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WET & HOT NEWS ! > Marine Sciences
Marine Laboratories, techniques and News Research.The S.S. World Trade Center Sets Sail
The 29 Jul. 2010 at 07:34Marine Sciences
By David W. Dunlap and Fred R. Conrad - The New York Times
Whatever the antique vessel was, and whenever in the 18th century it arrived on the Lower Manhattan waterfront, one thing can be said almost certainly: Its journey in was easier than its journey out.
The vessel was discovered by workers on July 13, about 20 to 30 feet below street level, during the excavation of a site bounded by West, Washington, Liberty and Cedar Streets.
This area — which had not been disturbed during the construction of the original World Trade Center — will one day house the vehicle ramps leading to the network of roadways, loading areas and parking spaces under the new World Trade Center.
The wood-hulled ship was an object of instant archaeological interest and popular speculation. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey worked around it as much as possible while keeping the excavation on track.
But the time for salvaging and removing the vessel finally arrived on Monday. Among those on site for the delicate operation were the archaeologists A. Michael Pappalardo, Diane Dallal and Molly McDonald of AKRF, the consulting firm working for the Port Authority; Warren Riess of the Darling Marine Center of the University of Maine, who worked on the last vessel unearthed in Lower Manhattan in 1982; and Nicole Doub, the head conservator of the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Library in St. Leonard, to which the remnants of the ship are bound — piece by piece.At Woods Hole, conquering the deep ocean
The 17 Jul. 2010 at 16:58Marine Sciences
By Daniel Terdiman - Cnet News
Although crews have managed to shut off--for now, at least--the flood of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, it is virtually certain that ongoing cleanup work will keep the concept of deep-sea science in the public's eye for some time.
That could be good news for the scientists and researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) here, one of the world's leading repositories of across-the-board ocean expertise, and the developers of a stunning collection of hardware and software tools designed to probe the countless mysteries of the deep.
I've come here as part of Road Trip 2010, and have been promised a close-up view of Nereus, one of the most exciting developments in underwater research in years. Nereus is a new style tool: a hybrid remotely-operated vehicle, meaning that it is the rare beast that can be used for pre-programmed, untethered research missions, or those in which it is controlled from the surface via a very thin, fiber cable that can reach 25 miles.
This is one of the only vessels on the planet capable of reaching the oceans' deepest locations, and it can do so while sending back high-fidelity data that could vastly broaden our understanding of what goes on below. Yet, despite the promise of Nereus and the other vehicles in the WHOI fleet, as well as that of other institutions, there is little doubt that deep-ocean research has, until recently, barely registered on the national consciousness.
After all, just before the recent celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first--and only--manned mission to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on Earth, at 35,800 feet, Don Walsh, one of the two men who had taken that trip, told CNET News, "We were happy to be the first, but we didn't expect to be the last."
To talk to me about Nereus, I've come to see Andy Bowen, the director of WHOI's national deep submergence facility.
Until now, Bowen said, most of the world's deep ocean exploration energies has gone into probing at 6,000 meters below the surface or above. That's because, he said, 98 percent of the world's seafloor is above that level. The remaining 2 percent has largely been inaccessible. "We tend to look in the the easy places first and the hard places last," he said.
The history of deep-sea submersibles has been about two kinds of vessels: Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which are designed to explore wide areas of the deep, mapping as they go and providing scientists with broad looks at the ocean floor; and remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs), which are tethered to a surface ship and which transmit data--photos, video and more--back over some kind of cable.
But Bowen explained that as scientists probe deeper and deeper, the costs of the exploration has traditionally grown, given the need for more sophisticated, and rugged equipment.Ancient ship replica helps fund Java dig
The 04 Jul. 2010 at 06:01Marine Sciences
From The Japan Times
The Indonesian government and a Japanese academic group have recently reconstructed an ancient ship to raise money for an archaeological study on historic ruins in and around Java.
According to the Japan Majapahit Association, the ship has been making port calls in Asian countries since late last month, asking for financial and technical support to excavate the ruins of the Majapahit kingdom, which existed in the area from the 13th to the 16th century.
The ship was built in Madura, part of Indonesia's Java Province, and left there on June 27 for a six-month, 9,000-km journey, before heading back to Jakarta.
It will reach Japan around the middle of July, making its first stop in Kudaka Island, Okinawa Prefecture. The island served as a trading post of the Ryukyu kingdom, which used to govern Okinawa.
The ship will then sail to Naha. The crew will pay Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima a courtesy call before continuing on their journey to Kagoshima, Yokohama, Tokyo and Fukuoka.
The 20-meter ship was reconstructed based on an ancient painting that was on a relief in Java's Borobudur ruins dating back to the eighth century. It is made entirely of wood using materials such as teak and bamboo, and does not use a single nail, according to the group.
The majority of the 15-person crew is Indonesian. Yoshiyuki Yamamoto, a Japanese explorer who canoed across the Indian Ocean, is on board as a project leader.Ancient Shipwreck to Aid Ghostly Neutrino Search
The 11 May. 2010 at 04:47Marine Sciences
By Jennifer Ouellette - Discovery News
You wouldn't think a sunken ship from 2000 years ago could hold the key to the success of a neutrino detection experiment, except perhaps in a Hollywood movie, or a NOVA special on Jacques Cousteau. But sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
Scientists with the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), a neutrino observatory buried under the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, hit the mother load when archaeologists discovered a Spanish ship off the coast of Sardinia, filled with lead that dates back two millennia.
Yes, lead. Really, really old lead. That might not seem very exciting to you, but for CUORE scientists, it's a godsend. They use lead (also copper) as a shielding material for their neutrino detection materials. See, neutrinos -- dubbed "ghost particles" because they so rarely interact with everything (billions course through you every second) -- are extremely difficult to detect, in part because their signals can be obscured by things like cosmic rays, and the natural radioactivity in rocks, for example.CUORE is looking for an even rarer event, known as neutrinoless double-beta decay. Among other things, such an observation would provide a handy means of directly calculating the mass of a neutrino (which is very, very small -- so small that for decades physicists believed neutrinos had no mass).
Alas, there are also trace amounts of radioactivity in the very materials that are supposed to shield the experiments from interference -- the radioactive isotope lead-210, in the case of contemporary lead ingots. But if you have lead that is 2000 years old, that radioactive isotope has pretty much disappeared.
Unfortunately, lead that old is quite a rare find. US scientists working on the IGEX experiment lucked out a few years ago when they snagged from 450-year-old lead from a sunken Spanish galleon.Korea to Develop Mobile Underwater Robots
The 23 Apr. 2010 at 06:34Marine Sciences
By Kim Tae-gyu - Korea Times
Korea is striving to develop versatile aquatic robots, which can swim as well as crawl on the seabed at a depth of 6 kilometers by 2016. The Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs said Monday that the Seoul administration will channel 20 billion won over the next five years to create the underwater vehicles.
"It must be able to swim at a speed of 18 meters per minute and walk 30 meters per minute to explore the seabed to search for organisms or minerals," the ministry's director Joo Hyun-jong said.
"On the strength of its precision camera and acoustic facilities, the robot will also be able to find sunken ships that divers cannot easily access to."
The development of a six-paddle locomotive machine has drawn people's attention here since they could have helped following the sinking of the Navy frigate Cheonan in the West Sea late last month. Dozens of sailors died in the tragedy and eight are still missing. Bereaved families of the dead crew members believe that some of them might have been rescued alive had there been a faster search.
Due to strong tidal currents and bad visibility in the West Sea, the search and rescue of the sunken vessel took several days. The ministry believes that such a six-legged drone would be ideal to work under such circumstances.
"The development of walking deep-sea robots was proposed a couple of years ago before the Cheonan disaster as demonstrated by the modest 1 billion won earmarked for the project earlier this year," Joo said.Roman ingots to shield particle detector
The 16 Apr. 2010 at 03:24Marine Sciences
By Nicola Nosengo - Nature News
Around four tonnes of ancient Roman lead was yesterday transferred from a museum on the Italian island of Sardinia to the country's national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso on the mainland.
Once destined to become water pipes, coins or ammunition for Roman soldiers' slingshots, the metal will instead form part of a cutting-edge experiment to nail down the mass of neutrinos.
The 120 lead ingots, each weighing about 33 kilograms, come from a larger load recovered 20 years ago from a Roman shipwreck, the remains of a vessel that sank between 80 B.C. and 50 B.C. off the coast of Sardinia. As a testimony to the extent of ancient Rome's manufacturing and trading capacities, the ingots are of great value to archaeologists, who have been preserving and studying them at the National Archaeological Museum in Cagliari, southern Sardinia.
What makes the ingots equally valuable to physicists is the fact that over the past 2,000 years their lead has almost completely lost its natural radioactivity. It is therefore the perfect material with which to shield the CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) detector, which Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) is building at the Gran Sasso laboratory.
CUORE, which will begin operations next year, will investigate neutrinos: fundamental particles with no electronic charge and long thought to have no mass. Researchers have confirmed that neutrinos do have a mass, but have been unable to pin down a figure for it.
The aim is to use the detector to try to observe a theoretical atomic event called neutrinoless double-beta decay — a radioactive process whereby an atomic nucleus releases two electrons and no neutrinos. 'Standard' double-beta decay is accompanied by the release of two neutrinos.
By observing this predicted but so far unseen event, physicists hope to estimate the neutrino's mass and to establish whether neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, are different particles. Some believe the two to be one and the same.
CUORE scientists will wait for neutrinoless double-beta decay to happen in a 750-kilogram cube of tellurium dioxide placed under 1,400 metres of rock at the Gran Sasso laboratory. But to successfully observe this rare event, they will need to shield their experiment from external radioactivity.Marine Science in Chile Shaken
The 28 Mar. 2010 at 09:01Marine Sciences
By Lisa Levin - NOAA
On Feb 27, I went down to my cabin to nap before a load of core samples arrived on deck. It was after 3 am. and a long stretch of work remained. As I headed down all was well. When I came back up 45 min. later central Chile had just experienced an 8.8 magnitude earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded.
Over the next few days news slowly arrived over our frustratingly slow shipboard email system. My concern was for the people of Chile, but also for the many friends I had made in 1998 during my time on sabbatical spent at the University of Concepcion and the University marine lab in Dichato. The quake epicenter was only 70 miles from Concepcion.
As communications resumed, I heard directly from some friends and indirectly about others. Most of the marine scientists I knew seemed alive and unhurt. The same was not true for marine science itself in Central Chile. Strangely enough the tsunamis resulting from the quakes and aftershocks did the most damage.
The wonderful marine laboratory at Dichato, where I had worked for one summer and returned to teach for part of another, was completely destroyed by a series of 3 tidal waves. These arrived 30 minutes apart, the first 2 hours after the initial quake. The loss of instrumentation, lab equipment, computers, samples and countless hours spent generating data is catastrophic and heartbreaking.
Many of the top marine researchers at the University of Concepcion made this laboratory their base of operations. Only the side walls remain, most of the contents and parts of the roof are gone. The Kay Kay, the University’s 18m research vessel was left high and dry nearly one kilometer inland. Although this ship could have been salvaged, vandals have apparently removed all of its instruments.Archaeological Potential for Shipwrecks
The 10 Mar. 2010 at 05:18Marine SciencesFrom Directions Magazine
The “AMAP2 - Characterising the Potential for Wrecks” project (AMAP2), commissioned in October 2009, is a collaborative project between SeaZone and the University of Southampton (UoS) which seeks to improve the management of the marine historic environment through the interoperability of reference and archaeological data for marine spatial planning.
The aim of the AMAP2 project is to study relationships between the survival of shipwrecks and the natural environment. The results will be used to develop a characterisation of areas of maritime archaeological potential (AMAP) based on the environmental parameters affecting the survival of wrecks in seabed sediments, thus providing the basis for a more justified assessment of potential for unrecorded wrecks.
Following the success of the AMAP1 pilot project in 2008, the AMAP2 project seeks to further the monitoring, mitigation and management of the marine environment for offshore industries such as renewable energy and marine aggregates by facilitating the assessment of potential threats to archaeological assets. This will be achieved by:
(1) comparing and unifying wreck data acquired by the UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) and held at English Heritage’s National Monument Record (NMR);
(2) developing interoperability between the wreck data published in SeaZone HydroSpatial and historical data available from the NMR, thereby enhancing the usefulness and accessibility of both datasets; and
(3) analysing the statistical relationships between maritime archaeological data and the environment.
Improving the understanding of the relationships between wrecks and their environment, coupled with the results of seabed modelling undertaken by UoS, will provide a firm basis for interpreting the variables which affect the potential for wrecks to survive in different seabed conditions.Shipworm threatens archaeological treasures
The 12 Jan. 2010 at 10:17Marine Sciences
From Physorg.com
The dreaded shipworm is moving into the Baltic Sea, threatening artefacts of the area's cultural heritage. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, suspect that the unfortunate spread is due to climate change, and are currently involved in an EU project to determine which archaeological remains are at risk.The shipworm is capable of completely destroying large maritime archaeological finds in only 10 years, and while it has avoided the Baltic Sea in the past, since it does not do well in low salinity water, it can now be spotted along both the Danish and German Baltic Sea coasts.
The shipworm has for example attacked shipwrecks from the 1300s off the coast of Germany, and we are also starting to see its presence along the Swedish coast, for example at the Ribersborg cold bath house in Malmö,' says Christin Appelqvist, doctoral student at the Department of Marine Ecology, University of Gothenburg.
Appelqvist and her colleagues believe that the development may be due to climate change. In short, the increased water temperature may help the shipworms to become adapted to lower salinity. The group is part of the EU project WreckProtect, a cooperative effort to assess which archaeological treasures are at risk. The project includes researchers from Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, as well as experts from France and Germany.The first museum under the sea to open at Silba
The 06 Oct. 2009 at 19:24Marine Sciences
From Croatian Times
The first museum under the sea in Croatia will open in Pocukmarak Bay off the shore of little Silba Island near Zadar.
Pocukmarak Bay is an area where a team of young experts led by Professor Zdenko Brusic from Zadar University has found a sarcophagus that may be 1,500 years old.
They discovered the stone sarcophagus and two covers last autumn. The sarcophagus is the first indication of a Roman presence on the island. But considering the specific details on the covers, it is assumed they could also date back to late antiquity (fourth to sixth centuries AD).
The daily Slobodna Dalmacija has reported the team has started a second phase of research. They are planning to prepare a location for the museum under the sea that will be available to all who can swim.
The area is easily accessible since the water there is only three meters deep and there is no need for diving equipment.
Zadar archaeologists are planning to clean the sarcophagus and to mark its location in order to make it available to all swimmers who want to see it.