A new portrait of our Planet (1960)

The New Portrait of our Planet, published in LIFE magazine in 1960. 
"LIFE made up these unique maps which reveal for the first time how the ocean floors would like if the water and ice were suddenly removed" 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Earth bathymetry : a world without water

Kongsberg Maritime looks in to the future with the project "MACS" - Maritime Control System for the future.

 How will the bridge look like in the future?

How will the crew interact?

MACS system combines the flexibility of the touch screen with steerability of the of the vessel, without looking at a screen.

You can't operate a touch screen and look around at the same time.

We thus needed a handle capable of operating a touch screen.

The advantage of the MACS system is that it can be spread out across two screens, rendering many instruments on the bridge obsolete.

This eneables better wiring and troubleshooting.

It's easier for the operator to work with one system only.

A Canadian province’s rocky symbol collapses into rubble

About half of Elephant Rock, a natural stone formation in New Brunswick, Canada, crumbled on Monday.

The tides that helped carve it out of the shoreline also played a role in its destruction. 
left : October 29, 2013 / right : March 14, 2016

Kevin Snair/Creative Imagery

From NYTimes by Ian Austen

Viewed at just the right angle, and maybe with a bit of squinting — and perhaps a little imagination — the natural stone formation resembled a charging elephant, about 100 feet high and up to eight feet wide.

Elephant Rock near Hopewell Cape, New Brunswick, was so well known and frequently photographed that it appeared on the provincial health care identification card.

But like the Rockies and Gibraltar — as the Gershwins somewhat simplistically put it — it’s only made of clay, and on Monday about half of it collapsed. 

The event, as far as anyone knows, went unwitnessed.

 Hopewell Cape in the GeoGarage platform (CHS chart)

Google Maps position

 

 zoom on Hopewell Rocks with the GeoGarage platform (CHS chart)

Elephant Rock, or at least what remains of it, is one of the 17 Hopewell Rocks in the Bay of Fundy that become whimsical formations at low tide.

Yet despite its importance as a tourist attraction and a provincial symbol, some in New Brunswick see the demise of the elephant as inevitable as the melting of an ice palace after a winter carnival. 

“To some degree, it’s the end of an era,” said Noël Hamann, the property manager of the provincial park that includes the Hopewell Rocks.

“This particular rock was iconic because it was on the health card, so everyone in New Brunswick feels they have ownership of it,” he said.
“But the rocks are always changing.”

While the most dramatic, Monday’s collapse was not the first recent act of natural destruction visited upon Elephant Rock.

In 1997, a protrusion that Mr. Hamann said resembled an elephant’s trunk snapped off.

Like its neighbors, Elephant Rock is a mixture of sandstone and a soft rock known as Hopewell Conglomerate.

 This photo shows how drastic the difference is between high and low tide of the Bay of Fundy at the Hopewell Rocks.

(Kevin Snair)

The tides, which rise and fall 36 to 46 feet, helped create the rocks by carving them out of the shoreline and also play a role in their destruction.

 Bay of Fundy tides : the highest tides in the world

Interactive tides animation (click or tap on a photo below, then drag up & down)
Remember, the real Bay of Fundy tides take about 6 hours to flow from low tide to high tide, so plan to stay long enough to witness this amazing phenomenon.

But Mr. Hamann said that major springtime collapses were the result of the same freeze-thaw cycle that creates potholes.

And, he added, all of the formations are ultimately doomed.

“People get attached, and they don’t like change,” Mr. Hamann said. “But the tide waits for no man or rock.”

Where the whale things are : new underwater microphones can track whales over thousands of miles

An eavesdropping technique allows scientists to instantly find, map, and classify whales over enormous stretches of ocean.

From TheAtlantic by Ed Yong

Whales, the biggest animals on the planet, are also among the hardest to find.
They spend most of their time submerged and unseen.
But not unheard: Whales are noisy animals that flood the oceans with songs, clicks, moans, and calls.
And Purnima Ratilal from Northeastern University has developed a way of listening in on these calls to instantly detect, find, and classify whales, over 100,000 square kilometers of ocean—an area the size of Virginia or Iceland.
“The conventional method for studying marine mammals is to go out on a boat, dangle a hydrophone [an underwater microphone] off the side, and listen for the sounds the animals make,” she says.
“Or you do visual surveys, focused on one or two species and just a handful of individuals at a time.”
By contrast, her technique uses 160 hydrophones to simultaneously map the presence of at least eight whale species, without ever needing to see a single fin.
Ratilal started her scientific career studying military sonar and found that fish would seriously clutter the rebounding signals.
That’s not great for people trying to detect enemy craft but it’s perfect if you want to, y’know, map fish.
Fishermen already use fish-finding sonar but it typically uses very high frequencies and can only map the water column directly beneath a boat.
By using lower frequencies, Ratilal could detect fish over thousands of square kilometers.
And a lot of fish, at that.


 

In September 2006, the team ventured out into the Gulf of Maine with two ships: one that sent out sound waves and another that detected the rebounding echoes with a string of 160 hydrophones. Together, they visualized the movements of a quarter of a billion herring.
During the day, these fish stick to the ocean floor and largely keep their distance.
But come sunset, they gather to spawn, rising to the surface and aggregating into a kilometers-wide mega-orgy—a shoal of 250 million fish all busy creating millions more baby fish.
While working on the herring, the team kept on hearing whales in their recordings.
They initially focused on humpbacks, reputedly among the most vocal of the whales.
“We were amazed at the quality of the data we got,” says Ratilal.
“We found 2,000 calls from humpbacks each day.”
But even though the herring were spawning throughout the gulf, the herring-eating humpbacks were clustered in two separate locations.
Why weren’t they going after the fish in the middle?
“We thought there might be other whale species occupying the regions in between. And sure enough, we found them.”

Each whale species calls within a certain frequency range and makes its own distinctive repertoire of sounds.
Using this information, the team could look at their recordings and extract the locations of five huge filter-feeding species (the blue, fin, humpback, sei, and minke) and three toothed ones (sperm, pilot, and killer).
The whales seemed to divide the herring between them, with each species sticking to its own particular part of the Gulf.
The blue whales stayed away from the humpbacks, which swam apart from the minkes, which lived separately from the seis.
“You find the same species in these same areas day after day,” says Ratilal. “It’s quite stable.”
It’s possible that the larger whales like blues stay away from shallower regions, leaving those to the smaller minkes and pilots.
But in truth, no one knows why or how the whales carve up the oceans between them.
It’s not surprising that they do—you can see similar partitioning among, say, plant-eaters on the African grasslands—but it’s rare to see such stark visual evidence of these divisions.

Check out Ratilal’s map: that’s a huge body of water.
See those rings of color?
Those are the territories of animals that are the size of ships.

 Wang et al, 2016. Nature

“[Ours] is the only technique that can instantaneously monitor marine mammal and fish populations over very large areas,” she says.
She calls her technique Passive Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (POAWRS), and the “Passive” bit is important.
When the team studied the herring, they found the fish by sending out sound waves and capturing the echoes.
But whales are so vocal that the first bit is unnecessary.
“We’re just listening in,” says Ratilal.
She thinks that POAWRS can reveal not just the distributions of whales and fish, but their interactions as predators and prey.
For example, she says that humpbacks are ten times more vocal at night than during the day, and suggests that they’re making feeding calls while engulfing the amassed herring.
Likewise, minke whales make buzzing sequences that have previously been interpreted as mating calls. But the team found that they overlap with the presence of herring.
“They’re probably an intricate part of the minke feeding behavior,” says Ratilal.
But Jeremy Goldbogen from Stanford University isn’t convinced.
He says that these large, filter-feeding whales might make calls between bursts of foraging, but tagging studies have shown that they don’t vocalize while feeding.
“This demonstrates both the power and limitations of using acoustics to study predator-prey interactions,” he says.
Sure, researchers can monitor large swathes of ocean and find patterns that no one has seen before. But they can only infer behavior through correlations, and they may do so wrongly.
When understanding what these animals are doing, rather than just working out where they are, you still need to see them.

Links:

• DigitalTrends : New acoustic mapping system can instantly find all whales in a 60,000-mile patch of ocean /  Navy proves its love for whales and dolphins, curbing sonar use

Submarine cable map 2016

From GoogleMapsMania by Keir Clarke

Every year TeleGeography creates a new global undersea cable map.
TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map 2015 was a particularly wonderful map.
The 2015 map was inspired by medieval and renaissance cartography and featured some wonderful map border illustrations and even a number of beautifully drawn sea monsters.

For the 2016 edition of its Submarine Cable Map TeleGeography has designed a much more modern looking and information rich map.
The main map shows 321 undersea cable systems around the world, while a number of smaller inset maps depict some of the world's busiest landing stations.

 Locations of all copper telegraph cables around the world in 1877.

Countries on the map are colored to show how many submarine cable system links are connected to each country.
Infographics along the bottom of the map provide additional information on the capacity of the major global cable routes around the world.

The Submarine Cable Map 2016 is certainly not as much fun as the 2015 edition.
However TeleGeography's latest map does provide a lot more information about the world's submarine cable networks and is consequently a lot more informative.

Other undersea cables map (from Azimap)

Links :

• GeoGarage blog :  Submarine cable maps / Thin underwater cables hold the internet / The medieval undersea cable map / Wiring the world below / Messages from the deep: Interactive map plots the sprawling growth of the submarine cable network since 1989 / Here’s how the Internet’s arteries travel across the world's oceans in 2014 / Undersea cables are actually more vulnerable than you might think /Fibre optics to connect Japan to the UK – via the Arctic / Submarine cables : how the net connected the world