Today it is an economic and even geopolitical necessity for oil companies, in order to maintain pipelines and offshore rigs, to send divers routinely to depths of a thousand feet, and keep them at that level of compression for as long as a month at a time. The divers who do this work are almost entirely male, and tend to be between the ages of twenty-five and forty. Were they any younger, they would not have enough experience or seniority to perform such demanding tasks. Any older, and their bodies could not be trusted to withstand the trauma. The term for these extended-length descents is “saturation diving,” which refers to the fact that the diver’s tissues have absorbed the maximum amount of inert gas possible.
posted by jason's_planet
on Jan 19, 2013 -
19 comments
"The word reclaim came up more than once to describe the rising tide. It is a revealing word, more narrative than simply descriptive: it hints at some larger backstory, some plot twist in a longer saga about our claims and the water’s counterclaims to the earth.… This story was already ancient when it was adapted for the biblical text—which is to say, it records a very old fear. Like all old fears, it has the uncanny feel of a vivid memory. It may be a memory of an actual flood in an actual Sumerian city, Shurrupal, ca 2800 B.C.E. In fact, it may be even older than that."
posted by the mad poster!
on Nov 13, 2012 -
21 comments
Maritime Monday. (No NSFW images in this link, but some weeks there will be a random picture or two of a topless mer-person or sailor.)
posted by resurrexit
on Jul 30, 2012 -
11 comments
Spanning one-ninth of the earth's circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exchange. These extensive connections were sustained by premodern transportation and communication technologies that relied on energy generated by human and animal bodies, winds, and currents. Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.
For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.
posted by Blasdelb
on May 11, 2012 -
57 comments
In 1984,
The Voyage of the Mimi set sail on PBS, exploring the ocean off the coast of Massachusetts to study humpback whales. The educational series was made up of thirteen episodes intended to teach middle schoolers about science and math. The first fifteen minutes of each episode were a fictional adventure starring a young Ben Affleck. The second 15 minutes were an "expedition documentary" that would explore the scientific concepts behind the show's plot points. A sequel with the same format,
The Second Voyage of the Mimi aired in 1988, and featured the crew of the Mimi exploring Mayan ruins in Mexico.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 9, 2012 -
36 comments
The BBC has produced a fabulous infographic showing the ocean zones: Sunlight, Twilight, Midnight, Lower Midnight, and The Trenches. The page also includes videos showing: what happens to material at 100, 1000, and 10,000 meters down; the animals living in the Abyssal Plains (described in a lovely Scottish accent); and the story of Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh going down to the Mariana Trench in 1960. No one has been back there since, but
director James Cameron and
Richard Branson are among the contenders who are going to make a go of it. (Rumour has it that Cameron intends to be the sole person in the sub, while Branson is just financing a team.) Meanwhile,
the Doer team (backed by Eric Schmidt of Google), says it's all about the science and not just being first in this century's race. And there's even
a yellow submarine for the rest of us, if by "rest of us" one means "has $250,000 to spare for a single trip".
Don't forget to click the links at the top of the infographic page to see everything.
posted by maudlin
on Feb 24, 2012 -
17 comments
Like a "modern-day pirate," 75-year-old Ray Ives has been diving for sunken treasure for decades. Wearing an ancient, bronze-helmeted diving suit, he searches the ocean floor and keeps a huge collection of marine salvage (including antique cannon balls, 'bottles, bells, swords, portholes and diving gear') in a shipping container "museum" at a British marina.
Ray: A Life Underwater:
Vimeo /
YouTube. (A short film documentary.)
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 23, 2011 -
5 comments
Saving Valentina. A group of five friends out boating on the Sea of Cortez discovered a young humpback
whale entangled in fishing net and possibly near death. After about an hour of hard work they were able to free the whale, who proceeded to put on an amazing show for her rescuers.
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Jul 14, 2011 -
43 comments
Here Be Monsters. "Three friends, on a drunken dare, set out in a dinghy for a nearby island. But when the gas ran out and they drifted into barren waters, their biggest threat wasn't the water or the ocean—it was each other."
[more inside]
posted by joannemullen
on May 10, 2011 -
49 comments
Obituaries editors probably belong by the sea. The cries of seagulls are their music, fading into infinity, and the light-filled sky bursts open like a gateway out of the world. The elderly gravitate there, shuffling in cheerful pairs along Marine Parade or jogging in slow motion past the Sea Gull Café, intent on some distant goal. Their skin is weathered and tanned, as if they have fossilised themselves in ozone to keep death at bay. They wear bright trainers, young clothes. But they have shifted to the shore here, or in Bexhill, or in Eastbourne, as if to the edge of life, and each flapping deck-chair reserves a waiting-place.
Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of The Economist, muses on mortality and the sea in the latest
correspondent's diary, a series of articles by various Economist writers. You can read the magazine's obituaries
here, including a recent one of former obituaries editor
Keith Colquhoun.
[Ann Wroe previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 24, 2010 -
8 comments
Paul Watson's
Sea Shepard Crew is at again. On the 6th Jan 2010, the Ady Gill, a $2M dollar high speed catameran
was sunk after a collision (video + story) with a Japanese whaling ship in the antartic.
Now, the former captain of the Ady Gill
is being detained (video+story) on the exact same whaling ship after using a jet ski and cover of darkness to climb aboard and present the Japanese with a civilian arrest warrant and $2M dollar demand for damages.
Diplomatic crisis builds as governments are unsure what will happen to Mr. Bethune. He may face piracy charges in Japan.
posted by Funmonkey1
on Feb 15, 2010 -
131 comments
Long before Chelsea Piers was a sporting complex and the South Street Seaport a mall, the city was lined with active piers. The city's residents were amply employed by the shipping trade, but containerization needed more land than would ever be available in the city: Massive ports sprouted in Elizabeth and Newark, and ships disappeared from the city. Efficient cranes replaced longshoremen, and the time in port for ships shrank from about a week to about a day.
"The technology changed the geography," says William Fensterer, a chaplain who has been with SIH almost since its new building opened in 1964. "It doesn't look like On the Waterfront anymore," he adds. When he started out, he says, he would wander on foot from pier to pier in Manhattan and Brooklyn and board ships, with nary a guard in site. But those piers have largely vanished.
And along with them, the seafarer, once ubiquitous in New York, has become invisible.
posted by jason's_planet
on Dec 18, 2009 -
14 comments
Stan Hugill, often known as "
The Last Shantyman," authored a
book called
Shanties From the Seven Seas, based on his own work experiences in the last days of sail. Influential in the folk revival, the book is one of the most important written sources for music sung aboard ships in the 19th and early 20th century,
the "Bible" of sea music. Decades of chanteying in pubs and at festivals have kept many of the songs alive, but in most cases they've strayed stylistically from the verses and versions Hugill collected, or dropped out of popularity entirely. Now,
one musician is returning to the source and creating a new audio archive for the original versions of the songs as written, by
singing through the more than 400 songs in the book, one song each week, and posting the songs on YouTube, with commentary.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Jun 15, 2009 -
28 comments
In 2009,
a remarkably gifted politician, confronting a remarkably difficult set of challenges, will
have to learn to say "No we can't",
Guantánamo will prove a moral minefield,
economic recovery will be invisible to the naked eye,
governments must prepare for the day they stop financial guarantees,
we will judge our commitment to sustainability,
scientists should research the causes of religion,
we will all be potential online paparazzi,
English will have more words than any other language (but it's meaningless),
Afghanistan will see a surge of Western (read: American) troops,
Iran will continue its nuclear quest while
diplomacy lies in shambles,
the sea floor is the new frontier,
we should rethink aging,
(non-)voters will continue to thwart the European project --
but cheap travel will continue to buoy it --
though it has some unfinished business to attend to, and
a Nordic defence bond will blossom.
The Economist: The World in 2009.
[more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Nov 27, 2008 -
31 comments
Soviet Music "You are browsing a resource which is devoted first of all to the history and culture of the Soviet Union, the country which the West for a long time usually named as "The Empire of Evil", the country to which some people in the West perceive as "something big and snowy".
I offer you to try to look outside the frames of usual stereotypes, to try to understand life of a unique country, with its interesting history, beautiful culture and miraculous relations between people.
The music submitted on this site - is an evident sample of a totally new culture, which completely differs from all that, with what Hollywood and MTV supply us so much. This culture, being free from the cult of money, platitude, violence and sex, was urged to not indulge low bents of a human soul but to help the person to become culturally enriched and to grow above himself."
[more inside]
posted by tellurian
on Sep 23, 2008 -
16 comments
