It also indicates that the UAS incident continued after the Bass Strait departed the area. So, a year ago, after cruising from New Zealand through the islands of Vanuatu and on to Australia, we sailed Sahula, David's Van de Stadt 40, south to Hobart, Tasmania. Three small boats were identified nearby, with one identifying themselves as a small fishing vessel. The veteran sailor, who has completed the race many times, was watching the forecast for strong winds on his way south. The Bass Strait Triangle is one of those places. Carbonate mud sedimentation on a temperate shelf: Bass Basin, southeast Australia. Instead of gradually fading off into the distance, however, the engine suddenly came to a stop as if someone had turned a radio off. Then, there was nothing but silence. Indigenous Australians crossed into Tasmania via the Bassian Plain tens of thousands of years ago. Like the Tasman Sea, the Bass Strait is heavily influenced by weather patterns and at the same time, the severity of the waves varies depending on which side of the Strait you are on. Lin Pardey. 6. Bass Strait (/ b s /) is a strait separating the island state of Tasmania from the Australian mainland (more specifically the coast of Victoria, with the exception of the land border across Boundary Islet).The strait provides the most direct waterway between the Great Australian Bight and the Tasman Sea, and is also the only maritime route into the economically prominent Port Phillip Bay. The Panama Canal: Interlinking the Atlantic Ocean with . As the the author explains, however, if you wait for the appropriate weather window, you can enjoy Deck logs further revealed that radiofrequency data was captured from the drones during the incident. Answer (1 of 6): Location, climate and sea bed morphology. There are two things to know about this body of water. The Ticonderoga class cruiser USS Bunker Hill (BKH) noted as many as 11 drones operating nearby. It can be a preferential area for them to develop and intensify, Louis says. He made two more crossings of Bass Strait before he died attempting to cross the Tasman Sea in February 2007. Battlefield commanders in Syria and Afghanistan have both had to constantly contend with drone threats. These details were obtained after The War Zone successfully appealed extensive redactions of the ship logs. The . The strait was possibly detected by Captain Abel Tasman when he charted Tasmania's coast in 1642. As he surveyed the area, a huge bronze disc came out of the clouds and settled alongside the plane for several moments before vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.[9]. In 1944, a strange dark shadow came out of nowhere and flew beside a Bristol Beaufort bomber for almost 20 minutes over the Bass Strait. Pipelines from the Otway Basin gas fields lead to several processing facilities in the vicinity of Port Campbell (Iona Gas Plant and Otway Gas Plant). The ominous reputation of the Bass Strait goes back to its very discovery in 1797, when the vessel Sydney Cove, . TrailerBoat had a lot of fun testing this Bass Strait Offshore 24, against the beautiful, yet rugged backdrop of Victoria's Cape Woolamai. Perhaps even stranger, she could see through the doorway to her driveway on the other side. The final hurdle for any Bass Strait crossing is the last step to the Tasmanian mainland across Banks Strait, theoretically the most dangerous part of the whole crossing. Bass can be disorienting, and can cause nausea, particularly in people who already have problems with that sort of thing, but is less . he said back in 2006, recalling the races worst-ever year. Speculation has swirled around these incidents in the last year, following high-profile leaks of night vision video footage depicting objects with an apparent triangular shape overflying Navy vessels. In 1920, while sailing into the Bass Strait, the SS Amelia J. disappeared without a trace shortly after entering the infamous stretch of water. The timeline indicates ships were directed by "GZ" but it is unclear what this abbreviation refers to. Owing to the various currents and weather systems that move through it, and also due to its shallow depth (varying around 50 . The Russell has attracted particular attention in the last year as the vessel that captured the leaked flying triangle footage. Read More: During that time, several drones flew directly over the USS Russell. The video was recently discussed in a congressional hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as an example of a solved case. [3] The strait between the Furneaux Islands and Tasmania is Banks Strait, a subdivision of Bass Strait. Anyone who has seen the Australian television show The Kettering Incident will perhaps be aware that many parts of the shows story lines are based, in part, on real-life accounts, particularly of life in Tasmania along the coast of the Bass Strait. The oil and gas is sent via pipeline to gas processing facilities and oil refineries at Longford (Longford gas plant), Western Port (Westernport Refinery closed 1985), Altona (Altona Refinery scheduled to close in 2021) and Geelong (Geelong Oil Refinery), as well as by tanker to New South Wales. Merchant Marine estimates that global piracy costs shippers $4.9 billion to $8.3 billion a year. Subsequent release of video from the Navy makes it more likely that the small dark dots in the images of the Bass Strait are part of the structure of the ship than drones. A note on the slide states that the cruiser unsuccessfully attempted to contact the Bass Strait. The timeline also indicates that Bunker Hill's AN/SPY-1 radar system held "valid tracks" of the drones, including up to an altitude of 21,000 feet. For a few thousand years, the sea was 60 metres below its current levels. This is in part because traditional deck logs were not available from Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) due to their use of digital records. Qantas also operates services. Forty miles into its Bass Strait nightmare, Midnight Rambler was confronted with a situation that could easily have ended its race. 1984 5th ed. The War Zone has received a highly significant new set of documents from the U.S. Navy via the Freedom of Information Act about a series of enigmatic drone swarm events that occurred in the waters off Southern California in 2019. At times it becomes dangerous because of its narrowness and acute turns the ships have to take. The terseness of the deck logs and limitations in AIS data left several unanswered questions, such as the origin of the drones and the specifics of their flight behavior. "Purists occasionally spark up and say that, strictly speaking, we don't actually cross the strait, as we are still in the Tasman Sea," wrote Oxley, a veteran round-the-world racer who is also a marine biologist. A draft public affairs statement further added that the drones were thought to be conducting collection operations on the ship. A lighthouse was erected on Deal Island in 1848 to assist ships navigating in the eastern part of the Straits, but there were no guides to the western entrance until the Cape Otway Lighthouse was first lit in 1848, followed by another at Cape Wickham at the northern end of King Island in 1861. We had eight people inside [the hull of the boat] with water up to our knees discussing what the next plan would be, he said. [8] The yacht was scheduled to arrive in Sydney for New Years Eve. As you might imagine, there were numerous accounts of strange events in the Bass Strait during World War II. 2022Recurrent Ventures. Watch the waves batter the vessel in the video above Watch the latest News on Channel 7 or stream for free on 7plus >> Exactly as Lien has said. We will continue to seek clarification regarding these incidents and keep readers updated as we analyze this complex new set of documents. Proud owner, Kevin King, recently . [4] After the glacial period ended, sea levels rose and flooded the Bassian Plain to form Bass Strait at around 8,000 years ago, leaving them isolated from the Australian mainland. Monnik noted that in recent years it has become more common for criminals to use one or more drones as a canary to assess the defenses of a target. : 1881 - 1895), Sat 26 Mar 1892, Page 30 - THE SEALERS OF BASS STRAIT. Meaning of place name. Further analysis suggested that the area had been in flames, and other material appeared to show someone had tried to intensely stamp it out. 8 The Loina Incident. The Australian Hydrographic Service does not consider it to be part of its expanded definition of the Southern Ocean, but rather states that it lies with the Tasman Sea. Bass Strait and its Islands. In short, there was nothing to indicate that she had been planning on leaving.[6]. It doesnt take a geoscientist to work out what might happen here, when tonnes and tonnes of water, sometimes flowing at 90 centimetres a second, hit kilometre-high walls: a lot of movement - or, in technical parlance, upwelling - where deep water is forced up the canyon walls and meets the surface. The USS Harpers Ferry (HFY), an amphibious dock landing ship, reported seeing as many as 8 unknown drones flying directly over the ship at an altitude of about 500 feet. Bass and low frequencies aren't necessarily bad for your ears - but they can be if they're too loud. But we've already seen that Tasmanian canoe-rafts became unmaneuverable and sank after about 10 miles of travel in calm seas. [35], Tammy van Wisse swam part of the strait in 1996, from King Island to Apollo Bay in Victoria, a distance of about 100km (60mi) in 17 hours and 46 minutes.[36][37]. Discovered (1606) by the Spanish mariner Luis Vaez de Torres, its . Notably, the public affairs statement characterizes the behavior of the drones as dangerous, and not in accordance with the rules of the road or internationally recognized maritime customs.. Tasmania is currently connected to the mainland via two Telstra-operated fibre optic cables; since 2006, dark fibre capacity has also been available on the Basslink HVDC cable. There appeared to be a burned patch only several centimeters wide. Similar briefings were prepared by other Navy vessels involved in the incidents. Sea strait between the Australian mainland and Tasmania, Map of Australia with Bass Strait marked in light blue. Nothing of the boat or the people on board was ever discovered. Hence, The Bosphorus strait is of great significance. All Rights Reserved. Bass Strait is regularly crossed by sailing vessels, including during the annual Melbourne to Hobart Yacht Race. But when he and his crew started getting slammed by 12-metre waves and 80km/h winds as they journeyed towards Tasmania, Oxley knew something wasnt right. Furthermore, Banks Strait is an awful place to try to navigate any boat. This prompted Governor King to send two vessels from Sydney to the island to establish a garrison at Hobart.[11]. In 1901, 22 crew members vanished into thin air along with the SS Federal in the Bass Strait, and five years later in 1906, the Ferdinand Fischer, a German cargo ship, met a similar fate as it made its way to the coast of Tasmania. [25][26], Kitesurfers have also completed the crossing[27][28] with Natalie Clark in 2010 become the first female to do the crossing. Documents show that the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Russell, also referred to by its hull number, DDG 59, and the abbreviation RSL), first reported an interaction with three unknown UAS on July 17th, 2019 approximately 62 nautical miles southwest of San Nicolas Island. Unclear images of the drones are also attached to the report, though few details can be made out: Based on these documents, the U.S. Navy had at least eight distinct encounters with groups of multiple drones in the waters off California in 2019. He has noticed that as the water becomes more shallow, the waves tend to stand up quite a lot. So the tides need to squeeze through the Bass Strait every day, going backwards and forwards and that may be in a different direction to all the other currents rushing around.. Today the wave height in Bass Strait exceeds 1 meter (3 ft 3 in) and it is dangerous for swimming. How can a small strait threaten a global powerhouse like China? . Why is Bass Strait so rough? Hopefully, this year will be smooth sailing. A . It might look like any other stretch of ocean big, blue and mostly empty but hidden just below the surface is another world of mountains and canyons, lakes and cliffs. And after flowing for hundreds of kilometres, it suddenly appears to stop moving south. A note on the slide states that the cruiser unsuccessfully attempted to contact the Bass Strait. Technology, performance and design delivered to your inbox. So, just what makes this stretch of water so tumultuous? The aircraft had just radioed the control tower in Tasmania to say it was preparing to make its approach to land when it suddenly went silent. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 71, 49-71. So if that happens, obviously you can get a fairly sudden deterioration in conditions and quite strong winds and heavy seas.. Indeed, the strait became so notorious for ships going missing that few dared to make the north to south journey until Melbourne was established in 1835, and even then at least seven major vessels vanished without a trace . WEIGHING 10,000lbs, this colossal Monster Truck is not for the faint-hearted. These teams consist of sailors trained to conduct onboard photographic intelligence in order to document unknown contacts and events of interest. DroneSec cited a 2020 Department of Justice audit focused on the use of drones in delivering prison contraband as an example of how swarm technology is increasingly used in practice. The Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race passes generally east of the strait but is affected by its weather conditions. 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