New Florence. New Renaissance.

Are shipwreck discoveries becoming easier?

Coupled with other underwater survey systems and GPS, this allows explorers to quickly and accurately map the scene below. Mapping data can then be run through software to detect anomalous undersea structures, like ship hulls, superstructures, and gun turrets, identifying possible wrecks. If the software finds something interesting, the crew can send an AUV equipped with a camera down to investigate up close.

Armed with these tools, explorers can close the book on mysteries decades long, writing a final chapter in the history of a ship, its crew, or sea battle. They can also bring closure to families of lost sailors, particularly those of the San Juan, who now have a location for their loved ones’ final resting place.

Popular Mechanics

The wreck of the Japanese battleship Hiei, sunk on November 14, 1942, was located in the Iron Bottom Sound by R/V Petrel. Watch video from more than 1000 meters below the sea.

 

 

Out There

Great PopSci issue which looks at the edge of everything - in space, under our oceans, the poles of our planet and elsewhere.

We know so little - so much more to explore

Artificial Surf Pool

The Kelly Slater Wave Co. purchased the 20-acre property in Lemoore in 2014. According to a report in Bloomberg, Slater chose Lemoore, a small city with a population of around 25,000, primarily because it was inexpensive. The property cost around $575,000, roughly half the price of a two-bedroom condo in San Francisco. The fact that two lakes already existed on the property also made it appealing. But if Slater was hoping for discretion when he chose Lemoore, which is located more than 100 miles from the California coastline, that part didn’t quite pan out: The internet has been in a frenzy about this man-made wave since Slater first started filing patent applications.

By 2015 the first version of the wave pool was operational. It is not open to the public for surfing, and may never be—although if you’re a Slater buddy, like Eddie Vedder or Tony Hawk, or a philanthropic organization, or an LA-based venture capitalist or tech executive with deep pockets, you can arrange an outing there.

Wired

Massive ocean clean up

The 2,000-foot-long unmanned structure was the product of about $20 million in funding from the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to trap up to 150,000 pounds of plastic during the boom’s first year at sea. Within five years, with the creation of dozens more booms, the organization hopes to clean half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The patch, a gyre of trash between California and Hawaii, comprises an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of scattered detritus, including at least 87,000 tons of plastic.

New York Times

NASA’s OMG

OMG is a multi-pronged effort to map the underwater contours of the Greenland coast, and better understand how warming ocean waters drive melting ice.

A giant leap forward came late in 2017, when NASA, the University of California, Irvine and others published high resolution maps of the bedrock and sea floor around Greenland

OMG’s measurements by ship and plane, including ice thickness data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, were plugged into a computer modeling tool called BedMachine. The result: high-precision maps that unveiled previously unknown features on the Greenland coast, and beneath its ice sheet.

NASA

 

The Coast Guard and Hurricane Harvey

The Coast Guard closed the port on Friday morning, and every day it remained closed meant $1.7 billion of lost economic activity. MTSRU coordinated every aspect of operations to reopen it. Fullmer was called in because he's an expert in aids to navigation—the system of lights, lighthouses, buoys, and beacons that guide ships through the channel. After Harvey, lighted buoy No. 5, the city-bus-size green float that usually marks the port side of the entrance to Galveston Bay (the shipping channel's mouth) was bobbing way out in the middle, where ships ought to be. Its starboard counterpart had also come unmoored and was nowhere near the channel. A Coast Guard cutter was dispatched to relocate them. Farther up, teams from the Army Corps of Engineers and NOAA performed soundings of the channel to measure depth, looking for shoaling—buildups of the seafloor caused by wind and water that compromise the 45-foot depth and 1,000-foot width that accommodate the massive ships that transit the ß second largest petrochemical complex.

As the ports were reopened in stages—only certain areas, to certain size boats, at certain times—the MTSRU determined which traffic should enter first. On August 30, tankers were dispatched to Marathon Petroleum and Phillips 66, which were running out of feedstocks for their refineries, preventing them from becoming part of the 20 percent of U.S. refining capacity shut down by Harvey. The next day two cruise ships arrived to let off passengers who'd been forced to temporarily divert to Miami and New Orleans. By Friday, September 1, the port was essentially back online.

Popular Mechanics

Submersible yacht

If you’re the helipad-on-a-sea-vessel type, the M7 not only has a place for your chopper to land, it has a swimming pool, VIP suites, multiple hangar bays, and a design inspired by the U.S. Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyers. (Alas, its engines are diesel-electric, not nuclear-powered.)

And unlike a yacht, which is just going to sit there on top of the water, floating around like a $200 million chunk of burnished driftwood, the M7 can dive to 1,500 feet and cruise underwater at 20 knots. The real excitement, as Sebastian the Crab once sang, is “under the sea.”

BusinessWeek

 

 

Seasteading

“The Seasteading Institute empowers people to build floating startup societies with innovative governance models.”

Any interesting concept which will get more attention as oceans rise and interest increases in oceans as food and energy sources

 

Drones to search for missing MH370

Ocean Infinity, a Texas-based firm that specializes in seabed exploration technology, told CNNMoney on Friday that it has submitted an offer to search for the remains of the Boeing 777 that disappeared more than three years ago with 239 people on board.

The company declined to reveal the exact terms of the proposal, but said it's willing to "take on the economic risk of a renewed search."

It's a bold move to offer to shoulder the financial burden of trying to help solve one of modern aviation's greatest mysteries. The original underwater search dragged on for years and cost roughly $150 million.

CNN

Image credit

Iceberg drift

Thomas Rackow and colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, are following the block with keen interest.

They recently published research in which they modelled the drift of icebergs through Antarctic waters - taking into account the different influences that act on small and large objects. There are essentially four "highways" that bergs travel, depending on their point of origin.

A-68 should follow the highway up the eastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, leading from the Weddell Sea towards the Atlantic.

"It will most likely follow a northeasterly course, heading roughly for South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands," Dr Rackow told BBC News. "It will be very interesting to see whether the iceberg will move as expected, as a kind of 'reality-check' for the current models and our physical understanding."

BBC

Simulated highways: Small to medium bergs (Classes 1-3) generally have a lifetime of a couple of years; the big bergs (Classes 4-5) are mostly all gone after 10 years