Experts found a necklace that had been missing for more than a century in the wreck of the Titanic, during a 3D digital scan of the shipwreck, and artificial intelligence is now being used to determine the owner of this jewel.
Richard Parkinson, chief executive of UK-based deep-sea mapping firm Magellan Ltd, said the find was "amazing, beautiful and impressive".
The company conducted the first-ever full-scale digital survey of the transatlantic cruise ship, which lies 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, 400 miles south of Canada.
The survey captured a picture of a turquoise and gold necklace decorated with the teeth of a megalodon shark, a type of huge prehistoric shark that lived about 20 million years ago.
The team was not able to recover this unique piece of jewelry due to an agreement currently in place between the United Kingdom and America, which prevents the removal of artifacts from the shipwreck.
However, Magellan Ltd has begun working on a technology that uses artificial intelligence to analyze footage of passengers when they boarded the ship, scan it and use facial recognition technology to catalog the clothes they wore on the day they embarked on the doomed voyage.
If analysts can identify who wore the necklace, they can start searching for living relatives of the 2,200 passengers on board the Titanic on its fatal voyage.
Deep sea mapping company Magellan Ltd, in association with Atlantic Productions, is currently producing a documentary about the project.
Mapping the depths of the ocean where the wreck of the ill-fated ship is located required the participation of a team of experts who commanded remotely controlled submarines. The submersibles collected more than 700,000 images from every angle of the Titanic, after spending more than 200 hours scanning the length and breadth of the wreck.
An accurate 3D reconstruction of the ship has been made using this data, which indicates that the Titanic may not have hit an iceberg before it sank.
Parks-Stevenson, who has studied the ship for many years, explains that there is "a growing amount of evidence that the Titanic did not hit the iceberg alongside it, as it appears in all the movies".
He added, "This was the first scenario put forward by the London Magazine in 1912. We may not have heard the true story of the Titanic yet."
Phys org : How does the crisis in Sudan contribute to the exacerbation of the climate crisis in the Horn of Africa?
Experts report that the ongoing crisis in Sudan will soon begin to affect neighboring countries, as refugees cross borders to escape violence.
Recurring conflicts in the country have already displaced up to 3.2 million Sudanese internally, and the current violence is driving more people to flee. It is estimated that some 20,000 Sudanese have crossed from Darfur to Chad, where some 400,000 refugees have been living in 13 camps for many years. About 10,000 people headed north to Egypt in late April. Refugees also end up in South Sudan and Ethiopia, where recent heavy rains and resulting floods have affected hundreds of thousands of people.
The floods destroyed homes, livestock and farmland, which could lead to further rural-urban migration within the region.
In these receiving countries, the arrival of thousands of refugees may overwhelm the already fragile infrastructure and public health services of some of the world's most vulnerable populations.
Moreover, Sudan itself hosts one of the largest refugee populations in Africa, many of whom are considering returning home. For example, some 70,000 refugees fled from Ethiopia to Sudan during the recent conflict in Tigray. If they do, the return movements will add to the flow of refugees moving into neighboring countries.
To support refugees and returnees, attention is needed in urban areas where they almost always end up in informal settlements.
For example, the city of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, where it is estimated that more than 80% of the city's population lives in informal settlements: areas that often lack clean water or waste management, where housing is built from existing materials available, and roads are unpaved. The electricity is intermittent at best.
The informal settlements in Addis Ababa - like many cities around the world - are among the most densely populated places on earth, yet events such as the current Sudanese crisis and the displacement it has caused will contribute to their rapid expansion.
Addis Ababa is already one of the largest cities in Africa (population over 5 million), and it is growing rapidly, especially the informal settlements. But urban management of the informal settlements is extraordinarily challenging, and even locating them is a major hurdle for local government planners.
These informal settlements in Addis Ababa are the main destination for most migrants (internal and international). Characterized by either non-existent or severely deficient infrastructure, these regions face the twin challenges of worsening climate change and poor urban environmental policy.
Addis Ababa's already mountainous landscape has been degraded by deforestation and soil erosion from the ongoing proliferation of informal settlements. Such unauthorized construction is usually associated with poor drainage systems, improper waste disposal, and loss of green spaces, exacerbating the area's vulnerability.
In particular, this rapid urbanization and expansion of informal settlements exacerbates the city's vulnerability to flooding. The decrease in green areas alone is estimated to contribute to more floods and landslides.
Researchers from Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, attempted to map informal settlements in inland African cities, including Addis Ababa, using satellite data and Google Street View imagery. Through these maps, they predicted climate impacts such as flooding through cities.
Climate modeling found that informal settlements are at high risk of flooding today, and at even greater risk in 25 and 50 years, given projected increases in monsoonal precipitation in the future.
Floods come with great dangers to human life and property, threatening to wash away unstable homes and the life inside them.
Without better alternatives, Sudanese refugees arriving in informal settlements in neighboring countries expose themselves to a different kind of danger: environmental hazards.
Their arrival will further burden the fragile infrastructure of informal settlements and exacerbate the existing flood risk. The Sudan crisis could thus further fuel environmental risks in informal urban settlements across the region.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides temporary shelter to Sudanese refugees, but many of them will eventually abandon formal humanitarian assistance and head for informal settlements in neighboring towns, where many have families and ethnic networks. But without direct support, these cities face potentially catastrophic results.
Data-rich, tailored maps that identify intersecting urban and climate risks are vital to understanding where the greatest threats are to the most vulnerable populations in cities, and where infrastructure such as sewers, clean water and sanitation systems are being built to help manage and sustain the new influx of people fleeing conflict. It is a small but crucial step to alleviate the suffering spread across the region in times of crisis.
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