carry satellite transponders, which makes it easy for them to evade surveillance.
Moreover, enforcement actions have traditionally been left to the states where the boats are registered, or “flagged,” rather than the “port” states where they bring their cargo to shore, where they would be more likely to be caught doing something illegal.

The combination of lax enforcement and the ability to escape detection has proved irresistible to criminals, who use IUU fishing as cover for other illicit activities.
For instance, a State Department report noted that drug smuggling is often aided by fishing boats moving drugs through the Bahamas, Jamaica and Florida.

But the human-trafficking dimension is worse, amounting to a form of modern slavery that traps laborers on the high seas, far from the reach of law enforcement.
Fortunately, this is an issue that members of both political parties have shown they care about.

In 2000, with bipartisan support, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which defines trafficking for purposes of labor or sex and provides critical elements for the protection of victims, as well as prevention and prosecution.

The law was reauthorized last March, again with broad bipartisan endorsement.
Meanwhile, in 2009 U.S. officials signed the Port States Measures Agreement.
This pact, which the Senate has yet to ratify, could address IUU fishing by strengthening port inspection procedures.
Only nine countries have ratified the agreement, and the United States could provide forceful leadership.
Congress could also pass the Pirate Fishing Elimination Act, which was backed by members of both parties when it was first introduced in 2011 and which would implement the international agreement.

Steps should be taken toward ending every form of human trafficking. “Trafficking” may sound like it refers to crossing borders, but it means turning people into commodities, robbed of autonomy.
Stopping illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing will do far more than save marine ecosystems; it will save human beings. 

 

Links :

• ILO : Caught at Sea - Forced Labour and Trafficking in Fisheries