148 nautical raster charts updated
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Saturday, January 20, 2018
World's first life saver drone : a drone saves two swimmers in Australia
A drone dropped a “rescue pod” into waters south of Brisbane, saving two swimmers in distress.
From NYTimes by Isabella Kwai
A practice session for Australian lifeguards who were testing a new drone turned into a real rescue when the drone helped save two swimmers at a beach in New South Wales.
On Thursday morning, Jai Sheridan, a lifeguard supervisor who was operating the drone, was alerted to two young men caught in turbulent surf with 10-foot swells.
Mr. Sheridan then steered the drone toward the swimmers.
In video of the incident taken from the drone, it can be seen releasing a yellow “rescue pod” that inflates in the water.
The two swimmers grabbed the pod, and with its support they made their way to shore.
They were fatigued, but not hurt, Surf Life Saving New South Wales, a volunteer organization, said in a statement.
The rescue took just 70 seconds. “On a normal day that would have taken our lifeguards a few minutes longer,” Mr. Sheridan said.
Little Ripper Lifesaver drones use world first algorithm technology to spot sharks for public safety at beaches.
Fitted with onboard sirens and voice messages in multiple languages they also warn people of any danger.
The lifesaving drones have multiple deployable automatically inflating rescue tubes capable of supporting up to 4 people in a rescue situation.
The drone used for the rescue, known as a Little Ripper unmanned aerial vehicle, is also part of a shark-spotting program being rolled out across Australian beaches this summer.
It uses an algorithm to automatically recognize sharks.
“The applications in the water are just phenomenal,” said Michael Blumenstein, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney who oversaw the team that developed the shark-spotting software. “The amount of payload that these drones carry enable them to be really be versatile.”
Drones and AI Take On Killer Sharks Down Under in Australia.
Whether or not shark attacks are a major problem in Australia, the Australian government has devoted an enormous amount of resources into trying to mitigate the risk of sharks near popular beaches.
They've tried nets to keep the sharks out, they've tried electronic gadgets to dissuade them, and they've tried lots of different ways of killing them, without much in the way of evidence that any of it is particularly effective.
After six months of trials, the latest and most robot-y idea is about to be implemented: drones will start patrolling some Australian beaches next month, using cameras and some AI-backed image analysis software to spot lurking sharks much better than humans can.
Humans aren't particularly good at identifying sharks on aerial imagery.
We can manage a 20-30 percent accuracy rate, which means both identifying other things as sharks (kinda bad) and misidentifying sharks as other things (way worse).
As with many tasks of this kind, a machine learning system does much better: once it's been trained on labeled aerial videos of sharks, whales, dolphins, surfers, swimmers, boats, and whatever else, the software is 90 percent accurate at telling humans to panic because there's a shark somewhere.
And when implemented on a drone, the system really does tell people to panic, using a loudspeaker to warn them that there's a shark in the water.
The drones come from an Australian company called Westpac Little Ripper, which modifies a few different kinds of commercial drones for tasks like shark spotting as well as general life-saving operations, such as dropping beacons and even rafts.
The larger Little Ripper drones are gas powered and can fly for hours, which is nice, but they somehow cost up to US $250,000 each.
In cases involving rough surf, remote locations or natural disasters, where conditions may be hazardous and time is a factor, Professor Blumenstein said, drones are able to help operators assess a situation without endangering human lives.
Farmers have also found practical applications for drones, using them to efficiently assess the health of their crops, for example.
But in crowded urban areas, Professor Blumenstein said, security concerns may still be an issue. “People are still, I think, wary of low-hanging hovering objects, and rightfully so,” he said.
A lifesaving example of the power of AI in edge devices is demonstrated using a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) and the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick.
The Little Ripper Lifesaver UAV is currently using cloud-based AI to monitor the Australian coastline.
n Intel proof-of-concept using Intel Movidius technology shows that AI processing could be done directly on the device, allowing for more immediate danger detection and response time.
In December, the state government of New South Wales announced that it would invest 430,000 Australian dollars, or $345,000, into drone technology as part of a trial on the state’s North Coast.
John Barilaro, deputy premier of New South Wales, said after Thursday’s rescue that the investment had already paid off.
“Never before has a drone, fitted with a flotation device, been used to rescue swimmers like this,” Mr. Barilaro said.
Australia is testing out a drone with shark-spotting software
to keep swimmers and sharks out of danger.
The software developed by Professor Blumenstein’s team could soon become a vital tool for lifeguards.
“There’s no reason why we couldn’t use it to automatically detect people in the water,” he said.
Links :
- YouTube : Drones detect Sharks at Lighthouse Beach, Ballina / Shark-spotting drones on patrol at Australian beaches
- Sydney Morning Herald : Drone used to save two swimmers caught in rough surf at Lennox Head
- ABC : Drone helps rescue teens just hours after being unveiled for trial at Lennox Head
- BBC : Caister lifeboat crew trials drones for rescues
Friday, January 19, 2018
115 years ago, this Arctic expedition ended in disaster
From National Geographic by Nina Stochlic
On the 130th anniversary of National Geographic’s founding, see what happened during an attempt to reach the North Pole.
Pacing sled dogs, bundled explorers, and meandering ice floes could be scenes from any early Arctic expedition.
But the 23 minutes of footage captured near the North Pole 116 years ago isn’t just the earliest film in National Geographic's archives—it’s a peek into a pair of wildly disastrous scientific adventures.
Members of the second Ziegler Polar Expedition set out for the Franz Josef Land archipelago in 1903.
The following year, the ship seen in the background sunk, leaving them stranded.
At the turn of the 20th century, America was in a polar frenzy.
During the 1890s, a Swedish balloon expedition, two Norwegians on skis, and an Italian Duke on a steam whaler all failed to reach the North Pole.
Meanwhile, famous authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe set their characters against the mysterious and stark Arctic, and reputable sources theorized that a lost race of giants resided on the top of the Earth.
In his 1885 book, “Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole,” the president of Boston University proposed that Atlantis, King Arthur’s Avalon, and the Garden Eden were all located in the North Pole.
“These ideas were taken very seriously and no one could refute them because no one had ever been there,” says PJ Capelotti, an anthropology professor and associate of The Polar Center at Penn State University.
Whoever became the first to reach the unknown arctic landscape was guaranteed fame and fortune stretching beyond their lifetime.
Fueled by wealthy financiers and public fascination, the “polar dash” kicked into high gear in the 1900s.
The first Ziegler Polar Expedition brough along photographer Anthony Fiala, who took this picture in 1901.
He logged it as "Alger Island showing snowcapped peak."
Evelyn Baldwin had more Arctic interest than experience until businessman William Ziegler, known as the “baking soda king,” chose him to lead an ambitious expedition to the North Pole.
Convinced by a dramatized version of an attempt to make a forward base camp in the northern islands of Franz Josef Land, Ziegler put his trust and unlimited funds in the hands of a man whose entire resume was either “outright fabrication or exaggeration,” says Capelotti.
“I do not want to see any but an American win the honor of the discovery of the North Pole, when so many of our brave countrymen have sacrificed their lives in the effort to attain it,” Baldwin recounted Ziegler telling him in an announcement of the expedition in McClure’s Magazine.
In 1901, the expedition landed on Alger Island to set up a camp sight.
Evelyn Baldwin, the leader, carries an American flag.
Baldwin was confident this attempt “to determine the secrets so jealously guarded by the Ice Sphinx of the North” would succeed where others had failed.
In 1901, Baldwin’s 42-man team set off for Franz Josef Land, the world’s northernmost archipelago.
On board was Anthony Fiala, a budding photographer who left his day job as a newspaper sketch artist and engraver to join the expedition.
Over the next year, Fiala produced what is “very likely the earliest footage of any expedition to the Arctic,” according to Capelotti, whose book, “The Greatest Show in the Arctic,” chronicles their attempt.
A photograph from September 8, 1901, shows a glacier
between the islands that comprise Franz Josef Land.
It was donated to National Geographic in 1986 by Fiala’s grandson, Ronald Fiala, and is the oldest film in our archives.
Seaman D.S. Mackiernan and First Assistant Scientist Russell Porter return to camp with their sled dogs in the spring of 1905.
Fiala later described his tactics for working in the -30-degree tundra without overexposing or cracking the film.
He used a bioscope—a motion camera—to “secure views of men, dogs and ponies moving over the ice-fields,” he wrote in a 1907 article for National Geographic, along with “the advance of the America [ship] through the ice, and, if possible, a bear fight.”
To prevent the film from becoming brittle as he worked he’d wrap the camera in warm blankets.
The expedition had been stranded for two years by the time a rescue ship reached them.
Anthony Fiala is pictured at the time the lost explorers first met their rescuers.
The trip was a failure.
Baldwin’s team hardly progressed north, his leadership skills were sparse, and he was later described by Ziegler as a guy who stood around smoking cigarettes and eating pie, says Capelotti.
When they returned empty handed in 1902, Baldwin was fired.
A carcass of a polar bear is hauled aboard the ship of the second Ziegler Polar Expedition.
But Ziegler still longed for his namesake expedition to reach the North Pole, and quickly launched a second attempt with Fiala at the helm.
Before departing, the pair met with Alexander Graham Bell, National Geographic’s then-president, and Gilbert H.
Grosvenor, its editor, who solidified support for the mission.
Grosvenor’s wife designed a special flag with the Society’s name for the expedition to take with them.
(This flag still accompanies National Geographic explorers around the world.)
"Observations were made on the floating ice for longitude and for magnetic declination," wrote Ziegler of his team's scientific work.
The second trip was even more disastrous.
Fiala struck out for the Arctic in 1903, but his ship sank, leaving the expedition stranded on an island in the Franz Josef Archipelago for two years.
“They were two very different expeditions in composition and leadership, but united in one thing: their incompetence,” says Capelotti.
Amazingly, all but one man survived, thanks to a steady supply of polar bear and walrus meat and the discovery of a vein of coal.
They were found by a rescue ship and returned to America in 1905.
Unfortunately, Ziegler had died earlier that year, likely assuming the worst.
Members of the second Ziegler Polar Expedition dig in to their dinners.
Despite being stranded for two years they managed to hunt enough to stay well fed.
A few scientific findings did come out of the expedition: A book by Chief Scientist William J.
Peters—comprising meteorology and topography of the Arctic—was published by National Geographic in 1907, which included First Assistant Scientist Russell Porter’s maps, and Fiala’s photography.
“What he did had not been done by anyone before and has not been done much since,” says Capelotti about Fiala.
“It's a glimpse of who we thought we were and what we thought we were doing.
The motion footage allows us to look at it through their eyes.”
In 1909, both Robert Peary and Frederick Cook claimed competing titles of the the first to reach the North Pole.
Whether either really did has since been disputed.
The first verified team to reach the North Pole overland didn’t get there until 1968.
Fiala’s next trip took him to the jungle, as he followed Theodore Roosevelt’s so-called “River of Doubt” expedition down an Amazon tributary.
He left after six months and launched Fiala Outfits, an expedition supply company selling everything from elephant rifles to dog sledges in New York City.
The islands of the Franz Josef Land archipelago are almost entirely covered by glacier ice and sparse vegetation.
He worked as a Navy clerk and died after being hit by a car in the 1930s.
But he had a final taste of polar glory—on the gravestone he likely commissioned hails him as an arctic explorer.
“He's buried under his own arctic myth in the middle of Kansas,” says Capelotti.
Capelotti himself got a starring role in the lore that still surrounds the North Pole.
After an expedition to Franz Josef Land in 2006, he was the center of an Internet conspiracy theory claiming he’d discovered a race of giants and covered it up for the government.
“The idea that there's a biblical or extraterrestrial thing up there that's unexplainable is really persistent in our culture,” he says, laughing.
But there are other similarities between the gilded age missions to the North Pole and 21st century dreams of exploration: “You've got millionaires planning trips to the moon.”
Franz Josef Land with the GeoGarage (NHS nautical chart)
Wherever future explorers go, they’ll return with images and video to share with the masses, even if cameras no longer need to be swaddled in blankets like Fiala’s.
In his 1907 article he imagined the potential this held: “There is still land to be conquered; and it is good to know that when these unknown places are found and the flags of discovery are planted, that with the help of the sun and modern chemistry, we will all be able to view with the explorer what had once been forbidden and mysterious territory.”
Links :
- National Geographic : Anthony Fiala’s description of surviving two years stranded in the Arctic /
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Robot subs are uncovering what makes underwater volcanoes blow
Havre seamount with the GeoGarage platform
(Linz nautical charts overlaid on Google Maps)
From Wired by Sian Bradley
In 2012, the Havre Seamount was the site of the largest underwater eruption of the century.
Now, high-resolution mapping of the ocean floor has revealed previously unknown behaviours of undersea volcanoes.
The remotely operated vehicle Jason (which is about the size of a large car), landing on the seafloor at Havre submarine volcano at 900 meters below sea level
University of Tasmania, Australia.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
A pair of autonomous underwater vehicles have helped uncover details of the biggest undersea eruption of the century.
The daring mission is helping to unlock the mysteries of a rarely-seen event and shed further light on underwater volcanism.
Guided by top volcanologists from the University of Tasmania, Australia, the vehicles plunged 650 meters below sea level to map the ocean floor, shedding light on a an eruption that occurred in 2002.
That eruption, of the Havre Seamount off the coast of New Zealand, released 400 square kilometres of porous volcanic rock, some of which floated to the surface.
Satellite imagery indicates that this sort of event happens about four times every 100 years – but is something that we rarely spot.
Now, volcanologists have delved beneath the surface, and answered questions that cameras above the ocean could not.
The Havre submarine volcano 650 meters below sea level, which was the site of the largest underwater eruption of the past century
University of Tasmania, Australia.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
“When we used the submersible vehicles to go down to the seafloor in 2015, we were able to see a vast array of new volcanic products, such as 14 different lava flows at depths of between 1,220 and 650 metres beneath sea level,” says Rebecca Carey, lead researcher on the study, which has been published in the journal Science Advances.
They were able to determine, for the first time, when the eruption happened and the volcanic processes that move magma from the crust to the surface.
Water pressure is so high at those depths that magma loses some of its energy during eruption.
“Hydrostatic pressure of the eruption column probably suppressed most of the explosivity that would have occurred if the volcano were on land,” Carey says.
“The eruption produced lava rather than a massive jet and eruption column that we see for land eruptions of this magnitude – such as Mount St.
Helens in 1980, or Chaiten volcano in 2008.” Their mapping has shown that around 80 per cent of the volcanic rock was dispersed into the Pacific Ocean, landing on Micronesian island beaches and the east Australian seaboard.
High resolution seafloor map of the Havre undersea volcano caldera with lava that erupted in 2012 lavas shown in red
University of Tasmania, Australia.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
Volcanic eruptions on the seafloor are not unusual; around 80 per cent of Earth’s volcanism occurs below the waves.
Detecting them, however, is very tricky indeed.
To notice this type of eruption you need just the right conditions that enabled volcanic rock to accumulate on the sea surface in 2012.
"Being such a unique event, we knew it had the possibility to strongly contribute to the fundamental yet outstanding questions of how submarine volcanism works,” Carey says.
This is why the researchers sent the autonomous vehicle Sentry and the remotely operated vehicle Jason to the depths of the ocean in 2015.
Jason had various sampling equipment on board, to collect rocks or fragmental deposits.
Sentry was key for navigating a steep and rocky ocean floor.
"Sentry can manoeuvre in all directions, whereas other AUVs (Autonomous underwater vehicles) can only go in the forward direction,” Carey says.
Importantly, Sentry provided them with a high resolution map of the seafloor which revealed that underwater volcanoes are as complex as they are on land.
(l-r) Images of ship-based mapping compared with Sentry mapping
University of Tasmania, Australia
"What is really interesting in that the lava flows look exactly like how they would if they were on land,” Carey says.
The discovery also opens up further research into how marine life copes with a gigantic volcanic eruption.
"Havre's eruption produced a blanket of fragmental pumice and ash.
That ash blanket has destroyed most of the life on the volcano," Carey says.
"There were some species recolonising the volcano after just 3 years… the biologists are very interested in what species they are and whether they are local recruits or exotic species."
Links :
- WHOI : a close-up look at a rare underwater eruption
- ScienceAlert : We All Nearly Missed The Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded
- NASA : NASA satellites pinpoint volcanic eruption (2012) / High-resolution view of Havre Seamount Pumice
- Wired : Havre seamount, the source of Kermadec island pumice raft ? (2012) / New volcanic cone confirms the Havre seamount eruption
- Smithsonian : Havre seamount
- GeoGarage blog : Mysterious pumice raft in Pacific explained /How a fake island landed on Google Earth / New map reveals New Zealand's seafloor in ... / Sophisticated unmanned submarines investigate ... / Kiwi scientists uncover stunning underwater insights / Origin of seabed more complex than scientists first ... / Scientists to survey uncharted seafloor area / New volcanic island unveils explosive past / Nereus deep sea sub 'implodes' 10km-down
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Australia AHS layer update in the GeoGarage platform
10 nautical raster charts updated & 2 new charts added
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