This boat will make its own fuel on a round-the-world voyage

The Energy Observer is due to set sail in May, 2017
A 100-foot long catamaran that had a successful racing career before it was converted into a clean-energy vessel, Energy Observer is a $5.25 million ship will use solar, wind, and hydrogen energy to power its electric motors.

From Wired by Bonnie Christian

Remember Solar Impulse 2, the solar-powered plane that circumnavigated the world in July 2016?
This could be the ocean-going equivalent. In a bid to prove the effectiveness of hydrogen as a renewable fuel, Victorien Erussard and Jérôme Delafosse will sail around the world in a boat powered by the gas – made from the elements they encounter on the way.

The Energy Observer is a renovated racing catamaran from 1983 that had a long competitive history. In 1994, as ENZA New Zealand the boat won the Jules Verne Trophy for the fastest sail around the world.

 

“The problem is that 95 per cent of the hydrogen that you use already is made out of fossil energies,” says Delafosse.
“We will produce hydrogen onboard from the ocean, we will clean and purify the water and then we will electrolyse it and then compress it in tank storage.”

 A publicity video for the project suggests that the ship will travel around France in 2017, and then move to the Mediterannian in 2018, and Northern Europe in 2019.

In 2020 it will attempt the trans-Atlantic and head to the Americas (focusing on North and Central).

In 2021, it will journey to the trans-Pacific and go on a tour of Asia and Oceania, visiting India, Africa, and the Middle East to end its trip in 2022.

The Energy Observer, which sets sail from Paris in May 2017, is an ex-racing catamaran that can generate hydrogen from 130 square metres of solar panels, two wind turbines, a traction kite and two reversible electric motors.
Explorer Delafosse, 45, and Erussard, 37, an experienced offshore racer, partnered with French research centre CEA-LITEN to develop the technology.
“When we are over-producing energy, when we have a lot of wind and sun, the idea was not to waste this energy and to just keep it on board,” says Delafosse.
“Hydrogen is the best way to do this because it's very light and the efficiency of hydrogen is three times more than just fuel.”

Jérôme Delafosse and Victorien Erussard have developed the world's first boat to be powered solely by hydrogen generated by renewable energies.
Energy is stored in lithium-ion batteries for short-term use, but the main source of energy is from the conversion of seawater into hydrogen fuel.
Demonstrating the production and use of hydrogen as a clean energy is one of the main points of the Energy Observer's mission.

The Energy Observer has hydrogen tanks instead of a battery, so even though it weighs 30 tonnes, it is nearly three times lighter than MS Tûranor PlanetSolar, the last solar powered boat to circumnavigate the globe.
In theory it can also go three times faster – a potential top speed of 42 knots – although in practice Delafosse expects it to cruise at eight to 10 knots.
However, whereas the PlanetSolar went round the world in 18 months, the sponsor-funded Energy Observer team expects to take six years, at a cost of €4 million (£3.42 million) per year.

 6 years, 50 countries and 101 stops around the world

Why so slow?
Because Energy Observer is set to make 101 stops, showcasing the potential of renewable energy at stop-offs around the world.

“We can use this technology in hotels, in houses, in cars… the idea is to be less dependent on the network,” Delafosse says.

“It shows how fast things can happen: as it did in London at the turn of the last century with [moving from] horses to cars, it will happen with renewable energy.”

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Turanor Planetsolar: sailing the world on solar power / PlanetSolar World Tour 2011
• DiscoverMag : Energy Observer: Around the World on Renewables

Ice-locked ship to drift over North Pole

The Arctic is a key area of global climate change, with warming rates exceeding twice the global average

From BBC by Jonathan Amos

It is being billed as the biggest single Arctic research expedition ever planned.

Germany is going to sail its 120m-long research vessel, the Polarstern, into the sea-ice at the top of the world and just let it get stuck so it can drift across the north pole.
The 2,500km (1,550-mile) trip, to begin in 2019, is likely to take a year.
Researchers hope to gather valuable new insights on the region where Earth's climate is changing fastest.

Last month the extent of Arctic sea-ice was the lowest ever recorded for a January (during the satellite era), with temperatures several degrees above the long-term average.
Prof Markus Rex will lead the so-called MOSAiC project:
"The decline of Arctic sea-ice is much faster than the climate models can reproduce and we need better climate models to make better predictions for the future.
"There is a potential that in a few decades the Arctic will be ice free in summer. That would be a different world and we need to know about that in advance; we need to know is that going to happen or will that not happen?

 Illustration of the MOSAiC polar expedition, before the ice completely freezes over trapping the research vessel RV Polarstern (Alfred Wegener Institute)

"Prof Rex outlined the plan for the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The German scientist, who is affiliated to the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, said the €63m (£54m; $67m) expedition was very nearly all funded, and would have key contributions from international partners.

 A realtime 3D VR app for visualizing imagery from different camera systems deployed aboard the RV Polarstern.

For details please see the paper.

Other European states, such as the UK, are involved - so too the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese.
The mission has echoes of the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen's attempt in the 1890s to be the first person to reach the North Pole by drifting in a ship locked in ice.
A schooner called Tara also traversed the frozen ocean - from Siberian waters to the Fram Strait - in the same way a decade ago.
But the RV Polarstern is an enormous science platform and its list of tasks and goals dwarfs those of all previous efforts to work in the region.
"We’re bringing a vessel full with equipment: many, many measurement containers and remote sensing in-situ instruments," Prof Rex said.
"We'll take water, ice and air samples. And we'll set up camps on the sea-ice close to the Polarstern and others up to 20-30km away. And the whole set-up will drift across the Arctic. That will give us a new and absolutely fascinating insight into the climate system."
The MOSAiC team even plans to make runways on the sea-ice so research planes can take to the air in support of the RV Polarstern.

 Possible route. The drift would start in the East Siberian Sea. RV Polastern would be taken over the top of the world and be released by the sea-ice in the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard

It will, however, be a difficult expedition for the scientists involved, especially during the freezing midwinter period when the Sun will not get above the horizon.
The researchers will also have to keep their eyes peeled for predatory polar bears.
But Prof Rex said the endeavour was vital to our understanding of this remote region and stressed the relevance to the wider public who live far from the North Pole.
"A warmer pole would affect weather patterns at mid-latitudes," he told BBC News.
"A warming Arctic means that the temperature contrast between our latitudes and the North Pole will be reduced in the future. This means the flow of air, the wind, that blows around the Arctic will be less zonal in the future climate, and it will allow for more excursions of cold air from the Arctic to our latitudes, and more excursions of warm air from lower latitudes to the North Pole. That certainly will have a strong impact on our weather."

RV Polarstern is expected to take up position ready to be captured in the sea-ice in the late summer or autumn of 2019, with the intention of being released a year later.

Links : 

• The Guardian : Scientists to repeat 19th-century ship's crossing of polar ice cap
• Inside Climate News : Researcher's 1979 Arctic Model Predicted Current Sea Ice Demise, Holds Lessons for Future

Sardine run

Sardine run 2016 from Shark Explorers

R2AK Race to Alaska

The inside passage to Alaska has been paddled by native canoes since time immemorial, sailing craft for centuries, and after someone found gold in the Klondike the route was jammed with steamboats full of prospectors elbowing each other out of the way for the promise of fortune.

It’s in the spirit of tradition, exploration, and the lawless self-reliance of the gold rush that Race to Alaska was born.

R2AK is the first of its kind and North America’s longest human and wind powered race, and currently the largest cash prize for a race of its kind.

Here are the teams competing to map the ocean for $7 million in prizes

 Part submarine, part aircraft, Rutgers University researchers have developed a drone that is just as at home underwater as it is flying through the air.

Watch the video to see the "Naviator" drone in action!

From Popular Science by Mary Beth Griggs

We’ve mapped the surface of the Earth in excruciating detail, with images of individual streets and rivers and canyons photographed and catalogued.
But one area of the Earth remains a mystery: the ocean floor.

Ninety-five percent of the ocean hasn’t been mapped in any kind of detail.
The maps of the world’s seafloor that you see online are mostly approximations based on scattered bits of data collected by expeditions over the years.
“What we see on Google Ocean is really about a five kilometers [16400 feet] resolution,” says Jyotika Virmani, head of the Ocean Discovery XPrize.
“Imagine where you are, and then something five kilometers [or bigger] is the only other thing you know. That's the kind of resolution that we currently have.”

 Team Arggonauts from Germany has proposed a swarm of 12 deep-sea robot drones.

On Thursday, Virmani announced the 21 semifinalist teams who will advance to the next round of the Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize competition, and who will hopefully help make the seafloor less of a mystery.
They will compete to build new technology to map the seafloor down to a resolution of just five meters (16 feet).
The teams are comprised of researchers from all over the world, a mix of both students and professional engineers and oceanographers.
To compete, they must design a system that is able to operate more swiftly than any existing mapping technology in extreme temperature and pressure conditions that are very different from what we experience on land.
“This is a chance to develop a technology to explore a new planet,” Virmani says.
The researchers are given a good amount of leeway to approach the mapping problem.
During the upcoming round of competition they will have to map at least 100 square kilometers in a 500 kilometer test area, take a photograph of a specified object on the seafloor, and identify and take photo or videos of five other objects of geological, biological, or archaeological importance.
They’ll have 16 hours to gather the data and 48 hours to process it.
The test site won't be announced until later this summer, but we know teams will be competing in the fall, and that the test site will be located in waters about 2,000 meters deep.

 Conceptual image of Blue Devil Ocean Engineering’s heavy UAV.

(Image: Duke/Blue Devil Ocean Engineering)

The teams are taking a wide variety of approaches.
Many are using swarms of underwater drones to cover a larger swath of the test site.
At least one team, Eauligo, from France, plans to use drones that will mimic bee behavior beneath the sea.
Others are using drones to drop Automated Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) near the test site, and still others, like New Jersey-based team SubUAS, are using drones that can fly as well underwater as they do above it.

They will be scored on how well and how quickly they can complete the tasks set in front of them.
Of the 21 teams in the first round of semifinals, up to 10 will be selected to move on to round two.
Those 10 (or fewer) teams will split a benchmark prize of $1 million and will have time to perfect their machine before sending it once again into the deep.
Only this time, they will be required to operate in 4000 meters of water—the average depth of the sea floor.

$1 million will go to the second prize winner, and $4 million will go to the first prize winner.
An additional $1 million will go to the team that competes an additional competition sponsored by NOAA, which asks teams to develop a tech that can track a chemical signal through the open ocean.
 All the money is a bonus, but Virmani and others hope that these inventions might help expand the world of ocean exploration, and help us preserve the ocean that we have.
“In order to make something healthy you need to value it but to value it you need to understand it,” Virmani says.

A list of the semifinalists and their projects as provided by XPrize follows:

• Arggonauts (Karlsruhe, Germany) – Led by Gunnar Brink, the team is creating a swarm of 12 intelligent deep-sea robot drones using insight gained through two previous projects.
• BangaloreRobotics (Bangalore, India) – Led by Venkatesh Gurappa, the International team is developing innovative and low-cost Underwater Swarm AUVs.
• Blue Devil Ocean Engineering - Duke University (Durham, NC, United States) – Led by Martin Brooke, the Duke University team is working with heavy lift aerial drones that drop retrievable diving SONAR pods.
• CFIS (Arnex-sur-Nyon, Switzerland) – Led by Toby Jackson, the team is designing a swarm of underwater robots that use lasers for ocean floor mapping as well as imaging of interesting creatures and formations.
• Eauligo (Nice, France) – Led by Christopher Lewis, the team is developing miniature micro subs that mimic bees and their behavior to map and explore the deep ocean.
• Environdrone (Windsor, Ontario, Canada) – Led by Ryan Cant, the team is using aerial drones that launch next-gen AUVs.
• Exocetus (Wallingford, CT, United States) – Led by Joe Turner, the team employs several low-cost underwater gliders equipped with side-scanning sonar to map for extended periods of time.
• Gebco-NF (New Zealand, Global) – Led by GEBCO-Nippon Foundation  scholars, the  12 nation team is integrating  existing technologies with a new unmanned surface vessel  to contribute to  comprehensive mapping of the entire ocean floor by 2030.
• Pisces (Portugal) – Led by Nuno Cruz, the team is aggregating Portuguese technologies developed at INESC TEC (Porto) and CINTAL (Algarve) to create the PISCES system that leverages cooperative robotics.
• Kuroshio (Yokosuka, Japan) – Led by Takeshi Nakatani, the team is integrating technologies owned by Japanese universities, institutes and companies for a unique collaborative approach centered around AUVs.
• Lehigh Tide (Bethlehem, PA, United States) – Led by Matthew Ciolino - The Lehigh University team is creating a cost-effective autonomous underwater vehicle that can accurately scan the ocean.
• Ocean Quest (San Jose, CA, United States) – Led by Danny Kim, the team endeavors to design a marine STEM platform for students worldwide to enable project-based learning with new technology and techniques.
• Oceanzus (Durham, NH, United States) – Led by James Case, the team is creating a continuous operating platform that supports multiple survey assets to realize the mapping goal.
• OD-Africa (Accra, Ghana) – Led by Mark Amo-Boateng, the team is building intelligent low-cost modular AUV/ROV systems to democratize ocean discovery, using advanced artificial intelligence and algorithms to navigate and explore the ocean.
• Orca Robotics (San Diego, CA, United States) – Led by Phillip Rhyner, the team is creating an underwater system that uses phase array radar and computing power to provide results in real time, which is a new use for this approach.
• SubUAS (Piscataway, NJ, United States) – Led by Rutgers professor Javier Diez, the team has created an AI-enabled drone that can fly quickly to remote survey locations, dive into the water and use a second set of propellers to navigate and intelligently explore underwater before flying home for data download, repowering and return flights.
• Tampa Deep-Sea X-plorers (Tampa, FL, United States) – Led by Edward Larson, the team is using existing technology and side scanning sonar on multiple AUVs to fully cover the large mapping area.
• Team Tao (Newcastle, United Kingdom) – Led by Dale Wakeham, the team is developing an autonomous swarm system for rapid surface to deep ocean exploration.
• Texas A&M University Ocean Engineering (College Station, TX, United States) – Led by Dylan Blakeslee and working in partnership with successful alumni of Texas A&M; the University team is using drone ships and AUVs equipped with innovative navigation systems, renewable power generation and chemical sensing technologies to explore remote ocean habitats.
• Virginia Deep-X -- Virginia Tech and Old Dominion University (Virginia, United States) – Led by Dan Stilwell, the team is developing small and low-cost underwater vehicles that operate in coordinated teams.
• X994 (Austin, TX, United States) – Led by David Ryan, the team is working to optimize robotic mapping of the ocean through advancements in software, AI, and data analytics.
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Links :

• Gizmodo : These Wild Robots Will Compete to Explore the Last Frontier on Earth
• Inverse : Swarms of Robotic Bees Will Map the Deep Ocean
• Xprize : 21 semifinalist teams advancing in $7M Shell Ocean discovery Xprize 
• GeoGarage blog : Three new crowdsourced XPRIZES launched for ocean ... / X Prize to map 4,000m-deep ocean floor with robots