Month: January 2024

It has sometimes been said that we know less about our ocean’s depths than we know about the moon. Now, a new study puts a twist on that old (and, some say, outdated) analogy, suggesting we know staggeringly less about our oceans’ surfaces than previously assumed.

For the first time ever, researchers have created a global map of human activity in the oceans and on coastlines, published last week in the journal Nature. By harnessing satellite imagery, GPS data and artificial intelligence, the team uncovered rampant, unregulated activity on the high seas, including untracked fishing vessels and a spike in offshore energy development.

“On land, we have detailed maps of almost every road and building on the planet,” lead author David Kroodsma, director of research and innovation at the nonprofit Global Fishing Watch, says in a statement. “In contrast, growth in our ocean has been largely hidden from public view. This study helps eliminate the blind spots and shed light on the breadth and intensity of human activity at sea.”

Crucially, the researchers found that between 72 and 76 percent of the world’s industrial fishing vessels are not being publicly tracked—and as a result, they haven’t factored into previous reports on ocean use.

To reach this conclusion, the team collected data from automatic identification systems (AIS)—devices used to convey a ship’s location and speed, essentially entering its voyage into public record.

Then, they analyzed two million gigabytes of satellite data from the European Space Agency, which painted a picture of ocean traffic between 2017 and 2021. The team trained an artificial intelligence model to identify vessels and other structures at sea. When comparing this map to the locations shown in AIS reports, the researchers discovered many more fishing vessels than anticipated.

This rampant number of “dark fleets”—so called because they are not connected to public monitoring systems and navigate undetected—were especially concentrated in waters around South Asia and Africa, and they immediately rang alarm bells for the researchers. Many vessels that participate in illegal fishing will deliberately sever their AIS connection.

“We had an idea that we were missing a big chunk of the activity happening in the ocean, but we didn’t know how much,” Fernando Paolo, a lead author of the study and a machine learning engineer at Global Fishing Watch, tells New Scientist’s Jeremy Hsu. “And we found that it’s a lot more than we imagined.”

For example, public data had previously suggested that the amount of fishing in European and Asian waters was similar. Instead, the new map shows a different story: Of every ten vessels in the ocean, seven are located off the coast of Asia, while just one is near Europe.

In the Mediterranean Sea, previous numbers had shown fishing on the European side to be ten times greater than that on the African side. But the new study suggests the amount of fishing on both sides is roughly the same.

“These previously invisible vessels radically changed our knowledge about the scale, scope and location of fishing activity,” writes Jennifer Raynor, an author of the study and a natural resource economist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in the Conversation.

Focusing on particular coastlines and geographies revealed potential hotspots for overfishing, as well as regional fishing strategies—from vessels off the coasts of Tunisia and Sicily gathering to bottom trawl near seabed canyons, to “dark” ships near Bangladesh following contours along the seafloor.

But this data can do more than uncover possible illegal fishing. “Vessel tracking could also transform environmental conservation efforts by revealing encroachment on protected areas,” write machine learning researchers Konstantin Klemmer and Esther Rolf in a perspective accompanying the paper. More than 20 vessels per week crossed into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and over five per week entered the Galápagos Marine Reserve, according to the study.

Beyond fishing, the maps also indicate that offshore energy has boomed in recent years—by 2021, wind turbines made up 48 percent of ocean infrastructure, compared to oil platforms’ 38 percent.

That more vessels and energy structures operate at sea than previously thought draws attention to the industrialization of the oceans, a process that some have coined the “blue acceleration.”

“The footprint of the Anthropocene is no longer limited to terra firma,” co-author Patrick Halpin, a marine geospatial ecologist at Duke University, says in the statement. “Our work reveals that the global ocean is a busy, crowded and complex industrial workspace of the growing blue economy.”

By the turn of the 20th century, the United States National Museum—now the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building—had assembled an impressive display of whale skeletons. But for biology curator Frederick W. True, the collection would not be complete until it included a “blower,” or a whale of truly epic proportions. A pioneer in the study of taxonomy and evolutionary relationships among whales, True specifically wanted a specimen of the largest living animal on earth, the sulphur-bottom whale—more commonly known as a blue whale.

Back then, most scientists and ordinary citizens saw whaling as an innocuous industry that pursued a seemingly unlimited supply of the world’s “monsters of the deep,” as the media was fond of calling whales. At this time, big was also “a big thing,” says John Ososky, a marine mammal specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The American public in the early 20th century was in the grips of dinosaur-mania, when it was common practice for huge skeletons and fossils to go on public display, and there was great demand to see these awesome creatures, Ososky adds. “True was definitely aware of the value of enticing the public with an enormous specimen.”

To fulfill the museum’s quest for a giant, True traveled to Newfoundland, Canada, and enlisted the help of local whalers. The nautical networking paid off in the summer of 1903, when whalers at Hermitage Bay brought in a 78-foot-long, 70-ton adult male North Atlantic blue whale. Waiting on the boat ramp, True’s museum colleagues snapped into action and began plastering the animal’s tail before the rest of the body had even been fully hauled out of the water. They spent the next ten hours working from tail to head to make a full-body cast of the dead animal.

The plaster model wasn’t all the Smithsonian scientists were after, though. Because models are not actual natural history specimens, the cast would be of little scientific value for studying the morphology and life histories of blue whales. So the team also collected the skeleton of the “mammoth whale,” as the newspapers referred to it. Both model and skeleton were displayed at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair before making their way to the Smithsonian. More than a century later, the animal’s skull is thought to be one of the largest in any scientific collection in the world.

In 1916, two years after True died, the Hall of Marine Life opened at what is now known as the National Museum of Natural History. For more than four decades, the skull and model entertained visitors who came to marvel at a whale of such size that it could provide “commodious quarters for Jonah,” as one headline proclaimed.

By the 1960s, though, sensibilities had changed. The modern environmental movement was blossoming in the U.S., and reports of steeply declining species had propelled conservation to the forefront of scientists’ minds. In preparation for a new exhibition that opened in 1963 called “Life in the Sea,” Smithsonian curators took down the old blue whale model.

Unlike the model, the original blue whale skull was featured in the new show. But now the former object of celebration and wonder had transformed into a poignant symbol of loss. As Arthur Remington Kellogg, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, lamented in his speech heralding the new exhibition, “We are now observing the closing days of the existence of the blue whale in our oceans. Indeed, some of you at this opening may never again have the opportunity to see a real blue whale except in museums.”

Fortunately, Kellogg’s dire predictions did not come to pass. Although it’s estimated that 99 percent of blue whales disappeared during the era of commercial whaling, in recent decades, the species’ population has rebounded in a major way, with between 10,000 and 25,000 populating our oceans today. This uptick is due mainly to new conservation legislation, which was shaped in part by Smithsonian scientists—especially mammals curator Charles Handley. A strong supporter of the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, Handley succeeded in efforts to list eight large whale species under the Endangered Species Conservation Act, the legislative predecessor to the Endangered Species Act of 1973. An international moratorium on commercial whaling, which most countries have abided by since 1985, also helped blue whales recover. In a way, the skull assisted in ushering in these changes, too. “Public awareness of whales and their plight led to political and legislative action to protect them,” Ososky says. “An iconic specimen such as our blue whale skull certainly played a role in that.”

By the time the “Life in the Sea” exhibition closed in 1998, the blue whale skull had accomplished its mission of helping bring its species back from the edge of extinction. So Smithsonian curators decided to retire the old skull from public view in favor of spotlighting species that currently face more pressing conservation threats, such as right whales and, more recently, Rice’s whales. The Rice’s whale exhibit, which opened in the Sant Ocean Hall in November, features a baleen plate from a deceased whale along with plastic extracted from the animal’s stomach. Since 2007, the blue whale skull has quietly resided at the Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryland, in a room where the 25-foot-high ceiling is just tall enough to accommodate it. For now, there are no immediate plans to put the gargantuan relic back on public display. But someday, perhaps, the skull will reappear in an exhibition showcasing the conservation that helped to save some of the ocean’s most majestic creatures.

Any Tintin fans out there?

I’m pretty sure there will be once The Adventures of Tintin, directed by Steven Spielberg with the assistance of motion-capture expert Peter Jackson, opens next week.

For many Americans—young and old—the appearance of the Belgian comic book hero on the silver screen will be a first encounter because Tintin never caught fire in the U.S. the way he did everywhere else. Since his adventures first appeared in a Belgian newspaper in 1929, books based on the strip have sold 250 million copies, translated into 100 languages (most recently, Yiddish). But America had its own indigenous cartoon tradition, featuring heroes like Superman and Catwoman, so when Tintin‘s creator Hergé approached Disney in 1948, he was turned down flat.

Enter Spielberg, who got to know Tintin in the early 1980s. It took 20 years for the movie project to find its perfect medium in motion-capture, a computer-assisted technique proved by Jackson in his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The film opens with Hergé’s intrepid boy reporter at a flea market where he finds a model boat with a secret inside. Anyone who has been to Brussels will immediately recognize the setting: the Place du Jeu de Balle in the Marolles, where Belgians sell bric-a-brac from their attics. I’ve bought my share of precious junk there. When the sun occasionally shines on the Belgian capital, it’s one of my favorite haunts.

Hergé was scrupulous about verisimilitude, which is why travelers can’t crack open a Tintin album without recognizing real-life sites and scenes that, like the Place du Jeu de Balle, served as models for frames in the strip.

The Belgian Royal Palace on a hill above Brussels’ medieval Grand Place stands in for the Royal Place of Klow in King Ottokar’s Sceptre (1939), capital of the Eastern European nation of Syldavia.

The Seven Crystal Balls (1948) features the Belle Époque Hotel Metropole, opened in 1895 on the downtown Place de Broukère.

Out in the suburb of Uccle the Belgian Royal Observatory gives frissons of deja-vue to fans who know Destination Moon (1953) and Explorers on the Moon (1954), in which Tintin completes a lunar landing 16 years before Apollo 11.

And here’s an extra-Belgian ringer. Marlinspike, ancestral home of Tintin’s Scotch-swilling buddy Captain Haddock, is the 17th century Chateau de Cheverny in the Loire Valley of France, without its two side wings. It’s not clear that Hergé ever went there because he wasn’t much of a traveler, poor soul. But Tintologists—a serious tribe of scholars who have investigated every aspect of the strip—found a tourist brochure for Cheverny among Hergé’s papers with a faint pencil drawing of Tintin and Haddock walking toward the chateau’s entrance.

For decades, a small, unassuming lead statue sat on the mantel of a farmhouse in England. Now identified as a previously unknown sculpture by 20th-century British Modernist Henry Moore, the artwork will go under the hammer in March. It carries an estimate of roughly $40,000 to $68,000 but could fetch substantially more at auction, reports ITV News.

Experts at the Henry Moore Foundation and auction house Dreweatts authenticated the work, which dates to around 1939 or 1940 and is titled Mother and Child. It features an abstract representation of the two figures; per BBC News, the foundation linked the statue to Eighteen Ideas for Sculpture, a 1939 Moore sketch in its archives.

Dreweatts specialist Francesca Whitham tells ITV News that the sculpture is “unique and rare,” partly because the artist only worked briefly with lead in the 1930s. Moore experimented with the substance, along with rope and wire, while creating his well-known stringed sculptures. Mother and Child may have been a preliminary design for a stringed piece.

“What is significant is that the Henry Moore Foundation was not aware of the sculpture, despite Moore keeping meticulous records,” Whitham tells Dalya Alberge of the London Times.

Born in 1898, Moore was a pioneer in post-war Modernism who was renowned for his abstract bronze sculptures. The artist rose to popularity in the 1950s and produced sculptures, drawings, prints and textiles until his death in 1986.

The seven-inch-tall statue had long sat unnoticed on the fireplace mantel of John Hastings, a farmer in Wiltshire, about 90 miles west of London. After his death in 2019, family members asked an independent valuer to appraise Hastings’ few possessions. According to the Times, the appraiser listed the figure as a “lead maquette … in the manner of Henry Moore”—an assessment that led the family to contact the foundation.

As a Dreweatts statement notes, Hastings’ father, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, was an editor at the Architectural Review for nearly 50 years. Moore, whose work was featured in the magazine during the 1930s, may have gifted the sculpture to the elder Hastings as a token of his appreciation, the Times reports. Alternatively, ITV News posits that Moore gave the piece to James Maude Richards, an assistant editor who, in turn, passed it on to Hubert.

“The family had always called the sculpture ‘The Henry Moore’ due to family myth and stories told by Hubert,” Whitham tells Taylor Dafoe of Artnet News.

She adds, “When it arrived on my desk and I heard the story I knew it was something interesting and definitely worth investigating.”

Speaking with the Times, Whitham says, “It would be interesting to think that Moore repaid his appreciation by gifting this sculpture to Hubert. … In 1974, it was [with] his son, a farmer, who didn’t even have locks on the doors. We have no record of an insurance valuation having been done.”

Hastings may not have realized the value of the sculpture. He placed it on the mantel alongside other family trinkets.

“John was a countryman and farmer who bred sheep and livestock,” a family spokesperson tells the Times. “He was more interested in his animals than fine art. He was not concerned or bothered who the sculpture was by. … It just became a sentimental family object.”