Comprehensive review of the maritime safety regimes.

This report presents a comprehensive review of the maritime safety regimes and provides recommendations on how to improve the system. The results show a complex legal framework which generates a high amount of inspections and overlapping of inspection areas where no cross-recognition is established by the various stakeholders. While the safety system seems to be successful in eliminating substandard vessels and while average insurance claims costs are substantially lower for inspected vessels than not inspected vessels, the results indicate that the economic conditions of the shipping market also have an effect on safety quality besides the frequency of inspections. No significant differences can be found between industry inspections and port state control inspections with respect to decreasing the probability of casualty. The system could be made more effective by combining data sources on inspections and use them respectively to improve risk profiling and to decrease the frequency of inspections performed on ship types such as tankers. The results further indicate a lack of proper implementation of the International Safety Management Code (ISM code) and conventions with reference to working and living conditions of crew (ILO 147). A revision of the ISM code and more emphasis on enforcement of ILO 147 could further enhance the level of safety at sea. The authors would like to thank several inspection regimes for their cooperation in providing inspection data and in allowing the observation of surveys and inspections on 26 vessels. In addition, the authors would like to acknowledge the data providers for the casualty data, Clarkson’s for the economic data as well as two P&I Clubs in making data on insurance claims available.

Deep-water turbidites as Holocene earthquake proxies: the Cascadia subduction zone and Northern San Andreas Fault systems

New stratigraphic evidence from the Cascadia margin demonstrates that 13 earthquakes ruptured the margin from Vancouver Island to at least the California border following the catastrophic eruption of Mount Mazama. These 13 events have occurred with an average repeat time of ?? 600 years since the first post-Mazama event ?? 7500 years ago. The youngest event ?? 300 years ago probably coincides with widespread evidence of coastal subsidence and tsunami inundation in buried marshes along the Cascadia coast. We can extend the Holocene record to at least 9850 years, during which 18 events correlate along the same region. The pattern of repeat times is consistent with the pattern observed at most (but not all) localities onshore, strengthening the contention that both were produced by plate-wide earthquakes. We also observe that the sequence of Holocene events in Cascadia may contain a repeating pattern, a tantalizing look at what may be the long-term behavior of a major fault system. Over the last ?? 7500 years, the pattern appears to have repeated at least three times, with the most recent A.D. 1700 event being the third of three events following a long interval of 845 years between events T4 and T5. This long interval is one that is also recognized in many of the coastal records, and may serve as an anchor point between the offshore and onshore records. Similar stratigraphic records are found in two piston cores and one box core from Noyo Channel, adjacent to the Northern San Andreas Fault, which show a cyclic record of turbidite beds, with thirty- one turbidite beds above a Holocene/.Pleistocene faunal «datum». Thus far, we have determined ages for 20 events including the uppermost 5 events from these cores. The uppermost event returns a «modern» age, which we interpret is likely the 1906 San Andreas earthquake. The penultimate event returns an intercept age of A.D. 1664 (2 ?? range 1505- 1822). The third event and fourth event are lumped together, as there is no hemipelagic sediment between them. The age of this event is A.D. 1524 (1445-1664), though we are not certain whether this event represents one event or two. The fifth event age is A.D. 1204 (1057-1319), and the sixth event age is A.D. 1049 (981-1188). These results are in relatively good agreement with the onshore work to date, which indicates an age for the penultimate event in the mid-1600 s, the most likely age for the third event of ?? 1500-1600, and a fourth event ?? 1300. We presently do not have the spatial sampling needed to test for synchroneity of events along the Northern San Andreas, and thus cannot determine with confidence that the observed turbidite record is earthquake generated. However, the good agreement in number of events between the onshore and offshore records suggests that, as in Cascadia, turbidite triggers other than earthquakes appear not to have added significantly to the turbidite record along the northernmost San Andreas margin during the last ?? 2000 years

Improving DoD Energy Efficiency: Combining MMOWGLI Social-Media Brainstorming With Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) to Strengthen the Defense Acquisition Process

Disclaimer: The views represented in this report are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy position of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the federal government.Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Acquisition Research Symposium Logistics ManagementThe research presented in this report was supported by the Acquisition Research Program of the Graduate School of Business & Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. To request defense acquisition research, to become a research sponsor, or to print additional copies of reports, please contact any of the staff listed on the Acquisition Research Program website (www.acquisitionresearch.net).Prepared for the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Performance Analysis of a Hierarchical Shipboard Wireless Sensor Network

International audienceWireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have recently gained a great attention in several applications such as environmental monitoring and target tracking. Applying this technology to shipboard monitoring systems may be a cost-effective solution to reduce the cost of wires installation and maintenance. However, wireless communications on board ships may be severely obstructed by the metallic structure of bulkheads. In this paper, we analyze the efficiency of a shipboard WSN by measurement and simulation. A measurement campaign is conducted to study the radio wave propagation and to verify the feasibility of a WSN on board a ship. Based on the measurement results, a hierarchical group-based topology for a large-scale shipboard WSN is proposed. A realistic simulation model of the ship, taking into account the environment particularities, is then performed using OPNET network simulator. Performance of the WSN architecture is evaluated using the ZigBee model. Measurement results show the feasibility of WSN technology on board ships, while simulation results show significant performance of proposed architecture in terms of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio

Architecting the cyberinfrastructure for National Science Foundation Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI)

The NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is a networked ocean research observatory with arrays of instrumented water column moorings and buoys, profilers, gliders and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) within different open ocean and coastal regions. OOI infrastructure also includes a cabled array of instrumented seafloor platforms and water column moorings on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. This networked system of instruments, moored and mobile platforms, and arrays will provide ocean scientists, educators and the public the means to collect sustained, time-series data sets that will enable examination of complex, interlinked physical, chemical, biological, and geological processes operating throughout the coastal regions and open ocean. The seven arrays built and deployed during construction support the core set of OOI multidisciplinary scientific instruments that are integrated into a networked software system that will process, distribute, and store all acquired data. The OOI has been built with an expectation of operation for 25 years.Peer Reviewe

DEVELOPMENT OF OPERATIONAL SCENARIOS FOR HYDROGEN-POWERED UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES IN NAVAL APPLICATIONS

Beyond the obvious burdens of moving refined petroleum products around the battlespace, and the inherent risks, the increasing cost of hydrocarbon fuels and their associated environmental impact have led to heightened demand for the use of alternative fuels in military applications. Hydrogen is one promising alternative fuel due to its high gravimetric energy density, large abundance, limited environmental impact, renewability, and ability to be produced in situ. The goal of this thesis is to develop a set of operational scenarios that demonstrate the plausibility and advantages of using hydrogen-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for naval operations. Use cases for hydrogen-powered UAVs are identified from operational experience and usage of other UAV types currently in operation. Systems modeling language (SysML) tools are used to present these use cases in readable diagrams. Each use case is explained by a written scenario, sequence diagram, and high-level operational concept graphic. Hydrogen-powered UAVs can be effectively used in numerous naval applications while providing advantages, mostly due to their increased flight endurance and low signature. Researchers can apply this same process to general hydrogen fuel usage in all naval operations to better prove its efficacy and justify continued research and development. The next step for this research is to demonstrate the operational capabilities of hydrogen-powered UAVs through flight testing.Outstanding ThesisLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Aeronautical Engineering. A continuing bibliography, supplement 115

This bibliography lists 273 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in October 1979

Seafloor incubation experiment with deep-sea hydrothermal vent fluid reveals effect of pressure and lag time on autotrophic microbial communities

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Fortunato, C. S., Butterfield, D. A., Larson, B., Lawrence-Slavas, N., Algar, C. K., Zeigler Allen, L., Holden, J. F., Proskurowski, G., Reddington, E., Stewart, L. C., Topçuoğlu, B. D., Vallino, J. J., & Huber, J. A. Seafloor incubation experiment with deep-sea hydrothermal vent fluid reveals effect of pressure and lag time on autotrophic microbial communities. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 87, (2021): e00078-21, https://doi.org/10.1128/AEM.00078-21Depressurization and sample processing delays may impact the outcome of shipboard microbial incubations of samples collected from the deep sea. To address this knowledge gap, we developed a remotely operated vehicle (ROV)-powered incubator instrument to carry out and compare results from in situ and shipboard RNA stable isotope probing (RNA-SIP) experiments to identify the key chemolithoautotrophic microbes and metabolisms in diffuse, low-temperature venting fluids from Axial Seamount. All the incubations showed microbial uptake of labeled bicarbonate primarily by thermophilic autotrophic Epsilonbacteraeota that oxidized hydrogen coupled with nitrate reduction. However, the in situ seafloor incubations showed higher abundances of transcripts annotated for aerobic processes, suggesting that oxygen was lost from the hydrothermal fluid samples prior to shipboard analysis. Furthermore, transcripts for thermal stress proteins such as heat shock chaperones and proteases were significantly more abundant in the shipboard incubations, suggesting that depressurization induced thermal stress in the metabolically active microbes in these incubations. Together, the results indicate that while the autotrophic microbial communities in the shipboard and seafloor experiments behaved similarly, there were distinct differences that provide new insight into the activities of natural microbial assemblages under nearly native conditions in the ocean.This work was funded by Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant GBMF3297; the NSF Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI) (OCE-0939564), contribution number 562; NOAA/PMEL, contribution number 5182; and the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) under NOAA cooperative agreement NA15OAR4320063, contribution number 2020-1113. The RNA-SIP methodology used in this work was developed during cruise FK010-2013 aboard the R/V Falkor supported by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The NOAA/PMEL supported this work with ship time in 2014 and through funding to the Earth Ocean Interactions group. NSF provided ship time for the 2015 expedition through OCE-1546695 to D.A.B. and OCE-1547004 to J.F.H