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The drone boat of "shipwreck alley"

Illustrations by Zoe van Dijk

From The Verge by Matthew Braga

Meet BEN, the self-driving boat that’s been tasked with helping lay bare the long-lost secrets of the lakebed

It was just past midnight when the Ironton punched a 200-square-foot hole in the side of the Ohio.
It was dark, the waters were rough, and the Ohio, a wooden bulk freighter loaded with flour and feed, was no match for the Ironton, a schooner heavy with coal.
The Ohio sank within half an hour, and the Ironton soon followed, taking five of its crew down too.

A tour of some of the 93 incredibly-preserved shipwrecks sunk in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary of Lake Huron.

Their ghostly hulls have sat largely undisturbed at the bottom of Lake Huron since colliding in late September 1894 — just two of the many wrecks that lie in a treacherous stretch of water called Thunder Bay off Michigan’s northeastern coast.
Some are so well preserved by the lake’s frigid freshwater that their unbroken masts point definitely towards the surface, rigging still intact.
Others have dishes in the cupboards, a century late for dinner.
A few years ago, local media reported that divers found a 1927 Chevrolet Coupe amid the wreckage of a steamship, covered with algae and barnacles, but nonetheless pristine.
You can thank the rocky shoals, frequent fog, and sudden gales of Thunder Bay for turning what was once the bustling marine interstate of America’s early industrial age into a modern-day museum of Great Lakes maritime history.
Locals called it “Shipwreck Alley.”

America's Best-Preserved and Nationally-Significant Collections of Shipwrecks

Divers flock from all over the world to see the wrecks for themselves each year — and last spring, they were joined by an unusual interloper: an autonomous boat named BEN.
The boat was developed by researchers from the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping.
Its name is short for Bathymetric Explorer and Navigator, but it also honors Ben Smith, the former captain of the university’s research vessel Gulf Surveyor, who unexpectedly died in 2016.
BEN is a self-driving boat that’s been tasked with making maps, and it was brought to Thunder Bay to help lay bare the long-lost secrets of the lakebed.

On land, we are spoiled for maps.
A few hundred imaging satellites now orbit the Earth, collecting new imagery each day, some at startlingly detailed resolution.
Our maps go far enough back that we can see how the planet has changed, and how we’ve changed the planet.
But on water, maps of this detail simply don’t exist.
Mapping is still largely done by boat, and unlike satellites, boats need crews.
It’s expensive, time-consuming work, and especially difficult in water that is shallow, rough, or remote.
It’s why we know comparatively little about what lies beneath the surface of our oceans and lakes — by some estimates we’ve mapped just 9 percent of the world’s oceans to modern standards— and why BEN and vehicles like it hold so much promise.
The thinking is that fleets of tireless, automated, uncrewed vehicles could one day criss-cross our waters, making maps where humans can’t or won’t.

Ask oceanographers about our lack of maps, and they’ll tell you it’s hard to know what’s important until you know what’s there in the first place.
Having the capacity to map more of our oceans, more often, and in higher detail than ever before, would give scientists an unprecedented amount of data — data crucial to our understanding of climate change, and the effects it has had on everything from melting Arctic ice to undersea life.
It would also be a boon for nautical safety and navy intelligence, for deep-sea miners in search of untapped resources, and for the telecom companies unspooling undersea cables from coast to distant coast.

For now, the researchers have set their sights on the more modest locale of Thunder Bay.
While the Ohio was discovered in 2017, the Ironton’s final location is still unknown.
As a test of its nascent map-making abilities, BEN was tasked with looking for the Ironton’s remains.
But the robotic explorer is more than just a seaworthy self-driving car.
It is an ambitious little boat with its own challenges to overcome and opportunities to seize.

In our oceans, there are countless more mysteries waiting to be solved, waiting for boats like BEN.

At the local marina, there was no shortage of curious onlookers drawn to the sight of the tiny, strange-looking boat.

BEN is about 13 feet long, or the length of a compact car, and a bright banana yellow.
It reminded me of an oversized jet ski — but with a tower of cameras, antennas, and other important sensors where a person would normally sit, and an array of computers packed inside.

The harbormaster, laughing from the driver’s seat of his pickup truck, asked if the research team had charged BEN’s batteries (in fact, BEN runs on diesel).
Another truck pulled alongside the boat launch, three small dogs jostling for position in the open window of the back seat.
“There’s no one in there?” the woman on the passenger side asked, eyes wide.
The man driving it asked if we could use BEN to catch fish.

It’s here in Alpena, Michigan, a small town of 10,000, that the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary is based.
The sanctuary is overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and it protects some 4,300 square miles of freshwater — basically, the top half of Lake Huron on the American side.
Like the world’s oceans, much of it has never been mapped.

“If you can believe it in this day and age of technology, we have only surveyed about 16 percent of the sanctuary,” said Stephanie Gandulla, the sanctuary’s research coordinator.
Gandulla told me there are 99 known wrecks in the sanctuary’s waters, but at least 100 more that have yet to be found — the Ironton among them.
That’s not even including the countless wrecks that lie outside the sanctuary, which litter the lake’s Canadian side.
“There’s lots of work yet to be done,” she said.

Leading BEN’s sojourn on Lake Huron was Lindsey Gee, the mapping and science coordinator of the Ocean Exploration Trust, the ocean research nonprofit founded by explorer Robert Ballard of Titanic discovery fame.
Gee and his colleagues don’t typically map freshwater lakes, but they decided to collaborate with the sanctuary, and the University of New Hampshire researchers, in anticipation of using BEN at sea.

The boat’s size makes BEN well-suited to coastal waters, and regions too shallow for larger boats yet too deep for divers.
They planned to spend two weeks in and around Alpena mapping points of interest to the sanctuary’s staff — the Ironton among them.
The hope is that BEN — tireless, automated — will eventually be able to collect more data for analysis than the sanctuary’s own crewed research vessel Storm could collect on its own.
When I visited, the researchers were preparing to map some shallower shipwrecks that were close to Alpena’s shores.
It was a dry run of sorts for the Ironton search to come.

BEN’s minders sat across the marina, inside a small white tractor-trailer parked by a break wall — the mobile command and control center that is crucial to BEN’s operation.
It is much more spacious on the inside than it seems from outside, crammed with computers, tables, tools, and a trio of giant screens that let the researchers monitor BEN’s vitals and see what its cameras and radar see.
Blessed with a day of clear weather in an otherwise dreary week, the researchers offered to show me how BEN makes maps.

Val Schmidt, the university research engineer who leads BEN’s development, helped ease BEN down the boat launch and into place alongside one of the marina’s docks.
BEN’s automatic identification system declares itself a “pleasure craft”; there’s no option yet for “self-driving boat.” Fully fueled, it weighs about 2,000 pounds and can run for around 16 hours.

Should they ever lose contact, there’s also a kill switch on the side of the boat — a simple lanyard of red string tied to a cap.
Pull the string, the cap comes off, and the fuel stops flowing.
That way it can’t run away to Canada, one of Schmidt’s colleagues joked.

They turned the boat on, and Schmidt used his foot to push BEN away from the dock.
For the sake of expediency — and to minimize any chance of damage before reaching open water — a colleague back in the trailer manually guided BEN out into the lake using a knock-off Xbox controller, like a very expensive remote-controlled boat.
Once BEN is free of the break wall, they let the ship’s onboard computer take control.

“Mowing“Mowing the lawn” is what oceanographers call the slow, tedious craft of making maps at sea.

You drive your boat in a straight line while your sonar repeatedly pings the seafloor below with sound.
At the end, you loop around and start a new line, going back the other way next to the line that was just completed.
With each line, you collect more data until you’ve covered the area you want to map — like filling the outline of a shape in a coloring book.

BEN, however, can do all of this on its own, and neither waves nor wind can conspire to push the boat off course.
The whole process is mundane, but the researchers have to remain alert, continually looking for any potential hazards that might require them to take manual control.
Though BEN may be able to drive itself, it is still learning how to understand and respond to the world around it.

The idea is that, eventually, BEN will not only be able to tell the difference between a sailboat and a container ship, but also decide how to alter its path in response.
BEN only tops out at about 5 and a half knots — if it were a runner, it could race a 30-minute 5K — whereas big merchant ships might move at a swift 20 knots.
Realistically, BEN would only have a few minutes to identify a potential hazard — its location, what it is, whether it’s moving — and then figure out where to go.

Working to tackle this problem is Coral Moreno, a PhD student on BEN’s development team.
Her specialty is sensing and perception.
Moreno has been taking all of BEN’s various sensors — cameras, LIDAR, radar, GPS, and sonar — and attempting to fuse the data together into a comprehensive picture of potential hazards above the water, and eventually, below.
“There is no single sensor that can provide you all the information that you need,” Moreno said.
“They really complement each other because they are good for different ranges, and they provide you [with] different kinds of information.
So you really need to use all of them.”

While there’s lots to learn from the world of self-driving cars, it’s not as simple as putting car technology on a boat.
Water is rarely still, and BEN is constantly moving.
There are no stoplights, and no clearly marked lanes.
Getting good data to train BEN’s image recognition algorithm has also been challenging.
Images taken by BEN’s cameras are sometimes distorted by splashes and glare on the surface of the water.
Existing image sets — what researchers use to train their neural networks to recognize, say, faces — weren’t created with the marine environment in mind.

A small window on Moreno’s laptop flashed possible matches, giving me a glimpse at what BEN thinks it’s seeing.
Close to shore, it seemed to work, correctly identifying dogs and their owners walking along the pier, the boats in the marina, and the trucks that trundle along in the distance with a high degree of confidence.
But out on the lake, it’s mostly false positives.
Much to the researchers’ amusement, BEN mistook lighthouses for fire hydrants during early tests.
Less amusing is the possibility that BEN could misidentify a potential hazard, and meet the same fate as the wrecks it’s supposed to hunt.

BEN is so small that — here, Moreno made a splat noise — a larger boat could run into BEN “like it was nothing, and not even notice.”

While Moreno and her colleagues keep an eye out for any splat-worthy boats, they also have their eyes on the sonar data BEN is sending back.
BEN is equipped with a multibeam sonar, which uses sound to ping the seafloor in a wide, fan-like area, and then measures the reflection of each ping.
The time it takes for a ping to return is used to measure depth, and the strength of the ping’s reflection — the backscatter — can be used to characterize the makeup of the lakebed or seafloor.
Those measurements are then rendered, roughly, and visualized in real time on one of the trailer’s screens.

We could see what’s in the water column directly below BEN — that is, everything the pings hit on the way down — and the current depth.
In another window, an isometric, rainbow-colored cutaway of the seafloor slowly extruded, in cool colors for the valleys, and warmer ones for the peaks.
The operators are constantly watching the data to ensure the sonar is properly configured.
Shallow water requires different settings than deeper water.

Temperature and salinity can also cause sound to bend as it moves through the water, resulting in inaccurate readings, so any environmental changes — measured as soundspeed — must be accounted for too.
The idea is that BEN will eventually be able to set and correct these values itself, so it can not only drive — and successfully avoid hazards — but also make maps by itself.
Another graduate student, Lynette Davis, has been working on the feature, called “Don’t run aground BEN.” They plan to test it this spring, but for now, the researchers set the values themselves.

It’s all very interesting, but I was mesmerized by the backscatter the most.
New data slid into view like a side-scrolling video game, or the way images used to load over dial-up modems, line by line.
Rocks and mud reflect sound differently — as do the ghostly hulls of long-lost wrecks — and these differences can shed light on what makes up a lakebed or seafloor (or, in this case, what lies on top).

My eyes scanned the incoming telemetry, rendered in different shades of gray, and tried to make sense of the data.
I looked for tell-tale ripples and anomalies in the backscatter, any beams or fragments that might suggest a wreck.
As we passed over one of the sanctuary’s chosen sites, I saw what I thought was a hull.
But it’s easy to see ghosts in the backscatter — to my untrained eye, a lot of things looked like a wreck — and we won’t know for sure until later.
What we could see in real time is only a rough approximation of the polished data to come.

Once BEN is done here, the team’s mapping specialist, Erin Heffron, will process the collected data, and render it into a higher quality, more magnificently detailed map of the lake floor.
Until then, I looked for ghosts in the backscatter, imagining how it would look to see the Ironton slowly emerge, largely intact, like traveling back in time.

  BEN is about 13 feet long, or the length of a compact car, and a bright banana yellow.

Photo by Matthew Braga

BEN isn’t the only autonomous boat in operation, nor even the only boat to have emerged from the University of New Hampshire’s engineering department.
An international team led by researcher Rochelle Wigley of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping won first place in the Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell.
The multiyear challenge required participants to map a 250-square-kilometer patch of seafloor in less than a day, without any human intervention.
Rather than map from the surface, Wigley’s GEBCO-Nippon Foundation team deployed an underwater mapping vehicle from an autonomous boat.
They were awarded a cool $4 million for their work.

Students at Denmark’s Arctic Research Centre, part of Aarhus University, have also been developing an autonomous vehicle similar to BEN for the purpose of researching ocean currents near icebergs and glaciers, which pose safety risks for larger crewed vessels.
There’s an ambitious project to build fleets of wind-powered boats, called Saildrones, that could rove the oceans in fleets for months at a time — mapping among their many potential capabilities.
Another company, SeaMachines, demonstrated an autonomous firefighting boat in 2018, and an autonomous oil spill skimmer in 2019.
The company said it’s currently testing its navigation assistance and perception technology on an A.P.
Moller-Maersk container ship, where it makes more sense to augment the crew’s ability to safely navigate a busy port than automate them out of existence.

As for oceanographers, some believe that even a handful of these vehicles set loose on the ocean could fill a sizable gap in our seafloor maps.
Roland Arsenault, a software engineer on the BEN research team, recalled the time he spent on a NOAA research vessel in the summer of 2018.
Each day, the NOAA crew sent a few people out on a smaller boat to do mapping surveys.
They would come back at night, process the data, and do it all again the next day.
But what if they had a fleet of boats like BEN they could send out instead? A small crew could run five or six boats at once.

“I’m not talking about the whole ocean filled with them yet,” he told me, “but heading in that direction, right?”

The data collected would aid in the study of our changing climate and the prediction of storms, yield safety improvements for fishing and freight vessels, and help oil and gas companies cut their survey costs.
An international organization of ocean mapmakers — the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) — has estimated that a collaborative effort between commercial shipping operators, international hydrographic organizations, oil and gas surveyors, fishing boats, scientific research vessels, and, yes, autonomous boats, could yield a complete map of our oceans by 2030.

Back at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, it will be a while before researchers can say if the Ironton is present among all the data collected last spring.
The sanctuary’s own research vessel Storm covered an area of nearly 80 square kilometers in ten days, while BEN covered just over 73 square kilometers over 11 days — and the post-processing required to make sense of it all has been delayed by other mysteries.

After their time in Alpena, the researchers took BEN to sea aboard the Ocean Exploration Trust’s research vessel Nautilus.
In August, BEN aided in the search for another wreck — the long-lost plane of storied pilot Amelia Earhart.
They spent two weeks around Nikumaroro, a remote island in the western Pacific, but they came up empty this time, too.
Like the wreckage of the Ironton, it’s not clear where, exactly, Earhart went down, and searches have been limited by cost and time.
It’s the kind of mystery that would be perfectly suited for a fleet of autonomous boats like BEN.

I knew I couldn’t leave Alpena without seeing a wreck myself, so I visited one of the few you can see from shore: the remains of the Joseph S.
Fay.
It lies about an hour north of Alpena, behind a lighthouse on the beach, a lattice of wood and bent iron rising from beneath the surf.

When the waves fell back, they revealed the twisted metal and weathered, blackened wood of the century-old wreck.
Though it was swept onto the rocks in 1905, there’s still a remarkable amount left.
It stretches like a scar down the beach, only a fraction of the ship’s total length.

I had a few seconds at a time to study the wreck before it was obscured by the waves, like an Etch A Sketch the length of the shore.
Then the wreck emerged again, and my eyes had a few seconds to adjust, to focus anew on a different part — like the backscatter from BEN’s sonar, looking for signal amid the noise.

With Sea Level rise, we've already hurtled past a point of no return

An iceberg floats in Disko Bay, near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 24, 2015. Every year, the massive Greenland ice sheet is shedding 300 billion tons of ice into the ocean, making it the single largest source of sea level rise from melting ice. (Source: NASA/Saskia Madlener)

From DiscoverMag by Tom Yulsman

Climate negotiators in Madrid are trying to avoid 2 meters of sea level rise, but research suggests 10 times that — 65 feet — is already inevitable.
As 25,000 people from 200 countries were converging on Madrid this week for the start of climate change talks, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres voiced this stern warning:

When it comes to climate change, “the point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

As sobering as it was, Guterres's statement had a hopeful flip side: We can still avoid crossing that Rubicon into the realm of dangerous climate change — if only we get more serious at cutting emissions of climate-altering carbon dioxide.

That's ultimately the whole point of these annual Conference of the Parties meetings, or COPs — finding ways to galvanize global action on climate change.

But there's just one problem: Research on past climates suggests we've already hurtled past one significant point of no return, one that should prompt us to pay more attention to adapting to climate change.

The research has focused on sea level during past times when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was as high as today.
The work suggests that we've already committed ourselves to sea level rise far higher than the 2 or so meters that climate negotiators are trying to avoid with CO2 cuts.

"We’ve already baked in 20 meters of sea level rise,” says James White, a University of Colorado scientist who has studied ancient climates to gain insights about the future.
"The coast is toast."

So far, sea level rise has been relatively modest. As Greenland and Antarctica have shed ice, and sea water has expanded as it has warmed, global mean sea level has come up by about 7 to 8 inches since 1900.

But the rise is accelerating, with about 3 of those inches occurring since 1993.
Moreover, just those 8 inches have made high-tide coastal flooding more extensive and severe — as was demonstrated recently with the catastrophic floods in Venice.

In the U.S., coastal flooding exacerbated by sea level rise is a worsening trend that "threatens America’s trillion-dollar coastal property market and public infrastructure, with cascading impacts to the larger economy," according to the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Sixty-five feet of sea level rise is nearly 100 times higher than what we've experienced so far. Here's what that would do to just one part of the U.S. coast:

Twenty meters is 65 feet — enough to inundate vast swaths of coastal territory, displacing hundreds of millions of people.

(For a full-size, interactive map, see Climate Central's feature here.) 

In the map above, have a look at Delaware — the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
It's completely swallowed by the sea.

Or, as White describes it, "First in, and first out."

We haven't seen such a dramatic impact yet because parts of the climate system respond slowly to a rise in CO2.
In fact, a full rise of something on the order of 65 feet would play out on a timescale of centuries, not decades.
And that's obviously a good thing, because it means we have time to prepare.

But there's also a sobering flip side to that somewhat reassuring picture: The science suggests that such a rise is probably inevitable.
Yet even as we're already suffering through hotter and longer-lasting heat waves, more intense storms, and more frequent megafires (not to mention increased coastal flooding), we humans still haven't managed to turn the tide on rising levels of CO2.

There is some good news: Major research findings published this week show that global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and industry grew slowly in 2019 due to a decline in coal burning. The projected growth rate of just 0.6 percent this year is down from 2.1 percent in 2018.

Even so, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere hit a high of about 411 parts per million this year, up from about 280 in preindustrial times.

And, crucially, the rate of CO2's increase has been accelerating over the past decade, not slowing — as the following graphic shows:

On a decade-by-decade basis, the growth rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising, not slowing — as shown by the horizontal bars.

(Source: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory)

You have to go all the way back to the middle of the Pliocene Epoch, 3.3 million years ago, to find atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations about as high as they are today.

For this and other key reasons, scientists regard this time period as a good analogue for where our climate is headed.

Thanks in large measure to that relatively high level of CO2 in the atmosphere, temperatures in the mid-Pliocene were about 2 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today.
And the Arctic was particularly warm. As science writer Alexandra Witze has written in Science News, "The warmth allowed trees to spread far to the north, creating Arctic forests where three-toed horses, giant camels and other animals roamed."

Today, the Arctic also has been affected more than other regions, warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

By gleaning chemical clues from the remains of tiny organisms that lived in the oceans during the mid-Pliocene, scientists have also sussed out how high the seas stood.

 

A scanning electron micrograph of the shells of tiny ocean organisms known as foraminifera.

The remains of foraminifera from 3 million years ago have yielded chemical clues to the height of the seas at that time.

(Source: NOAA/OER)

Among these organisms were foraminifera, single-celled planktonic animals with chalky shells. When these creatures died, they settled to the seafloor where their shells eventually became preserved in rock as they became buried by successive layers of sediment.
Today, scientists recover the shells in cores they drill from the seafloor.

The chemistry of the shells was strongly influenced by the conditions of the water in which these organisms lived.
Scientists have used that fact to work out the temperature of the ocean when the organisms were alive, and, crucially, how much ice was present on land.

A number of studies using this and other approaches have yielded a picture of Greenland during the mid-Pliocene as completely ice free, and Antarctica with a significant portion of its ice sheet gone. With that much ice missing, these studies suggest that sea level was 10 to 35 meters, or 30 to 115 feet, higher than today.

The relationship between peak global mean temperature, maximum global mean sea level, and sources of meltwater, are shown here for two periods in the past when global temperatures were comparable to or even warmer than at present.

The mid-Pliocene is on the right. Red pie charts over Greenland and Antarctica show how much ice is thought to have been missing compared with today. (Source: Fourth U.S. Climate Assessment)

Twenty meters is about in the middle of this range.
If, as the science suggests, we've already locked in that much sea level rise, then one could be forgiven for feeling a sense of resignation, or even despair.

But remember that the rise would occur over a very long time.
So, if we start thinking now about how to adapt to it, we'd have plenty of time to meet the challenge.
This could also be part of a broader effort to deal with serious climate change impacts happening right now.

Some argue that we have neither the time nor the resources to deal with adaptation given the pressing need to mitigate future impacts.
For example, David Roberts writes in Vox that a "just solution to climate change crucially hinges on maxing out near-term mitigation spending."

But climate impacts are already hurting millions of people worldwide.
"In 2016 alone, extreme weather-related disasters displaced around 23.5 million people," according to the Environmental Justice Foundation.
"This does not include the people forced to flee their homes as a consequence of slow-onset environmental degradation, such as droughts, sea level rise and melting permafrost."

Failing to help people adapt to these kinds of changes would be terribly unjust.

But working to protect people from what's already happening, as well as what's coming, could be an antidote for despair — a way for people to feel that they can make a difference.
And that could help galvanize action on arresting the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Make no mistake: That's absolute necessary.
Failing to bring emissions down will make things much worse — so much so that it would be difficult to imagine how we'd ever cope.

If emissions of carbon dioxide continue to rise as a result of fossil fuel use, atmospheric concentrations could go from 411 parts per million today to 800 ppm by about the year 2080. Research on past climates shows that when CO2 in the atmosphere gets that high, "Antarctica melts," White says.

That would give us 80 meters — or about 260 feet — of sea level rise.
We clearly shouldn't go anywhere near that.
"But right now, we're in the denial phase," White says.
"We're good at it."

To get out of denial, it would be helpful if we faced up to just how much of an impact we're having on our planet's life-support systems.
Here's how White thinks of this:
"During the 1970s, we were passengers on spaceship earth. We’ve since moved up to the driver's seat, and we're buckled in and driving. This is a planet that no longer functions just on natural laws, but on natural laws plus humans."

It's time we grew up and started driving to a more sustainable future.

In Mer Sion

IN MER SION from Air Vide et Eau productions

IN MER SION, a contemplative film depicting the storms of recent years that have hit the Breton coasts:
2011 / Joachim
2014 / Ruth
2016 / Ruzica
2020 / Ciara
Images : Jean-René Keruzoré / Martin Keruzoré
Helicopter pilot: Thierry Leygnac

Image of the week : cloud streets over the Labrador Sea

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.

From NASA by Adam Voiland

As sea ice in far northern latitudes approached its annual maximum extent, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite acquired this false-color image of the Labrador Sea on March 2, 2020.
Chunks of sea ice hugged the coast of Baffin Island, while cloud streets streamed over the sea.

With this combination of visible and infrared light (bands M11-I2-I1), snow and ice appear light blue, and clouds are white.
The orientation of the cloud streets indicate that strong, cold winds were blowing from north to south.
As the cold air moved over the comparatively warm ocean water, the air warmed and picked up the moisture needed to form cumulus clouds.

On March 2, 2020, GOES-16 (GOES-East) spotted ribbon-shaped cloud streets streaming over the Labrador Sea from the sea ice edge in the Davis Strait.

As frigid air moves over relatively warmer water, the warmer air rises, bringing moisture with it.

As it cools, it gradually condenses and sinks in rows of horizontal counterclockwise-rotating air cylinders that line up with the prevailing direction of the wind.

As that wind sweeps around the southern tip of Greenland, the clouds are blown in a new direction, losing their “streamer” shape.

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on NOAA’s GOES-16 (GOES-East) geostationary satellite also acquired imagery of the cloud streets on March 2, 2020. 

Imagery credit: CIRA/NOAA

Cloud streets form when columns of heated air—thermals—rise through the atmosphere and carry heat away from the sea surface.
The moist air rises until it hits a warmer air layer (a temperature inversion) that acts like a lid.
The inversion causes the rising thermals to roll over on themselves, forming parallel cylinders of rotating air.
On the upward side of the cylinders (rising air), water vapor condenses and forms clouds. Along the downward side (descending air), skies remain clear.
Arctic ice normally reaches its annual maximum extent in mid or late March.
Sea ice extent this winter has been below average, according to tracking charts published by the National Snow & Ice Data Center.