New seafloor map only 25% done, with 6 years to go
eos.org
eos.org
Hopefully it doesn't experience too much interference from the usual suspects, like with the requirements that GPS maps be offset from reality. Given the large extraterritorial sea claims pushed by the same, it could interfere with a large geographic area.
I see for china some into about random offsets but couldn’t find anything else.
but this information was really a military secret not that long ago. same as cryptography is right now!
which annoys me personally becuase I wish to learn more/better about the mathematics behind information technology and cryptography. but this is considered 'sensitive' understanding so the quantity of people that are ever taught this stuff is tightly controlled; not to say that it's difficult stuff to begin with and any efforts to make it more widespread and accessible are often derailed in education comitees and so on. but I should stop before I get any more paranoid
On top of that, dead-reckoning is disturbed by aerodynamic effects such as wind, as well as drift from the gyro compass itself... a fine-detailed gravity effect map can be used to compensate for both of that, and adding imagery maps and radar/laser distance measuring is even better.
To add even more context... that is the reason why Germany's Chancellor Scholz is refusing to deliver TAURUS long range missiles to Ukraine. TAURUS owes its significant increase in precision over Storm Shadow / SCALP (UK/FR equivalent) to that kind of sensor aids, but the assistance dataset aka the photogrammetry, gravity and height maps of the flight route must be individually created and loaded into the missile as part of the mission preparation. As you can imagine this kind of precision information is stuff that we really don't want to get leaked to Russia so we can't (or don't want to) deliver the systems for programming to Ukraine where it might get stolen/diverted to Russia, so Scholz is afraid that the necessary direct cooperation of German Bundeswehr soldiers with Ukrainian soldiers might be seen as an act of war of Germany by Putin. (Complete horse dung if you ask me, but I can understand where he's coming from)
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/do-you-weigh-more-at-the-equator...
Off from your intended vector by 0.35% when you're moving at 6500 m/s, and you're veering off course by 22 meters every second.
Try looking at China on Google Maps in satellite view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
Their resolution is "all features 100 meters or larger", so better than nothing but not useful for manuevering your submarine.
Having said that, maneuvering is only one problem among many.
But trees can wreck my face too. I'd still want a good contour map if I were to go wandering into the wilderness.
A good map can tell you about the possibilities of the environment, but it's always inferior to looking at it yourself.
Reminds me of the Map Men episode "Why does Russia have the best maps of Britain?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
> The retrofitted vessel was renamed R/V Falkor, after the Luckdragon in the fantasy novel The Neverending Story
They have a highly advanced deep sea research vessel called the Pressure Drop, and another called the Hadal Exploration System.
Do you know who owns Inkfish? Gabe Newell of Valve fame!
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38231626 (“HN: Why Is It So Difficult to Map the Ocean?”)
The Azores and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge work is also kind of interesting. Much larger number areas that are "almost islands" than I thought there were. The old GIS data seems smeared out and makes them look shallow, yet the newer maps show pretty distinct near surface ridges.
Cable-laying is another thing, but only along the lines that connect interesting points on the shore.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)#Gr...
The first two chair-people were... colorful. Leading to some 'colourful activities':
>In 2001, the Peruvian Congress determined that the foundation financed forced sterilizations in that country (1990-1999).
First chairman:
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%8Dichi_Sasakawa
>Ryōichi Sasakawa (笹川 良一, Sasakawa Ryōichi, May 4, 1899, in Minoh City, Osaka – July 18, 1995, in Tokyo)[1] was a Japanese suspected war criminal, businessman, far-right politician, and philanthropist. He was born in Minoh, Osaka. In the 1930s and during the Second World War he was active both in finance and in politics, actively supporting the Japanese war effort including raising his own paramilitary units. He was elected to the Japanese parliament during the war. After Japan's defeat he was imprisoned for a time, accused of war crimes, and then found financial success in various business ventures, including motorboat-racing gambling events (Kyōtei) and ship building. He supported anticommunist activities, including the World Anti-Communist League
Second chair-woman:
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayako_Sono
> Sono is considered to be a conservative. She was considered to be an advisor to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. She has drawn controversy for advocating for a system similar to South Africa's apartheid for Japan's immigrants.[1][2][3] She has also advocated for women to quit their jobs after becoming pregnant.[4]
The third is less colorful (at least his Wikipedia is highly curated), but the son of the first chairman, so who knows....
What are we missing out on because it's not profitable right now?
Fake> I ordered them to build the pyramid. If you revolt I will order them to pillage your village. Have a nice day and please send 20% more goats.
Do people in 2024 really care about the pyramids?
Other issues are cases where the profit to society is clear, but difficult to capture by any specific group (the reason why infrastructure is mostly built by governments), and cases where discoveries happen by chance because somebody was given the chance to "screw around" (for example the person who found the xz vulnerability probably couldn't have justified why he put engineering time into investigating a 0.5 second delay).
Taxes are a traditional approach to this. It's sloppy and imperfect (plenty of my money is spent on stuff I don't value), but I don't know a much better way.
Similarly, it's hard to price things where the negative externalities are diffused among many people. Pollution is a good example of this - the person generating pollution is often not the one suffering the effects of it, and the effects are generally widespread and diffuse (your car makes a thousand people a little bit worse off, not a single person horribly worse off). Taxes on these externalities are also an appropriate tool here.
Where does the data from Oil & Gas companies who prospect for new drill sites come into play?
I know companies like Shearwater are paid for their sea floor data.
Where we don't yet have hyper-accurate bathymetric data there are boats like the USS Jimmy Carter which have lots of tricks and capabilities that we'll never learn about.
Like, of course they do. If there are any unusually-good ocean maps they have, it’s those, at least.
Tapping cables is definitely something that's been done through history, but more of the stories were about things like recovering the remains of enemy test missiles for physical intelligence. Now that that fiber traffic is routinely encrypted anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if more of USS Jimmy Carter's missions are recovering North Korean rockets.
> like is there a big geologic underwater arch somewhere that subs pass under for shits and giggles.
I can't promise there's not, but most naval services have proud traditions of firing captains who are involved in collisions, allisions, and groundings.
There's also more to consider than just hiding. Navies have fleets. A surface fleet can deter anti-submarine warfare activities as well as conduct anti-submarine operations of their own. This both helps submarines to better hide and helps protect them if their stealth is for whatever reason compromised. If you have a surface fleet parked in the middle of nowhere, again it is a dead giveaway that there is something of interest there. Conversely there's no reason your adversary can't sail their surface ships there. If you are going to put your submarines somewhere remote, you want it to be a place where they are reasonably safe from surface assets, like under ice sheets.
There are also the practical concerns that keep other ships from passing through these areas. Remote locations are difficult to get to, difficult to resupply, and far from port facilities which are critical for maintenance and upkeep. If you're 200 miles from port and there's a problem, you can be back in port in a matter of hours. If you're 2000 miles from port it may be a week before you get help. This translates into higher operating costs for your deterrent.
I'm not saying that a sub would never traverse these waters, just that shifting strategy to focus on using remote locations to hide your missile subs has a lot of cons and limited pros.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-cias-earthviewer-was-the...
An NRO history has all early satellite reconnaissance as being under the “TALENT-KEYHOLE” designation:
https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/docs/HOSR/SC-2...
Many geosync orbits trace an asymmetrical 8 on the ground that looks like a keyhole. That's where the name comes from, from programs older than the TK sats.
What was that older than Corona?
"The CORONA satellites were designated KH-1, KH-2, KH-3, KH-4, KH-4A and KH-4B. KH stood for "Key Hole" or "Keyhole" (Code number 1010),[7] with the name being an analogy to the act of spying into a person's room by peering through their door's keyhole"
0. https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/docs/HOSR/SC-2...
1. In 1960, it was broadened to cover all national aerial reconnaissance (to later include SR-71 sourced imagery) and the KEYHOLE compartment was created for satellite intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform... compartment%20was%20created
To my knowledge S-100 is simply an updated “container” for ENC data and is replacing S-57. So it’s not necessarily related to this effort except that the new format may support gridded bathymetry data being encoded?
Although S-101 is the updated ENC standard for S-100 the new S-102 standard will enable the visualisation of processed bathymetric data by mariners, biggest benefits will be more granular no-go areas
Obviously military does not care about that.
> Seabed 2030 is a long-term mapping project attempting to fully chart the seafloor and reveal all features 100 meters or larger by 2030.
There is an area of interest, "Area 3: Indian Ocean: Ninetyeast Ridge" around 30S 87E, which specifically mentions MH370:
https://seabed2030.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AtlanticIn...
Though that is quite a bit (~830 km / ~1250 km from the center of the square around 30S 87E) off to the (north)west of the most recent search proposal from mh370search.com:
https://www.mh370search.com/2024/03/16/mh370-a-new-hope/
edit: Got the distance wrong. Corrected.
The US makes a several orders of magnitude more money from the Statue of Liberty where it is than they would get from its scrap value.
Could it? We can measure the cash flow the Statue of Liberty produces relative to its commodity value. A pristine deep sea certainly has value. But it's difficult to argue that every square inch of it is more valuable than the commodities on and below it. Particularly when you start trading off extraction there against terrestrial mining.
Make the difference.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
It's remarkable how people forget how we all got here.
Because it was gift. It was supported in the US locally by donations, but it was conceived and built in France as a gift to a younger nation.
But if you rephrase it as "Are those resources more valuable just sitting at the bottom of a deep sea instead of mixing them into our bodies and environment?" my reaction is now: Yes
To be clear, I'm not sure if either of those hypotheticals are true, but I have a feeling, as with many things in life is "It's complicated".
Being good stewards of our resources with careful management / regulation is the answer, rather than unfettered exploitation or outright bans.
So, yes, they are better left to their own devices.
It would be nice to document and observe first, rather than barging in to get the riches as fast as possible once again. ( riche in that point being « nodules » it’s a fun resource ! )
It's colonialism and exploitation of a different kind.
I'm not expecting you to single handedly put a stop to it or anything but it's not unreasonable to expect that you can recognize and acknowledge it instead of pretending it doesn't exist and saying that those sort of things only happened a long time ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority
I'm not sure this adds anything to the observation that there's a distinction between this and British empire colonialism.
What's driving our current exploration binge? Land for development and resources for extraction.
Regardless of intent, they share many of the same incentive structures.
That being said, I'm quite surprised by the partner list from the project website. I may be discounting conservation from my analysis.
From that perspective, comparing it to subjugating human populations seems like a non-sequitur, though one I respect.
The good news is that the impact of sea bed mining on the human population of the deep ocean appears negligible! The bad news is that the environmental impact is still quite uncertain, and the lack of resident humans could make advocacy more challenging.
From the Wikipedia article I linked about the ISA:
> The ISA is funded by UNCLOS members and mining contractors and led by Secretary-General Michael Lodge, a British barrister who oversees a 47-member administrative body and has come under criticism for close ties to the mining industry and support for deep sea robotic exploration to develop renewable energy.
Also, I feel compelled to respond to to the comment that it's "incredibly non-invasive," as I'm not sure that's how it actually works out. In theory, we can simply pluck the nodules from the seabed. In practice this requires sending a multi-ton robot vacuum cleaner down to suck up and sift through the top layer of the seafloor, pump the chunks back to the surface for processing, and spit the silt back overboard. Here's a video of how we currently mine shallow-water deposits by hand. (Deep sea nodules are a bit different, they sit on the surface, so less disruption to the seabed is required. Less isn't none though, and surface is where life concentrates.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYAw26nSzBA
In this light I'm actually quite enheartened by the partner list of the Seabed2030 project.
...you've never used a map in a different way? When we draw maps of the galaxy, are we imminently planning on dividing it up?
Sure. But the USGS doesn't publish precise up to date topological maps of every square inch of the United States for the purpose of guiding backpackers with compasses. They do it to divide up political boundaries, delimit resource rights, and guide commercial activity. This goes for just about any other large scale mapping effort (on earth).
Besides, maps are very much about taxation, balistics, and administration. Much more than just ownership.
Just like we've benefitted enormously from "exploiting" land resources.
Not saying things will be perfect, of course. They never are.
More seriously, I'd expect greater resource availability to result in fewer wars over it. That's pretty consistent with human history.
We grew from 50 million hunter gatherers to 8000 millions mostly living longer better lives, and have access to Hacker News.
So for me that's a very strong Yes.
How do we ant colony our way out of this bitch before we all die?
I'll give you my favorite answer. You probably won't like it.
For reasons I don't claim to know, humanity always expect the world to end. It's in all the religions. Christians has expected the Last Judgment any day now for 2000 years.
In this century we don't express that urge in religious term. It manifests in worries that pollution or overpopulation or nuclear war will bring the end of times. I've seen enough of these predictions over the last 50 years to stop worrying too much about the new ones that keep popping up.
Of course non of this proves we won't speed into one of these brick walls. None of us knows the future, and that's certainly a possible one.
Civilizational collapse is real. It has happened many times to flourishing cultures and might happen again. Most cultures never recover*. The difference is that previously there was always another culture that was not pulled into the abyss as well and could pick up the leftovers.
And regular conductors …
the entirety of modern society, good and bad... the computer or phone you're typing this with, your job, etc
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-22/us-claims... ("US Claims Huge Chunk of Seabed Amid Strategic Push for Resources", https://archive.is/9Uyg4 )
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/us-extended-continental-s... ("U.S. Extended Continental Shelf Data")
- "The mission of the U.S. Extended Continental Shelf (ECS) Project is to establish the full extent of the U.S. continental shelf, consistent with international law. "
- "Data collected for the project include bathymetric, subbottom, gravity, magnetic, seismic , and geologic sample data from the U.S. coastal waters to the deep ocean. U.S. ECS project data are in the public domain."
No, it doesn't. (Beyond that part of the Arctic Ocean already generally recognized as US territorial waters.)
“Continental shelf” is not “territorial waters”, it is a whole different legal category. The project to identify the extent of what qualifies under international law as continental shelf beyond the 200nm presumed limit is not about extending territorial waters.