Earth bathymetry : a world without water

Globe showing planet Earth without all its water.

From Googlemapsmania by Keir Clarke

XG - Earth Bathymetry is a WebGL globe showing planet Earth after someone has pulled out the plug and drained the world of all its water.

The globe uses data from NASA's Blue Marble to provide a view of the undersea land surface and water depth.

The shading of the sea floor indicates changes in slope or depth.

If the blue coloring of the oceans' floors confuses you then you can click your keyboard's 'w' key to change the color to a more earth like brown color range.
The 3d globe includes keys to zoom in and to rotate the map.

You can also rotate the globe simply by clicking on it and dragging the map around.

 Dutch map from 1690 of what the earth might look like without water.

Fire at sea (trailer) : shows horror of refugee crossings

The documentary captures life on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a frontline in the European migrant crisis.
Situated some 200km off Italy’s southern coast, Lampedusa has hit world headlines in recent years as the first port of call for hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern migrants hoping to make a new life in Europe.
Rosi spent months living on the Mediterranean island, capturing its history, culture and the current everyday reality of its 6,000-strong local population as hundreds of migrants land on its shores on a weekly basis.
The resulting documentary focuses on 12-year-old Samuele, a local boy who loves to hunt with his slingshot and spend time on land even though he hails from a culture steeped in the sea. 

 
From MarineLink by Michael Roddy

Images shot in the hold of a boat where dozens of people died of asphyxiation after five hours in the Mediterranean brought home the horror of the refugee crisis in the film "Fuocoammare" (Fire at Sea) shown at the Berlin film festival on last Saturday.

A theme of this year's festival is to encourage the world to help and welcome refugees.

Director Gianfranco Rosi's harrowing two-hour documentary, which is in competition for the top Golden Bear prize, underscores the urgency of the problem.
Rosi, whose "Sacro GRA" won the top prize at the Venice film festival in 2013, said his latest film "bears witness to a tragedy that's happening right in front of our eyes".
"I think that we all are responsible for that tragedy and perhaps after the Holocaust it's one of the greatest tragedies the world has ever seen," he said at a post-screening news conference.

The film was shot mostly on the Italian island of Lampedusa, which is only 70 miles (113 km) from North Africa and has been receiving a flood of refugees for about two decades.
It interweaves the lives of the islanders, many of whom depend on fishing for a living, with the desperate efforts of hundreds of thousands of refugees to reach Europe, hoping for a better life.
One of the main characters is Pietro Bartolo, a doctor who treats the local island population for routine ailments.

His job is also to check for vital signs among the dead and seemingly lifeless people hauled from the sea or rescued from boats jammed with so many people that they are unable to breathe.
"I've seen some beautiful things but above all I've seen really dreadful things - so many dead children, so many dead women, so many raped women," Bartolo said at the press conference.
"These things really leave you with a great big empty hole in your stomach, with a dreadful feeling. And it's really awful to look at this and these are really nightmares that haunt me very often."

Rosi said the refugee boat in which his camera shows the bodies below deck had been at sea for only five hours, but was so tightly packed with people that some were already dead.
"If they had not been picked up (by the Italian navy) they would all have been dead," he said, adding that the rescue operation last Aug. 20 had barely rated a mention in the news.

At the same time that Lampedusa is swamped with refugees, life continues as it has for centuries. Rosi portrays that mostly through the eyes of Samuele Pucillo, a 10-year-old boy with an outgoing personality and whose favourite pastime is making slingshots.
His life barely intersects with the refugees, but when he is rowing in the harbour his boat almost gets trapped between two of the powerful patrol boats that search for refugee vessels.
Bartolo said that despite the impact of so many people trying to reach Lampedusa, the islanders have gone out of their way to be helpful.
"I always say the people of Lampedusa are a people of seafarers and fishermen. All those who come from the sea are welcome - it's in our DNA," he said.

Image of the week : eARTh: Cloud streets off Kamchatka

Sea ice and cloud streets in the Sea of Okhotsk, as seen by NASA’s Aqua satellite on Feb. 8, 2016.

GeoGarage map of the sea and surroundings (NGA chart)

From Imageo by Tom Yulsman

As frigid air poured out of western Siberia and out over the Sea of Okhotsk two days ago, it helped create one of the atmosphere’s more striking phenomena: long bands of cumulus clouds arranged in roughly parallel rows called “cloud streets.”
When I saw an image of the action captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite, my mind’s eye went to work. I saw that with some cropping to emphasize abstract patterning over immediately recognizable features, as well as modest enhancements to bring out detail, a beautiful work of Earth art (or “eARTh”) could be created.
The result is the image above.
In addition to the cloud streets, my crop includes broken sea ice, which makes up part of the image on the left.

 A schematic of cloud street formation. (Source: NOAA)

NASA’s Earth Observatory provides this excellent explanation of how these lines of clouds form:

Cloud streets . . . form when cold air blows over warmer waters and a warmer air layer . . . rests over the top of both. The comparatively warm water gives up heat and moisture to the cold air above, and columns of heated air called thermals naturally rise through the atmosphere. The temperature inversion acts like a lid. When the rising thermals hit it, they roll over and loop back on themselves, creating parallel cylinders of rotating air. As this happens, the moisture cools and condenses into flat-bottomed, fluffy-topped cumulus clouds that line up parallel to the direction of the prevailing winds.

Here’s a broader view of the cloud streets over the Sea Okhotsk, showing the Kamchatka Peninsula jutting down from the upper right, and Sakhalin Island to the left:

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image of cloud streets and sea ice in the Sea of Okhotsk on Feb. 8, 2016. Cloud streets are long parallel bands of cumulus clouds that form when cold air blows over warmer waters and a warmer air layer (temperature inversion) rests over the top of both.
Image Credit: NASA image courtesy LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC

To enhance the detail in the image, I used a processing plug-in for Photoshop called Sharpener Pro (from Google’s Nik Collection).

I did a bit of sharpening, and I enhanced both structure and micro-contrast.

Sharpening enhances very fine features in an image. Structure works on a somewhat larger scale.

And micro-contrast enhances the distinction between areas that are very slightly different in their luminance values.

This tends to enhance micro-detail in an image.

I hope you like the result.

How a NASA team turned a smartphone into a satellite business

This images in this video were captured on March 7, 2015 by a RapidEye satellite

From NASA 

Satellites aren’t small or cheap.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory launched by NASA in 2010 weighs about 6,800 pounds and cost $850 million to build and put into orbit.
Even the satellites built under NASA’s Discovery Program, aimed at encouraging development of low-cost spacecraft, still have price tags beyond the reach of smaller companies or research organizations: one such satellite, the sun-particle collecting Genesis, ran up $164 million in expenses despite its modest design and mission.
But that’s beginning to change as increasingly powerful technology comes in increasingly smaller packages.
For example, in 2010 NASA and the Department of Defense launched the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, aptly called FASTSAT.
Weighing in at just 400 pounds, FASTSAT cost just $10 million and carried out six experiments in orbit, proving that low-cost, quick-to-assemble spacecraft were possible.
You could say that NASA was just getting started.

 Satellite imaging has revolutionized our knowledge of the Earth, with detailed images of nearly every street corner readily available online.

But Planet Labs' Will Marshall says we can do better and go faster — by getting smaller.

He introduces his tiny satellites — no bigger than 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters — that, when launched in a cluster, provide high-res images of the entire planet, updated daily.

Small Wonders

Pete Klupar, director of engineering at Ames Research Center, was fond of pulling a government-issued smartphone out of his pocket during speeches and wondering aloud why the phone, which had a faster processor and better sensors than many satellites, cost so little in comparison — after which he slipped the phone back in his pocket and carried on.

An Ames researcher named Chris Boshuizen took Klupar’s musings to heart.
Having seen the phone schtick before, Boshuizen and his colleague Will Marshall once interjected during a talk by Klupar when he began to muse aloud about satellite costs.
“We said, ‘Pete, don’t put that back in your pocket,’” Boshuizen recalls.
“‘We’re going to make that into a satellite.’”

By September 2013, a NASA team originally led by Boshuizen and Marshall successfully launched its first PhoneSats into low-Earth orbit at a cost of just $7,000 each.
Named Alexander, Graham and Bell, the three mini-orbiters took pictures from space and beamed the data back to Earth, demonstrating for the first time that a consumer-grade smartphone could be used to power a satellite in space.
Successive generations of PhoneSats, launched by NASA and housed inside of CubeSats, have since demonstrated increasingly greater capabilities.

Meanwhile, Boshuizen and Marshall — joined by Robbie Schingler, another research scientist at Ames — left NASA to found Planet Labs Inc., a company focused on using cheap, off-the-shelf commercial components to build ever-smaller satellites.
“Instead of doing it the old-school Apollo way, with a lot of system design and analysis and then building the thing at the end, we decided to do it the software way, which is building a minimum-viable prototype first just to show that we have a working model, then going on from there,” Boshuizen says of the process they used to create their satellites, a strategy the company calls “agile aerospace.”

 Open California: Our Data, Your Creativity

Planet Labs released their growing California archive under an a CC BY-SA license.

Join their community of image analysts, scientists, developers, and researchers.

Turning Insight into Action

The first prototypes proved promising enough that the company had no trouble raising funds from venture capitalists.
That money, in turn, allowed the company to hire engineers and produce more of the satellites, named Doves, improving them with each iteration until they were ready for full-scale deployment.

By February 2014, the company dispatched the first of its commercial “flock,” when 28 Doves were released from the International Space Station.
These were followed by further deployments that brought the fleet’s total to more than 130 satellites — enough to produce high-resolution imagery of nearly the entire globe on a daily basis.
“We’re going to be gaining insight into the changing planet in a way no one’s ever gotten before,” Boshuizen says of the Doves’ abilities.

The private sector is eager for such real-time information.
Insurance companies can use the images to verify damages claimed by homeowners and progress on repairs, while commodity trackers can track agricultural crops to forecast yields.
The oil and gas industry can monitor pipelines for safety, while mobile-phone companies can use the satellite imagery for improved map applications on smartphones.

The company is dedicated to providing technology that adds environmental and humanitarian value, and Boshuizen says monitoring forests is a top priority.
“If you’re able to plot tree logging in an area where no one is supposed to be logging trees, then you’d be able to do something about it,” he says.
“We have the vision of turning insight into action, and what that means is being able to see things and stop them before they become a problem.”

To learn more about this NASA spinoff, read the original article from Spinoff 2016.
For more information on how NASA is bringing its technology down to Earth, visit http://technology.nasa.gov.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : A satellite's-eye view: Brittany, France 
• Motherboard : Startups Are Launching Satellites to Spy on Us From Space  / Satellite Video Maps Let Anyone Spy Like the CIA
• What next for Space?

Satellites could help discover modern and ancient shipwrecks

Landsat-8 image taken in 2013 of shipwreck sites off the coast of Belgium.
Credit: HIGHROC

 UKHO chart with the GeoGarage

From Scientific American by Charles Q. Choi
 
Discovering otherwise undetected shipwrecks scattered throughout the oceans could shed light on previously lost history 

Ancient shipwrecks might not only hold buried treasures, but also countless historical secrets.
Now researchers suggest satellites could help spot submerged wrecks that might otherwise go undiscovered.

More than three million shipwrecks may be scattered across the oceans, UNESCO estimates.
"Of all the wrecks in the world, maybe less than 10 percent have been found," says James Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
"Any technology that enables us to pinpoint wrecks is a step in the right direction."

Submerged wrecks are currently detected via waterborne sonar and airborne LiDAR systems—the former searches for wrecks with sound whereas the latter uses lasers.
Waterborne sonar is most effective for deep water; airborne LiDAR requires clear water.

Neither method works well for cloudy, shallow waters, however.
This means that nearshore waters—often both shallow and cloudy—are frequently overlooked in hunts for old shipwrecks.
This is a problem because "the majority of shipwrecks lie closer to shore, clustered around the entrances to harbors, just as most car accidents happen a kilometer or so away from home—say, when jockeying for a spot in a parking lot or at an intersection," Delgado says.
"Near the Golden Gate Bridge there are more than 300 wrecks and off of Cape Hatteras, N.C., the 'Graveyard of the Atlantic,' there are more than 1,000."

 Sonar images of four shipwreck sites off the coast of Belgium that reveal how the wrecks disturb surrounding sediment. A: SS Sansip; B: SS Samvurn; C: SS Neutron; D: SS Nippon.
Credit: The Flemish Hydrography, Coastal Division, Agency for Maritime and Coastal Services, Flemish Ministry of Mobility and Public Works. 

Now in a new study detailed in the February Journal of Archaeological Science, marine geologist Matthias Baeye at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and his colleagues suggest that satellite color photos of the oceans could help find submerged wrecks in shallow cloudy waters.
"It is a clever and elegant solution for using satellites to find shipwrecks," says Peter Campbell, archaeological director of the Albanian Center for Marine Research who was not involved in this work.

 Shipwrecks around Zeebrugge

Baeye and his colleagues examined satellite color photos taken by Landsat 8, which NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey launched in 2013.
The researchers analyzed four known wreck sites near the Port of Zeebrugge on the Belgian coast, all civilian vessels.
Two of the wrecks sank after hitting mines during World War II, one sank shortly before the war after colliding with another vessel and one sank in 1965, likely after striking one of the World War II–era wrecks.

NASA imagery, acquired April 1, 2014

Baeye and his colleagues focused on suspended particulate mater in the seawater, such as sand and silt.
High-resolution satellite imaging can measure the concentrations of these particles—the researchers had previously investigated how natural phenomena such as tides and human activity, such as fishing and dredging, could influence these particle levels, and unexpectedly noticed that shipwrecks could have an effect, too.

The scientists found that tidal currents flowing against these wrecks can generate distinctive linear plumes of these particles up to four kilometers long that are detectable from space.
"It'd be like finding pyramids based only on how they disturb the patterns of wind around them," Delgado says.
The researchers noted that usage of Landsat 8 data is free, and suggest that their method could help spot promising sites for follow-up surveys.
"I do think that this technique will lead to new discoveries," says Delgado, who did not take part in this research.
"As this technique gets used and refined, it will help increase the population of known shipwrecks, and the opportunities to see what stories they have to tell will also increase."

Several archaeologists have already requested satellite data from the researchers, "mainly from the Mediterranean Sea but also from Belgium and the U.K.," Baeye says.
Marine archaeologist Brendan Foley at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who did not participate in this study, suggests "a very interesting possibility for this technique would be seeing if this works on wooden wrecks in the shallow, turbid, muddy-floored Baltic Sea, where low salinity results in remarkably well-preserved wooden hulls. Beautifully preserved wrecks from at least the 15th century A.D., and no doubt earlier, are numerous there."

Baeye notes it remains uncertain if there is a depth limit to their method—the four wrecks they looked at were all located in less than 15 meters of water.
Deep plumes may not reach near the surfaces of oceans, and therefore satellites could not image them.
"If it works in, say, 80 meters of water, then it could be a way to locate some historic wrecks," Foley says.
"I'd like to find and survey the wreck of the USS Tang, the World War II submarine commanded by Medal of Honor recipient Richard 'Dick' O'Kane. It went down in the Taiwan Strait after sinking most of a Japanese convoy, a victim of a circular run of its last torpedo."

The shipwrecks that Baeye and his colleagues have analyzed so far with their technique are all modern metal wrecks.
Older wooden ships may be more difficult to spot because they may have decayed and collapsed, therefore kicking up less of a plume.
If further research reveals this method can also find older wooden wrecks, "I'd love to use satellites to look at Imari Bay in Japan for the fleets sent by Kublai Khan that were sunk by the fabled kamikaze typhoons," Delgado says.