Until a few years ago, no serious consideration had been made of the many and varied representations of monsters found on world maps from the 10th century through to medieval and Renaissance times.
Yet they made so many appearances for a reason.
These monsters of the deep had caused concern – indeed struck fear into – sailors around the globe.
Although some of the images seem fantastic to the modern world, most of the creatures had some basis on true encounters, and their depiction on maps are a great example of how mythology and folklore can evolve from real events.
Like many cartographers of the era, Matthaeus Merian filled his maps' blank spaces with frightening creatures, like this sinister seamonster.
During the Age of Exploration, sailors provided natural philosophers and cartographers with firsthand accounts of the unfamiliar animals and people beyond the horizon.
Their experiences in this “New World” were informed by folk tales, biblical lore, and racial and cultural biases (not to mention the anxiety of sailing into unknown waters), and as a result, many of the creatures they encountered were interpreted as terrifying monsters.
Merian took this theme a step further, and surrounded his title cartouche with ominous skulls and bones to underscore the mysteries and dangers he and Europeans of his time associated with the New World and its surrounding oceans.
His message can be loosely interpreted as, “Beware, explorers and sailors, or these skulls might be yours!”
In 2013, the British Library released a book which took the study of these creatures seriously and offered a full and detailed account of the menacing artwork appearing on these maps.
Chet Van Duzer's " Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps" (British Library, 2013) catalogues a variety of examples of ‘sea monsters’ which cartographers had seen fit to include in previously unchartered areas of the world, issuing possible warnings of the creatures that had been or might be encountered in certain ocean territories.
Although it has been thought that the inclusion of these mythical creatures were simply the results of illustrators’ over-zealous artistic license and overactive imagination, many of the ocean’s creatures, such as whales, sharks, walruses and squid would have rarely been seen, and would have been viewed as monsters in medieval and Renaissance times.
Taken from the vignettes on Olaus Magnus's Carta marina, Basel c.1544 (Public Domain)
"The creatures look purely fantastic.
They all look like they were just made up," Van Duzer, a map historian at the Library of Congress, said in an interview concerning his book.
"But, in fact, a lot of them come from what were considered, at the time, scientific sources." For example, it was quite usual for the encyclopedias of the time to contain reference to strange looking terrestrial-aquatic-hybrid animals and mapmakers just took some poetic license in depicting them.
In his book, Van Duzer, who was a 2012 Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress, charts the origins of sea monsters from "mappa mundi," medieval European maps of the world; nautical maps; and Ptolemy's Geography, a treatise by the Greco-Roman mathematician and scientist Claudius Ptolemy, which contained an atlas of the known world during the second century.
The Kraken is but one example of a real sea creature being transformed into a beast of legend.
It is first mentioned in the Örvar-Oddr, a 13th century Icelandic saga.
In Scandinavian mythology, this gigantic sea creature was said to be 1 mile long.
It was depicted as great beast that would attack ships and was so huge that its body could be mistaken for an island.
St.Brendan's ship on the back of a whale.
From by Chet Van Duzer and published by the British Library:
'Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps' (CC BY 2.0)
The Kraken was also made it into the first edition of Systema Naturae [1735], a taxonomic classification of living organisms by the Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist Carolus Linnaeus.
Here the Kraken was classified as a cephalopod, designating the scientific name Microcosmus marinus.
The myth of the Kraken is believed by historians and scientists to relate to the real world giant squid, which can reach 18 meters in length and has been rarely seen due to its normal habitat being deep in the ocean.
Iceland is burning and attacked by sea monsters. Map by Abraham Ortelius Flemmish Cartographer (Public Domain)
By tracing the depictions of sea monsters throughout the centuries, Van Duzer presented an evolution from a world full of dangers lurking in distant oceans where gigantic octopuses and whales drag ships and sailors into the sea, to 17 th century maps showing ships exerting dominion over the beasts of the ocean.
Eventually, the beasts disappeared from maps altogether.
The take away from Van Duzer’s fascinating depiction of sea monsters is that mythological stories and legends of the past, however fanciful they seem, often stem from real life events or experiences.
Many of the stories from our ancient ancestors evolved from real events that were portrayed according to the understanding and knowledge of the time.
They may have become exaggerated and stray far from reality (any creature 1 mile long is stretching it) but the origin often hails from a seed of truth.
The Italian harbor city of Venice is famous for its many canals and
bridges.
Built along the shores of the Adriatic Sea, the canals were
used for protection, sheltering the city from the mainland, and
transportation within the city.
For the first time, research by the
Italian Institute for Marine Research (Ismar-Cnr) and the Italian Navy
has revealed what lies beneath the water's surface.
Venezia in the GeoGarage platform (Navimap/IIM nautical chart)
The depth of the canals was measured in high details using echolocation technology.
Using the time needed by the signals to be reflected from the ground,
not only can the depth be calculated, but also the density and type of
encountered substrates.
The light pink polygon depicts the area surveyed by the Istituto Idrografico della Marina (IIM) (Italian Hydrographic Institute), whereas the coloured ones the CNR-ISMAR weekly covered areas. Pseudo-true-colour LANDSAT 8 OLI imagery as background.
The scans show areas of sediment accumulation
and sediment erosion, which is especially important for the maintenance
of the canals.
Yellow and red colors in the published data show shallow
water - in some cases just three feet deep.
Green and blue colors are
deep water, thirty to sixty feet deep at least.
The maximum depth found
in the Venetian Lagoon is 164 feet below sea level.
Bathymetry of the main channel to the seaport of Venice (eastern part).
Source and Credit: Ismar-Cnr/Google Earth.
Main channel (western part) and seaport of Venice,
note the large cruise ships anchored along the piers in the port.
Source and Credit: Ismar-Cnr/Google Earth.
The artificial channels significantly changed the currents in the
lagoon of Venice.
Marine lifeforms living here have to deal with strong
seasonal variations of salinity and oxygen, as the exchange of water
with the open sea is limited.
Tides transport sediments into the lagoon.
Because the Venetian Lagoon is now separated from the open sea by dams,
the sediments tend to accumulate and fill the canals and the lagoon.
The scans also revealed another type of anthropogenic impact.
In some
pictures strange round features are recognizable on the ground of the
canals, disposed tires and other trash.
Tires, parts of
smaller boats and possibly house utensils disposed in one of the many
smaller canals. Maximum depth in this image is twenty feet.
‘People say, How did you first become interested in animals?,
and I say: Was there a time when you were not interested in animals?’ "All we have to do is keep declaring the facts as we see the facts, and producing the evidence whenever we can"
His sequel to The Blue Planet will focus not only on the marvels of sea life but also the threats to it. The naturalist explains why plastic pollution, climate change and overpopulation are problems too urgent to be left to ecologists
David Attenborough vividly remembers, nearly 80 years on, his first encounter with one of the worst scourges of the planet.
He was a schoolboy.
“I remember my headmaster, who was also my science master, saying: ‘Boys, we’ve entered a new era! We’ve entered, we’ll be proud to say, the plastic era.
And what is so wonderful about this is we’ve used all our scientific ingenuity to make sure that it’s virtually indestructible.
It doesn’t decay, you know, it’s wonderful.’”
Plastics are the latest in a long line of concerns for the 91-year-old naturalist.
They are a key theme of his latest work for television, the new series of The Blue Planet, which he will return to writing after our interview.
Premiering at the BFI Imax in London this Wednesday – with Prince William as a special guest – the series will focus not only on the marvels of ocean life, but the threats to it, of which plastic is one of the worst.
It will also deal with what people can do to help.
Plastic Oceans
The arc by which plastics started off as a wonder of technology and ended up as a calamity is familiar to the veteran conservationist.
It seems to be repeated endlessly: CFC aerosols and refrigerants destroying the ozone layer; pesticides killing wildlife; the fossil energies that fuelled a career based around television and exotic international travel resulting in climate change; the advances in medicine prolonging life and bringing good health, but giving us a population explosion that Attenborough fears will endanger further species, including our own.
For Attenborough, however, there must always be a message of optimism running above and beyond any warnings of doom.
While he admits to sadness at the disappearances he has witnessed – “Overall, without any question, the world is not going to be as varied and as rich as it was a hundred years ago” – he insists on practical solutions.
“It’s within our power, because most of the problems are created by us, and we can solve them or should be able to solve them,” he says, slapping his knee emphatically.
“There are solutions, and there is cause for hope, and there’s cause for encouragement, and it isn’t all disasters.”
Take plastics.
That problem could be solved “if we got together, within a decade, if not less”.
It could be dealt with technically, through potential breakthroughs such as degradable plastic.
“And disposing of it could be dealt with technically,” he adds.
This could involve ways to collect and filter plastics from the sea, and to absorb or break down the plastics that are already there.
And “stop putting plastic in the sea”.
A career spanning seven decades has earned him a loyal following of tens if not hundreds of millions of viewers, who are entranced by his delight in the beauties and savageries he witnesses.
It has also given him a unique authority.
When Attenborough speaks, viewers tend to trust him.
For years, he kept this trust to himself.
He was associated with several conservation groups, from Flora and Fauna International to the Dragonfly Society, but did not use his public platform to make prescriptions for the planet’s future.
For this, he was sometimes criticized by green activists, who wanted him to take a public lead on issues such as climate change.
It is evidently a criticism he feels a need to address, and, without prompting, he offers that in his earlier career he felt inhibited by his association with the BBC, where he was a channel controller as well as presenter, and the need to be strictly impartial.
“I joined the BBC after [national service in] the navy, and there was a monopoly and it was like a civil service.
So you had to be guarding against propaganda or guarding against grinding axes.
And so the moment had to be judged as to when it was you suddenly started talking about conservation and when it was that you were behind the Greenpeaces of this world.
They were the cutting edge and you, as a broadcaster, had to make sure that both sides of the argument were ventilated until such time as you, in your professional capacity, thought it was absolutely justified to say: ‘This is incontrovertible, this is what we’re doing to the natural world.’”
As he has felt more free to speak out, one of the more controversial areas Attenborough has addressed is population growth.
Of all the world’s problems, this is the one he sees as central and most difficult to solve, although it is a tricky and unpopular cause to take up.
Many high-profile environmentalists will privately agree that the rapid growth in the world’s population – now at more than 7 billion, a tripling since Attenborough was born – creates further problems, because feeding 9 billion by 2050 will be hard, and raising people out of poverty even harder, and it makes a real conundrum of giving people decent lives, opportunities and governance, while protecting dwindling natural resources and halting climate change.
For a start, it sounds offensive, even patronising – particularly coming from anyone who lives a relatively privileged life in a developed country.
For another, it crosses religious and other taboos.
And – for many the clincher – it can look like blaming the more numerous poor of the developing world for problems emphatically not of their making.
Attenborough chooses his words slowly.
“I sometimes question whether I should be more positive or more outgoing on the question.
The trouble is that we don’t know the answer.
What we all say is that if women are given political freedom and education and medical facilities and all the rest of it, the birth rate falls.
That’s actually not the whole question.
It’s more complicated than that.
But it’s all I can say in response.
One should be very cautious about imposing, from where I sit, regulations where other people have got the problems.”
But he will draw the links between population growth and ecological destruction.
“The whole question of migration out of Africa across the Mediterranean has multiple causes and part of it is the political systems, but part of it is undoubtedly ecological systems and sociological problems.
I mean the changing of the climate in Africa, the spread of the desert in Africa, the rise of political systems which oppress – all those things mount up.
That’s why conservation is not any more just the affair of ecologists.”
Viewing conservation as part of the whole future of humanity, rather than a thing apart, is one of Attenborough’s great legacies.
He is spearheading an effort at Cambridge University to bring all academic disciplines – “not just other botanists, not just ecologists, but law, international lawyers, psychologists, geographers, political scientists and so on” – to bear on the pressing problems of the planet.
“Break down those walls and get people talking about it who wouldn’t otherwise meet,” he says.
The Cambridge Conservation Initiative is a collaboration among 10 institutions, housed in the new Sir David Attenborough building in Cambridge.
Its future has just been assured by a $10m (£7.4m) endowment from Arcadia, the charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing, one of the heirs to the Tetra Pak fortune, and her husband, Peter Baldwin.
It will work across all conservation and environmental issues, and its ethos mirrors Attenborough’s own polymathic approach: the idea is that people will congregate in the building, from all over the world as well as across disciplines, for the cross-fertilisation of knowledge.
Attenborough spent two years at Clare College, Cambridge, from 1945, taking a degree truncated by the war.
“It was two years of unalloyed bliss,” he says.
“It’s a sudden great opening of windows, if you’re a provincial grammar school boy like me.
And you were with these people who had been fighter pilots and so on and you realised that the sun had come out over Europe and over you.
You were just looking through intellectual windows and singing, yes, madrigals – never heard of madrigals before.
Gosh, how marvellous.”
It was here, while ostensibly studying X-ray crystallography (“it was ghastly – I couldn’t understand a bar of it”) that he embarked on turning his interest in nature into the beginnings of a career.
“A guest lecturer came in and talked for an hour about frogs.
And all the extraordinary varieties, the beauties of frogs, how the frog’s life was dominated by how on earth they were going to rear their young, who needed water.
Some did it by spinning foam and hanging it above a pond.
Some by taking their eggs into their mouths.
Some even did it by putting eggs in their stomachs – extraordinary.
And so you sat there with your jaw slacking, just the amazement and splendours and wonders of the world.”
Keeping that sense of wonder will be what keeps us alive, he believes, if we do choose to save the planet.
“If you want a comfortable life, what you do is you turn your mind, your face away from problems, of course.”
He sees his responsibility as reminding people that they can and must turn towards the problems, and find solutions – in day-to-day life and in collective efforts.
To do that, he believes, the most important thing is to remind people of what they have forgotten, and what is sometimes hard to remember – why we are in love with the world we live in.
Can a Minke whale escape a dramatic attack by Orcas?
“People say to me, ‘How did you first become interested in animals?’, and I look at them and I say: ‘Was there a time when you were not interested in animals?’ It’s the first sort of pleasure, delight and joy you get as a child.
As a child grows, he becomes aware of all sorts of things, sex or computers and the internet and so on.
But if he loses the first treasure, he’s lost something that will give him joy and delight for the rest of his life.”
You’re driving down the highway, just as Google Maps instructed, when Siri tells you to “proceed east for one-half mile, then merge onto the highway.”
But you’re already on the highway.
After a moment of confusion and perhaps some rude words about Siri and her extended AI family, you realize the problem: Your GPS isn’t accurate enough for your navigation app to tell if you’re on the highway or on the road beside it.
Those days are nearly at an end. At the ION GNSS+ conference in Portland, Ore., today Broadcom announced that it is sampling the first mass-market chip that can take advantage of a new breed of global navigation satellite signals and will give the next generation of smartphones 30-centimeter accuracy instead of today’s 5 meters.
Even better, the chip works in a city’s concrete canyons, and it consumes half the power of today’s generation of chips.
The chip, the BCM47755, has been included in the design of some smartphones slated for release in 2018, but Broadcom would not reveal which.
GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs), such as Europe’s Galileo, Japan’s QZSS, and Russia’s Glonass, allow a receiver to determine its position by calculating its distance from three or more satellites.
All GNSS satellites—even the oldest generation still in use—broadcast a message called the L1 signal, which includes the satellite’s location, the time, and an identifying signature pattern.
A newer generation broadcasts a more complex signal called L5 at a different frequency in addition to the legacy L1 signal.
The receiver essentially uses these signals to fix its distance from each satellite based on how long it takes the signal to go from satellite to receiver.
Broadcom’s receiver first locks onto the satellite with the L1 signal and then refines its calculated position with L5.
The latter is superior, especially in cities, because it is much less prone to distortions from multipath reflections than L1.
In a city, the satellite’s signals reach the receiver both directly and by bouncing off of one or more buildings.
The direct signal and any reflections arrive at slightly different times, and if they overlap, they add up to form a sort of signal blob.
The receiver is looking for the peak of that blob to fix the time of arrival. But the messier the blob, the less accurate that fix, and the less accurate the final calculated position will be.
However, L5 signals are so brief that the reflections are unlikely to overlap with the direct signal.
The receiver chip can simply ignore any signal after the first one it receives, which is the direct path. The Broadcom chip also uses information in the phase of the carrier signal to further improve accuracy.
Though there are advanced systems that use L5 on the market now, these are generally for industrial purposes, such as oil and gas exploration.
Broadcom’s BCM47755 is the first mass-market chip that uses both L1 and L5.
Why is this only happening now?
“Up to now there haven’t been enough L5 satellites in orbit,” says Manuel del Castillo, associate director of GNSS product marketing at Broadcom.
At this point, there are about 30 such satellites in orbit, counting a set that only flies over Japan and Australia.
Even in a city’s “narrow window of sky you can see six or seven, which is pretty good,” Del Castillo says.
“So now is the right moment to launch.”
Broadcom had to get the improved accuracy to work within a smartphone’s limited power budget. Fundamentally, that came down to three things: moving to a more power-efficient 28-nanometer-chip manufacturing process, adopting a new radio architecture (which Broadcom would not disclose the details of), and designing a power-saving dual-core sensor hub.
In total, they add up to a 50 percent power savings over Broadcom’s previous, less accurate chip.
In smartphones, sensor hubs take the raw data from the system’s sensors and process it to provide only the information the phone’s applications processor needs, thereby taking the computational burden and its accompanying power draw off of the applications processor.
For instance, a sensor hub might monitor the accelerometer looking for signs that you had flipped your phone’s orientation from vertical to horizontal.
It would then just send the applications processor the equivalent of the word “horizontal” instead of a stream of complex accelerations.
The sensor hub in the BCM47755 takes advantage of the ARM’s “big.LITTLE”design—a dual-core architecture in which a simple low-power processor core is paired with a more complex core.
The low-power core, in this case an ARM Cortex M-0, handles simple, continuous tasks.
The more powerful but power-hungry core, a Cortex M-4, comes in only when it’s needed.
The BCM4775 is just the latest development in a global push for centimeter-level navigation accuracy.
Bosch, Geo++, Mitsubishi Electric, and U-blox established a joint venture called Sapcorda Services in August, to provide centimeter-level accuracy.
Sapcorda seems to depend on using ground stations to measure errors in GPS and Galileo satellite signals due to atmospheric distortions.
Those measurements would then be sent to receivers in handsets and other systems to improve accuracy.
Japan’s US $1.9 billion Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) also relies on error correction, but it additionally improves on urban navigation by adding a set of satellites that guarantees one is visible directly overhead even in the densest part of Tokyo.
The third of those four satellites launched in August.
A fourth is planned for October, and the system is to come online in 2018.
