A humpback whale swimming in a circular pattern while blowing bubbles to create a “net” to encircle its prey.
It’s a regular occurrence in the cold blue-green waters of Southeast Alaska, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers and their collaborators have captured it on video from an amazing whale’s-point-of-view along with aerial video.
The whales were packing on the pounds before heading
to Hawaii to breed.
Bubble-net fishing involves a group of whales near the ocean surface
rounding up fish or krill inside a circle of bubbles exhaled from their
blowholes.
As the whales rise toward the surface, they corral the fish
in the bubble net.
It's a cooperative behavior that results in a good
meal for the participants.
The team used drones
to capture the view from above.
Cameras and sensors attached to the
whales by suction cups gathered video and data from the whale's point of
view.
Put the two together and you get an incredibly detailed look at
this fascinating feeding behavior.
The British adventurer Sarah Outen has made an introspective and emotionally brave film about her awe-inspiring journey around the world.
She travelled 20,000 miles in four years, powered entirely by her own steam – on bike, foot and rowing boat.
Documentaries about big adventures usually feature a scene or two in which the hero (usually male), with chest-beating bravado, goes mano a mano with nature.
Not here.
In Alaska, Outen giggles when a bear sneaks up on her having a wash.
And it takes real guts to open up as she does about mental health issues in her elegant, self-aware voiceover.
Her adventure begins in 2011 rowing across the Channel to France, and from there it’s five and half months on the bike.
A recent Oxford graduate, Outen describes herself as confident and accomplished, but feeling lost and grieving the death of her father.
In Kazakhstan, she falls for the landscape and the hospitality.
People constantly invite her in for tea and ask: “Where is your husband?”
She points to her bike, Hercules.
Make no mistake, Outen is a tough lady, but her warmth and gentleness are as helpful while travelling so far alone.
In China, she picks up a young lad, Gau, who has recently dropped out of business school – and for 2,000 miles to Beijing the film becomes a buddy comedy.
Her adventure doesn’t go entirely to plan; a tropical storm at sea wrecks her boat and causes lasting emotional and physical harm.
While recovering in the UK, Outen falls in love and asks herself what’s the point of going back to finish.
Her film – co-directed with Jen Randall – shares with Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild a sense of the redemptive and healing power of travel.
Outen also has the nerve to probe her motives: what is she running from and why is she always restlessly planning journeys?
And she calls her boat Happy Socks, which is the most pleasing boat name since Boaty McBoatface.
One key to the past is crowd-sourcing data recovery
It’s been the stuff of science fiction for generations: a time machine that would allow researchers to reach back into yesteryear and ask new questions about long-ago events.
This month, a NOAA-funded research team published an update to a weather “time machine” they’ve been developing since 2011.
This third version of the 20th Century Reanalysis Project, or 20CRv3 for short, is a dauntingly complex, high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was for every day back to 1836.
The newest update provides continuous estimates of the most likely state of the global atmosphere’s weather on 75-kilometer grids eight times a day for the past 180 years.
It’s the scientific fruit of an international effort led by researchers with NOAA's Physical Sciences Division (PSD) and CIRES and supported by the Department of Energy.
This painting by James Gale Tyler depicts the crew of the USS Jeanette abandoning ship in 1881 after more than a year trapped in Arctic ice.
Barometric pressure observations from the ship's log comprise some of the data used to reconstruct global weather in the updated 20th Century Reanalysis dataset released by NOAA on Oct 9, 2019. Source: Wikipedia
The research opportunities that this work makes available are almost boundless, said Gil Compo, a CIRES scientist working at NOAA who leads the reanalysis project.
“We’re throwing open the door to lost history, and inviting scientists to pour through,” Compo said.
Old weather records fed into modern weather model
Using NOAA’s Global Forecast System, researchers reconstructed the global atmosphere from surface pressure readings, sea temperature and sea ice observations from archival records, some transcribed by citizen volunteers.
From this data, the model estimates temperature, pressure, winds, moisture, solar radiation and clouds.
This U.S. Weather Bureau Map depicts northern hemisphere circulation patterns on Aug. 16, 1915, as the Galveston hurricane made landfall on the Texas coast.
Surface pressure observations from historic weather records like this allow scientists to reconstruct global weather using modern weather models.
Credit: NOAA Physical Sciences Division
Scientists have used previous 20th Century Reanalysis datasets as a foundation for a wide range of studies, from understanding large-scale climate trends to diagnosing the impacts of individual historical extreme weather events.
The dataset allows researchers to explore how climate change is influencing temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric circulation, and compare today’s storms, heat waves, droughts and floods to historic events.
“This tool lets us quantitatively compare today’s storms, floods, blizzards, heat waves and droughts to those of the past and figure out whether or not climate change is having an effect,” Compo said.
“This should be useful for climate attribution research.”
Enriching our understanding of long-ago events
Scientists have also used the previous versions of the “old weather” data to discover unknown hurricanes, study the climate impact of old volcanic eruptions, investigate the timing of bird migrations, and even explore the economic impact of diseases spread by the tsetse fly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach said he can’t wait to begin working with 20CRv3.
“I’m a huge fan of reanalysis products,” said Klotzbach.
“I’ll probably be diving in by next week and I know my colleagues are looking forward to working with it.”
Others have used the data to enrich the scientific understanding of specific weather lodged in cultural memory, like the sinking of the Titanic or the extraordinary winter of 1880-1881, which was chronicled by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her book “The Long Winter.”
“I’ve found reanalysis composites incredibly useful and accessible,” said Barbara Mayes Boustead, a meteorologist instructor with NOAA’s National Weather Service, who has studied the winter of 1880-1881.
“We introduce them in our course on operational climate services and to weather forecast offices who want to investigate climate events like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.”
A big appetite for big data
20CRv3 uses millions more observations than previous versions of the reanalysis, especially for earlier periods.
The new reanalysis includes up to 25 percent more available observations for years prior to 1930.
Running the model and crunching all this data required astronomical computing resources.
To accomplish this third upgrade, the Department of Energy donated 600 million cpu hours to crunch 21 million gigabytes of data at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
The result?
This new update provides a much better indication of where the weather estimates are more reliable, and where more observations are needed.
“The atmospheric estimates from 20CRv3, as well as their uncertainties, are much more reliable than those from the previous reanalysis, particularly in the 19th century,” said Laura Slivinski, a CIRES meteorologist and the lead author of a recent paper in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society that lays out improvements in their reanalysis techniques.
“We’re more certain about how much we know, and where we need to know more.”
Citizen scientists help chart a “virtuous circle” of discovery
Some of the key players in the reanalysis story are groups like Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth, which marshals professional scientists and ordinary citizens alike to pore over historical documents like ship logs and extract meteorological observations that are used to refine old weather reconstructions.
Targeted data rescue can be extraordinarily valuable - for example, logs of 19th Century wooden sailing vessels attempting to penetrate the Arctic and Antarctic.
“These data have been invaluable to us because they come from the otherwise data-sparse polar regions,” Slivinski said.
“20CRv3 also provides a literal map to further advances in precision by identifying regions and time periods where additional weather observations will improve model estimates,” she added.
Earlier time periods, especially in the Southern hemisphere, still have high uncertainty.
Luckily, data rescue can help fix that.
“This dataset can keep getting better as we unlock more observations from historical archives,” Compo said.
“It’s really a virtuous circle.”
The Mayflower Autonomous Ship will set sail in September 2020, 400 years after the first Mayflower, and this time AI and other advanced technologies will be at the helm.
From BBC by Jen Coperstake A fully autonomous ship tracing the journey of the Mayflower is being built by a UK-based team, with help from tech firm IBM.
The Mayflower Autonomous Ship, or MAS, will launch from Plymouth in the UK in September 2020.
The Mayflower Autonomous Ship : max speed 20 knts, length 15 m, weight 5 tons
Its voyage will mark the 400th anniversary of the pilgrim ship which brought European settlers to America in 1620.
IBM is providing artificial intelligence systems for the ship.
Timeline :
October 2019 - January 2020: Hull constructed in Gdansk, Poland February 2020: Hull to arrive in Plymouth, UK February - June 2020: Fitted out with advanced navigation and research equipment July - August 2020: Testing at sea September 2020: Sets off from Plymouth, UK, to arrive in Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA, two weeks later
The vessel will make its own decisions on its course and collision avoidance, and will even make expensive satellite phone calls back to base if it deems it necessary.
The sensor technology guiding its decision-making process includes:
Light detecting and ranging (LIDAR)
Radio detecting and ranging (RADAR)
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Satellites
Cameras
Data on hundreds of ships has already been collected in Plymouth Sound to feed its machine-learning algorithms.
Pilgrim journey
400 years ago, on 6 September 1620, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth to Massachusetts, with 102 passengers and around 30 crew members.
The original journey took more than two months, landing at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, on 21 December 1620.
The passengers onboard, mainly Christian Puritans, became known as pilgrims.
A comparison of the original Mayflower with its futuristic version
This vessel will repeat their journey but without any humans on board, and a much faster anticipated crossing time of two weeks.
The ship is being built by ProMare - a non-profit marine research organisation - along with IBM.
The project's director, Brett Phaneuf, has ancestral roots in the area where the Mayflower landed on America's east coast, dating back to 1628.
Mr Phaneuf grew up in New England hearing family folklore about the early settlers, and visiting sites connected to the crossing.
He now lives in Plymouth, UK, and was inspired by his history to contribute to the commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower.
But he wasn't interested in building a simple replica of the ship.
"Nothing really was going to do it justice," Mr Phaneuf says.
"My immediate interest is in autonomy and we needed something that would speak to the next 400 years."
Sleek design
The ship is a trimaran with one very long slender main hull optimized for propulsive efficiency.
The two smaller hulls are for stabilization and provide the surface area for the solar panels.
The vessel will run on solar and wind power, with an emergency diesel backup generator if needed.
The hull of the ship is currently under construction in Gdansk, Poland, and is due to arrive in Plymouth next February.
Virtual reality experience of the new Mayflower autonomous ship next to the original in Plymouth Port (University of Birmingham)
"On a ship with no people there is a huge amount of volume left to do things with - there's nowhere for people to sleep, no need for storing food or water - all the things that keep people alive go away," says Mr Phaneuf.
Mr Phaneuf says many ships already have highly automated systems, but keep skeleton crews of 6-12 people.
"The ship is going to do oceanographic research but it is also an active test platform for artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms for collision avoidance," he says.
The team will keep an eye on its progress from a control centre in Plymouth and can take over if there is an emergency.
"Once it's past the Isles of Scilly, it's on its own," says Mr Phaneuf.
Data collection
IBM's deep learning software will help the vessel collect and analyse data to avoid collisions at sea, according to the company's chief technology officer Dr Andy Stanford-Clark.
"We are fusing all that data to create a multi-dimensional view of the world," he says.
"The ship can't keep going back to the cloud and saying 'can you check on this' as there will be long periods of time where there is no connectivity," says Dr Stanford-Clark.
The ship will use IBM's sophisticated operational decision maker (ODM) tool, which is also used by the financial industry to produce billions of complex functions.
Artist's rendition of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship showing room for science pods
Different views of the ship's design showing solar panel placement
Microplastics
Three research pods in the hull of the ship are being designed by scientists at the UK's University of Plymouth.
Director of the University's Marine Institute, Richard Thomson OBE, says the voyage is the first opportunity to sample the oceans for plastics, from an unmanned vessel.
Professor Thomson coined the term microplastics in a paper published 15 years ago, to describe the accumulation of fragments of plastic in the world's oceans.
'We're trying to construct a heat map of the problem but it is based on pinpoint sampling and extrapolation," he says.
"This is an opportunity to get a much deeper and data-rich picture of the situation."
The ship's ability to make its own decisions based on immediate data availability could lead researchers to remote areas where they wouldn't otherwise think to go.
"In the future, ten years from now, if the boat is in the middle of the deep Indian Ocean, and it detects something unusual but its humans want it to do something else, it can divert itself, as it will be seeing more data and say 'this is where I want to go'," says Mr Phaneuf.
The team inside the Mayflower Autonomous Ship mission simulation room
Insurance
A future of autonomous vessels roaming across the world's oceans brings up several issues around insurance, cyber-security and piracy.
Mr Phaneuf says this first voyage is being insured by insurance company Gard, which wanted to be the first company to insure an unmanned ocean vessel.
The main threat in the North Atlantic, he says, will come from the weather and the ocean conditions, rather than other vessels.
But not knowing what the ship will find is an exciting prospect.
"We know more about the surface of the moon than the surface of the ocean.
This is the first of many ships that will bring us to that state of knowledge," Mr Phaneuf says.
NASA scientists are trying to understand how this region is responding to climate change—and how that will influence sea levels around the world.
A thousand feet above the glistening, iceberg-dotted water of the ocean off of East Greenland, oceanographer Josh Willis braces for balance, his feet spread wide on the metal floor of a specially-outfitted airplane.
He grips a wide grey cylinder, hovering it over a 6-inch-wide bottomless tube.
The pilot’s voice crackles over the intercom: “3, 2, 1, zero, DROP.”
Willis lets the cylinder go.
With a whoosh, it slips down the tube and into the wide-open air.
The plane banks hard to the right and everyone on board rushes to a window.
“I see it!” yells Ian Fenty, another oceanographer on the project, as the probe—designed to sink to the seafloor and record the properties there—splashes down.
Willis, Fenty, and a crew of other scientists and pilots are flying the edge of Greenland’s vast ice sheet to figure out how the ocean eats away at the ice, speeding or slowing its slide into the water, where it melts, raising sea levels worldwide.
In an airplane flying low over the eastern coast of Greenland, Josh Willis, the lead scientist for the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) research project, prepares to drop a probe through a chute in the floor of a retrofitted DC-3 plane.
The probe will fly through through the air and land in the coastal ocean, where it will measure the temperature and salinity of the water.
photograph : Jonathan Nackstrand, AFP/Getty Images
But exactly how much ice it will deposit, and how fast, is still an open question.
Greenland is currently the biggest contributor to global sea level rise.
By 2100, will its ice sheet’s melt add inches to the world’s oceans—or will it add much more?
That’s a trillion-dollar question.
Nearly 70 percent of Earth’s population lives within 100 miles of a coast, and vast amounts of infrastructure—from airports to ports to cities to roads to Internet cables—sits in zones that could flood within decades.
Small, low-lying island nations, city planners, insurance adjustors, homeowners—everyone is clamoring for the most accurate estimates of how much extra water they’ll need to prepare for.
And for that, says Willis, they need to know what happens here, where ocean meets ice.
“This is where it all happens,” he says. The flooding of the future is being defined here and now, in the glittering sea below.
A sudden lurch into melting
Greenland’s ice is shrinking, this we've known for a while, since the science of global warming, a famous climate scientist likes to say, is older than the technology that makes our iPhones fast and the Internet run smoothly.
But until the 1990s, the ice in Greenland was remarkably stable, even as air temperatures rose because of human-caused climate change.
Each year, the ice sheet lost some weight as ice flowed like taffy from the center of the ice sheet, through funnel-like outlet glaciers at its edge, spilling into the ocean.
But enough snow fell on top of the mile-high interior of the ice sheet to balance out the losses.
In the 1990s, scientists thought that the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica responded slowly to changes in climate, shuddering into motion like bears waking up from hibernation.
Yes, they’d respond to the human-caused climate change that was gripping the planet, the thinking went, but it would take decades or even centuries to really see the impacts.
“Early on, we weren’t thinking about Greenland as being really critical on these kind of decadal scales, and we didn’t have tools to look at them on those time scales,” explains Twila Moon, a glacier expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission uses ships and planes to measure how ocean temperatures affect Greenland's vast icy expanses.
Jakobshavn Glacier, known in Greenlandic as Sermeq Kujalle, on Greenland's central western side, has been one of the island's largest contributor's to sea level rise, losing mass at an accelerating rate. In a new study, the OMG team found that between 2016 and 2017, Jakobshavn Glacier grew slightly and the rate of mass loss slowed down.
They traced the causes of this thickening to a temporary cooling of ocean temperatures in the region.
But around 1997, something changed.
Scientists studying Jakobshavn glacier, on Greenland’s western coast, watched in alarm as a tongue of ice that had for years poked out into a fjord started to shrink.
The tongue was about 15 kilometers long in 1997.
By the early 2000s—a scant half decade later—that tongue was gone.
“We suspected that this could happen from time to time, but this was the first time we’d seen anything like it,” says David Holland, who led the team studying the rapid disintegration of the ice tongue.
Huge chunks of ice break off the Jakobshavn glacier in Western Greenland.
Photo by James Balog, Nat Geo Image collection
Today, the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass about six times faster than it was just a few decades ago, whatever tenuous balance that existed before long since upended.
Between 2005 and 2016, melt from the ice sheet was the single largest contributor to sea level rise worldwide, though Antarctica may overtake it soon.
Within the past 50 years, the ice sheet has already shed enough to add about half an inch of water to the world’s oceans, and that number is increasing precipitously as the planet heats.
During this summer’s extreme heat wave that parked over Greenland for a week and turned over half its surface ice to slush, meltwater equivalent to over 4 million swimming pools sloughed into the ocean in a single day.
Over the month of July, enough melt poured into the ocean to bump sea levels up by an easily measurable half a millimeter.
Scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute used data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge to develop a more accurate model of how the Greenland Ice Sheet might respond to climate change in the future, finding that it could generate more sea level rise than previously thought.
Overall, there’s enough water locked up in the Greenland ice sheet to add about 25 feet to the world’s oceans.
It’s not likely that such catastrophic loss will happen soon, as in within the next few hundred years. But the whole of the ice sheet doesn’t have to collapse to cause massive, planet-wide reverberations.
“When I started this research, I never would have guessed that warm subsurface waters could unravel an ice sheet,” says David Holland, an oceanographer at NYU.
“But it’s becoming clear that they can, and that they are.”
