ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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Can't find a thread for this. If one exists, then would a kind mod please move this?
Faultlines, black holes and glaciers: mapping uncharted territories
In the era of satellites and Google Maps there are still areas that remain a mystery
by Lois Parshley Tuesday 7 February 2017 06.00 GMT
On a quiet summer evening, the Aurora, a 60ft cutter-rigged sloop, approaches the craggy shore of eastern Greenland, along what is known as the Forbidden Coast. Its captain, Sigurdur Jonsson, a sturdy man in his 50s, stands carefully watching his charts. The waters he is entering have been described in navigation books as among “the most difficult in Greenland; the mountains rise almost vertically from the sea to form a narrow bulwark, with rifts through which active glaciers discharge quantities of ice, while numerous off-lying islets and rocks make navigation hazardous”. The sloop is single-masted, painted a cheery, cherry red. Icebergs float in ominous silence.
Where Jonsson, who goes by Captain Siggi, sails, he is one of few to have ever gone. Because the splintered fjords create thousands of miles of uninhabited coastline, there has been little effort to map this region. “It’s practically uncharted,” he says. “You are almost in the same position as you were 1,000 years ago.”
A naval architect turned explorer, Siggi navigates by scanning aerial photos and uploading them into a plotter, the ship’s electronic navigation system. Sometimes he uses satellite images, sometimes shots taken by Danish geologists from an open-cockpit plane in the 1930s, on one of the only comprehensive surveys of the coast. Siggi sails by comparing what he sees on the shore to these rough outlines. “Of course, then you don’t have any soundings,” he says, referring to charts of ocean depths that sailors normally rely on to navigate and avoid running aground. “I’ve had some close calls.” Over the years, he has got better at reading the landscape to look for clues. He looks for river mouths, for example, where silt deposits might create shallow places to anchor, so that icebergs will go to ground before they crush the boat. In the age of GPS and Google Maps, it’s rare to meet someone who still entrusts his life to such analogue navigation.
Even when Siggi is retracing his own steps, the landscape of the Forbidden Coast is constantly changing. “Where the glaciers have disappeared,” he explains, pointing at washes of green on a creased, hand-drawn chart, “a peninsula turns out to be an island. It was actually sea where you thought there was land.” To account for this, he often trades notes with local hunters, who are similarly adept at reading the coast. “Their language is very descriptive,” Siggi explains. “So all the names of places mean something.” Although locations may have official Danish names, they are often ignored. An island technically called Kraemer, for instance, in East Greenlandic means “the place that looks like the harness for a dog’s snout”. ...
https://www.theguardian.com/science...-holes-glaciers-mapping-uncharted-territories
Faultlines, black holes and glaciers: mapping uncharted territories
In the era of satellites and Google Maps there are still areas that remain a mystery
by Lois Parshley Tuesday 7 February 2017 06.00 GMT
On a quiet summer evening, the Aurora, a 60ft cutter-rigged sloop, approaches the craggy shore of eastern Greenland, along what is known as the Forbidden Coast. Its captain, Sigurdur Jonsson, a sturdy man in his 50s, stands carefully watching his charts. The waters he is entering have been described in navigation books as among “the most difficult in Greenland; the mountains rise almost vertically from the sea to form a narrow bulwark, with rifts through which active glaciers discharge quantities of ice, while numerous off-lying islets and rocks make navigation hazardous”. The sloop is single-masted, painted a cheery, cherry red. Icebergs float in ominous silence.
Where Jonsson, who goes by Captain Siggi, sails, he is one of few to have ever gone. Because the splintered fjords create thousands of miles of uninhabited coastline, there has been little effort to map this region. “It’s practically uncharted,” he says. “You are almost in the same position as you were 1,000 years ago.”
A naval architect turned explorer, Siggi navigates by scanning aerial photos and uploading them into a plotter, the ship’s electronic navigation system. Sometimes he uses satellite images, sometimes shots taken by Danish geologists from an open-cockpit plane in the 1930s, on one of the only comprehensive surveys of the coast. Siggi sails by comparing what he sees on the shore to these rough outlines. “Of course, then you don’t have any soundings,” he says, referring to charts of ocean depths that sailors normally rely on to navigate and avoid running aground. “I’ve had some close calls.” Over the years, he has got better at reading the landscape to look for clues. He looks for river mouths, for example, where silt deposits might create shallow places to anchor, so that icebergs will go to ground before they crush the boat. In the age of GPS and Google Maps, it’s rare to meet someone who still entrusts his life to such analogue navigation.
Even when Siggi is retracing his own steps, the landscape of the Forbidden Coast is constantly changing. “Where the glaciers have disappeared,” he explains, pointing at washes of green on a creased, hand-drawn chart, “a peninsula turns out to be an island. It was actually sea where you thought there was land.” To account for this, he often trades notes with local hunters, who are similarly adept at reading the coast. “Their language is very descriptive,” Siggi explains. “So all the names of places mean something.” Although locations may have official Danish names, they are often ignored. An island technically called Kraemer, for instance, in East Greenlandic means “the place that looks like the harness for a dog’s snout”. ...
https://www.theguardian.com/science...-holes-glaciers-mapping-uncharted-territories
