In the northern hemisphere, the vernal equinox heralding the beginning of spring occurred Monday. Although there’s still snow on the ground and cold weather in the forecast, one can’t deny the new season has arrived.
March 20th marks the beginning of astronomical spring, which will last until the summer solstice on June 20. (NASA)
Astronomical spring begins when the sun reaches a certain height over the equator each year.
While nearly everyone knows spring arrives around March 20, what’s actually occurring in terms of the relationship between the earth and the sun still isn’t universally understood.
On both the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the sun is directly overhead at noon at some place along the equator of our planet.
This year, the first of these two occurrences happened at 6:29 a.m Eastern Standard Time on March 20.
Basically, if you were in central Africa and looked up at noon, the sun would be directly above your head, forming a 90-degree angle with the ground.
On Friday, Sept. 22, at 4:02 p.m., the same thing will occur at a different spot along the equator to begin the fall season.
It falls at the same instant around the globe. The moment of the vernal or spring equinox was yesterday 10:29 UTC. That marks the moment when the sun crossed the equator and its axis was tilted neither toward or away from the sun.
Just before sunrise, the sun is even with the horizon and then rises during the day, reaching the maximum height exactly between sunrise and sunset.
The highest point the sun reached around Boston Monday is about 48 degrees above the horizon.
This angle will continue to increase until the first day of summer, when it’s at about 71 degrees.
The spring equinox always falls on March 19, 20, or 21. It most often will come on the 19th or 20th.
The next time it will fall on March 21st will be 2101.
(The last time was in 2007.)
From then on it falls, reaching a minimum of 24 degrees as winter begins.
Other places on the planet have different maximum heights.
There’s always someplace where the sun is directly overhead, but it only occurs exactly at the equator on the equinox.
On the first day of spring, the sun will reach different maximum heights across the planet.
The sun is up all day at the South Pole during our fall and winter, but down all day during our spring and summer.
The word “equinox” is derived from the Latin words meaning “equal night.”
While nearly all spots on Earth have about 12 hours of darkness and light as spring begins, it’s not exact.
Depending on where you live on the planet, the day on which you have equal day and night shifts on the calendar.
Multiple factors cause this, including the shape of the planet and the way the sun’s light is bent as it passes through the atmosphere.
In a world in which many of us are overextended and stressed, the fact that the planet is spinning around a tilted axis at over 1,000 miles per hour can be lost.
With the arrival of spring, take a moment to ponder the changes occurring, and how the increase in light and strength of the sun will soon be melting the snow, warming the earth, and bringing about that magical and dramatic metamorphosis to our landscape known as spring.
The UK’s biggest ever oil spill in 1967 taught invaluable lessons about
the response to disasters, toughened up shipping safety and stirred
green activism
“I saw this huge ship sailing and I thought he’s in rather close, I hope
he knows what he’s doing,” recalled Gladys Perkins of the day 50 years
ago, when Britain experienced its worst ever environmental disaster.
The ship was the Torrey Canyon, one of the first generation of
supertankers, and it was nearing the end of a journey from Kuwait to a
refinery at Milford Haven in Wales.
The BP-chartered vessel ran aground
on a rock between the Isles of Scilly and Land’s End in Cornwall,
splitting several of the tanks holding its vast cargo of crude oil.
The stricken oil tanker Torrey Canyon two days after she stuck fast on
the notorious Seven Stones Reef, near the Isles of Scilly and Land’s
End.
Photograph: Staff/AFP/Getty Images
“I just could not believe it. They’d hit the Seven Stones [reef] in
broad daylight,” said the 90-year old resident of St Martin’s, the
northernmost of the isles.
What followed that night was an oil spill
eight-miles long which grew to 20 miles long within 24 hours, and later
hit hundreds of miles of coastline.
Following a navigational error, Torrey Canyon struck Pollard's Rock on Seven Stones reef between the Cornish mainland and the Isles of Scilly on 18 March 1967.
The tanker did not have a scheduled route and as such lacked a complement of full scale charts of the Scilly Islands. To navigate the region, the vessel used LORAN, but not the more accurate Decca Navigator.
Torre Canyon geographical position with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO chart)
It remains Britain’s biggest oil spill at up to 117,000 tonnes, or 1,231-times more than the amount leaked by a BP North Sea platform last year.
The ripples from the spill are still felt 50 years on.
An unknown
quantity of the oil remains in a Guernsey quarry, where spill response
teams carry out a training exercise each year.
Much of the oil that washed up on Guernsey was pumped into an old
quarry, fenced off to the public and used today to train disaster
response teams.
Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
Today’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the
environmental groups with millions of members are also partly a product
of the incident.
So is the way that authorities react to spills, and the
shipping industry’s modern failsafe measures.
At the time, the crisis ignited an incredible chain of responses.
The
government, led by prime minister and Scilly Isles holidayer Harold
Wilson, unleashed RAF bombers to sink the wreck and released thousands
of tonnes of detergent that proved toxic to marine life.
“The cure was worse than the malady,” said Stephen J Hawkins, a
scientist at the Plymouth-based Marine Biological Association, which
studied the spill’s impact on wildlife and habitats.
“Today people are
better prepared. Then, people didn’t know, they were making it up as
they went along.”
Initially it was thought the ship could be salvaged, a prospect
supported by its owners, the Bahama-based Barracuda Tanker Corporation.
Later, the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, said ministers considered towing
it to to the mid-Atlantic and sinking it.
Eventually, they decided the
best way of stopping the oil pollution was to bomb and sink the stricken
vessel.
Ten days after the supertanker began leaking, on 28 March, Buccaneer
bombers took off with the mission of sending the Torrey Canyon to the
seabed.
“From the hill at the back of St Martin’s we had a grandstand
view of these planes going over. Then there was a huge pall of horrible,
black smoke,” said Perkins.
The Royal Navy decided to bomb and sink the Torrey Canyon.
Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images
Only 23 of the 41 1,000lb bombs dropped in Operation Oil Buster actually
hit the huge target. However, “the navy made an efficient job of it,
providing a ‘spectacular’ not seen since the war,” wrote Guardian
reporter, Dennis Barker, who passed away in 2015.
Perhaps most spectacular of all, the RAF Buccaneers were followed by
Hawker Hunters and Sea Vixens, and napalm was dropped in an effort to
burn off the oil.
The resulting “ring of fire” sent up a three-mile
smoke plume that it was reported could be seen 100 miles away.
Finally,
on 30 March, the ship began to sink.
The government also poured 10,000 tonnes of a BP-manufactured
“detergent”, a crude first generation dispersant, into the sea and on
the shore. In some cases, barrels of the stuff were literally rolled off
cliffs.
“BP, whose oil it was, was selling detergent in industrial quantities
which was getting poured over the beaches, killing off the
microorganisms which would have broken down the oil,” said Tony Soper,
now 88, who reported on the story for the Western Morning News.
Hawkins, who has just this week been taking samples at Porthleven in
West Cornwall, found that areas where the detergents were not used,
because of concerns over seals, recovered in two to three years,
compared with the 13-14 years where the detergents were deployed.
“By the time the oil got to Guernsey, they didn’t treat things with dispersant. They learned from the lessons,” said Hawkins.
In total, hundreds of miles of coastline were affected by the oil
spill, and about 15,000 seabirds are thought to have died. Soper said:
“The tidal edge of the beaches in West Cornwall was simply covered by a
thick carpet of black goo. It was a pretty fearsome smell.”
While the wildlife has recovered in the decades since, some of the
disaster’s consequences are felt even now.
Some experts draw a direct
line between the incident and the creation in 1970 of the government’s
environment department, the first of its kind in the world.
Dr Rob Lambert, environmental historian at the University of
Nottingham, said: “Torrey Canyon led inexorably in a way to the
Department for the Environment. It was a recognition that the
environment had risen up to the top of the political agenda.”
Dispersant sprayed into the harbour.
Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer
Lambert also credits the incident with sparking the first big rush of
environmental volunteering. People travelled from Bristol and further
afield in an attempt to clean birds, in sinks at hairdressers, at
dedicated animal rescue centres and reportedly even in prisons.
“We take eco volunteering as normal now, but this was the first big
example in Britain. The tragedy was that most of these birds were beyond
help and they died,” said Lambert.
Torrey Canyon made household names of some environmentalists,
including a Durham University botany and ecology lecturer called David
Bellamy.
An RSPCA notice in Cornwall informs people where to take injured birds.
Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer
The 84-year broadcaster said of the disaster: “Many lessons were
learnt and are still being learnt. It was probably the first time that
words like environment and conservation were voiced on the media, later
to become so commonplace.”
He remembers coming to public notice after
being interviewed on TV by John Craven.
Government and industry responses to oil spills are much better
today, partly as a result of Torrey Canyon, according to Hawkins. Oil
spill contingency plans, something that did not exist in 1967, are in
place around the coast.
On rocky coasts, spilled oil is considered best
left alone, while in more vulnerable areas such as salt marshes, booms
are deployed.
The dispersants deployed are much less toxic, and rarely used at the
shore.
“The response is much more proportionate now,” said Hawkins.
Soldiers clean up the oil slick on the beach of Perros-Guirec.
Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images
The International Maritime Organization said that many of the
measures to prevent a spill employed by today’s shipping industry, such
as double hulls and duplicate navigation controls, can be traced back to
the disaster of 1967.
Industry statistics show the number of shipping
spills worldwide is down 90% since the 1970s; 99.9% of crude oil last
year was delivered safely.
While Torrey Canyon’s physical impact has virtually disappeared,
there is one place it lives on, in the English Channel.
Nineteen days
after the tanker ran aground, the oil reached Guernsey’s beaches,
sparking an emergency operation to scoop it up and send 3,000 tonnes of
it, mixed with sand, to a granite quarry on the island.
Onlookers watch the distant bombing of the stricken Torrey Canyon.
Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer
Some of the oil was later recovered and burned for power in the
1980s, but most sat in the quarry’s waters, occasionally coating
guillemots in oil.
Eventually, micro-organisms were deployed in 2008 to munch the oil,
but after a large quantity of oil surged to the surface in 2009, more
extreme measures were called for.
In total, 160,000 litres of
contaminated water was removed by buckets – but an unknown quantity of
the Torrey Canyon’s oil still remains below the surface.
“It’s just looking like a pond now,” said Steve Byrne, manager of the
GSPCA animal shelter, which has had no reports of oiled birds since
2012.
“We had been called out for 45 years to help them, so it’s great
news.”
Sea Charts of the British Isles, a 2005 book that is getting a paperback edition in next April.
Traveling along the British coastline, Sea Charts of the British Isles showcases a beautiful collection of charts containing a wealth of information about Britain's maritime history and the story of charting and surveying itself.
A 1482 recreation of a map from Ptolemy's Geography (2nd century)
showing the "Oceanus Germanicus", Great Britain & Ireland
The great names in British chart-making are all included, such as Captain Greenvile Collins, Professor Murdoch Mackenzie and his nephew of the same name, Graeme Spence, and William Bligh, who between them created the first structured attempts to survey and chart particular areas of the coast of mainland Britain as well as the more remote islands.
River Thames by Captn Collins
Pland of the bay and harbour of Conway by Lewis Morris, 1748
Examples include several from Collins' “Great Britain's Coastal Pilot,” such as charts of Edinburgh and the Forth, the Orkney Islands, the coast of Ireland and the River Thames; the Chart of the Coast of Wales in St George's Channel and that of Milford Haven by Lewis Morris; The River Clyde and Glasgow by John Watt; and the Observation by Trinity House Pilots and Surveyors of the Downs covering the coast of Kent and the Goodwin Sands, as well as charts by other well-known European chart-makers, such as the magnificent example of the Coast of England from Dover to the Isle of Wight showing the Cinque Ports by Lucas Janszoon Wagenaer that dates from 1583.
Lewis Morris' coastal charts of Wales.
In 1748 Admiralty encouraged the
publication of Morris private survey of the Welsh coast and individual
harbour plans.
John Blake, the author has researched maritime archives including the Admiralty Library, the National Maritime Museum, the Pepys Library, the UK Hydrographic Office, and the National Archives to reveal their unseen nautical records and portray the development of the sea chart.
Ships from
conflict zones and terrorist strongholds are covertly sailing into
European waters on suspected smuggling missions while attempting to
evade detection, security analysts have warned.
Research by the Windward maritime data company found that in
the first two months of 2017, 50 vessels with invalid registration
numbers entered the UK, and 245 more with “suspicious” gaps in tracking
data.
Another 40 ships sailed into Europe from near Isis-controlled territory in Libya after unexplained black-outs on their automatic identification systems (AIS) during January and February.
Ami Daniel, the firm’s CEO and cofounder, warned that the
cases found so far are just a small fraction of covert voyages in
Europe.
A Cyprus-flagged cargo ship made several 'suspicious stops' while
tracking data disappeared off the coast of Algeria before journeying to
the Scottish island of Islay (image : Windward)
“There is a void,” he told The Independent. “No one
is looking at what’s coming at sea – everyone is looking at planes,
everyone is looking at land borders but no one is looking at shipping.
“It’s frightening but it’s the reality.”
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires all
ships to be assigned a unique reference number that can be combined with
AIS data to avoid collisions and monitor movements, course and speed.
But Windward found numerous cases where fake IMO numbers
were being assigned to large cargo vessels, as well as blips in tracking
that appeared to lengthy to be accidental.
Mr Daniel said AIS equipment, which communicates with
satellites, is mandatory for all large international ships and passenger
vessels.
“These are safety transmissions so definition you would not turn that off,” he added.
“People who turn off transitions are doing a trade-off in their minds.”
Analysts believe such a trade would most likely be made for
illicit reasons to evade authorities, possibly while carrying illegal
cargo such as weapons, drugs or people.
A Tel Aviv startup company is distinguishing itself in Israel and with clients on four continents by its ability to clear away the clutter on loosely regulated, often fraudulent high seas. Using what it calls activity-based intelligence, Windward, a five-year-old maritime data and analytics firm here, probes beyond the ship-tracking services available on today’s market to validate identities of ocean-going vessels. It compares their patterns of behavior and past associations with other ships — even where they loaded or didn’t load in specific ports of call. (image : Windward)
One of the vessels tracked was a Cyprus-flagged cargo ship
owned by a Russian company, which broke from its normal pattern of
voyages between Northern Europe and West Africa last month.
It diverted via the Mediterranean Sea to make its first port
visit in Ukraine in December, before sailing back towards Gibraltar and
engaging in “12 days of suspicious drifting” where the AIS repeatedly
stopped transmitting.
Cyprus-flagged cargo reefer visited Ukraine before entering the Mediterranean.
As it sailed towards Gibraltar it drifted for 12 days off the Algerian and Moroccan coasts, shutting down its AIS multiple times, on one occasion for 28 hours
(image : Windward)
The ship went dark near the port of Oran in Algeria, where
gangs are active trafficking migrants, narcotics and illegal arms, and
al-Qaeda is waging an Islamist insurgency.
On 9 January, it set sail for the UK and arrived in Scotland
five days later, performing a “suspicious stop” off the coast of Islay
for 11 hours, when analysts said illicit cargo may have been loaded on
to smaller boats.
Ship Detection and Tracking Localisation of vessels and small-sized boats with Pleiades satellite.
“The UK’s coastline is vulnerable,” a report by Windward found.
“The maritime domain is vast and laws are difficult to enforce.
“Ships with criminal or terror-related intentions can easily conceal their cargo – arms, drugs or people.
Although ships arriving in EU ports have to declare their
last calling point, researchers say the measure does not take account of
behaviour at sea including diversions and offshore transfers.
As well as fake registration numbers and disappearing
location transmissions, more than half of all vessels entering the UK
were using “flags of convenience” – linked to tax avoidance, regulation
dodging and crime – as well as hundreds had ship-to-ship meetings just
outside territorial waters.
Libya to Greece: A large bulk carrier travelled from Libya to southern Crete — a deviation of its normal route.
It stopped off at the tiny resort of Kokkinos, raising fears of a people smuggling operation
(image : Windward)
There is particular concern over ships leaving conflict
zones including Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia, which have been tracked
carrying out “suspicious movements” off the coast of Greece and other
European nations.
Identification of the hijacked MV Sirius Star anchored at the Somali port of Harardhere (image : TerraSAR X)
Many lose transmission while anchoring around a mile
offshore – far from port but close enough to land for smaller vessels to
transfer goods.
“You might have ship come out of Libya, conduct a
ship-to-ship transfer near Malta, change registration numbers and
someone has done business with Isis,” Mr Daniel said.
Smuggling gangs based in the war-torn country packed disused
cargo ships and fishing vessels with hundreds of refugees at the start
of the Mediterranean crisis, sailing them into open water before calling
for aid and abandoning what became known as “ghost ships”.
By mid-January the reefer was off the coast of Islay,
spending 11 hours at a spot where there are no ports
(image : Windward)
Unseaworthy dinghies are now dominantly used but there have
been reports of groups using commercial vessels to transport migrants
from port to port before launching them towards Europe.
Mr Daniel, a former officer in the Israeli navy, said the
world of shipping presented an easier method of expansion for terrorist
groups and criminal organizations than more tightly regulated airports
and land borders.
Libya to Greece.
An Italian-flagged oil tanker sailed north fromLibya towards Greece.
En route it made two unusual stops — one for seven hours near Crete, and the second for 15 hours close to the mainland
(image : Windward)
“They can transport people, weapons, drugs, they can finance wars,” he added.
“It’s still the Wild West in these seas.”
European crime agency Europol said it was monitoring people
smuggling as part of the refugee crisis but that the primary
responsibility for maritime security lay with member states.
Example of vessels detected with RADARSAT-2 outside the coast of Somalia and correlated with AIS data. Green circles indicate positions of vessel reported with Satellite AIS.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Border Force monitors
vessels sailing off our coastline for suspicious behaviour, including
the disruption of AIS.
“The National Maritime Information Centre brings together
officers from Border Force, the National Crime Agency, police, Royal
Navy, coastguard and others to share intelligence, detect and respond to
a range of threats.
“This approach is working. In 2015, a vessel carrying more
than three tonnes of cocaine was detected despite turning off its AIS
system.”
