The First Complete Map of the Ocean Floor Is Stirring Controversial Waters
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
For one its cost. A single survey ship (their rates are cheap now due to low oil prices), cost about USD30000 a day, A single ROV (>5k a day), ROV crew, divers, backup ROV(yes there needs to be 2 ROV's) why? one needs to recover the other in deepwater, ships crew, the survey crew etc... all usually comes to about 50k-70k a day in cost (and this is being really conservative). I am not including cost of bunkering (refueling the ship), crew transport to location, rotations, food, water, waste disposal etc and the list goes on. If you take USD100000 a day at an average of 60miles a day in length and probably a mile width, USD18.5 mil would probably not cover much of a distance. Dont forget the cost of processors to process the multibeam data (yes multibeam provides higher resolution because it collects more data points), the mappers-charters, engineers etc...etc. Just the cost alone is enough to put most people off. There is a reason why MH370 couldnt be found, and the cost was enormous that they had to call of the search.
Thanks!
This is similar to how OpenStreetMap uses GPS to gather mapping info from normal people making normal trips. Granted a lot of people go out of their way to gather extra data, but if everyone contributed a GPS track of every journey that would not be necessary.
Same thing, if every GA plane had a GPS and downward facing camera we could gather detailed imagery from much of the world.
TL;DR; Don't charter mapping expeditions, instead add automated mapping gear to vehicles that are already going places.
https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch1en/appl1en/mariti...
Immense swaths of the sea just aren't visited.
>You could pay them to deviate from their optimal course in a systematic way so as to cover more ocean with each voyage.
The financial pressure for punctual shipments is possibly far too great to consider route deviations, especially if they mean longer times at sea.
Seabed 2030 will create a series of programmatic guidelines to be submitted
to national and international funding agencies, with the goal to promote
funding opportunities that will support and share the Seabed 2030 vision.
There's an information note [2] which describes in brief how the $18.5M will be spent:
The funding will cover funding of the Director and some personnel at the five
centers, with some travel and meeting costs. It would not cover any actual
survey costs.
[2] https://seabed2030.gebco.net/documents/information_note_06Ju...
You'd think with "drone technology" you could just send these things out there and have it surface and beam back images by satellite. Sphere designs. Haha just a ball that sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
What about sea floor changes how long would these maps be valid for? Anyway that's crazy.
Won't be deploying my gold-finding crabs anytime soon.
Specialized vessels (e.g. heavy crane ships, pipelay) can cost 250k-500k per day. A smaller survey vessel will obviously be much cheaper, but there's crew to pay, operating costs, specialized labor costs (ROV engineers, scientists), logistics, fuel, etc. It all adds up.
>You'd think with "drone technology" you could just send these things out there
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that aren't tethered to a ship are in wide use. However, you still need a ship to deploy, maintain, etc.
Here's an article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025322714...
In case you think that's rather a lot, remember that the modal barrister may get paid a lot less: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/richard-bentwood/legal-aid-r...
And it's certainly small beer compared to CEOs, footballers or top TV celebrities.
I had my part of this also (in a local scale) and is not an easy task. When the climate is suboptimal you need to fight against your desire to throw up constantly; at the same time that manipulating very fragile and expensive material in an always moving and often slippery platform.
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/01/14/paul-glasziou-and-iain-c...
The Spanish Oceanographic Institute own five ships and a ROV for example, with labs and all the stuff http://www.ieo.es/flota
For long expeditions (antartida) larger ships are shared directly with the army.
I think if your campaign is to map the ocean floor you can safely say the expected duration is pretty long.
Having a ship in a port for eight months is also expensive and moving a big ship eats a lot of gaz, so for coastal areas... "We're gonna need a smaller boat".
Edit: Looks like they're aiming for ~100m resolution. They specifically mention the search for Malaysia Flight MH370 as an example for the need for adequate ocean floor mapping.
https://seabed2030.gebco.net/documents/seabed_2030_roadmap_v...
I'd be willing to wager we have some under water assets that we don't necessarily want to be discovered.
Secondly most of the countries involved in this are US allies, and in fact US scientific institutions play an essential role in it. Why wouldn't they? This sort of thing is what us marine scientific research organisations exist for.
Thirdly US mining companies could stand to make billions off the back of this sort of data. Why pass that up, or drive such benefits abroad?
Finally, imposing such a ban would be tantamount to the US declaring unilateral sovereignty over all of the Earth's oceans and their contents. I know the current administration doesn't seem too bothered about snubbing it's closes allies, but even if the US wanted to do this, they couldn't. They don't have anywhere close to the assets to monitor and interdict all the Earth's oceans. They certainly don't have the capacity to do that and also carry out the security and defence missions their naval and air assets are already assigned to.
So what part of their current security commitments do you think the US would be willing to give up to try and enforce such a ban? Do you think alienating all their allies would make it easier or harder to carry out those existing commitments?
If wishes were fishes....
And while that's a very long sentence, this is just a "public" version of the same.
And I would assume they would protect those assets against other submersible devices
Historically, the country which claimed international jurisdiction over the sea was the UK.
Some kind of secret base on the abyssal plain?
The cost for such a thing would be astronomical, with no appreciable benefit.
They don't own the oceans.
Iraq and Afghanistan, for starters. If the US doesn't allow something and you do it anyway, you tend to come up with a nasty case of Dead.
Arrogance or not the force that the US government can exert anywhere in the world at any time they want is real.
roughly 500-2000m
Global coverage at 500-2000m resolution from satellite gravitometers represents a very cost effective middle ground between that huge effort and what is currently available, which is a patchwork of soundings that has gaps 10s to 100s of km thoughout much of the ocean. (See Fig 2 of [1]).
[1] Becker at al. (2009) http://topex.ucsd.edu/sandwell/publications/124_MG_Becker.pd...
I wouldn't call that particularly well-known.
That day, he took me to the top. He opened a steel door, and set up a 6' wooden ladder. He climbed up the ladder, and there was a 1' x 1' square that you could fit your head through. He stuck his head through, and said it wasn't that great. I knew he was playing it down, for my sake.
I asked him one more time if I could climb up and look.
He climbed down, picked me up, and he climbed the ladder, and put my head through the hole. The hole was unfinished, and it was dirty inside the space. I remember seeing a gum wrapper, and that fine construction dirt up there. Looking back it was probably Sheetrock dust.
I vaguely remember I could see the city, but the glass, or plexiglass, was dirty. It was neat though. The kids at school didn't believe me. He didn't want me to climb in, but I asked.
The best part of that day was being with my dad. We ate lunch, and my dad said, 'Well at least your mom took the wrapper off the cheese today.' (This was the late 60's, or 70's, and my mom hated being a homemaker.)
At worst there's a lot of 'low-quality' rambling, but usually I then tag the user as 'shitty poster' (my approach to categorization can be a bit odd) and I'll downvote the worst of the comments when I see them.
Could it be that after a certain number of heavily downvoted comments it causes an automatic shadowban? Or maybe some deleted or edited comments that were reason to do so?
If that's what HN is, congratulations: You just helped make it that way a little bit more.
That is how deep.
Contrails will help you find the jet, but you should be able to see it on a clear day.
Alternatively, if you've ever flown across the country, mid-flight, look down.
The San Francisco, a nuclear attack submarine, operating at flank speed at a depth of 525 feet, collided with an underwater mountain. Extensive damage, 98 crew injured, one dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)#Co...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_and_Le_Triomphant...
>The reason we have no comprehensive map is dumbfoundingly simple, considering that we’ve traversed and charted our solar system: “It’s not so easy to map the ocean, because the water is in the way,” says Jakobsson.
Honestly, I struggle to find any reasoning on why GPS is shared with the world beyond "Korean Air Lines 007 crashed, so Pres. Reagan made GPS free to (save the world|gain political capital). Later we removed the civilian precision restriction because that's cheaper than maintaining it", which I find a bit weak. Maybe somebody can enlighten me
The idea of government is that it lets us do things for the collective good what we would not do for ourselves individually. The US government, for all its faults, does sometimes follow that idea. It's not much different from maintaining the highway system. True, it covers the world, not just the US, but the nature of satellite navigation means that it wouldn't be any cheaper or easier to restrict the system to only work in the US, so why bother?
It slowed the need for other countries to put their own up.
The satellites were not a secret
Their encryption scheme was probably already cracked, so might as well open it anyways.
This is also why the US said they’d shoot down the EU system unless the EU would construct it in a way that the US could easily jam it. Now it has that backdoor in it. We shouldn’t have let them extort us like that.
Zero, that the militaries care about. Subs and other military craft have been mapping, they won't share.
How many secret villain lairs in the deep?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_...
Seafloor features will likely last millennia.
Iirc the Chinese are a partner in Galileo (the European program).
This is a good thing, hardware will rapidly appear that supports 2 or more of them meaning that either all the partners would simultaneously have to agree to disable theirs or (more unlikely) someone was shooting down the satellites which since that would realistically only happen during a global conflict means I'd have bigger things to worry about at the time.
Has been out for years. E.g. iPhone 4S supported GPS and GLONASS.
Now we have a system where the chinese stopped being a partner, and the US forced us to add a backdoor and reduce the quality. I’m not sure I can see anything good in this.
Jamming is a local action, the US will be able to jzm Gallileo like we are able to jam GPS - again locally.
Frequencies can be switched, if we only relied on the fact that they are the same then the US could switch theirs (and have equipment which is compatible if course) and there goes our security.
I work in security and have worked for 12 years for a huge provider of telecom systems and hinestly do not see any real advantages to match the frequencies.
Also, if we had the same frequency, WE could not jam GPS if we wanted to.
Rare earth mines on land are nowhere near running out.
One could even make an argument that time and money could be better spent researching a better recycling process for e-trash than trying to mine the ocean floor.
So people are worried that a scientific expedition that vastly increases our knowledge of our world is controversial because it will make mining easier/more profitable?!?
Per the quote above that it will be less damaging than the current mining we do on land. We should be doing everything to make this type of deep ocean mining more economical. In addition, it should be easier to enforce environmental regulations on deep ocean mining as the mining operations will be international waters and susceptible to visits by various navies and interested parties on boats. This would also help with a lot of the problems we have with land mining (opacity to the outside world, conflict materials, human rights abuses, displacement of existing populations due to mine locations).
This opposition just seems very illogical.
> it should be easier to enforce environmental regulations on deep ocean mining as the mining operations will be international waters
Precisely which regulations are you talking about, and who do you imagine enforcing them? The International Seabed Authority, of which the US is not a member state, and whose Law of the Sea Convention they have repeatedly declined to ratify? Good luck with that.
Violators must tow such disasters outside of said environment before returning regular exploitative operations.
Thank you,
The Management
That's a fact-free assertion by a person providing PR. I should be surprised people here are gullible enough to take that at face value, but obviously not.