Intrepid French hunt for sunken warships Cordelière and Regent

New research arried out in June 2018 to try to find the Cordelière, a flagship of the Franco-Breton fleet, missing at sea, during a battle against the English in 1512... !

500 years later, maritime history enthusiasts, in partnership with the Brittany region, still hope to find the wreck of this ship off Brest.

From BBC by Hugh Schofield

The spirit of famed French explorer Jacques Cousteau lives on in a mission to find the wrecks of two warships, one French and one English, that sank 500 years ago off the Brittany port of Brest.

Instead of Cousteau's old minesweeper Calypso, it is the French culture ministry's surveillance ship André Malraux and its doughty crew of scientists and divers.

 André Malraux, DRASSM research vessel deploying various electronic detection means on the survey area necessary to characterize anomalies likely to indicate the wrecks sought.

Frédéric Osada / Images Explorations/ DRASSM

Today's adventure: to locate, excavate and eventually raise the wrecks of the Cordelière and the Regent - two behemoths of the Tudor seas that sank together in the Battle of Saint-Mathieu in 1512.

And filling the Cousteau role is Michel L'Hour, marine archaeologist extraordinaire and veteran of a thousand missions to explore France's underwater heritage.
"I have been obsessed with finding these ships for 40 years," he says, ruddy-faced and bearded like any proper sea-dog.
"I am not so young any more, and I think this may be my last mission.
If I can locate the ships, then leave them to my colleagues to excavate, I will be a happy man."

 After initial unsuccessful searches between 1996 and 2001, a new three-week campaign will therefore begin around 20 June in an area of 25 km2 between the 'goulet de Brest' and Point Saint-Mathieu, in waters up to 40 metres deep. 

visualization of the area with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM chart)

How the two ships were sunk

For the French, or rather for the people of Brittany, the Cordelière has mythic status.
She was the flagship of the duchy's last independent ruler and revered heroine, the Duchess Anne.

And she was captained up until the moment of sinking (and his death) by another Breton hero, Hervé de Portzmoguer, a kind of patriot-corsair.
His Frenchified name Primauguet is still given to vessels of the French navy to this day.

But the English have a hand in this tale too.

The André Malraux's crew scour the ocean floor with remote-controlled vehicles

The Regent was, in its day, every bit as important as its sister ship the Mary Rose, which was famously raised from the Solent 36 years ago and is now on display in Portsmouth.
If anything, the Regent was the bigger ship.
And if Henry VIII's Mary Rose is anything to go by, then this would be a stupendous find indeed.
The trouble is no-one knows exactly where the Battle of Saint-Mathieu took place.
It was during one of the lesser-known wars between England and an alliance of France and a still-independent Brittany.

Hundreds died as the two ships caught fire and went down together
Contemporary picture of the Breton Marie-la-Cordelièreand the English Regent flagships ablaze.
The Cordelière flies the Kroaz Du, whilst the Regent flies St. George's Cross

On 10 August 1512, the Franco-Breton fleet was at anchor off Brest when it sighted the approaching English.
Most of the French ships made haste to get to safety through the mouth of the inner bay of Brest, a passage known as the goulet.
But the Cordelière and two other ships stayed to fight off the attack.

 Brest Museum

The Regent bore down on the Cordelière and for two or three hours there was close-quarters fighting.
But then, and no-one knows why, it all ended with a massive explosion.
The two ships, entangled in battle, sank together to the bottom.
Hundreds died.

The simultaneous destruction of the Cordelière and the Regent

depicted by Pierre-Julien Gilbert

Out there, somewhere

With backing from the French government, the Brittany region, universities and industry, Michel L'Hour has assembled a multidisciplinary team to find what he knows must be down there somewhere.
Tides and currents have been recalculated.
Previous efforts had failed to spot that the calendar changed in 1582.
Naval charts of the sea floor have been re-examined.
Historians are looking through the few contemporary accounts of the battle, and the search is on for clues from parish and other archives.

Christophe Cerino, of Brittany-South University, says diplomatic records in the UK will be a particular focus.
"We know that several hundred Englishmen were on the Regent, and many were of noble families.
After the battle their bodies will have washed up somewhere on the coast and been given burial," he says.

Research is based on the scant records available and the team is searching for more

"Somewhere in the archives there are bound to be requests from noble families asking for the repatriation of these bodies.
Those requests will contain names of places and parishes.
"Knowing where the bodies washed up, and the state of the currents, we may get a clearer picture where the battle took place."

Close, but no warship

For now Mr L'Hour is working on the theory that the French fleet was anchored near the goulet on the southern side of the outer bay, near the village of Camaret-sur-Mer.
This is based on a contemporary report that it was sheltering from a southerly wind, or auster.
The battle, he thinks, must have taken place in waters to the north of Camaret.
So that is where the André Malraux is now in a back-and-forth combing operation, dragging an array of sonar and magnetic detectors.
An undersea robot sends back video, and divers are ready to explore any find.

 Michel L'Hour (director of DRASSM) Olivia Hulot, co-director of the Cordelière Project, Philippe Alain, product manager engineer at IXBlue, a partner in the project, and Luc Jaulin, professor of robotics at the ENSTA-Bretagne engineering school, facing control screens during the acquisition of prospecting data.

Photo credit: Frédéric Osada / Images Explorations/ DRASSM

Video footage from the unmanned vehicles is pored over by the team back in the control room

In the operations room, the Cousteau-esque motif holds truer than ever, as the faithful team in identical Cordelière T-shirts (many have been with Michel L'Hour for years) pore over the incoming video and puzzle over recovered pieces of ceramic.
In fact, within the first days there has already been an interesting discovery.
A wreck has been located that is in the right zone.
It is big, and Mr L'Hour can tell from its clinker-built construction (with overlapping planks) that it is from the 15th or 16th Century.
At one point it even looks like there might be two wrecks lying together, which would be a clincher.

A fascinating discovery - but not the one the team was hunting for

But, alas, doubts set in.
If this is a warship, where are the cannon?
There are apparently none, which means it is probably only a commercial ship.
An important find, but not the one they were looking for.

Michel L'Hour is convinced that with all the technology now available the wrecks of the Cordelière and the Regent will eventually be found.
And afterwards who knows?
The dream is of a museum in Brest.

As for the Cousteau comparison, Mr L'Hour - who knew him - is bemused.
"You know that Cousteau was a hopeless archaeologist.
At one of his excavations in the Mediterranean, he completely failed to spot that he was dealing with not one shipwreck but two, one lying on top of the other.
"It was because of the mess he made, that the ministry created our outfit - the first ever government-funded undersea archaeological survey ship.
"But the team, the camaraderie, the seamanship - that I would be proud to share."

The hunt goes on.

Links :

• La Cordelière

What is the impact of Europe's warmer than ever seas

A heatwave in northern Europe means people are likely flocking to the coast to enjoy the warmer water. But what are the environmental costs of Europe's rising sea temperatures? …

From Euronews by Chris Harris

Sizzling temperatures in northern Europe will likely see more people flock to enjoy a dip in the warmer-than-normal water in the coming days.

But, while on the face of it this sounds like a positive development, do higher sea temperatures come at a cost?
Yes, according to Hans-Martin Füssel, a climate change expert from the European Environment Agency (EEA).

He told Euronews that warmer waters in Europe had been linked to more water-borne disease and a worsening of so-called sea dead zones, where increased temperatures mean there is less oxygen for marine life to survive on.
“But the most worrying effects of sea temperature rises are in the tropical and subtropical zones,” said Dr Füssel. “In particular coral reefs, the long-term perspective for them is extremely bad.

 One of the world's natural wonders will never be the same again according to a new report 

Euronews

“During the 2016 and 2017 marine heatwaves in Australia, for instance, half of the Great Barrier Reef died,” he added.
“We run the very large risk of losing most of the world’s coral reefs this century.”



The Mediterranean and the North Sea hit record high temperatures in 2014, the latest year for which figures are available.
They have never been warmer since systematic temperature measurements started around 1870.

Other regional seas in Europe have also reached record or near-record temperatures in recent years.
The images above in the video show how Europe's sea temperatures have differed from the long-term average since 2014.
Shades of orange, red and pink indicate warmer-than-average waters. with blue and purple highlighting the opposite.
But they only show a snapshot in time: the sea surface temperatures in July of each of the last five years.

What is causing temperatures to rise?

“The main driver, undoubtedly, are the emission of greenhouse gases, the leading one being carbon dioxide, released when fossil fuels are burned and a number of other gases, like methane and nitrogen oxide ” said Dr Füssel.
“Most human activities contribute to some degree to global climate change - that’s energy consumption and production, transport and agriculture, in particular meat production.”

What impact is rising sea temperatures having?

Higher temperatures are having a devastating impact on coral reefs in tropical areas but closer to home in Europe the effects are also significant.

Fish migration: We have seen large-scale migration of fish and marine life northwards as temperatures have shifted, which has meant subtropical species increasingly seen in European waters.

Catches of cold water fish, like cod and haddock, have halved in some parts of Europe since the 1980s, while fish favouring warmer water, such as red mullet and hake, have increased by 250%, according to the EEA.

“If people depend on local fish they will notice a change there but there’s obviously a lot of international trade with fish so that will balance these effects,” Füssel said.

“It’s more the producers, fishermen and the local communities who experience the changes and not necessarily the consumers.”

Will oysters be able to survive climate change and the expected rise of water temperatures in seas and oceans across the globe?

Our Futuris programme brings you the answers.

Water-borne infections: 

Higher sea temperatures in the Baltic Sea region have been linked to a rise in water-borne vibriosis infections.
Such illnesses can include cholera, gastroenteritis, wound infections, and septicaemia, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, fatalities are more common in those with existing diseases.
It comes as health authorities in northern Germany warned people with underlying conditions not to bathe in the Baltic Sea because of the warm temperatures in recent days.

‘Dead zones’ in the sea: 

Warmer sea temperatures will also expand the number of oxygen-depleted or ‘dead zones’ in Europe, according to the EEA.
These are areas that don’t have enough oxygen to support marine life and the Baltic Sea is the largest dead zone in the world.
Oxygen-depleted zones there have increased from 5 000 to 60 000 km2, since the start of the 20th century.
The nitrogen in fertiliser run-off from agricultural land is the main cause but warmer seas exacerbate the problem.

Links :

• Copernicus :  Europe’s north south weather divide
• BBC : Reality Check: Mapping the global heatwave / How does the 2018 heatwave compare to that of 1976?
• The Guardian : The big heatwave: from Algeria to the Arctic. But what's the cause? / Heatwave made more than twice as likely by climate change ...
• InsideClimate news : This Summer's Heat Waves Could Be the Strongest Climate Signal Yet
• NASA : Heatwave turns Europe brown 

His Pacific Island was swallowed by rising seas. So he moved to a new one.

Beniamina Island, part of the Solomon Islands.

Credit : Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

From NYTimes by Damien Cave

Makaru Island, Solomon Islands — The first island David Tebaubau moved to 14 years ago has already disappeared, drowned by heaving currents and rising seas.

“It used to be right there,” he told me, pointing east to what simply looked like more ocean.
“We thought everything was going to be O.K., but it’s getting very hard.”

The spit of earth he currently occupies here in this remote stretch of the South Pacific is half the size it was when he arrived five years ago.
At mid-tide, it’s 24 steps across at its widest point, and 58 steps long (by my own walking count).

At high tide it’s even smaller, a teardrop of sand and coral with just enough room for his family and a few tons of the seaweed they grow offshore.

 The sea has almost reached the heart of Beniamina Island.

It’s that seaweed that keeps them here.
The shallows near his island — and two others nearby that have also been settled by farming families — are perfect for a wiry breed that’s exported across Asia.
And Mr. Tebaubau, 50, a former mechanic with the calm voice and long beard of a sage, is especially adept at its cultivation.

His earnings have already sent his children to private school on a larger island.
To the neighboring seaweed farmers, he is not just a recluse.
He is The Seaweed King.
At least for as long as he has a kingdom.

 Makaru island with the GeoGarage platfrom (NGA chart)

All three of the sandy islands here are being swept away by powerful currents and a rising ocean caused by climate change.
Precarious and precious, life here is lovely, tropical and calm, but also akin to living in a bathtub with warm water pouring in and no drain to let it out.
Ever.

It’s what you see in many parts of the Solomon Islands, a struggling, stunning country of around 900 islands and 570,000 people.

Scientists call it a global hot spot.
The surrounding seas have risen about 7 to 10 millimeters per year since 1993, roughly three times today’s global average — and what scientists expect across much of the Pacific by the second half of this century.

Unloading seaweed after harvesting it near Beniamina Island.

Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Farmers sorting harvested seaweed for drying and planting on Beniamina Island.

Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Confronting such extremes, residents of many small villages on various islands have picked up and moved.
Others, especially here on the three islands surrounded by lush seaweed, are doing everything they can to stay.

“People talk about these islands being vulnerable, and along with that they tend to treat the human beings as vulnerable, too,” said Simon Albert, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia who has written several papers on adaptation to climate change in the Pacific.
“But in my view, they’re the opposite — they’re strong and resilient.”

Maybe they’re a bit stubborn, too — but with cause.

The families here are the children and grandchildren of migrants resettled by the British in the 1950s after their islands elsewhere in the Pacific suffered from extreme drought.

They’re not eager to move again.

“They call us crazy for staying, but we just survive, ourselves,” said Andrew Nakuau, 55, a farmer and community leader on Beniamina, where about 60 people live crammed together on an island no more than a few hundred meters wide.

We were meeting at its center, in a small church at Beniamina’s peak — shin-high from the sea.
I could see Makaru a short boat ride away.

Small solar panels the size of a notebook shimmered on the roofs of the thatch-and-wooden homes clustered nearby.
Washbins and buckets for rainwater, the only freshwater available, lined the island’s pathways, thirsty for a storm.

I asked Mr. Nakuau what it felt like to be so disconnected from the causes of climate change, with its cars and coal, but so close to its effects.
He shrugged and walked me over to his own line of defense.

David Tebaubau, a seaweed farmer, lives on Makaru Island.

“Here there’s no boss, you’re the boss,” he said.

Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Cooking rice on Beniamina Island.

Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

To the left of an outhouse dangling over teal blue water, which used to be land, he pointed to a pile of coral rising several feet from the sand.
It was held in place with wooden beams.

“This is the second wall I’ve built,” he said.
“The first one was four years ago.”

He has also added a second floor to his home.

When I saw a DVD player there, I asked if he had a favorite.
“Rambo,” he said.

A few hours later, low tide, and work, returned.
Most of the young men from the islands could be seen out in the water, piling seaweed into dugout canoes, or tying seedlings to underwater ropes.

It was hot, equatorial hot, even in the water.
When a thunderstorm rolled in, the men quickly moved their catch under tarps to protect it.

Under one tent on Beniamina, nearly a dozen women were working together, laughing and chatting as the men carried seaweed in and children splashed nearby in the rain.

Asked about the toughest part of living on the island, the women struggled for answers.
“It’s easier to get to know each other here,” said Rakeua Angela, 58, a mother of six.

A volleyball match on Beniamina Island.

Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

The families on Beniamina Island are the children and grandchildren of migrants resettled by the British in the 1950s after their islands elsewhere in the Pacific suffered from extreme drought.

Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Rarely, all agreed, does anyone cause trouble.
Even drinking alcohol is against the rules; 20 lashes on the rear-end is the punishment, last meted out about a year ago, Mr. Nakuau said, to eight boys and two girls caught in a not-so-distant corner of their very small island.

Cross-sea marriages are common (three of Mr. Tebaubau’s children married into Beniamina families) and recreation is communal — bingo nights for women around once a week, birthdays celebrated by all and, at dusk on most days, volleyball and music on Beniamina.

The games are competitive, but joyful with a soundtrack moving from hip-hop to Abba.
Watching the island’s teenagers play during one particularly glorious evening, it was almost possible to believe that life here could continue forever, undisturbed.

Except that in the distance were the dead gray trees that used to be on land, and the dark blue waves, crashing on the reef.

None of the islanders, especially not the Seaweed King, seemed to notice.
When we returned to Makaru, Mr. Tebaubau happily showed me his warehouse with the seaweed he planned to sell next.
“I don’t intend to move,” he said.
“Here there’s no boss, you’re the boss.”

His children were out.
His own wall of coral stood tall.
“We’ll keep trying,” he said, “trying to stand.”

Except for a few growling dogs, he was completely alone, tilting at the windmill of rising seas.

The remains of a fallen tree in an area formerly dry and inhabited, near Tetongo Island.

Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times 

 Tetengo island, Kiribati (NGA chart with the GeoGarage platform)

see MapCarta

Links :

• Univ. Queensland : Rising seas stealing back Solomon Islands communities /  Uneasy waters

Chausey islands

Les îles Chausey filmées en Drone - Easy Ride opérateur drone from Easy Ride

Chausey, the largest archipelago in Europe: 365 islands at low tide and 52 at high tide.. 
SHOM nautical chart in the GeoGarage platform 

Plan de l'ille de chausé by Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan (1674)

source : BNF

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Two canots in the Chausey islands

Study discovers just 13 percent of world’s oceans are “wilderness”

From WCSNewsroom 

Industrial fishing, shipping, coastal pollution squeezing ocean’s last wild places to remote areas

An international study published today in the journal Current Biology discovered that only 13 percent of the ocean can still be classified as wilderness.
“Those marine areas that can be considered ‘pristine’ are becoming increasingly rare, as fishing and shipping fleets expand their reach across almost all of the world’s oceans, and sediment runoff smothers many coastal areas” said lead author Kendall Jones of WCS.

Jones et al. show that Earth's marine wilderness has been eroded by humanity, with 13.2% now remaining across all of the oceans.

Despite holding high genetic diversity and endemic species, wilderness areas are ignored in global environmental agreements, highlighting the need for urgent policy attention.

The study found that most remaining wilderness is unprotected, leaving it vulnerable to being lost.
“Improvements in shipping technology mean that even the most remote wilderness areas may come under threat in the future, including once ice-covered places that are now accessible because of climate change” said Jones.

The authors used fine scale global data on 19 human stressors to the ocean, including commercial shipping, sediment runoff and several types of fishing, to identify Earth’s remaining marine wilderness – areas devoid of intense human impacts.

Marine wilderness in exclusive economic zones (light blue), in areas outside national jurisdiction (dark blue), and marine protected areas (green).

Realm-specific Wilderness Extent
Wilderness map showing the least impacted areas of each ocean realm.

They found that most wilderness is located in the Arctic and Antarctic or around remote Pacific island nations such as French Polynesia.
Because human activities are concentrated near land, very little wilderness remains in coastal ecosystems such as coral reefs.

Professor James Watson, of the University of Queensland and Director of Science at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and senior author of the research paper, said the findings highlight an immediate need for conservation policies to recognize and protect the unique values of marine wilderness.
“Marine wilderness areas are home to unparalleled levels of life – holding massive abundances of species and high genetic diversity, giving them resilience to threats like climate change,” said Watson. “We know these marine wilderness areas are declining catastrophically, and protecting them must become a focus of multilateral environmental agreements. If not, they will likely disappear within 50 years.”

The authors said that preserving marine wilderness also requires regulating the high seas, which has historically proven difficult since no country has jurisdiction of these areas.
However, Jones noted that a recent United Nations resolution could change this.

“Late last year the United Nations began developing a legally binding high seas conservation treaty - essentially a Paris Agreement for the ocean. This agreement would have the power to protection large areas of the high seas and might be our best shot at saving some of Earth’s last remaining marine wilderness,” said Jones.

Links :

• The Guardian : Almost all world’s oceans damaged by human impact, study finds
• BBC : Ocean wilderness 'disappearing' globally
• The Independant : Only 13% of world’s oceans are still untouched wilderness, scientists find
• WP : The first map of ocean wilderness shows ‘nowhere is safe' 
• National Geographic : Only One-Eighth of the Ocean is Free of Human Impact