NASA-led study reveals the causes of sea level rise since 1900

This aerial photograph shows fast-moving meltwater rivers flowing across the Greenland Ice Sheet, a region that, combined with Antarctic meltwater and thermal expansion, accounts for two-thirds of observed global mean sea level rise.
Credits: NASA

From NASA by Ian J. O'Neill / Jane J.Lee

Scientists have gained new insights into the processes that have driven ocean level variations for over a century, helping us prepare for the rising seas of the future.

To make better predictions about the future impacts of sea level rise, new techniques are being developed to fill gaps in the historic record of sea level measurements.
We know the factors that play a role in sea level rise: Melting glaciers and ice sheets add water to the seas, and warmer temperatures cause water to expand.
Other factors are known to slow the rise, such as dams impounding water on the land, stymying its flow into the sea.

When each factor is added together, this estimate should match the sea level that scientists observe.
Until now, however, the sea level "budget" has fallen short of the observed sea level rise, leading scientists to question why the budget wouldn't balance.

A new study published on Aug.19 seeks to balance this budget.
By gaining new insights to historic measurements, scientists can better forecast how each of these factors will affect sea level rise and how this rise will impact us in the future.

For example, in its recent flooding report, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) noted a rapid increase in sea level rise-related flooding events along U.S. coasts over the last 20 years, and they are expected to grow in extent, frequency, and depth as sea levels continue to rise.

Factors Driving Our Rising Seas 

On reexamining each of the known contributors to sea level rise from 1900 to 2018, the research, led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, uses improved estimates and applies satellite data to better understand historic measurements.

This infographic shows the rise in sea levels since 1900.

Pre-1940, glaciers and Greenland meltwater dominated the rise; dam projects slowed the rise in the 1970s.

Now, ice sheet and glacier melt, plus thermal expansion, dominate the rise.

Tide-gauge data shown in blue and satellite data in orange.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The researchers found that estimates of global sea level variations based on tide-gauge observations had slightly overestimated global sea levels before the 1970s.
(Located at coastal stations scattered around the globe, tide gauges are used to measure sea level height.) They also found that mountain glacier meltwater was adding more water to the oceans than previously realized but that the relative contribution of glaciers to sea level rise is slowly decreasing.
And they discovered that glacier and Greenland ice sheet mass loss explain the increased rate of sea level rise before 1940.

In addition, the new study found that during the 1970s, when dam construction was at its peak, sea level rise slowed to a crawl.
Dams create reservoirs that can impound freshwater that would normally flow straight into the sea.

"That was one of the biggest surprises for me," said lead researcher Thomas Frederikse, a postdoctoral fellow at JPL, referring to the peak in global dam projects at that time.
"We impounded so much freshwater, humanity nearly brought sea level rise to a halt."

Since the 1990s, however, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet mass loss and thermal expansion have accelerated sea level rise, while freshwater impoundment has decreased.
As our climate continues to warm, the majority of this thermal energy is absorbed by the oceans, causing the volume of the water to expand.
In fact, ice sheet melt and thermal expansion now account for about two-thirds of observed global mean sea level rise.
Mountain glacier meltwater currently contributes another 20%, while declining freshwater water storage on land adds the remaining 10%.

All told, sea levels have risen on average 1.6 millimeters (0.063 inches) per year between 1900 and 2018.
In fact, sea levels are rising at a faster rate than at any time in the 20th century.
But previous estimates of the mass of melting ice and thermal expansion of the ocean fell short of explaining this rate, particularly before the era of precise satellite observations of the world's oceans, creating a deficit in the historic sea level budget.

Ice shelves in Antarctica, such as the Getz Ice Shelf seen here, are sensitive to warming ocean temperatures.

Ocean and atmospheric conditions are some of the drivers of ice sheet loss that scientists considered in a new study estimating additional global sea level rise by 2100.

Credits: Jeremy Harbeck/NASA

Finding a Balance

In simple terms, the sea level budget should balance if the known factors are accurately estimated and added together.
It's a bit like balancing the transactions in your bank account: Added together, all the transactions in your statement should match the total.
If they don't, you may have overlooked a transaction or two.

The same logic can be applied to the sea level budget: When each factor that affects sea level is added together, this estimate should match the sea level that scientists observe.
Until now, however, the sea level budget has fallen short of the observed sea level rise.

"That was a problem," said Frederikse.
"How could we trust projections of future sea level change without fully understanding what factors are driving the changes that we have seen in the past?"

Frederikse led an international team of scientists to develop a state-of-the-art framework that pulls together the advances in each area of study – from sea level models to satellite observations – to improve our understanding of the factors affecting sea level rise for the past 120 years.

The latest satellite observations came from the pair of NASA – German Aerospace Center (DLR) Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites that operated from 2002-2017, and their successor pair, the NASA – German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) GRACE Follow-On (launched in 2018).
Additional data from the series of TOPEX/Jason satellites – a joint effort of NASA and the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales – that have operated continuously since 1992 were included in the analysis to enhance tide-gauge data.

"Tide-gauge data was the primary way to measure sea level before 1992, but sea level change isn't uniform around the globe, so there were uncertainties in the historic estimates," said Sönke Dangendorf, an assistant professor of oceanography at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and a coauthor of the study.
"Also, measuring each of the factors that contribute to global mean sea levels was very difficult, so it was hard to gain an accurate picture."

 The sea ice is surprisingly weak, has lots of melt ponds, and the expedition ship Polarstern was able to easily break through.

Photo: Steffen Graupnerice / MOSAiC

But over the past two decades, scientists have been "flooded" with satellite data, added Dangendorf, which has helped them precisely track the physical processes that affect sea levels.

For example, GRACE and GRACE-FO measurements have accurately tracked global water mass changes, melting glaciers, ice sheets, and how much water is stored on land.
Other satellite observations have tracked how regional ocean salinity changes and thermal expansion affect some parts of the world more than others.
Up-and-down movements of Earth's crust influence the regional and global levels of the oceans as well, so these aspects were included in the team's analysis.

"With the GRACE and GRACE-FO data we can effectively back-extrapolate the relationship between these observations and how much sea level rises at a particular place," said Felix Landerer, project scientist at JPL for GRACE-FO and a coauthor of the study.
"All observations together give us a pretty accurate idea of what contributed to sea level change since 1900, and by how much."

The study, titled "The Causes of Sea Level Rise Since 1900," was published Aug. 19 in Nature.
In addition to scientists from JPL and Old Dominion University, the project involved researchers from Caltech, Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, University of Siegen in Germany, the National Oceanography Centre in the United Kingdom, Courant Institute in New York, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
JPL managed the GRACE mission and manages the GRACE-FO mission for NASA's Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Based on Pasadena, California, Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Links :

• NASA : Emissions Could Add 15 Inches to 2100 Sea Level Rise, NASA-Led Study Finds
• NYTimes : The Arctic is shiftng to a new climate because of Global Warming
• Reuters : Sea of Slush: Arctic sea ice lows mark a new polar climate regime
• EurekAlert : How much will polar ice sheets add to sea level rise?
• BarentsObserver : Expedition shares scary photos from the North Pole
• Maritime Executive : In just 20 years ships could cross an open Arctic-ocean 
• SciTevhDaily  : Experts Calculate Future Ice Loss and Sea-Level Increases From Greenland and Antarctica 
• GeoGarage blog : Thwaites: 'Doomsday Glacier' vulnerability seen in new maps 

Tracking undersea earthquakes helps scientists study ocean heating

A team of seismologists and oceanographers has shown that small earthquakes repeatedly emanating from the same spot beneath the ocean floor can help measure changes in ocean temperature.

The quakes generate reliable acoustic signals for measuring ocean temperatures, including at depths below 2000 meters, beyond the reach of other techniques.

If validated, the approach, published this week in Science, could open an entirely new ocean observation system for understanding past and future climate change, says Frederik Simons, a geophysicist at Princeton University unaffiliated with the study.

“There’s a potential treasure trove of data waiting to be analyzed.”

From CleanTechnica by Steve Hanley

Almost every vehicle has a cooling system.
Whether it uses a internal combustion engine or an electric motor, it creates heat while in operation and that heat must be managed to keep the machinery working properly.
If it is not, the radiator may boil over or the battery could catch fire.
Either way, the consequences may be catastrophic.
The world’s oceans are the cooling system for the Earth.
In fact, they absorb up to 95% of the excess heat in the atmosphere.
And if the oceans overheat, the consequences for humanity will be dire indeed.

It is easy to install a temperature gauge in a vehicle’s cooling system to warn if the coolant is getting too hot.
Measuring the temperature of the oceans is much more difficult.
Surface temperatures are relatively simple to monitor but determining the temperature of the deepest parts of the ocean has been almost impossible up until now.
In truth, we know more about the moon, Mars, and the rings of Saturn than we do about the deepest parts of the oceans, where the water can be several miles deep.

In 1951, Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us, a beautifully written book about the oceans that explained in plain language everything we knew about them at the time.
I read it over the past summer and learned much that I didn’t know about the ocean.
In truth, even though people have stood on the moon since then, our knowledge of the deep oceans has advanced hardly at all since Carson’s book was published.

Oceanographers now have access to the ARGO system, a collection of buoys that can descend up to 2000 meters to measure things like salinity and temperature then rise to the surface where solar powered transmitters send the data to oceanographers around the world.
ARGO is a powerful tool but it covers only a tiny portion of the world’s oceans.
Now scientists at CalTech say they have devised a system that could provide data about deep ocean temperatures and track changes going back decades.

 A global map of earthquake activity.

The earthquakes occur at the boundaries between Earth's tectonic plates.

The colors indicate the depth of the earthquakes, with red being the shallowest and green the deepest. [USGS earthquake catalogue from 2000 to 2008, magnitude of 5.0 M and above.]

How is that possible?
When you hear a siren in the distance, the sound gets higher if the source is getting closer to you, lower if it is going away.
That is known as the Doppler shift.
That shift can be decoded electronically to determine how fast the source of the sound is travelling.
What the scientists at CalTech discovered is that the sounds of undersea earthquakes travel great distances through the water.
But how fast they travel is a function of the temperature of the water they are travelling through.
Carefully measure the amount of time it takes for those sounds to travel underwater and you can calculate the temperature of the water.

And here’s the kicker.
There are recordings of those sounds from some areas of the world that go back decades, so now for the first time it is possible to perform the necessary calculations over a significant period of time and plot the changes.
Jörn Callies is an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech and co-author of a study published in the September 18 edition of Science.
He says earthquake sounds are powerful and travel long distances through the ocean without significantly weakening, which makes them easy to monitor.

Wenbo Wu, postdoctoral scholar in geophysics and lead author of the paper, explains that when an earthquake happens under the ocean, most of its energy travels through the earth but a portion of it is transmitted into the water as sound.
These sound waves propagate outward from the quake’s epicenter just like seismic waves that travel through the ground, but the sound waves move at a much slower speed.
As a result, ground waves will arrive at a seismic monitoring station first, followed by the sound waves, which will appear as a secondary signal of the same event.
The effect is roughly similar to how you can often see the flash from lightning seconds before you hear its thunder.

 An artist’s rendering of undersea earthquake waves. Credit: Caltech

“These sound waves in the ocean can be clearly recorded by seismometers at a much longer distance than thunder — from thousands of kilometers away,” Wu says.
“Interestingly, they are even ‘louder’ than the vibrations traveling deep in the solid Earth, which are more widely used by seismologists.” The speed of sound in water increases as the water temperature rises, so the length of time it takes a sound to travel a given distance in the ocean can be used to deduce the water’s temperature.

“The key is that we use repeating earthquakes — earthquakes that happen again and again in the same place,” Wu adds.
“In this example we’re looking at earthquakes that occur off Sumatra in Indonesia and we measure when they arrive in the central Indian ocean.
It takes about a half hour for them to travel that distance, with water temperature causing about one tenth of a second difference.
It’s a very small fractional change, but we can measure it.”

Because the researchers are using a seismometer that has been in the same location in the central Indian Ocean since 2004, they can look back at the data it collected each time an earthquake occurred in Sumatra, for example, and determine the temperature of the ocean at that time.
“We are using small earthquakes that are too small to cause any damage or even be felt by humans at all,” Wu says.
“But the seismometer can detect them from great distances, thus allowing us to monitor large scale ocean temperature changes on a particular path in one measurement.”

The process can detect temperature changes as little as a thousandth of a degree.
Using just the data from the Sumatra area, the researchers say the temperature of the Indian Ocean has risen 0.044 degrees Celsius over the past decade, a result that correlates well with the data provided by the ARGO network.
In fact, the preliminary findings suggest the oceans are warming faster than predicted, although those results are preliminary.

The new research tool is “quite extraordinary and very promising,” says Susan Wijffels, a leader of the ARGO project at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
What excites here about the new technique is that it allows researchers to examining old seismic records that predate the beginning of the ARGO project.
“What a gift to the climate community that would be,” she says.

Because undersea earthquakes happen all over the world, Callies thinks it should be possible to expand the system to monitor water temperatures in all the world’s oceans..”We think we can do this in a lot of other regions and by doing this, we hope to contribute to the data about how our oceans are warming.” Wu adds that because the technique makes use of existing infrastructure and equipment, it would be quite inexpensive to implement on a global basis.

Of course, having such information available is one thing.
Acting on it is another.
In today’s world, there are any number of powerful corporations who prefer to put masking tape over any global temperature gauge to disguise the danger ahead.
They are only too happy to put profits ahead of people, little realizing that if there are no people, there will be no profits.
There is also an anti-science cult that actively denigrates any and all science.
Either of those forces could delay action to address the factors causing our planet to overheat to the point where corrective action becomes impossible.

Knowing how ocean temperatures are rising is vital information but overcoming the cabal of ignorance and stupidity dedicated to ignoring global heating is even more important.
In the upcoming election, vote as if your life depends upon it, because it does.

Links :

• ScienceMag : Ocean's hidden heat measured with earthquake sounds
• BBC : Climate change: Earthquake 'hack' reveals scale of ocean warming
• Science American : Earthquake Sounds Could Reveal How Quickly the Ocean is warming
  

Huge waves crash against swaying North Sea oil rig

This video could make you seasick...

Huge waves crash against a swaying oil rig, as a severe storm which swept across parts of Scotland hits the North Sea.

The footage of the Borgholm Dolphin installation was captured at the weekend by James Eaton, an offshore worker on the nearby Lomond Platform, around 145 miles east of Aberdeen.

Image of the week : 5 tropical cyclones over the Atlantic basin

We are issuing advisories on five tropical cyclones over the Atlantic basin.This ties the record for the most number of tropical cyclones in that basin at one time, last set in Sept 1971.

See http://hurricanes.gov for the latest updates. #Paulette #Rene #Sally #Teddy #Vicky
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

Links :

• The Guardian : Five cyclones churn in Atlantic Ocean for only second time in history

Worst shipping crisis in decades puts lives and trade at risk

By August, almost half of the 20-person crew on-board the JY Ocean bulk carrier had been at sea for more than a year.
Source: Handout

 

From Bloomberg by K. Oanh Ha, Jack Wittels, Khine Lin Kyaw and Krystal Chia 

 

Note: Data as of Sept.17, 2020
Source: Wilhelmsen Ships Service AS

 

With 300,000 workers stranded on merchant ships, Bloomberg found dozens of labor violations that threaten seafarers’ safety, as well as the global supply chain.

On July 25, the Unison Jasper pulled into the Australian port of Newcastle carrying 31,000 tons of alumina bound for one of the country’s largest smelters.
The ship had traveled around the world in the seven months since the pandemic began, but in Australia, authorities found a problem serious enough to detain the vessel.

Seven of the 22-person crew had been on the ship for 14 months, beyond the end-date of their contracts and in breach of international maritime law, regulators and union officials said.
They were owed $64,000 in back pay, and there wasn’t enough fresh food.
There was also no valid plan to get them home to their families in Myanmar.
They wanted off.

“I’ve been on the sea for 14 months,” one of the sailors said in a video interview with an organizer for the International Transport Workers’ Federation, a union that represents seafarers.
“We are actually very tired. I want to go home.”

Ratified by more than 80 countries, the Maritime Labour Convention isn’t mere guidance—the agreement sets minimum working conditions for seafarers that underpin the insurance policies and global contracts that govern the transport of basically everything.
But the ongoing pandemic has shattered the norms of this highly fragmented industry, and with countries wary of relaxing port and border restrictions, violations of worker protections have become common.
Nearly 20% of the world’s 1.6 million seafarers are stranded at sea and, like those on the Unison Jasper, at the mercy of employers and shifting quarantine requirements to get them home.

In conversations with Bloomberg reporters, more than 40 seafarers on nearly as many ships described deteriorating conditions.
Most asked for anonymity given the fragility of their situations.
About half didn’t have current contracts and some said they hadn’t been paid in more than two months, meeting International Labour Organization's definition of forced labor.
Overtime pay, they said, was inconsistent, if their extra hours were logged at all.
Most haven’t left their ships in months after coronavirus outbreaks tied to cruise liners and merchant ships put an end to shore leave.
Seafarers with abscessed teeth haven’t been able to get dental care, and others say they’ve received stitches from crewmates in lieu of off-shore medical attention.
On one ship, the captain died of a heart attack, and the crew stored his corpse in the freezer for nearly two weeks before it found a port that would repatriate the body.

The past-due contracts and unpaid overtime are especially troubling, said Brandt Wagner, head of the transport and maritime sectoral policies unit at the ILO, which administers the Law of the Sea.
“These are violations of the Maritime Labour Convention,” he said.
“We should make sure that the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t used as an excuse to breach the law … Seafarers’ rights have to be upheld, even if it’s cumbersome or difficult.”

Burmese seafarers disembark from the Unison Jasper at the Port of Newcastle, Australia.
Seven of the ship's 22 crew sought the help of International Transport Workers’ Federation and have been repatriated.
Source: International Transport Workers’ Federation

The industry says the options are limited.
Changing immigration rules and limited air travel have made swapping workers more difficult and more expensive, said Esben Poulsson, chair of the International Chamber of Shipping, the industry’s principal trade group.
“The efforts that are being made by companies to take care of the seafarers and effect properly timed crew changes have been and continue to be tremendous,” he said.

“I haven’t seen any situations where you can’t get a crew home.
It just requires more time, more money and more effort.”

Many companies have rerouted ships and chartered flights to facilitate crew changes, and still some 300,000 seafarers are overdue for relief—a number that grows as the pandemic drags on.
The crisis has begun to reach shipping investors including global asset manager Fidelity International Ltd., American insurance giant Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., asset manager Oaktree Capital Group LLC and finance titan JPMorgan Chase & Co.
If it isn’t resolved soon, analysts say, it threatens to ripple up the supply chain, affecting commodities companies like Cargill Inc. and Glencore Plc. and retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc., just in time for the holiday shopping season.

“This is the most dire situation with vessels and crew that I’ve seen in many decades,” said Andrew Kinsey, a New York-based senior marine risk consultant at Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty.
At best, he says, expect more detentions and delays.
At worst, there will be disastrous mistakes—Allianz estimates that human error contributes to at least three-quarters of shipping industry accidents—and fatalities.

“The people who own the assets and make money off the assets need to come together to come up with a solution,” Kinsey said.
“They have to use their assets to get the crew off.
Each party needs to assume responsibility instead of passing it to the next party.”

The seafarers interviewed by Bloomberg represented more than a dozen nationalities, working on vessels that regularly cross the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, on global shipping lines like CMA CGM SA, Evergreen Line and other publicly traded companies.
The shipping industry typically recruits from poor countries where wages are low and complaining is discouraged.
Shipping lines and staffing agencies determine when and how workers will get home, down to holding their passports, and seafarers who spoke to Bloomberg asked to be anonymous because they feared speaking out would hurt future job prospects.

Shipping companies and regulators benefit from a complicated and fragmented system that rewards on-time shipments over the welfare of nearly invisible workers.
It’s hard to drum up public outrage, said Teresa Lloyd, chief executive officer of trade group Maritime Industry Australia Ltd.
“The consumer doesn’t know,” she said.
“It’s not like when a sweatshop in Bangladesh catches fire—that’s horrific, and we should all be appalled—we don’t have the same visibility of what’s happening to seafarers.”

Closed Due to Covid

More than 120 countries and territories have stopped or limited access to ships for seafarer crew changes to prevent the spread of coronavirus

Last month, French shipping behemoth CMA CGM sent one of its ships from Marseille to Beirut on a humanitarian mission to deliver medical supplies and goods to Lebanon after the deadly port explosion there.
From another ship in the CGM fleet, the APL Pusan, the crew looked on with confusion.
Some of them had been on board for more than 13 months, including a seafarer who was brought back to the ship after a hospital stay on shore for kidney stones.

The ship has even stopped several times in Singapore, a port that helps facilitate crew changes, and no one was swapped out, two seafarers on the ship said.
Their original employment contracts expired months ago.
If the company can undertake a humanitarian mission, they wondered, why couldn’t it let them go home?

“Many companies in the world are making crew changes.
But our CMA CGM, such a big company, can’t do a relief flight,” said one seafarer.
“We are forgotten lives in the sea.”

The company said in a statement that it is doing all it can for the workers aboard its ships and that the number of over-run contracts has been decreasing over the past three months.
In addition, the company said all its seafarers are working under labor contracts that meet legal rules.

“The situation remains very constrained and constantly challenged by regular changes in country rules with respect to the Covid situation,” the company said.
“Our teams are fully mobilized and we will not spare any efforts to facilitate seafarers’ transit and return home in accordance with the authorities, local rules and personal requests.”

Bound for Lebanon, the CMA CGM container ship is loaded with humanitarian aid in Marseille, France, on Aug. 25.
Photographer: Christophe Simon/AFP via Getty Images

Since the very beginning, shipping companies and the moneymen behind them have held seafarers’ lives in the balance.
By one historian’s estimate, 10 sailors died for every 47 tons of Asian cargo shipped to Europe by the Dutch East India Company from 1580 to 1795, and it was common for Spanish galleons to start their journeys with surplus crew, knowing they’d lose some to starvation, disease or desertion.

Modernity has made shipping safer, but seafarers are still at the mercy of an industry that is opaque, deeply fragmented and bound by a patchwork of national and maritime laws.
Every ship is connected with a handful of separate entities.
Typically, there’s the ship’s owner, its operator, a staffing agency which recruits seafarers, and the charterer—the company that hires the boat to get its goods from point A to point B.

There are a few dominant players in the shipping industry, but much of the trade is made up of middle men upon middle men, connecting companies that have goods to ship with a vast network of owners, operators, staffing agencies and so on.
Those layers make it hard to hold anyone accountable for on-board working conditions, says Richard Meade, managing editor of U.K.
shipping researcher firm Lloyd’s List, or to solve problems when they arise.

At the furthest remove, investors and money managers have built lucrative portfolios out of shipping assets they almost never have to touch.
MassMutual owns ships, as does hedge fund Apollo Global Management Inc.; Oaktree Capital owns almost 41% of Star Bulk Carriers Corp.
and has three seats on the board.
The financing divisions of Citigroup, DNB ASA and JPMorgan Chase have made them among the industry’s most influential backers, according to Lloyd’s List.

But as in the subprime lending crisis, the financial titans have some distance from their underlying assets.
JPMorgan Asset Management, for example, barely blinked when, in 2019, one of its ships was seized by U.S.
customs after more than $1 billion in cocaine was found on board.
The firm declined to comment on the incident.

The Unison Jasper illustrates how thinly responsibility can be spread.
The ship is registered under the flag of Hong Kong, so the authorities there are responsible for the vessel’s seaworthiness and labor conditions on board.
Then there are at least four companies in three jurisdictions with at least a sliver of oversight:

• Registered owner: Emerald Shipping (Hong Kong) declined to comment for this story.
• Beneficial owner and operator: Unison Marine Corp.(Taiwan) didn't respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment.
• Charterer: Lauritzen Bulkers A/S (Denmark) said it had continuously urged the owner to resolve the situation. “We find the situation entirely unacceptable and do not want to be associated with this kind of behavior,” CEO Niels Josefsen said in an email.
• Sub-charterer: Pacific Basin Shipping Ltd. (Hong Kong) paid to transport the alumina. Said it knew nothing about the working conditions on board and wasn’t responsible.

Raft of Responsibility

The shipping industry is highly fragmented, rendering seafarers nearly invisible

Note: Diagram illustrates a typical staffing process in the shipping industry.

Source: Bloomberg reporting

In most ports, employers—usually the operator or the owner—are legally responsible for seafarers’ safety, health and welfare.
“But everyone along the supply chain has a responsibility,” said the ITF’s National Coordinator in Australia, Dean Summers.
“Traditionally industry stands in a circle and points to the bloke to the left and no one takes the blame.

For the Burmese workers trying to get off the Unison Jasper, the primary point of contact was Dagon Lin Maritime Service Co., a recruiting firm in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city.
Shipping draws labor from the Philippines, India and other parts of Southeast Asia, relying on local companies like Dagon Lin to keep up the supply.

Dagon Lin managing director Nyunt Swe said everyone along the supply chain was paying the price for the pandemic.
He was arranging crew changes and flights home at great expense.
The workers who complained, he said, had hurt the reputation of the country’s seafarers as a whole.
If ship owners think Burmese workers are a risk, “they will stop offering jobs for Myanmar,” he said.
“This hurts our maritime industry and the economy as a whole.
There aren’t enough jobs for everyone here.”

To be fair, the shipping industry was faster than most to understand the magnitude of disruption heralded by the coronavirus pandemic.
Executives and trade groups have been lobbying governments and port authorities for months to award seafarers “key worker” status, with the same travel and immigration privileges often conferred on aircraft staff and medical workers.
In July, more than a dozen countries including critical global shipping hubs like the U.S., Singapore, Greece and the United Arab Emirates pledged to ease port and border restrictions and to help stranded crews return home.

And yet, as Covid-19 outbreaks flare up, even shippers with the best of intentions are having trouble.
In August, GasLog Ltd., a natural gas shipper based in Greece, appealed to the International Maritime Organization to help 31 crew members on the GasLog Savannah in Singapore.

“As you will appreciate, for reasons of safety, an oil tanker cannot be left unmanned.”

In a seven-page letter, GasLog Chief Operating Officer Paolo Enoizi wrote that they’d been trying since June to rotate the crew on a tanker at the Sembawang Shipyard for repairs.
The letter describes a Kafkaesque bureaucratic process of applications filed, lost, filed again, partially denied, only to have the rules and regulations change, requiring a whole new set of applications.
At one point, the letter says port authorities would allow the crew to leave, but no new seafarers could embark.

“As you will appreciate, for reasons of safety, an oil tanker cannot be left unmanned,” the GasLog COO wrote in his letter.
“Permission to release four crew members but not allow their reliefs to join does not improve the situation.”

Meantime, the crew hadn’t been allowed off the vessel, not even to walk around the shipyard, according to the letter.
After four months of de facto quarantine, there wasn’t a single case of Covid-19 on board.
“We are concerned that no adequate measures have been taken to preserve the human rights of our crew,” Enoizi wrote, citing international marine law.

The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore said “a total of 16 sign-ons and 32 sign-offs were carried out between May and September on the GasLog Savannah and the ship departed Sept. 7.
“In spite of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Singapore has been facilitating crew changes under a set of ‘safe corridor’ procedures,” the MPA said in a statement.

The Singapore port authority runs three floating dorms—accommodation vessels—for seafarers waiting to join their ships.
It's one of the countries still facilitating crew swaps during the pandemic.
PHOTOGRAPHER: ORE HUIYING/BLOOMBERG

 

Crew members check in ahead of their deployment on a bulk carrier.

Seafarers come from China, India, the Philippines and elsewhere to meet their ships.
PHOTOGRAPHER: ORE HUIYING/BLOOMBERG

The quarters give seafarers a place to stay for 48 hours if flight and ship schedules don't line up.
They also keep transient workers away from the local community.
PHOTOGRAPHER: ORE HUIYING/BLOOMBERG

Shipping has always been an attractive investment, first for wealthy land-lubbing speculators, then as a staple of investment banking, hedge funds and, in the last decade, private equity.
In this context, the labor crisis is a Covid-era anomaly.
“It is being addressed and the crews are being repatriated,” said Andy Dacy, head of the $2 billion global transport portfolio for JPMorgan Chase, adding that companies that act irresponsibly in this crisis will suffer in the long term.
“I haven't seen any situations where you can't get a crew home.
It just requires more time, more money and more effort.”

Others, though, are starting to wonder whether the on-board conditions could affect their investments.
“The shipping industry has never been seen as risky,” said Antony Crockett, who leads the Asia-Pacific business and human rights practice for international law firm Herbert Smith Freehills.
“Now those companies are going to get questions from their customers: ‘Tell us about the conditions on ships.
Tell us what you're doing to mitigate these impacts on the workforce?’”

Mariners say they’re concerned the long months at sea are leading to accidents.
On CMA CGM’s APL Pusan, a crew member gashed his head and required stitches.
On a ship carrying coal, a sailor suffered an eye accident with pressurized oil; he said he wasn’t allowed on shore to see a doctor for another two months.
Mentally, seafarers told Bloomberg, they’re suffering.

“We are like hostages,” said a crew member on the JY Ocean, a ship managed by Oceanbulk Maritime SA, a sister company to the Nasdaq-listed Star Bulk Carriers.
By August, almost half of the 20-person crew had been on-board for more than a year, sent contract extensions and, they said, instructed by the captain to sign them.
“It’s very hard to concentrate on your work when you want to be home,” the crew member said.

Oceanbulk Maritime was founded by Star Bulk’s chief executive officer and several executives hold titles at both companies; the two share an address in the Greek capital of Athens, according to public records.
Oceanbulk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
But Hamish Norton, who is president of Star Bulk and was Oceanbulk’s chief financial officer as recently as 2019 according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, said in an email that the JY Ocean crew had been on board too long, “as have the crew on many of our other ships and thousands of ships all over the globe.
It is a worldwide humanitarian crisis.”

The ship, he went on, has called in ports where crew changes were prohibited or “grossly discouraged” by government quarantine requirements, advance notice or other procedural obstacles.
“Relieving our crews is the highest priority for our management,” said Norton.
“It is a safety issue, it is a mental health issue, it is a contractual issue and we wish we could fix it.”

Oaktree, which holds three seats on Star Bulk’s board, called the situation in shipping “very difficult and unfortunate,” according to a company spokesman.
“Oaktree is fully supportive of industry efforts to work with governments to address these challenges and get these crew off of their ships in a timely manner,” he said.

Taipei-based Evergreen Line, part of the massive Taiwanese conglomerate that includes EVA Airlines, commands one of the world’s biggest container fleets.
It’s received awards for environmental stewardship from the ports of Vancouver and Los Angeles, and its customer service and “maintenance of schedule integrity” earned it an industry award for “Best Shipping Line—Asia-Africa.”

It’s also been recognized by the companies that rely on it to stock their shelves.
Dollar Tree Inc., a $24 billion national U.S.
chain of discount stores, named Evergreen its Ocean Carrier of the Year in 2017, “in appreciation and recognition for service excellence.” Dick’s Sporting Goods, another mega-retailer, gave the shipper its “gold award for outstanding ocean carrier service and customer commitment.”

But seafarers on the Evergreen-chartered Triton, a container ship so big it often makes local news when it comes into port, say they’ve been on the ship for more than a year, with gaps in their employment agreements, according to a worker who asked not to be named.
The ship was put in drydock in China for two months before facilitating a crew change; the seafarers weren’t allowed off while the ship was being repaired.

“The people who own the assets and make money off the assets need to come together to come up with a solution.”

A spokesperson for Evergreen said that crew employment and ship management of the Triton is the responsibility of the owner, Monaco-based Costamare Inc., which is listed in New York.
“Notwithstanding that, Evergreen always takes human rights and crew welfare seriously on all our operating fleet,” the company said, adding that, after Bloomberg’s inquiry, it encouraged Costamare to “seek mitigation on this crew issue soonest.”

Costamare said in a statement that all of the crewmembers of the Triton are under contract, “in full compliance” with the Maritime Labour Convention and the relevant authorities.
“The shipping community, including our company, is doing its best to address these problems while at the same time maintaining the uninterrupted flow of global trade,” the company said.
“The answer lies in persuading governments everywhere to facilitate the exchange of ship crew as essential workers.”

Further up the supply chain, few companies that rely on container shipping have addressed labor conditions for ship workers.
In response to questions about working conditions on Evergreen ships, Dollar Tree confirmed a business relationship with Evergreen but declined to comment further.
Dick’s also declined to comment.

The chartering companies have come together in the past to push for changes in the industry, particularly with respect to climate change and green energy practices, said Meade, the Lloyd’s List editor.
“They will get involved in things that make them look good, like decarbonization,” he said.
“But they don’t want to be involved in the hidden humanitarian crisis affecting hundreds of thousand crew stuck on ships.
It doesn't have the same P.R. ring, does it?”

Ships off the coast of Singapore, on July 6.
During the Covid pandemic the narrow waterway off the island became even more congested.
Photographer: Wei Leng Tay/Bloomberg

Of the commercial ports in 123 countries and territories, 45 have stopped allowing crew changes, according to Wilhelmsen Ships Service AS, part of the border closings and quarantine requirements that have come to define coronavirus containment policy.
Seventy-six allow seafarer swaps with restrictions and two permit the changes with appropriate documentation.
Until the world’s ports reopen, shipping companies say, it will be hard to relieve large numbers of workers.

National governments are cautious.
Hong Kong, one of Asia’s biggest cargo ports, had permitted unrestricted crew changes until this summer when a fresh wave of cases swept the city.
Now only ships bringing cargo to the city can enter the port and change crews.
Incoming seafarers must test negative for coronavirus; those leaving are confined to their ship until they head for the airport and are forbidden to use public transportation.
As for workers who aren’t swapping out, they have to stay on ship the whole time.


“In recent years, there’s more availability of seafarers than demand for them, so you have an unequal balance, which can of course lead to exploitation, sadly,” said the ICS’ Poulsson, adding that the problem, “unacceptable as it may be,” is the result of a few bad actors.
“Covid has opened the door for unscrupulous operators to continue being unscrupulous.”


In June, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority put shipping companies on notice.
Flexibility had been critical to supporting international trade in the early months of the pandemic, the marine authority said, but “there is a limit to reasonable continuous periods of service.” Starting July 1, any ship in an Australian port must have satisfactory repatriation plans for workers onboard for more than 11 months.
Seafarers who are no longer working under valid contracts must be repatriated immediately, and if that means the ship falls below its minimum crewing requirements, so be it.


As of Sept.
10, the regulator said it’s received 108 complaints alleging labor violations.
In roughly 32, workers said they’d been on board 14 months or longer.
Most of the complaints have been resolved, authorities say, but seven ships, including the Unison Jasper, were detained for what the regulators described as failure to provide decent working conditions, insufficient quality and quantity of food, underpayment of seafarers and attempts to coerce workers’ silence.
In the most egregious cases, the ships have been barred from Australian ports for six to 12 months.

Investors are also expressing concern.
Fidelity International, a $566 billion asset manager, said it had contacted 30 of its portfolio companies in the shipping, airline and charterer sectors to discuss “the crisis of stranded seafarers,” a company spokesperson said in an email.
“We need collective action and multilateral collaboration.”

Spain's military emergencies unit (UME) arrives for a deep clean operation at the border inspection point at the Port of Barcelona, Spain, on March 20.
Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

Shipping is a business built on coordination between independent entities—it’s called ‘logistics’ for a reason.
But the Covid-19 pandemic has cast all future plans in doubt and, with the world economy in deep recession, few are willing to take on expensive, complicated rescue missions unless they absolutely have to.
While anyone with far-flung family might be unsure when they’ll be able to see them again, it’s particularly hard for seafarers who manage their tours of duty with an end-date in mind.

Indian seafarer Alroyd Fernandes quit his job on an oil tanker when his six-month contract expired in mid-August; he’s stopped working but his company has yet to let him off the boat.
“My wife is in poor health and needs me — she’s managing three kids on her own, including an infant,” Fernandes wrote in his resignation letter.
“I don’t want to jeopardize the safety of the vessel and on-board crew ...
due to stress and my present mental state.”

Relief, for now, is piecemeal and somewhat arbitrary.
The Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs says it’s currently working to bring home 127 Filipino seafarers.
The seven Burmese ship workers from the Unison Jasper sought the help of their union and, after much negotiation, have been repatriated.
Crew members on the APL Pusan said that the company finally orchestrated their release after representatives from CMA CGM visited the vessel in Singapore.
The company confirmed the successful crew swap even though, it said, “the country lockdown and flight ban were blocking all initiatives.”

Most efforts haven’t risen to the magnitude of the crisis, says Kinsey, the risk consultant at Allianz.
More drastic action is in order, he says: Ships should stop calling at ports that refuse to repatriate seafarers, and ship owners should declare their vessels unfit to make deliveries because the crew is overworked.

“Nothing’s going to get resolved until you start disrupting trade,” Kinsey said.
“If everything gets delivered and ships continue to come and go, the crew gets forgotten.
That’s what’s happening now.”

“They’ve been delivering goods to consumers, the PPE we all need, the fuel and energy we depend on,” he added.
“Their contracts are done, their time is up, and everyone needs to answer for it.”—With Claire Jiao, Annie Lee, Ann Koh, Stephen Stapczynski, Prejula Prem, Shruti Srivastava, Matthew Boyle and Cindy Wang

(Updates to add efforts by the Philippines government to bring home stranded seafarers in the fourth-to-last paragraph.
An earlier version of this story corrected the eighth and seventh-to-last paragraphs to show that Fidelity International, a $566 billion asset manager, has raised concerns about the seafarer crisis with portfolio companies, not Fidelity Investments.)