Beyond charting : nautical information for the 21st century

Transit down the very congested lower Mississippi River on the M/V Ocean Wind

From ECO by John Nyberg, chief of NOAA's Marine Charting Division

NOAA Office of Coast Survey is the US national hydrographic office, meaning that it is the authoritative source for navigational charts, and related products, within US territorial waters.
Unlike most other national hydrographic offices, which charge for their products, Coast Survey provides the digital versions of these products for free.
This free supply of information has spawned a positive change in technology.

There are countless examples of how NOAA data is and could be used, ranging from ultra-precise data for captain- less vessels to re-imagined products designed for recreational boaters.
Coast Survey enables chart users to take advantage of its enhanced products without requiring large investments in advanced technology.
It is hoped that recent efforts to increase the detail of its digital data and modernizing standards will encourage innovation and data usage beyond traditional charting.

Coast Survey continues to innovate the services it is providing to constituents and stakeholders, including those outside of the maritime navigation community, such as oceanographers, resource managers, and coastal engineering designers and developers.
To put these innovations in the context of current and future users of Coast Survey’s navigation services, let’s review the value of charting and of the underlying data in supporting decision- making by these groups.

Rolls-Royce Intelligent Awareness System

The Robots Are Coming: Unmanned Vessels and the Need for Precise Navigation Data

Recently, there have been several industry announcements about unmanned vessels, including some testbed work to be done in Norway this summer.
The use of unmanned vessels has the potential to increase maritime shipping efficiency.
As the world looks to reduce the cost of shipping— both environmental risk and direct operational cost—there is recognized value in providing real-time navigation services in coastal regions enabled by higher-bandwidth connections to authoritative sources ashore.
The provisioning of these services, which may include weather, port services, regulatory framework, and other location-based information, is likely to be a growth area of maritime service providers.
They will need to have readily available authoritative navigation data to support these services, including weather models, currents, and other observations.

In time, and as these services result in machine augmentation of the navigator’s decision-making, there will be opportunities to develop risk assessment as part of the voyage planning automation toolkit.
Voyage planning is a fundamental task in ensuring safety of shipping and consists principally of optimization of route and speed to arrive at the next port at the expected time.
Understanding the environmental constraints, such as wind, current, and underkeel clearance for every leg of the voyage is critical to managing the risks of the journey.
Preparing for computer-enabled decision support of this aspect of navigation will include sensor integration, such as the present state of radar and sonar integration with Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS), and also the incorporation of new information into the same operating visualization, such as weather and sea state models, observations from nearby stations, and historical trends in routing and environment.
For example, if ten ships of deeper draft and lower tide have been through a passage, the current ship likely has less underkeel clearance (UKC) risk.
However, if this is an estuarine port and the prior ships were inbound on a flood tide, it’s possible that their buoyancy was greater (given salt water), and so the latest ship may have a grounding risk that the prior ships did not.

The dream of self-driving ships is becoming a reality.
This includes the already available automated route planning in electronic charting systems for recreational mariners.
However, self- driving ships and automated routes are only as good as the data that is being used to run them.
A large part of Coast Survey’s recently released National Charting Plan prioritizes a quadrupling of large scale charting coverage.
This more detailed data will be instrumental in serving as the base map for voyage planning services of all types.

ENC Place Names and scale issue

courtesy of The Nautical Institute

Augmenting Human Decision- Making: Interoperable Navigation Data is the Key to Success

As the various sensors are integrated to the bridge control and visualization system of the future, there is significant potential for the display of the data to be too cluttered to quickly assess, orient, and act upon the information by humans alone.
The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) has been working on new standards (S-101 and others) that will drive how charts and the information they portray will change.
Coast Survey has transitioned from a chart-by-chart content curation model to a unified national-level database of navigational features in preparation for this future.
This database will serve as the underlying information for the spectrum of new S-100 product specifications which will make interoperable data for tides, surface currents, sailing directions and a variety of additional information critical for making decisions at sea.

Custom Charts

Another benefit of Coast Survey’s currently-available navigation database, is to create a custom chart with automated cartography for any area NOAA has compiled.
NOAA Custom Charts currently use the same chart symbolization as is used on an ECDIS.
For boats in an emergency, such a backup will be easier to transition to when the ECDIS is suddenly unavailable.
However, plans are underway for optional displays in the traditional style of NOAA charts and custom repeatable ordering systems that would have digital versions of paper charts delivered regularly to the customer.

Since NOAA Custom Chart uses the NOAA ENC® suite as its data source, re- scheming ENC data, as outlined in the National Charting Plan will have the added benefit of offering more detailed paper chart coverage wherever large scale ENCs have been built.

Crowd-Sourced Navigation Data: Ensuring Data is Accurate and Reliable

There is a lot of talk about crowdsourcing—using data collected from private sources.
Coast Survey has maintained a crowdsource conflation and presentation workflow for decades, that’s where “existence doubtful” and “position approximate” chart features came from.
The modern approach to taking advantage of all available data and presenting a recommended level of confidence begs many questions.

 Dr Larry Mayer, director of the CCOM, UNH and Andy Amstrong work on mapping the ocean floor.

Photo courtsey of John Farrell, US Arctic Research commission

Who owns the data?
Who is responsible for crowdsource data certification, a necessary step in changing ‘data’ to ‘information’ and releasing it as a service?
Should the traditional cartography that is becoming increasingly automated transition to curation of content that ensures that the right information is being used for the right reason at the right time?
If other countries and authoritative producers created freely or even readily-available digital information products, wouldn’t that create an opportunity for innovative analysis and tools to be created for improving the decision-making processes within all the communities?

Rather than focus on the direct navigation problem of supporting a human navigator in assessing the risk of maritime movement, perhaps the true value of the content of a national or regional nautical information system is in the analytical tools and ecosystem of available partners to bring new insights to the 70% of the world that is “blue.”

Links :

• NOAA : Online NOAA Custom Chart lets boaters create their own charts / The world of S-100: Updated framework of maritime data standards to be released in 2018 / NOAA announces launch of crowdsourced bathymetry database
• GeoGarage blog : Rolls-Royce rolls out sophisticated situational awareness for navigators

Belgium Vlaamse layer update in the GeoGarage platform

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Why the tongue of the Pine Island Glacier suddenly shrank

Retreat of Pine Island Glacier sind 1947 (Photo: Jan Erik Arndt) 

From AWI

Researchers map the seafloor near the Pine Island Glacier and use time-lapse video to unravel the mystery of its abrupt retreat

The Pine Island Glacier in Western Antarctica is not only one of the fastest-flowing ice streams in the Southern Hemisphere; over the past eleven years, four major icebergs have calved from its floating tongue.

In February 2017, researchers on board the German research icebreaker Polarstern successfully mapped an area of seafloor previously covered by shelf ice.
A comparison of these new maps with satellite images of the ice stream reveals why the glacier suddenly retreated toward the coast: at important points, it had lost contact with the ground, as the experts report in the online journal The Cryosphere, a journal of the European Geosciences Union.

 Pine Island glacier with the GeoGarage platform (NGA chart)

With a flow speed of four kilometres per year, Western Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier is one of the fastest-flowing ice streams in the Southern Hemisphere.
Together with its neighbouring glaciers, every year the up to 50-kilometre-wide ice stream transports more than 300 gigatonnes of ice from the hinterland to the Amundsen Sea, and is responsible for between five and ten percent of the global sea-level rise.
Scientists have already identified the cause of this rapid loss of ice: since the 1940s, warm water masses, which branch off from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, have found their way beneath the floating part of the glacier, melting what is referred to as its ice shelf from below.
As a result, the ice tongue, which is currently ca.
55 kilometres long, has been losing roughly 5.3 metres of thickness per year for the past quarter-century.

That being said, what remained unclear was why, despite this sustained melting, the Pine Island Glacier’s calving front had barely retreated since the beginning of observation in 1947.
Then in 2015, a calving event shifted the edge of the ice shelf 20 kilometres nearer the coast and reduced the floating ice tongue’s total area to roughly 470 square kilometres.
“The direction and speed of a given glacier’s flow chiefly depend on the topography of the ground below it.
But for most of the ice shelves in the Antarctic, we know very little about the features of the underlying seafloor.

As such, our Polarstern expedition in February 2017 was an unprecedented opportunity to map 370 square kilometres of an area that had previously largely been covered by the Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf,” explains first author Dr Jan Erik Arndt from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven.
With the aid of multibeam echosounders, Arndt and his colleagues were able to precisely map the seafloor.

Submarine mountains held back the ice

The new maps of the ocean floor in Pine Island Bay, which is predominantly 800 to 1,000 metres deep, reveal a previously unmapped submarine ridge and two mountains, the peaks of which reach up to a water depth of 370 metres.
The Pine Island Glacier’s more than 400-metre thick ice shelf must have been grounded on the ridge for several decades, as the satellite images of the glacier gathered by the researchers – dating back to 2002 – confirm.
In the older images, rises in the ice’s surface can be identified at precisely those points where the peaks of the ridge are directly under the ice shelf.
“But after 2006, these landmarks are nowhere to be seen.
By that time, the ice shelf must have melted so extensively from below that it was either too light to produce any impression on the surface of the ice, or the ice sheet must have already lost contact with the mountains beneath it,” says co-author Dr Karsten Gohl from the AWI.

When an ice shelf loses contact with such obstacles (known as “pinning points”), the ice stream reacts as if someone had suddenly released a giant brake.
With nothing left to stop them, the ice masses rapidly flow out to sea – at least that’s the theory.
Using the time series of satellite images for the Pine Island Glacier, the researchers were now able to test this thesis step by step.
Much to their surprise, in the process they determined that submarine highs not only stabilise ice shelves like giant brakes; in some cases, these mountains can also set off calving events – for instance, when the calving front advances, causing it to crash into a mountain with full force.

That must be what happened during a calving event in 2007.
As the satellite images show, back then the edge of the Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf collided with one of the newly discovered mountains, hitting it so hard that rifts formed in the surface of the ice.
When one of the rifts finally became too large, the entire face of the ice shelf broke off.

The story was similar, albeit less dramatic, with the iceberg that calved in 2015, breaking into several pieces just a few weeks later.
The largest piece became caught on the submarine ridge for nearly a year, turning clockwise over and over again until the combination of ocean currents, wind and melting broke it loose.
The researchers surmise that, just as in 2007, the ice shelf’s repeated contact with the ridge is what ultimately led to the calving event.

The ice shelf has now regained its footing
“The roughly 50-kilometre-long edge of the Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf currently runs between an island to the north and another glacier to the south, which once again give the ice a bit of support,” says Jan Erik Arndt.
If the melting on its underside continues, at some point the process may make the ice shelf so thin that it becomes instable; however, as the researchers report, with the ice thickness measuring approximately 400 metres at the calving front, we haven’t yet come to that point.

The bathymetric maps of the seafloor in Pine Island Bay and the results of the image analyses can now be fed into computer models of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, helping produce more accurate simulations.

In addition to the two researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, a member of the British Antarctic Survey and experts from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) took part in the new study.

Links :

• Hydro : Researchers Map Seafloor Near Pine Island Glacier 
• Bathymetric Controls on Calving Processes at Pine-Island Glacier
• Nature : Evidence of an active volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island Glacier 

The fight to own Antarctica

Competition for natural resources, research and tourism is putting pressure on the cold war-era treaty that guarantees order on the continent

From FT by Leslie Hook and Benedict Mander

Antarctica is a continent with no government.
The closest thing it has is a drab, 10-person office, with a small sign on its wooden door in Buenos Aires that reads “Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty”.
This is the group whose job it is to keep things running smoothly among the 53 nations that together govern Antarctica.

If that sounds like a quixotic system for a continent twice the size of Australia that contains vast untapped natural resources, it is.
But the idealism underpinning it is very clear.

“One of the amazing things is that Antarctica is the only continent where people work together for peace and science,” says Jane Francis, head of the British Antarctic Survey, who last week attended the annual Antarctic Treaty Consultative meeting that brings all of the nations together.
“You wouldn’t believe that 53 nations after two weeks can agree . . . It can be done in this world.”

However, not everyone does agree.
And at last week’s meeting in the Argentine capital some of those divisions were on show.
There is a growing number of issues that the Antarctic Treaty System, which has kept order on the continent for almost six decades, is struggling to deal with.
From climate change to fishing, new geopolitical tests are facing Antarctica that are increasingly difficult for a consensus-based group to address.

“One of the things the treaty system needs is almost like a new kind of vision,” says Klaus Dodds, a professor of geopolitics at London’s Royal Holloway University, and an expert on Antarctic governance.
“One where parties are explicit about what they are trying to do.”

The Buenos Aires meeting was typical: it produced a series of agreements that represented relatively low-hanging fruit, such as new rules for drone use, and guidelines for heritage sites (like the hut built by Ernest Shackleton and his team more than 100 years ago).

But the thorniest issues — for example, what happens when countries violate the treaty rules — are almost never addressed.
Scientists and diplomats are growing concerned that the existing system will be unable to respond to the new pressures.
At stake is the last pristine continent, one that contains the world’s largest store of freshwater, huge potential reserves of oil and gas and the key to understanding how quickly climate change will impact the world through rising sea levels.

“What we are seeing at the moment . . . is almost like a lethargy among the treaty parties to take the necessary steps,” says Daniela Liggett, professor of geography at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury.
The last major binding protocol in the treaty system came into force 20 years ago, she adds.
Any new protocol must be approved by consensus, so even one dissenting country effectively has veto power.

A tourist enjoys the view in Pleneau Island, Antarctica © AFP

The greatest areas of tension are those that touch on the growing economic and strategic interests in Antarctica, such as tourism and fishing (mining is banned).
Signatories to the treaty, which dates back to 1959, agree to set aside their territorial claims, and use the continent only for peaceful purposes.

However, the growing number of signatories has made the system unwieldy: In 1980 there were just 13 countries that had “consultative” status to make the key decisions on treaty matters — that number has risen to 29, a diverse group ranging from Finland to Peru, India and Belgium.
Meanwhile the number of permanent scientific research stations on the island, a proxy for activity, has grown to more than 75.
China has been a particularly enthusiastic builder of new research stations since it joined the treaty in 1983, and the environmental approvals for its latest, a fifth base, have caused division among the treaty members.

“Resources have always been the big trigger,” says Prof Dodds.
“Once you get more explicit about resource exploitation, then you raise the troubling issue of who owns Antarctica. That’s the issue that haunts the Antarctic Treaty, and the Treaty System more generally.”

Those anxieties are growing in tandem with Antarctica’s importance.
The continent is covered in an ice sheet up to a mile thick and represents a window into how the planet is changing.
Temperatures in some parts of Antarctica are rising much faster than the global average, and the pace of glacial melting there will help determine how quickly global sea levels rise in future.

The Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, is becoming a significant fishing ground, as resources in other seas are depleted.
And it plays a crucial role in absorbing heat and carbon from the atmosphere, in ways that are not yet fully understood.

“Things have changed profoundly,” says Damon Stanwell-Smith, a marine biologist who first visited Antarctica more than 25 years ago.
“It is visible in a human lifetime — the change in coastal waters, ice, retreat of glaciers, and then the related wildlife movement. Nowhere else has it been so obvious.”

A critical factor is the addition of many more visitors. Mr Stanwell-Smith heads the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, the closest thing the region has to a tourist police.

Last month Iaato reported that the number of visitors to the region rose to more than 51,000 last season, an increase of 17 per cent on the previous year.
That number is expected to keep growing.
Some 20 new polar expedition vessels are under construction, adding to the 33 already registered with Iaato, to serve the growing interest, says Mr Stanwell-Smith.

The race to understand Antarctica

For most tourists — who pay between $10,000 and $100,000 for a trip — visiting Antarctica involves stepping off the boat at just a handful of highly regulated landing sites.
But there are loopholes in the system, such as private yachts that flout permitting rules, as well as a growing number of tours that involve activities such as kayaking or skiing.

“It’s becoming a bit of an adventure playground, and the trouble is the unregulated tourism,” says Prof Francis, at the British Antarctic Survey.
“It has become much easier for people just to sail their yachts to Antarctica, to fly their private aircraft to Antarctica.”

The fastest-growing source of new visitors last year was China, which was second only to the US in the ranking of total tourists.
At the same time Beijing is investing heavily in missions to Antarctica, part of its plan to become a “polar great power”— moves that have not always been welcome.
One idea that has been met with concern is China’s proposal for a special “code of conduct” that would apply for a large area around its Kunlun Station research base, which has been seen as an attempt by China to limit activities near its base.

The construction of China’s fifth research base has also been controversial because preliminary building activities were started before the environmental impact assessment was complete, in violation of protocol.
The lack of punishment for these — and similar infractions by other countries — is one of the weaknesses of the treaty system.

China spends more on its Antarctic research programme than any other country, according to Anne-Marie Brady, professor of political science at the University of Canterbury and editor of The Polar Journal.
China’s interest is not limited to the potential natural resources available, but also the continent’s strategic importance — having a ground station near the South Pole can increase the accuracy of global satellite navigation systems.

The Royal Navy’s patrol ship breaks through ice in Ross Sea, Antarctica © EPA

The US, Russia and China all have critical infrastructure in Antarctica to aid their global positioning systems.
“That makes Antarctica very, very interesting right now,” says Prof Brady.
She adds that the Antarctic Treaty System may be poorly equipped to respond to a growing “clash of values” in the region.
“There is a lot that is unresolved [in the treaty] and may not be fit for purpose for our current global strategic environment,” she says.
“If the Antarctic Treaty is going to be sustainable, there has to be more high-level attention paid by governments on how to adjust to the changing environment and how to protect Antarctica.”

The Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration declined a request for an interview.

Dr Matt Davey of Cambridge University digs for snow algae on Lagoon Island near the British Antarctic Survey base Rothera © Charlie Bibby

China and other countries are positioning themselves for a day when the current confines of the Antarctic Treaty System may no longer apply.
While it does not technically expire, the provisions that ban mining could change after 2048 — the year in which the environment protocol is expected to come up for review.

As the number of signatories has expanded it means there will be far more voices involved in any potential review.
“What role do these countries [not among the 12 original signatories of the 1959 treaty] intend on playing? For sure, they have one eye focused on the resources that might be available in the future,” says Máximo Gowland, Argentina’s director for Antarctic foreign policy.

Giant icebergs calve from a glacier and into the waters surrounding Antarctica © Charlie Bibby

He points out that both water and mineral resources could become an issue.
“You don’t know how quickly the situation might evolve,” he says, mentioning the severe water shortages in Cape Town , where the idea of towing an iceberg from Antarctica to South Africa, to ease the crisis, was discussed.

Already the treaty system is struggling to protect resources in the Southern Ocean, where fishing for krill is on the rise.
Opposition from China and Russia has repeatedly delayed the creation of new marine protected areas, a topic that will be discussed again at a meeting in October.

Another unresolved issue is bio-prospecting — taking biological samples from Antarctica to study in a lab.
Because the species that exist in Antarctica are adapted to extreme cold conditions, they could contain compounds with valuable commercial or pharmaceutical applications.
Yet the question of who owns the intellectual property from these samples is impossible to solve, because of the many and varied sovereign claims on the continent.

Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Research Station

While there is no indication that anyone is about to take the step of quitting the Treaty System, there is equally little hope that it will be able to reform itself.
A risk is that it simply becomes less relevant as it fails to address the challenges facing the continent, says Prof Liggett.

Evan Bloom, the top polar diplomat in the US, which sends the largest number of scientists and tourists to Antarctica each year, says Washington supports the treaty system despite its limitations.
“It has worked quite well in terms of setting aside those political differences, and allowing science to occur,” he says.

How much longer that continues to be the case will rely on a fragile treaty that is about to face its greatest tests.

1912 map of Antarctica and islands of the Southern Ocean

‘Limited friction’ Tradition of co-operation endures on the continent 

The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959 at the height of the cold war, was focused on denuclearising the continent and avoiding military conflict, and the 12 original signatories all agreed to set aside any territorial claims there for the duration of the treaty. Subsequent agreements addressed issues like fishing rights and extraction of resources (which is banned), creating a group of deals called the Antarctic Treaty System.

“The Antarctic is a very positive symbol in a lot of ways,” says Claire Christian, head of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, adding that the treaties were “extremely forward looking” when they were written.

Eight years after the first treaty was signed, it was used as a loose model for the Outer Space Treaty, and is still seen as a template for how to govern areas that fall outside of traditional national boundaries. Today diplomats wonder if it could be a model for the Arctic region, where climate change has opened up new shipping routes and created new sources of tension.

Evan Bloom, the head of the US Office of Oceans and Polar Affairs, says that many of the geopolitical tensions in the rest of the world are filtered out in Antarctica. Everyone who endures the South Pole’s harsh climate has to rely on their neighbours to survive.

“Those frictions are relatively limited in part because the tradition of co-operation in Antarctica flows from the way that the science programmes relate to each other,” he says. “If you are running a science camp or a research station in a remote place, you have a real incentive to work with other nearby stations, regardless of their nationality.”

Mr Bloom says occasionally his colleagues at the US state department will ask him whether similar models could be applied in other parts of the world. “Middle East peace negotiators come and say, this Antarctic Treaty System has worked out really well, is there something we can apply,” he jokes. 

Links :

• FT Magazine : Inside Antarctica: the continent whose fate will affect millions
• PRI : Antarctica needs humans to protect it. It also needs humans to stay ...
• BBC : 'Antarctica is my office'
• Maritime Executive : A brief history of Antarctica in maps
• National Geographic :  100-Year-Old Photos Reveal Antarctica Like You've Never Seen It 
• CNN : Antarctica: A great trip or a guilt trip?

Iceland IC-HDG layer update in the GeoGarage platform

12 nautical raster charts updated

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Blaeu Map of Iceland [ca. 1635]


1767 map of Iceland and adjacent oceans