Norway, the slow way : the route of the Hurtigruten

 Enjoy the complete cruise of M/S Nordnorge from Bergen to Kirkenes in 37 minutes.

The original footage was 8040 minutes. The speed in this timelapse varies between 100x to 300x normal speed.

Footage is from the live broadcast "Hurtigruten Minutt for Minutt" aired on television in June, 2011.

Links :

•  NYTimes by Reif Larsen : A journey in which I travel north, on the world’s most beautiful voyage, searching for the specter of my grandfather and a glimpse of the ever-elusive midnight sun.
  

Photos reveal China building on reefs in disputed waters

Johnson South Reef which China calls Chiga Reef with the Marine GeoGarage

From SMH by Lindsay Murdoch

Spy photographs obtained by Fairfax Media reveal that China is rapidly building artificial islands on reefs in fiercely disputed areas of the South China Sea.

For centuries they were dots in turquoise waters, home only to sea birds.
But the latest images show that land reclamation and construction is underway on Kennan and Burgos islands in the heart of the Spratly Islands and on its eastern and western extremes, as China aggressively presses territorial claims in the resource-rich waters.

 left picture : 31 March 2014 / right picture : 7 August 2014

CNES 2014, distribution Astrium Services/Spot Image SA/IHS

 China's reclamation on Mabini Reef (Depart. Foreign Affairs Philippines)

The United States warned last week that China's accelerated land reclamation work had proved "intimidating and worrisome" for other regional countries, including the Philippines and Vietnam.

 Burgos Reef, June 2014. Materials for constructing breakers and dredging appear.

US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel, the senior US diplomat for East Asia, said that while Beijing rightly points out it is not the only claimant country to have carried out such work "the pace of China's reclamation in the sensitive disputed waters of the South China Sea vastly outstrips what other claimants have done in the past by many orders of magnitude."
"What I think the effect of what they are doing is to destabilise the situation and make it harder, not easier, for the claimants to resolve their claims peacefully," he said.
The US has stepped up surveillance flights over the region, despite Chinese protests, including reportedly from bases in east Malaysia.

Burgos Reef, July 29, 2014.

The reclaimed portion appears with an altered shoreline that has been reinforced by breakers.

Carl Thayer, an expert on the South China Sea from the University of New South Wales, said that while the photographs do not support speculation China is building military bases or airports on the islands they support the "official Chinese position that land reclamation and other construction activities will improve the quality of life for Chinese living on these artificial islands."
"This basic infrastructure could support economic activities, including rudimentary medical facilities and, if the Chinese were so inclined, serve as lilypads to small search and rescue aircraft," Professor Thayer said.
"These photographs alert analysts to keep a close watching brief on Chinese activities and to adjust assessments of their military utility as construction continues."

Kennan Reef, April 2014.
Waterways are dredged while excavated residue is used to reinforce the land.

Defence analysts in the US and Asia have been tracking the movements of a 127-metre Chinese dredging ship, the Tian Jing Hao, that is believed to have transformed at least six reefs into artificial islands this year, sucking up the seabed and disgorging it on reefs at the rate of 4,500 cubic metres per hour.
Tensions were heightened in the region in May when China moved an oil drilling platform into an area of the sea disputed with Vietnam which prompted an eruption of anti-Chinese rioting in Vietnam.
The Philippines has attempted to shore up its claims in the sea, releasing dozens of ancient map which officials said show that China's historical southernmost territory was always Hainan island, just off the Chinese coast.

Kennan Reef, July 29, 2014.
An increased number of construction equipment, materials and container vans
used as shelter for the workers appear.

Philippine officials said the maps dating from the Song Dynasty in the year 960 do not include Scarborough Shoal as Chinese territory, an area where China has been engaged in a acrimonious stand-off with the Philippines.
The Philippines, a close US ally, has brought a case to a United Nations court in The Hague challenging China's sovereignty claims.
China claims the near entirety of the South China Sea, a major maritime thoroughfare that is also claimed by Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei.

Links :

• BBC : China's island factory 
• Philstar : China reclaiming land in 5 reefs? 
• ChinaDailyMail : China speeds up building artificial island on Johnson South Reef, in defiance of Philippines protests 
• DW : Beijing seeking to 'change facts' in South China Sea
• GeoGarage blog : South China Sea tension mounts near Filipino shipwreck / The Law of the Seas and the Spratly Islands dispute / New map boosts China's maritime claims

Adventurer Daniel Fox's spectacular album from Alaskan islands

The intrepid explorer is currently three weeks into a monstrous 1,000 mile Pacific kayak expedition from Victoria, Canada, to San Francisco, California

From DailyMail by Jack Crone

•  Daniel Fox, 40, from San Francisco, took on the challenge to document the region's spectacular scenery and animals
• Armed with few supplies, he camped on site where Russians founded early settlement in Alaska in the late 1700s
• Adventurer says it's his mission to bridge the gap between people and nature - and sees the world as his studio
• He says: 'Unfortunately many of today's youth are immersed in totally different reality, living in front of a computer'
• He's currently kayaking a staggering 1,000 miles from Victoria, Canada to San Francisco to raise charitable funds

These breathtaking photos were captured by adventurer Daniel Fox - who spent three months circling the remote and unspoiled islands of Alaska in just a kayak.

The explorer, 40, from San Francisco, took on the challenge to offer people a tantalising glimpse into the region's spectacular scenery and animals.

Mr Fox, also a wildlife photographer, first visited the north-western state in 2013 and fell in love with the abundance of sea otters, deer and eagles. 

This mesmerising picture shows explorer Mr Fox inside strolling

through the famous Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau Alaska

He decided to return this summer and spent three months travelling around the islands by kayak, meeting humpback whales and brown bears along the way.

Armed with just a few supplies he camped on the site where Russians established one of their first settlements in Alaska in the late 1700s.

He regularly awoke to bears and deer inspecting his tent - but the animals were merely curious about the lone human camping in the open air.

He said: 'I camped where the Russians established the location of their first Alaska settlement and first substantial European settlement on the Pacific Coast of North America, north of California.

'I dined watching humpbacks breaching and feeding, listening to their roaring splash echoing around, bouncing off the steep mountains.

Mr Fox claims claims that it's his mission to bridge the gap that has developed between nature and people(above he kayaks in the Mendenhall Glacier)

This beautiful photo was taken at the outset of the trip - he is pictured at Bear Glacier next to his kayak in April 2014 in British Columbia, Canada

A sea lion yawns at Daniel Fox as it sits on rocks in Kodiak Island, Alaska - the explorer describes himself as an artist and a storyteller

'I went back to Mendenhall Glacier but this time paddling the lake and exploring the icebergs. It was during that outing that I found this amazing iceberg cave.

'Kayaking is a really intimate relationship with the water and the places you visit. You are sitting in this small cockpit, feeling every little ripple, wave, breeze, or current.'

Mr Fox, who counts Sir David Attenborough as one of his heroes, describes himself as a photographer, storyteller and artist and says his mission is to bridge the gap between nature and the public.

Daniel Fox splashes water into the camera as he kayaks around the stunning scenery in June this year in Afognak Island, Alaska

Not one to shy away from adventure, he is currently kayaking down the Pacific coast from Victoria, Canada, to San Francisco, California.

The astonishing 1,000 mile journey is in aid of Wilderness Immersion for Leadership and Discovery (W.I.L.D.), a foundation Mr Fox started to connect young people with wildlife.

The goal is to raise $14,500 in sponsorship so that two underprivileged teenagers can attend a 30-day sea kayaking camp in Alaska in 2015.

He is now three weeks into the journey, has kayaked more than 300 miles, bringing him to waters off the coast of north Oregon, and has raised just under $5,000. 

"Really rarely do we have the capacity to just focus on one single thing.
The minute of nature is a daily exercice is like a meditation; to try to disconnect from all our distractions and just to basically stop :
Stop, breathe, relax, listen, enjoying the moment"
(see Paddling magazine)

The intrepid explorer is currently three weeks into a monstrous 1,000 mile Pacific kayak expedition from Victoria, Canada, to San Francisco, California

The explorer says 'nature is raw, rough, cruel, pretty, beautiful, inspiring, but above all, a humble experience' (pictured above is a red fox)

The adventurer said he would regularly wake to find deer sniffing through his belongings (above a black sitka deer inspects his camp on Kodiak island)

A lone brown bear looks straight into the camera as it  walks along the beach in this image taken in May 2014 on Admiralty Island, Alaska

On his foundation's website, Mr Fox says: 'Ever since I was a young boy, I found my inspiration and comfort in nature. It taught me about life, and death. 

'Nature is raw, rough, cruel, pretty, beautiful, inspiring, but above all, a humble experience.' 

Explaining his inspiration for starting the foundation he says: 'Unfortunately many of today's youth are immersed in a totally different reality. 

'Living in front of the computer, the television omnipresent and socially connected via smartphones, they spend little time in nature and rarely disconnect from technology. 

 Mr Fox stands to admire the stunning green landscape at Three Saints Bay in Kodiak Island, Alaska

Mr Fox's goal is to raise $14,500 on his current expedition so that two underprivileged teenagers can attend sea kayaking camp in Alaska in 2015 (a bald eagle above) 

'If their lives exist on the screen now, it’s unrealistic to think they will have the desire to connect with the natural world as they mature. 

'Yet, humans have always been connected with nature - 99.9% of our evolution comes from living in natural environments and our psychological underpinning is still entrenched in many ways with nature.' 

To track his progress on his 1,000 mile challenge, you can visit his W.I.L.D. website.

Explaining his inspiration for starting the foundation he says: 'Unfortunately many of today's youth are immersed in a totally different reality'

Mr Fox first visited the north-western state in 2013 and fell in love with the abundance of sea otters, deer and eagles (above a bird flies near Afognak Island, Alaska)

Daniel Fox photographed three otters playing in the water on Kodiak Island, Alaska, this summer during a three month kayaking trip around the state's islands

Links :

• CityWeekly : The Wild Image Project @ Antelope Island
• Sidetrack : Sitka to Hoonah
• Daniel Fox website

Map Lab uncovering hidden text on a 500-year-old map that guided Columbus

The 1491 Martellus map (click to enlarge or see on Yale Univ.)
It reflects the lastest theories of that time and its projection on a flat surface.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

From Wired by Greg Miller

Christopher Columbus probably used the map above as he planned his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492.

It represents much of what Europeans knew about geography on the verge discovering the New World, and it’s packed with text historians would love to read—if only the faded paint and five centuries of wear and tear hadn’t rendered most of it illegible.

But that’s about to change.

A team of researchers is using a technique called multispectral imaging to uncover the hidden text.

They scanned the map last month at Yale University and expect to start extracting readable text in the next few months, says Chet Van Duzer, an independent map scholar who’s leading the project, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The map was made in or around 1491 by Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer working in Florence.

It’s not known how many were made, but Yale owns the only surviving copy.

It’s a big map, especially for its time: about 4 by 6.5 feet.

“It’s a substantial map, meant to be hung on a wall,” Van Duzer said.

The Martellus map during preparations for multispectral imaging.

The Martellus map is interesting for several historic reasons, Van Duzer says.

One is it’s relevance to Columbus.

“It’s extremely likely, just about unquestionable that Christopher Columbus saw this map or a very similar one made by the same cartographer, and that the map influenced his thinking about the world’s geography,” Van Duzer said.

There are several lines of evidence for this, Van Duzer says.

Columbus sailed west from the Canary Islands hoping to find a new trade route to Asia.

Writings by Columbus and his son suggest that he began searching for Japan in the region where it appears on the Martellus map, and that he expected to find the island running north to south, as it does on the Martellus map, but not on any other surviving map made before his voyage.

(You can see Japan floating too far off the coast of Asia in the top right corner of Martellus’s map above).

 1482 Claudius Ptolemy World Map

World map (1490) of Henricus Martellus Germanus

(otherwise known as Heinrich Hammer)

This map is important because it claimed that Colombus used this map or a similar type to persuade Ferdinand de Aragon and Isabella de Castilla to be his patrons in his adventures in the early 1490s.

Colombus used it as evidence to prove that there wasn't a great dstance between Europe and China by sea.

Furthermore, this proved that Europeans could go to the East Indies by sea without having to go through Muslim-held lands.

The map was also the first to record the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa by the Portuguese in 1488.

Some believe that Martin Behaim heavily relied on the world map when he made Erdapfel in 1492, on the eve of Colombus' first voyage to the West.

Of course, what Columbus found instead was something Martellus hadn’t known about—the New World.

Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map was influenced by the earlier map by Martellus (click to enlarge). Library of Congress

Martellus’s map was also a big influence on Martin Waldseemüller, another German cartographer whose 1507 map is the first to apply the name “America” to the New World.

The Library of Congress purchased the only surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s map in 2003 for $10 million.

“There are many places where the same information was in the same place on the two maps,” Van Duzer said.

“The layout is very similar, a lot of the decorative elements are very similar.”

What isn’t known, because of the condition of the Martellus map, is how similar the text on the two maps is.

“One of the most exciting images I’ve ever seen of a map is an ultraviolet image of the Martellus map taken in the early ’60s,” Van Duzer said.

“If you look at eastern Asia with natural light, if you look closely, you get a hint that there’s text there, but if you look in ultraviolet light suddenly you see that there’s text everywhere.”

Most of the text still isn’t legible in those older UV images, but some of the parts that are appear to be drawn from the travels of Marco Polo through east Asia.

There are also indications of where sailors could expect to find sea monsters or pearls.

“In northern Asia, Martellus talks about this race of wild people who don’t have any wine or grain but live off the flesh of deer and ride deer-like horses,” Van Duzer said.

Waldseemüller copied much of this.

A photo of the Martellus map taken in 1960 with ultraviolet light (right) reveals text in places where it’s not normally visible (click to enlarge).
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

There are also interesting differences between the two maps.

Waldseemüller gets the shape of Africa more or less right, but on the Martellus map, southern Africa juts out way too far to the east (Africa is on the left side of both maps).

In addition, Martellus’s depiction of rivers and mountains in the interior of southern Africa, along with place names there, appear to be based on African sources.

It’s likely that this information came from an African delegation that visited the Council of Florence in 1441 and interacted with European geographers.

Three other surviving maps contain some of this same information, but the Martellus map covers more territory than any of them, making it the most complete surviving representation of Africans’ geographic knowledge of their continent in the 15th century. “In my mind, that’s absolutely amazing,” Van Duzer said.

Van Duzer hopes to learn more about Martellus’s sources from the new images the team is creating. Scanning the map only took a day, after two and a half days of set up, he says.

The team used an automated camera system developed by a digital imaging company called Megavision.

The system uses LEDs to deliver light within a narrow band of wavelengths and minimize the amount of heat and light the map was exposed to.

The camera has a quartz lens, which transmits ultraviolet light better than glass.

The team photographed 55 overlapping tiles of the map, using 12 different types of illumination, ranging from ultraviolet to infrared.

Conceptually, the process isn’t very complicated, says team member Roger Easton, an expert on imaging historical manuscripts at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“We’re really just looking at the object under different colors of light and trying to find the combination of images that best enhance whatever it is that we’re trying to see.”

But extracting legible text from all those images will take a lot of imaging processing and analysis, and a lot of trial and error, Easton says.

A combination that works on one part of the map might be useless for another part.

“It depends on the details of how the map has eroded or how the color of the pigments has changed,” Easton said.

“Different pigments reflect different wavelengths of light, and they deteriorate differently too.”

When the project is complete, probably sometime next year, the images will be available for scholars and the general public to examine on the website of the Beinecke Digital Library at Yale.



Links:

• GeoGarage blog : Colombus and the Piri Reis map of 1513 / The golden age of nautical charts - When Europeans discovered the rest of the world (BNF exhibition) / Worlds upon worlds : about the Waldseemüller world map / The making of a mysterious Renaissance map

Netherlands NLHO update in the Marine GeoGarage

19 charts (42 including sub-charts have been updated with 2014 material from the Netherlands Hydrographic Office (so a total of 227 including sub-charts -see list-) :

• 18111   Overzichtskaart Waddenzee (Westeli   250 000
• 18112   Zeegat van Texel   50 000
• 18113   Waddenzee, Den Helder tot Kornwerd   75 000
• 18114   Waddenzee, Zeegat van Terschelling   75 000
• 18115   Hoofdkaart Terschelling/Vlieland   250 000
• 18116   Waddenzee, Zeegat van Ameland tot   75 000
• 18117   Eierlandsche Gat   50 000
• 18118   Noordzeekust, Zeegat van Texel tot   100 000
• 18119   Noordzeekust, Eierlandsche Gat tot   100 000
• 18122   Hollum tot Ternaard   50 000
• 18123   Schiermoog tot Lauwersoog   50 000
• 18124   Lauwersmeer   30 000
• 18125   Schierm-oog tot Rottumeroog   50 000
• 18126   Schierm-oog tot Norddeich   75 000
• 18127   Eemshaven tot Knock   50 000
• 18128   Knock tot Papenburg   50 000
• 18129   Frieschezeegat tot Monden v/d Eems   100 000
• 181110   Noordzeekust, Zeegat van Ameland   100 000
• 181210   Monden v/d Eems tot Norderneyer S   100 000

Note : In accordance with SOLAS, nautical products must be kept up-to-date.

The Netherlands Hydrographic Office therefore publishes Notices to Mariners (corrections on Netherlands nautical charts, small craft charts and Nautical Publications / Week edition).