Ghosts of the Arctic was the type of passion project that my boyhood dreams were made of. Our goal was to venture out into the beautiful frozen expanse of Svalbard, in winter, to search and document polar bears. During the shoot we experienced temperatures that were never warmer than -20ºC and frequently plummeted down as low as -30ºC + wind chill factor. Many days we drove over two hundred kilometres on our snow mobiles in very difficult terrain and conditions as we searched for wildlife.
The bumpy terrain left us battered, bruised and sore.
We experienced three cases of first and second degree frostbite during the filming as well as a lot of failed equipment and equipment difficulties as a result of the extreme cold.
Each day involved 14-16 hours in the field. We had batteries that would loose their charge in mere minutes, drones that wouldn't power up and fly, cameras that wouldn't turn on, steady-cams that would not remain steady, HDMI cables that became brittle and snapped in the cold, frozen audio equipment, broken LCD mounts, broken down snow mobiles and more. We existed on a diet of freeze dried cod and pasta washed down with tepid coffee and the occasional frozen mars bar. But in spite of the conditions, it was one of the most rewarding shoots we have all been involved in. We hope you enjoy it!
Flying fish can make powerful, self-propelled leaps out of water into air, where their long, wing-like fins enable gliding flight for considerable distances.
It appears these flying fish are in a no win situation, picked off above the surface by frigatebird's and devoured underwater by the dorado.
These amazing bottlenose dolphins have adopted a unique way of hunting fish.
Taking advantage of the low tide, these super smart mammals are able to beach themselves on mud banks, and attack in perfect synchrony.
We track a hungry but determined polar bear as it seeks to ambush a plump seal.
With the odds stacked against it, this scrawny looking bear will need to pull off an amazing manoeuvre if it's to get a well earned meal.
Epic footage of one of Earth's most feared predators, the great white shark.
Each dawn, cape fur seals leave their colony to go fishing.
To reach the open sea they must cross a narrow strip of water which is patrolled by the largest predatory fish on the Planet.
From amateur ecologists to charismatic aristocrats and war tourists, the first explorer yachtsmen blazed a colourful trail.
now, says Caroline White, a new generation follows in their wake...
"Brandy, prussic acid, opium, Champagne, ginger, mutton-chops and tumblers of salt-water,” listed Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, in a letter to his mother.
This was the roll call of remedies with which he was trying to cure his (apparently sporting) friend, Dr Fitz, of seasickness – they were on board the Marquess’s schooner Foam in 1856, making a choppy passage from Scotland to Iceland.
Today, the pair would likely have zipped in by plane or helicopter to meet the yacht in Scandinavia – leaving the crew to endure the North Sea’s roil alone.
But when the Marquess embarked on his adventure, no such option existed.
“If you wanted to go off and see the world, having a yacht made that possible in a way that no other means did,” says William Collier, managing director of classic yachts specialist GL Watson.
And so an off-grid transport problem – which lasted until the end of WWII – created a long golden age for the explorer yacht.
For some, a yacht simply enabled long-range travel in comfort: in 1931 Lady Yule and her daughter visited New Zealand, Australia and Miami on 91 metre motor yacht Nahlin.
For others it meant expedience: after he’d raced his Camper & Nicholsons schooner Wyvern in the first America’s Cup, in 1851, Lord Marlborough lent her to his son Lord Churchill, who sailed from the Cape of Good Hope to Australia in the record time of 36 days (he was speeding to the gold rush).
For others still, a boat was a ride to a far-flung shore: “Yachts went to the Crimean War because it was fun, stuff was happening,” says Collier.
“Lord Cardigan, for instance, of the Charge of the Light Brigade, lent his yacht [Dryad] to a chum who sailed out to watch the Siege of Sevastopol.
Once the yacht was out there it was also comfortable digs for Lord Cardigan.”
The 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava's schooner Foam
Then there are the true adventurers, such as the Marquess.
The writings on his voyage through Iceland and Norway are steeped in the charm that made him a spectacularly successful diplomat.
Amid the geysers he bumps into Prince Napoléon Bonaparte – plus a vast entourage – and has his crew whip them up a feast of game and plum pudding from his meagre stores, an incident he describes with a what-else-could-I-do matter-of-factness.
Later, he is pleasantly surprised when the monarch and his entire cabal ditch their plans and follow his boat to Jan Mayen and Spitsbergen.
He’s an elegant and entertaining writer, chronicling the evening sea “burnished, darkling into a deep sapphire blue against the horizon”, and “contorted lava mountains, their bleak heads knocking against the solid sky”.
Many of his ruminations are also salutary tips for owners going off grid today – including the “rapid transformation” from heaven to hell that weather makes at extreme latitudes and thus the all-importance of when to go.
“[This] fully accounted for the difference I had observed in the amount of enjoyment different travellers seemed to have derived from it [Norway].”
The Marquess published a book of his writings, Letters From High Latitudes, which is still readily available.
Albert I en route to discovering Princess Alice Bank in the Azores
Other yacht explorers left a broader legacy.
The first yacht of Prince Albert I of Monaco, the 200-tonne sailer Hirondelle, sparked a lifelong passion.
He founded Monaco’s Oceanographic Institute, tracked whales, studied fish and discovered Princess Alice Bank in the Azores.
During a 1921 speech at the Washington Academy of Sciences, his language conveyed a raw wonder for “the awful spaces of the ocean, which almost daily yielded tons of beings unknown to science – abyssal cephalopods or pelagic crustacean”, and fish with “luminous organs”.
Prince Albert I of Monaco’s Hirondelle
Experience also placed Albert ahead of his time in understanding the effects of over-fishing and “steam trawlers”.
“The latter now graze the very soil of continental plateaux, plucking off the sea-weeds and ruining the bottoms that are fittest for the breeding, as well as the preservation, of a great many species.”
He even suggested the “reserved district principle” – marine reserves of the sort now championed by Blue Marine Foundation.
A member of the Queen of Scots party shows off the Galápagos wildlife
On the other side of the Atlantic, wealthy Americans were undertaking their own naturalist adventures.
In the late 1920s, socialite and diplomat Anthony J Drexel Biddle Jnr took his yacht Queen of Scots on an epic trip from Bayonne to North Africa, the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Barbados, the Panama Canal and the Galápagos.
The family hunted, fished, photographed Talamanca Indians and collected specimens for the British Museum.
William Kissam Vanderbilt II, meanwhile, made his voyage to the Galápagos in 1926 on his 65 metre yacht Ara, a former French warship.
He discovered a new species of shark and reeled at the bounty of natural wonders but, like Prince Albert, grew concerned for their safety.
Back home he wowed guests with a slide show of his trip, but finished with an odd shot.
His biography, by Steven H Gittelman, calls it “a night scene where the dilapidated shore met the sea’s edge and a long trail of the moon was reflected in the water”.
Populating it were forlorn goats and an emaciated donkey.
These were the introduced species and “by virtue of numbers they extinguished all in their path.
Nothing, regardless of its rarity or beauty, was spared, until finally the invaders too began to starve.” It was an ecological warning to his world-roaming and powerful guests.
The Golden Shadow is the research vessel.
Tasked with providing accommodation and diving support for over 30 scientists at a time, from all over the world, it is a vital component for any ocean research on this scale.
Today’s explorer yacht owners have taken up their forebears’ legacy.
One group of owners have helped realise Albert I’s dream with the world’s largest marine reserve in the Chagos Islands.
In 2015 Paul Allen recovered the bell of the battlecruiser HMS Hood, sunk by the Bismarck in 1941, using his yacht Octopus and her state-of-the-art remotely operated vehicle – it will be restored as a tribute to the 1,415 lives lost.
And a couple of years ago, explorer yacht Arctic P ventured further south than any vessel in history.
Improvements in transport – and stabilisers – mean there is less call for prussic acid and tumblers of seawater.
But with a burgeoning list of ultra-tough superyachts hitting the water, for a new breed of yacht-bound explorers, the golden age dawns again.
From Reuters by Tom Westbrook and Jonathan Barrett
Detailed sea-floor maps made during the
unsuccessful search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370,
released by Australia on Wednesday, could help increase the knowledge of
rich fisheries and the prehistoric movement of the earth's southern
continents.
The Indian Ocean search ended
in January after covering a lonely stretch of open water where under-sea
mountains larger than Mount Everest rise and a rift valley dotted with
subsea volcanoes runs for hundreds of kilometers.
The
whereabouts of the plane, which vanished in March 2014 en route to
Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board, remains one of the
world's greatest aviation mysteries.
After Flight MH370 disappeared in the Southern Ocean, Fugro was invited to help find the lost plane in a remote area covering 120,000 square kilometres in very challenging conditions. Deploying specialist vessels, a multinational specialist crew and state-of-the-art technology, Fugro produced 3D terrain and texture maps and used deep tow sonar vehicles and AUVs to search for the wreckage. The seafloor across the entire search area was mapped to a high level of accuracy and it became clear that flight MH370 had gone down elsewhere.
However,
information gathered during painstaking surveys of some 120,000 sq km
(46,000 sq miles) of the remote waters west of Australia should provide
fishermen, oceanographers and geologists insight into the region in
unprecedented detail, said Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of coastal
oceanography at the University of Western Australia.
"There
are the locations of seamounts which will attract a lot of
international deep sea fishermen to the area," Pattiaratchi told Reuters
by phone.
High-priced fish such as tuna,
toothfish, orange roughy, alfonsino and trevally are known to gather
near the seamounts, where plankton swirl in the currents.
Pattiaratchi
said the location of seamounts would also help model the impact of
tsunamis, given undersea mountains help dissipate their destructive
energy, and potentially change our understanding of the break-up of the
ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.
The
data consists of three-dimensional models of undersea landforms as well
as raw bathymetric survey information and drift analysis.
It was
published online by Geoscience Australia on Wednesday, with a further
tranche due to be published next year.
An undated supplied image from Geoscience Australia shows a computer generated three-dimensional view of the sea floor obtained from mapping data collected during the first phase of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)/Handout
"To see this work come out of that tragedy that was MH370 is really quite astounding, they've taken it to a new level," said Martin Exel, a commercial deep-sea fisherman at Austral Fisheries who has fished in the area.
"From a fishing perspective it would be valuable information - they've found whale bones and cables and a drum, it is incredible the resolution," he said, referring to the data.
But the expense and difficulty of operating in such remote high seas made a rush to fill nets in the area unlikely, he said.
An undated supplied image from Geoscience Australia shows a map view of the sea floor obtained from mapping data collected during the first phase of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)/Handout via REUTERS
Stuart Minchin, chief of Geoscience Australia's environmental geoscience division, said the remote search area was now among the most thoroughly mapped regions of the deep ocean on the planet. "It is estimated that only 10 to 15 percent of the world's oceans have been surveyed with the kind of technology used in the search for MH370," Minchin said.
Investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off MH370's transponder before diverting it thousands of miles off course, out over the Indian Ocean.
Various pieces of debris have been collected from Indian Ocean islands and Africa's east coast and at least three of them have been confirmed as coming from the missing Boeing 777.
Australia has not ruled out resuming the search for the airliner but has said that would depend on finding "credible new evidence" about the plane's whereabouts.
"No new information has been discovered to determine the specific location of the aircraft and the underwater search remains suspended," Transport Minister Darren Chester said in a statement.
An apparent mass and blatant, GPS spoofing attack involving over 20 vessels in the Black Sea last month has navigation experts and maritime executives scratching their heads.
The event first came to public notice via a relatively innocuous safety alert from the U.S. Maritime Administration :
A maritime incident has been reported in the Black Sea in the vicinity of position 44-15.7N, 037-32.9E on June 22, 2017 at 0710 GMT. This incident has not been confirmed. The nature of the incident is reported as GPS interference. Exercise caution when transiting this area.
But the backstory is way more interesting and disturbing.
On June 22 a vessel reported to the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center:
GPS equipment unable to obtain GPS signal intermittently since nearing coast of Novorossiysk, Russia.
Now displays HDOP 0.8 accuracy within 100m, but given location is actually 25 nautical miles off; GPS display…
After confirming that there were no anomalies with GPS signals, space weather or tests on-going, the Coast Guard advised the master that GPS accuracy in his area should be three meters and advised him to check his software updates.
The master replied:
Thank you for your below answer, nevertheless I confirm my GPS equipment is fine.
We run self test few times and all is working good.
I confirm all ships in the area (more than 20 ships) have the same problem.
I personally contacted three of them via VHF, they confirmed the same.
Sometimes, position is correct, sometimes is not.
GPS sometimes looses position or displays inaccurate position (high HDOP).
For few days, GPS gave a position inland (near Gelendyhik aiport) but vessel was actually drifting more than 25 NM from it.
Important: at that time, GPS system considered the position as “Safe within 100m”.
Then last night, position was correct despite several “lost GPS fixing position” alarm that raised couples seconds only; then signal was back to normal.
Now position is totally wrong again.
See attached pictures that I took on 24 June at 05h45 UTC (30 min ago).
Note: you can also check websites like MarineTraffic and you will probably notice that once in a while all ships in the area are shifting inland next to each other.
I hope this can help.
To back up his report, the master sent photos of his navigation displays, a paper chart showing his actual position and GPS-reported position, and his radar display that showed numerous AIS contacts without corresponding radar returns.
One of the photos was of the navigation receiver’s “GPS Information Screen.”
This has allowed navigation experts to conclude this was a fairly clear, if not subtle, case of “spoofing” or sending false signals to cause a receiver to provide false information.
They point to the receiver saying its antenna is 39 meters underwater, that all the GPS satellites it is using have the same high signal strength, and that the WER, or Word Error Rate, is 97 percent (normal is less than 10 percent).
The RNT Foundation has received numerous anecdotal reports of maritime problems with AIS and GPS in Russian waters, though this is the first publicly available, well-document account, of which we are aware.
Russia has very advanced capabilities to disrupt GPS.
Over 250,000 cell towers in Russia have been equipped with GPS jamming devices as a defense against attack by U.S. missiles.
And there have been press reports of Russian GPS jamming in both Moscow and the Ukraine.
In fact Russia has boasted that its capabilities “make aircraft carriers useless,” and the U.S. Director of National Intelligence recently issued a report that stated that Russia and others were focusing on improving their capability to jam U.S. satellite systems.
Assuming Russia is behind this, why would they do such a thing?
Maybe it was to encourage use of the Russian GLONASS satellite navigation system or their terrestrial Loran system, called Chayka, instead of GPS.
Perhaps it was for some security reason known only to them.
Whatever the reason, we are reminded of a maritime GPS disruption incident last year and the U.S. Coast Guard’s subsequent advice about GPS and all satnav – “Trust But Verify.”
