Underwater mountain range near California declared a Mission Blue 'Hope Spot'

Black coral, primnoid coral, and feather stars flourish 2,669 m (8,757 ft) deep on the pristine Davidson Seamount off the coast of California. 

NOAA/MBARI

 From Forbes by Priya Shukla

California is known for its picturesque beaches and dramatic coastlines filled with sandy beaches, tide pools, and kelp forests.
But, a lesser-known habitat exists further offshore - an underwater mountain range that spans the California coast consisting of approximately 60 seamounts.
Each seamount is slightly different from the rest - some are used by seabirds and whales as rest stops along their migration routes, while others harbor centuries-old deep-sea corals.
However, recent interest in deep-sea mining and destructive fishing practices threatens these diverse and slow-growing ecosystems.
Thus, in an effort to raise awareness about the importance of these seamounts and protect them from intrusive human activities, Mission Blue recently declared these seamounts a "Hope Spot".

“The rationale for exploiting fish, oil and gas, and minerals in the deep sea is based on their perceived current monetary value," says Dr. Sylvia Earle, a world-renowned ocean explorer and founder of Mission Blue, "But the living systems that will be destroyed by these activities are perceived to have no monetary value."

Mission Blue aims to develop a global network of marine protected areas.
Marine sites that are declared "Hope Spots" support rare and diverse species, have cultural and/or economic value, and are vulnerable to damage by human actions.
The California Seamounts "Hope Spot" encompasses not only underwater mountains, but also hydrothermal vents and cold methane seeps - both of which also support a wide variety of sea life.
These deep-sea habitats can be found along the Gorda and Mendocino Ridges, which were historically identified as locations for deep-sea mining operations.

Seamounts located within the exclusive economic zone off the coast of California.

Marine Conservation Institute

 

The unique environment that the seamounts create has allowed a specific suite of animals to live on them.

This is because the seamounts alter ocean currents in a way that allows them to draw in waters enriched with nutrients and food.

 

Davidson Seamount with the GeoGarage platform (NOAA nautical raster chart)

 

Davidson Seamount bathymetry

 

The Davidson Seamount alone harbors over 230 animals, 15 of which had never been spotted before their discovery on the seamount.

In fact, 20 percent of the animals found on these seamounts cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

"Just as we have created parks to protect Yosemite Valley, and Giant Redwoods, we must act to protect the great mountains underneath the surface of the ocean and the coral forests that live on them," says Dr.

Lance Morgan, President of the Marine Conservation Institute, "The ocean and its life – whether we can see it from the beach or not – is a wonderful creation; and it is our responsibility to be a good steward and protect those things we have been given."  

 

Links :

• Mission Blue "Hope spots" 
• Deeper Blue : Mission Blue Recognizes Azores As A ‘Hope Spot’

Chay Blyth: 50 years since his impossible voyage

Chay Blyth finished his solo non-stop westwards circumnavigation around the world on 6 August 1971. Credit: Getty

From Yachting Monthly

50 years ago Chay Blyth became the first person to sail solo, non-stop, westwards around the world. Dee Caffari, the first woman to emulate his record, looks back at his achievement 

 

 (1 Aug 1971) Lone round the World yachtsman Chay Blyth seen 50 miles off Land's End as he neared the end of his voyage

 

Before the attempt, Sir Francis Chichester commented that he thought the voyage was impossible, and on completion it became known as ‘The Impossible Voyage’.
The Times newspaper in London described it as, ‘The most outstanding passage ever made by one man alone’.
It is still considered the toughest challenge in sailing; only five people have ever managed it, a number which becomes more significant when compared to the 12 people who have walked on the moon.
The plan began in earnest to sail the ‘wrong way’ round the world in 1969.
It was not until 18 October 1970 that Chay Blyth departed from Southampton on board the 59ft ketch, British Steel.
His voyage had never been done before: to sail single-handed, non-stop, westwards around the world.
Thousands cheered and their Royal Highnesses Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne were there to greet him as was the then prime minister, Edward Heath.

 

Chay Blyth’s record breaking 59ft yacht British Steel.

Credit: Getty

In recognition of his impressive achievement, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Sponsorship was vital to the success of the venture and Chay secured the backing of The British Steel Corporation.
This experience of gaining and developing a relationship with a major corporation was to shape not only Chay’s personal exploits in the following years but also his business initiatives too.
Those skills were something he happily passed on and I remember receiving advice from Chay about business meetings and how the world of corporate sponsorship worked during regular chats when I was preparing for my solo voyage.
Preparation for such a voyage is an endless task with phone calls, meetings, challenges and hurdles all to be overcome.
There are infinite decisions that need making and as you are the only sailor involved, you are the only one that can make the final decision.
The hours of commuting from boatyard to boardroom and back again gives you plenty of time to think.

40th anniversary of Chay Blyth’s return

Chay, and his wife Maureen, worked tirelessly through their tasks.
I also remember driving back and forth during my preparation, making calls and endless lists. It’s not something that can be done alone.
You need a support network and those closest to you are crucial in fulfilling that role.
Without their support the dream never becomes a reality.
As departure day came closer Chay talked about it being not possible to be completely ready as there was always last-minute organised chaos.
The final night ashore you are unable to relax, your mind racing through final checklists, mixed with nerves and anxiety.
No one can take any more days of tension and pressure – all you want is the start line.
Chay recalled his emotions at his start: ‘I think you are beyond feeling, you don’t feel anything.’

As mentor for my ‘Impossible Voyage’ in 2005/6, his parting words to me as I set off, were to remind me not to cry – it had been done before.
Asked how I felt, I think, like Chay, I was too busy initially to feel anything.
Then it was overwhelming. I was heading towards the Lizard Lighthouse, the stopwatch started and I was swamped with the reality of what I had chosen to undertake.
It took a while to settle into a routine.
Calms and light airs were conditions that both Chay and I seemed to find most difficult to tolerate.
Chay often talked to himself, a trait I can relate to.
It is like giving yourself a running commentary or a set of instructions out loud to follow.
The benefits are two-fold.
First it gives you confidence in your decisions on what actions to take.
It also feels like you have some dialogue or company while you do it.
Both of us were plagued with autopilot issues and had to constantly fix or hand steer in certain conditions, testing our resolve.
Chay had his army and para training to draw upon, and I had my stubbornness and tenacity, but both of us were determined to see things through.
A common topic that comes up no matter whose sailing memoirs you read are the constant references to food.
In the preparation phase the focus is all on performance, sails, navigation, boat systems and weather.

 

Sir Chay Blyth with Dee Caffari after finishing her own solo Impossible Voyage in 2006.

Credit: Getty

 

But the reality is that when you are out there, it is the fuel you consume that keeps you going.
That, and sleep or rather the lack of it at times, and how that affects your mood in difficult circumstances.
Recognising how you react at these times, so you can do something about it, is something I probably underestimated in my voyage, despite having read about it in Chay’s book.
My relationship with Sir Chay Blyth started when I was one of his skippers in the 2004 Global Challenge Race – ‘The World’s Toughest Yacht Race’.
He planted the solo non-stop seed in my mind during the Cape Town stop-over, while we were chatting after dinner.

Since his Impossible Voyage, only three men had followed in his footsteps, Mike Golding, Philippe Monnet and Jean-Luc Van den Heede.
In Chay’s opinion it was only a matter of time before a woman would do it, so why shouldn’t it be me?
Sir Chay Blyth may not have directly passed on his tips and techniques for dealing with mountainous seas and gale force headwinds, but the 14 years’ experience of sailing on Global Challenge races and the teams he put together to compete in them clearly benefited me.
I trusted their confidence and Blyth’s belief in me and my abilities.
When I crossed the finish line 15 years ago, having sailed myself into the history books following in Sir Chay Blyth’s footsteps, the first call I made was to Chay.
I was standing on deck in the rain with the wind blowing 50 knots and the phone inside my hood.
He had heard the news and had popped the Champagne cork and he sounded proud.
As he wrote in the foreword of my book published the following year: ‘The Impossible Voyage may no longer be impossible, but it remains hard, very, very hard.’

 

Links :

• Yachting Monthly : Blyth returned to a hero’s welcome 292 days later  / Chay Blyth had become the first person to sail non-stop, around the world against the prevailing winds and currents.

Image of the week : Impressive shallow seafloor at the coast of Mozambique

Impressive shallow seafloor at the coast of Mozambique.
True color image captured by Sentinel2 with small contrast and saturation adjustment

Localization with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO nautical raster chart)

A brief geography of time

worldmapper.org/maps/grid-timezones-2018/

From Worldmapper by Benjamin Hennig

Sometimes referred to as the fourth dimension, time has a highly geographical relevance

 1943

For human geography, population sizes can have as much impact on the ‘tempo of places’ as culture or even climate.
In physical geography, the concept of time is indispensable for an understanding of how the natural environment has changed and keeps changing.

In the 21st century, time has been described as being a commodity itself, affecting everything from manufacturing and trade, to financial flows and global transport links.

The general geographic distribution of time zones is based on the general concept of dividing the world into zones of equal time following a 24-hour day around the world.
In theory, this means that there are 12 time zones of 15° width in which each differs by one hour’s time difference.

The 12 TZ for France

The necessity of time zones was closely linked to growing needs of transport and communication links during industrialisation.
British railway companies began adopting Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) which helped to coordinate timetables.
In 1880, GMT became standard across Britain and time differences of tens of minutes between cities in the country started vanishing.
At a global level, time zones became established in the first decades of the 20th century.

But as much as time zones are legal, commercial and social constructs, they are also highly political issues which find their expression in the spatial patterns of today’s time zones.
The adoption of the Greenwich meridian itself can be seen as a highly political act that helped in manifesting a Euro-centric world view.
Furthermore, many of the time zone boundaries do not follow the geographical pattern of each zone.
Most boundaries follow political boundary lines such as country or state borders.
While in some cases this can be practical minor deviations, more often the political decisions for time zones have a considerable impact on people’s everyday lives.

The most extreme example for geographical distortion through time can be seen in the case of China which covers the extent of five time zones, but only uses one, orientated on the location of Beijing (at UTC +8 hours).

 Situation in Antarctica

At the most extreme ends of the country, people use the same time even if sunrise is approximately four hours apart.
India made a similar decision to continue using only one time zone by adjusting Indian time half way between the two time zones that used to divide the country (now at UTC +5:30 hours), with only approximately two hours solar difference appearing between the outermost parts of the country.

Another political decision was North Korea’s creation of Pyongyang Time in 2015, creating a 30-minute distance to its southern neighbour.
Another political decision was Iceland’s move to abolish changing the clocks between summer and winter time in 1968.
Iceland’s decision meant a move towards adopting Greenwich Mean Time and becoming the westernmost country in that zone.
On GMT’s eastern edge, almost all of the western European countries that would geographically fall into this zone instead adopted Central European Time (GMT +1), which has become equally large, touching the geographic extent of almost four time zones.

GeoGarage maritime Time Zone API

Larger populations are not always affected by such deviations from the theoretical time zone: The most extreme deviation was created by Kiribati’s decision to realign the zone for the Line Islands with the same date as its territory, meaning that the sparsely populated islands follow the same time as Hawai’i but are one day ahead as the ‘easternmost land’ with the earliest time zone (GMT +14 hours).

The above cartogram shows time zones from the perspective of an equal-population projection – a gridded population visualisation where each small area is proportional to the population living there.
The map highlights how these geopolitical considerations have an effect on the impact that time has on people and the functioning of the world.
Globalisation is far from having resulted in a compression of space and time.

On the contrary, time defines our contemporary world because it has put a new meaning to the spaces of humanity, or, as Tennessee Williams describes it in The Glass Menagerie: ‘Time is the longest distance between two places.’
In an interconnected world, time is equally the longest distance between two people.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : World Maritime Time Zone API / How does a country go about changing its time zone / Lines of Longitude explained, with maps / Opinion: How the Prime Meridian changed the world / Why time will stop for a leap second 
• WP : North Korea’s new time zone is perfectly bizarre

We’ve discovered an undersea volcano near Christmas Island that looks like the Eye of Sauron

Phil Vandenbossche & Nelson Kuna/CSIRO, Author provided

From The Conversation by Tim O'Hara

Looking like the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, an ancient undersea volcano was slowly revealed by multibeam sonar 3,100 metres below our vessel, 280 kilometres southeast of Christmas Island.

This was on day 12 of our voyage of exploration to Australia’s Indian Ocean Territories, aboard CSIRO’s dedicated ocean research vessel, the RV Investigator.

Previously unknown and unimagined, this volcano emerged from our screens as a giant oval-shaped depression called a caldera, 6.2km by 4.8km across.

It is surrounded by a 300m-high rim (resembling Sauron’s eyelids), and has a 300 m high cone-shaped peak at its the centre (the “pupil”).

 

Sonar image of the ‘Eye of Sauron’ volcano and nearby seamounts on the sea bed south-west of Christmas Island.

Phil Vandenbossche & Nelson Kuna/CSIRO, Author provided

A caldera is formed when a volcano collapses

The molten magma at the base of the volcano shifts upwards, leaving empty chambers.

The thin solid crust on the surface of the dome then collapses, creating a large crater-like structure

Often, a small new peak then begins to form in the centre as the volcano continues spewing magma.

One well-known caldera is the one at Krakatoa in Indonesia, which exploded in 1883, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving only bits of the mountain rim visible above the waves.

By 1927, a small volcano, Anak Krakatoa (“child of Krakatoa”), had grown in its centre. 

 

A great eye, wreathed in flame emerging from the seabed

In contrast, we may not even be aware of volcanic eruptions when they happen deep under the ocean.

One of the few tell-tale signs is the presence of rafts of light pumice stone floating on the sea surface after being blown out of a submarine volcano.

Eventually, this pumice stone becomes waterlogged and sinks to the ocean floor.

Our volcanic “eye” was not alone.

Further mapping to the south revealed a smaller sea mountain covered in numerous volcanic cones, and further still to the south was a larger, flat-topped seamount.

Following our Lord of the Rings theme, we have nicknamed them Barad-dûr (“Dark Fortress”) and Ered Lithui (“Ash Mountains”), respectively. 

 

The voyage of the RV Investigator around Christmas Island. 

Tim O'Hara/Museums Victoria

 

Localization with the GeoGarage platform (AHS nautical raster chart)
 

Although author J.R.R. Tolkein’s knowledge of mountain geology wasn’t perfect, our names are wonderfully appropriate given the jagged nature of the first and the pumice-covered surface of the second.

The Eye of Sauron, Barad-dûr, and Ered Lithui are part of the Karma cluster of seamounts that have been previously estimated by geologists to be more than 100 million years old, and which formed next to an ancient sea ridge from a time when Australia was situated much further south, near Antarctica. The flat summit of Ered Lithui was formed by wave erosion when the seamount protruded above the sea surface, before the heavy seamount slowly sank back down into the soft ocean seafloor.

The summit of Ered Lithui is now 2.6km below sea level.

 

A flyby of the seamounts, south of Christmas Island.

3D imagery courtesy of CSIRO/MNF, GSM

 

But here is the geological conundrum.

Our caldera looks surprisingly fresh for a structure that should be more than 100 million years old.

Ered Lithui has almost 100m of sand and mud layers draped over its summit, formed by sinking dead organisms over millions of years.

This sedimentation rate would have partially smothered the caldera. Instead it is possible that volcanoes have continued to sprout or new ones formed long after the original foundation.

Our restless Earth is never still.

The large deep-sea predatory seastar Zoroaster.

Rob French/Museums Victoria, Author provided

 

Small batfish patrol the seamount summits.

Rob French/Museums Victoria, Author provided 

 

Elasipod sea cucumbers feed on organic detritus on deep sandy seafloors.

Rob French/Museums Victoria, Author provided

 

But life adapts to these geological changes, and Ered Lithui is now covered in seafloor animals.

Brittle-stars, sea-stars, crabs and worms burrow into or skate over the sandy surface.

Erect black corals, fan-corals, sea-whips, sponges and barnacles grow on exposed rocks.

Gelatinous cusk-eels prowl around rock gullies and boulders.

Batfish lie in wait for unsuspecting prey.

Our mission is to map the seafloor and survey sea life from these ancient and secluded seascapes.

The Australian government recently announced plans to create two massive marine parks across the regions.

Our expedition will supply scientific data that will help Parks Australia to manage these areas into the future.

Scientists from museums, universities, CSIRO and Bush Blitz around Australia are participating in the voyage.
We are close to completing part one of our journey to the Christmas Island region.

Part two of our journey to the Cocos (Keeling) Island region will be scheduled in the next year or so.

No doubt many animals that we find here will be new to science and our first records of their existence will be from this region. We expect many more surprising discoveries.

 

Links :

• Museums Victoria : A Lord of the Rings-like marine landscape revealed in Australia’s Christmas Island Territory