"There hadn't been many transformations since medieval times".
It is "a very little-known watercolour manuscript plan of Nantes dating from 1698, according to Loïc Ménanteau, the history-mad Nantes native.
That is to say, before the transformations of the city in the 18th century".
This document is of immense interest "because of its precision".
It shows perfectly the configuration of the city and its confluence site, the islands and the sandy banks, such as the Saulzaie.
The site of the confluence and the estuary bottom of Nantes appears clearly at a time when there had not been many transformations since medieval times.
What interested me most, perhaps through professional distortion (researcher in geography, editor's note), was the very precise representation for the time of the outline of the islands, the sandbanks, including the one where the Feydeau housing estate was later built, from 1740 onwards".
SHOM map overlaid on Google Maps imagery with the GeoGarage platform
You can also discover the mouths of rivers, such as the Chézine, Erdre and Sèvre Rivers in Nantes, and the Loire crossing line with all the bridges.
You can see on the plan the traces of the designer's grid pattern, which shows his desire for precision. This publication delighted many people in Nantes by sharing it on his Facebook.
The plan shows many other types of interesting points: the medieval enclosure and its moat (dry or wet), the 16th century fortifications to protect the Marchix suburb, the convents and other constructions outside the enclosure (extra-muros).
Add to this the medieval fortified enclosure with its moat and, to the north-west, the fortifications built in 1562-1598 to protect the Faubourg du Marchix, churches and convents.
The Royal Navy is committed to the tradition, but academics say it could betray a patriarchal view
Anachronistic and patronising, or benign nautical tradition? The appropriateness of referring to ships as “she” has been challenged by the Scottish Maritime Museum’s decision this week to adopt gender-neutral signage for its vessels.
The move has provoked debate over when, if ever, it is acceptable to use the feminine pronoun for inanimate things.
Ask a grown-up: why are boats called she?
It’s not just ships.
Cars are often personified as female.
How many male owners enjoy “taking her for a spin?” One well-known haulage company, Eddie Stobart, gives its trucks female names.
Planets, forces and countries, rendered as Mother Earth, Mother Nature, and the Motherland, are symbols of the life-giving, and life-sustaining.
We no longer have feminised weather systems, but from the 1950s violent destructive hurricanes bore only female names until campaigners forced meteorologists to alternate with male names in the 1970s.
Ella Tennant, from Keele University’s Language Centre, said referring to ships as “she” is an example of how language shapes the way we see the world.
There is “power and authority” in labelling, she says, and once that label is attached, “we have our own assumptions and preconceptions of what it is when we see that object”.
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From a feminist language perspective, she adds, labelling ships, countries, and other inanimate things as female could be interpreted as “perpetuating the patriarchal view”, and as “slightly derogatory and patronising”.
Unlike some languages, English is not gendered.
But, Tennant argues, gender is often arbitrarily used, and cognitive research suggests that language and the way people use it has a profound influence on the way we see the world.
Some argue it is merely an expression affection by sailors who see their vessel as a maternal protector.
These include the retired naval chief Admiral Lord West who, on Radio 4’s Today programme, denounced the move as “an insult to a generation of sailors” who merely saw their ship as a mother.
Another theory lies in the idea of goddesses and mother figures playing a protective role.
Whatever the origin, it has a long tradition: the earliest known example appears to date from 1375, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist described as a foremost authority on English grammar, argues “he” or “she” may be may be used “in order to show a certain kind of sympathy with or affection for the thing, which is thereby, as it were, raised above the inanimate sphere”.
Jespersen describes, in Essentials of English Grammar (1933), how “railway-men will speak of the locomotive or train, and the motor owners of their car, as she”.
HMS Queen Elizabeth returns to Portsmouth from sea trials.
Photograph: AB Conor Culwick/PA
David Mann, director of the Scottish Maritime Museum, said the decision to drop “she” for “it” was taken after two signs were vandalised.
“The debate around gender and ships is wide-ranging, pitting tradition against the modern world.
But I think that we have to move with the times,” he said.
Lloyds List, the 285-year-old daily maritime bible, abandoned “she” for “it” almost 20 years ago.
Richard Meade, its editor, said the decision was made to bring the paper “in line with most other reputable international business titles and referring to ships as she seemed anachronistic”.
“I get the maritime tradition.
In the days of a wooden ship, or an old steam liner, there was a certain amount of romanticism, and these ships had personality.
But the modern-day container carrier is about 400 metres long and carries 22,000 steel boxes on board, and I challenge anybody to look at the rusting hulk of one of those and assign a gender to it,” he said.
A Royal Navy spokesman said: “The navy has a long tradition of referring to its ships as ‘she’ and will continue to do so.”
The debate has found little sway with the royal family, it seems.
Princess Anne, naming a new Hull-based fishing trawler this week, smashed the traditional bottle of champagne against it as she said: “I name this ship Kirkella.
And may God bless her and all who sail in her.”
Lissy Lovett, editor of the online feminist magazine, The F-Word, said: “At a time when transphobic rhetoric is being repeated in mainstream newspapers …people in Northern Ireland still don’t have access to safe, free abortions and when the majority of people living in poverty around the world are women, I just can’t see this as that big a deal.”
The Women’s Equality party said a particular concern was the failure to recognise the achievements of women in the naming of buildings.
“A recent example is the scandal regarding the naming of a cultural and learning hub in Tunbridge Wells.
Instead of respectfully naming the hub ‘Amelia Scott’ in remembrance of the brilliant Amelia Scott, who was a social reformer and campaigner for women’s suffrage, the building was simply named ‘Amelia’.
“You wouldn’t name a building ‘Karl’ after Karl Marx, or ‘Winston’ after Winston Churchill.
So why omit ‘Scott’ from Amelia Scott if not to undermine her significance instead of celebrating it?”
Researchers make haunting discoveries while peering deep inside H.M.S. Terror, one of two ships lost during the ill-fated Franklin expedition.
The wreck of H.M.S. Terror, one of the long lost ships from Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, is astonishingly well preserved, say Parks Canada archaeologists, who recently used small remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) to peer deep inside the historic vessel’s interior.
“The ship is amazingly intact,” says Ryan Harris, the lead archaeologist on the project.
“You look at it and find it hard to believe this is a 170-year-old shipwreck.
You just don’t see this kind of thing very often.”
Discovered in 2016 in icy waters off King William Island in Canada’s far north, the shipwreck hadn’t been thoroughly studied until now.
Taking advantage of unusually calm seas and good underwater visibility, a team from Parks Canada, in partnership with Inuit, earlier this month made a series of seven dives on the fabled wreck.
Working swiftly in the frigid water, divers inserted miniature ROVs through openings in the main hatchway and skylights in the crew’s cabins, officers’ mess, and captain’s stateroom.
(Here's the mysterious clue that led to the discovery of the H.M.S. Terror.)
Lost and found
Deep in the Canadian Arctic, Franklin’s ships were trapped in sea ice for 19 months.
Survivors set out on foot but were never heard from again.
Archaeologists hope the sunken ships, located in 2014 and 2016, will yield answers.
“We were able to explore 20 cabins and compartments, going from room to room,” says Harris.
“The doors were all eerily wide open.”
What they saw astonished and delighted them: dinner plates and glasses still on shelves, beds and desks in order, scientific instruments in their cases—and hints that journals, charts, and perhaps even early photographs may be preserved under drifts of sediment that cover much of the interior.
“Those blankets of sediment, together with the cold water and darkness, create a near perfect anaerobic environment that’s ideal for preserving delicate organics such as textiles or paper,” says Harris.
“There is a very high probability of finding clothing or documents, some of them possibly even still legible.
Rolled or folded charts in the captain’s map cupboard, for example, could well have survived.”
The H.M.S. Terror and Erebus were state-of-the-art naval vessels in 1845, when the Franklin expedition embarked from Britain.
Photograph by Illustrated London News, Getty
The only area below decks the team was unable to access was the captain’s sleeping quarters.
Apparently the last person to leave closed the door.
“Intriguingly, it was the only closed door on the ship,” says Harris.
“I’d love to know what’s in there.”
Just as tantalizing is the possibility that there could be pictures of the expedition awaiting discovery.
It’s known that the expedition had a daguerreotype apparatus, and assuming it was used, the glass plates could still be aboard.
“And if there are, it’s also possible to develop them,” says Harris.
“It’s been done with finds at other shipwrecks.
The techniques are there.”
Glass bottles in the officers' mess remain intact.
The vessel appears to have settled gently to the bottom.
Screenshot Courtesy Parks Canada, Underwater Archaeology Team
Plates remain on shelves, as if ready for the next meal.
Silt covers much of the…
Photograph Courtesy Parks Canada, Underwater Archaeology Team
What’s known is that Sir John Franklin set sail in May 1845 with a crew of 133 men and orders to discover the Northwest Passage—a goal that had eluded explorers for centuries.
Then as now, geopolitics was a driving force in Arctic exploration, with the Royal Navy wanting to secure the fabled shortcut to the Pacific ahead of the Russians, who had maritime aspirations of their own.
With this in mind no expense was spared.
Photograph By Universal History Archive, Universal Images Group/Getty
The ill-fated expedition was led by British naval hero and Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin.
Franklin was given command of two state-of-the-art ships, Erebus and Terror, both equipped with stout, iron-sheathed hulls and steam engines, as well as the finest scientific equipment and enough food and supplies for three years in the high Arctic.
It was one of the best equipped and best prepared expeditions ever to leave Britain’s shores.
After brief stops in Scotland’s Orkney Islands and Greenland, the two ships set off for Arctic Canada in hopes of picking their way through its labyrinth of straits and bays and islands and eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean.
The last European eyes to see the ships were the crews of two whaling vessels who encountered Erebus and Terror in late July 1845, on the crossing from Greenland to Canada’s remote Baffin Island.
After that they were never seen or heard from again.
As years passed with no word of the expedition, search parties were sent out.
Over time the discovery of skeletons and discarded equipment—as well as disturbing evidence of cannibalism—made clear that the expedition had met with disaster.
But how and why has remained a mystery.
A brief note found under a cairn gives a bit of the story.
Dated April 1848 and signed by Francis Crozier—captain of the Terror, who by then had taken command of the expedition—it stated that the ships had been locked in ice for a year and a half, that 24 of the men were already dead—including Franklin—and that Crozier and the other survivors planned to attempt to walk overland to a remote fur-trading outpost hundreds of miles away on the Canadian mainland.
None of them ever arrived.
What caused such a well-equipped expedition to go so badly wrong remains a mystery.
But in recent years the two biggest pieces of the puzzle—the ships themselves—were discovered: Erebus in 2014, lying in 36 feet of water off King William Island, and Terror two years later, found in a bay about 45 miles away, in 80 feet of water and largely intact.
H.M.S. Terror, one of two ships from the doomed Franklin expedition, was discovered in 2016 off King William Island in the Canadian Arctic.
The small expedition boat seen here sank along with the Terror and rests on the seafloor a short distance from the ship.
photo : Thierry Boyer, Parks Canada
Why the ships ended up so far apart, which one went down first, and why and how the ships sank are questions archaeologists hope to answer.
“There’s no obvious reason for Terror to have sunk,” says Ryan.
“It wasn’t crushed by ice, and there’s no breach in the hull.
Yet it appears to have sunk swiftly and suddenly and settled gently to the bottom.
What happened?”
Teasing out the answers won’t be easy, even with such a bounty of artifacts.
There are plans to excavate both wrecks, but it will be a slow process requiring years.
“Diving up here is extremely difficult,” says Ryan.
“The water is extremely cold, making it impossible to stay down for very long, and the diving season is short—a few weeks if you’re lucky, a few days if you’re not.”
HMS Terror and Erebus | Franklin Expedition (Nova Ghost Documentary)
Even so, this season’s work on Terror has already provided some tantalizing clues that will help researchers develop a chronology of the disaster.
“We noticed the ship’s propeller still in place,” says Ryan.
“We know that it had a mechanism to lift it out of the water during winter so that it wouldn’t be damaged by the ice.
So, the fact that it’s deployed suggests it was probably spring or summer when the ship sank.
So, too, does the fact that none of the skylights were boarded up, as they would have been to protect them against the winter snows.”
No doubt there are a lot more answers lying beneath the sediment in those cabins, says Ryan.
“One way or another, I feel confident we’ll get to the bottom of the story.”
The waters along the world’s coasts and islands are incredibly important to human activities, yet they are not always well mapped.
Coastal waters are often turbulent and murky, as the sand, mud, and sediment on the bottom is constantly in motion.
Unless there are regularly dredged channels, it can be difficult and dangerous for ships to travel in shallow water.
Making accurate and up-to-date depth charts is time-consuming and expensive, and doing so on a global scale is a monumental task.
By combining satellite measurements with ship-based sonar data, a team of researchers is now working to fill the gaps in our seafloor maps.
They are using data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) to accurately measure the depths (bathymetry) of shallow coastal waters, where surveying ships have historically been unable to travel due to safety, expense, or remoteness.
The images above show Velasco Reef in the Republic of Palau.
The left, natural-color image of the South Pacific reef was acquired by Landsat 8 in 2020; the right image is a digital elevation model created with ICESat-2 data.
The map was developed as part of a demonstration study led by remote sensing scientists Lori Magruder of the University of Texas at Austin and Chris Parrish of Oregon State University.
They partnered with the Coral Reef Research Foundation in Palau to fuse existing sonar data with their ICESat-2 dataset.
Mapping shallow, nearshore areas can be slow and potentially dangerous. Conventional field methods may involve a surveyor standing in shallow water, taking measurements at specific intervals, while at the mercy of waves and currents.
Meanwhile, boat-based sonar surveys are inefficient in shallow waters and subject to the dangers of waves, rocks, and reefs.
In addition, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has established Navigable Area Limit Lines (NALL), which define the shoreward limit of their boat-based surveys. The NALL is set at water depths of 3.5 meters (11 feet), and NOAA advises caution to captains maneuvering in shallow areas within the NALL because they are not often mapped, if at all. Sometimes the NALL limit can extend significant distances from shore.
These challenges result in many nearshore coastal waters being largely unmapped.
The area is nicknamed “the white ribbon” because it appears as white space hugging coasts, shoals, and atolls on bathymetric maps.
It essentially represents no data.
“The near-coastal area from 0 to 10 meters in depth is notoriously hard to map because a lot of the acoustic sensors that are used in bathymetry do not capture the shallower depths accurately,” said Magruder.
“Near-shore measurements provide a window into the coastal dynamics and processes that are really important.”
The maps above show the NALL regions around Velasco Reef and the current
water depths as measured by Magruder and Parrish’s team. This use of
ICESat-2 data could be a game-changer.
The satellite’s main instrument is the ATLAS altimeter, which sends 10,000 laser pulses per second toward Earth’s surface and detects the photons that return in order to determine the height of landmasses and features on it (such as ice sheets, forests, and glaciers).
It turns out that ICESat-2’s laser pulses can also penetrate the water column in shallow areas and return measurements from the seafloor.
The main mission of ICESat-2 is to map sea ice thickness and ice sheet elevation, as well as the height and density of temperate and tropical forests.
Scientists and engineers thought it might be possible to measure ocean bathymetry, but they were not sure until Adrian Borsa, a geodesist at the University of California, San Diego, noticed in 2018 that ICESAT-2 data was picking up seafloor signals around Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific.
This finding provoked Parrish and Magruder to make a concentrated effort to use the satellite for near-shore mapping.
Because it can observe across the entire globe, ICESat-2 provides broader spatial coverage than sonar-mapping ships.
The satellite also collects data from the same location every 91 days, allowing for repeat mapping of areas that previously took great effort to map even once.
Beyond Velasco Reef, researchers are using the novel dataset to map near-shore habitats off of Western Australia and around the Gilbert Islands, French Polynesia, Turks and Caicos, and the Bahamas.
The methods are even being used to map the shores of Lake Tahoe, California.
With a complete and continuous look at near-shore bathymetry, researchers can aid efforts to monitor endangered coral reefs and coastal mangroves, sediment transport after disaster events, carbon storage capacity, water clarity, invasive species, and several other aspects of coastal dynamics.
Forecasts of precipitation and mean sea level pressure are just one
example of the hundreds of ECMWF charts that will be made available.
From The Parliament Mag by Umberto Modigliani, ECMWF’s Deputy Director of Forecasts, responsible, with the Department Director, for the 24/7 production of forecasts and for liaison with users.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is moving towards open data, writes Umberto Modigliani.
Charts will cover the whole world, all types of weather situations including extreme events, and, very importantly, will also include probability-based information, providing guidance on forecast confidence.
Up till now, full access to these forecast charts was restricted to the national meteorological and hydrological services of ECMWF’s Member and Co-operating States, World Meteorological Organisation members and commercial customers.
Access was subject to a range of bespoke licences and often incurred charges.
Forecasts of precipitation and mean sea level pressure are just one example of the hundreds of ECMWF charts that will be made available.
Forecast charts will be free and open, so users can share, redistribute and adapt the information as they require, even for commercial applications, as long as they acknowledge ECMWF as the source.
Andy Morse, Professor of Climate Impacts at the University of Liverpool, commented: "The potential uses and benefits these products bring for a range of users and sectors is vast and particularly key in less economically developed countries. Now that remote internet access is widespread through modern mobile phone networks; the availability of this information is likely to be a game changer for many small enterprises. In my experience, people in these most remote parts of the world are hungry for such information."
The changes also mean a move to an open data policy for historical information in ECMWF’s huge repository, which contains billions of meteorological fields including recent and past forecasts.
It represents the largest archive of such data in the world.
“The societal benefits associated with free and open data are big. We are aware that the move comes with its financial challenges, but the benefits outweigh those challenges” Rolf Brennerfelt, Chair of ECMWF Policy Advisory Committee
Under the EU Open Data Directive, EU Member States will be required to make as much information available for re-use as possible.
Weather forecasts are considered as ‘high value’ data, the re-use of which is associated with particularly important benefits for society and the economy.
The EU Copernicus Earth observation programme, several elements of which are implemented by ECMWF, has operated a policy of free, open data since its inception.
With many thousands of users, the programme offers a host of examples of the benefits that open data can bring.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of Italian epidemiologists used atmospheric pollution data from the EU Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS) to investigate links between the level of pollution in a given area, and the rate and seriousness of COVID infection.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has developed an application that allows health authorities and epidemiology centres to explore whether temperature and humidity affect the spread of the coronavirus.
With hundreds of petabytes of data, ECMWF’s vast repository is the epitome of the term ‘big data’.
It offers immense opportunities for machine learning, where a computer uses data to ‘learn’ relationships between different variables.
If there are sufficient data for training, machine learning can be used to develop numerical tools that can mimic complex systems.
In fact, researchers are coupling these ECMWF data and machine learning to investigate the development of a ‘digital twin’ of the Earth system.
Wider applications such as anticipating weather effects on financial markets can also be envisaged.
Rolf Brennerfelt, Chair of ECMWF Policy Advisory Committee, commented: “ECMWF Member States have been keen for the Centre’s data to be open and free for a while.
The societal benefits associated with free and open data are big.
We are aware that the move comes with its financial challenges, but the benefits outweigh those challenges.
We are in a period of transition, and this first batch of data being made freely available is a very good start and illustrates well our commitment to this principle.”
This phased move towards free and open data aims to support creativity and innovation in the field of scientific research as well as weather applications, and should enable more necessary and critical scientific, social and economic advances.
