Tag: oceanography

Saildrones

Saildrone’s investors are taking a longer view, and that a global database of the oceans will benefit the company’s future more than chasing whatever business it can book today. “The most important asset is the data, and getting data that no one else can accumulate”. Still, Jenkins has been paired with Chief Operating Officer Sebastien de Halleux, who has a long track record of turning startups into big businesses. It’s de Halleux who convinced Jenkins that money could be made from understanding the weather. “Sebastien will keep it tethered, while Richard does his thing as a creative genius”. Saildrone plans to sell data to all comers, building a software platform that almost anyone can tap, and to go after commercial work, particularly with fisheries and logistics companies. Later this year, possibly by August, they plan to revive the goal of replicating Magellan’s voyage with a couple of saildrones. In order to make the circumnavigation official with the World Sailing Speed Record Council, the drones must start out in the Northern Hemisphere, cross every longitude line, and cross the equator twice. “We’ll fulfill all of our contracts first, and as soon as there is a boat available, we’ll set them off. It’s all about priorities, right?”

2023-03-11: Semi-autonomous ocean mapping

The Saildrone SD 1200 uncrewed surface vessel has successfully surveyed more than 45k km2 of previously unmapped ocean floor around the Aleutian Islands in Alaska and a region off the Californian coast. An Environmental Sample Processor went along for the trip too – gathering environmental DNA.

40 shipwrecks

The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project wasn’t looking for shipwrecks. Its brief is to survey the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea for data about the rise water levels after the last Ice Age 20 ka ago. To accomplish this aim, marine archaeologists have been scanning the seabed using cutting edge Remotely Operated Vehicles that can detect land surfaces underneath what is now the Black Sea but in prehistory were on dry land. They’ve also taken core samples, laser scanned and filmed the sea bed both in video and with high resolution 3D photogrammetry. A felicitous but entirely unplanned side-effect of this exceptionally thorough geophysical survey is the discovery of more than 40 historic shipwrecks, including ancient Byzantine, medieval and Ottoman ships. Some of them may even be the first of their kind ever found, previously known only from documentary sources. Such a large, varied group of shipwrecks from different periods will give archaeologists a whole new understanding of trade and maritime links between towns on the coast of the Black Sea.

this is unprecedented, and very awesome

RIP Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 ma old.

For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It was 2200km long, with 2900 individual reefs and 1050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored 1625 species of fish, 3000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220 species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.

2022-08-21: Various coral startups are tackling this problem. I haven’t been able to find a number in centimeters / year for this claim to make it comparable.

Unlike traditional projects, Coral Vita grows their corals on land, and they do this for a few key reasons. Land-based coral farming basically allows us to grow more diverse and resilient corals more affordably and at scale. So corals have a natural ability to adapt to changing conditions, but things are deteriorating in the ocean so quickly— largely due to climate change— that they can’t keep up. So what we’re doing is acclimating the corals. By raising and lowering the temperature of the water, the corals undergo stress. We basically take them to the gym. And in turn harden, which boosts their ability to survive the planet’s warming oceans. Corals also have an ability to make babies, it’s known as coral spawning. So when it comes time for coral spawning, we can then put those already more resilient corals together so that their babies are also gonna be more resilient. This process is called ‘assisted evolution.’ They can also dramatically speed up a coral’s growth rate. The method we rely on to accelerate coral growth rates is known as ‘microfragmenting,’ which is an open-source method that basically allows us to grow corals 50x faster.

2022-10-07: Another huge claim on coral growth. Has anyone combined these techniques?

In nature, coral grows 0.5cm per year through the accretion of minerals dissolved in seawater, which form a thick layer of substrate. But on electrically charged reefs, the electric current takes on some of the heavy lifting needed to deposit essential calcium carbonate on the reef. The coating could thicken at a rate of 5cm per year — 10x faster than coral grows naturally — for as long as a current was flowing through it.

2023-04-07: There’s also Stony coral tissue loss disease to deal with

A bacterial probiotic treatment effectively stopped or slowed SCTLD in 66% of tested infected coral fragments. It also prevented the infection from spreading in all transmission experiments.

Fishing Watch

see also: Overview Effect

For now, Global Fishing Watch only displays ship activity from the previous 2 years, but Oceana aims to eventually incorporate more recent data that will allow authorities to act quickly.

“The plan is that we will build out a public release version that will have near-real-time data, Then you’ll actually be able to see someone out there fishing within hours to days.”

Oceana has already used the system to monitor boats that have already been tagged for illegal fishing, though it still doesn’t pick up boats that haven’t registered with the automatic identification system, as well as vessels that go dark before reaching restricted waters. But the hope is that over time, Global Fishing Watch will serve as an important check to encourage fishers to stay within the law.

Ultra Large Container Vessels

The Ultra Large Container Vessels (ULCV) will take over shipping routes between Asia and Europe, as smaller containerships are no longer seen as competitive when it comes to unit costs. The Triple-E container ship is 2x as long as the Titanic, 5x longer than an Airbus 380. Each contains as much steel as 8 Eiffel Towers and has a capacity of 18K TEU. Those containers would fill more than 30 trains, each 1.6 km long and stacked 2 containers high. Inside those containers, you could fit 36K cars or 863M tins of baked beans.

2021-06-17: The largest container Vessel is 400m long with a capacity of 24K TEU.

Ocean vs Atmosphere Climate

Circulation of the ocean plays an equally important role in regulating the earth’s climate as the atmosphere. Major cooling of Earth and continental ice build-up in the Northern Hemisphere 2.7M years ago coincided with a shift in the circulation of the ocean – which pulls in heat and CO2 in the Atlantic and moves them through the deep ocean from north to south until it’s released in the Pacific. The ocean conveyor system changed at the same time as a major expansion in the volume of the glaciers in the northern hemisphere as well as a substantial fall in sea levels. It was the Antarctic ice that cut off heat exchange at the ocean’s surface and forced it into deep water. This caused global climate change at that time, not CO2 in the atmosphere.