10 years of PlanetSolar

PlanetSolar boat was launched on 31st of March 2010 in Kiel, Germany.

That was 10 years ago

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Converting plastic into energy may be key to ... / This boat will make its own fuel on a round ... / Turanor Planetsolar: sailing the world on ...

Whitbread Round the World Race official films

Like so many great adventure stories, this one started in a pub, with a conversation between the Royal Naval Sailing Association and the head of the Whitbread Brewery.

Within a year or so, 17 crews were on the start line off Portsmouth, UK, for the first Whitbread Round the World Race in September 1973.

From that was born one of the greatest sporting events in the world. Check out the story of the first edition of what we now know as The Ocean Race.

The second edition of the Whitbread Round the World Race cemented the race's place as a fixture and pillar event in the sport of sailing.

Dutchman Conny van Rietschoten would claim the race on corrected time in Flyer, a Sparksman and Stephens design that can still be seen sailing today.

Clare Francis became the first woman to skipper a boat in the race and Sir Peter Blake made his race debut as one of the crew on board Heath's Condor, and was forced to make a spectacular man overboard rescue in the Southern Ocean.

15 boats would start the race in Portsmouth and all 15 completed the four-leg, 27,000 nautical mile course.

Conny van Rietschoten returned to the Whitbread Round the World Race in 1981-82 determined not just to defend his title but to win both line honours on every leg, and the overall race on handicap. Impressively, with his Flyer II, he was able to accomplish just that.

He also had some young and impressive young talent on board to help him on his quest, including Grant Dalton, who would go on to become an icon of the race in his own right, while Sir Peter Blake skippered his own campaign for the first time.

The French take the win.

Lionel Péan would skipper L'esprit d'équipe to victory over 14 other teams, marking the first time a French team would win the race.

But this race is perhaps best remembered for when Drum lost her keel and capsized during training in the Fastnet Race, with Duran Duran singer Simon Le Bon on board.

Other famous names were involved in this race, with Sir Peter Blake back for a fourth time with Lion New Zealand and this is when a spirited and determined Tracy Edwards would make her debut before launching her celebrated Maiden campaign for the following race.

What do you think's changed, and what's stayed the same?

Au cœur des cartes – Nautical atlas

Dated from the end of the 13th century, the so-called "Pisane" chart is considered to be the oldest nautical chart that has ever come down to us.
It mainly represents the Mediterranean Sea, where the Spanish and French coasts and the large islands are shown with relative fidelity.
It is part of the charts called "portulans", whose main attributes are: names of ports and harbours inscribed perpendicular to the coast lines, wind lines indicating compass directions, distance scales.
Appearing in the ports of the western Mediterranean, these nautical charts were an essential tool for the control of the seas and the dissemination of the results of European explorations from the 15th century onwards.

see Gallica

The Catalan Atlas is a collection of illuminated maps, bound like a book. Intended for the King of France, it gave him a picture of the entire known world in his time.
Ancient legends and the "wonders" of faraway Asia are mixed with geographical, political and economic information on these maps, which are based on medieval tales, such as Marco Polo's Devisement of the World.
see Gallica

This map of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea is drawn on a single sheet of parchment.

At the place of the neck of the animal that provided the skin is the date, 1447, and the signature of the artist, Gabriel de Vallseca, a representative of the Catalan cartographic school that produced many ornamental marine maps from the 14th century onwards.

The space represented on it is narrowed around the Mediterranean.

The coastline is finely drawn from Gibraltar to Syria, and nine cities from the West and East are shown as bird's-eye views.
Map kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Maps and Plans Department, GE C-4607 (RES)
View the document in the Gallica Digital Library: https://c.bnf.fr/Hzq
see Gallica

The author of this atlas, Grazioso Benincasa, a former ship's captain, signed a large number of atlases and maps made in Venice and Rome in the second half of the 15th century.

These maps represent the Mediterranean and Black Seas, but also the coasts and islands of the Atlantic Ocean, from England to the shores of Africa, recently explored by the Portuguese. 
see Gallica 

Links :

• YouTube : Au coeur des cartes
• GeoGarage blog : The golden age of nautical charts - When Europeans discovered the rest of the world (BNF exhibition)

A.I. is helping scientists understand an ocean’s worth of data

Machine-learning applications are proving to be especially useful to the scientific community studying the planet’s largest bodies of water.

Credit...Francois Gohier/VW Pics/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

From NYTimes by Tatiana Schlossberg

This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives.

If you had about 180,000 hours of underwater recordings from the Pacific Ocean, and you needed to know when and where, in all those different hours, humpback whales were singing, would you Google it?

That is what Ann Allen, a research ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, did.
Sort of.

In January 2018, she approached Google and asked if they might be able to help her find the signal of humpback whale songs amid all the other ocean noise, like dolphin calls or ship engines.
Using 10 hours of annotated data, in which the whale songs and other noises were identified, Google engineers trained a neural network to detect the songs, based on a model for recognizing sounds in YouTube videos, said Julie Cattiau, a product manager at Google.

About nine months later, Dr. Allen had a model for identifying humpback whale songs, which she is using in her research on the occurrence of the species in islands in the Pacific and how it may have changed over the last decade.
Google used similar algorithms to help Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans monitor in real time the population of the endangered Southern Resident Orca, which is down to around 70 animals.

Read more about the research

Machine learning and artificial intelligence applications are proving to be especially useful in the ocean, where there is both so much data — big surfaces, deep depths — and not enough data — it is too expensive and not necessarily useful to collect samples of any kind from all over.

Climate change makes machine learning that much more valuable, too: So much of the data available to scientists is not necessarily accurate anymore, as animals move their habitats, temperatures rise and currents shift.
As species move, managing populations becomes even more critical.

The endangered North Atlantic right whale, whose population has fallen to about 400, is one animal that could benefit from more technologically advanced monitoring: Probably because of warming temperatures, these whales have moved north from their traditional habitat of the Gulf of Maine to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada.
Coinciding with that shift is what NOAA has termed an “unusual mortality event,” in which 30 whales are known to have died since 2017 — 21 in Canada and 9 in the United States — the majority from ship strikes or getting tangled in fishing equipment.

ImageNorth Atlantic right whales, like this mother and calf, have moved north, and more of them are dying.

North Atlantic right whales, like this mother and calf, have moved north, and more of them are dying.
Credit New England Aquarium

To protect the whales, scientists need to know where they are, which is what the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and the New England Aquarium are doing in what they call “counting whales from space.” Taking data from satellites, sonar, radar, human sightings, ocean currents and more, they are training a machine-learning algorithm to create a probability model of where the whales might be.
With such information, the federal, state and local authorities could make decisions about shipping lanes and speeds and fishing more quickly, helping them to better protect the whales, according to Sheila Hemami, director of global challenges at Draper.

Many fish populations are moving, too, or are overfished or nearing it, and much of that fishing is done illegally.
In an effort to clamp down on illegal activity and keep populations at healthy levels in the ocean, Google also helped start Global Fishing Watch, an organization that monitors fishing around the world by collecting and making vessels’ positions and activities public.
“The oceans are a pretty exciting place to work in big data because there’s so much opportunity for improving data, which, in fisheries has historically been very poor, especially when you compare it with other extractive industries,” said David Kroodsma, Global Fishing Watch’s director of research and innovation.
“Twenty percent of fishing is illegal, unreported or unregulated,” he said.
“What if we didn’t know where 20 percent of the forests were, or carbon emissions?”

Other applications are used in ocean chemistry and pollution, for tasks like monitoring ocean plastic.
Using sensors similar to those that monitor air quality in the International Space Station, Draper is collecting data on the properties of microplastics found in the ocean at the request of the Environmental Protection Agency.
From that information, they produce “a fingerprint of specific chemicals,” said Dr. Hemami, and use that fingerprint to train the algorithm to identify kinds of plastic.

They are still in the testing phase, but have deployed their first-generation sensor near the Northern Pacific gyre, home to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which helped provide information about how the system might work.

Machine learning is helping to track the giant larvacean, whose mucus houses trap carbon dioxide, sending it to the bottom of the ocean.

Credit...2016 MBARI

Machine learning has not yet been widely used in assessing other issues in ocean chemistry, like ocean acidification, deoxygenation or nitrate concentrations, but Dr. Hemami said there was significant promise in that area.
In at least one case, animal observation applications and the more chemically focused ones overlap.
They come together in shared pursuit of the giant larvacean.

Kakani Katija, a principal engineer at the Monterey Bay Research Aquarium Institute, has been using machine learning to track the lives of these zooplankton, which build themselves elaborate houses out of mucus, and model their behavior.
In their snot-bubble homes (which can exceed three feet), the tiny animals (about half the length of a new pencil) filter water, in the process capturing particles and detritus sinking from the surface of the ocean to eat.

Once the structure is clogged with this ocean dust, much of which is made up of photosynthesizing organisms that have pulled down atmospheric carbon dioxide in the process, the animals abandon their homes, which sink to the ocean floor and feed bottom dwellers.
But they have another crucial function: In trapping all of that debris, the mucus houses are sequestering carbon dioxide, sending it to the bottom of the ocean.

As we burn fossil fuels, we release carbon dioxide, much of which is absorbed by the oceans.
The oceans have, as a result, prevented our planet from warming by as much as 36 degrees Celsius (instead of about one degree), but all of that carbon dioxide makes the oceans more acidic.
Knowing how much carbon dioxide the ocean is storing is crucial to modeling future climate changes, and given the prevalence of these creatures around the world and how much water they can filter, it is likely a significant amount.

“With the oceans or the environment, it’s really easy for us to get stuck in this doom-and-gloom narrative,” Dr. Katija said.
“What I love about technology or the progress we’re seeing in A.I., I think it’s a hopeful time because if we get this right, I think it will have profound effects on how we observe our environment and create a sustainable future.”

Links :

• Google : A tale of a whale song

How to escape from a sunken submarine

illustration : Casey Chin

From Wired by Rachel Lance

First of all, you can't just open the hatch when you're trapped at the bottom of the ocean. But there is a way out—it requires physics and some audacity.

Ever since human beings created the first submarines, there have been other, more claustrophobic people who have stared at the devices and thought: “Nope.”
For many, the thought of the pipe- and equipment-filled narrow metal confines is enough to trigger a fear of drowning—even when they’re standing on dry land.
But everyone who has ever looked at a sub, even those of us so enamored with the underwater beasts that we sleep in custom-sewn adult-sized submarine pajamas, has at some point wondered: If the boat goes down, is there any way out?

How to Escape a Sinking Submarine | US Navy Training Film | 1953

Yes! Escape plans and tools are almost as old as submarine technology itself.
Although the odds may always be stacked in favor of the merciless, cold depths of the sea, a few dozen lucky people have taken that unintentional ride down to the ocean floor and lived to see daylight again.
Their stories teach us how to get out.

Adapted from In the Waves: My Quest to Solve the Mystery of A Civil War Submarine, by Rachel Lance. Buy on Amazon. Courtesy of Dutton

In 1851, German submarine inventor Wilhelm Bauer looked at two of his panting countrymen, slumped inside the hull of his creation.
The boxy, 26-foot-long, human-powered early sub model was supposed to help win the ongoing war with Denmark, Germany’s neighbor to the north, but the odds of its successful use were looking grim.
The crew of three had been trapped inside the submarine for hours, sitting and waiting for rescue.

The test day in Germany’s Port of Kiel had started normally.
The men had crawled, as usual, through the hatch in the angular conning tower above the bow and taken their places: Bauer at the controls, and Witt and Thomsen each standing at one of the two massive hamster wheels that powered the boat’s propeller.
Bauer gave the command.
Witt and Thomsen lifted their legs and began to step on the spokes of the wheels, spinning them slowly like a giant human-powered waterwheel.
The submarine began to move forward.

In this training film, see how the U.S. prepares its submariners and submarine support personnel to handle potentially disastrous emergencies.

The USS Balao (SS-285) plays the part of submarine that has had a fire aboard and is now stuck on the sea floor.

Some trapped crew members make individual emergency buoyant ascents via the escape trunk.

In the meantime, the submarine rescue ship USS Skylark (ASR-20), rushes to the scene and uses its Rescue Bell (RC14) to evacuate the remainder of the crew.

Bauer expected a graceful and smooth disappearance beneath the surface of the water, like an elegant metal seal.
Instead the Brandtaucher (“Fire Diver”) plummeted unexpectedly, caroming wildly in an awkward, unstoppable, and rapid descent into a depression in the harbor floor that was 16 meters deep.
As she crashed into the seafloor and shuddered to a final stop, the three men were hurtled unceremoniously into the bow of the boat.
They pieced themselves together, shaken but uninjured.
However, Bauer, Witt, and Thomsen slowly came to the realization that they couldn’t get the boat out of the hole.
They were stuck.

At first, they just waited.
And waited.
For at least five hours, according to them, they sat, wondering when rescue would come.
Their dive had been witnessed by onlookers; they figured it was just a matter of time until the German Navy hauled them back up to safety and fresh air.
Someone had in fact noticed, and eventually the clanking of chains and anchors on the hull indicated that boats and divers were poking around the wreck site.
But Bauer was growing concerned about the air … and the anchors.

All the men were panting hard, pale and sweating.
Bauer himself had a splitting headache and felt like he was about to be sick.
Bauer knew these were the signs of carbon dioxide buildup, caused by the fact that they kept inhaling the oxygenated air they had brought down with them and exhaling noxious CO2.
Their blood was becoming more acidic with every breath from the invisible but dangerous CO2, and he knew that they did not have much fresh air supply left.
He was also concerned about the anchors and chains that were striking the submarine so loudly, because he thought her thin hull might rupture from their repeated hits.
The submarine had an escape hatch, but the pressures of the ocean held it firmly shut.
Bauer reached up a pallid, trembling hand and gripped a seacock valve tightly in his palm, twisting it open.
Water poured in and started to flood the submarine.

Imagine being trapped in a submarine as gallons of water begin pouring in.

There is no escape. In today's educational animated cartoon we look at the daring rescue mission to save the crew of the sinking USS Squalus.

Witt and Thomsen immediately pounced on Bauer, one slamming him down and sitting on his chest, the other scrambling to restrain his arms and close the valve.
Wide-eyed, they yelled that he was trying to commit suicide and drown them too.
But Bauer had opened the seacock because he was a man who wanted to live, and because he was also a man who understood physics.

The pressure inside the submarine was roughly 1 atmosphere because it had been closed and sealed on the surface at 1 atmosphere.
The pressure in the seawater outside, at a depth of 16 meters, was equal to about 2.6 atmospheres.
Therefore, the pressure difference across the hatch of the submarine was about 1.6 atmospheres total.
Converting the units, if Bauer wanted to force open the hatch to escape he would need to be able to move it against the 166 kilopascals of pressure pushing the hatch door closed.

The hatch door had a total surface area of roughly 1.5 square meters.
And 166 kilopascals of pressure from the water times the 1.5 square meters of the door equaled 249,000 newtons of aquatic force shoving against the door.
Let’s put that into relatable units; I choose to describe the force in units of Rachel.
I personally am 160 pounds’ worth of human-being mass, comprised mostly of cake, which in metric units is 72 kilograms.
Therefore, according to Isaac Newton, to calculate the force exerted by me on the Earth, my 72‑kilogram mass gets multiplied by the rate at which Earth’s gravity wants to accelerate me downward, which is 9.8 meters per second squared.
Seventy-two multiplied by 9.8 is a total downward force of 711 newtons.

Therefore, I exert 711 newtons of force on the ground just by standing there, doing nothing productive, converting oxygen to carbon dioxide.
The force on the hatch from the water was 249,000 newtons.
If Bauer wanted to leave the submarine, he would have needed to be strong enough to lift the 350 Rachel Lances standing on the hatch door.

Bauer opened the seacock because he knew that he needed to equalize the pressure differential.
If he could partially flood the submarine and bring the pressure inside up to 2.6 atmospheres, the total pressure difference across the hatch door would drop to zero.
The door would swing open with ease, and all three submariners could swim to safety.
More likely the door would have blown open violently as the buoyant air tried to escape and shoot to the surface, but either way, exit pathway achieved.

Talked down by Bauer and his mastery of the laws of pressure, Witt and Thomsen released their captain and allowed him to flood the sub.
The increase in the partial pressure of the carbon dioxide was temporarily difficult to tolerate, leading to gagging and choking, but the submarine flooded quickly and the pressure was equalized.
The trio got blown out through the liberated hatch door and rocketed safely to the surface like they were the “corks of champagne bottles,” as Bauer later put it.

Bauer, Witt, and Thomsen were the first three submariners ever to successfully escape a submarine.
They did it in the year 1851, and they did it through a mastery of the scientific principles of the underwater world.
The Brandtaucher was plucked out of its mud hole in the ocean and conserved.
It is presently on display in a museum in Dresden, Germany, and is the oldest submarine ever recovered.

The USS Tang has been sunk by a Japanese gunboat, but a handful of its crew remain alive inside. Their only chance of survival is to open the hatch and swim 180 feet to the surface.

Not all of the submariners from that early generation learned the counterintuitive undersea physics required to execute a daring escape, however.
A few years later, in the fall of 1863 and during the heat of the American Civil War, Confederate privateer Horace Hunley found himself clawing at the conning tower hatch of a small hand-cranked submarine that would soon be renamed in his memory.
Three Rachels of force were pushing the small oval door closed, and Hunley did not think to equalize the pressure like Wilhelm Bauer did.
Hunley was unable to bash his way to freedom, and the hatch door remained firmly sealed.
All eight of the crew asphyxiated inside.

Starting around the early 1900s, submariners looking for a way out became less reliant on the savvy wits of a lone scientific hero among the crew.
Instead, the more modern boats came fully equipped to let everyone out in a semi-organized fashion, through double sets of doors known as locks.
Locks allow submariners to escape by first climbing through an inner door or hatch and sealing it tightly behind themselves.
They then partially flood the small volume before the outer hatch will swing open, but this two-door system means they do not need to flood the entire boat.
Once they swim out safely, the outer hatch is resealed against the ocean, the flooded volume of the small escape trunk is drained and opened, and a new set of escapees can climb in.

However, even with submarines designed to provide an easier exit, submariners of the early 1900s still faced the fundamental problem of being humans and not fish, and militaries everywhere began to design escape “lungs” to solve that problem.
The lungs were devices that recycled an escapee’s breath, using a chemical reaction to remove carbon dioxide and adding more gas as needed.
The lungs began to become standard, and were routinely stashed onboard submarines like the HMS Thetis.

In June 1939, a thick slathering of sticky grease covered the nearly naked bodies of British naval officers Captain Harry Oram and Lieutenant Frederick Woods, who stood in front of their crew wearing only trousers.
The layer of grease was supposed to provide them with some insulation against the frigid waters of Liverpool Bay, where their submarine had sunk during a sea trial conducted amidst the first rumblings of the war to come with Hitler.
They were ready to show their compatriots on the downed submarine HMS Thetis that the Davis escape lungs they were putting on, which were untested in a real sunken submarine scenario, did indeed work as promised.
The two men applied their nose clips and began breathing out of their mouths and directly into the square airtight bags strapped against their chests.
They climbed into the lock of the flooded and crippled submarine, past the inner door.
By this time all of the crewmen were nearly debilitated from the excruciating effects of their own exhaled carbon dioxide, but Oram had a plan to save them, which he had written down and tied around his wrist in case he ended up floating dead on the salty waves above.

The inner door was sealed behind Oram and Woods, imposing a robust metal barrier between them and their crew, and confining them in the small cylindrical volume of the escape trunk.
With the inner door sealed, the outer hatch, held shut by the ocean, was all that remained between them and freedom.
Water began to flood the trunk.
The pressure began to equalize.
Their Davis lungs recycled their breathing gas as planned, giving them new oxygen and removing their carbon dioxide even when submerged underwater.
Once the pressure equilibrated to zero across the outer hatch door, the men pushed it open and swam the remaining 20 vertical feet between them, sunlight, and safety.

Four lucky sailors made it out of the HMS Thetis.
However, a failure of the outer hatch door meant that 99 more would die inside.
A few years later, nine Americans would execute a similar getaway when they used Momsen lungs, the American parallel to the Davis lung, to escape the downed USS Tang in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of China.

The Momsen and Davis lungs provided the crucial gas supply that allowed escapees to become fish, to let them rocket for the surface and freedom without the need to grow their own gills, even for those who did not know how to swim.
The design worked.
But the grease was a rudimentary plan at best, and the hypothermia that later destroyed the escaped crew of the Soviet submarine K-278 Komsomolets in 1989 emphasized that the ocean still had ways to win.
The Komsomolets crewmen were able to climb out of their vessel while it floated on the surface of the Barents Sea before sinking, but they died waiting for a rescue that did not find them quickly enough.

The SEIE suit is an ingenious pressurized suit designed to permit escape from stricken subs up to a depth of 183 meters. Rising at a speed of up to three meters per second, the number one rule of submarine escape is "never ever hold your breath."

Modern-day submariners are equipped with full-body waterproof suits called SEIE suits, an acronym that stands for Submarine Escape Immersion Equipment and is pronounced “sigh.”
They are brightly colored fabric pods that look a bit like inflatable Minion costumes, except orange.
To break free from a downed vessel, each sailor dons one and waits patiently inside the escape trunk with a partner, staring at the rising water and each other through the clear plastic panels in the front that provide viewports out of the poofy heads of the suits.
The hatches of the locks are controlled by someone else now—too many times has the panicked, premature release of one hatch door rendered the entire lock useless—and when the outer hatch opens, the inexorable, extraordinary positive buoyancy of the fully inflated suits rockets the escapees forcefully toward the sky.
The submariners pop up two at a time, and each suit unfurls its own personal flotation raft, also bright orange, until from above they look like a smattering of neon orange sprinkles bobbing placidly across the surface of the ocean.
At least in theory, assuming the submariners weren’t blocked from getting to a hatch by the mangled wreckage of their sub’s new, more twisted form, and they weren’t incapacitated by rising levels of CO2.

 The Royal Navy Submarine Escape Training Tank in Gosport is a 30 metre deep pool with hatches to "escape" from at 9m, 18m and a mock submarine tower at 30m.

The purpose of the training is to give submariners the confidence to escape from a stricken submarine if it has sunk.

The escapees do not use any diving equipment to breathe but due to the expanding volume of gas in their lungs as the pressure reduces, it is possible to continue breathing out all the way from 30m to the surface.

This video also shows a demonstration of the Submarine Escape Immersion Suit that would be worn.

Today’s submarines can withstand pressures well above those caused by a thousand feet of seawater; that’s more than 6,000 Rachels to immobilize any moderately sized hatch.
The first and preferred plan is to wait for rescue, but the physics of the undersea world—along with some modern technological innovations—does in fact provide another way back to the surface.