National Geo has greenlit an epic documentary detailing the successful search and discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s sunken Endurance ship near Antarctica, helmed by British historian Dan Snow.
The doc will chart the successful search by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust for famed explorer Shackleton’s shipwrecked Endurance, which sank in 1915 near Antarctica.
Led by Polar Geographer Dr. John Shears and Marine Archaeologist Mensun Bound aboard the South African icebreaker Agulhas II, a crew of scientists and archaeologists teamed with filmmakers and Snow to document the events in real time leading up to the discovery.
With the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, SciTech Daily has a nice article on the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market. The US, Qatar and Australia are some of the biggest exporters. China and Japan are two of the biggest importers with Germany ramping up its own imports
"LNG is made by cooling natural gas to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 162 degrees Celsius), which reduces its volume by a factor of more than 600. Natural gas is piped to a port, processed in a liquefaction plant, and then loaded into specialized insulated, temperature-controlled tankers for shipment by sea.
To receive LNG, an offloading port must have a regasification plant that converts the LNG back to a gaseous form so it can be sent by pipeline to end users. Both liquefaction plants and regasification plants cost billions of dollars and take multiple years to build."
In 2015, McKinsey acquired QuantumBlack, a London-based data analytics and AI specialist which had established its reputation working with F1 teams. “The New Zealand team wanted an AI that could do dynamic manoeuvres in highly variable environments, but didn’t think this was possible,” says QuantumBlack’s Nic Hohn. “Reinforcement learning really works when you’ve tried everything else.”
The McKinsey team worked with the New Zealand team for ten months during 2019 and 2020. The bots got so good that the human sailors would watch the simulations and pick up tips. “The bot was actually doing things that felt counterintuitive to the sailors,” says Jacomo Corbo, QuantumBlack’s co-founder and chief scientist, “but they’d try them out on the water and they’d actually work.”
The world’s biggest owner of cables is a household name, at least to Americans – it’s AT&T, which has a stake in around 230,000 kilometres of international internet cabling, or around one sixth of the total. But looking at others in the top ten reveals why both Big Tech and Western governments are starting to pay the apparently dull issue of cable ownership more attention: in second place is China Telecom, while Chunghwa Telecom (based in Taiwan) is third and China Unicorn is sixth.
In the tenth and eleventh spots, however, are some very familiar names: Facebook and Google. Big Tech is getting into big cables – and doing so in a big way. Over the past few years, 80 percent of investment in new cables has flowed from the two US tech giants. As of today, Facebook owns or co-owns 99,399 kilometres of cables, Google 95,876 kilometres. And more investments are on their way: in August, Facebook and Google announced their plans for building a 12,000 kilometre undersea cable, Apricot, which will link Singapore, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia when completed in 2024. For Google, that came hot on the heels of a previous announcement about the Echo subsea cable, which will connect California, Singapore, Guam and Indonesia. For its part, Facebook has thrown its weight behind the coalition of telcos building what might turn out to be the longest subsea cable ever: 2Africa, a 45,000 kilometre-long cord planned to encompass the whole African continent and connect 33 countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle-East by 2024. In May 2020 Bloomberg reported that the project will cost under $1 billion – but that was before Facebook announced several expansions to the initial design.
Founded by former Airbus engineers, Airseas has designed a 10,000-square-foot kite system dubbed Seawing. It can be deployed at the touch of a button and help tow large cargo ships by harnessing the power of the wind. Think of it like an epic kitesurfing setup, where the kite is operated by an automated flight control system first developed for the aerospace industry—and the kitesurfer is, well, a 50,000-ton cargo ship.
Sea Machines Robotics, a Boston-based developer of autonomous vessel software and systems, announced on Tuesday that it is readying a tugboat for a 1,000-nautical-mile autonomous journey (that’s roughly 1,150 miles) around Denmark.
Crafted in the Netherlands, the tug will employ long-range computer vision and a “sensor-to-propeller” system called the SM300. Together, Sea Machines says these features allow for “path-planning, obstacle avoidance replanning, vectored nautical chart data, and dynamic domain perception.” In other words, it is designed to follow along a predetermined path safely, identifying and avoiding any obstacles that might appear along the way.
Fortunately Bedrock is here to drag that mapping process into the 21st century with its autonomous underwater vehicle and modern cloud-based data service.
The company aims to replace the standard “big ship with a big sonar” approach with a faster, smarter, more modern service, letting companies spin up regular super-accurate seafloor imagery as easily as they might spin up a few servers to host their website.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Rob Kugel, SVP & Research Director of Office of Finance and Business Research at Ventana Research. Here he writes about his diving and the volunteer work he does with Reef Check.
"I love the ocean. I started with Reef Check in 2010 as a volunteer diver because I fell in love with California’s kelp forest ecosystem. Diving in them is like floating through a forest with fish, marine mammals and – yes – birds (diving cormorants) all around you, some curious, some skittish. And plants and animals unlike anything on land.
Becoming a volunteer diver requires four days of classroom and in-water training as well as annual recertification to ensure the quality of the data we collect. On the first day of our classroom training our instructor kicked off the session by informing us that all Reefcheckers share a common characteristic: We are “adventuresome nerds.”
Cold water SCUBA diving is a different, more complicated sport compared to tropical diving. In northern California, you need a lot more gear and a lot more insulation to be in water that’s usually 50 degrees Fahrenheit (plus or minus). I wear a dry suit because it’s more comfortable and I’m always wearing a hood and thick gloves. And usually, dive conditions here are “less than ideal,” with limited visibility (25 feet is great; often it’s more like 10-15 feet), and strong ocean surge and currents. Some people find all of this too cold and claustrophobic.
Reef Check dives are a challenge because they’re heavily task loaded. You have to accurately identify and count a range of target organisms (specific species of fish, invertebrates and algae) along a transect and write down the things you’ve found, all in these less-than-ideal conditions and within the time limits of your available air. For me, there’s a lot of satisfaction being able to do all that.
There’s also the satisfaction in supporting California’s Marine Protected Areas by collecting the data that demonstrates that MPAs do what they’re supposed to do. Reef Check is also doing experimental work to help restore the kelp forest. Many people are aware of the threats to coral reefs around the world. Few are aware of the devastation of the west coast's kelp forests over the past decade caused in part by a sea urchin population explosion that was the result from an epidemic die-off of sea stars, their main predator. Reef Check is leading projects in California that are designed to find ways to restore the kelp forests.
Five years ago, I joined the board of Reef Check Foundation and I’m also a member of our executive committee. Reef Check began in 1996 to do the first coordinated worldwide scientific assessment of the health of coral reefs. That work confirmed the rising phenomenon of coral reef bleaching. Reef Check’s mission is to save our reefs and oceans and ensure their sustainable future through education, research, and conservation. We have completed nearly 15,000 surveys in over 100 countries. We train thousands of citizen scientist volunteers every year around the world to survey the health of tropical coral reefs and kelp forest ecosystems along the entire coast of California. Government bodies, NGOs and academic organizations use the data we collect to improve natural resources management. Reef Check programs provide ecologically sound and economically sustainable solutions built on partnerships among community volunteers, government agencies, businesses, universities, and other nonprofits.
Here’s a video that I created and narrated to provide a short introduction and explanation of our mission. Most of the technology that we use is embodied in the refinements made of the past 50 years in SCUBA gear. When you watch the video, you’ll see that our survey work is all manual. You have a tablet for securing underwater paper and a pencil to record your findings, a dive light and a 30-meter tape. We’ve tried to find ways to use underwater cameras and video processing software to eliminate or reduce the need for humans but (so far) it’s not practical."
Seaweed can play a huge role in fighting climate change by absorbing carbon emissions, regenerating marine ecosystems, creating biofuel and renewable plastics as well as generating marine protein. Until recently, this centuries old industry has mainly farmed seaweed for food in Asia, with China as the world’s biggest producer of seaweed, accounting for 60% of global volume. But over the past decade, global seaweed production has doubled—with an estimated value of $59.61 billion in 2019—as interest in seaweed as a food source, carbon sink option and renewable product from consumers, farmers, researchers, and business leaders blossoms. The coast of British Columbia, where Druehl has spent his adult life, is a hotspot of seaweed biodiversity and yet the industry here is only just taking off. A seaweed industry could bring jobs to the area, amidst mass layoffs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Could this remote, seaweed-rich corner of the world turn seaweed into climate solutions for the future? Druehl is optimistic: “I think we’re going to pull it off.”
Lifting boats from the water reduces drag and fuel usage, even for older vessels, so Artemis Tech started developing foils and complex control systems for many kinds of new and existing vessels. Turbines mounted on the hydrofoils will generate electricity from the boat’s motion, storing it in batteries to power engines when the wind dies.
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