It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, September 07, 2021
Australia’s New Antarctic Research Vessel Delivered
Nuyina departing the Netherlands for her first voyage to Australia (Damen)
The world’s newest and one of the most advanced Antarctic research vessels completed construction and commenced her delivery run from Northern Europe to Australia last week. The new ASRV (Antarctic Supply Research Vessel) Nuyina, (a Tasmanian Aboriginal word for southern lights) sailed from Damen Vlissingen in the Netherlands for a seven-week voyage to Hobart, Tasmania, where she will be commissioned.
Along with other new research vessels, including the UK’s Sir David Attenborough, the Nuyina joins an elite class of next generation vessels. Her mission will include the resupply of Antarctic stations and research campaigns, scientific research, icebreaking, transport, disaster relief, evacuation, and patrol duties.
“It’s a monumental occasion,” added Gerry O’Doherty, Master of ASRV Nuyina. “It’s been custom designed and built for the Australian Antarctic Program and it’s really special. It’s day one of a thirty or possibly forty-year lifespan! We're going to be able to do so much with it, and I just want to wish all those scientists and crew who will be working on it all the best for the future. Everyone involved in this project can take great pride in their contribution to the development of a vessel that has set a new world benchmark in polar science capability.”
Measuring 525 feet in length, and displacing 24,000 tons, the Nuyina represents a A$1.9 billion (US$1.4 billion) commitment to the country’s ongoing Antarctic research. She replaces an older vessel that was retired before the 2021 research season. The new vessel has a range of 16,000 nautical miles operating at 12 knots and an ice-breaking capability of 1.65 meters at 3 knots.
The vessel is designed to accommodate a crew of 32 plus up to 116 on the research team and will carry a doctor on missions lasting up to 90 days. The design incorporates innovative systems to reduce the environmental impact of the ASRV Nuyina. On board research facilities include science laboratories and offices, a wet well and ultra-pure seawater systems, plus meteorological and air chemistry labs. Accommodations for the crew and researchers also include a dining area, lounges, a theater, a fitness center, and yoga and medical suites.
According to Damen Shipyards Group, which was responsible for the vessel’s construction, the project was a multi-national effort involving the Australian Antarctic Division, the vessel operator Serco, Danish concept designers Knud E. Hansen, Damen’s engineering and detailed design teams in the Netherlands, and the construction team at Damen Shipyards Galati in Romania. In total, over 120 Dutch companies were involved in the project as well as a range of Australian companies.
Pacesetters of WWII: The First Female Physicians in the U.S. Navy
In 1917, at the height of World War I, the American Women’s Hospital Service (AWHS) began advocating for changes to allow female physicians to receive military commissions after they were excluded from service in the reserves of the armed forces. In 1939, the possibility that another war might engulf their country prompted female physicians to rally again for the right to serve. In December 1941, the director of the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA) sent resolutions to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking that female physicians be admitted on an equal basis with men in the Medical Reserve Corps of the Army and Navy.
On 30 July 1942, President Roosevelt formally authorized the creation of the Women’s Reserve of the U.S. Naval Reserve, known as the WAVES (Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency Service). Women were allowed to join their own branch of the reserves; however, there were restrictions. For example, they were restricted to duty within the continental United States. The establishment of the WAVES allowed female physicians to be assigned to the care of the women who served, but these commissions were within an auxiliary force rather than as part of the service.
In 1942 and 1943, Dr. Emily D. Barringer, president of the AMWA, served as the chair on a special committee to lobby Congress specifically for the appointment of female physicians and surgeons to the Medical Corps of the Army and the Navy. In April 1943, the Sparkman Johnson Act was passed to allow women to receive temporary commissions in the Navy, Army, and Public Health Service. During the remaining years of World War II, fifty-seven women received temporary commissions in the U.S. Naval Medical Corps.
Lieutenant (j.g.) Cornelia J. Gaskill, Lieutenant (j.g.) Achsa M. Bean, and Lieutenant Commander Hulda E. Thelander were the first three women to receive their commissions in the U.S. Navy.
Lieutenant (j.g.) Cornelia Jane Gaskill
Dr. Cornelia Jane Gaskill received her commission as a Lieutenant (j.g.) in the Women’s Reserve on 1 September 1942. She was a 1937 graduate of Cornell University School of Medicine.
In same month that she applied to the Women’s Reserve, she married to First Lieutenant William H. Sternberg in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Despite the restrictions on married women serving in the Women’s Reserve, she remained on active duty because her husband was a military physician in the U.S. Army Medical Corps rather than the U.S. Navy.
Upon accepting her commission in the auxiliary service, Lieutenant Gaskill left her practice in New York City to begin her training. In January 1943, Lieutenant Gaskill began her indoctrination course at Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.
As a specialist in gynecology and obstetrics, she was based with a group of reserve officer candidates at Mount Holyoke College, where she served as the physician for all 350 girls in training at the college. She left the service in 1944 following her assignment to the school, and after the war, she joined the faculty at Tulane Medical School in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Lieutenant Commander Achsa Mabel Bean
Achsa M. Bean graduated from the University of Maine in 1922 and attended medical school at the University of Rochester. She was one of three women in her class when she graduated in 1936. Prior to the start of World War II, she was hired at Vassar College.
When war broke out, she volunteered for the American Red Cross at the age of 42, responding to a request from the British Emergency Medical Service. In February 1942, she left for England with her friend, Barbara Stimson, to serve overseas. Her service in England and her full commission as a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps were cited in 1943 by Dr. Emily Barringer in her advocacy for the appointment of female physicians and surgeons in the armed forces of the United States.
When Dr. Bean returned to the United States in the fall of 1942, she wrote of her satisfaction with her experience in England and her contributions to the war effort overseas. In a letter to Dr. Esther Lovejoy, past president of the Medical Women’s International Association and director of the American Women's Hospital Service (AWHS), expressing appreciation for her experience overseas and her hope that she could be of service to her own country.
In an interview with the Vassar College newspaper, she said she joined because “I couldn’t stand us – that is, America as a whole, because we were so untouched by the war, and complained so much.” After her experiences in London, she refused to stand on the sidelines, and she spoke often of an increased sense of social responsibility.
After being granted a commission as a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps while serving in England, Dr. Bean refused to accept anything less than a commission as an officer. She wrote of her experience overseas as proof that female physicians were capable of standing side-by-side with their male counterparts. Upon accepting an internship at the National Naval Medical Center in 1943, the newly appointed Lieutenant (j.g.) Bean was careful to distinguish that she had “not joined the WAVES,” but she had received a “lieutenantship in the United States Naval Reserve.”
Dr. Bean was aware that women were not yet allowed to enroll in the Naval Medical Corps, but she was hopeful that the change was coming when she reported for duty at Bethesda on 14 February 1943. She was initially put in charge of the dispensary at the Women’s Naval Training School, Hunter College, in the Bronx, New York City. In an interview with the Poughkeepsie Journal, Lieutenant Bean was excited to serve her country, but hopeful that legislation would soon be passed to allow women to serve overseas. In 1944, she was promoted to lieutenant commander and sent to Pearl Harbor to serve as senior medical officer of the Women’s Naval Reserve for the 14th Naval District.
After her discharge in December 1945, Dr. Bean returned to her position as a professor of hygiene at Vassar College. She often gave talks on campus to increase student awareness of the toll that the war had taken on people all over the world. She was a strong advocate for the American Red Cross, often writing articles for the campus newspaper about the importance of this organization to show student awareness for global health concerns. In June 1946, she became the Vassar College physician. She continued to travel often to observe different clinics and hospital operations in New York and overseas, and share her own experiences until her retirement.
Commander Hulda Evelyn Thelander
Hulda E. Thelander was born to Swedish immigrants in Little Falls, Minnesota. She graduated from University of Minnesota with her undergraduate degree and completed her medical training at the same institution. She worked as a medical missionary to China from 1926 to 1927 before returning to the United States. After her return, she established her practice at the Children’s Hospital in San Francisco before the outbreak of World War II.
When Dr. Thelander was commissioned on 29 March 1944 as a lieutenant commander, she was the first female physician to receive a commission with a rank higher than lieutenant. Although her specialty was pediatrics, her experience in contagious diseases and her medical degree were in demand.
Dr. Thelander was assigned to report for service with the U.S. Marine Corps in San Francisco on 29 March 1944. In an interview many years later at the University of California, she said that "it was a strange feeling to don a uniform and walk down the streets of your home town and be saluted . . . I rather liked my uniform." Lieutenant Commander Thelander gave lectures to the women assigned to the Marines in the bases on the West Coast about what she called the “Birds, Bees, and Wolves” in an effort to prevent further increases in pregnant women in service. After the end of the war, she was honorably discharged in 5 December 1945.
After the war, Dr. Thelander continued to serve in the reserves as a consultant to female veterans until her retirement in 1953. She went back to a successful career as a pediatrician and became an authority on birth defects. In 1951, she became Chief of Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. She taught at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Stanford Medical School.
She continued to expand her understanding of the field of medicine and her education as an advocate for women’s rights. In 1952, she joined another female doctor, Dr. Helen B. Weyrauch, in a study of 230 female physicians, both married and unmarried, to assess their contributions to the field. They found that women who were married had two jobs, and their primary job was not their role as a physician.
Among the awards she received for her tireless efforts, Dr. Thelander was honored with the International Humanitarian Award for her work with children with debilitating disorders. In 1968, she received an honorary doctorate of law degree (L.L.D) from the University of California at Berkeley. Before her retirement from her civilian career, she served as the director for the Child Development Center, Children’s Hospital of San Francisco.
Kati A. Engel is an editor and writer with NHHC's Communication and Outreach Division.
This article appears courtesy of NHHC and is reproduced here in an abbreviated form. The original may be found here.
Part II: Fish Farming is Feeding the World, But at What Cost?
In September 2019, Gambian lawmakers gathered in the stately but neglected hall of the National Assembly for an annual meeting, where James Gomez, minister of the country’s fisheries and water resources, insisted that “Gambian fisheries are thriving. ” Industrial fishing boats and plants represent the largest employer of Gambians in the country, including hundreds of deckhands, factory workers, truck drivers, and industry regulators. When a lawmaker asked him about the criticisms of the three fish-meal plants, including their voracious consumption of bonga, Gomez refused to engage. “Boats are not taking more than a sustainable amount,” he said, adding that Gambian waters even have enough fish to sustain two more plants.
Under the best circumstances, estimating the health of a nation’s fish stock is a murky science. Marine researchers like to say that counting fish is like counting trees, except they’re mostly invisible—below the surface—and constantly moving. Ad Corten, a Dutch fishing biologist, told me that the task is even tougher in a place like West Africa, where countries lack the funding to properly analyze their stocks. The only reliable assessments of fish stocks in the area have focussed on Mauritania, Corten said, and they show a sharp decline driven by the fish-meal industry. “Gambia is the worst of them all,” he said, noting that the fisheries ministry barely tracks how many fish are caught by licensed ships, much less the unlicensed ones. As fish stocks have been depleted, many wealthier nations have increased their marine policing, often by stepping up port inspections, imposing steep fines for violations, and using satellites to spot illicit activity at sea. They also have required industrial boats to carry mandatory observers and to install monitoring devices onboard. But Gambia, like many poorer countries, has historically lacked the political will, technical skill, and financial capacity to exert its authority offshore.
Still, though it has no police boats of its own, Gambia is trying to better protect its waters. In August 2019, I joined a secret patrol that the fisheries agency was conducting with the help of an international ocean conservation group called Sea Shepherd, which had brought—as surreptitiously as it could—a one-hundred-and-eighty-four-foot ship called the Sam Simon into the area. It’s equipped with extra fuel capacity, to allow for long patrols, and a doubly reinforced steel hull for ramming into other boats.
In Gambia, the nine miles of water closest to the shore have been reserved for local fishermen, but on any given day dozens of foreign trawlers are visible from the beach. Sea Shepherd’s mission was to find and board trespassers, or other vessels engaged in prohibited behaviors, such as shark finning or netting juvenile fish. In the past few years, the group has worked with African governments in Gabon, Liberia, Tanzania, Benin, and Namibia to conduct similar patrols. Some fisheries experts have criticized these collaborations as publicity stunts, but they have led to the arrest of more than fifty illegal fishing ships.
Barely a dozen local government officials had been informed about the Sea Shepherd mission. To avoid being spotted by fishermen, the group brought in several small speed boats at night and used them to spirit a dozen heavily armed Gambian Navy and fisheries officers out to the Sam Simon. We were joined on the patrol by two gruff private-security contractors from Israel, who were training the Gambian officers in military procedures for boarding ships. While we waited on the moonlit deck, one of the Gambian guards, dressed in a crisp blue-and-white camouflage uniform, showed me a music video on his phone by one of Gambia’s best-known rappers, ST Brikama Boyo. He translated the lyrics of a song, called “Fuwareyaa,” which means “poverty”: “People like us don’t have meat and the Chinese have taken our sea from us in Gunjur and now we don’t have fish.”
Three hours after we embarked, the foreign ships had all but vanished, in what appeared to be a coördinated flight from the forbidden waters. Sensing that word about the operation had gotten out, the Sam Simon’s captain changed plans. Instead of focussing on the smaller unlicensed ships close to land that were mostly from neighboring African countries, he would conduct surprise at-sea inspections of the fifty-five industrial ships that were licensed to be in Gambian waters. It was a bold move: marine officers would be boarding larger, well-financed ships, many of them with political connections in China and Gambia.
Less than an hour later, we pulled alongside the Lu Lao Yuan Yu 010, a hundred-and-thirty-four-foot electric-blue trawler streaked with rust, operated by a Chinese company called Qingdao Tangfeng Ocean Fishery, a company that supplies all three of Gambia’s fish-meal plants. A team of eight Gambian officers from the Sam Simon boarded the ship, AK-47s slung over their shoulders. One officer was so nervous that he forgot the bullhorn he was assigned to carry. Another officer’s sunglasses fell into the sea as he leaped onto the deck.
Copyright Fabio Nascimento / The Outlaw Ocean Project
Onboard the Lu Lao Yuan Yu 010 were seven Chinese officers and a crew of four Gambians and thirty-five Senegalese. The Gambian marine officers soon began grilling the ship’s captain, a short man named Shenzhong Qui who wore a shirt smeared with fish guts. Below deck, ten African crew members in yellow gloves and stained smocks stood shoulder to shoulder on either side of a conveyor belt, sorting bonga, mackerel, and whitefish into pans. Nearby, the floor-to-ceiling rows of freezers were barely cold. Roaches scurried up the walls and across the floor, where some fish had been stepped on and squashed.
I spoke to one of the workers who told me his name was Lamin Jarju and agreed to step away from the line to talk. Though no one could hear us above the deafening ca-thunk, ca-thunk of the conveyor, he lowered his voice before explaining that the ship had been fishing within the nine-mile zone until the captain received a radioed warning from nearby ships that a policing effort was under way.
When I asked Jarju why he was willing to reveal the ship’s violation, he said, “Follow me.” He led me up two levels to the roof of the wheel room, where the captain works. He showed me a large nest of crumpled newspapers, clothing, and blankets, where, he said, several crew members had been sleeping for the past several weeks, ever since the captain hired more workers than the ship could accommodate. “They treat us like dogs,” Jarju said.
When I returned to the deck, an argument was escalating. A Gambian Navy lieutenant named Modou Jallow had discovered that the ship’s fishing log book was blank. All captains are required to maintain log books and keep detailed diaries that document where they go, how long they work, what gear they use, and what they catch. The lieutenant had issued an arrest order for the infraction and was yelling in Chinese at Captain Qui, who was incandescent with rage. “No one keeps that!” he shouted.
He was not wrong. Paperwork violations are common, especially on fishing boats working along the coast of West Africa, where countries don’t always provide clear guidance about their rules. Fishing-boat captains tend to view log books as tools of bribe-seeking bureaucrats or as statistical cudgels of conservationists bent on closing fishing grounds.
But the lack of proper logs makes it almost impossible to determine how quickly Gambia’s waters are being depleted. Scientists rely on biological surveys, scientific modelling and mandatory reports from fish dealers on shore to assess fish stocks. And they use log books to determine fishing locations, depths, dates, gear descriptions, and “fishing effort”—how long nets or lines are in the water relative to the quantity of fish caught.
Jallow ordered the fishing Captain to steer his ship back to port, and the argument moved from the upper deck down to the engine room, where the Captain claimed he needed a few hours to fix a pipe—enough time, the Sam Simon crew suspected, for the Captain to contact his bosses in China and ask them to call in a favor with high-level Gambian officials. Jallow, sensing a stalling tactic, smacked the Captain in the face. “You will make the fix in an hour!” Jallow shouted, grabbing the Captain by the throat. “And I will watch you do it.” Twenty minutes later, the Lu Lao Yuan Yu 010 was en route to shore.
Over the next several weeks, the Sam Simon inspected fourteen foreign ships, most of them Chinese and licensed to fish in Gambian waters, and arrested thirteen of them. Under arrest, ships are typically detained in port for several weeks and fined anywhere from five thousand to fifty thousand dollars. All but one vessel was charged with lacking a proper fishing-log book, and many were also fined for improper living conditions and for violating a law that stipulates Gambians must comprise twenty per cent of shipping crews on industrial vessels in national waters. On one Chinese-owned vessel, there weren’t enough boots for the deckhands, and one Senegalese worker was pricked by a catfish whisker while wearing flip flops. His swollen foot, oozing from the puncture wound, looked like a rotting eggplant. On another ship, eight workers slept in a space meant for two, a four-foot-tall steel-sided compartment directly above the engine room and dangerously hot. When high waves crashed onboard, the water flooded the makeshift cabin, where, the workers said, an electrical power strip had twice almost electrocuted them.
Back in Banjul, one rainy afternoon I sought out Manneh, the local Gambian journalist and environmental advocate. We met in the white-tiled lobby of the Laico Atlantic hotel, decorated with fake potted plants and thick yellow drapes. Pachelbel’s Canon played in an endless loop in the background, accompanied by the plinking of water dripping from the ceiling into half a dozen buckets. Manneh had recently returned to Gambia after a year in Cyprus, where he had fled after his father and brother had been arrested for political activism against Yahya Jammeh, a brutal autocrat who was eventually forced from power in 2017. Manneh, who told me that he hoped to become President one day, offered to take me to the Golden Lead factory.
Copyright Fabio Nascimento / The Outlaw Ocean Project
The next day, Manneh returned in a Toyota Corolla he had hired for the difficult drive. Most of the road from the hotel to Golden Lead was dirt, which recent rains had turned into a treacherous slalom course of deep and almost impassable craters. The trip was about thirty miles, and took nearly two hours. Over the din of a missing muffler, he prepared me for the visit. “Cameras away,” he cautioned. “No saying anything critical about fish meal.” Just a week before my arrival that some of the same fishermen who had pulled up the plant’s wastewater pipe had apparently switched sides, attacking a team of European researchers who had come to photograph the facility, pelting them with rocks and rotten fish. Though they opposed the dumping and resented the export of their fish, some locals did not want foreign media publicizing Gambia’s problems.
We finally pulled up at the entrance of the plant, five hundred yards from the beach, behind a ten-foot wall of white corrugated metal. An acrid stench, like burning orange peels and rotting meat, assaulted us as soon as we got out of the car. Between the factory and the beach was a muddy patch of land, studded with palm trees and strewn with litter, where fishermen were repairing their boats in thatched-roof huts. The day’s catch lay on a set of folding tables, where women were cleaning, smoking, and drying it for sale. One of the women wore a hijab dripping wet from the surf. When I asked her about the catch, she shot me a dour look and tipped her basket toward me. It was barely half-full. “We can’t compete,” she said. Pointing at the factory, she added, “It all goes there.”
The Golden Lead plant consists of several football-field-size concrete buildings, and sixteen silos, where dried fish meal and chemicals were stored. Fish meal is relatively simple to make, and the process is highly mechanized, which means that plants the size of Golden Lead need only about a dozen men on the floor at any given time. Video footage clandestinely taken by a fishmeal worker inside Golden Lead reveals the plant is cavernous, dusty, hot, and dark. Sweating profusely, several men shovel shiny heaps of bonga into a steel funnel. A conveyor belt carries the fish into a vat, where a giant churning screw grinds it into a gooey paste, and then into a long cylindrical oven, where oil is extracted from the goo. The remaining substance is pulverized into a fine powder and dumped onto the floor in the middle of the warehouse, where it accumulates into a ten-foot-tall golden mound. After the powder cools, workers shovel it into fifty-kilogram plastic sacks stacked floor to ceiling. A shipping container holds four hundred bags, and the men fill roughly twenty to forty containers a day.
Near the entrance of Golden Lead, a dozen or so young men hustled from shore to plant with baskets on their heads, brimming with bonga. Nearby, standing under several gangly palm trees, a forty-two-year-old fisherman named Ebrima Jallow explained that the women pay more for a single basket, but Golden Lead buys in bulk and often pays for twenty baskets in advance—in cash. “The women can’t do that,” he said.
A few hundred yards away, Dawda Jack Jabang, the fifty-seven-year-old owner of the Treehouse Lodge, a deserted beachfront hotel and restaurant, stood in a side courtyard staring at the breaking waves. “I spent two good years working on this place,” he told me. “And overnight Golden Lead destroyed my life.” Hotel bookings have plummeted, and the plant’s odor at times is so noxious that patrons leave his restaurant before finishing their meal.
Golden Lead has hurt more than helped the local economy, Jabang said. But what about all of those young men hauling their baskets of fish to the factory? Jabang waved the question away dismissively: “This is not the employment we want. They’re turning us into donkeys and monkeys.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the tenuousness of this employment landscape, as well as its corruption. In May, many of the migrant workers on fishing crews returned home to celebrate Eid just as borders were closing down. With workers unable to return to Gambia and new lockdown measures in place, Golden Lead and other plants suspended operation.
Or they were supposed to. Manneh obtained secret recordings in which Bamba Banja, of the Ministry of Fisheries, discussed bribes in exchange for allowing factories to operate during the lockdown. In October, Banja took a leave of absence after a police investigation found that, between 2018 and 2020, he had accepted ten thousand dollars in bribes from Chinese fisherman and companies, including Golden Lead.
On the day that I visited Golden Lead, I made my way down to the sprawling beach. I found Golden Lead’s new wastewater pipe, which was about 12 inches in diameter, already rusted, corroded and only slightly visible above the mounds of sand. The Chinese flag was gone. Kneeling down, I felt liquid flowing through it. Within minutes, a Gambian guard appeared and ordered me to leave the area.
The next day I headed to the country’s only international airport, located an hour away from the capital, Banjul, to catch my flight home. My luggage was light now that I’d thrown away the putrid-smelling clothes from my trip to the fish-meal plant. At one point during the drive, as we negotiated pothole after pothole, my taxi driver vented his frustration. “This,” he said, gesturing ahead of us, “is the road the fishmeal plant promised to pave.”
At the airport, I discovered my flight had been delayed by a flock of buzzards and gulls blocking the only runway. Several years earlier, the Gambian government had built a landfill close by, and scavenger birds descended in droves. While I waited among a dozen German and Australian tourists, I called Mustapha Manneh. I reached him at home, in the town of Kartong, seven miles from Gunjur.
Manneh told me he was standing in his front yard, looking out on a litter-strewn highway that connects the JXYG factory, a Chinese fish-meal plant, to Gambia’s largest port, in Banjul. In the few minutes we had been talking, he said, he had watched ten tractor-trailer trucks rattle by, kicking up thick clouds of dust as they went, each hauling a forty-foot-long shipping container full of fish meal. From Banjul, those containers would depart for Asia, Europe, and the United States.
“Every day,” Manneh said, “it’s more.”
Ian Urbina is the director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington DC that focuses on environmental and human rights concerns at sea globally.
This article appears here courtesy of The Outlaw Ocean Project. Part I of this story may be found here.
Video: Salvors Complete Final Cut of Golden Ray Wreck Removal Project
Pollution prevention crews tend a boom next to the wreck of the Golden Ray (image courtesy St. Simons Sound Incident Response)
On Saturday, salvors completed the very last cut in the long-running Golden Ray wreck removal project. All that remains is to load out the last two segments of the hull and clean up the seabed, and the waters of St. Simons Sound, Georgia will have the same appearance as before the vessel's grounding.
The team finished cutting the last of the Golden Ray's wreck into two sections on Saturday and are now getting ready to lift and stow one of the last two segments onto a dry-dock barge. Once that process is complete, the final segment will be loaded and stowed on the deck barge Julie B. An extra dry-dock barge is still on site in case it is needed for the last segment.
The unified command has not reported any large-scale fuel oil spillage during this cutting evolution, but responders are still on hand in case another release should occur. During a previous cutting and hoisting operation in late July, an exensive bunker fuel spill prompted a public health warning and a large-scale shoreline cleanup effort involving about 80 responders.
The wreck removal project has taken far longer than initially expected. Salvors' early projections suggested that each cut would take 24 hours, but most took weeks or months. The extreme forces involved in the chain-cutting operation also added extra time between cuts for equipment repairs and repositioning. With additional delays - like a shutdown for a COVID-19 outbreak among the crew from July through September 2020, along with a major fire in May 2021 - the project is now entering its 19th month of site work.
Image courtesy St. Simons Sound Incident Response
The car carrier Golden Ray went aground and partially capsized in Georgia's St. Simons Sound on September 7, 2019. During an outbound transit in calm conditions, a routine turn to starboard turned into an uncontrolled runaway maneuver, ending with the vessel aground and resting on her side. Lt. Ian Oviatt, a staff engineer at the Coast Guard Marine Safety Center, told the NTSB that the vessel had taken on too little ballast for her cargo load. “The cause of the vessel capsizing was lack of righting energy due to the way the vessel was loaded,” Oviatt told an investigative panel last September. “The vessel could have taken on additional ballast to be in compliance.”
Majestic sequoia trees can live for thousands of years. Climate change could wipe them out
By Stephanie Elam, CNN
Almost everything about a sequoia tree is giant: It can grow to more than 200 feet tall and live longer than 3,000 years. Yet the sequoia's footprint is shrinking, as human-induced climate change threatens this ancient tree's survival.
Two giant sequoia trees stand shoulder to shoulder in the Alder Creek Grove, more than 500 acres purchased by Save the Redwoods League in 2019.
Sequoias were once found across the Northern Hemisphere, but today, they only naturally grow across the western slopes of the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.
So when the Castle Fire broke out in August 2020, and merged with another fire to tear through more than 174,000 acres over four months, the loss was something even experts didn't think possible -- somewhere between 7,500 to 10,600 mature giant sequoias were destroyed, according to a report by the National Park Service, published in June.
That's 10-14% of the entire world's population of mature sequoias -- a big chunk of history up in flames.
"They stood for a couple of thousand years before ancient Rome, before Christ," Clay Jordan, superintendent of Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, told CNN. "I mean, these trees were mature."
There are only around 48,000 acres of sequoia groves left in the world, and the trees are now facing threats from human-made climate change in several ways.
Scientists say that climate change is making wildfires more frequent and intense. Fires in June this year in the Western states would have been "virtually impossible" without human-made climate change, according to an analysis by more than two dozen scientists at the World Weather Attribution project.
The Castle Fire last year was started by lightning, but that doesn't mean climate change wasn't to blame -- a severe and extended drought in California had left vegetation extremely dry, turning it all into kindling, allowing fires here to burning hotter and longer.
Sam Hodder -- president and chief executive officer of Save the Redwoods League, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting coastal redwoods and giant sequoias -- explained that the threat is compounded by cedar bark beetles, which thrive in drier conditions.
"A giant sequoia that was weakened by drought was then subject to impacts by the bark beetle, which then further weakened the tree and made it more susceptible to mortality from fire," he said.
Hodder described the Castle Fire as something not witnessed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
"This was the first time that the fire got big and hot enough to get into the crowns of multiple giant sequoia and kill them," he said.
Sequoias have survived many a drought before, and even those that were spared from the Castle Fire are showing clear signs of stress. Christy Brigham, Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks' chief of resource management and science, said the trees were shedding their needles because it's too dry.
The trees have recovered from previous droughts, Brigham said, "but if climate change continues and droughts become more severe, they may not be able to survive." she said.
To know what these trees have survived, researchers turn to dendrochronology, the science of studying tree rings, which Clay Jordan refers to as the sequoias' "journals."
Biologists can look at those rings and work out when it might have been affected by fire or periods of drought. They sometimes shed light on how humans have threatened them.
"We know that, on average, a healthy forest would experience lightning strike fires about every 10 to 20 years and those fires would be low in intensity and would help burn up those excessive fuels -- keep the forest at a thin enough level so that the forest could thrive," Jordan said.
A raft of suppression measures that authorities have undertaken to reduce forest fires has in some cases made matters worse. Forests naturally need to burn to some degree, just typically at lower intensity than they do now. Those less powerful fires burn off just enough kindling to make forests less susceptible to more intense fires.
"Now those fires burn hot enough that they can get above the thick barks and into the crowns of these giant sequoias, where they are vulnerable," Jordan said, noting that fires are now burning at much higher intensities than they historically did.
'Burned up toothpicks'
When Brigham and her colleagues visited the site of the Castle Fire after it stopped, they discovered a scene of such lifelessness that she described it as a "moonscape."
"There were no seedlings. There were no needles. There were hardly any cones. Everything had been incinerated -- the entire canopies. It was a field of the world's largest burned up toothpicks," she said.
A couple of hours away by car stands Alder Creek Grove -- roughly 540 acres purchased by Save the Redwoods League at the end of 2019. On the day CNN visited, the sky was smoky and white, as yet another wildfire burned in the region. Among the charred and misshapen trees, some of the once-commanding giant sequoias had been reduced to short and spindly spires.
"Standing here, we've got at least a dozen dead giant sequoias. These trees were 1,500 to 3,000 years old," said Tim Borden, Save the Redwoods League's sequoia restoration and stewardship manager. "Their tree mortality rate for these trees annually was less than .01% and so in one year, in 2020, for us to see 10 to 14% of the total of giant sequoias alive killed in one year, in one fire? There's nothing to compare that to."
But patched between the peaks and valleys in the Sierra Nevada mountains, there are little saplings of hope. Down the ridge near where the monarch sequoias -- which are the older trees -- burned out, in an area where the fire wasn't so intense, a carpet of new life has taken root.
That's because after lower-intensity fires, sequoias can open up their cones and start to germinate, Hodder explained.
And there is hope, too, that people will value these trees -- and all of the planet's biodiversity -- enough to influence their governments to take bolder action on the climate crisis behind the sequoias' struggles.
During CNN's visit to the Sequoia National Park, schoolchildren and families flocked to up the winding road to see the world's largest tree, by volume. The General Sherman tree is stunning, a glorious monarch sequoia standing more than 275 feet tall and 36 feet wide. It's more than 2,300 years old.
Without an urgent response to the climate crisis and an improvement in forest maintenance, this tree, which has lived through the rise and fall of entire civilizations, could be lost in a single fire, like thousands of others in this forest were.
"They're among the most rare, the oldest, the biggest living species in the world," Hodder said.
"We don't have a moment to lose in getting these forests ready for our new reality."
A New York Institute of Technology physicist has secured a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in an attempt to solve one of science’s greatest mysteries: how the universe formed from stardust.
Many of the universe’s elements, including the calcium found in human bones and iron in skyscrapers, originated from ancient stars. However, scientists have long sought to understand the cosmic processes that formed other elements—those with undetermined origins. Now, Eve Armstrong, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics, will perform the first known research project that uses weather prediction techniques to explain these events. Her revolutionary work will be funded by a two-year $299,998 NSF EAGER grant, an award that supports early-stage exploratory projects on untested but potentially transformative ideas that could be considered "high risk/high payoff.”
While the Big Bang created the first and lightest elements (hydrogen and helium), the next and heavier elements (up to iron on the periodic table) formed later inside ancient, massive stars. When these stars exploded, their matter catapulted into space, seeding that space with elements. Eventually, stardust matter from these supernovae formed the sun and planets, and over billions of years, Earth’s matter coalesced into the first life forms. However, the origins of elements heavier than iron, such as gold and copper, remain unknown. While they may have formed during a supernova explosion, current computational techniques render it difficult to comprehensively study the physics of these events. In addition, supernovae are rare, occurring about once every 50 years, and the only existing data is from the last explosion in 1987.
Armstrong posits that a weather prediction technique called data assimilation may enhance understanding of these events. The technique relies on very limited information to sequentially estimate weather changes over time, which may make it conducive to modeling supernovae conditions. With simulated data, in preparation for the next supernova event, Armstrong and undergraduate New York Tech students will use data assimilation to predict whether the supernova environment could have given rise to some heavy elements. If successful, these “forecasts” may allow scientists to determine which elements formed from supernova stardust.
“Physicists have sought for years to understand how, in seconds, giant stars exploded and created the substances that led to our existence. A technique from another scientific field, meteorology, may help to explain an important piece of this puzzle that traditional tools render difficult to access,” says Armstrong.
The NSF is an independent agency of the U.S. government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. NSF funding accounts for approximately 27 percent of the total federal budget for basic research conducted at U.S. colleges and universities.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'S MAILMAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
IMAGE: COUPLES PARTICIPATE IN A WORKSHOP AS PART OF THE WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT STUDY IN IBADAN, NIGERIA.view more
CREDIT: WOMEN WORKING WITH PARTNERS
Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, led a randomized control trial in Ibadan, Nigeria, to evaluate educational programs to empower women by working with couples in three critical areas: spousal relations and financial and reproductive decision-making.
The researchers report an increase in household decision-making by women. The evidence was mixed among those randomized to participate in only one or two of the areas. The findings appear in the journal Development in Practice.
The researchers randomized more than 1,000 male-female domestic partners and married couples to take part in one of four arms with one or more weekly two-hour group education sessions: (1) sessions designed to impart a critical understanding of gender roles and norms, as well as relationship strengthening (2) sessions on gender socialization plus sessions on financial literacy and household budget management, (3) sessions on gender socialization and financial literacy plus couple counseling on family planning, and (4) a control group. All sessions were led by a facilitator and included individual and group activities, as well as role-play.
The researchers observed positive trends toward increases in women’s household decision-making and decisions regarding the use of husbands’ earnings in all three intervention arms, as compared to the control arm. However, the results were significant only in the arm that received all three interventions, and only marginally significant in the first and second arms. Financial decision-making scores significantly improved only in the second arm, were marginally significant in the first arm, and non-significant in the arm that received all three interventions. The researchers say additional qualitative research is needed to understand why the program worked in some decision-making domains versus others. Inconsistent findings might also be the result of the way results were measured in questionnaires
“The intervention appeared to be most successful in areas where women continue to be less active, such as general household and financial decisions, as well as decisions pertaining to the use of men’s earnings,” says senior author Neetu John, PhD, assistant professor of population and family health at Columbia Mailman School. “On the other hand, the intervention was less effective in areas where the trend may already be moving towards increased female or joint decision-making, such as reproductive decision-making and use of women’s earnings.”
Background
In Nigeria, despite increases in women’s education and participation in the formal economy, women continue to grapple with a patriarchal culture, which relegates their position within the household and limits their capacity to exercise choice and agency in their lives. Household division of labor continues to follow traditional gendered roles. The male partner is the decision-maker on important household and health matters like family spending and whether or when his partner can have children, and when she and her children can receive healthcare.
“Women’s empowerment is recognized as an important strategy to foster gender equality, which is linked to health and wellbeing. Our goal is to help women recognize and use resources in their own interest by challenging discriminatory gender and social norms, as well as by creating an enabling environment to foster this process by engaging their male partners,” says John.
The study’s first author is Funmilola M. OlaOlorun at the University of Ibadan.
The research is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
A couple-based gender transformative intervention to enhance women’s participation in household decision-making: results from a cluster randomised control trial in Ibadan, Nigeria
Dr. Cornelia Jane Gaskill received her commission as a Lieutenant (j.g.) in the Women’s Reserve on 1 September 1942. She was a 1937 graduate of Cornell University School of Medicine. 
Achsa M. Bean graduated from the University of Maine in 1922 and attended medical school at the University of Rochester. She was one of three women in her class when she graduated in 1936. Prior to the start of World War II, she was hired at Vassar College. 
Hulda E. Thelander was born to Swedish immigrants in Little Falls, Minnesota. She graduated from University of Minnesota with her undergraduate degree and completed her medical training at the same institution. She worked as a medical missionary to China from 1926 to 1927 before returning to the United States. After her return, she established her practice at the Children’s Hospital in San Francisco before the outbreak of World War II.
