People have been warning me for years that rising sea levels will erode the coastline. It’s hard to fathom (pun not intended) what that really means. Fortunately a new scientific method is being developed by the American government to quantify the situation. A report called “National Assessment of Shoreline Change: Historical Shoreline Change in the Hawaiian Islands” shows a fairly significant (14 mile) loss of beach.
Because the U.S. population continues to shift toward the coast where valuable coastal property is vulnerable to erosion, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is conducting a national assessment of coastal change.
[…]
A principal purpose of the USGS shoreline change research is to develop a common methodology so that shoreline change analyses for the continental U.S., portions of Hawaii, and Alaska can be updated periodically in a consistent and systematic manner. The primary objectives of this study were to (1) develop and implement improved methods of assessing and monitoring shoreline movement, and (2) improve current understanding of the processes controlling shoreline movement.
Ok, so they’re improving our understanding…and then they give a huge caveat:
Rates of shoreline change presented herein may differ from other published rates, and differences do not necessarily indicate that the other rates are inaccurate. Some discrepancies are to be expected, considering the many possible ways of determining shoreline positions and rates of change, and the inherent uncertainty in calculating these rates. Rates of shoreline change presented in this report represent shoreline movement under past conditions and are not intended for use in predicting future shoreline positions or future rates of shoreline change
We are only a couple months away from the giant America’s Cup catamaran wings being launched. A team led by American Paul Cayard already has theirs on sea trials. Blue Planet Times explains there was a lot of effort put into design regulation.
The box rule governing the AC72 is one big sandbox, so the engineers get to play. Oracle Racing Team Coordinator Ian Burns explains: “I was involved in writing the rule for the AC72s, and when we addressed the wing, we started with a complicated rule, to limit what a designer could do. We added more and more pieces as we thought of more and more outcomes, and we came to a point where it was so complicated—and it was still going to be hard to control, because the more rules you write the more loopholes you create – that we reverted to a simple principle. Limit the area very accurately, and make it a game of efficiency.â€
“We have 38 hydraulic cylinders. We want to avoid running hydraulic piping to each of them, because that would be heavy, so we have electrovalves embedded in the wing to actuate the hydraulics. But if you had two wires, positive and negative, running to each electrovalve, your wing would look like a PG&E substation, and that’s heavy too, so we use a CAN-bus [controlled area network] with far fewer wires. Still, it’s incredibly complex.
“We wind up with lot of hydraulics,†Cayard says, “and the America’s Cup rules don’t allow stored power, so two of our eleven guys—we think, two—will be grinding a primary winch all the race long. Not to trim, but to maintain pressure in the hydraulic tank so that any time someone wants to open a hydraulic valve to trim the wing, there will be pressure to make that happen.â€
Ok, so there’s thousands of hours in design of these wings but there’s something deeply ironic about a 72 foot catamaran with a 130 foot wing that can sail faster than the wind but can’t generate enough power to manage hydraulics without two crew constantly grinding a winch. It seems like a legacy mindset. A big part of the old America’s Cup boats was to be staffed with powerful yet heavy crew who can muscle the boat around. These boats surely call for lighter more nimble crew. What if someone even figured out a way to efficiently use the wind to generate power…?
Perhaps Luca Devoti said it best. These boats are pure racing machines that have power to burn. They should have no shortage of energy at their disposal, or they may even have a reason for absorbing excess.
You have to change completely your way of thinking: the boat is sailing from the moment the wing comes out of the shed because the wing can fly away at any moment.
The trick, as explained in the following video, is to make the wing secure yet light; to keep it as uncomplicated as possible to reduce risk and reduce response time. Most of all, it sounds like the designers want to hurry-up and make up for 20 years of lost time by borrowing technology and efficiency study lessons from the A-Class and C-Class catamaran fleets:
The LA Times has posted an amusing story on the current GSA auction for a giant invisible catamaran.
…the U.S. Navy, which — after five years of trying and failing to donate the stealthy Sea Shadow to a museum — is now selling the ship for scrap metal in an online auction. All bids must be in at 3 p.m. Pacific time Friday. But there’s a catch. To win the auction, the successful bidder must agree to dismantle and scrap the Sea Shadow within six months…
What if you are a museum? Suddenly it is not good enough to be a museum?
Obviously the ship’s stealth is limited, otherwise the government would not be able to know what you did with it after winning the auction, right?
This is my favorite part of the story.
“On a typical night of testing, the Navy sub-hunter planes made 57 passes at us and detected the ship only twice,” he wrote. “A typical warship was a very high reflector of radar — a radar profile equal to about fifty barns. Our frigate would show up a hell of a lot smaller than a dinghy.”
That’s good news. The test success suggests that stealth technology in use today has come a long way from $200 million invested in 1985. Perhaps stealthy floating sea barns would now appear to be oar-sized? What’s a unit smaller than a dinghy? Life preserver?
More to the point, who in the world uses barns as a measure of size, especially when looking for something floating on the water? Perhaps it comes from people who think differently than the average person; people who use very precise and technical language to present their view of the world. People like this:
“I am amazed that it’s up for auction and a museum didn’t take it,” said Sherm Mullin, retired head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works. “But when I stop to think about it for about 10 microseconds, it becomes apparent to me that ships are difficult to take care of — a lot more difficult than airplanes.”
10 what? I would not even qualify 10 microseconds as a stop. That’s more like a yield in my mind. A speed bump at best.
Personally I would consider making bids for it but sadly it only comes with one microwave oven. I’d want at least a camp stove if I’m going to spend over $100K on a yacht. Although, I bet that microwave can cook food faster than anything on the market. Tuna in 10 microseconds anyone?
Earlier, I wrote about the tragedy of Low Speed Chase. A touching and beautiful memorial was held on Saturday on the water near the San Francisco Yacht Club.
Below is a brief capture I made at the memorial, as we passed by the bagpiper on Farallon.
I’ve compressed the video significantly (from 80MB) but left the audio alone. The buzzing in the background is from a helicopter flying overhead.
Update: A Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane helicopter left Half Moon Bay Airport and reached the Farallon Islands in 15 minutes, picked up the boat and returned. This was the last week to retrieve the boat before the Islands would be closed and protected as a bird sanctuary until October.
