Extremities of the Earth: The most remote inhabited island

Carte de l'Ocean Méridional

Creator: Bellin (1746)
Publisher: Arkstée et Merkus

From LOC by Julie Stoner

Where is the lowest point on dry land?
Or the northernmost inhabited point on earth?
How about the highest city?
All of these questions and many more will be unraveled in this new occasional series, Extremities of the Earth, created to explore the farthest reaches of our planet.
For this inaugural post for the series, I found myself fascinated by the most remote inhabited island in the world: Tristan da Cunha. Located in the South Atlantic Ocean, this small island with a 25-mile circumference is farther away from the next outpost of humanity than any other inhabited place in the world.
About 1,200 miles away from the island of St. Helena and 1,750 miles from Cape Town, South Africa, Tristan da Cunha (colloquially known simply as Tristan) is home to 256 people.
The island is part of an archipelago of six small islands, with Tristan being the only permanently inhabited one.
It is believed that the island was first sighted by Admiral Tristao da Cunha, pictured below, in 1506, as he and his crew were sailing from Portugal to the east coast of Africa.
However, it was not until 1643 that the first recorded landing took place by the crew of the Dutch vessel Heemstede.

 “Triastao da Cunha, 1460?-1540.” Woodcut of Triastao da Cunha by Tobias Stimmer. Illustrated in Elogia Virorum Bellica Virtute Illustrium…by Paolo Giovio, 1575.

Rare Book Division, Library of Congress.

Due to its location, Tristan was a convenient place for ships to resupply on long sea voyages from Europe to Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Although the first large-scale charts of the archipelago were created by the Dutch in 1656, the islands can be seen marked on earlier maps, such as on this portolan chart from 1633 by Pascoal Roiz.
Can you spot the island of Tristan da Cunha on this map?

 “A portolan chart of the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent continents,” Pascoal Roiz, 1633.

Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

 Detail of “A portolan chart of the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent continents,” Pascoal Roiz, 1633. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

The first attempt at settlement of the island was made in 1810 by Jonathan Lambert of Salem, Massachusetts, who arrived on the island with three other men.
Lambert became the self-proclaimed “ruler” of the island.
His reign was short, however, as Lambert and two of the other men drowned while on a fishing expedition in 1812.
The expedition’s one survivor, Thomas Curry, was left to continue farming on Tristan, but he was soon joined by several more settlers.
In 1816, the United Kingdom annexed the archipelago and a garrison of British troops was sent to secure Tristan, although the troops were soon recalled in 1817.
Several men led by Corporal William Glass decided to remain and settle on the island, becoming the ancestors of many of today’s islanders.

 “Tristan da Cunha,” published by Directorate of Colonial Surveys, 1948.

Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

As seen in the map above, there is only one town on the island, officially named Edinburgh of the Seven Seas but locally known simply as the Settlement.
This is the only relatively flat plain on the island, with the remainder dominated by Queen Mary’s Peak, an active volcano and the highest island mountain in the South Atlantic Ocean.
In 1961, a volcanic eruption forced residents to evacuate the island, moving temporarily to England. The majority of Tristan residents chose to return in 1963.

 Tristan da Cunha NGA nautical chart with the GeoGarage platform

Today, the social and economic organization of the island is much the same as it was set up by William Glass in 1817.
All land is communally owned and all Tristan families are farmers at least part-time, working on family plots of land in an area known as the Patches.
Anyone interested in visiting the island today must receive prior approval by the island Administrator.
Although it is the most isolated settlement in the world, Tristan da Cunha remains a vibrant and successful community.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Vendee Globe : Tristan de Cunha passage

Nightmare scenario: ship critical systems easy target for hackers

Naval Dome exposes vessel vulnerabilities to cyber attack

From World Maritime News

Hackers can easily access and over-ride ship critical systems, results of a series of cyber penetration tests conducted by Naval Dome, an Israel-based cyber security specialist, show.
The tests were carried out on systems in common use aboard tankers, containerships, superyachts and cruiseships, under the supervision of system manufacturers and owners,
Naval Dome’s cyber engineering team hacked into live, in-operation systems used to control a ships’ navigation, radar, engines, pumps and machinery, and was able to shift the vessel’s reported position and mislead the radar display.

Another attack resulted in machinery being disabled, signals to fuel and ballast pumps being over-ridden and steering gear controls manipulated.
“We succeed in penetrating the system simply by sending an email to the captain’s computer,” Asaf Shefi, Naval Dome’s CTO, the former Head of the Israeli Naval C4I and Cyber Defense Unit, said commenting on the penetration into the ship’s Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS).

“We designed the attack to alter the vessel’s position at a critical point during an intended voyage – during night-time passage through a narrow canal. During the attack, the system’s display looked normal, but it was deceiving the Officer of the Watch. The actual situation was completely different to the one on screen. If the vessel had been operational, it would have almost certainly run aground.”

According to Shefi, the Naval Dome hack was able to alter draught/water depth details in line with the spurious position data displayed on the screen.
“The vessel’s crucial parameters – position, heading, depth and speed – were manipulated in a way that the navigation picture made sense and did not arouse suspicion,” he said.
“This type of attack can easily penetrate the antivirus and firewalls typically used in the maritime sector.”

Commenting on the ease with which Naval Dome was able to by-pass existing cyber security measures, Shefi explained: “The Captain’s computer is regularly connected to the internet through a satellite link, which is used for chart updates and for general logistic updates. Our attacking file was transferred to the ECDIS in the first chart update. The penetration route was not too complicated: the attacking file identified the Disk-On-Key use for update and installed itself. So once the officer had updated the ECDIS, our attack file immediately installed itself on to the system.”

In a second attack, the test ship’s radar was hit. While the radar is widely considered an impregnable, standalone system, Naval Dome’s team used the local Ethernet Switch Interface – which connects the radar to the ECDIS, Bridge Alert System and Voyage Data Recorder – to hack the system.
“The impact of this controlled attack was quite frightening,” said Shefi.
“We succeeded in eliminating radar targets, simply deleting them from the screen. At the same time, the system display showed that the radar was working perfectly, including detection thresholds, which were presented on the radar as perfectly normal.”

A third controlled attack was performed on the Machinery Control System (MCS).
In this case, Naval Dome’s team chose to penetrate the system using an infected USB stick placed in an inlet/socket.
“Once we connected to the vessel’s MCS, the virus file ran itself and started to change the functionality of auxiliary systems. The first target was the ballast system and the effects were startling. The display was presented as perfectly normal, while the valves and pumps were disrupted and stopped working. We could have misled all the auxiliary systems controlled by the MCS, including air-conditioning, generators, fuel systems and more.”

Itai Sela, CEO of Naval Dome, added that the virus infecting ship systems can also be unwittingly transferred by the system manufacturer.
“As manufacturers themselves can be targeted, when they take control of onboard computers to carry out diagnostics or perform software upgrades, they can inadvertently open the gate to a cyber attack and infect other PC-based systems onboard the ship. Our solution can prevent this from happening.”

Links :

• Ship Management International : Cyber penetration tests underscore maritime industry’s nightmare security scenario
• Maritime Global News : Maritime Cyber Security: The Wrong Formula
• GeoGarage blog : Pirates turn to hacking on the high-seas / Combatting maritime cyber security threats / How hackers are targeting the shipping industry / Cyber threats prompt return of radio for ship navigation / Mass GPS spoofing attack in Black Sea? / Cybercrime on the high seas: the new threat facing billionaire superyacht owners / Your ship has probably been cyber attacked / UK at risk from ships covertly sailing into Europe after 'suspicious stops' near terror strongholds, say security analysts / Fleet digitalisation comes with greater cyber risks to ship systems / Hacked at sea: Researchers find ships’ data recorders vulnerable to attack / US navy returns to celestial navigation amid fears of computer hack / ...
   

Does this 17th-century map show an early image of Father Christmas?

The map images are Crown Copyright, courtesy of The National Archives (FO 925/4111, folio 11).

From IanVisits
A rare map of the Arctic Ocean held at The National Archives may contain some of the earliest colour images ever produced of Father Christmas.

Found inside a volume of John Seller’s Atlas Maritimus, the custom-made chart dates from around 1675.
Significantly this is also just a few years after the restoration of the Monarchy, and the overthrowing of the ban on Christmas that was introduced by the Puritans.

At the time also Father Christmas wasn’t seen as a gift-giving figure in the style of Santa Claus as we think of today, but as a personification of the Christmas festival, not dissimilar to John Bull or The Green Man, or for Americans, Uncle Sam.

Back to the map, and in the 17th century, as part of the bespoke production process, buyers could choose from a selection of maps for their own volume of an atlas showing seas and coasts then known around the world.

Hand-tinting, applied as an extra service, made each chart unique.
Curiously, the particular choice of red colouring applied in this example may make it the first ever map to depict Santa in his customary red clothing.

On the right hand side of the chart, in Novaya Zemlya, a sleigh crosses the snowy wastes pulled by reindeer with a red-coated driver; another image on the lower right shows a figure dressed in red and white, leaning on the scale bar as if chatting with the polar bear.

The icy waters shown on this ‘Chart of the Sea Coasts of Russia Lapland Finmarke Nova Zemla and Greenland’ lie to the extreme north of Europe, chiefly within the Arctic Circle.
These are the ‘seas of the midnight sun’ where the sun shines day and night in the middle of the short summer.
The lower edge of the chart shows the northern shores of Scandinavia at left – Norway and Lapland – on the White Sea, with Archangel in the centre lower edge, and the coastline then sweeps to the right across the top of north-west Russia to Novaya Zemlya.

This chart was not intended for navigation.
It lacks information useful to mariners, such as soundings, warnings of rocks and sandbanks, and the locations of harbours.
The space is filled instead with decorative details.

What is marked as Greenland at top left of the whole chart is really its eastern neighbour, Spitsbergen. ‘Finmarke’ is part of modern Norway, ‘Corelia’ (Karelia) lies to right of the prancing goat, while Lapland forms the ‘nose’ of the horse’s head shape.

Pictures of ships and a blowing whale at top centre, plus compass roses, and ornate cartouches for title and scale, were designed to appeal to an expanding market for charts among the nobility and gentry of Europe.

For those with an interest in the origins of Christmas, however, it may chart the beginnings of what became the fable of Santa Claus.
The red decorative details of the two figures dressed as Father Christmas are perhaps what bring a legend to life.

Crab vs eel vs octopus - Blue Planet II

How do the oceans assist in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

 Carbon dioxide ocean–atmosphere exchange

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is the most important human-made greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.

Oceans assist in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: phytoplankton accumulate carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and their chlorophyll colours the ocean’s waters.

Satellites use this colour to measure chlorophyll, which helps scientists to calculate how much carbon dioxide is absorbed or emitted. 

Planetary Visions (credit: ESA/CCI Ocean Colour/Climate Monitoring User Group/Planetary Visions) 

 CO2 Monitoring Task Force presents architecture and definition of an operational system capacity for Anthropogenic CO₂ Emissions Monitoring & Verification Support.

 Use case of Copernicus Marine Service : save fuel, reduce CO2 emissions, safest navigation

Links :

• Copernicus : Report: CO₂ - An Operational Anthropogenic CO₂ emissions - Monitoring & Verification Support Capacity