Germany (BSH) layer update in the GeoGarage platform

80 nautical raster charts updated & 6 new charts added

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Norway (NHS) layer update in the GeoGarage platform

131 nautical raster charts updated

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Very spectacular is the Atlantic road, running for 8 km almost in the middle of the sea from on island to another, in the western county of Møre og Romsdal

The way the world catches fish defies all economic logic

Industrialization hasn't made fishing more efficient.

(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

From Quartz by Gwynn Guilford

It’s often said that there are plenty more fish in the sea.
For most of human history, that was true.
From ancient Minoans to postwar industrial trawl fleets, mankind found wealth from harvesting more and more of the sea’s seemingly endless abundance of creatures.
The more fishermen tried, the more their catches grew, such that, between 1950 and the mid-1990s, global fish landings more than quintupled.

And then, suddenly, that stopped.
Since then, the world has hauled up roughly the same volume of fish out of the ocean each year—about 85 million tonnes, on average.
It’s not hard to guess the culprit: overfishing.
Similarly well-known is that overfishing is a problem of biology: we’re hauling up too many fish, leaving too few adult ones behind to repopulate.

 courtesy of Atlas (data : FAO)

But if fewer and fewer fish are left behind to replace themselves, why have we caught around the same volume of them each year for the last two decades?
The answer, explored in an important new World Bank study, reveals a little-understood dimension of why overfishing is so destructive.
It’s not just biologically unsustainable; our global marine fisheries are also uneconomic.
That’s because we’re pouring more and more effort into fishing, and still getting the same result.

Nowadays, more people are using more boats, more fuel, and more technology to catch sea creatures than ever before in human history.
The global fleet doubled in the last four decades, according to UN FAO data, and the ranks of fishermen has more than tripled.
At the same time, heavy technology investment—in things like more powerful engines, fancier fishing gear and spiffy fish-location devices—likely boosted fishing efficiency of fishing capital and labor, according to 2017 World Bank report, The Sunken Billions Revisited.

 Different fishing techniques inflict a very specific type of environmental damage.

Taken together, global fishing effort has surged at least fourfold in the last 40 years, while the level of catches has not even doubled, says Charlotte de Fontaubert, senior fisheries specialist at the World Bank.
“If we have to fish four times as much in order to catch twice as much fish, the only way to explain that differential between the increase in catching and [the catch levels] is that stocks have declined,” says de Fontaubert, who co-authored The Sunken Billions Revisited.

This is a problem of productivity, the measure of how much value a person creates per hour.
When productivity grows, it means we’re making more with less.
Global marine fisheries are doing something approaching the opposite: making the same with more.
But how has such an unproductive industry been chugging along for so long?

In its fuller picture of the global marine balance sheet, the new World Bank report tallies up not just assets of fisheries, but also costs and subsidies.
The global fishing industry landed $164 billion worth of marine fish in 2014.
However, taking into account labor, capital, and fuel costs and subsidies, global fisheries produced a net loss of $44 billion, according to the World Bank.

By encouraging more fishing than is economical, government subsidies crash the supply of fish all the more, says Glenn-Marie Lange, economist at the World Bank and one of the report’s authors.
“There are too many vessels out there that are not only financially unprofitable but fishing way beyond what can be regenerated by the natural population,” says Lange.

Of course, that’s not true for every country.
Out of 139 countries evaluated, 64 generated profits from their fisheries, even after accounting for subsidies.
But the fisheries of 75 countries aren’t actually generating wealth.

There’s a word for these fisheries: zombies, unprofitable enterprises kept on life support by government subsidies.
One problem with zombies is that they waste resources that could be directed toward productive uses—for example, retraining fishermen to work in other industries.
Another problem is that, freed from suffering the punishing effects of economic logic, they can keep prices low.
That can drive sustainably operating fishermen out of business.

For seafood lovers—at least, the ones who don’t eat exclusively sustainably caught fish—there is a perverse upside to the zombie status quo.
Sushi sure is cheap when it’s bought and paid for by taxpayers.

Links :

• Washington Univ : Simple rules can help fishery managers cope with ecological complexity
• Wired : This is what China's overfishing problem looks like
• GeoGarage blog : The fishing wars are coming /  Getting serious about overfishing / Nine of world's biggest fishing firms sign up to ... / Overfished and under-protected: Oceans on the ... / The fishing wars are coming / This startup wants to reverse the tide on our overfished oceans / Marine food chains at risk of collapse, extensive ... / Tuna and mackerel populations suffer catastrophic ... / The high seas are too precious to be left to ...

New Zealand (Linz) layer update in the GeoGarage platform

3 nautical raster charts updated

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Why these tiny ocean creatures are eating plastic

When plastic trash degrades in the ocean, it doesn't just go away: It becomes countless tiny particles, and little creatures called larvaceans sweep it up--and into the food chain.

Haunting words from one of the most daring Antarctic adventures of all time

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew embarked on an ambitious expedition:
completing the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent.
"Life, to me, is the greatest of all games. The danger lies in treating it as a trivial game."
What words or phrases were most haunting for you?

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Walking in Shackleton's footsteps / Scott and Shackleton logbooks prove Antarctic sea ... / Henry Worsley's journey wasn't foolhardy – it was ... / Shackleton's icebound survival story, up close / Shackleton Death or Glory - Rough Seas / Ernest Shackleton voyage to be retraced by modern ...

Image of the week : signs of ships in the clouds

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response

From NASA by Adam Voiland

Ships churning through the Atlantic Ocean produced this patchwork of bright, criss-crossing cloud trails off the coast of Portugal and Spain.
The narrow clouds, known as ship tracks, form when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships emit as exhaust or that form from gases in the exhaust.
Ship tracks typically form in areas where low-lying stratus and cumulus clouds are present.

Some of the pollution particles generated by ships (especially sulfates) are soluble in water and serve as the seeds around which cloud droplets form.
Clouds infused with ship exhaust have more and smaller droplets than unpolluted clouds.
As a result, the light hitting the polluted clouds scatters in many directions, making them appear brighter and thicker than unpolluted marine clouds, which are typically seeded by larger, naturally occurring particles such as sea salt.

Several shipping lanes intersect in the waters off the coast of Portugal.
Visualizations of ship traffic show large numbers of ships entering and exiting the Mediterranean Sea in this region.
Many of them hug the coast of the Iberian Peninsula as they travel toward ports in northern Europe. In this case, the large volume of ships along the coast appear to have brightened the clouds so much that it is difficult to distinguish individual ship tracks.
The more visible tracks are several hundred kilometers offshore, and many of these appear to be created by ships heading out of the Mediterranean Sea toward North America.
Others are probably the result of ships from South America and Africa charting courses toward northern Europe.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on January 16, 2018. Some of the criss-crossing clouds stretch hundreds of kilometers from end to end.
The narrow ends of the clouds are youngest, while the broader, wavier ends are older.

Age is not the only factor that affects the appearance of ship tracks. NASA scientists have identified specific atmospheric conditions that affect their brightness, or albedo.
One key factor is the structure of clouds already in the area. Ship tracks clouds that form near open-cell clouds—many of which are present in this image—tend to be brighter than those that form near close-celled clouds.
(Open-cell clouds look like empty compartments, whereas closed-cell clouds look like compartments stuffed with clouds.)

The high reflectivity of ship track clouds means they shade Earth’s surface from incoming sunlight, which produces a local cooling effect.
However, determining whether ship tracks have a global cooling effect is challenging because the way particles affect clouds remains one of the least understood and most uncertain aspects of climate science.

Links :

• Chen, Y.-C. et al. (2015, April 3) Aerosol-cloud interactions in ship tracks using Terra MODIS/MISR
• NASA’s Earth Observing System (2007) The Dynamic Atmosphere - Ship Tracks
• NASA Earth Observatory (2012, March 8) Ship Tracks off the California Coast
• NASA Earth Observatory (2012, March 8) Ship Tracks off the Kamchatka Peninsula
• Toll, V. et al. (2017, December 28) Volcano and Ship Tracks Indicate Excessive Aerosol-Induced Cloud Water Increases in a Climate Model
• GeoGarage blog : Ship tracks off North America / Ship tracks reveal pollution's effects on clouds / Image of the week : satellite's view of ship pollution / Warns of the effects of shipping emission policy on ...

Mega-rocket test succeeds, but not landing at sea

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Demonstration Mission launched from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on 6 February 2018, at 20:45 UTC (15:45 ET).

For its maiden flight, Falcon Heavy’s second stage will attempt to place the payload, Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster, into a precessing Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the Sun.

For this first flight test, Falcon Heavy’s two side cores launched the Thaicom 8 satellite (May 2016) and the CRS-9 mission (July 2016).

Following booster separation, Falcon Heavy’s two side cores landed at SpaceX’s Landing Zones 1 and 2 (LZ-1 and LZ-2) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

Falcon Heavy’s center core attempted to land on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

From Maritime Executive

On Tuesday, aerospace firm SpaceX conducted the first test of its Falcon Heavy rocket, the heaviest capacity launch vehicle in operation today.
The launch was a success, the rocket's dummy payload is in orbit, and two of three booster sections have returned to Earth for reuse.

  Falcon Heavy animation :

When Falcon Heavy lifts off, it will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two. With the ability to lift into orbit nearly 64 metric tons (141,000 lb)---a mass greater than a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel--Falcon Heavy can lift more than twice the payload of the next closest operational vehicle, the Delta IV Heavy, at one-third the cost.

Falcon Heavy's first stage is composed of three Falcon 9 nine-engine cores whose 27 Merlin engines together generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft.

Following liftoff, the two side boosters separate from the center core and return to landing sites for future reuse.

The center core, traveling further and faster than the side boosters, also returns for reuse, but lands on a drone ship located in the Atlantic Ocean.

At max velocity the Roadster will travel 11 km/s (7mi/s) and travel 400 million km (250 million mi) from Earth.

The Falcon Heavy is comprised of three of the company's Falcon 9 first stage boosters, which are designed to return to ground (or to a seagoing landing pad) for recovery.

 Synchronized landing of the two side booster cores.

Photo : Jared Haworth / We Report Space

In earlier launches of the Falcon 9 - a single-booster variant that is designed to put commercial satellites into orbit - SpaceX has managed to recover the rocket's valuable first stage on a specially-equipped, DP-enabled landing barge.
It has also successfully experimented with the recovery of its rocket nose cones at sea, using a modified crewboat with a grabbing device to catch each half of the cone.
By bringing its equipment back to shore intact for refurbishment, SpaceX hopes achieve "full and rapid reusability" and greatly reduce the cost per launch.

During the second Falcon 9 rocket launch (GovSat, January 31st, 2018), the company chose not to land the booster after takeoff and instead dispensed it in the ocean.

In a weird twist, the Falcon 9 still managed to survive its fall into the deep sea waters and is bobbing intact in the Atlantic.
see @elonmusk_tweet

The Falcon Heavy test required a highly complex, choreographed sequence of events.
After takeoff, the two side boosters separated from the main body of the rocket and fell away.
They reduced speed, rotated and flew back for a successful landing on shore.
The center stage separated successfully and reentered the atmosphere, but the video feed aboard the landing barge cut off before touchdown.

To stop the polemic :
SpaceX has historically shown every failure, some epic explosions and missed landings...

So no doubt SpaceX hided anything.

Core crashed beside platform and that was it.

Nothing happened in frame anyhow other than smoke and one piece of debris.

Overall mission was an awesomely impressive success
see Elon Musk describing Core failure

In a news conference later on Tuesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the center stage was only able to relight one out of its three engines during landing, and it missed the barge and hit the water at 300 miles an hour.

Nose cone fairing recovery at sea was also listed as part of Tuesday's launch evolution, but it appears that it was not successful either.
"Fairing recovery has proven surprisingly difficult. It turns out if you pop a parachute on the fairing you've got this giant awkward thing - it tends to interfere with the airflow on the parachute, and it gets all twisty," Musk said.
"We've got a boat to catch the fairing - it's like a giant catcher's mitt in boat form."

 The modified crewboat "Mr. Stevens," likely designed to catch Falcon 9 nose cone fairings

(file image via social media)

While the reusable components headed back to the surface, the second stage and its payload achieved orbital trajectory around Earth.
If all is successful, SpaceX says, the payload will head for a slingshot orbit around the sun, then out into space.

In a whimsical twist, the dummy payload is an actual dummy, seated behind the steering wheel of Musk's Tesla Roadster.
(Elon Musk is the charismatic entrepreneur behind both Tesla and SpaceX.)

Links :

• Space : SpaceX Rocket Survives Experimental High-Thrust Landing at Sea (January 31st)
• DailyMail : Elon Musk confirms the middle booster of Falcon Heavy EXPLODED after it missed its drone ship and hit the ocean at 300mph during SpaceX's historic launch of the world's most powerful rocket
• PopularMechanics : The Center Booster of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Crashed Into the Ocean
• TheVerge : The middle booster of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket failed to land on its drone ship 
• GeoGarage blog : SpaceX Falcon 9 launch with Dragon & successful ... / SpaceX just asked permission to launch 4,425 ... / SpaceX to try ocean platform landing of Falcon rocket /
  

France set to become a European Offshore Wind powerhouse by 2022 ?

There was a big 19% increase in wind generation in Europe last year.

[Vattenfall / Flickr]

From Bloomberg by Jeremy Hodges and Jess Shankleman

• WindEurope sees French turbine orders passing U.K., Germany
• Offshore wind investments to recover after contracting in 2017

Europe’s wind-power industry expects new French offshore turbine installations to overtake the U.K. and Germany by 2022, boosting President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to increase renewable energy.

Such has been the slow progress with early projects that floating offshore wind is likely to leapfrog them
France has made a significant commitment to offshore windfarms but still hasn’t built any, however that situation is changing as floating offshore wind projects come to the fore

Construction off the French coast is expected to ramp up from 2020 and turn the country in the fourth-biggest offshore wind generator with about 4.3 gigawatts capacity by 2030, according to the Brussels-based WindEurope industry group.

Macron has repeatedly promised to turn France into a green energy leader and reduce the country’s reliance on nuclear power.
He’s trying to cut through bureaucratic red tape that has delayed offshore wind projects tendered in 2012.
His government said in November that it aims to trim offshore project development to less than seven years from more than a decade.



The U.K. and Germany currently lead in offshore wind installations with 1,753 and 1,168 installed turbines respectively, according to a WindEurope report on Tuesday.

98% of offshore wind capacity comes from the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Investment in new offshore wind farms is expected to recover marginally in 2018 after a sharp drop last year, according to the industry group, which estimates more than 9 billion euros ($11.2 billion) of projects could reach financial close this year.

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy currently accounts for 51% of new installed capacity.

Last year investment in new European offshore wind projects dropped almost three-fifths, to 7.5 billion euros, after countries cut subsidies and technology costs fell.
Conversely, the refinancing of existing projects jumped 80 percent to 4.6 billion euros.
“Project sponsors have used the favorable market conditions and increased liquidity to restructure their project debt,” WindEurope reported.

By 2020 WindEurope expects European offshore wind capacity of 25 gigawatts.
The market will continue to concentrate around the North Sea, where the U.K. will connect 3.3 gigawatts of new offshore capacity by 2020.

Fifteen miles off Scotland's North Sea coast is a new wind farm,

with the world's first floating turbines.

During the period, Germany is expected to install 2.3 gigawatts while Belgium and the Netherlands will install 1.3 gigawatts and Denmark will add 1 gigawatt of offshore power.

Links :

• Offshore Wind : France plans to play catch-up as floaters leapfrog first round projects
• Euractiv : Britain ahead of EU pack in low-carbon transition / Winds of change: Seven key statistics of Europe’s booming offshore wind industry
• Reuters : France sets out ten-point plan to double wind power capacity by 2023
• Fortune : Europe's Wind Power Industry Is Blowing Up Offshore
• The Guardian : UK built half of Europe's offshore wind power in 2017
• e360 : After an Uncertain Start, U.S. Offshore Wind Is Powering Up
• GeoGarage blog :There's enough wind energy over the oceans to ... / Offshore wind power cheaper than new nuclear / North Sea wind power hub: A giant wind farm to ... / Wind power takes to the seas / The new Viking invasion: How Denmark's offshore wind giant / Statoil to build the world's first floating wind farm ... / Wind turbines policy is all at sea / Image of the week : the London array, the world's largest wind farm ... / Offshore wind cable plan highlights grid bottleneck 

How blockchain is strengthening tuna traceability to combat illegal fishing

For the global tuna industry, which has historically struggled with illegal and environmentally dubious fishing practices, the use of blockchain could be a turning point.

photo : WWF

From The Conversation by Candice Visser & Quentin Hanish

In a significant development for global fisheries, blockchain technology is now being used to improve tuna traceability to help stop illegal and unsustainable fishing practices in the Pacific Islands tuna industry.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Australia, Fiji and New Zealand, in partnership with US-based tech innovator ConsenSys, tech implementer TraSeable and tuna fishing and processing company Sea Quest Fiji Ltd, has just launched a pilot project in the Pacific Islands tuna industry that will use blockchain technology to track the journey of tuna from “bait to plate”.

from GovInsiderAsia

The aim is to help stop illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and human rights abuses in the tuna industry.
These have included reports of corruption, illegal trafficking and human slavery on tuna fishing boats.

It is hoped the use of blockchain technology will strengthen transparency and enable full traceability, thereby countering significant threats to licensing revenue and crew working conditions and safety, and broader impacts on the environment.

Tracking tuna from catch to customer : 

The provenance of tuna, backed by blockchain technology,

and accessible to actors all along the supply chain.

Blockchain is evolving beyond Bitcoin

Blockchain technology is rapidly evolving beyond Bitcoin.
Emerging applications are geared to improve business in many ways – including supply-chain transparency for all kinds of products.

A blockchain is a digital ledger that is distributed, decentralised, verifiable and irreversible.
It can be used to record transactions of almost anything of value.

Essentially, it is a shared (not copied) database that everyone in the network can see and update.
This system provides multiple benefits for supply chains, including high levels of transparency.
This is because everyone in the network can see and verify the ledger, and no individual can alter or delete the history of transactions.

For consumers, this means you will be able to scan a code on an item you want to buy and find out exactly where it has been before landing in your hands.
It will be easy to answer those tricky questions about whether or not an item – such as a fish – is sustainable, ethical or legal.

As seen here, once the tuna is caught, a reusable tag is attached, from which information is then automatically uploaded to blockchain.

photo : WWF

Using blockchain to trace tuna

The WWF pilot project will use a combination of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, quick response (QR) code tags and scanning devices to collect information about the journey of a tuna at various points along the supply chain.
While this use of technology is not new for supply-chain tracking, the exciting part is that the collected information will then be recorded using blockchain technology.

Tracking will start as soon as the tuna is caught.
Once a fish is landed, it will be attached with a reusable RFID tag on the vessel.
Devices fitted on the vessel, at the dock and in the processing factory will then detect the tags and automatically upload information to the blockchain.

Once the fish has been processed, the reusable RFID tag will be switched for a cheaper QR code tag, which will be attached to the product packaging.
The unique QR code will be linked to the blockchain record associated with the particular fish and its original RFID tag.
The QR code tag will be used to trace the rest of the journey of the fish to the consumer.

At the moment, linking tags is not difficult because the project is focusing on whole round exports – that is, the whole fresh fish minus head, gills and guts.
It gets a little more complicated when the fish is cut up into loins, steaks, cubes and cans, but the project team is now able to link the QR code tags on the packages of the processed fish with the record of the original fish on the blockchain.

While it may be possible to use RFID tags throughout the whole process, the expense of these tags could prohibit smaller operators in the fishing industry from participating in the scheme if it expands.
There is also potential to use near field communicator (NFC) devices to track the fish all the way to the consumer in the future.

Marine Stewardship Council-certified yellowfin tuna processed at SeaQuest processing plant at Walu Bay, Suva, Fiji, December 2017.

photo : WWF

Bringing much-needed transparency to the industry

While this use of the blockchain is the first of its kind for the Pacific Islands region, it is not a world first.
A company called Provenence and the International Pole and Line Association (IPLA) has already completed a successful pilot project tracing products from Indonesian tuna fisheries to consumers in the UK.

Blockchain technology to boost food transparency

Provenance is also working on using blockchain to track a range of other physical things – including cotton, fashion, coffee and organically farmed food products.
However, the potential of blockchain goes further.
For example, Kodak recently launched its own cryptocurrency to help photographers track and protect their digital intellectual property.

Blockchain technology is just starting to change the way business is done.
If it delivers on its promise of supply-chain transparency, it will be a great tool to help ensure that industries – including the tuna industry – are doing the right thing.

This will give consumers more information on which to base their purchasing decisions.
For the global tuna industry, which has historically struggled with illegal and environmentally dubious fishing practices, this could be a turning point as visionary fishing companies demonstrate true stewardship and begin to open up the industry to full transparency.

Links :

• The Conversation : Demystifying the blockchain: a basic user guide / Blockchain is useful for a lot more than just Bitcoin
• Gizmodo : Even the Tuna Conservationists Want a Piece of This Blockchain Action 
• Provenance : From shore to plate: Tracking tuna on the blockchain 
• Stuff : WWF uses blockchain to improve transparency in tuna industry

Hacked at Sea: Concerns grow over lax cybersecurity for ships, ports

From NewsDeeply by Jessica Leber

As hacking risks grow and maritime operations become more digitally connected, experts in industry and government have long said no one is prepared.
This summer was a wake-up call.

The port of New York and New Jersey is the largest port on the east coast of the United States, touted by officials as the “gateway to one of the most concentrated and affluent consumer markets in the world.”
But for a few weeks last summer, the goods moving through one of its terminals slowed to a crawl because of a global cyberattack that originated 4,500 miles away.

“The delays were six to eight hours to pick up a container,” said Jeffrey Bader, chief executive of the trucking company Golden Carriers, recalling when a terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, switched to manual operations while its systems were down.
“The line was many, many miles long. Trucks, trucks, trucks.”

The terminal’s operator, APM Terminals, is a subsidiary of the world’s largest container shipping company, A.P. Moller-Maersk Group.
The company, which transports roughly 20 percent of the world’s cargo containers, was among the hardest hit by the NotPetya ransomware.
NotPetya sprouted in hacked accounting software in Ukraine in late June, and by exploiting a weakness in Microsoft Windows operating systems, quickly went global as it infected corporate networks and locked down the data of contaminated computers.
Hackers would usually restore access after a ransom payment is made, but NotPetya was engineered to cause chaos more than extort funds, cybersecurity experts say.

Maersk and many other global firms affected, such as FedEx and pharmaceutical giant Merck, were not specific targets of the attack, but that didn’t matter.
In a “heroic effort” over 10 days, Maersk reinstalled 4,000 servers, 45,000 personal computers and 2,500 applications, chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe said at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last month.

Snabe called the episode a “very significant wake-up call” that cost Maersk, which has been applauded for being unusually public about the whole episode, as much as $300 million.

The entire shipping and maritime sector, a crucial part of the global economy that impacts ocean health, heard that alarm bell.
It is, according to many experts, an industry that is lagging in its preparedness to face modern cybersecurity threats.
As ships become more connected to online systems and controlled by software, the risks will only grow.

“This summer is when everybody woke up,” then U.S. Federal Maritime Commissioner William Doyle said at the Shipping 2030 North America conference in New York City in November.

Companies, governments and experts have, in fact, been gathering at meetings and conferences for the last several years to talk about cybersecurity risks both at sea and at port.
These extend beyond the usual I.T.
and business concerns common to any corporation to the industrial, navigational and information systems that, if breached, could pose national security, environment and worker safety risks.
Both the International Maritime Organization and the global shipping industry group BIMCO have issued cybersecurity guidelines in the last two years, as have national governments and the U.S.
military.

But the shipping sector as a whole has been playing catch-up, and it still has a long way to go.
“We are about 20 years behind the ball compared to many industries worldwide,” Kate Belmont, a lawyer specialized in maritime cybersecurity issues at the firm Blank Rome in New York City, said at the November conference.

The long lifetime of ships and the relatively slow pace at which vessel systems at sea have been connected to the internet, along with the particularly global and interconnected nature of the business, all help to explain why the industry has been slow to grapple with cybersecurity threats.

But cyber attacks and everyday malware infections are increasingly common.
The Port of Los Angeles’ executive director recently testified before a congressional homeland security committee that the port’s three-year-old Cybersecurity Operations Center is handling an unprecedented 20 million-plus cyber intrusion attempts.
A survey conducted by maritime consulting firm Futurenautics found that 40 percent of 5,000 shipboard officers surveyed said they’ve sailed on a ship they know has been infected with malware, its chief executive KD Adamson said.

Unlike Maersk, most shipping companies are tight-lipped about data breaches.
“Attacks have been occurring, but nobody wants to talk about, so a lot of people don’t believe they are happening,” Belmont said.

Ken Munro, who works with the firm Pen Test Partners and conducts what is called “penetration testing” to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities for clients, contrasted the shipping industry with the aviation sector, which he says has deployed anonymous reporting systems for all kinds of situations.
In that industry, he said, “an incident is viewed as something you can learn from, not something you should hide.”

Although many worst-case scenarios at sea – ranging from a hacker taking control of a vessel’s navigation systems or causing a ship to spill its oil, explode or sink – have been shown to be theoretically possible, the list of major publicly known cybersecurity incidents is relatively short and not as dramatic.

Over the last few years, cybersecurity specialists have uncovered or demonstrated software vulnerabilities and, just as worrying, human oversights that could allow a cyber intruder to gain access to or control of a variety of ship systems.
Among them: the navigational Electronic Chart Display and Information System; a load planning system that balances weight on a containerized ship; or even the voyage data recorder.

One researcher demonstrated at a conference in 2017 how he could quickly take control of a billionaire’s super yacht, according to the Guardian.
Another showed that a ship’s satellite communications system was not only connected to the public internet but used default login credentials (for example, a username like “admin”) that could allow anyone relatively easy access.

USB sticks that seafarers still carry and can connect to ship systems are one way malware can make its way to ships and cause trouble, according to Andy Davis, transport assurance practice director at the cybersecurity consulting firm NCC Group.
But while ships used to be isolated and off the grid while at sea, now-common “satcom” boxes can also provide entry for hackers looking for access to a vessel’s systems.

“Hackers who have a modicum of sense, who can discover these devices on the internet, they can find security flaws in them and compromise ships,” said Munro.

It is also still uncommon, he said, for ship technology manufacturers to offer a straightforward way for outside researchers to flag software vulnerabilities or bugs they find.
“The manufacturers – they really haven’t woken up to security yet,” said Munro.
“It’s going to take them several years to get onboard vessel control systems to a point of security where everyone else is already at.”

 Shodan now live tracking ships via VSAT antennas exposing web services

For now, major publicly known targeted attacks have largely involved stealing critical information, not compromising a ship’s physical systems.
In a 2017 report about an unnamed company, Verizon’s cybersecurity team described how pirates hacked into a ship’s cargo management system to target valuable crates.
In another example, the Port of Antwerp in 2013 reported that smugglers had gained access to data system to make it easier bring drugs through the port.

But it can also be hard to tell whether a cyber incident has even occurred.
After the separate collisions of two U.S. Navy destroyers in 2017, speculation that hackers were involved prompted the Navy to include a cyber attack assessment in one of the cases as part of a larger investigation, according to Foreign Policy.
Two experts following the Navy’s cyber assessment wrote about why these kinds of forensic investigations are new and difficult.
“It is clear that we do not yet have the basic tools to definitively answer the question, ‘Were we hacked or did we break it?’ ” they said.

Another widely discussed episode on the Black Sea this past summer left unanswered questions.
The U.S. Maritime Administration issued an advisory that about 20 vessels in the area were reporting interference with their GPS systems that could affect navigation.
Outside researchers found patterns of GPS “spoofing,” in which a false signal confuses a GPS receiver and could potentially misdirect the ship.
While it’s well known that it’s possible to spoof GPS signals – and the U.S. government is working to develop a more secure alternative to GPS – there’s no definitive answer yet for what happened.

Vessel at Sochi Harbor reporting itself at Sochi Airport.

By running its algorithms on data from vessels' Automatic Identification System (AIS), Windward experts identified two additional instances of mass GPS interference in 2017, lasting for months each. 

As ships become more controlled by software or, in some cases, even autonomously operated, questions about cybersecurity will become even more important – or may slow down adoption of these kinds of technologies.
“Right now, cybersecurity risks haven’t been solved at all,” said Lars Jensen, founder of the Danish maritime cybersecurity firm CyberKeel, referring to autonomous technologies.
At a far more basic level, he says, companies need to do more to train workers and develop more sophisticated strategies to protect critical systems.

As a legal matter, it’s now even possible that ship owners could potentially be held accountable if a real disaster strikes because of a cyberattack they could have easily prevented, attorney Belmont said.
“The definition of seaworthiness now has changed,” she said.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Nightmare scenario: ship critical systems easy target ... / Cyber threats prompt return of radio for ship navigation / How hackers are targeting the shipping industry /
  Your ship has probably been cyber attacked / US navy returns to celestial navigation amid fears of computer hack / Mass GPS spoofing attack in Black Sea? / Superyacht GPS spoofing experiment on the high seas / Rising fraud in the high seas / Cybercrime on the high seas: the new threat facing ... / Opinion: Were US sailors 'spoofed' into Iranian ..  / Opinion: Were US sailors 'spoofed' into Iranian ... / Combatting maritime cyber security threats / Google's global fishing watch is using 'manipulated ... / GPS back-up: World War Two technology employed
• BeCyberAwareAtSea : Guidance
• Mashable : Remotely hacking ships shouldn't be this easy, and yet..
• Business Insider : “Perfect Storm” of Cyber Security, Regulation and Cost Cutting Impacts Global Shipping, According to Allianz Safety & Shipping Review 2017
• Gov.uk :Ship security: cyber security code of practice

Galileo : Reaching you faster – when every minute matters

Search and Rescue (SAR) operations involve locating and helping people in distress.

They can be carried out in a variety of locations including at sea, in mountains or deserts, and in urban areas.

With the launch of Initial Services, Galileo will help SAR operators respond to distress signals faster and more effectively while also lowering their own exposure to risk…

Search and Rescue service is Galileo’s contribution to the international Cospas-Sarsat network.

Galileo is a EU programme, carried out in cooperation with the European Space Agency.
see also on YouTube

Red Bull Storm Chase - the most-challenging windsurfing contest

Red Bull Storm Chase 2018 extreme windsurf

France & misc. (SHOM) update in the GeoGarage platform

87 nautical raster charts updated & 4 new charts added

see GeoGarage news

Trump would open nearly all U.S. waters to drilling. But will they drill?

From NY Times by Hiroko Tabuchi & Tim Wallace

The Trump administration’s move to open nearly all of America’s coastal waters to offshore oil and gas drillingwould give energy companies access to more than a billion acres off the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts.

Mr. Trump’s plan upends a decades-long effort to balance the nation’s energy needs with protecting ocean ecosystems, and it is meeting stiff resistance from governors up and down the coasts.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced on Jan. 9 that Florida was off the table after meeting the state’s governor, Rick Scott.
But 10 days later, a senior Interior official appeared to contradict Mr. Zinke, telling a congressional hearing that the secretary’s decision was not final.

Other states are also seeking exemptions.

The California attorney general, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, has asked why the Trump administration felt Florida’s coastline was valuable enough to preserve, but not California’s.
The Republican governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, has also asked the Trump administration for a drilling exemption, citing the risks that oil and gas would pose to the “unspoiled beauty” of his state’s beaches.

All told, at least 15 governors of coastal states, one-third of them Republican, have publicly opposed Mr. Trump’s offshore drilling plan.
How did we get here, and what’s at stake?
Here’s the breakdown.

Different Presidents, Different Ideas on Drilling

Most coastal states control leasing off their shorelines out to three nautical miles.
At least 200 miles beyond that, the federal government owns the seabed and its mineral resources — some 1.7 billion acres’ worth.

The Department of the Interior parcels out offshore leases in those areas under five-year plans.
Both Congress and the president also have the authority to impose protections and moratoriums that render areas off limits to leasing.

The oil-rich western and central parts of the Gulf of Mexico have been open to drilling for decades, while other areas have been withheld from leasing or protected under moratoriums and other protections.

And each of the last three presidents has had differing ideas about how to parcel out leases.

These three maps break down the changing status of the offshore zones: Areas open to drilling leases, areas not yet open to leases, and areas under protection, where leases are prohibited.



President George W. Bush opened up new areas to offshore drilling for the first time in decades when he lifted a longstanding moratorium on new drilling off much of the nation’s coasts.

At the same time, a bill passed by Congress in 2006 allowed new drilling in some parts of the Gulf of Mexico but banned drilling in most of the eastern Gulf until 2022.

Much to the chagrin of environmental groups, the Obama administration initially said it would also expand offshore drilling and allow new leases off the Atlantic coastline, parts of the Gulf and the north coast of Alaska.
However, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, which killed 11 people and caused the worst-ever oil spill in American waters, triggered a reversal of Mr. Obama’s plans.

In the final weeks of his administration, Mr. Obama called for what he described as a permanent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along wide areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic Seaboard, a move meant to bolster his environmental legacy.

President Trump’s proposal seeks to reverse that legacy.

Under its new plan, the Interior Department would open 25 of 26 regions of the outer continental shelf to drilling.
That would leave only the North Aleutian Basin, the traditional territory of many Native Alaskans and home to one of the world’s biggest salmon runs, off limits to drilling.

The eastern Gulf would also remain out of bounds until 2022 because of the 2006 moratorium. But after that it, too, could be opened to drilling under the Trump plan.

Separately, drilling is banned within about 600,000 square miles of marine and Great Lakes waters designated as marine sanctuaries or monuments.

Just how much oil lies off America’s coasts, and how much drilling could actually happen?

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which manages offshore leasing, estimates that the areas opened up to drilling under Mr. Trump’s plan hold nearly 45 billion barrels of oil, of which 21 billion barrels would be economically recoverable assuming oil prices remain around $60 a barrel.
(To put that in perspective, since 1970, the western and central zones of the Gulf have yielded about 14.5 billion barrels of oil.)

While those are large amounts, there are significant oil reserves still to be found in the western and central Gulf, which are already open to drilling.
There, some 45 billion barrels of oil reserves are up for grabs, of which 37 billion barrels could be produced economically at current oil prices.

Stated another way: Almost two-thirds of the nation’s oil reserves that companies can hope to drill for while still turning a profit lie in seas already open to drilling.
Meanwhile, there’s little recoverable oil and gas in the South Atlantic or the Straits of Florida, or off the Washington and Oregon coast, or off Alaska outside the north shore.

The abundance of cheap oil and gas from onshore fracking in the United States has already diminished the incentive for companies to go drill in new offshore zones.
Given the risks and costs of building wells in seas that have seen little development to date, not to mention the possibility that a new administration could again change offshore policy down the road, analysts don’t expect a rush into newly opened waters soon.



Links :

• NYTimes : Mr. Zinke's Risky Venture into Deep Water
• OilPrice : Shell Snaps Up Nine Blocks In Mexico Oil Tender / Mexico's Oil Dilemma Continues In 2018
• Energy voice : Mexico hopes for boost to energy sector as it begins oil and gas auction 
• Business Wire : Total Announces Major Deepwater Discovery In The Gulf Of Mexico
• Newsweek : Will Trump's Oil Drilling Mistake Cause Another Deepwater Disaster?
• Surfrider : Learn how you can protect your coast from offshore oil drilling 

Solution: ‘Triangulation and Motion Sickness’

From QuantaMag by Praddep Mutalik

A method for estimating distances in sailing and astrophysics helps explain why riding on buses and boats can make us nauseous.

This month’s Insights puzzle was inspired by a new way to determine the value of the Hubble constant, which quantifies how rapidly the universe is expanding by measuring the distance to a pair of colliding neutron stars.
This method opens up the possibility of significantly improving the accuracy of distance measurements to faraway astronomical objects.
We recalled that, for centuries, surveyors have used a method called triangulation to calculate the distance to an object without physically traveling to it.
This triangulation method, which can still be used for nearby astronomical objects, uses basic trigonometry to produce accurate distance estimates based on angles measured to the object from two different points a known distance apart.
This was the basis for our first problem.

Problem 1

You are sailing on the ocean and spot a bright light from a lighthouse due south.
You sail on an easterly course for 30 nautical miles.
You get bearings on the lighthouse again and find that it is now 53.13 degrees south of west.
How far was the lighthouse from you when you first spotted it? How far is it from you now?

As Ty Rex pointed out, we have to assume plane geometry here because the answers vary with latitude on a spherical surface, especially close to the poles (as readers who know about the famous “color of the bear” puzzle will recognize).
This should not be a problem in the middle latitudes of most planet-size objects given the small distances specified.
Here’s the answer in Ty Rex’s words:

The right-angled triangle formed by the initial and final positions and the lighthouse is similar to the famous (3,4,5) triangle (note that tan 53.13 ~ 4/3), with the path of the boat being on the “3” leg.
Hence the initial distance from the lighthouse is 40 nautical miles, and the final distance is 50 nautical miles.

The above problem assumes that our measurements of the boat’s traveled distance and our angular bearings on the lighthouse are accurate, which they would be if we used the accurate clocks, speed indicators and theodolites that we have on Earth.
However, astronomical distance measurements are affected by several sources of uncertainty, so in our second problem we assumed some uncertainty in the distance and angle measurements, and then tried to figure out how much triangulation helped.

Senior Editor Lenny Rudow as he walks through the basic steps on how to triangulate your position on the water when your technology and electronics decide to fail.

Using a compass, a pair of parallel rulers, a pencil, a map, and your eyes, these tips will help you to determine your exact position. 

Problem 2

Let’s revisit the scenario of Problem 1.
Assume that you live on a planet on which there is a phenomenon of “optical wind” that causes lensing effects so that you can be sure that your estimates of the direction of an object are accurate only within ±2 degrees.
So all you can say is that the lighthouse is somewhere between 2 degrees west of south and 2 degrees east of south.
Also, you know (or think you know) how intrinsically bright the source of the light is — it is a “standard candle” — and from this you can infer its distance from you to an accuracy of ±5 percent.
Based on this, you can narrow down the area in which this lighthouse is situated.
How large is this area?

Now suppose you triangulate as before.
With the aid of the optical wind, you sail 30 nautical miles (which you can measure accurately, of course) and then again find the lighthouse to be 53.13 degrees south of west, this time with an error of ±2 degrees.
You can also infer the distance to the lighthouse with ±5 percent accuracy.
By triangulating this new measurement with your previous one, you can narrow down the area in which the lighthouse is situated.
How much reduction can you achieve?

The original area of uncertainty lies between the two 4-degree sectors of two concentric circles with radii of 38 and 42 nautical miles (a sector of a circle is the portion of a circle bounded by two radii and an arc).
It is easy to calculate the difference in area between these two sectors using the formula for the area of a sector, which is simply 1/2r²q, where r is the radius and q the angle in radians.
The answer comes out to be 11.17 square nautical miles.
As Ty Rex noted, we can approximate this figure by a rectangle centered 40 nm south of the initial boat position.
This rectangle has a length of 4 nm and a width of 2.79 nm (2 × 40 × tan 4°), which gives an area of 11.17 square nm and differs from the actual area only in the third decimal place, showing that this simplification is justified.
If we do the same thing with the area of uncertainty from the second measurement, we have two overlapping rectangles with common centers tilted from each other at an angle of 53.13 degrees (see figure below).
The original rectangle (A) has diagonals 4.88 nm long, whereas the second rectangle (B) has sides of 5 nm and 3.49 nm with the long side falling in almost exactly the same direction as the diagonal of rectangle A in the northeast to southwest direction.
This means that the long side of rectangle B completely overlaps this diagonal, but the short side leaves two small triangles uncovered at the northwest and southeast ends of the other diagonal.
These two uncovered triangles have a combined area of 1.14 square nm in which the location of the lighthouse is excluded, giving an improvement in uncertainty of about 10.2 percent.
This is a slight improvement in our knowledge of the location, but certainly not a very dramatic reduction in the area of uncertainty, thanks to the large measurement errors involved.

In general, triangulation works best when the distance between the two points used is large and errors in distance estimates and angle measurements are small.
In astronomy, the largest distance we can use is the major diameter of Earth’s orbit, which, though huge on terrestrial scales, is much too puny for objects that are light-years away.

A far more dramatic reduction in uncertainty is seen in a process analogical to triangulation that is an inbuilt part of how we learn about the world, which I called “cognitive triangulation.” In cognitive triangulation, we pay special attention when the same answer emerges from two independent methods, strengthening the conclusions of both and reinforcing our faith in the reliability of our conclusions.
This is a process that has helped us build the entire edifice of scientific knowledge.
One way all of us use cognitive triangulation to learn about the world is by comparing and integrating the information coming from two different sense modalities.

This leads to our third question.

 courtesy of Captain Lang sailing tutorials

Problem 3

What does cognitive triangulation between sense modalities have to do with motion sickness?

Many commenters accurately described the proximate cause for this as the cognitive dissonance between the information coming from the sense organs in the inner ear (the semicircular canals) and the eyes, and some even described how you can lessen or avoid motion sickness.

Here is a nice description by Alex MacDonald:
When experiencing motion sickness on, say a ship, you are feeling the intense failure of your body and brain to triangulate your physical position and its movement using the sensors in your inner ear which are effectively an accelerometer and your vision — two separate mechanisms which should produce the same measurement.
If you are observing primarily your surroundings on the ship itself — say in a stateroom — they will disagree.
Your eyes show you to be still and your inner ear tells you you are moving because the ship is.
This dissonance produces motion sickness.
If you follow the well known advice to look to the horizon your vision will now confirm the entire ship to be moving as your balance mechanism knows, and the two systems more nearly agree, reducing the discomfort.
Drivers in cars trend to be less sick than passengers because the driver has additional feedback from his control of the wheel and throttle and is more likely to be visually focused at a greater distance, also reducing the body’s feedback dissonance.

This is accurate, but why does cognitive dissonance induce nausea and vomiting?
What, in the language of philosophers and evolutionary biologists, is the ultimate cause?
As Anurag Reddy first mentioned, this reaction is hypothesized to take place because the brain “assumes” that the body has been poisoned.
In fact, the vomiting in motion sickness is induced by the same area of the brain — the chemoreceptor trigger zone in the medulla — that causes vomiting in response to poisons.
This response has probably been programmed by evolution: If two normally reliable sensory systems of the brain give information that is drastically different, in the absence of trauma or illness, it is probable that one of them, or both, are malfunctioning.
In the past, when there were no warning labels on foods, and no toxicology databases to consult, one of the most common reasons for this was likely the unwitting ingestion of unknown poisons.
If the symptoms were severe, the only chance of being saved would have been to expel as much of the as yet unabsorbed poison as possible.
Hence, when the brain believes the body has been poisoned, it is programmed to try to eject all the contents of the gastrointestinal tract as soon as it can.
It may make you even more miserable, but if you were poisoned, it could very well save your life.
If not, it’s just a temporary discomfort.
Recall how many times you’ve been sick in response to food poisoning even with today’s food-safety regulations.
This response has probably saved millions of lives throughout evolutionary history.

But can’t the brain distinguish between motion sickness and poisoning?
Such an ability could evolve, but motion sickness has only become common with the relatively recent advent of high-speed travel.
A rewiring change in the brain to distinguish motion sickness from poisoning would only be fixed in evolution if there was an appreciable advantage in survival or fertility for people who could distinguish between the two.
Considering that motion sickness is rarely, if ever, fatal, this could take many hundreds of thousands of generations.
Meanwhile, it’s always a great evolutionary strategy for our brains to imagine the worst and protect us from it, so we seem to be stuck with motion sickness for the foreseeable future.

Thank you for all your interesting comments.
Please keep them coming.
Besides the comments referenced above, I enjoyed reading about the personal experiences and the cognitive triangulation “aha!” moments of readers such as Ty Rex, Randy Tompson and Jonathan J.
Dickau.