Meditation on and reflection of the creative process
Artist statement :
In my ocean paintings I’m interested in holding the moment.
I contemplate the collision of opposites at life’s centre, both brutally tragic and endlessly tender.
The ocean mirrors the tempo of my body, the beating of my heart, the in and out of my breath.
Surging contractions birth swells that rise and then die.
Waves like a metronome mark the present, each insisting: now.
In the ocean I’m immersed in now.
Yet in the ancient body of the sea I feel the root of time.
In the pulsing surge I feel the wild place of my wilderness beginnings.
There is no totem to the irrational more potent.
Nothing points to the stirrings of my unconscious more than what lies below the surface.
No peril is more ominous.
Yet the sea is where I bathe my wounds.
Where I get lost in all that is luxuriously infinite.
Nothing is more symphonic, more effervescent, more delicately complete than the endless sea.
Ran Ortner, 2015
Few natural phenomena are as
mesmerizing as a swimming jellyfish, with its graceful full-body
contractions.
Biologists rhapsodize about it for a different reason than
your typical aquarium-goer, though: It’s a highly efficient way to get
around the ocean.
And now, scientists have figured out exactly what
helps drive that locomotion.
New research in Nature Communications reveals that jellyfish and an unrelated eel-like creature called a lamprey are in fact more pulling
their bodies along than pushing.
That might seem like a minor
discovery, but in fact it could transform not only how engineers think
about building underwater vehicles, but how biologists think about
movement at large.
Take a look at the GIF below.
That’s a swimming lamprey, surrounded
by millions of miniscule glass beads.
By shining lasers into the
tank and recording it all with high-speed cameras, researchers were able
to track the movements of the beads and calculate the different
pressures the lamprey creates as it cuts through water.
A lamprey doing its thing. Red is high-pressure water, while blue is low-pressure.
John O. Dabiri
What you’re seeing in red at the lamprey’s snout is an area of high
pressure, which you’d expect where the creature has to break through
the water.
More interesting, though, are the blue bits: areas of low
pressure that those undulations create.
As the lamprey twists and rotates, it churns the water next to its
body into small whirlpools, explains Stanford University’s John Dabiri, a
fluid dynamicist who authored the study.
“At the center of those
vortices you end up getting low pressure, just like in a hurricane or
tornado you often will have low pressure in the middle of that rotating
mass of air.”
Those low pressure whirlpools form near the creature’s forward-facing
surfaces, sucking in the water ahead of the lamprey and propelling the
animal forward.
The jellyfish is the same way: Both animals essentially
suction their way through Earth’s oceans.
A lamprey illuminated with the green and red lasers
that track the movement of tiny glass balls in the tank.
Sean P. Colin
That mechanism makes them highly efficient swimmers.
If these animals
just propelled themselves forward by pushing water back with their
waggling tails or full-body contractions, they’d waste a lot of
energy—imagine the waves left behind a high-speed motorboat.
“In the
case of the suction motion,” Dabiri says, “it’s possible to sort of slip
past that water without leaving a lot of energy in your wake.”
These findings could be a big deal for engineers.
Like a flick of a
fish’s tail tends to waste energy, so too do propellers.
But there may
be a way to generate low-pressure suction around a vessel to give it
a boost, says Dabiri.
If engineers end up capitalizing on this suction-driven swimming
technique, they won’t be the only ones.
Biologists may take note too.
Lampreys and jellyfish are pretty darn evolutionarily distinct—they’re
not even remotely closely related.
So if this trick of locomotion is
present in two disparate groups, it may well show up elsewhere in the
animal kingdom.
To create the low-pressure vortices, both the lamprey and the
jellyfish exploit their bendy bits—and all kinds of other structures in
the animal kingdom are nice and flexible as well.
“What we see are, for
example, wings and fins bending somewhere around 70 percent of the way,”
says biologist Jack Costello of the Marine Biological Laboratory, who
was also involved in the research.
“That seems to be true whether it’s a
mosquito wing or a condor wing or fish bodies.”
Another shot of a swimming lamprey, this one showing the direction of flowing water.
John O. Dabiri
Could it be that other creatures out there are utilizing the suction
trick?
With such a big advantage in energy savings, one might expect
evolution to select for it.
“It’s such a strong selective force acting,
it doesn’t care what lineage you come from,” says Costello. “It’s sort
of like gravity doesn’t care whether you’re a dinosaur or a tsetse fly.”
The beautiful, hypnotic jellyfish, then, may hold far more secrets
than it lets on.
So the next time you’re at the aquarium, take time to
appreciate its ballet.
It’s kind of a big deal.
Nautical charts are an important tool in navigating safely in coastal waters, and Coast Survey’s mission is to keep these charts up to date.
However, maintaining accurate charts can be a challenge in locations where sandy shoals may shift seasonally and present a danger to navigation.
These areas differ from the current nautical charts, and bottom contours change so rapidly that it may seem an impossible task to keep up using the traditional survey methods. Office of Coast Survey and NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson are seeking a solution to this ongoing problem and may have an answer with satellite-derived bathymetry.
Satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) begins with using multi-spectral satellite imagery, obtained by satellites such as Landsat and WorldView2, which compares green and blue color bands.
Multi-spectral satellite imagery of Mutton Shoal in Nantucket Sound, overlaid on the chart.
Green color bands are attenuated by the water faster than blue bands and help to infer relative depths of the water (blue areas being deeper than green).
These images are then transformed into a color range scale applicable to the color scale used when surveying with a multibeam echo sounder.
With the color range applied, reds on the image represent an area that may be shoal whereas blues and greens represent deeper water.
Satellite-derived bathymetry of Mutton Shoal with a color range scale
that is correlated with the color scale used for multibeam processing.
Since the images are based on attenuation of color bands, depth can only be inferred, so survey equipment (such as vertical beam and multibeam sonars) is necessary to acquire true depth.
This fall, NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson investigated the use of satellite-derived bathymetry imagery as a new survey tool.
Survey technicians will calibrate the application of this imagery through bathymetry studies for Nantucket Sound and Chincoteague Island.
NOAA Lt. Anthony Klemm, who is leading the studies, chose these project areas because they both had relatively clear shallow water and were in a highly changeable area.
At these locations, he chose specific shoals for exploration based on vessel traffic density.
In October, Thomas Jefferson spent two days in Nantucket Sound researching shifting shoals using the satellite-derived imagery overlain on the most recent chart.
Ensign Marybeth Head developed line plans to acquire data over the potential location of shoals as seen with the satellite images, as well as their charted locations.
Survey launches acquired multibeam data in water deeper than six feet, and Z-Boats were sent in to acquire vertical beam data in areas too shoal for the launches to safely operate.
Satellite-derived bathymetry of Mutton Shoal with multibeam data from
the investigation overlaid. This picture demonstrates how accurate the
location of the shifted shoal was compared to the SDB imagery.
During routine conductivity, temperature, and depth casts for sound speed velocity, Ensign Head and Ensign Kaitlyn Seberger used a Secchi disk to determine the attenuation coefficient at each cast location for later comparisons.
The satellite imagery was a vital tool in project planning, as well as determining safe navigation of the ship and the survey launches.
Below is a picture of the chart location where Thomas Jefferson intended to anchor.
The adjacent image is the satellite-derived bathymetry imagery indicating the anchorage would have been within a shoal area and unsafe for anchoring.
Side-by-side picture of the chart and SDB imagery for the intended
anchorage location in Nantucket Sound.
SDB imagery indicated a shoal
that covered half of the anchorage safety circle.
A Z-boat verified the
indicated shoal was almost 30 ft shoaler than charted and without this
useful imagery, the ship and launches could have run aground.
Ensign Head determined safe passage routes for the survey launches, using the satellite-derived bathymetry imagery overlaid on a chart of the area, as the charted soundings were not reliable.
For example, a safe passage route between the study areas and the ship was located between two shoals that had shifted considerably from the chart of the area.
Sections of the passage are currently charted at 20 feet or more of water, but the fathometer on the launch displayed depths of less than 10 feet.
Boat sheet for the launches indicating a potential safe passage route
from the project area to the ship.
After processing the multibeam data, Ensign Head determined that more than half of the charted shoals in the project area had shifted and the red zones depicted in the satellite-derived bathymetry imagery were significantly shoaler than charted depths for the surrounding area.
Results from the investigation showed that the satellite-derived bathymetry for Nantucket Sound was exceptionally accurate and aided in the identification of current navigational dangers.
However, more research is needed regarding the use of satellite-derived bathymetry as a contemporary survey method.
Limitations on use of the imagery can include variables such as cloud cover, turbidity, Chlorophyll a, and other water quality properties that may affect attenuation.
Despite these challenges, satellite-derived bathymetry is a new tool that could support survey efforts by reducing the amount of time and area necessary to survey and by increasing the effectiveness of NOAA’s efforts to efficiently provide safe navigation to the local mariner.
Migrant crisis: more than 4,000 migrants and refugees have had to be rescued by the Greek Coast Guard off the shores of Lesbos this month alone. Migrant tragedy in Greek seas shows dangers as winter nears (Monthly record of 218,000 reach EU by sea) EU predicts 3 million more migrants could arrive by end 2016
The rubber dinghy rolled perilously on the waves and twisted sideways, nearly flipping, as more than three dozen passengers wrapped in orange life vests screamed, wept and cried frantically to God and the volunteers waiting on the rocky beach.
Khalid Ahmed, 35, slipped over the side into the numbing waist-high water, struggled to shore and fell to his knees, bowing toward the eastern horizon and praying while tears poured into his salt-stiff beard.
“I know it is almost winter,” he said.
“We knew the seas would be rough. But please, you must believe me, whatever will happen to us, it will be better than what we left behind.”
Migrants from Turkey arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos in early November.
The great flood of humanity pouring out of Turkey from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other roiling nations shows little sign of stopping, despite the plummeting temperatures, the increasingly turbulent seas and the rising number of drownings along the coast.
If anything, there has been a greater gush of people in recent weeks, driven by increased fighting in their homelands — including the arrival of Russian airstrikes in Syria — and the gnawing fear that the path into the heart of Europe will snap shut as bickering governments tighten their borders.
“Coming in the winter like this is unprecedented,” said Alessandra Morelli, the director of emergency operations in Greece for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“But it makes sense if you understand the logic of ‘now or never.’ That is the logic that has taken hold among these people. They believe this opportunity will not come again, so they must risk it, despite the dangers.”
A dinghy crowded with migrants approaching Lesbos.
Refugees and relief workers shrug when asked how far into winter people will try to make the treacherous crossing.
The surge means that countries throughout the Balkans and Central Europe already under intense logistical and political strain will not find relief — especially Germany, the destination of choice for many of the refugees.
Hopes that weather and diplomacy would ease the emergency are unfounded so far, putting more pressure on financially strapped and emotionally overwhelmed governments to quickly find more winterized shelter.
The influx also underscores the European Union’s failure to reach a unified solution to the crisis, leaving places like this, on the Greek island of Lesbos in the northern Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey, struggling to deal with huge numbers of desperate people and raising questions about what will happen not just this winter, but in the spring and beyond.
Early this week, the number of people who had crossed into Greece from Turkey hit 600,000, after having passed 500,000 only a few weeks earlier.
Boats and life jackets left by migrants on a Lesbos beach.
“Coming in the winter like this is unprecedented,” said Alessandra Morelli, the director of emergency operations in Greece for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Both migrants and relief workers shrug when asked how far into the winter people will try to make the treacherous crossing.
“Some of the smugglers, they tell the people who call them, ‘Yes, there will be more trips, you should come,’ and so the people keep coming,” said Abu Jawad, a 28-year-old Palestinian Syrian who works as a broker for Turkish smugglers, recruiting passengers from the crowds in Izmir, Turkey, and other coastal cities.
“So what I think is that people will keep coming as long as the smugglers tell them to come, and the smugglers will keep attempting trips as long as the people are coming,” he said.
In mid-October, an average of 8,700 a day were landing in Greece, peaking at 10,006 on Oct. 21. Fistfights broke out, and there were some stabbings, as people tried to cut in line to get the precious documents from Greek officials that allowed them to take a ferry to Athens and beyond.
Relief workers sent out pleas for help and resources.
But smaller numbers of migrants arrived, largely because of the weather, and the adoption of a new system that divided the migrants into groups to apply for the necessary papers allowed officials in Lesbos to more easily send refugees on their way.
The landings fell to an average of 5,800 a day before creeping up to 6,200 per day in the last seven days. In all, 16,500 people were waiting in camps across the Greek islands on Wednesday for transport to the mainland.
But the calm may be short-lived: a four-day strike by Greek ferry workers that began on Tuesday threatened once again to create bottlenecks and overwhelm relief workers who had only just begun to catch their breath.
In the meantime, with every break in the weather, rafts and dinghies continue to wash ashore.
On Saturday, 9,300 people landed on the Greek islands, when it was unseasonably balmy.
On the next two days, when the north winds blew more fiercely, about half that number arrived.
On Tuesday, once again, the seas calmed and boats appeared one after another pushing across the choppy strait.
“We had no choice,” said Nouri Mahmoud, 60, who once ran a small oil company in Syria.
“We had to leave Aleppo. It has gotten much worse in recent weeks. The rebels are fighting each other, and now we have the Russians, too. Everyone is fighting everyone else. Whoever comes into Aleppo next is going to be slaughtering people.”
Clustered around him in the doorway of a temporary shelter at a refugee center were his wife and his 15-year-old triplets.
“We can’t go back now,” Mr. Mahmoud said.
“We have nothing to go back to.”
A man holds up a young boy as a boat carrying migrants and refugees arrives at the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey
Photo: AFP
That the crossing is getting more perilous — as it does every winter when the northern winds and the sinking temperatures churn and chill the sea — is beyond doubt.
Last Wednesday, a boat carrying more than 250 migrants — a “yacht,” the Turkish smugglers call them, but they are usually old and creaky tubs — foundered in the stretch between Turkey and the north shore of Lesbos.
More than three dozen drowned.
And that was only the largest recent catastrophe.
In one day this week, 11 people died when a boat capsized just 30 yards off the shore of Samos, another Greek island; two died off the shore of Rhodes, and six perished in the waters north of Lesbos.
“We are confronted with these shipwrecks every day now,” Ms. Morelli said.
In an outdoor coffeehouse one afternoon last week outside the main train station in Izmir, several dozen Syrian refugees sipped tea at rickety tables.
Nearby shops sell life jackets, inner tubes and waterproof packets for cellphones and passports.
“Of course, we are aware that winter is coming, but it took us this long to sell all of our land and our house in Deir ez-Zor,” said Ahmed Ali, 28, who was surrounded by a half-dozen family members.
“Now, with the Russians bombing in places, we think the situation will be even worse.”
He is waiting, he said, to shop among the smuggling operations to try to divine which one he can trust.
“What choice do we have now but to move forward?” he said.
“We have nothing left at home to return to. Tell me, where else can we go?”
By late Tuesday night, Mr. Ali said, the family had already reached Lesbos, taken a ferry to Athens, crossed through Macedonia and Serbia and was making its way across the Croatian border.
A few yards away, at another tottering table, Adnan Sheikh Mohammad clicked shut his flip-phone and smiled broadly, clapping his cousin, Sami, on the shoulder.
“I have made a deal with a smuggler,” he said.
“God willing, we leave tomorrow.”
The price was $1,100 per adult, half that for the children, a sizable amount for a party of 12 adults and 10 children.
They plan to make their way to Sweden, where friends live, but they do not know the exact path they will follow.
“We are going to get off the boat in Athens and just follow the crowd,” said Sami, 39, who had been a barber in Aleppo.
A woman waved a life jacket to direct a migrant boat ashore as it made the crossing from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos.
Carl Court/Getty Images
The next afternoon, volunteers waited at high points on Lesbos’ shore and scanned the horizon.
Every now and then, small orange dots bobbing in the distance slowly clarified into a line of smaller orange dots.
As they drew closer, they transformed, like apparitions, into a few dozen people in orange life vests, waving frantically.
A volunteer clambered atop his car and began twirling a life vest over his head, signaling the boat to head to his left, away from a more treacherous stretch of shore.
But the migrants did not see him or were unable to control the boat, and it crashed into the surf line on a jagged patch of stones.
It had clearly been a terrifying crossing.
A half-dozen children wailed and clutched at their mothers, who were also weeping, the men looking about, trying to figure out what to do.
Volunteers charged into the waves and tried to keep the boat perpendicular to the shore, but the force of the water was too strong and it flattened against the shoreline, threatening to upend.
One by one — children first, then women, then men — the passengers were unloaded and escorted the final few feet to shore.
They looked around, dazed and tearful, but they all survived.
“Adi! Adi!” a frantic mother screamed, spotting her son leaning against a nearby rock.
She fell to the ground, pulled up the leg of his pants and began to kiss his shivering shin.
Ran Ortner Documentary Teaser (Sept) from Todd Holland
