Power and elegance! Solo sailors Armel Le Cleac'h and Alex Thomson and their IMOCA60 passed the Kerguelen Islands in 1st and 2nd position of the Vendée Globe and the French Navy was there to wave them off. Fantastic to see their gorgeous yachts fly away and relieving to hear calm and focused skippers on the radio! other video
Kerguelen islands in the middle of Indian ocean (GeoGarage platform with UKHO chart)
NOAA has issued a new nautical chart for the Port of Palm Beach,
Florida, an important distribution center for commodities being shipped
all over the world, and especially the Caribbean Basin.
The Port of Palm Beach operations include containerized, dry bulk,
liquid bulk, break-bulk, and heavy-lift cargoes.
It is the only port in
South Florida with an on-dock rail where the Florida East Coast Railway
provides twice-daily service to the port’s rail interchange.
The Palm Beach Harbor Pilots Association asked Coast Survey for the
new chart, citing the dangers confronting navigators who approach the
port and anchor offshore using the small scale coverage and
corresponding lack of detail currently available on chart 11466
(1:80,000).
With more and bigger vessels entering the port, the larger
scale inset helps pilots navigating within the turning basin and
surrounding infrastructure.
This is especially important because it is
located within the traffic flow of the Intracoastal Waterway.
In consultation with the Palm Beach Pilots, the U.S. Coast Guard
Sector Miami, Port of Palm Beach (Operations Division), and the Army
Corps of Engineers Jacksonville District, Coast Survey developed the new
chart specifications.
All parties agreed that the new 1:15,000 scale
chart and a 1:5,000 scale inset would enhance navigational safety and
greatly benefit port operations.
In order to create the new chart, new data had to be collected.
The
National Geodetic Survey’s Remote Sensing Division collected additional
bathymetric lidar data along the shoreline and Coast Survey’s navigation
response team collected hydrographic data in the area just beyond where
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data ends.
Modern day explorers from the Arctic nations of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Russia, and the United States are
setting their sights north to map the seabed and establish sovereign
rights to resources in an icy area that just over a decade ago was
virtually inaccessible.
Coastal nations have sovereign rights to ocean resources that extend 200 miles past the country’s coastline.
Under the Law of the Sea treaty,
coastal nations may also claim resources discovered if the extended
continental shelf (ECS) of the nation extends past the 200-mile
exclusive economic zone.
“The convention allows the opportunity for a coastal state to extend
sovereign rights over its resources of the seafloor and sub-seafloor far
beyond what every coastal state is entitled to,” said Dr. Larry Mayer,
director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping.
“The Law of the
Sea Convention is basically a constitution for the oceans. In one
article, just 617 words allow the redefinition of the continental shelf
which allows a coastal nation sovereign rights of the seabed.”
Congress has charged Mayer and his team from University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) National Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping with
mapping the areas of the Arctic where the U.S. has potential rights to
extend its continental shelf.
He has worked closely with the U.S. Coast
Guard since 2003 to have access to a platform capable of breaking and
transiting through ice, while also supporting the scientific equipment
needed to gather data on the ECS.
The premier asset for the job is Coast Guard Cutter Healy, the service’s most technologically advanced polar icebreaker, homeported in Seattle, Washington.
“The Coast Guard has been an amazing collaborator in everything we’ve
accomplished, and provided us with a spectacularly unique asset we are
fortunate to have access to,” said Mayer.
“When we first started, the
Healy was one of the only icebreakers in the Arctic that used multi-beam sonar technology.”
During Mayer’s first cruise with Healy in 2003, they discovered a
10,000-foot high seamount approximately 400 miles north of Barrow,
Alaska, which they named the Healy Seamount.
“This is our ninth trip to the Arctic. Four years in a row, we
actually did a two-ship operation with the Canadian icebreaker Louis St.
Laurent,” said Mayer.
“They collected information which allows us to
look deeper into the seafloor structure. Up until this year, they did
not have the ability to map like we do with the multibeam sonar, so we
worked together.”
Scientists aboard Coast Guard Cutter Healy monitor the depth of a dredge
deployed off the back of the ship in the Arctic Ocean on Sept. 23,
2016.
The computer screen shows a 3D model of the undersea cliff-face
the dredge is retrieving samples from.
U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty
Officer 3rd Class Lauren Steenson.
The multibeam sonar is one of the key pieces of equipment scientists
use aboard the Healy.
Mayer described it as a very sophisticated
echo-sounding system that puts together a 3-D picture of the seafloor
that allows them to see if the seafloor meets the characteristics of the
ECS.
On a computer screen, Mayer showed a three-dimensional, colorful
image resembling a mountain range.
The different colors correlate with
the depth of the ocean.
These mountains and canyons on the seafloor are
what the multibeam sonar charts through the echo-sounding technology.
Over the past eight years of studying the Arctic seafloor, Mayer and
his team have mapped more than 164,000 square miles of previously
inaccessible waters.
This summer, the destination was a previously
mapped underwater valley to determine whether the canyon is part of the
continental shelf.
“What we’re looking for is this big valley so we can dredge its steep
walls,” said Mayer.
“We’re going to drag a dredge, or a big, steel
basket up the wall to try and break pieces of rock off to determine what
it’s made out of. The dredge is actually for the Canadians mostly,”
said Mayer. “Canada has collected seismic data for us (the U.S.) this
year, so we are dredging and mapping for them.”
Crewmembers aboard Coast Guard Cutter Healy prepare to deploy a dredge in the Arctic Ocean on Sept. 23, 2016.
The dredge collected rock samples from outcrops of a seafloor canyon.
U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Lauren Steenson.
Just after a pink and orange sunrise over ice covered waters on
Friday, Sept. 23, the bundled up Healy deck crew gathered on the fantail
to deploy the steel dredge with a crane.
The crane slowly lifted the
chainmail basket off the deck, boomed it overboard, and lowered it into
the trench of open water broken by the bridge team that morning.
In the aft conning room, the scientists kept their eyes on the depth
and position of the dredge while the deck chief and first lieutenant
monitored the safety of their crewmembers on deck.
The cable attached to the dredge was more than a 1/2 inch thick, but
the resistance of pulling the dredge up a cliff face through the water
tightens and stretches the cable like a bungee cord. If it were to break
under strain, it could whip through anything in its path.
It was hours until they saw the dredge again.
The scientists watched
eagerly on deck in orange insulated suits waiting to dig through the
muddy dredge basket like a Christmas present.
The first rock they uncovered was just bigger than a softball.
After
dumping the contents out on deck, they started sifting through on their
hands and knees finding more small samples, enough to fill a five-gallon
bucket.
Crewmembers and scientists aboard Coast Guard Cutter Healy empty the
contents of dredge on deck to find rock samples in the Arctic Ocean on
Sept. 23, 2016.
The scientists recovered several rock samples from the
mud.
U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Lauren Steenson.
Then the equipment was reset, and the entire process was completed
again.
By evening, the deck crew had executed another successful dredge
which yielded further valuable rock samples for the science members to
study.
“We recovered rocks from both dredges, which is great. It turned out
very successful,” said Mayer. “The mission was very constrained, but
everyone has bent over backward to mitigate weather and time
challenges.”
He said that weather, ice, and distance are always the challenges faced when operating in the Arctic.
“We had some key mapping targets we’ve worked hard to accomplish. The
dredge was a very high priority item for international collaboration,”
said Mayer.
“We had no guarantees with the dredge, but we’re coming back
with two successful dredges, so we lived up to our end of the
cooperative agreement, and the Canadians fulfilled theirs with the data
they’ve collected.”
The overarching goal of both the Canadian mission and the U.S.
mission is to establish the limits of the ECS by determining the shape
of the seafloor, thickness of the sediment, and the nature of the rocks.
The mapping, seismic data, and dredging operations are pieces of the
puzzle to determine if the limits of the ECS can be extended.
“Scientists are always greedy, as time on this ship is so valuable,”
said Mayer. “How often does anyone get up to an area like this to
collect information? We know so little about the Arctic; we want every
little bit of information we can get.”
A scientist aboard Coast Guard Cutter Healy holds up a rock sample from
the Arctic extended continental shelf, Sept. 23, 2016.
The rock was
broken off the undersea cliff-face by the deployed dredge.
U.S. Coast
Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Lauren Steenson.
All the collected samples will be delivered to the U.S. Geological Survey,
the official curator of the samples. Then they are sent to Canada, or
made available to Canadian scientists, to determine the nature of the
rocks and ECS.
The ECS for the U.S. and Canada are very close together, if not
overlapping. The bottom line is that it is so challenging to work in the
Arctic, Mayer said. Pooling resources and coordinating research with
our neighbor saves both countries a tremendous amount of cost and
effort, and that’s why we can work together and share information.
“It’s rewarding on many levels. It’s a feeling of serving your
country in a sense, since we’re doing something on behalf a national
mission,” said Mayer. “It’s also one of the most unexplored places in
the world, so we are truly explorers mapping places that have never been
mapped before and taking samples from things that people have no idea
what it’s made of.”
Capt. Jason Hamilton, commanding officer, Coast Guard Cutter Healy, talks about the cutter's missions in the Arctic this year.
U.S. Coast Guard video by Lt. Anastacia Visneski.
Healy’s commanding officer, Capt. Jason Hamilton,
agreed with Mayer that it is a privilege to serve the United States at
the end of the planet.
Hamilton said, “The Healy crew is honored to act
as the backbone for groundbreaking science, providing presence and
access throughout the Arctic to execute Coast Guard missions, project
national sovereignty, and fulfill our treaty obligations.”
The overall attitude of this mission has been bittersweet between the
excitement of exploring and researching the unknown, and the reality of
why ships are now able to access areas this far north. Receding Arctic
ice is opening up the area to additional claims to resources via the
ECS, as well as increased commerce, transit, and touring.
The need for
precautions, protection, and safety of life at sea and ecosystem is
paramount in the years to come.
