This concept yacht has a surprising power source

The new boat's use of electricity, along with solar cells and wind turbines will make the boat 70% self-sufficient in energy.
Image: The SeaCleaners

From World Economic Forum by Lucien Libert

Yvan Bourgon and his team have designed a yacht which collects plastic garbage from the ocean and then uses it as fuel.
It is hoped that a prototype for this design can be launched in 2024.
Bourgon has said that if 400 of the boats were to be made, they could clean up one third of the plastic debris in the oceans.

A French ocean adventurer and his team have designed a yacht which he says can scoop up plastic garbage to stop it blighting the world’s oceans, and converts the same waste into fuel to help power the boat.

Yvan Bourgnon has spent his career racing sailing vessels around the globe as a competitive yachtsmen. Over the years, he said, his encounters with floating carpets of trash became more and more frequent.

Yvan Bourgon and his team have designed a yacht which collects plastic garbage from the ocean and then uses it as fuel.
It is hoped that a prototype for this design can be launched in 2024.
Bourgon has said that if 400 of the boats were to be made, they could clean up one third of the plastic debris in the oceans.

A French ocean adventurer and his team have designed a yacht which he says can scoop up plastic garbage to stop it blighting the world’s oceans, and converts the same waste into fuel to help power the boat.

Yvan Bourgnon has spent his career racing sailing vessels around the globe as a competitive yachtsmen. Over the years, he said, his encounters with floating carpets of trash became more and more frequent.

 The SeaCleaners presents The Manta : the first concentrated ecology and technology factory ship capable of collecting, processing and recovering large quantities of marine plastic waste.

 

Right now, it exists only on the drawing board, but Bourgnon and his team hope to turn into a working prototype that can be launched in 2024.

As the boat moves through the water, conveyor belts will scoop up waste, sort it, then feed it into a burner.

That will melt the plastic, producing gas which drives a turbine, and in turn generates electricity for the boat’s systems to use.

That electricity, along with solar cells and wind turbines on the boat’s deck, will make the boat 70% self-sufficient in energy, according to Bourgnon.

He said that if 400 of the boats were to be made, they could clean up one third of the plastic debris in the oceans.

He said even conservative estimates project that, by 2060, there will be three times more waste in the sea than now
“To fold your arms and say ‘No, we’ll do nothing, we’ll leave it, we’ll focus on dry land, we’ll leave the waste in the ocean,’ is totally irresponsible,” he said.

Links :

• The Sea Cleaners website

RSV Nuyina discovers deep glacial canyon

The AAD acoustics team used Nuyina’s multibeam echosounders to map more than 840 square kilometres of the seafloor in front of the Vanderford Glacier, following a canyon more than 55 kilometres long, and 2200 metres deep at the deepest point mapped (in purple).

Hydrographic Material reproduced with permission of The Australian Hydrographic Office © Commonwealth of Australia 2022

Photo: Pete Harmsen/AAD

From Antarctica

A deep canyon at the front of the Vanderford Glacier in East Antarctica has been mapped for the first time by acousticians on board RSV Nuyina.

 Vanderford Glacier (Photo : Pete Harmsen / AAD)

The previously unknown canyon, more than 2200 metres deep, 2000 metres wide and at least 55 kilometres long, was discovered after the ship departed Casey research station, following its refuelling operation.

 

Localization in Antarctica with the GeoGarage platform (AHS nautical raster chart)

 

No info with STRM bathymetry data

 
As the ship navigated Vincennes Bay in front of the glacier, acousticians Jill Brouwer, Alison Herbert and Floyd Howard switched on the ship’s EM122 multibeam echosounder and were surprised by what they saw.

 

The AAD acoustics team used Nuyina’s multibeam echosounders to map more than 840 square kilometres of the seafloor in front of the Vanderford Glacier, following a canyon more than 55 kilometres long, and 2200 metres deep at the deepest point mapped (in purple).

Hydrographic Material reproduced with permission of The Australian Hydrographic Office © Commonwealth of Australia 2022

(Photo: Pete Harmsen/AAD)

“Although we’ve been visiting this region for decades on the Aurora Australis, we haven’t had the capability to do this sort of detailed mapping before,” Mr Howard said.
“As a result, current navigational charts of this area are based on fairly limited surveys.”
“Our work has shown that the seafloor is deeper and more complex than we thought.”

 

Some of the multibeam echosounder data showing the structure of the seafloor in front of the Vanderford Glacier, with different colours representing different depths. (Photo: Pete Harmsen/AAD)

The multibeam echosounder sends out pings of sound in a fan-shape beneath the ship and ‘listens’ to the returning echoes to build a picture of the seafloor.

The sideways projection of sound also allowed the team to map the canyon underneath the glacier for up to three and a half kilometres from the front.

Voyage Leader Lloyd Symons said it’s not unusual to see interesting features in front of glaciers, which scour the seafloor as they advance or retreat, and drop rocks or ‘erratics’ along the way.

 

AAD acoustician Jill Brouwer monitoring the multibeam echosounder as the undiscovered canyon in front of the Vanderford Glacier is revealed.

(Photo: Pete Harmsen/AAD)

But he wasn’t expecting a canyon this deep.
“It is truly mind boggling to look northward to the nearby Browning Peninsula and know that there is 2200 metres of water underneath the keel,” he said.
“It will be really interesting to see how we can use Nuyina’s acoustic capabilities to improve our understanding of the seafloor bathymetry around our other stations in the future, particularly the approach to Mawson, which has a deep, narrow channel surrounded by pinnacles of rock.”

A conductivity, temperature, depth (CTD) instrument was deployed into the deepest part of the canyon, 2200 metres below, to measure water properties such as temperature and salinity.

(Photo: Pete Harmsen/AAD)

The technical team on board also sampled the water in the canyon using a conductivity, temperature, depth (CTD) instrument, deployed to just three metres above the seafloor.
CTDs are used by oceanographers to measure changes in water properties – including ocean temperature and salinity near glaciers, to understand how warming water contributes to glacial melt from below.

The data from this and other mapping efforts on board Nuyina will feed into global efforts to map the world’s oceans by 2030.

Acoustics experts and science systems engineers on the ship are from the AAD’s Technology and Innovation Branch, funded by the Australian Government to manage the suite of world-leading science systems on board RSV Nuyina.

 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Australian icebreaker maps deepsea mountain

Melting beauty: the icefields of Patagonia

From NASA

Forests, grasslands, deserts, and mountains are all part of the Patagonian landscape, which spans more than a million square kilometers of South America.
Toward the western side, expanses of dense, compacted ice—the Patagonian icefields—stretch for hundreds of kilometers atop the Andes mountain range in Chile and Argentina.
The northern and southern lobes of the Patagonian icefield are what’s left of a much larger ice sheet that reached its maximum size about 18,000 years ago.
Though just a fraction of their previous size, the modern icefields remain the largest expanse of ice in the southern hemisphere outside of Antarctica.

But rapid change is ongoing.
“They are, in fact, melting away at some of the highest rates on the planet,” said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California-Irvine.

Meltwater from the Patagonian icefield contributes to sea level rise.
The contribution is less than what will come from Greenland and Antarctica, but scientists plan to keep studying the region from space, from the air, and from the ground.

According to Rignot: “Understanding the evolution of these glaciers helps us understand what glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica may look like in the future in a much warmer climate.”

The images of NASA highlight this dynamic region.
Click on the links for even more insight about each icefield and its glaciers.

Bigfin squid

It’s not every dive that deep-sea explorers encounter a bigfin squid (Magnapinna sp.).

It’s actually pretty unusual; roughly a dozen sightings have been confirmed worldwide.

So, when we captured an adult bigfin squid on camera during Dive 10 of Windows to the Deep 2021 off the West Florida Escarpment in the Gulf of Mexico, it was quite an exciting moment.

Canada (CHS) layer update in the GeoGarage platform

83 nautical raster charts updated & 2 new charts added

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