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The next global tech disruption will happen where few expect it

image : Globe staff

From BostonGlobe by Captain John A. Konrad V

The profound impact of shipping on modern life cannot be overstated.
Ninety percent of everything we own has spent some time on a container ship.
Consider your furniture, your clothes, your computer.
Likely all those things traveled across an ocean at some point in their lifecycle.
Pop your car’s hood and look at your engine.
Each component inside was likely shipped between multiple ports before being assembled, shipped again, and bolted inside.

According to the World Bank, no other industry has pulled more people out of poverty worldwide.
And if the world’s ships were to suddenly stop, billions of people would go hungry.
Yet most of us give very little thought to the 50,000 cargo ships at sea right now driving the global economy.
Likewise, the modern maritime industry, responsible for moving $9 trillion of goods around the oceans every year, has been mostly ignored by policy makers, innovators, and venture capitalists.

No doubt tech has largely avoided shipping because historically, the industry has been notoriously slow to adopt new technology.
Thousands of years of experience has convinced those who make their living at sea that if something fails, people die.
It’s easier to keep things the way they are than to tinker with new ideas.
And because shipping is slow to change, it will be the last major industry to undergo 21st century-style tech-driven disruption.
When tech finally does take hold, the global consequences will be unprecedented.

The sheer scale of modern cargo ships is astounding: The world’s biggest ships are hundreds of feet longer than the largest aircraft carrier; each one can ferry up to 23,000 containers across oceans.
That’s more than double the number of trucks crossing the world’s busiest bridge, New York’s George Washington Bridge, each day.
A single supertanker can carry over 42 million gallons of oil.
One of the largest bulk ships can carry over 300,000 tons of coal.

And one new algorithm or design tweak that makes sea-bound vessels just a fraction of a percent faster will vastly reduce carbon emissions and change the cost of things throughout the world.

But in our data-driven world, shipping lags far behind other industries.

Here are a few facts that might surprise you: Due to the lack of cargo and ship location information available, according to the insurance specialist Allianz, 46 large ships were lost in 2018 — that’s nearly one ship lost every week.
Just last month, the International Transport Workers Federation discovered 12 starving crew members on a ship off the coast of Tunisia.
(While the International Maritime Organization mandates that all large ships carry a satellite phone and GPS tracking device, companies can order captains to unplug the devices and no organization is tasked with finding ships that suddenly go dark.)
The crew had spent more than a year marooned on the ship, left to die by owners who refused to pay them or allow them to dock.

It may also surprise you to learn that at a time when you can track every mile of a package of Hanes boxer shorts as it travels from the Amazon warehouse to your door, we lack the technology to track a 40-foot-long shipping container carrying thousands of the same shorts from China to the US.

The World Shipping Council reported that an average of 1,582 shipping containers were lost every year between 2008 and 2016.
Some of these lost containers held cheap and harmless goods, but others concealed expensive and/or hazardous chemicals.
We only know where a handful of these overboard containers are located, and hundreds more are lost on land each year.

On the high seas, huge, unmonitored ships and underfunded coast guards conspire to destroy our oceans.
Each lost ship and container leaks pollutants into the ocean, but without a standardized way to collect information, we don’t know the specific chemicals, plastics, and hazardous materials dumped into our waters each year.

Last January, an oil tanker carrying one million barrels of toxic light oil condensate crashed into another ship causing a large oil spill.
Days later, officials at the Global Fishing Watch (GFW), a project funded by Google to track fishing vessels, found large trawlers pulling fish out of the toxic water; they continued to fish knowing that buyers had no way of knowing that the food was tainted.

Because US Customs lacks the tools to view the history of where a shipping container was loaded, drug cartels have been emboldened.
A few days ago, $1 billion worth of cocaine — 17 tons — was discovered aboard a ship docked in Philadelphia.

Even the largest and most visible ships are difficult to monitor once they’re at sea.
Just last month, Princess Cruises acknowledged violating probation terms from a 2016 dumping case.
According to filings with the Justice Department, operators of the 951-foot-long, 3,142-passenger ship Caribbean Princess dumped plastic into the ocean, falsified records, and dispatched cleanup teams ahead of inspectors to avoid environmental violations.

Lack of tracking tech has hampered our military as well: In the summer of 2017, the USS Fitzgerald hit a giant container ship, killing seven sailors.
Nine weeks later, the USS McCain crashed into a commercial ship killing 10 sailors off the coast of Singapore.
Despite boasting the world’s most advanced radar systems and many safeguards aboard, these warships failed to identify and avoid the huge and slow-moving commercial ships.

Even more troubling is the fact that the Navy can’t effectively monitor its own ships.
The McCain’s crew didn’t even know their ship was sinking until the ship got close enough to shore for a crew member to call the mayday in on his cell phone.

These are just a few of the chronic problems facing the maritime industry which technology could potentially solve.

But people are starting to pay attention.
On June 20, Connecticut-based maritime publisher Marine Money hosted its first ever pitch day in the United States.
Marine Money chairman Jim Lawrence acknowledged in his opening remarks that the field is so new they didn’t even know what to call it: “Financial technologies are called Fintech, Medical Technologies are Medtech, but what do we call technology for shipping? Some say it should be Bluetech, others Shiptech, or Martech for maritime technology. Nobody can agree on even the name.”

One of the most promising startups presenting at the forum is built on a simple idea: If one could know what is being shipped, and where, on a global scale, one could potentially predict major market shifts before they occur.

This video (click on the picture to launch it) shows the movements of commercial ships larger than 10,000 dead weight tons in 2018.
One second of the video equals four minutes of actual time; the entire year unfolding over 36 minutes.
The “tail” of the ship represents the distance it sailed over the previous 24 hours.

Boston-based CargoMetrics is using Amazon’s high-performance computing network to do just that: consolidate and crunch all available shipping data — GPS, cargo manifests, and satellite tracking — to gain a global understanding of the movement of raw and finished goods in real time.
This big-data approach to trade could transform both shipping and markets.
CargoMetrics’s tools offer an unprecedented level of freight-pricing transparency to shipping companies, many of which currently rely on a paper manifest system overseen by a few international brokerages and middle men.
Access to the big picture could help shippers find more fuel-efficient routes, which in turn could make an enormous impact on global emissions and freight pricing.
Founder Scott Borgerson is patenting various ways to understand the vast amounts of information CargoMetrics is collecting, and he’s turning to stakeholders to direct his inquiry.
Maersk Tankers, for example, uses CargoMetrics to overlay weather and performance data so that the company can reposition its tankers to respond to incidents, like the recent tanker explosions in the Persian Gulf.
Last year, the huge Danish shipping company installed rotor sails — large spinning cylinders that convert wind into energy to propel and power ships — on three of its tankers, and CargoMetrics will collect data to determine whether the company should invest further in the technology.
If CargoMetrics chose to, it could help identify distressed ships, like the one caught off the Tunisian coast, or help locate the dozens of ships lost each year.
These finer uses of supercomputing have yet to be explored.
As is often the case, profit comes before labor.

But Boston-based Shipin Systems is using tech to protect mariners.
The company develops visual tracking systems that it hopes will reduce accidents aboard ships by giving companies a way to monitor their staff and equipment at sea.
In the future, Shipin Systems’s monitoring might prevent a massive oil spill by sounding a warning if a crew member turns the wrong valve on a supertanker.
Monitoring could also help prevent collisions like the oil tanker and US Navy ship disasters cited above.

German startup Closelink is helping companies manage something else: their lubricants.
It may sound unglamorous.
But remember that ships are basically small cities which need to create electricity, manage sewage, pump water, and perform countless other tasks.
Each pump and every piece of machinery aboard needs some type of lubrication, so the savings could be considerable.

An undated image made from a video by the National Transportation Safety Board shows the stern of the sunken ship El Faro.

(National Transportation Safety Board via AP)

The use of Closelink could also save lives.
In October 2015, the American container ship El Faro lost propulsion in the midst of a hurricane because she had sailed from Jacksonville with dangerously low oil levels.
Thirty-three mariners died when the ship went down off the Bahamas.
This past March, the Viking Sky cruise ship, loaded with 1,373 passengers and crew, lost power in a storm due to low oil levels.
A daring helicopter rescue saved all aboard, but it was an expensive and elaborate operation.

Chances are, before we have automated cars, we’ll have fully automated ships.
Boston-based Sea Machines, founded in 2013, offers remote control operation of large commercial boats like tugboats, fireboats, and ferries.
The company is also developing an artificial intelligence-powered situational awareness system for container ships.
This system will help ship operators identify hazards — like small boats that can’t be seen on large ship radar systems.

The question is not if maritime technology can improve the world.
Nor is it a question of when innovative bluetech companies will make money, because they already are.
The question is where the maritime tech hub will establish itself.

And there’s a strong case that it could be in Boston.
With its rich maritime history on par with New York and San Francisco, Boston has a vibrant startup community and a solid foundation of venture capital.
Its robust network of maritime-based academic offerings include MIT’s prestigious Center for Ocean Engineering.
Many ship owners are graduates of Harvard Business School, including Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and her sister, Angela Chao, CEO of the shipping line Foremost Group.
Nearby Woods Hole is home to the preeminent school for oceanography.
The Mass Maritime Academy in Bourne trains professional mariners.
Also nearby: the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Maine, and the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.
The ship financing capital of the United States is Stamford, Connecticut.
With all this in mind, Boston’s first innovation hub dedicated to BlueTech startups, SeaAhead, was founded last year by Mark Huang, a veteran of cleantech venture capital funds.
The hub has already signed partnerships with shipping companies like the tugboat company Moran, marine science hubs including the New England Aquarium, academic institutions including Tufts, and several venture capital firms.
Boston’s most successful startup accelerator, MassChallenge, is getting in on maritime innovation, too.
We’ve seen myriad industries transformed by tech in the past two decades.
Keen observers will be able to watch this one unfold in real time.

Links :

• World Bank : The Maritime Transport crisis

Sailing around the World trailer

Who are we? What are we doing? Where do we come from?

Why are we doing this or how everything started will be answers you will find on this trailer of our production of 22° South, Sailing around the world

Image of the week : Mariana Trench inverted

 The Mariana Trench Is the deepest place on earth.
Here is what the region would look like as a mountain if it was inverted.
The elevation in the map is exaggerated by 5x so in real life the slope is 5 x shallower

courtesy of xkcd

As countries battle for control of North Pole, science is the ultimate winner

courtesy of N. Desai / Science

From ScienceMag by Richard Kemeny

A competition for the North Pole heated up last month, as Canada became the third country to claim—based on extensive scientific data—that it should have sovereignty over a large swath of the Arctic Ocean, including the pole.
Canada's bid, submitted to the United Nations's Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) on 23 May, joins competing claims from Russia and Denmark.
Like theirs, it is motivated by the prospect of mineral riches: the large oil reserves believed to lie under the Arctic Ocean, which will become more accessible as the polar ice retreats.
And all three claims, along with dozens of similar claims in other oceans, rest on extensive seafloor mapping, which has proved to be a boon to science, whatever the outcome for individual countries.
The race to obtain control over parts of the sea floor has "dramatically changed our understanding of the oceans," says marine geophysicist Larry Mayer of the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Coastal nations have sovereign rights over an exclusive economic zone (EEZ), extending by definition 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) out from their coastline.
But the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea opened up the possibility of expanding that zone if a country can convince CLCS that its continental shelf extends beyond the EEZ's limits.

Most of the 84 submissions so far were driven by the prospect of oil and gas, although advances in deep-sea mining technology have added new reasons to apply.
Brazil, for example, filed an application in December 2018 that included the Rio Grande Rise, a deep-ocean mountain range 1500 kilometers southeast of Rio De Janeiro that's covered in cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts.

Canadian and U.S. Coast Guard ships worked together to map the Arctic sea floor for continental shelf claims.

DVIDSHUB/Flickr

To make a claim, a country has to submit detailed data on the shape of the sea floor and on its sediment, which is thicker on the shelf than in the deep ocean.
The data come from sonar, which reveals seafloor topography, and seismic profiling, which uses low-frequency booms to probe the sediment.
Canada's bid also enlisted ships to conduct high-resolution gravimetry—measurements of gravity anomalies that reveal seafloor structure.
Elevated gravity readings are found over higher-density mantle rocks found in oceanic crust, and lower readings over lighter, continental structures.
And the bid used analyses of 800 kilograms of rock samples dredged up from the sea floor, whose composition can distinguish continental from ocean crust.

The studies don't come cheap; Canada's 17 Arctic expeditions alone cost more than CA$117 million.
But the work by the three countries vying for the Arctic—and that of dozens of others elsewhere in the world—has been a bonanza for oceanography.
In the Arctic alone, the mapping has revealed several sunken mountains, previously missed or undetected by older sonar methods.
Hundreds of pockmarks found on the Chukchi Cap, a submarine plateau extending out from Alaska, suggest that bursts of previously frozen methane have erupted from the seabed, a phenomenon that could accelerate climate change.
And gaps discovered across submarine ridges allow currents to flow from basin to basin, with "important ramifications on the distribution of heat in the Arctic and on overall modeling of climate and ice melting," Mayer says.

CLCS, composed of 21 scientists in fields such as geology and hydrography who are elected by member states, has accepted 24 of the 28 claims it has finished evaluating, some partially or with caveats; in several cases, it has asked for follow-up submissions with more data.
Australia was the first country to succeed, adding 2.5 million square kilometers to its territory in 2008.
New Zealand gained undersea territory six times larger than its terrestrial area.
But CLCS only judges the merit of each individual scientific claim; it has no authority to decide boundaries when claims overlap.
To do that, countries have to turn to diplomatic channels once the science is settled.

The three claims on the North Pole revolve around the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain system that runs from Ellesmere Island in Canada's Qikiqtaaluk region to the New Siberian Islands of Russia, passing the North Pole.
Both countries claim the ridge is geologically connected to their continent, whereas Denmark says it is also tied to Greenland, a Danish territory.
As the ridge is thought to be continental crust, the territorial extensions could be extensive.
(U.S.
scientists should finish mapping in the Arctic in about 2 years, says Mayer, who is involved in that effort, but as one of the few countries that hasn't ratified the Law of the Sea convention, the United States can't file an official submission.)

Tensions flared when Russia planted a titanium flag on the sea floor beneath the North Pole in 2007, after CLCS rejected its first claim, saying more data were needed.
The Canadian foreign minister at the time likened the move to the land grabs of early European colonizers.
Not that the North Pole has any material value: "The oil potential there is zip," says geologist Henry Dick of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
"The real fight is over the Amerasian Basin," Dick says (see map, above) where large amounts of oil are thought to be locked up.

It will take years, perhaps decades, for CLCS to rule on the overlapping Arctic claims.
Whoever wins the scientific contest still faces a diplomatic struggle.

Denmark, Russia, and Canada have expressed their desire to settle the situation peacefully.
"Russia actually has played nice on this and stopped at the North Pole," rather than extending its claim along the length of the ridge, says Philip Steinberg, a political geographer at Durham University in the United Kingdom.
Denmark had no such qualms and put in a claim up to the edge of Russia's EEZ, "even though there's no way in hell they'll get that," when it comes to the diplomatic discussions, Steinberg says.

One solution would be to use the equidistance principle, by drawing a median line between the coastlines, as has been done when proposed marine territories overlapped in the past; doing so would mean the North Pole falls to Denmark.
There's also a proposal to make the pole international, like Antarctica, as a sign of peace, says Oran Young, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"It seems a very sensible idea."

Links :

• LiveSciences : Canada Makes a Claim to the North Pole
• The Economist : Does Santa Claus speak Danish, English or Russian?
• The Guardian : The end of the Arctic as we know it 
• GeoGarage blog : The Arctic Ocean, explained / China's scientists are the new kids on the Arctic block / Russia's bid for supremacy in the Arctic Ocean / Melting ice in the Arctic is opening a new energy / China wants to build a “Polar Silk Road” in the Arctic