The North Atlantic ocean viewed on a spherical globe projection. The Atlantic, It’s Bigger Than You Imagine As a comparison the road distance between New York and San Francisco is about 2900 miles. In reality the former is in the region of 1000 miles while the latter is over 3500 miles. Greenland for example is many times smaller than its depiction in a Mercator projection, and the distance across the far north Atlantic from Greenland to Norway appears as the same as that from for example New York to Morocco. Doing this makes it easy for us to create a mental picture of where places are in the world, but creates a significant distortion in our perception of distance. On this side of the Atlantic they have Europe and Africa roughly in the centre, with the International Date Line skirting New Zealand on their right, and the Pacific ocean and Alaska on their left. Known as the Mercator projection, a spherical globe has been distorted into a cylinder which can then be unwrapped as a rectangular piece of paper. We are used to viewing the world in terms of the map on the wall in your primary school. Perhaps in understanding this it’s best to start by looking at the scale of the distances involved. Some of these distances are not like the others: the familiar Mercator world map projection. In a very literal sense it had dropped off the radar, but the question for us is how? With the huge array of technological advances in both navigation aids and global sensing available at the end of the 21st century’s second decade, should that even be possible? It’s worth taking a while as land-lubbers to look at how ships are tracked, to try to make sense of the seeming invisibility of something that is after all pretty large and difficult to hide. Its crew had been rescued by the US Coast Guard, and since then - apart from a brief sighting in mid-Atlantic by a Royal Navy polar research vessel - it had passed unseen as a drifting ghost ship before appearing on the Irish coast.
The MV Alta is a nearly 2300t and 77m (just over 253 ft) freighter that had been abandoned in 2018 south of Bermuda after a mechanical failure had rendered it incapable of navigation. In the news following the storm is a merchant ship that was washed up by this storm on the coast of County Cork. Our neighbours in the Irish Republic are first in the path of these storms, and receive an especially strong pasting.
Some areas have widespread flooding, while fallen tree branches and damaged roofs are countrywide. I’m writing from a cozy farmhouse just outside of Oxford, UK where we are slowly emerging from a particularly intense Atlantic storm.
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