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)
Efforts are underway to raise $1 million to help save a historic Great Lakes car ferry that is moored in Northern Michigan and whose preservation is under threat due to significant hull corrosion.
The Society for the Preservation of the S.S. City of Milwaukee says it’s hoping to raise the funds that will be used for the long term preservation of S.S. City of Milwaukee, a 1930-built steam-powered railroad car ferry that was instrumental in Michigan’s industrial revolution.
With a $1 million budget that will cover preparation, towing, shipyard services, and contingency for cost overruns, the aim is to have City of Milwaukee dry docked at the Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, for critical works. The project will mark the first time that the National Historic Landmark ship will be out of the water in 45 years.
The City of Milwaukee was the last of six sister ships designed in the 1920s and built by the Manitowoc Shipbuilding company out of Wisconsin. She was launched in 1931 to replace SS Milwaukee, which sank with all hands in October 1929 during a gale.
The ship had an illustrious career and is known as one of Michigan’s most important surviving links to the Great Lakes’ industrial and transportation history. She remains as the last unmodified traditional Great Lakes railroad car ferry in existence, making her the most complete surviving example of the once-critical industry.
For decades, City of Milwaukee and other ships like her were a critical extension of Michigan’s rail system, carrying entire freight trains, automobiles, and passengers across Lake Michigan and supporting manufacturing, agriculture, travel, and jobs in communities throughout the state. The steel-hulled ship had a carrying capacity of 30 to 32 fully loaded rail cars.
When the Grand Trunk Western Railroad ended car ferry operations in 1978, the importance of the industry was so clear that the State of Michigan purchased the City of Milwaukee and leased her to the Ann Arbor Railroad until 1981 in an effort to keep the car ferry system alive and protect a transportation network that was vital to the state’s economy.
Retired in 1982, City of Milwaukee is today preserved in Manistee, Michigan, where she serves as a museum ship, attracting thousands of visitors annually. The society responsible for the ship’s preservation says that like all historic ships, the City of Milwaukee requires care to survive. Currently, much of the ship’s steel hull lies below the waterline and cannot be fully inspected or repaired while afloat, which makes a trip to dry dock critical to allow the vessel to be lifted out of the water for preservation works.
While in dry dock, the underwater hull will be power-washed and sandblasted, all sea chests and underwater openings will be sealed, the propellers will be removed and stern tubes sealed, and the hull will receive two coats of a marine epoxy coating with an estimated service life of 25 years or more.
“Significant progress has been made to preserve the ship; however, securing the long-term integrity of her hull is the next and most critical step,” said The Society for the Preservation of the S.S. City of Milwaukee in a statement.
The society added that once the project is finished, City of Milwaukee will return to her current home in Manistee where she will continue attracting visitors, offering overnight stays and special events.
Monday, December 22, 2025
Pipe bombs and chicken nuggets: how fake news became ‘fact’
20 December, 2025 Left Foot Forward From Trump to Fox News, Johnson to Fleet Street, misinformation is not a series of isolated failures. It’s a business model, one that rewards outrage, punishes accuracy and treats the public not as citizens to be informed, but as audiences to be manipulated.
In what is the last RWW of the year (we’ll be back on January 10), takes us President Trump – no less – who has long styled himself as the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes ‘fake news.’ In January 2017, reacting to media scrutiny of an executive order, he declared: “The FAKE NEWS media … is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.”
Few outlets embody the very practices Trump decries more fully than Fox News. The network has faced decades of criticism for promoting conspiracy theories and demonstrably false claims, from climate change denial to Covid misinformation and lies about the 2020 election.
Studies have shown Fox viewers are more likely to hold factual misperceptions than consumers of other news sources, or even those who watch no news at all.
It was therefore richly ironic when Fox News itself inadvertently exposed the misinformation economy. Following the Justice Department’s recent announcement of the arrest of the man accused of planting pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican National Committee offices on January 5, 2021, Fox News’ host Sean Hannity interviewed Dan Bongino, deputy director of the FBI and formerly a prominent right-wing commentator. Bongino is a political ally of Trump, who, until he was appointed in a post typically occupied by a veteran FBI agent less than a year ago, had no prior experience at the FBI.
Hannity pressed Bongino on his past claims that the bombing was an “inside job” and part of a “massive cover-up.”
Bongino’s response was remarkably candid. “I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,” he said. “That’s clear. And one day, I’ll be back in that space. But that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”
In that moment, Bongino unintentionally laid bare the grift at the heart of the right-wing media ecosystem. Figures are financially rewarded for offering reckless speculation that flatters their audience’s views, with no accountability when those claims collapse. Opinions are monetised and the truth is optional.
Interestingly, Boningo announced this week that he will step down from his role as the FBI’s second-in-command. According to the New York Times, he suggested he would return to his former career as a pro-Trump podcaster and social-media personality, presumably once again earning a living by promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation.
If such a system has corroded American political discourse, the pressing question is whether Britain is immune. It is not.
A British tradition of manufactured scandal
What we now recognise as ‘fake news’ arguably entered British politics on October 29, 1924, when the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev letter, purportedly written by the head of the Communist International to encourage Labour to pursue revolutionary policies, triggering a political crisis that would change the course of history.
Labour suffered a crushing defeat and the Conservatives returned to power. Later investigations, including exhaustive archival work in the 1990s by foreign office historian Gill Bennett, concluded the letter was almost certainly forged by White Russian anti-Bolsheviks, likely with help from sympathetic figures in British intelligence.
One might have expected such a scandal to prompt lasting reforms in journalistic standards. Instead, it normalised distortion as both a political weapon and a profitable model.
As author Phil Tinline noted in the New Statesman, the Zinoviev affair established a template still in use today: “cultivate your lie from a germ of truth.”
Boris Johnson and the normalisation of dishonesty
No figure better embodies the modern British incarnation of such a passing acquaintance with truth than Boris Johnson, whose falsehoods are not always cultivated from even that minimal germ.
Johnson’s career, from journalist to prime minister, has been marked by a casual and often strategic relationship with the truth. In 1988 he was dismissed from the Times for fabricating a quote from his godfather to support a false historical claim. For most journalists, such an offence would have been career-ending. For Johnson, it was just the beginning.
That he rebounded so quickly speaks volumes about the protective power of elite networks. Shortly after his dismissal from the Times, Johnson resurfaced as a Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, having met its editor, Max Hastings, at a party. There his ‘Euromyths,’ exaggerated or entirely invented stories about EU regulations, helped entrench British Euroscepticism.
These articles did not merely misinform; they reshaped the national conversation. As Jean Quatremer, Libération’s Brussels correspondent argued, Johnson “invented a self-serving journalistic genre that set a poisonous tone for British EU reporting.”
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Once Johnson entered frontline politics, much of the press abandoned scepticism altogether. During his time in office, journalists frequently acted less as interrogators of power than as amplifiers of his distortions.
A particularly stark example came in September 2019, when the Daily Mail ran the front-page story alleging that Downing Street was investigating Remain MPs for “foreign collusion.” The claim, based on an unnamed “senior No 10 source,” ricocheted across the media, reproduced the following day by the Daily Express, the Sun, and the Times.
It even reached the BBC’s Today programme, where presenter Nick Robinson asked Johnson about the supposed investigation. Rather than challenge the premise, Robinson allowed Johnson to legitimise it, as the prime minister asserted that there were “legitimate questions” to be asked.
No one asked the most basic question, did such an investigation exist? It did not, as was later confirmed.
Beergate
The pattern continued with ‘Beergate,’ when a photograph of Keir Starmer drinking a beer in a constituency office was inflated into weeks of scandal by the Conservative press, despite obvious factual holes and glaring hypocrisy.
Johnson’s political career may be over, but his adoration and protection by the right-wing press is not. He now enjoys a lucrative weekly column in the Daily Mail, reportedly worth six figures, a remarkable indulgence for a former prime minister found by Parliament to have deliberately misled it.
The arrangement was on full display last month, when the Mail splashed “BETRAYAL OF OUR CHILDREN” across its front page in response to the Covid inquiry. Of the paper’s numerous articles on the report that day, none led with Johnson’s role in pandemic decision-making, nor with that of his then adviser Dominic Cummings. Rather, it chose to focus on how “[Nicola] Sturgeon’s government failed to plan for killer Covid pandemic and showed no urgency in responding, says damning inquiry report.”
Accountability was demanded by our newspapers, just not from the Mail’s own star columnist who had been in charge of the country at the time.
As we see time and time again, in parts of the British press, outrage is weaponised selectively and scrutiny is applied only where it is politically convenient.
The ‘chicken nugget’ myth
One of the most incredulous recent examples of this is the absurd “chicken nugget” story, which claimed a foreign national avoided deportation because his child disliked foreign nuggets. Despite being entirely false, the story persisted in the media, recycled as evidence of migrants abusing human rights law and as justification for leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.
In September, the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford published a report examining how the ECHR is discussed in the UK media in relation to immigration. Reviewing 379 news stories and opinion pieces from January to June 2025, the authors found widespread misreporting, incomplete information and an overwhelming fixation on immigration cases.
“Politicians, journalists and commentators may legitimately hold different views on immigration and human rights. But mischaracterising how the law operates does a disservice to the public,” said Başak Çalı, director of research at the Bonavero Institute.
The report also identified a familiar pattern: a misleading framing appears in one outlet, is then repeated across others as the story is “picked up,” and quickly hardens into accepted fact. The authors cited the “chicken nugget” case as a prime example, an absurd and “completely erroneous” account, as co-author Alice Donald told Reuters, that was reproduced by multiple outlets and echoed by senior politicians.
Donald argues, the problem lies in using isolated, distorted cases to stand in for how the ECHR and immigration law actually work.
The lie as a business model
Which brings us back to Donald Trump. Many, me included, welcomed news this week that the BBC intends to fight Trump’s defamation lawsuit. Whatever one thinks of the corporation’s editorial choices, it is hard not to note the grotesque irony of Trump demanding truth and accountability.
During his first term alone, the Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims, an average of 21 per day. Fact-checkers have described his dishonesty as unprecedented in American politics, not incidental but integral to his political and business identity.
That, ultimately, is the point. From Trump to Fox News, Johnson to Fleet Street, misinformation is not a series of isolated failures. It’s a business model, one that rewards outrage, punishes accuracy and treats the public not as citizens to be informed, but as audiences to be manipulated.
Until that model is challenged, the lie will remain not as an atypical bug in our media systems, but their most lucrative feature. Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Poetry in Motion
The choreography of lifting and moving huge pieces of equipment is something to behold.
(Article originally published in Nov/Dec 2024 edition.)
Shipyards are key pieces of the global maritime infrastructure. From newbuilds to refits to scheduled maintenance, every single ship on the sea needs to return home periodically for a little rest and recovery – not to mention needed repairs, realignment, a fresh coat of paint and so on. Shipyards come in all sizes and shapes and can be found anywhere that the land meets the sea. But no matter the size, location or specialty, there's one constant you'll find at every single yard on earth: Cranes.
Nothing gets done without cranes. Equipment needs transferring; supplies need loading, and sometimes even ships themselves need lifting. Besides dock space, the next most flaunted feature that shipyards tout is their crane capacity. They're the single most important tool needed to get the job done. Crane technology has steadily advanced over the years with better operating systems, environmentally friendly designs and innovative solutions. Here are a few of my favorites.
FROM SKYSCRAPERS TO SHIPYARDS
Tower cranes are a familiar sight in the city. You see them at every construction site. They're quickly installed at the side of the road during highway construction, on bridges, and high in the sky on top of skyscrapers. But they haven't been a fixture widely seen in shipyards – until now. Founded in Spain in 1962, Comansa tower cranes have worked on all kinds of projects around the world: bridges, skyscrapers and high-rise buildings, dams, ports, stadiums and power plants, to name a few.
The company has been operating in North America since 2002 from offices in Pineville, North Carolina. Its specialty is producing large-scale tower cranes for big civil projects. This skillset is also a great option for shipyards needing assist cranes. Tower cranes don't require a road network, take up very little space and have an impressive working capacity, hook height and swing radius that are perfectly suited to shipyard work – all at a reasonable cost.
The company recently provided Vigor Shipyard in Seattle, Washington with two of its LCL-560 luffing jib-tower cranes. These are fitted with Comansa's level luffing system, which maintains load height during boom luffing (raising and lowering), and the EFFI Plus system that controls the electrically driven motors. This slows the hoisting speed when bearing a load but increases wire speed when unloaded on the downcycle. The overall cycle time is the same as traditional large motors but saves on power consumption.
Another innovation is Comansa's Crane Mate system. This digital platform allows crane monitoring, tele-diagnosis and fleet management in support of the preventive maintenance program. Thanks to this cutting-edge communications technology, clients can receive in real time technical information, location, alerts and data related to the productivity and maintenance of the crane. Tower cranes require minimal space versus crawler or mobile cranes. Pair this with the cost savings and all-electric motors for limited maintenance, and the advantage to shipyards becomes clear.
LIFT AND TRAVEL
Space is often at a premium in shipyards – especially those that primarily service the pleasure boat market. Since its inception in 1954, Marine Travelift has been known for its innovative boat-handling equipment, designing the very first mobile boat hoist in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin back in the 1940s.
Not long after, in the 1950s, Marine Travelift was officially established and has remained an industry leader for the past 70+ years. The company has had many firsts along the way including the first open-end boat lift design for faster handling of sailboats' masts, marina forklifts and breaking the record for largest capacity boat hoist multiple times. In 2022, it introduced a revolutionary variable-width option, available on both the BFMII and C-Series Mobile Boat Hoist machines. The variable-width option helps shipyards save space by stowing vessels more tightly together, enabling them to work on more vessels at the same time. The hydraulically actuated system allows the travel lift's uprights to better conform to the width of the boat being moved rather than requiring a one-size-fits-all approach.
The first Marine Travelift model with the variable width option was a 75BFMII with a 75-metric ton lifting capacity. Delivered to the Marine Group Boat Works in San Jose del Cabo, California, this model offers nine feet of width variability and can seamlessly expand and retract under full load in 60 seconds. "The variable-width option provides the ability to handle a wider variety of hulls and without any major infrastructure changes," explains Kurt Minten, Executive Vice President. "With the ability to vary the boat hoist's width, you can not only lift wide vessels such as catamarans but narrower mono-hulls as well without exceeding recommended sling angles."
A second exciting development was the introduction of a fully electric series of lifts. Fitting a 700-volt, battery-powered system on the 50BFMII boat hoist, which carries a 50-metric ton lift capacity, the power consumption was optimized to ensure the Electric Series meets or exceeds the performance of the standard engine machine. A full charge can be delivered in eight hours with the recommended 30kW high-speed smart charger, and yards can expect to lift anywhere from 10 to 14 vessels a day on a full charge. The Electric Series option is available in all capacity hoists offered. Where possible, going to a boat hoist rather than a drydock allows providers to work on more vessels at once and doesn't create the same delays a drydock might when waiting on parts needed for repairs. This gives yard and marina owners more versatility and allows them to more efficiently move vessels in and out of work areas.
MOVING MORE THAN SHIPS
If you've ever seen an impossibly large structure on top of a platform fitted with dozens of rubber wheels being moved over land, chances are you've seen Cimolai in action. Cimolai Heavy Lift provides the design and execution for the transport and lifting of "exceptional structures in weight and size." This is accomplished by using self-propelled modular transporters or SPMTs.
These hydraulically operated SPMTs are essentially a steel platform fitted with a number of double wheels riding on top of a hydraulic suspension system and powered by a hydraulic power pack on the end. The wheels are able to rotate, which allows the trailer to crab-walk, spin in circles and quickly adjust in any direction. When a weight is loaded on top, the hydraulic suspension serves to keep the platform level, even as the trailer moves across uneven ground. This keeps the load stable, which is critical when moving huge and heavy structures.
The real magic, however, is when you link multiple SPMTs together. The size of the structure to be moved is only limited by the size of the platform available to place it on and the weight-bearing capacity of the wheels. More SPMTs means more wheels and a bigger working surface. When linked, both length-wise and width-wise, all of the wheels respond to the same single operator's inputs. The result is a single unit customized to exactly meet the space requirements of the lift, providing a load capacity of up to 9,500 tons. (Note that the author has participated in many SPMT-powered operations, and they never fail to impress.)
SPACE-SAVING SOLUTIONS
In a world that demands increased efficiencies, space and agility are core considerations, and the need for equipment that is powerful, precise and space-conscious continues to increase. Cranes and heavy-lift technologies are no longer just about brute strength. They're about efficiency, flexibility and sustainability. Whether through the towering reach of Comansa cranes, the adaptability of Marine Travelift hoists or the modular versatility of Cimolai SPMTs, modern solutions are enabling shipyards to handle more complex projects in tighter spaces with reduced environmental impact. The future of shipyard operations will depend on adopting these innovations to remain competitive and deliver the reliability the maritime industry requires.
SEAN HOGUE is Executive Vice President of Baker Marine Solutions.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
Thursday, September 25, 2025
Ecology: Sunk debris from World Wars provides home for wildlife
More marine life is living on some World War II munitions disposed of on the Baltic Sea’s seabed than on the sediment surrounding it. The findings, reported in a paper in Communications Earth & Environment, show that some marine organisms can tolerate high levels of toxic compounds if there is a hard surface for them to inhabit. The results also demonstrate how detritus from human conflict can provide habitats for wildlife, which is similarly shown in a Scientific Data study mapping a fleet of World War I shipwrecks in Maryland, USA.
Prior to the signing of the 1972 London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution, explosive munitions were frequently disposed of by dumping them unused at sea. These munitions typically contain chemicals which are highly toxic to marine life, although the hard metal casings may provide a suitable surface for marine life to live on.
Andrey Vedenin and colleagues used a remotely controlled submersible to investigate a newly-discovered munitions dumpsite in Lübeck Bay in the Baltic Sea in October 2024. They filmed the munitions and analysed water samples collected from the site, and also investigated two areas of the surrounding sediment for comparison.
The authors identified the discarded munitions as warheads from V-1 flying bombs, a type of early cruise missile used by Nazi Germany in late World War II. They found that there was significantly more marine life present on the munitions than the sediment — an average of around 43,000 organisms per square metre compared to around 8,200 organisms per square metre. Similar magnitudes of marine life abundance have been recorded on natural hard surfaces in the bay in other studies. The concentrations of explosive compounds (mostly TNT and RDX) in the water varied widely, from as little as 30 nanograms per litre to as much as 2.7 milligrams per litre — a level estimated to be potentially fatally toxic to marine life.
The authors suggest that, compared to the surrounding sediment, the advantages of living on the hard surfaces of the munitions outweigh the disadvantages of the chemical exposure. They note that organisms were mainly observed on the casings rather than uncovered explosive material, and speculate that this may have reflected lifeforms trying to limit their chemical exposure. However, the authors conclude that although the munitions are currently an important habitat in the bay, replacing them with a safe artificial surface would further benefit the local ecosystem.
In a separate study, published in Scientific Data,David Johnston and colleagues present a high-resolution photographic map of all 147 wrecks currently in the so-called “Ghost Fleet” of Mallows Bay, on the Potomac River, Maryland, USA. These ships were built during World War I but were deliberately burnt and sunk in the late 1920s, and their wrecks are now known as a habitat for a wide variety of wildlife, such as ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) and Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus). The authors created the map by combining high-resolution photographs (an average of 3.5 centimetres per pixel) of the entire fleet, taken using aerial drones in 2016. They suggest that the map may be useful for future archaeological, ecological, and cultural research into the fleet.
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Springer Nature is committed to boosting the visibility of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and relevant information and evidence published in our journals and books. The research described in this press release pertains to SDG 14 (Life Below Water). More information can be found here.
Once a haven for flamingos, sturgeon and thousands of seals, fast-receding waters are turning the northern coast of the Caspian Sea into barren stretches of dry sand. In some places, the sea has retreated more than 50 kilometers. Wetlands are becoming deserts, fishing ports are being left high and dry, and oil companies are dredging ever-longer channels to reach their offshore installations.
Climate change is driving this dramatic decline in the world’s largest landlocked sea. Found at the boundary between Europe and Central Asia, the Caspian Sea is surrounded by Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan, and sustains around 15 million people.
The Caspian is a hub for fishing, shipping, and oil and gas production, and is of rising geopolitical importance as it sits where the interests of global superpowers meet. As the sea shallows, governments face the critical challenge of maintaining industries and livelihoods, while also protecting the unique ecosystems that sustains them.
I’ve been visiting the Caspian for more than 20 years, working with local researchers to study the unique and endangered Caspian seal, and support its conservation. Back in the 2000s, the far north-eastern corner of the sea was a mosaic of reed beds, mudflats and shallow channels that teemed with life, providing habitats for spawning fish, migrating birds, and tens of thousands of seals that gathered there to moult in the spring.
Now these remote wild places we visited to catch seals for satellite tracking studies are dry land, transitioning to desert as the sea retreats, and the same story is playing out for other wetlands around the sea. This experience parallels that of coastal communities, who year by year are seeing the water recede away from their towns, fishing wharves and ports, leaving infrastructure stranded on newly-dry land, and the people fearful for the future.
A sea in retreat
The level of the Caspian Sea has always fluctuated, but the scale of recent change is unprecedented. Since the turn of the current century, water levels have declined by around 6cm per year, with drops of up to 30cm per year since 2020. In July 2025, Russian scientists announced the sea had dropped below the previous minimum level recorded during the era of instrumental measurements.
During the 20th century, variations were due to a combination of natural factors and humans diverting water to use for agriculture and industry, but now global warming is the main driver of decline. It might seem inconceivable that a body of water as large as the Caspian could be at risk, but in the hotter climate the rate of water entering the sea from rivers and rainfall is reducing, and is now being outstripped by increased evaporation from the sea surface.
Even if global warming is limited to the Paris agreement target of 2°C, water levels are predicted to fall up to ten meters compared to the 2010 coastline. With the current global trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, the decline could reach 18 meters, which is about the height of a six-story building.
Because the northern Caspian is shallow – much of it only around five meters deep – small decreases in depth mean huge losses of area. In recent research, colleagues and I showed that even an optimistic ten-meter decline would uncover 112,000 square kilometers of seabed – an area larger than Iceland.
What’s at stake
The ecological consequences would be dramatic. Four out of ten ecosystem types unique to the Caspian Sea would disappear completely. The endangered Caspian seal could lose up to 81% of its current breeding habitat, and Caspian sturgeon would lose access to critical spawning habitat.
As in the Aral Sea disaster, where another massive lake in Central Asia almost entirely disappeared, toxic dust from exposed seabed would be released, with serious health risks.
Millions of people are at risk of displacement as the sea recedes, or face highly degraded living conditions. The sea’s only link to the global shipping network is through the delta of the Volga River (which flows into the Caspian) and then via an upstream canal to the Don River for connections to the Black Sea, Mediterranean and other river systems. But the Volga is already struggling with reduced water depth.
Ports like Aktau in Kazakhstan and Baku in Azerbaijan need dredging just to keep operating. Similarly oil and gas companies are having to dredge long channels to their offshore facilities in the north Caspian.
Already the costs of protecting human interests are in the billions of dollars and are only set to grow further. The Caspian is central to the “middle corridor," a trade route linking China to Europe. As water levels fall, shipping loads must be reduced, costs rise, and settlements and infrastructure risk being stranded tens or even hundreds of kilometers from the sea.
A race against time
Countries around the Caspian are having to adapt, relocating ports, and dredging new shipping lanes. But these measures risk conflicting with conservation goals.
For instance, there are plans to dredge a major new shipping channel across the “Ural saddle” of the north Caspian. But this is an important area for seal breeding, migration and feeding, and will be a vital area for the adaptation of ecosystems as the sea recedes.
Since the rate of change is so rapid, traditional fixed boundary protected areas risk becoming obsolete. What’s needed is an integrated, forward-looking approach to planning across the whole region. If the areas ecosystems will need to adapt to climate change are mapped and protected now, planners and policymakers will be better able to ensure future infrastructure projects avoid or minimize further damage.
To do this, Caspian countries will have to invest in biodiversity monitoring and planning expertise, all while coordinating action across five different countries with different priorities.
Caspian countries are already recognizing the existential risks, and have begun to form intergovernmental agreements to address the crisis. But the rate of decline may outstrip the pace of political cooperation.
The ecological, climatic and geopolitical importance of the Caspian Sea means its fate ultimately matters far beyond its receding shores. It provides a key case study in how climate change is transforming major inland water bodies across the world, from Lake Titicaca to Lake Chad. The question is whether governments can act fast enough to protect both the people and nature of this rapidly changing sea.
Simon Goodman is a Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology at University of Leeds.
This article appears courtesy of The Conversation and may be found in its original form here.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
Sunday, September 21, 2025
BAN DEEP SEA MINING
Mapping the world's oceans — a blessing or a curse?
Oceans cover three-quarters of the Earth, yet only 20% of the seafloor has yet been mapped. The race to understand these depths could further scientific understanding, but also lead to exploitation.
International researchers have so far mapped just one-fifth of the mysterious ocean floor
Image: H. Goethel/blickwinkel/picture alliance
Looking at Google Maps, it may seem as if every last corner of the planet has already been subjected to topographical surveys. But what lies beneath the ocean surface remains largely hidden from the view of orbiting satellites.
That's because radar signals can't penetrate water. So while commercial satellites provide a resolution of about 30 centimeters per pixel of the Earth's surface, ocean images are much rougher, with a resolution of around just 5 to 8 kilometers (3-5 miles) per pixel.
Only about 20% of the ocean floor has been surveyed so far with echo sounding. But Seabed 2030, a joint project between the United Nations and the private Nippon Foundation, aims to map the entire ocean floor by the end of this decade.
Ocean depths hold 'entire worlds'
"The ocean covers 71% of the planet, so it's just vast, incomprehensibly vast," said Laura Trethewey, a Canadian environmental journalist and author of "The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World's Oceans," published in 2023.
"There's just no terrestrial equivalent, which is why we so often compare the ocean to the moon or outer space. There's nowhere else on land that comes close to the ocean in terms of size," she added, pointing out that both the moon and Mars have been more thoroughly mapped than the ocean floor.
"We stretch for the stars and dream of building new perfect societies on Mars. But I would point out that we have this otherworldly space right here on Earth that we haven't finished exploring yet."
To research her book, Laura Trethewey traveled to an Inuit-led hydrographic community project in the Arctic, a drone factory in San Francisco and deep-sea mining talks
Image: Colin Boyd Shafer
To explore the underwater universe, acoustic sound waves are emitted in a fan-like pattern from ships, diving robots and submarines in various directions toward the seafloor. The time it takes for these signals to travel to the bottom and back is measured individually for each sound wave, from which the depth is calculated. The deeper the sound, the deeper the sea.
Surveying with multibeam echo sounding provides topographic maps, three-dimensional models and terrain profiles even for very great depths. "There are entire worlds that we're missing out on right here on Earth — undiscovered mountains and canyons, animals unknown to science and just huge amounts of data and discoveries that are still out there waiting for us," said Trethewey.
In light of climate change, researching the seabed could also provide important information about what the future could hold.
"A lot of the seafloor used to be land. After the last ice age, melting glaciers released water that covered continental shelves that are equal to the size of South America. So there's a whole other continent down there, another lost Atlantis, that could hold insight into how past human societies navigated sea level rise and what we might do facing the same problem in the future," said Trethewey.
"Making the map is the first step in making that future a reality."
An ambitious project
Seabed 2030 will likely fall short of its ambitious goal, however. The oceans are simply too large and the ships and sonar equipment needed are lacking — not to mention the delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a waning political motivation.
"Back when the project launched in 2017, the world was a less fractured place, geopolitically. We live in a more unstable time now and governments are more suspicious and less willing to share maps," said Trethewey, adding that technology isn't the issue as it has existed for decades.
Organizers have tried in vain to "make up for any shortfalls with innovations like drones and crowdsourcing and recruiting super yachts and cruise ships to map the seafloor," she said.
But the fact remains that deep-sea exploration poses an extreme challenge for both humans and equipment. Adverse conditions at sea require expedition costs of around $50,000 (€43,000) a day, said Trethewey, "which means governments and businesses often need a good incentive to map, usually for resources, infrastructure or national security interests."
Seabed 2030 has estimated that the cost of reaching its goal will be between $3 billion and $4 billion (€2.5 billion to €3.4 billion) —roughly equivalent to the NASA Mars mission that began in 2020 and included landing a rover on the planet.
One downside of success could be that more complete mapping would significantly accelerate the exploitation of the oceans, however. "When people think of maps, they often think of mining and resource extraction. And they're not wrong. Right now there’s a big push to exploit the deep sea and open the first commercial mines in international waters," said Trethewey.
But she hopes that mapping will be used primarily for science and conservation, as the international community agreed to do after the complete mapping of Antarctica with the Antarctic Treaty in 1959, which protected the continent for scientific purposes for 60 years.
Still, strict regulations are unlikely to protect the deep sea as effectively as ignorance and inaccessibility.
"Nearly two-thirds of the ocean and almost half the surface of the planet fall in what's called international waters, so no country or person has ownership rights over it. This unclear legal status is the major reason why the international ocean is mostly unmonitored and unregulated, and why it's so hard to tackle crime at sea, whether it's overfishing or pollution or drug trafficking," said Trethewey.
"Stricter ocean governance would be welcome, but what’s perhaps more important are money and political will," she added. "The ocean is vast, incomprehensibly vast [...] and without money to fund monitoring and enforcement at sea, more rules are largely meaningless." This article was originally written in German. Alexander Freund Science editor with a focus on archaeology, history and health@AlexxxFreund
U.S. Oceanography Cornerstone Research Vessel Retires After 50 Yar
Research vessel Endeavor ends her long career on September 20 to be replaced by a larger vessel i 2027 (URI)
A research vessel that has been the cornerstone of ocean science in the U.S. for five decades is set to retire, marking an end to an illustrious career. The R/V Endeavor, which has been synonymous with ocean research in the modern era, will retire on September 20 upon the completion of its final mission.
Two weeks ago, Endeavor embarked on its final mission, which was focused on the long-term impacts of oil and gas extraction on ecosystems along the Atlantic coast, including historical, active, and future production areas. On September 20, the vessel will return to its home port at the University of Rhode Island’s (URI) Bay Campus in Narragansett, ending a long career in ocean science.
First launched in 1975, the ship is owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO) under a charter party agreement. Endeavor was one of three intermediate-class research vessels commissioned by NSF and built by Peterson Builders, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
At 185 feet (56 meters) and officially christened at the GSO pier on December 11, 1976, the vessel was designed from the keel up for oceanographic work, a floating laboratory built to advance exploration and discovery. Nuala Pell, the wife of Senator Claiborne Pell, broke the traditional bottle of champagne across the bow.
Based out of Narragansett, Endeavor has lived up to its billing as the cornerstone of oceanography in the U.S., spending approximately 200 days a year at sea for five decades. Her illustrious career is unrivalled. She brought on board over 8,000 scientists, engineers, technicians, students, and teachers who spent 9,600 days at sea carrying out a total of 736 scientific expeditions. Over her long career, Endeavor sailed over one million miles and made port calls in 22 countries.
The longest expedition for the ship with a capacity of 16 scientists, 12 crewmembers, and two marine technicians was 38 days, while the deepest instrument deployment was at a depth of 8,700 meters.
Endeavor’s career started through baptism by fire. Only four days after her christening, she found herself responding to one of the largest oil spills in U.S. history after tanker Argo Merchant ran aground off Nantucket Island during a storm on December 15, 1976. The tanker was carrying more than 7.7 million gallons of heavy fuel oil that spilled into the ocean after the tanker broke apart.
The disaster thrust Endeavor on her first mission studying the movement of currents, analyzing the spread of oil hydrocarbons, and assessing the impact on marine ecosystems. The series of trips to the spill site lasted three months and is considered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to be the birth of oil spill response.
Apart from the spill response, the ship has also been instrumental in the advancement of the oil and gas industry. Owing to her proximity to the Gulf Stream, the vessel has led a number of missions, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, focusing on circulation and biogeochemistry studies.
Narragansett Dawn, now under construction, will start sailing in 2027 as the new research vessel (URI)
A key milestone for Endeavor’s history was in 1993 when she underwent a major mid-life refit that saw her length increased from 177 feet to her current overall length of 185 feet (56 meters). After that, she would go on to carry out other critical missions like responding to the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, delivering humanitarian aid, and undertaking post-earthquake seafloor surveys. The same year, she was involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response in the Gulf of Mexico.
Following the retirement of Endeavor, URI is preparing to welcome a new research vessel at its Narragansett Bay Campus pier. The $125 million vessel, which is also owned by NSF and has been named Narragansett Dawn, will arrive in 2027. The 199-foot (61-meter) ship is being constructed at the Bollinger Houma Shipyards in Houma, Louisiana.
Lake sturgeonwere once abundant in Georgia’s Coosa River before disappearing altogether. Now, an initiative to bring them back is showing major progress, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.
The lake sturgeon’s lineage can be traced back millions of years, all the way to the time of the dinosaurs. But due to a mix of pollution and overfishing, they were completely wiped out in the Coosa River.
In 2002, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources began a project to bring these ancient fish back. Every year, eggs from lake sturgeon in Wisconsin were brought to Georgia before being hatched and released into the Coosa River.
UGA researchers were tasked with monitoring the project’s progress, conducting an intensive netting study to capture and tag as many fish as possible.
“There was kind of a big question mark as to whether fish with the genetics of fish from up north would survive,” said Martin Hamel, lead author of the study and an associate professor in UGA’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. “And even if they did survive, would they be able to reproduce on their own and have a self-sustaining population?”
The scientists now believe they have the answer.
“Not only are these fish surviving, but we’re showing evidence that they are capable of reproducing and that the young are able to survive on their own.”
Lake sturgeon continued hatching even when stocking stopped
The goal of the reintroduction project was to have the lake sturgeon reproduce without the aid of stocking, but measuring progress had its challenges. On average, male lake sturgeon don’t reach maturity until they’re 13 to 15 years old. Females take even longer to mature.
That means it takes a long time for lake sturgeon to reproduce. The annual stocking of the Coosa River makes it even more difficult to determine if lake sturgeon are procreating on their own.
But in 2020, stocking halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"It doesn’t necessarily mean that the population has recovered, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.”
—Martin Hamel, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources
In 2022 and 2023, UGA researchers sampled sections of lake sturgeons’ fins to estimate the fishes’ ages and gauge the progress of the reintroduction project. The age of some lake sturgeon suggested that they were hatched in 2020 – a year with no stocking. This was an unexpected outcome that would have never been observed without the disruption from the pandemic.
“That was kind of the smoking gun for confirming that these fish were reproducing in the wild on their own, which really is a huge benchmark for recovery,” said Hamel. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that the population has recovered, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.”
Researchers plan to continue monitoring sturgeon recovery
The researchers plan to revisit this method in a few years to see if natural reproduction is still taking place. For Hamel, it’s critical that these fish be saved.
“They’re really kind of a charismatic, unique fish, and they’ve been around for a really long time. They’re an integral part of the aquatic ecosystem,” said Hamel. “I feel privileged to be able to study them in areas where they were historically found and, for this particular project, being able to repopulate this previously lost population.”
The study was published in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management and co-authored by Matthew Phillips, Savannah Perry, Brian Irwin and John Damer.
