Le gouf de Capbreton

copyright : Ifremer

La fosse de Capbreton

 

Links :  

• IFREMER : Le canyon de Capbreton - Carte morpho-bathymétrique - Échelle 1/50 000

Kalani

For the past 3 years, filmmaker Nuno Dias has been busy capturing the life of one of the most enigmatic phenomenons of the Big wave Scene, Kalani Lattanzi.

Filmed in Nazaré and Rio de Janeiro, this documentary portrays Brazilian waterman Kalani Lattanzi’s route, all the way from his origins and first contact with the ocean in Brasil, to Nazaré in Portugal.

Where ultimately, with his body alone, no fins or boards or jets, he faces the biggest waves in the world, in the most pure form of wave riding: bodysurf.

“Kalani - Gift from Heaven” also counts with the participation and testimonies of some of the biggest names in the big wave scene, that crossed or witnessed Kalani’s path, names like Garrett McNamara, Andrew Cotton, Ross Clarke-Jones, Hugo Vau, Maya Gabeira, Carlos Burle, Nic Von Rupp, Lucas Chumbo, David Langer, Tim Bonython, Tom Lowe, Dudu Pedra and João Zik.

This production contains a lot of unreleased and unique big wave imagery of Nazaré, including historic footage of the biggest waves ever attempted by a bodysurfer.

The result is enriched by a variety of different angles: action from land, aerial photography or water footage, in what is a particularly difficult sport to capture on video.

At 25, Nuno Dias has filmed some of the most iconic Nazaré moments, is a multiple WSL Big wave award winner, including the filming of a Guiness Record Wave. His film “Empties” won best short film in 2018 at SAL, and later the Festival Lagoa Surf e Arte, in Florianópolis, Brasil.

The new ocean explorers

Our oceans are changing at an unprecedented rate.

Discover how Saildrone is taking action by building a global fleet of 1,000 wind-powered, emission-free ocean drones to monitor our oceans in real time and working with the science community to improve our collective understanding on how these changes impact people around the world.

From Popular Mechanics by Stav Dimitropoulos

Meet the wind- and solar-powered ocean drones boldly going where humans rarely venture—including the harsh, unforgiving Antarctic.

On January 19, 2019, an unmanned surface vehicle going by the name SD 1020 left Bluff, New Zealand, heavily tasked.
SD 1020 had to cover 22,000 kilometers (11,879 nautical miles) around the Antarctic (Southern) Ocean, ​where colossal waves occasionally soar to nearly 24 meters, gusting winds exceed 65 knots, and titanium icebergs emerge out of nowhere, as the neophyte ocean envelops Antarctica like the iciest blanket ever—the Earth’s coldest, most remote, and most hostile water mass.
The SD 1020 showed great resolve.

On August 3, 2019, it returned to Bluff safe and became the first vessel ever to have completed an autonomous circumnavigation of the Antarctic.

SD 1020 approaches Point Bluff, New Zealand, in stormy conditions after finishing the First Saildrone Antarctic Circumnavigation, sailing 22,000 kilometers around the Antarctic Ocean in 196 days.

SD 1020 is a member of the wider family of saildrones, wind- and solar-powered ocean drones that are able to sail 100 kilometers per day on average, and which consist of a narrow seven-meter-long hull, a five-meter-tall wing, and a keel with a 2.5-meter draft.
These saildrones can be deployed and recovered from any seaside dock and can fit into a shipping container allowing transit to any launch site.
When they’re deployed from a dock, they can sail to the area of study, and come back once the mission is complete.

“Saildrones are autonomous,” says Richard Jenkins, engineer, founder, and CEO of Saildrone, the company that designs, produces, and manages these USVs.
A human gives them a route to sail and waypoints, and the vehicles get from one waypoint to the next autonomously by themselves.
And they do so without putting to risk the sea or any marine life that crosses their path.

Generation 4 saildrone deployed from San Francisco on the 2018 White Shark Cafe mission.

The technology enabling this autonomy is wholesome: Each USV carries an automatic identification system, navigation lights, a radar reflector, high visibility wing colors, four onboard cameras, acoustic Doppler current profilers (sonar systems to measure water current velocities), passive acoustic recorders for marine mammal studies, and an array of 20 sensors, different for each saildrone (sensors are recruited in alignment with the tasks the human operator wants to complete).

These machines don’t fly, but that doesn’t make them any less fascinating.

Currently, there are about 30 of these autonomous SailDrones deployed around the world.

These vessels are jam-packed with sensors and analyze parts of the oceans where normally very few people venture.

The SailDrone company aims to have about 1,000 of these sailing drones navigating the world in a few years.

Linked to onboard computers and transmitting their data through satellite communications to the Saildrone mission control center in Alameda, California, these sensors can measure anything, whether it be air, sea, and bulk water temperature, irradiance, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, wave height and period, salinity and acidity levels, biomass and the list goes on.

When SD 1020 was launched from Bluff, it was “ordered” to accomplish a suite of science objectives.
Most of them were about investigating the abundance of krill, the direct and indirect relationships between marine predators and prey, and the oceanic carbon dioxide uptake and general acidification—targets developed in collaboration with prominent research agencies of the U.S., Europe, and Australia.
But SD 1020 didn’t leave the shores of New Zealand alone.

On that same January day, SD 1022 and SD 1023, two more saildrones, were launched alongside SD 1020, but were damaged en route and had to return to Bluff soon after.
(The two drones were relaunched last May and are currently in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, collecting data on krill.)
What made SD 1020 successful was its wing.
SD 1022 and SD 1023 had a tall and slender wing, unable to withstand winds over 60 knots and the subsequent massive waves; au contraire, the triumphant USV had a robust, newly designed “square rig” able to withstand the huge forces of being rolled and submerged by 15-meter waves.
It was a result of 10 years of research that interestingly span from Jenkins’s previous successful attempt to break the land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle.

“The Southern Ocean is one of the most unexamined areas of our planet,” Jenkins says.
“The survival of the saildrone at sea for [so] long is an evolution of very solid engineering,” Jenkins says.

SD 1022 and SD 1023 being redeployed to the Southern Ocean after receiving new "square wings."

Though scientists have yet to wrap up their surveys, Jenkins is confident that the data saildrone SD 1020 brought to shore after circumnavigating the world’s youngest ocean for 196 days will have a tremendous impact on our understanding of the environment, weather, and climate, and will aid the sectors of shipping, fishing and oil and gas exploration.

“We can’t make any sweeping claims before scientists digest the data, but it’s safe to say that we already have important new data, particularly with reference to the rates of carbon uptake in the Southern Ocean,” Jenkins says.
Previous scientific knowledge on the Southern Ocean based primarily on observations made from ships that avoided extreme winter weather conditions in the region assumed that the Antarctic was a huge carbon sink.
But in the face of recent findings, scientists might want to reconsider.

“Work done through the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project [a multi-institutional program aimed at unraveling the mysteries of the Southern Ocean and determining its impact on the climate] involved deploying pH sensors on autonomous floats in the ocean, a hose developed by Team Durafet, one of the winning Teams in the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE,” says Jyotika Virmani, physical oceanographer, atmospheric scientist, and executive director of planet and environment at XPRIZE.
“Data showed that the Southern Ocean may not sponge up as much carbon as hitherto thought, however, there was some uncertainty in this data,” Virmani continues.
Obviously, she finds the Saildrone mission a great achievement: “The strong winds and giant waves, and generally extremely harsh conditions of the Antarctic Ocean in the winter make it extremely difficult to accurately sample with manned vessels.
The recent amazing Saildrone mission has shown that advancing autonomous and unmanned technologies can really enhance the understanding of our ocean.”

Photo taken from SD 1020’s onboard camera during the 2019 Antarctic Circumnavigation.

Petros Ioannou, professor of electrical engineering systems at the University of Southern California, is also positive that such big strides in ocean exploration are a natural expression of where the technology is headed.
“It’s great to have all these unmanned vehicles,” Ioannou says.
“We are talking about a very hostile environment where it would be risky for humans to be on board.”

So these drones become very potent.
They can discover things previously impossible to discover.
That said, Ioannou is quick to sound a more skeptical note about the safety of the USVs.
“What happens if pirates interfere with the signals coming from the commander control centers and direct the drone elsewhere?” he asks.
“What if you lose contact with the vehicle? How does it recover? What kind of protocols will it follow? How about its failure modes? Can you sink it for example? How do you eliminate the risk of causing epic accidents?” Ioannou says.

Asked about whether saildrones have failure modes, Jenkins says there’s no need for a self-destruct capability on the drones because their data is encrypted, and there’s no scrap value in the vehicle, so the targets for capture in the same way that some USVs, mostly military drones, are.

Ioannou also appears unsure of who is going to benefit from such technologies.
“Let’s say you map the ocean, like we map the space.
Who is going to pay for it? Who would benefit from the knowledge of the deep ocean? We know there are minerals in the ocean floor.
Probably oil mining companies?” he says.
(The Antarctic Ocean is believed to host huge deposits of oil and gas fields on continental margin and valuable minerals like gold).

SD 1023 returning to New Zealand for repairs after damage to the wing during a storm in the Antarctic Ocean.

photo : Stephen Jaquiery

Meanwhile, last August, another saildrone family member, SD 1021, completed the fastest unmanned Atlantic crossing.
SD 1021 was launched from Bermuda in the North Atlantic Ocean on May 25, with the mission to sail toward the Solent, the strait that separates the Isle of Wight from the mainland of England, and cover 3,000 nautical miles (5,550 km) in 75 days in the process.

 SD 1021’s mission track from Newport, RI, to the Gulf Stream (pink), Bermuda to the UK (green), and back across the North Atlantic to Newport, RI (red).

see Saildrone news

It was one more record-setting race for Saildrone, which, according to its website, collects the data of all its missions for fish stock assessments, marine mammal tracking, bathymetric mapping, monitoring changes to the ocean ecosystem, and improved weather forecasting.

Only at the time of speaking, the company deploys 30 drones around the world, with aims to snowball the size of the fleet.
“We are making 100 drones this year and intend to make 200 next year,” says Jenkins.
“Next year again, we want to have 10 to 20 vehicles permanently circumnavigating the Southern Ocean.”

 Global Weather Forecast web & mobile app, powered by global saildrone fleet

An estimated 1,000 drones roaming the planet is the Saildrone’s CEO ultimate endgame; he wants to fill the Earth with saildrones.
“We have collected data from where no data has ever been collected before and proven we are capable of navigating anywhere in the world, throughout the entire year,” Jenkins says.
“This opens the door to a whole new chapter in understanding weather and climate.”

Links :

• Maritime Executive : Saildrone Makes Another Record Voyage
• KomoNews : UW studies tiny drone-powered sailboats as potential breakthrough in weather forecasts
• Phys : Saildrone is first to circumnavigate Antarctica, in search for ...
• GeoGarage blog : Saildrone launched with seafloor mapping ...

The World’s largest caldera discovered In the Philippine Sea

From Forbes by David Bressan

A team of marine geophysicists recently published a paper describing a large igneous massif east of the island of Luzon, located on the bottom of the Philippine Sea.

 Localization of Benham Bank with the GeoGarage platform (NGA nautical raster chart)

Based on the morphology, the research suggests that the submarine mountain massif represents the remains of a volcanic caldera with a diameter of ~150 km (93 miles), twice the size of the famous Yellowstone caldera in Wyoming (U.S.).

Bathymetry map showing major undersea features in the West Philippine Basin (WPB): Benham Rise, Central Basin Spreading Center, Palau-Kyushu Ridge, Philippine Trench, East Luzon Trough (ELT), Luzon-Okinawa Fracture Zone, Gagua Ridge, Ryukyu Trench, Urdaneta Plateau, Oki-Daito Rise, Oki-Daito Ridge, Daito Ridge, and Amami Plateau.

Inset shows map location relative to the Philippine Sea Plate.

Background is predicted bathymetry

(Version 18.1, Satellite Geodesy, 2014; Smith and Sandwell, 1997).

Gravimetric analysis shows that the Benham Rise, as the submarine mountain massif is named, consists of a nine miles thick layer of magmatic and volcanic rocks.

Rock samples comprise ages of 47.9 to 26-million-years, when volcanic activity build up the massif.
Sonar surveys of the seafloor also revealed the morphology for the first time.

Bathymetry map of the Benham Rise region produced from NAMRIA's multibeam grid overlaid on predicted bathymetry grid.

Thin grey line marks the extent of multibeam data.

The thin grey lines on the profiles mark slope values and the blue arrows point to where the platform base transitions to the crest.

Abbreviated feature names are: AB = Aurora Bank, BS = Bicol Saddle, BB = Benham Bank, B = Bayog Seamount, PH=Peña Hill, VS=Vinogradov Seamount, MS=Molave Saddle, PT = Philippine Trench, LOFZ = Luzon-Okinawa Fracture Zone, and CBSC = Central Basin Spreading Center. 

 

Locations of bathymetry profiles A-A′, B-B′ and C-C′ are plotted on the map together with locations DSDP 31 Site 292 and seismic lines RC2006-61 and GC31.

 Profile C-C′ showing a cross-section of the circular outer ridge and basin floor at the NW corner of the crest. Vertical dashed grey lines mark where the profile line changes direction.

The Benham Rise is rising from the 5.200 meters (~17,000 ft) deep seafloor to ~2500 meters, roughly 8,200 ft, beneath the sea surface, with a depression in the central portion, which likely is a volcanic caldera.
When large volumes of magma are erupted over a short time, a volcano may collapses downward into the emptied or partially emptied magma chamber, leaving a massive depression at the surface, from one to dozens of kilometers in diameter.
The circular depression on the Benham Rise is surrounded by a crest with scarps as high as 100 to 300 meters (300 to 900 ft).

 Bathymetry map of Benham Bank, a guyot shallowing to ~50 m below sea level.

Its summit and flanks exhibit evidence of mass wasting such as scarps and embayments.

Contour interval at 100 m.

It may be the world's largest known caldera with a diameter of ~150 km (93 miles).
For comparison, the famous caldera of Yellowstone in Wyoming is only about 60 km (37 miles) wide.
The researchers named the caldera Apolaki, meaning “giant lord”, after the Filipino god of the sun and war.

Links : 

• GMA : Expect no eruption at world’s largest caldera —PHIVOLCS
• Mashable : The largest known volcano in the world has been discovered in the Philippine Sea

Climate change: speed limits for ships can have 'massive' benefits

Cornwall, UK, example of ships’ tracks.

Image courtesy of Edward Gryspeerdt, with data from NASA

From BBC by Matt McGrath

Cutting the speed of ships has huge benefits for humans, nature and the climate, according to a new report.

A 20% reduction would cut greenhouse gases but also curb pollutants that damage human health such as black carbon and nitrogen oxides.
This speed limit would cut underwater noise by 66% and reduce the chances of whale collisions by 78%.

UN negotiators will meet in London this week to consider proposals to curb maritime speeds.
Ships, of all sorts and sizes, transport around 80% of the world's goods by volume.
However they are also responsible for a significant portion of global greenhouse emissions thanks to the burning of fuel.

Shipping generates roughly 3% of the global total of warming gases - that's roughly the same quantity as emitted by Germany.
While shipping wasn't covered by the Paris climate agreement, last year the industry agreed to cut emissions by 50% by 2050 compared to 2008 levels.

This new study, carried out for campaign groups Seas at Risk and Transport & Environment builds on existing research that suggests that slowing down ships is a good idea if you want to curb greenhouse gases.

The report though also considers a range of other impacts of a speed cut such as on air pollution and marine noise.

As ships travel more slowly they burn less fuel, which means there are also savings in black carbon, sulphur and nitrogen oxides.
The last two in particular have serious impacts on human health, particularly in cities and coastal areas close to shipping lanes.

The report found that cutting ship speed by 20% would cut sulphur and nitrogen oxides by around 24%.
There are also significant reductions in black carbon, which are tiny black particles contained in the smoke from ship exhausts.

Cutting black carbon helps limit climate warming in the Arctic region because when ships burn fuel in the icy northern waters, the particles often fall on snow, and restrict its ability to reflect back sunlight, which accelerates heating in the Arctic region.

The study also says that a 20% cut in speed would reduce noise pollution by two thirds - while the same speed limitation would reduce the chances of a ship colliding with a whale by 78%.
"It's a massive win, win, win, win," said John Maggs from Seas at Risk.
"We've got a win from a climate point of view, we've got a win from a human health point of view, we've got a win for marine nature, we've got a potential safety gain, and up to a certain point we are saving the shipping industry money.
"It is also of course by far the simplest of the regulatory options.  Thanks to satellites and transponders on commercial vessels it really is quite easy to track their movements and the speed they are travelling."

Proposals to reduce the speed of ships are among the ideas that will be considered at this week's meeting of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) in London.

Experts believe that in the medium to long term, the industry will move to alternative fuels.
But there is considerable pressure, including from many countries and shipping companies, for effective short term measures to curb emissions.

One proposal from France would focus on oil tankers and bulk carriers but not container or cruise ships.
Denmark is proposing that the industry has a goal-based standard, where it is up to the individual shipping companies as to how they meet it.

Many shipping companies are in favour of slowing down.
"Slow steaming not only reduces the fuel costs but its application does not require time-consuming procedures as it can be implemented instantly, it requires no investment from ship owners, can be easily monitored and is the most efficient means of slashing CO2 emissions," said Ioanna Procopiou, a Greek shipping company owner.

But the idea is not supported by some of the biggest names in the trade.
"Maersk remains opposed to speed limits," said Simon Christopher Bergulf, who is Regulatory Affairs Director with the giant Danish shipping conglomerate.
"We rather support the principle of applying power limitation measures.
Focusing on power instead of speed limits will help deliver on the CO2 reduction targets set by the IMO, whilst rewarding the most efficient ships."

What gives campaigners hope is that shipping has already tried out the concept of going slow - back in 2008, during the global financial crisis, cargo ships slowed down to cut costs.
With average speeds dropping by 12% this helped cut daily fuel consumption by 27%, which equated to a significant drop in emissions.

Campaigners believe that whatever decision the IMO eventually comes to will involve slower steaming.
"The short term measure, whatever it is, is going to reduce ship speed," said John Maggs.
"We think the best way to do this most effectively is with a direct speed limit, whether we get that or not is unknown, but ships will have to slow down in the future."

Links :

• Safety4Sea : Vessels’ speed limits to have positive impact on the environment
• The MediTelegraph : “Slow shipping is not the answer to cutting emissions”
• VPO : Satellite tracking shows relationship between ship emissions and cloud patterns 
• GeoGarage blog : Sulphur-emissions rules for shipping will ... / Luxury cruise giant emits 10 times more air ... /Lower emissions on the high sea  / Sentinel tracks ships' dirty emissions from orbit