2016 deadliest year in the Mediterranean

2016 - Deadliest Year in the Mediterranean from Migrant Offshore Aid Station

From MOAS

Despite tireless efforts to save lives by both civil society and European navies, MOAS crews are witnessing search-and-rescue efforts in the Mediterranean becoming more challenging than ever.

The number of deaths this year has risen to almost 4,300 exceeding death tolls of past years.

While the number of people crossing the Mediterranean as a whole has decreased when compared to previous years, it must be noted that the number of people attempting the Central Mediterranean route – from Libya to Italy – has remained largely unchanged.

MOAS has seen its humanitarian efforts overwhelmed this year, largely due to the changing approach of smuggling networks. Whereas in past years, crossings were organised in more manageable trickles, perhaps a few a day, this year our crews have seen departures organised in large waves.

MOAS research and analysis suggests that this change in approach might be both an attempt to maximise opportunity and meet demand on the part of the smugglers.

The smuggling networks appear to be industrialising, with increased competition representing a new challenge for them in procuring enough rubber boats, engines, and fuel containers to meet the demand.

This is leading to unprecedented numbers of migrants and asylum seekers being placed on unseaworthy rubber boats.

“The combination of heavier loads and inferior quality is a recipe for disaster”, said MOAS Head of Operations Ian Ruggier.

“Rescue assets have had to deal with increased challenges. There is no doubt that the vessels are built to last a few miles to see people beyond Libyan territorial waters”.

As a result, it is almost certain that the true death toll is much higher than the recorded figure as it is highly likely that many boats sink without ever being reported.

It is now more challenging for rescuers to spot all the boats being sent in one wave, and then manage to rescue everyone.

There have also been incidents in which our crews have spotted vessels at night that had been at sea since the early morning, suggesting many other migrant boats may go unnoticed.

Over 30,000 people have already been saved since MOAS launched its first life-saving mission in 2014, and almost 19,000 have been rescued and assisted since June 2016 alone.

“Crossings in the Mediterranean will not be stopped by creating more borders or building walls and fences. There is no force based solution to migration. People will always find a way to come to Europe. There is an urgent need to manage the phenomenon rather than try to hide behind razor wire. For this to occur European leaders must stand up and be counted”, said MOAS director Pete Sweetnam.

MOAS continues to call for the creation of safe and legal routes to end the needless loss of life at sea and to guarantee protection and dignity for human beings in search of a better life.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Mediterranean migrant deaths reach record level in 2016 / Fire at sea (trailer) : shows horror of refugee crossings /European Union authorizes military action against people ... / Migrants can't be left to die in the seas of Europe / SAR crisis in the Mediterranean – commercial vessels ... / The millionaires who rescue people at sea / Lampedusa, the Italian Island thousands are dying to reach

The future of sailing

Links : 

• GeoGarage blog : Vendee Globe : the foils user manual /Flying the course : a game changer / Stable flight - foiling's holy grail /

8 tools we used to navigate the world around us before GPS and smartphones

 Do you know how the early sailors navigate the oceans?

The technology today makes it real easy to navigate the oceans.

But it's very interesting to know how the early sailors managed to navigate without it.

There's a lot of history on it.

From The Atlantic CityLab by Megan Garber
(from original article The Atlantic)

A new Smithsonian exhibit takes on the history of "getting from here to there."

Type an address into your phone, and up will pop a step-by-step route from where you are to where you want to be.
This is, in its way, magic -- magic that has, at this point, been rubbed and polished into a simple fact of life.
The ease with which we machine-carrying humans make our way through the world, though, is quite new.
And it's the product of a long, painstaking history: of people plotting a course, getting lost, and finally finding their way.
The newest exhibit at the Smithsonian's Air and Space museum, "Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There," opened this weekend, shares the story of human route-charting -- in the seas, in the sky, on the street, and in space.
And it's largely a story of failure.
The first spaceships we sent to the moon either missed their destination completely or crashed into it.
Amelia Earhart was very likely lost due to poor navigation.
Columbus and his ships were, famously, misdirected.

 History of Navigation

But the story of navigation is also one of gradual knowledge and readjustment, of looking to the constant objects of the physical world -- the sun, the moon, the stars -- and using them to understand, ever more precisely, how to find our way in the world.
"Dead reckoning" (positioning oneself using time, direction, and speed) has now given way to global positioning using satellites.
And that, in turn, is giving way to atomic clocks that can keep time within three billionths of a second -- clocks that may soon make it to our phones.
So it's easy to imagine that, given our tools, we have made getting lost obsolete.
But that's to take the luxury of location-based living for granted. "Navigation was the great scientific challenge of our time," an animated 19th-century British "admiral" notes in a video tour of navigation's history.
And it was the challenge on which many more challenges hinged.
As explorers ventured off into distant, unknown lands, they needed above all to know where they were going -- to be, as they say, on the right path. Navigation was in many ways a leap of faith.
It's just that the faith in question concerned calculations. 
Now, though, thanks to the man-made stars we navigate by, "the whole world is synchronized." We humans are synchronized.
The problems faced by those early explorers have been solved using that time-honored combination: ingenuity, and math.
"Time and Space" is one of the most ambitious exhibits Air and Space Museum has yet put on -- in part because it involved a collaboration among curators at different Smithsonian institutions (Air and Space as well as American History), but also because the exhibit is so theoretical in its topic and scope.
It's not so much about a particular time or trend, but about, you know, space and time ...
and humans' place between the two.
So one particular challenge the curators faced was to make the story of navigation -- a story, ultimately, about mathematical calculations -- accessible to the range of people who come through the museum every day.
They tackled it well.
The tale is arranged chronologically, but also in sections: navigation in the sea, navigation in the air, navigation in space, navigation in the contemporary world.
We see models of clocks designed by Galileo.
We see Charles Lindbergh's sextant.
We see the updated sextant used by Apollo astronauts to navigate using the stars.
We see a GPS-guided glide bomb.
We see a duplicate of the Mariner 10 space probe, the first craft to reach Mercury.
We see Stanley, the early self-navigating car.
Below, courtesy of the Smithsonian, are some of the artifacts featured in "Time and Navigation." For more, here's the online version of the exhibit.

Bond Chronometer.
This timekeeper was the first American-made marine timekeeper taken to sea.
William Cranch Bond, a 23-year-old Boston clockmaker, crafted it during the War of 1812.
This artifact is part of the National Museum of American History's collection.

 Bygrave Position-Line Slide Rule.
Celestial navigation requires complicated computations.
Performing these calculations in cramped open cockpits with low temperatures and wind speeds of over 160 kilometers (100 miles) per hour was part of what made navigation difficult in the early years of aviation.
Thankfully, Capt. L. C. Bygrave developed this handy slide rule shortly after World War I.
It provided the best shortcut method of speeding up celestial computations at the time.

 Ramsden Sextant.
Navigating in the sea: this sextant was one of the navigation tools invented in the 18th century by British mathematical instrument makers that permitted mariners to find their position much better than ever before.
The sextant became the most essential instrument for celestial navigation, used to find the angle of a celestial body above the horizon.
Jesse Ramsden, who made this sextant, also devised a machine to divide the scale on the sextant very precisely.

 Apollo Sextant and Scanning Telescope.
Navigating in space: to determine position in space, an Apollo astronaut located a specific star using a single-power, wide-field telescope and then took a fix using a sextant.
While this instrument does not look like a traditional sextant, the basic procedure is descended from centuries-old methods used by navigators at sea and in the air.

Dutch Pendulum Clock.
In the 17th century, several inventors were trying to make an accurate clock for finding longitude at sea.
In pursuit of a sea clock, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch mathematician, changed timekeeping forever when he patented the first working pendulum clock in 1656 and later devised a watch regulator called a balance spring.
Pendulum clocks immediately became the best timekeepers for use on land, but they didn't work accurately on a heaving ship's deck.
Huygens worked with several Dutch clockmakers, including Johannes van Ceulen, who made this table clock around 1680.
It is one of the earliest clocks with a pendulum.

Longines Sidereal Second-Setting Watch.
Before 1927, watches used with sextants for celestial sightings could only be set to the minute.
A watch error of 30 seconds caused a navigational error of up to 12 kilometers (7 miles).
In 1927, P. V. H. Weems devised a watch with an adjustable second hand that could be set using radio time signals.
This was one of his personal navigation watches.
Sidereal refers to the watch running on a celestial day (about 23 hours, 56 minutes), rather than the 24 hour solar day.

Lockheed Vega 5C Winnie Mae.
Wiley Post's Winnie Mae circled the globe two times, shattering previous records.
The first time was in 1931 with Weems associate Harold Gatty as lead navigator.
The second was a solo flight in 1933 assisted by "Mechanical Mike," one of the world's first practical autopilots.

Stanley Autonomous Vehicle.
This autonomous vehicle, named Stanley, was developed by the Stanford Racing Team.
Stanley is a 2005 Volkswagen Touareg modified to navigate without remote control and without a human driver in the seat.
Stanley won the 2005 Grand Challenge, a robot race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), by successfully navigating 212 kilometers (132 miles) across desert terrain.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Hōkūle'a: The dangers of sailing around the world / Polynesian navigators revive a skill that was nearly lost / Book World: 'Lost Art of Finding Our Way' explores the ... /Farewell Greenwich Mean Time /GPS back-up: World War Two technology employed /
    Circumnavigate the globe without instruments?

SpaceX just asked permission to launch 4,425 satellites — more than currently orbit Earth

SpaceX plans Satellite Network for global Internet coverage

Flickr/SpaceX

From Business Insider by Dave Mosher

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by the Mars-hungry tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, just made a big move to enshroud the planet in high-speed internet coverage.
On November 15, the company filed a lengthy application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch 4,425 satellites.
(We first heard about the filing through the r/SpaceX community on Reddit.)
That is a hell of a lot of satellites.
According to a database compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists, there are 1,419 active satellites currently orbiting Earth.
There are estimates of roughly 2,600 satellites that no longer work floating in space, but even factoring those in, SpaceX's planned fleet would be larger than everything already in space.
Some of the biggest telecommunications satellites can weigh several tons, be the size of a bus, and orbit from a fixed point about 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above Earth.
After we took a look at SpaceX's FCC application, though, it seems these won't be your typical telecommunications satellites.
Each satellite in SpaceX's planned constellation will weigh about 850 lbs (386 kg) and be roughly the size of a MINI Cooper car.
They will orbit at altitudes ranging from 715 miles (1,150 km) to 790 miles (1,275 km).
From this lofty vantage point, SpaceX says each satellite could cover an ellipse about 1,300 miles (2,120 km) wide.
That's about the distance from Maine to the Florida panhandle.
"The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, governmental and professional users worldwide," SpaceX wrote in its application.

SpaceX/FCC

SpaceX's filing with the FCC outlines a two-phase launch plan.
To get the party started, SpaceX wants to send up 1,600 satellites at one orbital altitude, then follow up with another 2,825 satellites placed in four shells at different altitudes.
"With deployment of the first 800 satellites, SpaceX will be able to provide widespread U.S. and international coverage for broadband services," SpaceX wrote.
"Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1 Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the U.S. and globally."

Turbo speeds 

A speed of 1 Gbps globally would be huge.
The global average for internet speed in late 2015, according Akamai's "State of the Internet" report, was 5.1 Mbps per user — about 200 times slower than SpaceX's target — with most of the higher speeds tied up in cable and fiberoptic connections.
SpaceX also makes the point in its filing's legal statement that, according to a July 2016 report by UNESCO's Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, "4.2 billion people (or 57% of the world’s population) are offline for a wide range of reasons, but often also because the necessary connectivity is not present or not affordable."
Bathing the planet in internet is one way to get those people online.

Here are some more details directly from SpaceX's filing, which are notable:

• High capacity: Each satellite in the SpaceX System provides aggregate downlink capacity to users ranging from 17 to 23 Gbps, depending on the gain of the user terminal involved. Assuming an average of 20 Gbps, the 1600 satellites in the Initial Deployment would have a total aggregate capacity of 32 Tbps. SpaceX will periodically improve the satellites over the course of the multi-year deployment of the system, which may further increase capacity.
• High adaptability: The system leverages phased array technology to dynamically steer a large pool of beams to focus capacity where it is needed. Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit. Further, the constellation ensures that frequencies can be reused effectively across different satellites to enhance the flexibility and capacity and robustness of the overall system.
• Broadband services: The system will be able to provide broadband service at speeds of up to 1 Gbps per end user. The system’s use of low-Earth orbits will allow it to target latencies of approximately 25-35 ms.
• Worldwide coverage: With deployment of the first 800 satellites, the system will be able to provide U.S. and international broadband connectivity; when fully deployed, the system will add capacity and availability at the equator and poles for truly global coverage.
• Low cost: SpaceX is designing the overall system from the ground up with cost- effectiveness and reliability in mind, from the design and manufacturing of the space and ground-based elements, to the launch and deployment of the system using SpaceX launch services, development of the user terminals, and end-user subscription rates.
• Ease of use: SpaceX’s phased-array user antenna design will allow for a low-profile user terminal that is easy to mount and operate on walls or roofs.
• The satellites will last between 5 years and 7 years and decay within a year after that. 

 Musk is not alone in recognizing the market potential.

Besides investing in Musk’s project, Google is working on a high-altitude balloon-based Internet delivery system called Loon.

Facebook is developing high-altitude, high-endurance drones to deliver Internet capability to remote areas.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Qualcomm, meanwhile, are investing in a competing venture called OneWeb, which aims to build a similar network of micro-satellites.

These projects would be similar in concept to the space-based systems, while operating within the Earth’s atmosphere.

Musk first discussed the unnamed satellite constellation project back in January 2015, later filing for an FCC application to test basic technologies that'd support it.

At the time, Musk said during a SpaceX event (our emphasis added):

"The focus is going to be on creating a global communications system. This is quite an ambitious effort. We're really talking about something which is, in the long term, like rebuilding the Internet in space. The goal will be to have the majority of long distance Internet traffic go over this network and about 10% of local consumer and business traffic. So that's, still probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber but we'll do about 10% business to consumer direct and more than half of the long distance traffic." 

According to a June 2015 story by Christian Davenport at The Washington Post, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion into Musk's company, in part to support the project.
So it's a good guess that if and when the network becomes functional, those companies would partly assume control of it.
(Google parent company Alphabet is also working on its own effort to beam internet connectivity from the skies using satellites, balloons and drones.)
The filing comes just two months after a SpaceX rocket exploded during a routine launchpad test.
It was carrying the $200 million AMOS-6 satellite, which Facebook intended to license to beam free internet to parts of Africa.
Business Insider contacted SpaceX for more details on the project, including its projected timeline and how the satellites would be launched (presumably through Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets), but representatives did not immediately answer our questions.

Links :

• Reuters : SpaceX seeks US approval for internet-via-satellite network
• TechCrunch : SpaceX seeks approval for satellite-powered internet service
• Bloomberg (2015) : The New Space Race: One Man's Mission to Build a Galactic Internet

Uncovered: the mysterious killer triffids that dominate life in our oceans

New videography techniques have opened up the oceans' microscopic ecosystem, revealing it to be both mesmerizingly beautiful and astoundingly complex.

Marine biologist Tierney Thys has used footage from a pioneering project to create a film designed to ignite wonder and curiosity about this hidden world that underpins our own food chain.

From The Conversation by Aditee Mitra

Have you ever wondered where the foam in the ocean comes from?
Or why the sea can look clear on some days and green, brown, or even pink on others?
And how fish get the ingredients to make those omega-fatty acids that we’re told are so good for us?
Well, the single word answer to all of these questions is: “plankton”.
Plankton are organisms that inhabit all water bodies – from lakes and ponds to oceans.
The word plankton is derived from a Greek word – πλαγκτός (planktos) – meaning “I drift”, and so while plankton can move between deeper waters and the surface and vice versa, they cannot swim against the current.
So sometimes we have vast numbers of planktonic jellyfish, fantastic swimmers within the water columns but helpless against the tide, stranded on our beaches.
In size, plankton range from microscopic, single-celled organisms to multi-celled animals such as krills, jellyfish, crab larvae and juvenile fish.

 Little triffids: Mixotrophs at large. Author provided

We often think of the sea as being dominated by fish and whales.
But microscopic, single-celled plankton are, in fact, the main drivers of life in Earth’s oceans.
But how well do we really understand them?
For decades, the accepted view has been that these single-celled microscopic plankton can be divided broadly into two types.
Food producing “phytoplankton” (also known as microalgae) are like tiny marine plants.
“Microzooplankton”, on the other hand, eat the phytoplankton and are in turn eaten by bigger zooplankton, such as krills.
This division of microscopic plankton is akin to the plant-animal split in terrestrial ecosystems. However we now know that, beneath the waves, there is another microscopic plankton group – “mixotrophs” that combine features of “plant-like” phytoplankton and “animal-like” microzooplankton.
And their mode of feeding is, but for their microscopic scale, the stuff of horror stories.
They are like miniature triffids, which can engulf living prey, suck out their innards, poison them, harpoon them, make them explode, and steal and reuse body parts.
They can kill whole ecosystems in a matter of hours and alter the colour of the water – and yet they also shape the Earth’s atmosphere and support the growth of larval fish at critical stages of their life cycle.

For decades, these mixotrophs have been considered to be freaks of nature, prospering only when phytoplankton and microzooplankton are disadvantaged.
Over the past five years, however, through a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we have established that the mixotrophs are far from freaks; indeed, mixotrophy is the norm rather than the exception.
This has major implications – it means that the base of the oceanic food web doesn’t follow the traditional “plant-animal” pattern.
Instead, it is dominated by the activities of the single-celled mixotrophs, microscopic “triffids” which can photosynthesise like plants and eat like animals – all within the one cell.

 "The Power of Plankton" (Bringing the importance of plankton to life) is an animation movie.
This animation was written and designed by Clare Buckland, SAHFOS Education Officer and is aimed at all age groups of the general public.

The movie promotes the importance of plankton and the long term Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey.

A new type of life?

Based on our findings, we have proposed a new model for life in our oceans, arguing that the traditional split between the “plant-like” phytoplankton (microalgae) and the “animal-like” microzooplankton used to describe the oceanic food-web is no longer tenable.
This model could overturn a century’s worth of our understanding of marine biology.
Indeed, mixotrophs have the potential to impact all of our lives, not least because they are major contributors to the food webs that support fisheries.
This is especially true for the healthy growth of very young fish, which depend on them for food during the summer months.

Bad news for fish: Phaeocystis bloom on the Loughor Estuary, south Wales.

Author provided

Just like the triffids of John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi novel, however, mixotrophs can be dangerous, too – and to more than just other microplankton.
The release of nitrates and organic nutrients, such as raw sewage or silage slurry, into coastal waters contributes to an imbalance of nutrient loads, which causes mixotrophs to produce toxins and mucus.
The toxins can kill fish and close shell-fisheries.
Muddy-coloured foam in estuaries during summer is the result of plankton secreting excess mucus – and this mucus can clog the gills of fish, effectively drowning them.
Mathematical models are used widely to aid environmental management, to study fisheries and to investigate the impacts of fishing and climate change on them.
But such models do not take into account the presence and activities of the mixotrophs that we now realise comprise more than half of all microscopic plankton.
And this could result in serious flaws.
We have shown that marine food web and climate change models that don’t include mixotrophs could be giving questionable results.
Indeed, based on our modelling studies, we suggest that we start to take mixotrophs more seriously and include their remarkable impacts in mathematical models used to predict climate change and aid environmental management.
They may be microscopic, but we ignore these little triffids at our peril.

Links :

• Youtube : Phytoplankton Levels Dropping / The Ocean's Green Machines
• Unesco : Harmful algal blooms