Image of the week : Maheno SS shipwreck on Fraser island

SS Maheno rusted shipwreck on a beach of Fraser Island (East coast of Queensland, Australia) remains as a landmark attraction.

Localization with the GeoGarage platform (AHS nautical raster chart)

 shipwreck displayed in Bing imagery

Imagery on the left, from OneAtlas, shows a shipwreck on the coast of a beach.

The zoomed in image on the right shows a more detailed view of the ship that was once used as a portable hospital in World War I.

The ship also travelled back and forth between local countries during WWI.

During a cyclone in 1935, the ship detached from a tow-line and drifted ashore, where 8 crewmen setup camp and were rescued a few days later. 

images : Airbus OneAtlas

From AtlasObscura

She was built for comfort, but when WWI broke out she went into service, her dining rooms converted into hospital wards, until a cyclone swept her away.

Originally constructed and used as an ocean liner sailing back and forth across the Tasman Sea, the 5,000 ton steel-hulled SS Maheno was called into duty in 1915 to serve as a hospital ship transporting casualties back and forth between Sydney and Melbourne.

She was eventually called to the UK and served the wounded soldiers in Europe, delivering them from France to England via the English Channel.

At the end of the war, the SS Maheno headed home to New Zealand to resume carting perfectly healthy humans back and forth across the waters, and in July, 1935, she was sold to an Osaka shipbreaker.

Unfortunately, she would never reach her new home, for there was a storm brewing.

About 50 miles out from the coast, a severe cyclone whipped itself around the Maheno and the ship towing her, the 1,756-ton Oonah.

The towline was severed, and the crews were unable to reattach it as the ships heaved about in the choppy waters.

The Maheno and the eight men aboard drifted away into the dark waters, as the helpless crew aboard the crippled Oonah could do nothing but watch.

After three hand-wringing days, the ship and her camped-out crew were found beached on the shore of Fraser Island.
Attempts to re-float the liner proved to be futile, and the SS Maheno, the luxury liner that served so many wounded troops, was stripped and abandoned.

The rusty remains of the ship are still visible, but the site is extremely unsafe and is prohibited to visitors.
 
Links :

• YouTube : SS Maheno on Fraser Island (Australia) / Drone and SS Maheno (Fraser Island) - April 2018
• Fraser Tours : The S.S Maheno Shipwreck on Fraser Island

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Island reveals rising tide of plastic waste

Volumes of plastic waste washing up on an uninhabited South Atlantic island is worsening, with 15 per cent more bottles drifting onshore each year since the 1980s

This bottle has been colonized by goose barnacles. 

From BBC by Mark Kinver

A remote island in the southern Atlantic Ocean has helped reveal the scale of the problem of plastic waste facing our seas.
Some 75% of bottles washed ashore on Inaccessible Island, in the South Atlantic, were found to be from Asia - with most made in China.

Inaccessible island with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO nautical chart)

Researchers said most of the bottles had been made recently, suggesting they had been discarded by ships.
An estimated 12.7 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans each year.

'By 2018, Asian bottles comprised 73 per cent of accumulated and 83 per cent of newly arrived bottles, with most made in China,' the team wrote.

Pictured, 500ml water bottles made by Chinese brand Master Kong, which were the most abundant in 2018, sorted by age

But this figure just covers land-based sources.

The team from South Africa and Canada, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said that it had been assumed that most of the debris found at sea was coming from the land.

Study co-author Maëlle Connan inspects bottles to see where they came from.

Researchers compared surveys of pollution on the remote beach from the eighties with those they undertook in 2009 and 2018

However, the scientists said the evidence suggested otherwise.
"When we were [on the island, called Inacessible Island] last year, it was really shocking how much drink bottles had just come to dominate," explained lead author Peter Ryan, director of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town.

During litter surveys on the island, which is a World Heritage Site, the scientists examined 3,515 debris items in 2009 and 8,084 debris items in 2018.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) drinking bottles were the most common type of debris and had the fastest growth rate among debris, increasing at 14.7% each year since the 1980s.

The oldest container, found in 2018, was a high-density polyethylene canister manufactured in 1971.

Yet most bottles were date-stamped within two years of washing ashore.

"Once you get into it you can learn quite a lot even from bottles that don't have labels on," Prof Ryan added.
"They've got dates on, they've got manufacturer's marks and once you know different manufacturers you can work out where they come from," he told BBC News.
"What was really shocking was how the origin had shifted from largely South American, which is what you would expect from somewhere like Inaccessible Island because it's downwind from South America to predominantly Asian.
"In fact, during the three months that we were on the island it was 84% of the bottles that washed up were from Asia."

Ship to shore?

The combination of the fact that the bottles were from Asia, particularly China, and the fact that they were manufactured too soon to have drifted there on the global oceanic currents, suggested that they were being discarded by passing vessels.

"My initial thought was that it was going to be fishing fleets. Fishing boats tend to be a little bit more Wild West than the merchant fleets as a rule, but the fact that it's primarily Chinese doesn't really fit with that because the predominant fishing fleets in the South Atlantic are Taiwanese and Japanese," Prof Ryan observed.
"I think the evidence is pretty strong that it's coming from merchant shipping," he suggested.
"It is where we've seen the really big increase in shipping, particularly from South America to Asia over the last decade or so. It came as a bit of a shock to me because I had assumed that the merchant fleets would be reasonably compliant [to international agreements not to throw waste overboard]."

Prof Ryan said that he would be interested to hear what the international shipping sector made of the findings, adding: "I think we need to look quite carefully at better monitoring and enforcement of regulations."

Links :

• Phys : Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
• DailyMail : Plastic pollution worsens as study finds 15% MORE single-use bottles are washing up on a remote beach in the Atlantic Ocean every year since the 1980s
• The Guardian : Seven tonnes of marine plastic pollution collected on remote Arnhem Land beach
• Newser : All That Ocean Plastic? It Has an Unexpected Source
• The Inverse : An uninhabited island in the Atlantic is surprisingly covered in plastic bottles
• The Economist : Inaccessible Island’s rubbish problem has been bottling up for years
• Newsweek : Plastic Pollution on Inaccessible Island in South Atlantic ...
• Discover Mag : Why Do So Many Plastic Bottles Wash Up On Inaccessible ...
• Ars Technica : One of the most remote islands is plagued by plastic waste
• Business Insider : New research suggests we might be thinking about the ocean plastic problem all wrong — trash dumped from ships could be a major culprit