Tag: oceans

The Titan Submersible Disaster Hearings Paint a Damning Picture

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After they left, the Titan was rebuilt with a new hull that was never tested to industry norms nor certified by an independent third-party agency. Patrick Lahey, CEO of submersible maker Triton Submarines, said that certifying a novel hull was not only possible but essential for safety.

“We were developing and certifying the deepest diving sub in the world at the same time they were developing this amateurish contraption,” he testified. “There was absolutely no reason they couldn’t have got it certified.”

A History of Troubled Titanic Missions

OceanGate’s first missions to the Titanic in 2021 were beset with problems, including the Titan’s forward titanium dome falling off after a dive, worrying readings on the acoustic monitoring system, and a thruster failing at 3,500 meters’ depth. One Coast Guard evidence slide showed 70 equipment issues requiring correction from the season’s dives. Things improved slightly the following year, with only 48 recorded issues. But these included dead batteries extending a mission from around seven to 27 hours, and the sub itself being damaged on recovery.

One dive in 2022 ended with a mysterious loud bang and cracking noise upon surfacing. Antonella Wilby, an OceanGate engineering contractor, was so worried about this bang she considered alerting OceanGate’s board of directors. She testified that another employee warned her that she risked being sued if she did so. “Anyone should feel free to speak up about safety without fear of retribution, and that is not at all what I saw,” she said. “I was entirely dismissed.”

On the Titan’s penultimate dive in 2023, contractor Tym Catterson admitted to failing to carry out a safety check; the Titan was left listing at a 45-degree angle for an hour, piling up those on board.

Conflicting Views on the Carbon Fiber Hull

There was conflicting testimony on the safety of the Titan’s unique carbon fiber hull. Dyer pointed out that carbon fiber could be a good fit for deep submersibles, and Nissen was adamant that computer modeling and the acoustic monitoring warning system meant that it could be used indefinitely. Lochridge, Catterson, and former HR director Bonnie Carl were all far more skeptical about the hull’s design and implementation. But all three acknowledged that they were not engineers.

Next week’s appearances by Nissen’s successor, Phil Brooks, more submersible engineers, and a carbon fiber expert from Boeing should address many of these questions. In particular, testimony next Wednesday from an engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board’s Materials Laboratory about the Titan’s wreckage may identify the physical cause of the implosion.

Where Was the Coast Guard?

At several points, investigators pointed out that the Titan should have been inspected by the US Coast Guard before carrying paying passengers. None of those questioned could say why it was not, despite OceanGate apparently contacting the Coast Guard on multiple occasions to provide notice of its underwater operations.

Lochridge also testified that OSHA had told him in 2018 that it had communicated his safety complaints to the Coast Guard. At least one of the five US Coast Guard witnesses being called next week is based in the Puget Sound, near OceanGate’s headquarters, and may be able to speak to this.

US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Lockwood, who joined OceanGate’s board in 2013, is not on the witness list. Lochridge and Carl testified that Lockwood’s role was to provide oversight and smooth interactions with the Coast Guard.

Missing Witnesses

Nor is Lockwood the only notable absentee from the witness box. Multiple witnesses this week testified to the key roles of OceanGate employees, including Wendy Rush, Scott Griffith, and Neil McCurdy, in making crucial business, regulatory, and operational decisions throughout OceanGate’s history and on the day of the accident. None are being called to testify. Nor have any of the hulls’ manufacturers been called. The Coast Guard has not provided a reason for this other than to deny that it is because those witnesses would have asserted their Fifth Amendment rights to refuse to answer questions.

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September 20, 2024
Special electrodes will produce hydrogen fuel directly from seawater

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Seawater could be a source of clean hydrogen fuel

Tamara Kulikova / Alamy

For the first time, electrodes that can make hydrogen from seawater without generating corrosive and toxic chlorine gas will be produced at commercial scales.

“Traditional electrolysis has only been possible with pure water, an increasingly scarce global resource,” Doug Wicks at the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) said in a press release. “[These electrodes] eliminate the process’s dependence on pure water and it taps into the world’s most abundant water resource instead: the ocean.”

The process uses a negatively-charged cathode and a positively-charged anode to split seawater into four “streams” – useful oxygen and hydrogen, and harmless acidic and alkaline streams that can be easily recycled back into the ocean. Equatic, the California-based startup that designed the technology with support from ARPA-E, plans to sell the hydrogen and oxygen created in the process to offset their costs. The alkaline stream reacts with CO2 in the atmosphere to form stable minerals that can be poured back into the sea, while the acidic stream can be returned to the ocean once it is restored to its original pH after flowing over silica-rich rocks.

Like standard techniques that split water to produce hydrogen, this process takes place in an electrolyser, a machine that uses stacks of electrodes to separate water molecules with electricity. But existing devices have trouble working with seawater because it destroys them: it is full of dissolved salt, other minerals, metals and microorganisms that degrade components and gum up the works. Also, the electrical charge that attracts oxygen to the anode separates the salt in seawater, generating toxic chlorine gas that rapidly corrodes the machine.

To avoid this problem, Chen and his colleagues designed an anode that can selectively split oxygen from the water molecules without splitting the salt. They used a chlorine-blocking layer to allow water to flow through the catalyst while stopping the salt. Based on laboratory tests, Chen says they expect the anodes will work for at least three years before they need to be removed and recoated.

Pau Farras at the University of Galway in Ireland, who is not involved with the company, says three years would be a strong performance, and these oxygen-selective anodes are a promising approach to using seawater to make hydrogen fuel. But he says they haven’t yet shown they can work in the wild. “What we need to do is see the real performance in a real environment,” he says.

The company will now begin producing anodes at a factory in California capable of making 4000 of them a year. They will be used in a demonstration plant being built in Singapore, which the company says will be able to remove 10 tonnes of CO2 and produce 300 kilograms of hydrogen per day.

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September 19, 2024
Freak waves may be more dangerous than we thought possible

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Multidirectional waves created in a circular tank grew higher and larger than those in the one-way tanks

Thomas Davey and Ross Calvert

Ships, wind farms, oil rigs and other offshore structures may be at risk of damage from extreme ocean waves due to underestimations in potential wave sizes and forces.

Using a circular tank that generates waves from multiple directions, scientists have produced “3D” waves that accurately mimic real ones in the ocean – in particular rogue waves, which can grow exceptionally steep and large. Compared to those created by standard one-way tanks, the waves in the multidirectional, circular tank…

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September 18, 2024
‘I Told Him I’m Not Getting in It’: Former Titan Submersible Engineer Testifies

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The US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible hearing kicked off with a startling revelation.

“I told him I’m not getting in it,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen said to a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to act as a pilot in an upcoming expedition to the Titanic.

“It’s the operations crew, I don’t trust them,” Nissen told the investigators. “I didn’t trust Stockton either. You can take a look at where we started when I was hired. Nothing I got was the truth.”

Nissen’s testimony, which focused on the design, building, and testing of OceanGate’s first carbon fiber submersible, was a dramatic start to nearly two weeks of public testimony in the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation’s hearings into the fatal June 2023 implosion of the Titan. Its five occupants, including Rush, all likely died instantly.

Before Nissen took the stand, the Coast Guard presented a detailed timeline of OceanGate as a company, the development of the Titan submersible, and its trips to the wreck of the Titanic, resting nearly 3,800 meters down in the north Atlantic. These slides revealed new information, including over 100 instances of equipment failures and incidents on the Titan’s trips in 2021 and 2022. An animated timeline of the final few hours of the Titan also included the final text messages sent by people on the sub. One sent at about 2,400 meters depth read “all good here.” The last message, sent as the sub slowed its descent at nearly 3,400 meters, read “dropped two wts.”

The Coast Guard also confirmed reports that the experimental carbon fiber sub had been stored in an outdoor parking lot in temperatures as low as 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (–17 Celsius) in the run-up to last year’s Titanic missions. Some engineers worried that water freezing in or near the carbon fiber could expand and cause defects in the material.

Nissen said that almost from when he joined OceanGate in 2016, Rush kept changing the company’s direction. A move to certify the vessel with an independent third party fell by the wayside, as did plans to test more scale models of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull when one failed early under pressure. Rush then downgraded titanium components to save money and time. “It was death by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recalls.

He faced tough questioning about OceanGate’s choice of carbon fiber for a hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system to provide an early warning of failure. One investigator raised WIRED’s reporting that an outside expert Nissen hired to assess the acoustic system later had misgivings about Rush’s understanding of its limitations.

“Given the time and constraints we had,” Nissen said, “we did all the testing and brought in every expert we could find. We built it like an aircraft.”

Nissen walked the Coast Guard board through deep-water testing in the Bahamas in 2018, during which he says the sub was struck by lightning. Measurements on the Titan’s hull later showed that it was flexing beyond its calculated safety factor. When a pilot subsequently found a crack in the hull, Nissen said, he wouldn’t sign off on another dive. “I killed it,” he testified. “The hull is done.” Nissen was subsequently fired.

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September 17, 2024
The Coast Guard’s OceanGate Hearings Start Next Week—but Key Witnesses Won’t Appear

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On Monday, September 16, the US Coast Guard is convening a Marine Board of Investigation hearing into the loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible in June 2023 and the deaths of the five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. It intends to use the two-week livestreamed hearing in Charleston, South Carolina, to help it determine the cause of sub’s implosion, if incompetence or negligence was involved, and whether any laws were broken. It could then refer the matter to criminal prosecutors and make recommendations to improve marine safety.

It hopes to do all that without publicly hearing from most of OceanGate’s remaining executives or Rush’s wife Wendy, who sometimes took a leading role during Stockton’s dives. Nor will the investigation include public testimony from any of the companies that designed and built the Titan’s innovative carbon fiber hulls, or any of the senior operations staff who prepared, maintained, or supported the Titan on its 2023 expedition.

In fact, it seems few of the 24 witnesses subpoenaed were even on board the Titan’s support vessel, the Polar Prince, for the final mission: Renata Rojas, an unpaid volunteer, and Tym Catterson, a contractor with experience of piloting submersibles.

Anonymous sources close to the investigation but not authorized to talk with the media told WIRED that the Coast Guard had approached some contemporary OceanGate staff and executives, and third-party suppliers, but was told that if compelled to appear they would assert their Fifth Amendment rights. That means that they could refuse to testify on the grounds that their responses might incriminate them or expose them to legal risk.

WIRED approached OceanGate and the hull manufacturers for comment. A lawyer for Janicki Industries, which cured and machined a portion of the hull, wrote that it was not participating in the hearings. WIRED did not receive replies from the others before publication.

There was speculation that former US Coast Guard rear admiral John Lockwood, who joined OceanGate’s board in 2013, would testify, but he is also missing from the list.

The absence of people who would appear to have relevant knowledge has caused consternation among former OceanGate employees and marine experts, who are skeptical that the full story of the Titan’s demise can be told without them.

“Personally, if I was in the Coast Guard, I’d bring them in and make them take the Fifth,” says Alton J. Hall Jr., a maritime lawyer. “They do have subpoena power, so I’m not really sure why they’re not.”

Melissa Leake, a Coast Guard public information officer and its deputy public affairs officer for the Atlantic area, noted that the Coast Guard does not comment on reasons for not calling specific witnesses. However, she denied that the Coast Guard did not subpoena certain individuals or organizations because they would plead the Fifth.

What the board has is a wealth of digital and physical evidence, such as data from previous dives and wreckage of the Titan recovered from the Atlantic seafloor, including some of its carbon fiber hull. One of the expert witnesses being called is a materials engineer from the National Transportation Safety Board’s Materials Laboratory.

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September 13, 2024
Another extreme low for Antarctic sea ice signals a permanent shift

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Sea ice in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica

Sergio Pitamitz/VWPics/Alamy

For the second year in a row, Antarctic sea ice has reached near-record low levels. This reinforces concerns that human-caused climate change has initiated a lasting “regime shift” in the amount of ice that forms in the Southern Ocean each year.

“Last year we were talking about whether Antarctic sea ice is undergoing a regime shift. Not anymore,” says Edward Doddridge at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Australia. “Antarctica has pretty definitively answered that question for us. Now we are talking about what the impacts of that…

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September 12, 2024
A Rare Coincidence of La Niña Events Will Weaken Hurricane Season

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While much weaker than their Pacific counterpart, Atlantic Niñas can, however, partially counteract La Niñas by weakening summer winds that help drive the upwelling that cools the eastern Pacific.

Why Are Both Happening Now?

In July and August 2024, meteorologists noted cooling that appeared to be the development of an Atlantic Niña along the equator. The winds at the ocean surface had been weak through most of the summer, and sea surface temperatures there were quite warm until early June, so signs of an Atlantic Niña emerging were a surprise.

At the same time, waters along the equator in the eastern Pacific were also cooling, with La Niña conditions expected there by October or November.

A map of sea surface temperature anomalies shows cooling along the tropical Atlantic and eastern Pacific regions, but much warmer than average temperatures in the Caribbean.

Photograph: NOAA Coral Reef Watch

Getting a Pacific-Atlantic Niña combination is rare but not impossible. It’s like finding two different pendulums that are weakly coupled to swing in opposite directions moving together in time. The combinations of La Niña and Atlantic Niño, or El Niño and Atlantic Niña are more common.

Good News or Bad for Hurricane Season?

An Atlantic Niña may initially suggest good news for those living in hurricane-prone areas.

Cooler than average waters off the coast of Africa can suppress the formation of African easterly waves. These are clusters of thunderstorm activity that can form into tropical disturbances and eventually tropical storms or hurricanes.

Tropical storms draw energy from the process of evaporating water associated with warm sea surface temperatures. So, cooling in the tropical Atlantic could weaken this process. That would leave less energy for the thunderstorms, which would reduce the probability of a tropical cyclone forming.

However, the NOAA takes all factors into account when it updates its Atlantic hurricane season outlook, released in early August, and it still anticipates an extremely active 2024 season. Tropical storm season typically peaks in early to mid-September.

Two reasons are behind the busy forecast: The near record-breaking warm sea surface temperatures in much of the North Atlantic can strengthen hurricanes. And the expected development of a La Niña in the Pacific tends to weaken wind shear—the change in wind speed with height that can tear apart hurricanes. La Niña’s much stronger effects can override any impacts associated with the Atlantic Niña.

Exacerbating the Problem: Global Warming

The past two years have seen exceptionally high ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and around much of the world’s oceans. The two Niñas are likely to contribute some cooling relief for certain regions, but it may not last long.

In addition to these cycles, the global warming trend caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions is raising the baseline temperatures and can fuel major hurricanes.

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August 31, 2024
How a viral video made turtles the face of the ocean plastic crisis

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Nine years ago, in August 2015, Christine Figgener posted a video of her team removing a plastic straw from the nostril of a turtle. It went viral.

Christine is a friend of mine and fellow marine biologist. We have both conducted sea turtle research off the coast of Costa Rica, where her video was captured. It is emotional and disturbing – but for us this sort of occurrence is common. We regularly find turtles entangled in fishing gear, and I have seen turtles’ insides filled with plastic. What surprised all of us was how impactful the video would prove to be.…

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August 28, 2024
OceanXplorers review: James Cameron’s new ocean-life series is try-hard but effective

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The OceanXplorer team work together to tag a Greenland shark

Mario Tadinac/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

OceanXplorers
National Geographic
Disney+

With the prominent X in the middle of its title, OceanXplorers sounds like something from the 1990s trend of making “extreme” versions of familiar things to draw in younger people.

Host and executive producer James Cameron adds to that feel as he opens each episode of the documentary series by touting the “kick-ass team of insanely talented specialists” who work on “the most technologically advanced research vessel ever built” – like they are the stars of a Mission: Impossible movie. Of the four…

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August 28, 2024
Bayesian Yacht Sinking: Climate Change Created Perfect Storm for

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The waterspout blamed for the deadly sinking of a luxury superyacht carrying the British tech billionaire Mike Lynch in Italy has been called a freak “black swan” event. But scientists believe this kind of marine tornado is becoming more common with global warming.

While the cause of the sinking of the Bayesian hasn’t officially been determined, weather conditions and witness reports from Sicily, where the yacht was anchored off the coast, have led experts to suspect a waterspout, a whirling column of air and water mist. The key factor for waterspout formation is warm water—and the past year has seen the ocean surface heat up to record-breaking temperatures, in part due to climate change.

“If this rate of warming is going to be continuing in the future, it’s very possible these phenomena will be common and not rare,” says Michalis Sioutas, a meteorology PhD who studies waterspouts in Greece and is a board member of the Hellenic Meteorological Society. “It’s very possible to talk about waterspouts or even tornadoes and extreme storms becoming common.”

The 180-foot Bayesian sank in a matter of minutes after a sudden storm with strong winds and intense lightning snapped its mast around 4 am on Monday. Fifteen people who had been aboard were rescued, and one person was found dead. Six people are missing, including British tech billionaire Mike Lynch, who was recently cleared of fraud charges over the sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard. On Wednesday, the bodies of five people were recovered from the sunken ship but have yet to be identified.

Fishermen saw a waterspout near the yacht shortly before it sank, and a nearby schooner was tossed about by what its captain, Karsten Borner, called a “hurricane gust,” which he believes capsized the Bayesian. Experts have said the conditions were ripe for a waterspout.

This extreme weather phenomenon occurs when warm, moist air rises rapidly over water, spinning as winds change direction at different heights. The result is a long, bending funnel of spray between the water and the clouds, tapering off as it rises as much as 10,000 feet into the heavens.

It comes in two flavors. The more vanilla kind is a fair weather waterspout, which forms in relatively calm and even sunny conditions, often under a billowy cumulus cloud. It happens more often in places like the Great Lakes and the Florida Keys, reaches wind speeds of 50 miles per hour, and usually breaks up before it can cause significant damage.

Then there are severe waterspouts, essentially tornadoes over water, which “are another beast” entirely, according to Wade Szilagyi, a retired forecaster at the Meteorological Service of Canada who now directs the International Center for Waterspout Research. These tornadic waterspouts can move from land to water, or vice versa, and twist at 125 miles per hour or more. They’ve been known to throw debris, rip apart buildings, and overturn boats.

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August 21, 2024