L'île aux oiseaux
Links :
- GeoGarage blog : Bassin d'Arcachon : world's longest aerial panoramic photography
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Drone seen by the sky : Le Bassin d'Arcachon
Saturday, December 12, 2015
A satellite's-eye view: Brittany, France
Get a tour of Brittany from space.
A dove satellite captured these images of rugged seashore
idyllic pastures and an urban center on September 7, 2015.
From La Pointe de l'Armorique to Brest
with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM nautical chart)
with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM nautical chart)
Friday, December 11, 2015
Could a Titanic seawall save this quickly sinking city?
Jakarta is considering a $40 billion-plus project to build an outer sea wall and 17 artificial islands, which together would be shaped like a Garuda—the mythical bird that's Indonesia's national emblem.
Jakarta, Indonesia’s fast-growing capital of 10 million people, is embarking on one of history’s biggest seawall projects—to be shaped like a Garuda, a mythical bird-like creature.
Standing on the banks of Jakarta Bay, Victor Coenen sees flimsy houses with sheet metal roofs sitting on the city’s seawall.
A girl wearing flip flops and a pink bow walks along the wall, only a couple feet off the ground.
Coenen points to cranes trying to clear waterways that are clogged with plastic debris and water hyacinth while nearby, in the low-lying Pluit district, mopeds and bicycles ride through flooded streets.
“The city cannot keep up with the sinking,” says the Dutch physical geographer during a tour of the town, noting it’s dropping 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) each year on average and up to 10 inches in some areas—exponentially faster than Venice, the famous “City of Water.”
In fact, Jakarta could be the Titanic of the world’s metropoles, a place where children wade through waist-deep brackish water to get to school and nearly half its people live with frequent flooding.
Last Christmas, during high tide, water poured over the Pluit seawall.
In 15 years, 80 percent of the northern city will lie below sea level—up from 40 percent now.
In 50 years, current streets could be at least 10 feet below it.
Jakarta with the GeoGarage (NGA chart)
So this former Dutch trading post is embarking on one of history’s biggest seawall projects.
In three phases over three decades, it aims to build an exterior wall off the coast that would be 25 miles (40 kilometers) long and 80 feet high, a third of which would sit above sea level.
That’s not all.
To help pay for the $40 billion-plus behemoth, developers could buy land on 17 new artificial islands and build luxury homes, shopping malls and Grade-A offices.
Together, the wall and islands would be shaped like a Garuda, the mythical bird-like creature of Hinduism that’s the national emblem of Indonesia.
“We’re trying to build a seawall city. That’s completely new,” says Coenen, who’s managing the project in Jakarta for the engineering and consulting firm of Witteveen+Bos, part of a Dutch consortium that prepared the master plan.
Flimsy homes are built on the existing sea wall in the low-lying Pluit area of Jakarta
as shown on February 2, 2015.
The Great Garuda, as it’s known, has only just begun.
Last year, the city began work on the first phase, which entails raising the existing sea wall an average of seven feet over the next two years.
Officials will then decide whether to give the go-ahead for the final two phases, but it’s unclear what they’ll do.
Also unclear: Would this project, which has plenty of skeptics, even work?
The Lure of Seawalls
Since ancient times, seawalls have been built to keep water at bay.
Their popularity is on the rise as the world’s seas, almost a foot higher than a century ago, are projected to climb more because of climate change.
Countries across the globe will build walls to protect themselves, because the price of these projects is cheaper than the cost of flooding, according to a 2014 study.
The U. S. government spent more than $14 billion on gates and walls to protect New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005.
The Dutch have built huge dikes, and in 2010, South Korea finished the world’s longest man-made one: the 22-mile Saemangeum Seawall.
Yet seawalls have failed to prevent catastrophe.
Japan’s 2011 tsunami brought waves that overwhelmed its seawalls, leading to a meltdown at its coastal Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Now, it’s proposing a new 250-mile-long, four-story-high sea barrier.
Jakarta’s plan is controversial.
A government study said it could erode islands, damage natural habitats such as coral reefs, and force the relocation of thousands of coastal people including fishermen.
Skeptics say it could exacerbate corruption, spur more development, and avoid fixing the root of the problem: massive groundwater extraction.
“It’s treating the symptoms, not the cause,” says Christophe Girot, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who did a case study on Jakarta.
He says most of the sinking is due to households, developers, and industry illegally extracting groundwater to obtain free fresh water.
“It’s the Far West. It has a frontier feeling, a free-for-all,” Girot says, noting the city grew rapidly without treating enough wastewater to provide piped-in drinking water for all residents.
Also, he says it’s failed to stop the dumping of trash into the waterways, an estimated 500 tons daily, that make the water costlier to clean.
“You just throw your stuff into the river,” which can be 20 feet deep in plastic, he says.
“It’s a self-perpetuating problem,” he says, and since the water is a toxic sludge containing lead and mercury, “it’s also a public health problem.”
Cranes remove water hyacinth from the Pluit flood reservoir on Feburary 2, 2105.The fast-growing hyacinth, along with trash, clogs waterways and drainage pumps.
Others agree.
A recent editorial in the Jakarta Post, Indonesia’s largest-circulation English language daily newspaper, called for a “high-capacity” wastewater treatment plant.
“Although it took them decades, Tokyo and Bangkok have managed to stop groundwater extraction and Jakarta definitely can do it, too. It must,” the paper says.
“And when Jakarta has done it, who needs to close Jakarta Bay with a giant seawall?”
Time’s Running Out
“You have to do it all,” says Gijs van den Boomen of KuiperCompagnons, a Dutch firm that designed Jakarta’s urban plan.
If people wait for the city to take all the steps needed to stop groundwater extraction, he says it will be too late.
“It’s staggering, almost unimaginable,” he says about the scope of the sinking. He says the project includes cleaning the 13 rivers that will pour into a newly created reservoir—located between the outer and inner seawalls—and treating the water so “we don’t create a lagoon of death.”
Woman picks through trash that surrounds a slum in northern Jakarta on February 1, 2015. Coenen says there are hydrological deadlines.
Parts of the current seawall, raised in 2008 after a massive 2007 flood covered nearly half the city in as much as 13 feet of muddy water, are already submerged at high tide.
He says upgrading it will protect Jakarta only until 2025, at which time the outer wall will be needed.
“There are no small or easy solutions,” he says, noting it won’t be easy for the city to either halt subsidence or build the Great Garuda.
He says it’s approved funds to heighten the one third of the current wall that sits on public land; the other two-thirds tend to be in better shape, because landowners protect their property.
The Dutchmen working on the project acknowledge it could cause some environmental harm, but they don’t see a better alternative.
They expect changes to their master plan as the city decides whether to proceed. Since the outer wall will take six to eight years to build, Coenen says, Jakarta needs to get started within a few years.
“This is a city of maybe,” he says, adding: “It’s difficult to predict what will happen.”
Links :
- The Great Energy Challenge : The story is part of a special series that explores energy issues
- GeoGarage blog : Going Dutch to help conquer the rising seas
Thursday, December 10, 2015
'In the Heart of the Sea' movie review: Ron Howard's high-seas adventure is adrift
Snapshot: A high-seas adventure recounting the tragedy of the whaling ship the Essex, the sinking of which inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
From NOLA by Lindsey Bahr
Ron Howard's "In the Heart of the Sea" is a curious beast.
The ambitions are as big as a whale; the results are an earnest wreck.
It could possibly work if you think of the movie as a metaphor for the story it's trying to tell, but that's a little too meta for something that should be fairly straightforward.
It's ostensibly about the real expedition that inspired Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" that Nathaniel Philbrick wrote about in his nonfiction book.
Voyage of the Pequod (illustrated by Everett Henry).
It's ostensibly about the real expedition that inspired Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" that Nathaniel Philbrick wrote about in his nonfiction book.
But despite a promising start, something is lost in the spectacle and the framing device, which ultimately undermines its own story.
Howard uses Melville as a character (played by Ben Whishaw) and his curiosity about the mysterious circumstances of how the whaleship Essex sank as the audience's entry into the story.
Howard uses Melville as a character (played by Ben Whishaw) and his curiosity about the mysterious circumstances of how the whaleship Essex sank as the audience's entry into the story.
He's looking for big answers about the unknown.
So, he finds Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), the ship's only remaining survivor, who's drinking his life away.
At his wife's pleading, and Melville's promise of generous payment for one night's conversation, Tom starts to spill about the events of 30 years ago, when he was 14 (played by Tom Holland).
It's best not to do the math.
This is the story of two men, he says: A captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), and his first mate, Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth). Pollard is the son of the expedition's proprietor.
This is the story of two men, he says: A captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), and his first mate, Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth). Pollard is the son of the expedition's proprietor.
He's wealthy, arrogant, entitled and inexperienced.
What doesn't: The pieces never mesh together into a cohesive whole, with little insight to the characters and even less emotion.
Chase is the real seaman — a working-class Adonis with a classist chip on his broad shoulders.
He's also arrogant, but has the skills to back it up.
Chase flexes his hero muscles early, bounding up a ladder to cut free a tangled sail, and the captain responds with ill-advised bravado in leading the men full-speed into a squall.
But the "who leads" question is abandoned quickly and without much resolution once the whaling starts.
Perhaps the most striking scenes are those that deal with the process of catching a whale, from spearing to the gory disemboweling.
Perhaps the most striking scenes are those that deal with the process of catching a whale, from spearing to the gory disemboweling.
But whales are scarce on the ship's normal route and they must sail on to get enough oil for their bosses.
It's thousands of miles off the coast of South America where they encounter the big one, which locks on the Essex with a Terminator's resolve.
Hemsworth is best when he's by himself — either barking orders or doing something physical.
Of all the actors he shares scenes with, it's Cillian Murphy as his second mate who brings out something resembling emotion.
But we never really care about the lead, so there's little hope that we'll be interested in the rest of the men once it becomes solely about survival.
Indeed, most of the second half is spent drifting with them on lifeboats.
Indeed, most of the second half is spent drifting with them on lifeboats.
In these interminable minutes, we don't get anything resembling an understanding of how they survived (or didn't) either mentally or physically.
Future Tom Nickerson isn't much help either, and Melville is already too focused on his own literary ambitions to actually ask the big questions he told us he was seeking.
"In the Heart of the Sea" tries to be about so many things — ambition, capitalism, greed and survival. In the end, it feels most interested in how Herman Melville got his classic.
"In the Heart of the Sea" tries to be about so many things — ambition, capitalism, greed and survival. In the end, it feels most interested in how Herman Melville got his classic.
The pieces are there, but apparently it's up to "Moby-Dick" to assemble them, not Ron Howard.
Links :
Moby Dick (1956)
Links :
- NYDailyNews : Movie review: ‘In the Heart of the Sea’ is Ron Howard’s lackluster ‘Moby-Dick’
- SmithsonianMag : The True-Life Horror That Inspired Moby-Dick
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