The idea of it was actually conjured up on a busy dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a 24 year old truck driver, Malcolm McLean from Fayetteville, North Carolina.  Here’s the story of one of the most significant inventions of the modern world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo of an undersea cable in cyprus.

Have you ever wondered where the cables go that connect your computer to web sites overseas? Well if you live in the USA and are visiting a website in Asia then the connection travels directly under gCaptain HQ in Morro Bay California on it’s way across the Southern Cross Cable. But if you live elsewhere then you need only to consult TeleGeography’s free interactive submarine cable map. The chart is based on authoritative Global Bandwidth research, and depicts active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations. Selecting a cable route on the map provides access to data about the cable, including the cable’s name, ready-for-service (RFS) date, length, owners, website, and landing points. Selecting a landing point provides a list of all submarine cables landing at that station.

Cables shown include international and US domestic submarine cables with a maximum upgradeable capacity of at least 5 Gbps. Cable routes are stylized to improve readability, and do not reflect the physical cable location. Similarly, cable landing stations do not show the precise coordinates of the building, and are meant to serve as a general guide to where a cable system lands.

While most charts will show the location of subsea cables, they often don’t differentiate between regular telephone lines and massive, high dollar, fiber-optic connections. So be sure to consult the map before anchoring you ship near a subsea cable or risk shutting down the internet of an entire continent. No seriously!

There are over seventeen million shipping containers in the world. Have you ever wondered where they go when their time is up? There are several amazing ways one can utilize these steel structures at the end of their voyaging life. The abundance and relative cheapness (some sell for as little as $900) of containers during the last decade has made them attractive to architects, artists and designers worldwide.

1. Build a house

This shipping container house was constructed in San Antonio for use as a summer house, entertainment and guest quarters in an artist community. The owner selected this container specifically for its stunning blue color. By Poteet Architects

Shipping containers built into 1000 units in Amsterdam, offering students an affordable alternative in a tough real estate market. If this was created in New York City, students would be lining up to rent a "box". By TempoHousing

What is more appropiate as an office space for a logistics company than a container office..? It's something to think about. By Clive Wilkinson Architects

Simple and efficient. By Clive Wilkinson Architects

This out of the ordinary swimming pool is called The Badeschiff, created from old cargo containers and is floating on the river Spree in Berlin.

3. Portable business

This little coffee shop brings a whole new meaning to coffee on the go!

Container Bar/Restaurant

This is a traveling eco-exhibit and restaurant conceived by artist Joost Bakker, and it aims to be as environmentally friendly as possible, made from shipping containers and straw bales. It even grows some of its own food on the rooftop. This restaurant stays true to the spirit of it's containers by traveling from city to city all around the world.

 4. Playgrounds

This Container Treehouse creation is still in the works in Stuttgart, Germany.

Children's Activity Center, Phooey Architects Australia

5. Observatory for a Panoramic View

Korean designers Keehyun Ahn & Minsoo Lee have designed a public observatory out of recycled shipping containers.

Lauga is originally from Iceland, and is a Sales and Marketing Executive for MTS Logistics. Lauga has experience as a Sales Manager for a large fitness corporation in Oslo, Norway before she moved to New York in 2009 to pursue a Business Management degree at Berkeley.

The engineers at Astrium, pioneers in Earth observation and geo-information services, clearly have an eye for natural beauty.  While serving clients in the defense, oil and mining, mapping, agriculture, infrastructure, and emergency response sectors, they have managed to capture some of the most unique and beautiful images of earth ever seen via their own constellation of high tech satellites.

Here’s a sampling of some of their incredible work, to see more, click HERE.

Mackenzie River, Canada, 2005, via SPOT 5 satellite, (c) CNES 2003

Bazaruto Archipelago, Mozambique, (c) DEIMOS IMAGING 2011

Korea Bay, North Korea, via the SPOT 5 satellite, image (c) CNES 2005

SPOT 5 Satellite Image – Agger Tange, Denmark, (c) CNES 2002

NASA image by Robert Simmon, using ALI data from the EO-1 Team

A new island is forming in the Red Sea. About 60 kilometers (40 miles) from the coast of Yemen, an undersea eruption began in mid-December 2011. Local fishermen reported an eruption near the island of Saba, while satellites captured a white plume rising from the sea, and a pulse of sulfor dioxide. The activity was located on the northern edge of the Zubair Islands. On December 23, high-resolution satellite imagery revealed details of the eruption. More recent video from a Yemeni Navy helicopter showed violent explosions, typical of shallow submarine eruptions.

This new satellite image, acquired January 7, 2012, suggests that the eruption has risen nearly completely above water. A plume of steam, other volcanic gases, and ash spews from a distinct cone. The land surrounding the vent has grown, and is now about 530 by 710 meters (1,700 by 2,300 feet) across. Once above water, past eruptions in the Zubair Islands were primarily effusive, with relatively runny lava forming thin lava flows. In contrast to the fragmented rock that forms when lava interacts directly with water, lava that solidifies on land is tough, so this new island is likely to stick around.

This natural-color image was acquired by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite.

A merchant ship passes by Haycock Island in the southern Red Sea, image (c) Robert Almeida Photography

Ragged Island, a volcanic island in the Zubair Island chain in the southern Red Sea, image (c) Robert Almeida Photography

RV Southern Surveyor, image courtesy Nautilus Minerals

(University of Sydney)  In the remote waters of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth, scientists have just discovered two sunken islands, almost the size of Tasmania, which were once part of the supercontinent Gondwana.

“The data collected on the voyage could significantly change our understanding of the way in which India, Australia and Antarctica broke off from Gondwana,” said Dr Joanne Whittaker, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences.

Researchers from the University of Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Tasmania led an international team of scientists on the voyage to map the seafloor of the Perth Abyssal Plain. The expedition returned to Perth last week after a three-week cruise.

Traveling on the CSIRO vessel Southern Surveyor the scientists discovered the islands through detailed seafloor mapping and by dredging rock samples from the steep slopes of the two islands, now in water depths of over 1.5km.

“The sunken islands charted during the expedition have flat tops, which indicates they were once at sea level before being gradually submerged,” said Dr Whittaker.

Rocks from the abyss more than 1.5 km below the surface, image courtesy University of Sydney

Collecting rocks from the abyss more than 1.5km below the surface was not easy, but the geologists managed to retrieve hundreds of kilograms and unexpectedly found rocks that showed the islands had not always been underwater.

The University of Sydney’s Dr Simon Williams, the chief scientist on the expedition said: “We expected to see common oceanic rocks such as basalt in the dredge, but were surprised to see continental rocks such as granite, gneiss and sandstone containing fossils.”

In the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (more than 130 million years ago), India was adjacent to Western Australia. When India began to break away from Australia, the islands formed part of the last link between the two continents.

Eventually these islands, referred to as ‘micro-continents’ by scientists, were separated from both landmasses and stranded in the Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometres from the Australian and Indian coasts.

Dr Williams commented: “A detailed analysis of the rocks dredged up during the voyage will tell us about their age and how they fit into the Gondwana jigsaw.”

- University of Sydney

Sophisticated instruments were put to use…

Helping the scientists to acquire this data was the suite of Kongsberg Maritime hydroacoustic sensors and systems aboard the RV Southern Surveyor, which included:

• Simrad EK60 scientific echo sounder
• Simrad EK500 scientific echo sounder
• KONGSBERG EA 500 hydrographic echo sounder
• KONGSBERG EM 300 multibeam hydrographic echo sounder
• KONGSBERG PS 018 Sub-bottom profiler

Travelling on RV Southern Surveyor the scientists discovered the islands through detailed seafloor mapping using the EM 300 multibeam system and by the challenging collection of rocks from the abyss more than 1.5 km below the surface.

What is a multibeam hydrographic echo sounder you ask?  Check out this video from Kongsberg…

Click here to view the embedded video.

By Rob Almeida, gCaptain

In case you never noticed, the global maritime and offshore energy industry can be pretty damn old school in how they do things.   New ideas are taken with great apprehension because well, who knows what people might think if you tried something new?

What is success based on?  Technical expertise and a bit of creativity is essential if you’re an engineer, but for those who aren’t crunching numbers all day, is it ok to have an original idea and tell someone about it?

How many times in your career have you said to yourself, “I want to go out on a limb here and suggest something totally out of the blue,” but didn’t because you knew for sure that people might look at you funny or think your nuts.

Did it ever occur to you that those same people might appreciate the fact you had the balls to suggest something different?  Or that, by you going out on a limb, you might spark another idea that pays off big for everyone?

The people at Greenpeace went out a limb, blindly venturing into the mysterious world of social media and discovered something remarkable.  They discovered that by not taking themselves too seriously, and using social media properly, they could be hugely successful and find exactly the answers they were looking for.

If you’re really super old school, you may not want to watch this video, because it may hurt your brain a little and cause you to have an original idea of your own.

Reaching from Chile up to the Bering Sea, then down again to New Zealand, the fault lines circling the Pacific Ocean are named The Pacific Ring of Fire and are collectively responsible for many fo the world’s most devastating earthquakes. The most infamous of these faults, at least for residents of the United States, is California’s San Andrea fault, a continental strike-slip that runs a length of roughly 810 miles along the California coast. But little is known about the geology of faults far below the earth’s surface.

In 2002, scientists in Parkfield California took the first steps to better understand earthquakes by drilling deep into the San Andreas Fault Zone to install instruments near the initiation point of previous high magnitude quakes. This experiment was followed in 2004 when a second hole was drilled reaching a depth of 3.4 kilometers below the surface.

While this experiment proved effective, it’s location was less than ideal. First, being landbased, 100% of the drilling depth was through the earth’s surface, limiting the total depth of the experiment. Offshore drilling operations often reach greater depth because, being in the water, up to the first 10,000 feet of depth does not require any drilling. Second, the last magnitude 6 earthquake at the site was recorded in 1966, too long ago for optimal results.

In January 2005, with drilling on the San Andreas fault near completion, scientists on the other side of the ocean took delivery of a groundbreaking ship built to address the shortcomings of Parkfield.  Costing nearly $1 billion dollars, the drillship named Chikyu, the Japanese word for “Earth”, was designed to bore through the mantle of its namesake to explore the inner workings of earthquakes at depth.

And the vessel was impressive.

The enormous price tag of the 689-foot-long ship included scientific labratories, dynamic positioning systems, seven 12.5-foot-propeller thrusters, and a cruising speed of 12 knots.

Pure drilling science wasn’t its only goal however.  Built in Nagasaki, a city known for the devastation science can design, the ship was built to use science as a means to protect Japan from another historic enemy,  the tsunami.  This destructive natural enemy was one that Parkfield – located approximately 40 miles inland from the coast, was incapable of measuring.

The Chikyu began drilling operations in 2007 with plans to prod the earth with six holes in regions of high seismic activity. But the Earth fought back.  Trouble began for the Ckikyu early in the planned operation with the deepest hole reaching a depth of only 1,400 metres, far short of the planned depth of 6 kilometers.  Minor setbacks continued to burden the operation,  however by December 2010, the team was announcing it’s first major success.  This announcement came with the installation of a long-term observatory which was planned to eventually connect to DONET, Japan’s network of oceanographic Tsunami warning systems.

With a break in the drilling program, the ship returned to Hachinohe, on the northeastern portion of Honshu – Japan’s largest island.

Then disaster struck.

On March 11, 2011, Chikyu recieved reports of an enourmous earthquake and quickly left port, but she was not fast enough. Just 300 meters from the shore when the wave hit, she was overcome by its forces and soon drifted into a pier damaging one of her enourmous thrusters. All personnel aboard the ship were safe, however like the seafloor in which she drilled, she was punctured.  A damage survey revealed a 1.5 meter hole in the bottom of her hull.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the company who originally outfitted the vessel, moved quickly to help begin repairs at their Yokohama shipyard. The timeline of repairs were critical because, though disastrous, the massive tsunami created an unparalleled opportunity to drill deep into a recently active fault. The scientific rewards could be unprecedented.  The shipyard worked fast and on June 18th, the vessel returned to sea and the crew began preparations to drill into the epicenter of the earthquake which damaged their vessel.

The main question scientists now look to answer is how earthquakes form and how can detection methods be improved.

“It’s a fundamental issue in seismology right now: how do you get rock to slip tens of metres?”

James Mori, a seismologist at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan, recently told Nature magazine.  The answer may be in the resistance between plates of rock, resistance which creates heat.  ”Friction is dissipated as heat, precise temperature data should fill a crucial knowledge gap” said Mori.

To measure temperature, speed is essential.

Soon after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, experiments were conducted to measure the temperature of fault lines, however these projects largely failed, recording only the smallest temperature differences between long dormant and recently active faults.  The question has remained if the lack of temperature differences is because of rapid cooling, negligible temperatures created by quakes, or because of imperfect monitoring techniques.  ”The recurring theme is that the faults tend to be colder than they should be,” says Emily Brodsky, a seismic reasearcher at the University of California noting that larger slip event provides a better chance of tracking the temperature increase. But to measure a “larger slip” you need a large earthquake, and the drilling apparatus available to measure the temperature of the fault at its core. “We need to do this now, and do it fast, and do it correctly.” said Brodsky.

The Chikyu may just the answer.  Nature tells us she will drill down 1 kilometer through the fault, and lower a string of temperature sensors down the hole. By tracking temperatures for one to three years — much longer than has been attempted before — researchers should be able to calculate the total amount of heat that was generated by the quake. That will provide them with the resistance forces felt in the fault during the slip, filling in a blank in models of earthquake dynamics. “This is a key missing ingredient,” said Jean-Philippe Avouac, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who is not involved in the project.

Completing the drilling won’t be easy. The Tohoku fault lies under 7 kilometers of water, and some 700 meters of Earth’s crust, so a huge drill string will be needed. Previously, only a tiny 15-meter core has ever been extracted from beneath water of that depth, says Brodsky; most cores are taken from beneath 6 kilometers of water or less.

In addition to temperature measurements, the project will also examine the sediments pulled up in the core. Certain sediment textures, such as ball-bearing-like particles of clay, might be associated with large-slip earthquakes. Identifying such features should help scientists to forecast the slip potential of other faults.

The chance to collect precious information from the Tohoku event represents “an opportunity, maybe even a responsibility”, says Mori. Almost all of the damage caused by the quake was done by the tsunami, he points out. “What we really want to understand is what caused that.”

Some of you may remember a cartoon which appeared during World War I, a drawing showing an inquisitive stranger talking with the gateman at a railway crossing. The gate was painted with the usual black and white stripes, and lying on the river beyond the tracks was a steamer painted with similar markings. The stranger asked, “Why do they paint the stripes on the gate?” And the gateman answered, “Oh, that’s to make them more visible.”

And then the stranger asked, “Well, why do they paint the stripes on the vessel out there?” And the gateman replied, “Oh, that’s to make the ship less visible.”

-Everett Warner [paraphrased from his lecture notes]

A ships in costume, gCaptain brings you Razzle Dazzle; history’s most unusually painted ship. What is Razzle Dazzle? GoTouring.com tells us;

During World War I, the British and Americans faced a serious threat from German U-boats. All attempts to camouflage ships at sea had failed, as the appearance of the sea and sky are always changing.  Any color scheme that was concealing in one situation was conspicuous in others. A British artist and naval officer, Norman Wilkinson, promoted a new camouflage scheme that was derived from the artistic fashions of the time, particularly cubism. Instead of trying to conceal the ship, it simply broke up its lines and made it more difficult for the U-boat captain to determine the ship’s course. The British called this camouflage scheme “Dazzle Painting.” The Americans called it “Razzle Dazzle.”

Artists were enlisted to draw up the camouflage designs. Early in the war, designs were drawn for individual ships, with each ship having its own distinctive pattern. As the war progressed, standard patterns were devised and applied to large numbers of ships. Even the great passenger liners were camouflaged for the duration of the War.

It is unfortunate that there are no color photographs of these WWI ships. People who witnessed convoys of dazzle painted ships reported that the scene was quite dramatic. Imagine sailing across the North Atlantic surrounded by dozens of brightly painted ships, each in different colors and patterns. If you compare the colored drawing with the black and white photograph of the ship “War Clover”, you can get an idea of how much we are missing. Read More…

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The problem confronting a submarine, once his prey has been sighted, resolves itself solely into estimating course and speed of the target, in order to determine how the approach to torpedo fire position should be made. The “dazzle” system of painting is based on this one consideration and that is, of rendering the problem confronting a submarine more difficult, confusing him as to how his approach shall be made and thereby adding in some degree to the safety of the vessel attacked.

U.S. Admiral William S. Sims (1917)

Camopedia has this amazing information on the World War I design team assigned to the project;

ONE METHOD camoufleurs might have used (but did not, apparently) to generate a large number of unique dazzle schemes is the stencil method.

It is indebted to American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921), sometimes called “the father of camouflage,” who (circa 1909) devised a clever, easy way for individuals to design their own camouflage, using cut-out silhouettes.

Whatever the surrounding, said Thayer, a person “has only to cut out a stencil of the soldier, ship, cannon or whatever figure he wishes to conceal, and look through this stencil from the viewpoint under consideration, to learn just what costume from that viewpoint would most tend to conceal this figure.” However, the purpose of dazzle camouflage was confusion, not concealment, so, in the examples below, we have used the silhouette as a mask with which to “find” valuable dazzle designs in an abstract, geometric plan. In studies of human vision, Gestalt psychologists and others have investigated embedded figures or “puzzle pictures” (Wolfgang Köhler called them “camouflaged figures”) in which a simple shape has been adroitly hidden within a larger, more complex surrounding.

In pre-computer days, one could make arbitrary compositions in art by overlapping “systems” on layers of tracing paper, viewed on a light table. Today, it is ever so easy to do the same thing (and much more) by using the “layers” function in software such as Adobe Photoshop. This could have been useful as a way to generate dazzle designs, had all that been available in World War I.

If you are looking for more information on this topic be sure to read things magazine‘s extensive ship camouflage links section.

Photo By Derek K. Miller

Wikipedia tells us “The IMO number is made of the three letters ‘IMO’followed by the seven-digit number assigned to all ships by IHS Fairplay when constructed. This is a unique seven digit number that is assigned to propelled, sea-going merchant ships of 100 GT and above. It serves to identify ships and is not changed when the ship’s owner, country of registry or name changes.” This number makes tracking ships, via AIS and other means, over long periods of time practical.

While most mariners can tell you the significance of a ship’s IMO number, few know how the number is chosen. One of the mathematicians over at teppovuori.fi thinks he’s figured it out:

IMO Numbers are made up of the letters IMO and seven decimal digits (Six information digits followed by a seventh check digit concatenated into a seven digit number)

1. The six information digits to be checked are weighted from left to right by 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2.
2. Products are added up.
3. The sum is divided by 10. The remainder is the check digit.

Example: IMO 9074729 (Pacific Frontier, Hong Kong)

	 9  0  7  4  7  2  9
	 7  6  5  4  3  2
	63  0 35 16 21  4  = 139 -> 9

The method could also be described by saying that the weighting factors are 7..2 from left to right, and the check digit is the digit that you need to subtract from the sum to make it evenly divisible by 10. Note: This was updated by a gCaptain reader

If anyone is a mathematician or cryptologist and can verify this please leave a comment below.

So what is an IMO Number anyway? The IMO says:

As a result of the attack on the USS Cole, the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and the suicide bombing of the oil tanker Limburg, the IMO held a Diplomatic Conference on Maritime Security in December 2002. At the conference, it adopted a number of measures aimed at enhancing the security of ships and port facilities. In addition to the creation of the well-known ISPS Code, the conference also included a modification to SOLAS Regulation XI-1/3 to require ships’ identification numbers to be permanently marked in a visible place either on the ship’s hull or superstructure.

The IMO Ship Identification Number is a unique seven-digit number assigned to propelled, seagoing vessels of 100 gross tons and above. The number is assigned by Lloyd’s Register – Fairplay Ltd. on behalf of the IMO. It consists of the three letters IMO followed by seven numbers.

It is important to note that this number is separate and different from your official number. The official number is an internal control number issued by your yacht’s flag administration and cannot be used to replace the IMO number.

gCaptain’s Short Answer: A vessel’s “IMO Number” is the single best way to track and locate history on a ship since each number is unique and is the only identification that remains with a vessel from shipyard to scrapyard.

Links:

• Official IMO Issuance Page
• Look-Up Vessel Information by IMO Number (Registration required)
• USCG Vessel Information by IMO (Hull) Number