The fossil of Syllipsimopodi is from the Invertebrate Paleontology collections of the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo: Christopher Whalen
NPR reports that researchers say they have found the oldest known relative of octopuses and vampire squids, in a fossil dug up decades ago in Montana.
The official name of the newly discovered species is Syllipsimopodi bideni, named after President Joe Biden, in a nod to what the researchers say is his embrace of science.
The Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum in South Carolina has decided after years of debate to scrap USS Clamagore, a Cold War-era submarine, and save some of its artifacts for an exhibit.
“Unfortunately, we cannot financially sustain the maintenance of three historic vessels,” Rorie Cartier, executive director at Patriots Point, said in a statement after the vote. “The USS Yorktown and USS Laffey also need repair, and we are fighting a never-ending battle against the corrosion that comes from being submerged in saltwater.”
When Janet MacPherson started surfing around 1955, she was a rarity in a sport dominated by men. In those days, male surfers would sometimes throw rocks at her because they didn’t want a woman on their waves. She overcame the initial resistance to become a surfing icon, known worldwide and revered in her native Malibu in Southern California. Remarkably, she continued surfing for more than 60 years, riding the waves through her 70s and into her 80s. She died on March 5th, at age 84, of cancer in her home on Carbon Beach in Malibu.
A cruise on the Norwegian Escape that sailed from Port Canaveral, Florida last Monday didn’t go well, and for a change, had little to do with Covid 19. On the second day of the cruise, the ship ran aground in high winds at Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, its first port-of-call.
The good news is that the ship was refloated on Tuesday and there were no reported injuries among the more than 2,000 passengers or the 1,700 member crew. The bad news is that the passengers were stuck aboard the ship for the two days it took to arrange a damage survey and to determine that the hull damage was severe enough to cancel both the current cruise and the next cruise scheduled to begin March 19th.
HMS Spey
The Royal Navy patrol ship HMS Spey was on a mission to check and update charts of waters around British Overseas Territories scattered around the globe. It recently observed that Henderson Island in the South Pacific is one mile south of the position marked on charts used by mariners the world over since 1937.
The notes on the chart say that it was produced in 1937 from aerial photography, which implies that the aircraft which took the photos was slightly off in its navigational calculations.
Now, one nautical mile is not very far off, particularly when determined by using a sextant. Only about 14 square miles in area, Henderson Island is also uninhabited and quite remote. It is one of four islands in the Pitcairn chain. Chile lies 3,600 miles to the east and New Zealand 3,200 miles to the southwest.
To put the navigational error in a historical context, it is notable that Henderson Island is one of four islands in the Pitcairn chain. Continue reading
On St. Patrick’s Day, a post about another Irish saint, St. Brendan the Navigator, and the adventurer who sought to replicate his epic voyage.
Who was the first European to sail to North America? According to Irish tradition, it was St. Brendan the Navigator in the 6th century, who is said to have set off with a small group of monks in a currach, an open boat built with a wooden frame covered with hides, on a 7-year voyage around the North Atlantic, that may have reached North America. If the story is true, St. Brendan reached the “New World” hundreds of years before the Norse and almost 900 years before Columbus.
There is no absolute evidence that St. Brendan ever reached North America, although many of the islands visited in the medieval accounts appear to be similar to features of the Hebrides, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. In the 1970s, inveterate explorer Tim Severin decided to mount an expedition to see whether St. Brendan’s voyage was possible.
Lady Anastasia
Spain has recently seized three Russian superyachts believed to be subject to EU sanctions, including the 48-meter-long $7 million Lady Anastasia, which was partially sunk when sabotaged by its Ukrainian chief engineer. Taras Ostapchuk, 55, the engineer was said to have been furious that arms shipped by the yacht’s owner, the oligarch Alexander Mikheyev, were allegedly used to attack his country. Ostapchuk was arrested but later left Spain to fight for Ukraine.
Spanish authorities also seized the 135-meter Crescent, which is valued at $600 million, at the port in Tarragona, Catalonia, the transport ministry said on Wednesday. Spanish media speculated that the yacht could be owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin but police are still investigating who it belongs to.
Almost one year ago, the container ship Ever Given ran aground, blocking the Suez Canal for six days. Now, another ship operated by the same shipping company, Evergreen Marine Corporation, has run hard aground. The Ever Forward, a 1,095-foot, 12,000 TEU, container ship, ran aground around 9PM on Sunday night after leaving Baltimore, a spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard said.
The ship grounded outside the shipping channel off Gibson Island in the Chesapeake Bay. The ship, reported to have a draft of 42′ feet, ran aground in approximately 25′ feet of water while traveling at over 13 knots. The ship apparently failed to make a turn in the channel. It is unclear whether human error or a mechanical failure caused the casualty. The Ever Forward had a pilot aboard at the time of the grounding.
The Coast Guard said the cargo ship is outside the main shipping channel and is not a hazard to navigation. Ships in the area have been instructed to slow down and use a one-way traffic pattern. There are no reports of damage, injuries, or pollution as a result of the incident.
During Women’s History Month it is worthwhile remembering Eleanor Creesy, the navigator of the clipper ship Flying Cloud, who with her husband, Captain Josiah Creesy, set world sailing records for the fastest passage between New York and San Francisco.
Eleanor Prentiss was born in 1814, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the daughter of a master mariner, who taught his daughter the art and science of navigation. Eleanor knew how to use a chronometer and a sextant and how to make a sight reduction. In 1841, Eleanor married Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy. The couple sailed together on the ship Oneida in the China trade. Josiah was captain of the ship but Eleanor was the navigator.
Russian billionaire Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko’s superyacht Sailing Yacht A is nothing if not distinctive. It is one of the largest sail-assisted vessels afloat, with a singularly terrible name, and is arguably the ugliest large yacht in service. It is also the most recent superyacht to be seized as part of international sanctions resulting from Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Reuters reports that Italian police have seized the superyacht, valued at $580 million, the prime minister’s office said on Saturday, a few days after Melnichenko was placed on an EU sanctions list following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sailing Yacht A has been sequestered at the northern port of Trieste, the government said.
On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian naval vessel Vasily Bykov ordered the 13 Ukrainian border guards on Snake Island in the Black Sea to surrender. The border guards replied, “go f*** yourself“. The warship shelled the island in response and the soldiers were reported to have been killed. Later reports suggested that the border guards may have survived and been taken prisoner. The border guards’ response has become an informal rallying cry of the Ukrainian military and militias in resisting Russian aggression.
Now, the Ukrainian Navy reports that the patrol boat Vasily Bykov that ordered the surrender has been destroyed by Ukrainian missiles in the Black Sea near Odessa. Ukrainian small boats lured the patrol boat to a camouflaged firing position, where it was shelled.
Military.com reports that a federal judge in Florida has ruled that the US Navy cannot do anything to remove a commander of a destroyer, despite testimony that he has flouted the service’s rules for COVID-19 mitigation while seeking a religious exemption from receiving the vaccine for the virus. Navy officers said they cannot deploy the Norfolk, Va.-based Arleigh Burke-class destroyer after the judge’s ruling.
The officer at the heart of this dispute is an unnamed commander who joined the Navy in 2004 according to the lawsuit. Other documents filed by the Navy show that the destroyer he commands belongs to Destroyer Squadron 26.
The Endurance22 Expedition announced yesterday that they have discovered the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton‘s ship Endurance, which was crushed by pack ice off Antarctica in 1915. The ship was in remarkably good condition. How is it that the ship is so well preserved after having been sitting on the bottom 10,000 feet beneath the Southern Ocean for over a century?
The BBC notes that the ship looks much the same as when photographed for the last time by Shackleton’s filmmaker, Frank Hurley, in 1915. The masts are down, the rigging is in a tangle, but the hull is broadly coherent. Some damage is evident at the bow, presumably where the descending ship hit the seabed. The anchors are present. The subs even spied some boots and crockery.
The Endurance22 Expedition announced today that they have discovered the remarkably intact remains of Sir Ernest Shackleton‘s ship Endurance, which was crushed by pack ice off Antarctica in 1915.
A team of marine archeologists, adventurers, and technicians on the icebreaking research vessel SA Agulhas II, battled shifting sea ice, blizzards, and temperatures that dropped to -18 degrees C, for over two weeks, before finding the sunken ship. Using undersea drones, the shipwreck of the Endurance was located 10,000 feet below the ice-covered surface of the Weddell Sea.
As Western governments scrabble to identify the luxury yachts of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, the ownership of Scheherazade, a 495′ long superyacht, docked in Marina di Carrara, a small Italian town on the Tuscan coast, remains a mystery. Valued at $700 million dollars and almost as long as an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, Scheherazade is one of the 14th largest superyachts and is alone in that no likely owner has been publicly identified.
The New York Times observes that determining the ownership of assets that the wealthy want to keep hidden is difficult, especially without a warrant, because they are often zealously guarded by private bankers and lawyers and tucked away in opaque shell companies in offshore secrecy havens. The Scheherazade is flagged in the Cayman Islands and its owner, Bielor Assets Ltd., is registered in the Marshall Islands. The yacht’s management company is also registered in the Cayman Islands.
So while clearly a billionaire’s yacht, Italian authorities are asking, which billionaire? Continue reading
In honor of both Women’s History Month and last month’s Black History Month, an updated repost about the barrier-shattering naval engineer Raye Montague, who died at the age of 83 in 2018.
At the age of 7, she was inspired to become an engineer after she toured a captured World War II German submarine with her grandmother. As an African-American girl, however, she was told that becoming an engineer was simply not an option.
Thirty years later, Raye Montague became the first person to use a computer program to rapidly develop a preliminary ship design for the U.S. Navy. The design process had previously taken the Navy two years. Montague completed the preliminary design of the Oliver Hazard Perry Class frigate in less than 19 hours. Her accomplishment revolutionized the way the Navy designs ships and submarines.
During Women’s History Month, it is a good time to honor Winnie Breegle who celebrated her 100th birthday last month. She served in World War II as a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) cryptographer and a Navajo code talker, who didn’t happen to be a Navajo. An updated repost.
In 1941, Winnie Breegle, a 21-year-old farm girl from Ohio taught Latin, Spanish and English in high school, and women with such backgrounds were highly sought for work as coders. When she enlisted in the Navy, she was trained as a cryptographer.
Last week, representatives from 175 nations agreed to begin writing a global treaty that would restrict the explosive growth of plastic pollution on land and sea. The agreement commits nations to work on a broad and legally binding treaty that would not only aim to improve recycling and clean up the world’s plastic waste, but would also include curbs on plastics production itself.
World leaders have until 2024 to agree on the terms of the plastic pollution treaty, including which elements will be legally binding and how the deal will be financed.
Scientists say plastics cause harm throughout their life cycle, releasing toxic as well as planet-warming greenhouse gases during production, landfill and incineration. Plastics, which are manufactured from fossil fuels, caused 4.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2015, one recent study estimated, more than all of the world’s airplanes combined.
In early February, the Endurance22 expedition set off from Cape Town, South Africa for Antarctica’s Weddell Sea aboard the icebreaking research ship, SA Agulhas II. Their objective is to locate, survey, and film the wreck of Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s ship that sank after being crushed in Antarctic pack ice in 1915. Last week, history briefly repeated itself. As they approached the location where the Endurance was lost, SA Agulhas II became stuck in the ice after the mercury dipped to -10C.
Fortunately, using the ship’s power, assisted by a deck crane that swung a fuel container back and forth to rock the ship, the crew was able to free the SA Agulhas II after several hours.
The net of sanctions is tightening around the superyachts owned by Russian oligarchs. Yesterday, Germany seized the 512-foot yacht Dilbar, valued at nearly $600 million, owned by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who faces European Union sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Forbes reported. The yacht has been in the Hamburg shipyards of German shipbuilding firm Blohm+Voss since late October for a refitting job.
Today, the French seized the 289-foot yacht Amore Vero belonging to Rosneft boss Igor Sechin as it tried to leave the Mediterranean port of La Ciotat in a breach of EU sanctions on Russian oligarchs, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said.