Archinaute prepares a third way of navigation for the third millenium, a solution between sailing and motoring, to match the challenges of Energy Transition.
With the rotating sail principle, wind power can supply all the energies required aboard and Archinaute reaches operational capabilities quite similar to motorships with zero fossil fuel use and zero emission.
“This is a story about conquering and overcoming your personal fears — in this case, the water,” director Alan Barillaro said in an exclusive interview with USA Today last week. “This is a tale of how to grow up in a world that seems so large and intimidating with the courage to get past those fears.”
The little sandpiper learns how to forage for food in the short clip and (we’re told by editors who have seen the film) Piper even makes a friend who shows her the ways of the ocean.
“There’s also the parent aspect, personal to me,” Barillaro told USA Today of the film. “Letting your kids grow up, make mistakes and not hovering over them. The mother piper is the parent I wish I was — being there for your kids, but giving them space to grow.”
We are now starting a long #livedive down to Endeavour, Canada's first Marine Protected Area.
It will take 2-3 hours to reach the hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, depth 2200m.
The main purpose is to lay a cable from Mothra to RC-South (in yellow on map above).
This will bring online the RC South Junction Box, a BPR and 2 moorings.
Following a post-lay inspection, we will then install instrumentation at Mothra: a hydrophone, seismometer, BPR and BARS.
see LIVE : www.oceannetworks.ca//expeditions/2016/research-vessel This is the main camera from the Jason ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) The R/V Sikuliaq is a 80 metre ice-capable oceanographic research vessel, equipped with the Woods Hole Oceanographic’s robotic vehicle Jason that can dive to 6500 metres. It hosts a team of 24 scientists and a ships crew of 22.
Endeavour and Neptune observatory on the GeoGarage platform (CHS chart)
The Endeavour area of the Juan de Fuca Ridge is a seismically active area of seafloor formation and hydrothermal venting.
The Endeavour Hydrothermal Vent area is located 250 km offshore from Vancouver Island, 2250 meters below the ocean’s surface. The map shows the locations of the five main hydrothermal vent fields and smaller sites of flow.
In the darkness of special places like the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents, ocean research is bringing to light deep secrets about life on earth and potentially elsewhere in our universe.
“Black Smokers” and hydrothermal vents Create an ecologically-rich oasis in the deep
It’s not often scientists suggest they’ve found an entirely new group
of animals, something so different that they can’t be considered as
belonging to one of the main groups, such as shellfish, insects, worms,
jellyfish, sponges, animals with backbones (like us) and so on.
So there was a fair bit of excitement when researchers in reported, in 2014, on strange mushroom-shaped organisms living on the deep seafloor, a kilometre under the water surface, off south-eastern Australia.
These animals, called Dendrogramma, were certainly peculiar.
There was a gelatinous stalk and cap shaped like a mushroom, an opening
down the bottom of the stalk that looked like a mouth, and a canal that
ran from there up into the cap, radiating into numerous branches.
There
were no appendages or special cells that would give away its
relationship to other animals.
If that wasn’t intriguing enough, the creatures bore some resemblance to 560 million-year-old fossils that have been found in Newfoundland, Russia and Namibia, as well as in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.
This is from a time when the first multi-celled organisms were
forming, back before animals and plants took on the shapes and functions
that we see today.
How amazing if these strange simple creatures had
survived off Australia for hundreds of millions of years!
Dendrogramma-like fossils from 560 million years ago.
But a crucial bit of evidence was missing from this story; there was no DNA data.
Just like in police investigations and medicine, DNA has proved
indispensable to the modern biologist.
It can reveal relationships
between organisms or plants that would not be guessed from their
appearance.
Organs such as eyes have evolved multiple times and do not necessarily indicate a shared ancestry.
But the Dendrogramma specimens had been collected in 1986 and preserved in DNA-busting formalin.
More examples had to be found first.
Alien-like mushroom-shaped creatures have been discovered in the depths of the ocean off the Australian coast.
Scientists said two species of the unusual life form were found that could not be placed in any existing group of organisms.
The animals, named Dendrogramma, consist mainly of an outer skin and inner stomach, separated by a dense layer of jelly-like material.
A discovery in the deep
And so the matter rested until November last year when the sharp eyes
of Hugh MacIntosh of Museum Victoria spotted the familiar mushroom
shapes at the bottom of a seafloor sample hauled it up from 2,800 metres
in the Great Australian Bight.
Hugh was on Australia’s new research vessel RV Investigator, participating in a CSIRO-led scientific program to study the marine environment off South Australia.
Hugh emailed us urgently from the ship: “Guess what I have found.”
Australia’s new research vessel, the RV Investigator.Tim O'Hara/Museum, Victoria
Science is often a waiting game.
So we had to wait for the RV
Investigator to finish her voyage, wait for the specimens to arrive,
wait until the DNA extraction and sequencing proceeded through various
laboratories, and then wait for publication.
Not that we were idle during that time.
Our evolution guru, Andrew
Hugall, downloaded genomes from dozens of animals, setting up a system
that could pigeonhole DNA-sequences originating from a single-celled
protozoan to a whale.
And still we waited; the Christmas break didn’t help.
We even set up a betting sweep, each of us guessing where Dendrogramma would be placed in the tree of life (I didn’t win).
Finally, at 4:30pm, one Tuesday afternoon in January, the DNA results
came in.
Andrew’s computer whirled and four hours later we had an
answer. Dendrogramma was a type of siphonophore.
The what’s-it-called?
A siphono-what?
Well, that was almost our reaction, because even to a
bunch of marine biologists, siphonophores are uncommon and strange
creatures.
They are cnidarians related to jellyfish, corals and anemones.
They
have polyps like corals, but have long stinging tentacles like jellyfish
and can move around.
Some polyps function as propulsion units, some are specialised to
feed, and yet others are gonads. They also can have flattened defensive
appendages called bracts.
These can also be mushroom-shaped!
The evidence shows that the Dendrogramma specimens are not entire animals, but just siphonophore bracts, pieces detached from a larger creature.
A benthic siphonophore attached by tentacles
to a ledge on the sides of a deep-sea canyon in the Gulf of Mexico.
Okeanos Explorer/NOAA
One mystery leads to another
Some commentators have criticised the original authors for publishing without DNA data.
I don’t fully agree with this view.
You need people to raise ideas
and hypotheses that can be tested against subsequent data.
We wouldn’t
have even looked for Dendrogramma if we had not been alerted.
DNA evidence indicates that the Dendrogramma mushrooms are not entire animals, just pieces of a siphonophore.What the whole animal looks like remains a mystery.David Paul and Rebecca McCauley/Museum Victoria
Okay, we were disappointed that Dendrogramma was not a
completely new type of animal.
But the hunt is important. Hundreds of
millions of years of independent evolution could have resulted in the
development of all sorts of biochemical novelties, from antibiotics to
cancer drugs.
So we have solved one part of the mystery but others remain.
We know what Dendrogramma bracts look like but not the whole animal.
Siphonophores come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
The deep sea is a big place.
It took decades for us to get video footage of the giant squid; it may take decades again for us to see footage of Dendrogramma in all its living glory.
Coast Survey Research Vessel Bay Hydro II collected about
123,000 soundings, over 12 days, to pre-test the efficacy of Rose Point
beta test for bathymetric crowdsourcing.
From NOAA by Lt. Adam Reed, Integrated Oceans and Coastal Mapping (IOCM) Assistant Coordinator We are on the verge of acquiring a significant new source of data to improve NOAA nautical charts, thanks to an enthusiastic industry and mariners equipped with new technology.
The United States has about 3,400,000 square nautical miles of water within our coastal and Great Lakes jurisdiction.
Coast Survey, who is responsible for charting that vast area, averages about 3,000 square nautical miles of hydrographic surveying each year.
The data collected by those surveys update over a thousand NOAA charts.
However, hydrographic surveys are expensive and laborious, and so Coast Survey directs them toward the highest priority sites, which leaves many coastal areas without updates for many years.
Coast Survey may soon get new sources of information, provided voluntarily by mariners, which will alert cartographers to areas where shoaling and other changes to the seafloor have made the chart inaccurate.
Rose Point Navigation System beta tests new crowdsourcing database
Technology has reached the point where any boater can buy an echo sounder kit, add a GPS system, record depth measurements, and make their own geospatial observations in a common reference frame.
The question then for hydrographic offices (who are concerned with improving nautical charts for safe navigation) becomes “how do we take advantage of that?”
Rose Point Navigation Systems is working with system developers at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and with hydrographic experts at Coast Survey and others who are collaborating on an international effort to maintain crowdsourced bathymetry.
In a beta test released on May 13, 2016, Rose Point has added a new feature to Coastal Explorer that gives users an option to send anonymous GPS position and soundings data to a new international database managed by NCEI.
After getting permission from users, Rose Point systems will generate data log files of positions, depths, and time, and automatically transmit the files to the data center, where Coast Survey can pull the data to compare it to nautical charts.
Crowdsourced bathymetry is an international project
Using data from private sources is not new for Coast Survey.
Private interactive cruising guides and other internet-based enterprises have set up services that allow commercial mariners and recreational boaters to share information about navigation hazards they see (or experience) while on the water.
The United States Power Squadrons and the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary have a decades-long tradition of sharing updates through our cooperative charting programs.
But the lack of appropriate software and integration between sources has hampered efforts to use the information to its full potential.
Evaluation and Use of Crowd Source Bathymetry in SHOM’s Digital Bathymetric Models
Hydrographic offices around the world are re-thinking crowdsourced bathymetry.
In October 2014, Coast Survey led the U.S. delegation to the Fifth Extraordinary International Hydrographic Conference, with Rear Admiral Gerd Glang at the helm.
At this meeting, the U.S.and France jointly proposed an initiative (see Proposal No.4) that introduced crowdsourced bathymetry as a recognized source of data for nautical charts.
One of the results of that initiative was the formation of the IHO Crowdsourced Bathymetry Working Group (IHO CSBWG) that set out to develop crowdsourcing principles and guidelines, and then offer a platform for sharing best practices around the world.
Working hand-in-hand with NCEI, the working group has developed a database that can receive volunteered bathymetric data.
Data can come from anyone in the world, and everyone can access it.
Coast Survey will use crowdsourced bathymetry to assess chart accuracy
Crowdsourced reports serve an important role in focusing attention on trouble areas.
The data helps cartographers determine whether a charted area needs to be re-surveyed, or if they can make changes based on the information at hand.
Even with very sparse data, cartographers can make improvements to nautical charts.
Agreeing in principle to use crowdsourced data is much different than applying the system to the vigor of data transmission from moving vessels, however, so Coast Survey experts contributed hydrographic expertise and system testing.
Using Rose Point’s Coastal Explorer, Coast Survey Research Vessel Bay Hydro II transmitted “crowdsourced” data using log files that were automatically produced by the electronic charting system software.
(Bay Hydro II is Coast Survey’s primary platform to test and evaluate new hydrographic survey technologies.)
“When you aggregate crowdsourced data, we can expect to see trends
develop where the seafloor has likely changed from charted data,”
explains Lt. Anthony Klemm.
“Using Bay Hydro II data
transmissions, we saw such trends indicating shoaling near the Patuxent
river entrance. Similarly, in the approach to Solomons harbor, trends
displayed depths deeper than charted.”
It is important to emphasize that Coast Survey does not necessarily
make changes to any significant charted feature based on crowdsourced
data alone.
That data, however, is about to become a major factor in
making charts better.
