is visual poem filmed all around the underwater world. Location : Hawaii, Madagascar, France, Mauritius, Tahiti. Music : Bach, Busoni - Chaconne D minor
As the video above shows, it takes a lot of technical expertise and imagination.
Fortunately, that was Leonardo da Vinci’s expertise.
When Leonardo was installed at Imola, Italy, as politician Cesare Borgia’s military engineer, he was charged with helping Borgia become more aware of the town’s layout.
To do it, he made a groundbreaking map that combined cutting-edge surveying techniques with his artistic imagination.
The resulting “ichnographic” map was a step forward for cartography, transforming it from a partly imaginative exercise to an informational asset.
Drafting 1502’s equivalent to a “satellite” map was a massive undertaking, and Leonardo managed to pull it off.
His early map helped Italian politcian Cesare Borgia construct an idea of the town of Imola that was far more accurate than most contemporary maps.
Through the use of careful measurements of angles and pacing out distances using a primitive odometer, Leonardo managed to create a map that was very close to accurate.
This map — an “ichnographic” map — was a step forward in portraying how maps could work to represent geography.
Though it’s marked with some inaccuracies, it’s stunningly precise for the time and pushed forward the art of mapmaking.
Leonardo’s Imola remains, even today, a remarkably useful guide to the city.
David Rumsey began collecting maps back in 1980, and since then has amassed more than 150,000 maps spanning from the 16th to the 21st century. Nearly 90,000 of those maps have been carefully digitized and made available online, making it easier for students, researchers and enthusiasts around the world to experience the history of the world in maps.
Today we’re bringing back a layer that has long been a favorite of ours on Google Earth — the Historical Map Collection from David Rumsey.
Long-time users might recognize some of these maps from a previous collection, but they’ve never been easier to explore on the web or on your phone or tablet.
David Rumsey has been collecting maps for nearly 40 years, and in that time, he has amassed more than 150,000 maps. He hand selected this collection specifically for Google Earth.
Each of the 100 plus maps has been georeferenced so you can easily compare the historic interpretation of the world with the world as it is today.
I especially love the early maps that include detailed illustrations and map things beyond the known world, like this Celestial Globe from 1792.
So take a few minutes to explore today, and see just how much the world and our perception of it has changed in the past 400 years.
Not only can maps show us where we are going, but they can help us to better understand where we’ve been.
You can also use the mashup created and hosted by the GeoGarage platform :
From The Conversation by Mirjam van der Mheen / Charitha Pattiaratchi / Erik van Sebille
Great areas of our rubbish are known to form in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
But no such “garbage patch” has been found in the Southern Indian Ocean.
Some of this waste sinks in the ocean, some is washed up on beaches, and some floats on the ocean surface, transported by currents.
The garbage patches
As plastic materials are extremely durable, floating plastic waste can travel great distances in the ocean.
Some floating plastics collect in the centre of subtropical circulating currents known as gyres, between 20 to 40 degrees north and south, to create these garbage patches.
Here, the ocean currents converge at the centre of the gyre and sink.
But the floating plastic material remains at the surface, allowing it to concentrate in these regions.
Even less is known about what happens to plastic in the Indian Ocean, although it receives the largest input of plastic material globally.
For example, it has been estimated that up to 90% of the global riverine input of plastic waste originates from Asia.
The input of plastics to the Southern Indian Ocean is mainly through Indonesia.
The Australian contribution is small.
The major sources of riverine input of plastic material into the Indian Ocean.
The Indian Ocean has many unique characteristics compared with the other ocean basins.
The most striking factor is the presence of the Asian continental landmass, which results in the absence of a northern ocean basin and generates monsoon winds.
As a result of the former, there is no gyre in the Northern Indian Ocean, and so there is no garbage patch.
The latter results in reversing ocean surface currents.
The Indian and Pacific Oceans are connected through the Indonesian Archipelago, which allows for warmer, less salty water to be transported from the Pacific to the Indian via a phenomenon called the Indonesian Throughflow (see graphic, below).
Schematic currents and location of a leaky garbage patch in the southern Indian Ocean: Indonesian Throughflow (ITF), Leeuwin Current (LC), South Indian Counter Current (SICC), Agulhas Current (AC).
Author provided
This connection also results in the formation of the Leeuwin Current, a poleward (towards the South Pole) current that flows alongside Australia’s west coast.
As a result, the Southern Indian Ocean has poleward currents on both eastern and western margins of the ocean basin.
Also, the South Indian Counter Current flows eastwards across the entire width of the Southern Indian Ocean, through the centre of the subtropical gyre, from the southern tip of Madagascar to Australia.
The African continent ends at around 35 degrees south, which provides a connection between the southern Indian and Atlantic Oceans.
How to follow that rubbish
In contrast to other ocean basins, the Indian Ocean is under-sampled, with only a few measurements of plastic material available.
As technology to remotely track plastics does not yet exist, we need to use indirect ways to determine the fate of plastic in the Indian Ocean.
We used information from more than 22,000 satellite-tracked surface drifting buoys that have been released all over the world’s oceans since 1979.
This allowed us to simulate pathways of plastic waste globally, with an emphasis on the Indian Ocean.
Global simulated concentration of floating waste after 50 years.
Mirjam van der Mheen, Author provided
We found that unique characteristics of the Southern Indian Ocean transport floating plastics towards the ocean’s western side, where it leaks past South Africa into the South Atlantic Ocean.
Because of the Asian monsoon system, the southeast trade winds in the Southern Indian Ocean are stronger than the trade winds in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
These strong winds push floating plastic material further to the west in the Southern Indian Ocean than they do in the other oceans.
So the rubbish goes where?
This allows the floating plastic to leak more readily from the Southern Indian Ocean into the South Atlantic Ocean.
All these factors contribute to an ill-defined garbage patch in the Southern Indian Ocean.Simulated concentration of floating waste over 50 years in the Indian Ocean.
Simulated concentration of floating waste over 50 years in the Indian Ocean.
In the Northern Indian Ocean our simulations showed there may be an accumulation of waste in the Bay of Bengal.
It is also likely that floating plastics will ultimately end up on beaches all around the Indian Ocean, transported by the reversing monsoon winds and currents.
Which beaches will be most heavily affected is still unclear, and will probably depend on the monsoon season.
Our study shows that the atmospheric and oceanic attributes of the Indian Ocean are different to other ocean basins and that there may not be a concentrated garbage patch.
Therefore the mystery of all the missing plastic is even greater in the Indian Ocean.
From Atlantic Productions and coming soon to the Discovery Channel, Deep Planet follows The Five Deeps Expedition.
This three-minute trailer follows the team during the final stages of testing of the Limiting Factor manned submersible that will journey to the deepest point in each of the world's five oceans.
Vescovo's $48 million submarine is designed withstand the most extreme underwater conditions.
He has already finished three deep-sea dives, putting him on track to finish his expedition by September.
While speaking at the TED 2019 conference, Vescovo revealed that he discovered a mysterious new species on his third dive in the Indian Ocean.
At age 53, explorer Victor Vescovo has already climbed the world's seven highest peaks. Now he is on a mission to explore the bottom of the ocean — a treacherous territory that remains largely untouched by humans.
"I think it's almost cliche at this point, how people mention that 70% of the Earth is ocean, and we've only explored 5% of it," Vescovo told Business Insider.
That fact inspired Vescovo's quest to visit the deepest points of all five oceans — a mission appropriately called the Five Deeps Expedition.
In December, Vescovo became the first person to reach the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. He traveled to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench — 27,480 feet below the surface (8,376 meters) — in a $48 million titanium submarine.
At that depth, any message you send takes 7 seconds to be heard.
By comparison, radio waves sent back-and-forth from the moon during the Apollo missions took less than 3 seconds to transmit.
Since that first record-breaking dive, Vescovo has successfully completed two other expeditions in the Triton 36000 submarine.
On his third dive, at the bottom of the Java Trench in the eastern Indian Ocean, Vescovo discovered a mysterious species that's never been seen by humans.
His final mission as part of the Five Deeps project will be a dive in the Arctic Ocean in September 2019.
The explorer discussed these efforts on Wednesday at the TED 2019 conference in Vancouver, Canada. Here's what he revealed about his death-defying journey.
Vescovo's expedition is designed to take him to the deepest points of all five oceans.
Five Deeps Expedition
Vescovo described the bottom of the ocean as "an incredibly hostile environment."
But in general, being underwater in a submarine is "relatively peaceful," he said.
If he's successful, Vescovo will eventually become the first person to have climbed to the highest point of each continent and reached the deepest point of each ocean.
Atlantic Productions
About a decade ago, billionaire Richard Branson tried to embark on a similar diving feat, but the project was suspended after it failed to build a submarine that could sustain multiple dives.
Vescovo's journey began in December 2018 with the Puerto Rico Trench dive, and is expected conclude in September 2019 in the Arctic Ocean.
"These aren't going to be one-off dives that are experimental in nature," Vescovo told Business Insider. "We are trying to construct a system that opens the door to the ocean."
With his first dive, Vescovo became the first person to reach the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean.
Reeve Jolliffe EYOS Expeditions
His dive in Puerto Rico took him 27,480 feet below the water's surface.
"It felt great to get to the true bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in history," he said in a release after he returned to the surface.
His second dive took place in February in the South Sandwich Trench, an area between South America and Antarctica.
Caladan Oceanic
This time, he traveled 24,400 feet below sea level.
On his third dive in the Indian Ocean, Vescovo discovered a mysterious species that had never been seen by humans before.
The Five Deeps Expedition successfully dived to the deepest point in the Indian Ocean, in the Java Trench.
During one dive, what is believed to be a new species of Jellyfish was recorded on video.
The animal resembles a bottom-dwelling jellyfish, but Vescovo said him team isn't quite sure about its species.
The team has discovered three or four new species on every deep dive they've done, but Vescovo noted that this particular animal was "very, very unique looking" compared to the others.
Vescovo's $48 million Triton 36000 deep-sea submarine took three-and-a-half years to design and build. He's confident that it will continue to keep him safe underwater.
Reeve Jolliffe EYOS Expeditions
"We kind of have a running joke within the development team that I don't trust a lot of things, but I do trust math. I do trust titanium," he said.
"We have very high confidence that the systems will survive these extreme environments."
Vescovo said that at the ocean's most extreme depths, pressure levels are 1,100 times stronger than at the water's surface.
Caladan Oceanic
So his team tested the submarine at pressures beyond that of the deepest parts of the ocean floor.
In two weeks, Vescovo will attempt to reach the Challenger Deep — the deepest known point in the ocean.
Challenger Deep is located at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, almost 7 miles underwater. It's farther down from sea level than Mount Everest is up.
"We believe, hopefully, given our track record, that we'll be successful," he said.
Fewer people have reached Challenger Deep than have walked on the moon.
The Deepsea Challenger submersible carried James Cameron into the Mariana Trench.
AP
Hundreds of people have ventured into space, and a dozen have landed on the moon.
But only three have reached Challenger Deep.
Film director James Cameron went there in 2012, and explorers Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh did it more than 50 years earlier in 1960. But that's it.
Vescovo plans to go down multiple times.
Vescovo said diving is the opposite of mountain climbing, but both require "calculated risks."
Caladan Oceanic
"In mountain climbing ... you are completely subjected to the weather and you feel freer because you're surrounded by a lot of open space. You feel the biting cold and you feel the wind," he said.
But deep-sea diving, by contrast, is a "far more technical mission."
While speaking at TED, Vescovo said the experience was "kind of like the Space X of ocean exploration, but I pilot my own vehicles."
"Elon [Musk], if you're listening," he said, "I'll give you a ride in mine if you give me a ride in yours."
