Magnetic oceans and electric Earth

The magnetic signature from ocean tides (every 12.42 hours)
thanks to two years of data from ESA’s Swarm mission
courtesy of DTU/NASA/ETH Zurich 

From ESA 

Oceans might not be thought of as magnetic, but they make a tiny contribution to our planet’s protective magnetic shield.
Remarkably, ESA’s Swarm satellites have not only measured this extremely faint field, but have also led to new discoveries about the electrical nature of inner Earth.

The magnetic field shields us from cosmic radiation and charged particles that bombard Earth from the Sun.
Without it, the atmosphere as we know it would not exist, rendering life virtually impossible.

Scientists need to learn more about our protective field to understand many natural processes, from those occurring deep inside the planet, to weather in space caused by solar activity.
This information will then yield a better understanding of why Earth’s magnetic field is weakening.

Although we know that the magnetic field originates in different parts of Earth and that each source generates magnetism of different strengths, exactly how it is generated and why it changes is not fully understood.

 Earth's protective shield

The magnetic field and electric currents in and around Earth generate complex forces that have immeasurable impact on every day life.

The field can be thought of as a huge bubble, protecting us from cosmic radiation and charged particles that bombard Earth in solar winds.

This is why, in 2013, ESA launched its trio of Swarm satellites.
While the mission is already shedding new light on how the field is changing, this latest result focuses on the most elusive source of magnetism: ocean tides.
When salty ocean water flows through the magnetic field, an electric current is generated and this, in turn, induces a magnetic response in the deep region below Earth’s crust – the mantle.
Because this response is such a small portion of the overall field, it was always going to be a challenge to measure it from space.

Last year, scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, showed that if it could be measured from space – never done before – it should also tell us something about Earth’s interior.
However, this all remained a theory – until now.

Thanks to Swarm’s precise measurements along with those from Champ – a mission that ended in 2010 after measuring Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields for more than 10 years – scientists have not only been able to find the magnetic field generated by ocean tides but, remarkably, they have used this new information to image the electrical nature of Earth’s upper mantle 250 km below the ocean floor.

Magnetic field sources

The different sources that contribute to the magnetic field measured by Swarm.

The coupling currents or field-aligned currents flow along magnetic field lines between the magnetosphere and ionosphere.

Alexander Grayver, from ETH Zurich, said, “The Swarm and Champ satellites have allowed us to distinguish between the rigid ocean ‘lithosphere’ and the more pliable ‘asthenosphere’ underneath.”
The lithosphere is the rigid outer part of the earth, consisting of the crust and upper mantle, while the asthenosphere lies just below the lithosphere and is hotter and more fluid than the lithosphere.
“Effectively, ‘geo-electric sounding from space’, this result is a first for space exploration,” he continues.
“These new results are important for understanding plate tectonics, the theory of which argues that Earth’s lithosphere consists of rigid plates that glide on the hotter and less rigid asthenosphere that serves as a lubricant, enabling plate motion.”

Swarm is ESA's first Earth observation constellation of satellites.

The three identical satellites are launched together on one rocket.

Two satellites orbit almost side-by-side at the same altitude – initially at about 460 km, descending to around 300 km over the lifetime of the mission.

The third satellite is in a higher orbit of 530 km and at a slightly different inclination.

The satellites’ orbits drift, resulting in the upper satellite crossing the path of the lower two at an angle of 90° in the third year of operations.
The different orbits along with satellites’ various instruments optimise the sampling in space and time, distinguishing between the effects of different sources and strengths of magnetism.

Roger Haagmans, ESA’s Swarm mission scientist, explained, “It’s astonishing that the team has been able to use just two years’ worth of measurements from Swarm to determine the magnetic tidal effect from the ocean and to see how conductivity changes in the lithosphere and upper mantle.

“Their work shows that down to about 350 km below the surface, the degree to which material conducts electric currents is related to composition.
“In addition, their analysis shows a clear dependence on the tectonic setting of the ocean plate. These new results also indicate that, in the future, we could get a full 3D view of conductivity below the ocean.”

Rune Floberghagen, ESA’s Swarm mission manager, added, “We have very few ways of probing deep into the structure of our planet, but Swarm is making extremely valuable contributions to understanding Earth’s interior, which then adds to our knowledge of how Earth works as a whole system.”


Links :

• Science avances : research paper
• Phys : Magnetic oceans and electric Earth / Changes in strength of Earth's magnetic field mapped

Photos of the submarine Internet cables the NSA probably tapped

 Documentation of NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site,

Miami Beach, Florida, United States, 2015

From Wired by Laura Mallonee

The words “mass surveillance” usually bring to mind wiretaps, security cameras, and the NSA hoovering unfathomable quantities of cellphone metadata and Internet activity.
Few pause to consider the physical aspect of that last type of data collection: The government taps hundreds of cables that snake across the ocean floor, carrying data around the world.

NSA-Tapped Undersea Cables, North Pacific Ocean, 2016

Artist Trevor Paglen reveals some of those cables in a recent series, offering a visual reminder of how vulnerable your data is, and how easily it is accessed.
“Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world’s information goes through little tubes under the ocean,” Paglen says.
“Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world.”

South America (SAM-1) NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean, 2015

Security and surveillance fascinates Paglen, who has spent 10 years photographing everything from so-called “black sites” to spy satellites.
He was a cinematographer for Laura Poitras’s fascinating film Citizenfour, which documents Edward Snowden‘s NSA leaks as he made them.
During filming, Paglen visited NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, who suggested the artist look into Internet infrastructure.

 Under the Beach (Tumon Bay, Guam)

Among the many things Snowden disclosed was the fact the NSA and others tap these undersea cables.
Paglen spent two years studying the leaked data, cross-checking it with information gleaned from telecom documents, maritime charts, and topographical maps.
He also searched FCC filings and other regulatory documents, correlating information with the NSA documents.
It required a bit of detective work to sort it all out, because the agency often uses codewords.

 Documentation of NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Marseille, France, 2015

Once he had a sense of where these cables came ashore, Paglen had to photograph them.
That meant learning scuba diving.
He took a class in Berlin in the spring of 2015, flew to Florida for a certification course, and was diving off the coast of Miami Beach the next day.
He found the cable within minutes, exactly where his research indicated he would.

Japan-US Cable System NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Pacific Ocean, 2016

He photographed 10 cables off the coast of Florida, Hawaii, and Guam during more than 30 dives for the ongoing project, which includes large-format photos of where those cables come ashore.

 From tapped fiberoptic cables at the bottom of the sea to football field-sized antennas in deep space, the architecture of state surveillance is as ubiquitous as it is invisible.

In this talk, artist Trevor Paglen shares more than a decade's worth of images, research, and stories about how to "see" the top-secret infrastructures that are so emblematic of our historical moment.

He also creates collages of maps and documents linking those cables to NSA surveillance, providing a multi-media overview of government snooping.
“Much of the way we understand the world is through images,” Paglen says.
“That’s what I think good art does—it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.”

Links :

• New Yoker : Trevor Paglen Plumbs the Internet
• YouTube : Trevor Paglen visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World."
• GeoGarage blog : Submarine cable map 2016 / Facebook and Microsoft are laying a giant cable across ... / Submarine cable maps / Wiring the world below / The medieval undersea cable map / Thin underwater cables hold the internet / Undersea cables are actually more vulnerable than you ... / Here's how the Internet's arteries travel across the world's ... / Fibre optics to connect Japan to the UK – via the ArcticInteractive map plots the sprawling growth of the submarine cable ...  

Amelia Earhart mystery may finally be solved

Amelia Earhart last flight video :

this writer was unable to vet the following video as part of Earhart’s final flight, but it’s definitely footage of Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan.

From The Inquisitr by Kaanii Powell Cleaver

Many notable names of the 20th century have faded with the passage of time.
Not so with aviatrix Amelia Earhart.
The pioneering female pilot disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, but people still wonder what happened to her.
In fact, the Amelia Earhart mystery is generating global buzz right now, and the world can thank Ric Gillespie and Thomas King of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery’s Amelia Earhart Project for that.
On October 1, 2016, Nature World News made the announcement that the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has recovered and is touting conclusive evidence that proves where and possibly how Amelia Earhart and her flight navigator, Fred Noonan, perished nearly 80 years ago.

Although no real evidence was ever presented that could prove or disprove it, the U.S. government declared the official cause of Earhart’s and Noonan’s deaths to be an airplane crash.
In theory, a plane crash into unknown Pacific waters makes sense.
She had, after all, crashed while piloting a plane at least twice before.
In reality, the demise of Amelia Earhart and her trusty navigator may be a far more grisly tale.

According to The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, Amelia knew she was running out of fuel and could not find her planned destination of Howland Island, so she landed her plane on a relatively flat coral reef on the western edge of an atoll then known as Gardner Island. She used the last of her fuel to send distress calls for several nights.
A week after Earhart’s final radio transmission, the U.S. Navy sent a fleet of search planes to find Amelia.
By then, Earhart’s Lockheed Electra had been swept off the tiny reef and into very deep water, so no wreckage was seen from above.
Search pilot Lt. John O. Lambrecht did report seeing “signs of recent habitation” on the beach, but he assumed there were natives living on the island and did not send a rescue team.

 Finding Amelia with Hard Facts and Sound Science :

Powerpoint presentation given by TIGHAR Executive Director Ric Gillespie

at The Collider in Asheville, NC on August 5, 2106

What in the world happened to Amelia Earhart?

As the official story goes, Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E “flying laboratory” was equipped with aviation gear that was state of the art for the time. Biography.com notes that although Amelia was a competent pilot, she was not a very good navigator.
She flew more by instinct than by instruments, which may or may not have contributed to her disappearance on June 2, 1937.
Other factors that came into play that fateful night were the overcast skies that blocked Noonan’s ability to navigate by the stars and the fact that the charts used by Noonan and Earhart were outdated and placed 6,500 feet long, 1,600 feet wide Howland Island, which was their destination, at least five miles from its actual location.
Amelia’s plane circled the region, looking for Howland Island and its tiny landing strip as they radioed a U.S. Coast Guard vessel called the Itasca with the following message.

In the days following Amelia’s disappearance, at least 100 people around the planet reported hearing distress calls that originated from Earhart’s radio, reports The Vintage News.
Among those who described calls were a shortwave operator in Texas who said that Amelia claimed to have made a partial water landing.
Another radio listener reported hearing Earhart say she was injured, but that her navigator was in worse shape than she.
Anecdotal evidence is fascinating, but not enough to prove that Earhart and Noonan survived their aviation mishap long enough to fire up the radio and send distress calls.
Things that can prove the doomed duo survived a crash and died some time later are the “hard facts and sound science” presented by Ric Gillespie at The Collider in Asheville, North Carolina, on August 5 of this year.

 Nikumaroro with the GeoGarage platform (Linz nautical chart)

According to Gillespie, Earhart landed her Lockheed Electra on the western reef slope of the South Pacific coral atoll of Nikumaroro, some 1,800 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii, 700 nautical miles south of Samoa and 1,000 nautical miles north of Fiji.
As Gillespie describes it, Nikumaroro atoll is in “the middle of nowhere.”

  Nikumaroro with the GeoGarage platform (NGA nautical chart)

And the middle of nowhere is precisely where a 19 inch by 23 inch rectangle of aluminum was found by TIGHAR researchers in 1991.
Since that time, TIGHAR researchers have unearthed several other bits of conclusive evidence on Nikumaroro, including a pot of freckle cream, the heel of a woman’s shoe that matches contemporary photos of Earhart and several small bones.
Scientists surmise that the rest of Earhart’s and Noonan’s bones may yet be discovered in old crab burrows.

 This excerpt form the Discovery Channel documentary Finding Amelia explains TIGHAR's theory about how how Earhart landed on the reef at Gardner Island (Nikumaroro)

Scab patch as proof that Amelia landed on Nikumaroro atoll.

When the aluminum slab was first discovered, some pooh-poohed it as not matching Earhart’s Elektra airplane.
In 1996, the metal was tested by an independent lab and was found to be essentially identical to the 24ST Al-clad aluminum used as the skin of Earhart’s plane, NR16020.
Recently, the TIGHAR team found a Miami Herald photograph that clearly shows the same piece used as a “scab patch” to cover a broken window on the plane that became a part of the Amelia Earhart mystery more than seven decades ago.
Gillespie notes that “the patch was as unique to her particular aircraft as a fingerprint is to an individual and that the aluminum matches that fingerprint in many respects.”

 Video summary of NAI'A's 2015 expedition to Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands in support of TIGHAR's search for Amelia Earhart.

Between 2001 and 2010, Gillespie and the TIGHAR team visited Nikumaroro Island several times, finding artifacts and evidence of long-ago meals, leading scientists to conclude that Earhart may have survived for several months before dying of malnutrition or illness.
Whatever the cause of her death, the brave aviatrix who flew through the Pacific sunset and into the history books perished shortly before her 40th birthday.

Links :

• Washington Post : Amelia Earhart didn’t die in a plane crash, investigator says. This is his theory
• Nature World : What Happened to Amelia Earhart? New Evidence Proves She Survived for Months, Did Not Die of Plane Crash
• GeoGarage blog :  Amelia Earhart: sonar image shows what may be lost aviator's wrecked plane

Celebrating the 500th Anniversary of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1516 Carta Marina

source : Library of Congress

Martin Waldseemüller's 1516 Carta Marina sought to present the most up–to–date conception of the world at that time.

Equal in size to his 1507 map, the Carta Marina is markedly superior to the earlier map in artistic detail, possibly reflecting the hand of the artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528).

It incorporates greatly expanded and corrected geographical information.

The Carta Marina could be considered the first printed nautical map of the entire world.

However, in part because of the controversies surrounding his earlier naming of the Western Hemisphere “America,” Waldseemüller omits the word from the Carta Marina, and indicates that North America is joined with Asia. 

Links :

• LOC : Celebrating the Carta Marina / Compare 1507 vs 1516 Waldseemüller maps
• GeoGarage blog : Worlds upon worlds : about the Waldseemüller world map / The making of a mysterious Renaissance map / A world redrawn : when America showed up on a map, it was the universe that got transformed
• Maps & Explorers : Carta Marina 1516: A new approach to map making
• Who Printed Waldseemüller: Watermark Evidence from the 1507, 1513 and 1516 Maps
• YouTube : Legends on Martin Waldseemüller's Carta Marina of 1516 by Chet Van Duzen
  
  

Coral colors

coral colors from myLapse

In this video we have tried to show movement and the enormous chromatic beauty of corals, a kind of marine animals that despite being one of the oldest animals on our planet, are mostly unknown.
You will discover its stunning beauty, its spectacular colors and the mystery of his movements.
To capture these images it was necessary to apply the technique of time lapse as the slow movements of these animals are very difficult to see at a glance.
The use of macro lens gives a large enough vision to contemplate the huge variety of colorful species.
To perform this video over 25000 individual images of the marine invertebrates to compose, and photography of species, such as the Acanthophyllia, Trachyphyllia, Heteropsammia cochlea, Physogyra, were made for approximately 1 year.
We like to think that with this work, we have put a small grain of sand to raise your attention about the Great Barrier Reef, one of the natural wonders of our world, endangered because of global warming and because of the industrial projects of the Government of Australia.

You can see more up-close images of the coral species featured in this film on Flickr.