3D ocean map tracks ecosystems in unprecedented detail

This ecological marine unit (EMU) map shows variations in water conditions off the coast of Ireland.

Keith Van Graafeiland & Sean Breyer/Esri

From Nature by Alexandra Witze

Oceanographers are carving up the world’s seas like the last of the holiday turkey.
A new 3D map sorts global water masses — from deep, frigid circumpolar waters to the oxygen-starved Black Sea — into 37 categories.

Clicking on the map will display information about ecological marine units based on a clustering analysis that was preformed against NOAA’s World Ocean Atlas Data.

The interactive map allows you to zoom and pan and interact with the data by clicking on the map.

Clicking the points on the map enables you to explore the depth (vertical) profile and associated oceanographic information for the selected location.
Please explore this fascinating ocean dataset and discover the (statistically) different clusters and what makes each one of them unique.

Access Open Data online

The map groups together marine regions of similar temperature, salinity, oxygen and nutrient levels. It has been available for only a few months, and researchers are still working through how they might use it.
But its international team of developers hopes that the map will help conservationists, government officials and others to better understand the biogeography of the oceans and make decisions about which areas to preserve.
It could also serve as a data-rich baseline for analysing future ocean changes.

EMUs rendered at the bottom of the water column.

Many existing systems also attempt to classify variations in the ocean, such as lists of large marine ecosystems or the Longhurst biogeographical provinces that are defined by the rate at which ocean life consumes carbon.
But these are often limited to surface or coastal ecosystems.
The latest effort, known as the ecological marine units (EMUs), is the most detailed attempt yet to cover the global ocean in three dimensions.

“What’s often missing is all that’s between the surface of the ocean and the ocean bottom,” says Dawn Wright, chief scientist of Esri, a geographic information-systems company in Redlands, California, that helped to develop the 3D map.
“That’s what our project will hopefully bring to the table.”

Ecological Marine Unit Explorer

Esri launched a web portal for the EMU data in September, and has been presenting the concept at conferences since then.
Wright described it on 16 December in San Francisco, California, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Ecological Marine Units (EMUs) are Esri's gift to a world

whose final unexplored terrain lies beneath its seas.

EMUs can help to reveal why marine animals live where they do. In the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean the mapping shows a complex interplay between oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor waters.
The boundary of the low-oxygen zone shifts towards the surface in some spots and dips deeper in others.
That variation affects the locations of economically important tuna fisheries, says Patrick Halpin, a marine ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
“It’s an interesting thing to look at in three dimensions, fairly unique and gratifying.”

Such data could guide the United Nations’ effort to designate a series of ecologically or biologically significant marine areas to focus future conservation efforts, Halpin notes.
Looking at the distribution of EMUs could help officials to pinpoint the boundaries of those areas, or to make sure they are designating enough waters to capture all the biogeographic diversity.

Dr Kathryn Sullivan introducing the Ecological Marine Units

IUCN Conservation Congress (Sept 2016)

And the South African National Biodiversity Institute is interested in using EMUs to update data on open-ocean and deep-sea habitats for the country’s next national biodiversity assessment, due in 2019, says Heather Terrapon, a spatial analysis coordinator at the institute in Cape Town.
Nations that do not have the money to gather their own data sets could use the free EMU data and visualizations to manage their marine resources, says Peter Harris, a marine geologist at the environmental information-management centre GRID-Arendal in Arendal, Norway.

The creation of the EMUs is the second step in a project that started with similar mapping on land. The intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations asked Roger Sayre, an ecologist at the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, to lead a team to categorize terrestrial eco­systems.
The researchers, including some at Esri, combined information on geology and vegetation to generate nearly 4,000 ‘ecological land units’.
One example might be warm, wet plains, on metamorphic rock, with mostly deciduous forest.

Next, the team moved their focus from land to the oceans.
“It’s like total world domination in ecosystem mapping,” says Sayre, who heads the EMU project with Wright

They began with 52 million data points in the World Ocean Atlas maintained by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
These include information on chemical and physical parameters gathered every 27 kilometres to create a 3D grid.
The team added other data such as the shape of the sea floor and used statistical techniques to group the results into categories.

Annual mean sea surface salinity (WOA 2009)

The resulting EMUs include the deep, very cold, low-oxygen waters that encompass roughly one-quarter of the world’s oceans.
Others are much smaller, such as the upper waters of the Red Sea, or the dilute estuaries of several Northern Hemisphere rivers.

For now, the EMU maps rely on data averaged over five decades.
Looking at conditions over shorter periods of time, such as seasons, would provide more helpful detail, says Frank Muller-Karger, a biological oceano­grapher at the University of South Florida in St Petersburg who has been comparing EMUs with weekly maps of coastal changes made using satellite imagery.
And to monitor change over decades, the EMU team would need to recalculate its maps every five years or more.

The EMU developers say that future iterations of the system could tackle such issues.
For now, they are hoping to expand on the land and marine units by creating new categories for coastal and freshwater ecosystems.

Links :

• ESRI : New Map Sets Framework for Describing Ocean Ecology in Unprecedented Detail
• Scientific American : 3-D Ocean Map Tracks Ecosystems in Unprecedented Detail 

Titanic sank due to enormous uncontrollable fire, not iceberg, experts claim

From The Independant by Rachael Pells

Rarely seen images of the Titanic before it left Southampton have furthered researchers’ theory that a fire may have been the root cause of the 1912 disaster

The sinking of the RMS Titanic may have been caused by an enormous fire on board, not by hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic, experts have claimed, as new evidence has been published to support the theory.
More than 1,500 passengers lost their lives when the Titanic sank on route to New York from Southampton in April 1912.
While the cause of the disaster has long been attributed to the iceberg, fresh evidence has surfaced of a fire in the ship’s hull, which researchers say burned unnoticed for almost three weeks leading up to the collision.

While experts have previously acknowledged the theory of a fire on board, new analysis of rarely seen photographs has prompted researchers to blame the fire as the primary cause of the ship’s demise.
Journalist Senan Molony, who has spent more than 30 years researching the sinking of the Titanic, studied photographs taken by the ship’s chief electrical engineers before it left Belfast shipyard.
Mr Maloney said he was able to identify 30-foot-long black marks along the front right-hand side of the hull, just behind where the ship’s lining was pierced by the iceberg.
He said: “We are looking at the exact area where the iceberg stuck, and we appear to have a weakness or damage to the hull in that specific place, before she even left Belfast”.
Experts subsequently confirmed the marks were likely to have been caused by a fire started in a three-storey high fuel store behind one of the ship’s boiler rooms.

A team of 12 men attempted to put out the flames, but it was too large to control, reaching temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius.
Subsequently, when the Titanic struck ice, the steel hull was weak enough for the ship’s lining to be torn open.
Officers on board were reportedly under strict instruction from J Bruce Ismay, president of the company that built the Titanic, not to mention the fire to any of the ship’s 2,500 passengers.
Presenting his research in a Channel 4 documentary, Titanic: The New Evidence, broadcast on New Year’s Day, Mr Maloney also claims the ship was reversed into its berth in Southampton to prevent passengers from seeing damage made to the side of the ship by the ongoing fire.
Mr Molony said: “The official Titanic inquiry branded [the sinking] as an act of God. This isn’t a simple story of colliding with an iceberg and sinking.
“It’s a perfect storm of extraordinary factors coming together: fire, ice and criminal negligence.
“Nobody has investigated these marks before. It totally changes the narrative. We have metallurgy experts telling us that when you get that level of temperature against steel it makes it brittle, and reduces its strength by up to 75 per cent.
“The fire was known about, but it was played down. She should never have been put to sea.”

 History Channel - Titanic Real Story - Discovery History Documentary 2017

In 2008, Ray Boston, an expert with more than 20 years of research into the Titanic’s journey, said he believed the coal fire began during speed trials as much as 10 days prior to the ship leaving Southampton.
He said the fire had potential to cause “serious explosions” below decks before it would reach New York.
An inquiry into the disaster, presented to Parliament in 1912, described the ship as travelling at “high speed” through dangerous icy waters, giving the crew little opportunity to avoid the fatal collision.

Links :

• CNN : Did a coal fire sink the Titanic?
• HuffingtonPost : New Evidence Suggests Massive Fire Helped Sink The Titanic
• The Inquisitr : Irish investigator Selan Molony claims Titanic fire weakened hull, resulting in fateful 1912 sinking
• GeoGarage blog :Challenge to Titanic sinking theory / Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic is mapping ... / Titanic items to be sold 100 years after sinking / New images of Titanic wreck revealed / Titanic threat: why do ships still hit icebergs? / First map of entire Titanic wreck site sheds new light on ... / New expedition to Titanic site will create 3D map of wreck / Her tale will go on: Titanic survivor's story sold at auction 

New technologies bring marine archaeology treasures to light

Three autonomous underwater vehicles searched for wrecks last year at Marzamemi, off the Sicilian coast.

Photograph: Salvo Emma/Courtesy of Sunrise

From The Guardian by Ian Sample

Robotic submarines and ‘internet of underwater things’ to transform hunt for sunken cities and ancient shipwrecks

No one knows what happened at Atlit-Yam.
The ancient village appeared to be thriving until 7000BC.
The locals kept cattle, caught fish and stored grain.
They had wells for fresh water, stone houses with paved courtyards.
Community life played out around an impressive monument: seven half-tonne stones that stood in a semicircular embrace around a spring where people came to drink.
Then one day, life ended.

 Not far off the coast of the village of Atlit in the Mediterranean Sea, near Haifa, lies the submerged ruins of the ancient Neolithic site of Atlit Yam.

The prehistoric settlement, which dates back to the 7th millennium BC, has been so well preserved by the sandy seabed that a mysterious stone circle still stands as it was first erected, and dozens of human skeletons lay undisturbed in their graves.

Atlit Yam is one of the oldest and largest sunken settlements ever found and sheds new light on the daily lives of its ancient inhabitants.

Today, Atlit Yam lies between 8 – 12 metres beneath sea level and covered an area of 40,000 square meters.

The village that once sat on the Mediterranean coast now lies 10 metres beneath the waves off Israel’s shore.
It was inundated when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age.
But Atlit-Yam was destroyed before then, and swiftly, perhaps by a tsunami.
Buried under sand at the bottom of the sea, it now ranks as the largest and best preserved prehistoric settlement ever found on the seafloor.
Human skeletons still lie there in graves, undisturbed.

For marine archaeologists, Atlit-Yam is a trove from the Neolithic world.
Research on the buildings, tools and the remains of past lives has revealed how the bustling village once worked.
“It looks as though it was inhabited until the day it was submerged,” said Benedetto Allotta, head of industrial engineering at the University of Florence.
But for all the secrets the site has shared, it is only one window into a lost world.
For a fuller picture, researchers need more sunken settlements.
The hard part is finding them.
In January, work will start on a new project to transform the search for sunken cities, ancient shipwrecks and other subsea curiosities.
Led by Italian researchers, Archeosub will build a new generation of robotic submarines, or autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), for marine archaeologists.
“You can find plenty of human settlements not far from the coast,” Allotta said.
“In the Mediterranean there will be a lot more Atlit-Yams waiting to be explored and studied.”

 Researchers from University of Porto preparing to ready to launch an AUV.

Photograph: Marco Merola/Courtesy of Sunrise

The goal of Archeosub is to put sophisticated AUVs in the hands of cash-strapped researchers.
That, in part, means turning the costly, heavy technology of the military and oil industries into far cheaper and lighter robots.
They must be affordable for archaeological organisations and light enough to launch by hand from a small boat, or even the shore, rather than from a winch on a large research vessel.
Slashing the cost and weight is only the start.
The team behind Archeosub has begun to make the AUVs smarter too.
When thrown overboard, the submarines can become part of an “internet of underwater things” which brings the power of wifi to the deep.
Once hooked up, the AUVs can talk to each other and, for example, work out the most efficient way to survey a site, or find particular objects on the seabed.
Field tests show the approach can work.
When cargo ships near Porto in northern Portugal lose containers overboard, AUVs can be deployed to find the missing goods.
And in a trial last year, Allotta’s group sent three AUVs to search for wrecks at Marzamemi, off the Sicilian coast.
The site is the final resting place of a Roman ship, known as the “church wreck”, which sank while ferrying pre-formed parts of marble and breccia for an early Christian church in the 6th century AD. “We used the AUVs to pass through and look for new ruins,” Allotta said.
“We could do a reconstruction of the area, where old Roman ships sank while bringing marble columns to Italy,” he said.

 The underwater archaeological site of Marzamemi, Sicily.

The site is the final resting place of a Roman ship which sank while ferrying marble and breccia for an early Christian church in the 6th century AD.

Photograph: Salvo Emma/Courtesy of Sunrise

Creating an internet beneath the waves is no breeze.
Slip under the surface and the electromagnetic waves used in wifi networks travel only centimetres.
Instead, a more complex mix of technologies is called for.
Acoustic waves, which are affected by depth, temperature, salinity and surface wind, are used to communicate over long distances underwater.
At close range, AUVs can share data over light beams.
But more creative solutions are also envisaged, where an AUV working on the seabed offloads data to a second which then surfaces and beams it home by satellite link.
Work is underway on AUVs that can beam pictures from the seabed over acoustic waves, and dock with others that charge them up.
Surface buoys that receive GPS signals tell the AUVs where they are.
“If you want to build an internet of underwater things, you cannot use the technology we have developed for the terrestrial world,” said Chiara Petrioli, a computer engineer who leads the work under the Sunrise project at Rome University.
“You have to be smarter.”
David Lane, a professor of autonomous engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has created a marine version of Dropbox for the underwater internet of things.
It allows AUVs to share information from seafloor scans and other data.
So if an AUV on a first pass survey spies an intriguing object on the seabed, it can share the coordinates with a nearby AUV that carries better cameras and sonar, and arrange for a closer inspection once it has left the area.

“The use of these vehicles has huge potential for marine archaeology,” Lane said.
“There’s a lot of history wrapped up in what’s lying on the seabed.”
One site where Allotta plans to deploy the new AUVs is the Gulf of Baratti off the coast of Tuscany. In 1974, a remarkable shipwreck was discovered there in 18 metres of water.
More than a merchant ship, the 2000-year-old vessel was a travelling medical emporium.
More than 100 wooden vials were found on board, along with other ancient medical supplies, including tin containers of tablets that may have been dissolved and used as eyewash.
Other Roman ships went down in the waters, shedding cargoes of olive oil and wine held in huge terracotta pots called dolia.
Often it is only the dolia that remain, the wooden ships lost, or at least buried, under silt.
Allotta hopes to have the first test results from the Archeosub project in the summer.
“Right now, we don’t have the right technology to give to archaeologists,” he said.
“But we are close.”

Happy New Year

GeoGarage presents its best wishes for a happy, prosperous and peaceful 2017.
We are grateful for having you in 2016, and we look forward to serving you during this New Year. 

Thank you for working with us in 2017.

Exciting things are coming up next year. Stay Tuned! :)

Pretty far North

PRETTY FAR NORTH from Pictionary Productions

In spring of 2016, me and a couple of friends decided to head up to no-mans-land

above the arctic circle to explore, sail, fish & chase some spring slush.