Three masts sticking up above the waves near the coastal town of Sheerness in the UK mark the spot where a deadly wreck has been rusting for almost 80 years. They belong to the SS Richard Montgomery, a US second world war-era ship that ran aground in August 1944 with a cargo of bombs. The half-submerged wreck, just 2 kilometres from land, still has 1400 tonnes of TNT in its holds.

Almost 20 years after I mounted an investigation for 快猫短视频 into the dangers posed by this doomsday wreck, the UK government has now announced plans to cut back the thick steel masts this year to reduce their weight. This is to prevent them collapsing into the holds, where they would fall onto the bombs and set off an explosion.

A spokesperson for the Department for Transport says the wreck 鈥渋s in a relatively stable condition鈥� and added that 鈥渆xpert wreck assessors are now undertaking detailed surveys鈥� to determine how much to shave off the masts.

When I began our investigation in 2004, I wanted to find out the dangers posed by this wreck. What were the chances of an explosion? And how serious would it be? The answers were far from reassuring.

A large part of the cargo was removed in 1944. But work stopped after the Admiralty 鈥� the UK government department responsible at the time 鈥� refused to pay workers danger money for unloading the bombs. This was the best chance the government would ever have to make the ship safe. Sixty years later, the wreck was disintegrating and the explosives were unstable.

Our investigation revealed that the government鈥檚 Explosives Research and Development Establishment (ERDE) had calculated in 1972 that the blast from an explosion at the wreck would shatter virtually every window in Sheerness and send a 300-metre-wide column of mud, metal and munitions shooting up almost 3 kilometres into the air. As part of the investigation, 快猫短视频 asked researchers at Defence Research and Development Canada to check these alarming calculations and they confirmed the results.

A blast on this scale would be one of the world鈥檚 biggest non-nuclear explosions, causing widespread destruction and death. The proximity of a giant liquefied natural gas terminal at the Isle of Grain is an additional worry. Supertankers on their way to the terminal pass as close as 200 metres to the wreck.

So how likely is an explosion? Unexploded bombs are always dangerous and unpredictable, which is why they are normally made safe as soon as they are found. A particular problem with the SS Richard Montgomery is that many of the smaller fragmentation bombs were fused, ready for use; bombs would normally be transported without fuses for safety.

鈥淪ome of these fused bombs may, in all probability, go through a period of enhanced sensitivity,鈥� said the ERDE in 1972. In 1999, the UK government asked consultants to carry out a risk assessment. They concluded that 鈥渟ome [bombs] may not have passed their most sensitive phase, and have a higher risk of premature detonation鈥�. The consultants said the wreck would start to collapse in 10 to 20 years and the explosion of one bomb could start a chain reaction. Doing nothing was no longer an option, they said. In 2001, senior officials met to discuss this report and agreed the time for procrastination was over. That was 21 years ago.

This week I spoke to at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London, who has taken a keen interest in the SS Richard Montgomery. He says the bombs need to be removed. 鈥淪ooner or later they have to do something,鈥� says Alexander. 鈥淭he question is will they do it too late.鈥�

Stef Conner is working with a group that recreated an ancient lyre and aims to recreate the song music of the 2nd millennium聽BC

Are there any traces of Babylonian music, which hasn鈥檛 been heard for over 3000 years?
We have the text of lots of poems from ancient Mesopotamia, and it seems likely that some were originally songs of a sort. We have the words, but the music was either not written down or is lost. I thought it would be exciting if we could listen to these poems as they were meant to be heard. The reason I think we can do this is that the language of the poems 鈥� their stresses, intonation and rhythm 鈥� provides clues about musical style.

When did you develop your interest in the links between language and music?
My PhD was in composition, with a focus on the ways in which language can be used as musical material. At that time I also played piano with a folk band called . It gave me new insights into how music interacts with language.

Isn鈥檛 it a bit of a leap from modern folk music to the music of ancient Mesopotamia?
I got in touch with a group interested in lyres and harps as I am very interested in Anglo-Saxon music. Through them I met Andy Lowings, who organised the 鈥� which built a replica of a 4550-year-old Mesopotamian gold lyre. He asked me to compose music for the lyre and last year we recorded the result 鈥� an album of contemporary music, sung in Babylonian, called The Flood, out this December (see ).

What about more historically accurate music?
It would be nearly impossible to work with Babylonian poetry and replica instruments and not become preoccupied by the question of what Mesopotamian music really sounded like.

So how would you go about answering that?
I propose to look for features that recur frequently in living musics linked to Mesopotamia. The point is to look for the most consistent features in a widely dispersed collection of musics. The most commonly occurring will be those most likely to have been features of Mesopotamian music, either because they have been preserved through musical lineages branching out from Mesopotamia, or because external influences have caused them to be invented over and over.

How can the Mesopotamian song texts help?
If I limit my survey of contemporary musical features to those that relate directly to the language and text of songs, then I should be able to produce useful models for reconstructing music from the Babylonian texts. For example, the penultimate syllable of lines in Babylonian poems is often stressed. For ideas about how this might translate into music 鈥� such as the singing of multiple notes on one syllable 鈥� you can search for examples in today鈥檚 songs with texts that share such characteristics.

Would the songs be familiar to ancient ears?
You can鈥檛 perfectly reconstruct a Mesopotamian song in this way. But I think if you could go back 3000 years and play it to a Babylonian they would say: 鈥淥h, that sounds a bit like our music.鈥�

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淯ltimate golden oldie鈥�

Editorial: Defuse this oil time bomb

Thousands of ships sunk in the second world war are seeping oil 鈥� and with their rusty tanks disintegrating, 鈥減eak leak鈥� is only a few years away

THE battle for Guadalcanal was one of the pivotal moments of the second world war. The Japanese occupied Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands, in August 1942. When the Americans landed a few months later, the Japanese set out to reinforce their troops by sea. The struggle for naval supremacy that followed was confused and bloody, but by February 1943 the battle was over and the Japanese had evacuated their remaining troops.

The battle has a hidden legacy, however. Before the war, the stretch of water north of Guadalcanal was called Sealark Sound. Now it is known as Iron Bottom Sound, because of the number of wrecked ships there. One of these is the 6800-tonne Japanese freighter Hirokawa Maru, lying stranded off what would otherwise be an idyllic, palm-fringed Pacific island beach. Every now and then the ship leaks oil, threatening coral reefs, marine life and subsistence fishing.

Compared with the spill from BP鈥檚 Deepwater Horizon field in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil from the Hirokawa Maru is a drop in the ocean. But this is not an isolated case of one ship blackening the shores of one Pacific island. The second world war saw the greatest-ever loss of shipping: more than three-quarters of the oil-containing wrecks around the globe date from the six years of this war. Sunken merchant ships are scattered around trade routes, the victims of attack by U-boats and other craft aiming to disrupt enemy nations鈥� supply lines (see map). Then there are the naval ships sunk during great engagements such as the attack on Pearl Harbor and the battle of Chuuk Lagoon, the Japanese base in the Pacific where the US sank over 50 Japanese ships. In some locations these hulks are already leaking oil, threatening pristine shorelines, popular beaches and breeding grounds for fish. This year, for example, oil has begun to leak from the Darkdale, a British naval tanker that sank in 1941 near the island of St Helena in the south Atlantic Ocean. It was carrying more than 4000 tonnes of oil when it went down.

So how long have we got before there is a sharp increase in leakage from this lost fleet, and how big a problem could it be? What, if anything, can we do about it 鈥� and who will foot the bill?

Mystery cargoes

Trevor Gilbert of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, Dagmar Etkin of Environmental Research Consulting in New York state, and their colleagues have compiled the first global database of these polluting wrecks. In 2005 they told the in Miami that there are 8569 potentially polluting wrecks, 1583 of which were oil tankers. No one can know for sure how much oil is held in these ships. 鈥淢any wrecks may have lost oil when being sunk due to major structural damage,鈥� says Rean Gilbert of the Queensland-based consultancy , a leading authority on wrecks of the second world war. Regardless of whether they were carrying oil as cargo, these ships all contain 鈥渂unker fuel鈥�, a heavy oil that can devastate marine life and fisheries. How much bunker fuel they have depends partly on how far they had travelled since they last refuelled. But experience with modern wrecks, such as the oil tanker Prestige, which split in two off the coast of Spain in 2002, shows that most will have at least some oil on board.

There may be huge uncertainties about exactly how much oil is out there, but no one doubts that it dwarfs any single previous maritime spill. Etkin and Trevor Gilbert put the figure at somewhere between 2.5 million tonnes and 20 million tonnes. Even the lower estimate is more than double the amount of oil thought to have been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon accident and more than 60 times that of the Exxon Valdez (see diagram).

After 70 years at the bottom of the ocean, these wrecks will soon start to leak. 鈥淭here is ample evidence that there are a large number of wrecks in US coastal waters that are, in essence, spills waiting to happen,鈥� says Etkin. Doing nothing is fast ceasing to be an option. Ian MacLeod, based at the Western Australia Maritime Museum in Welshpool, is an authority on marine corrosion and has worked on the wrecks in Chuuk Lagoon. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not hopeless but it is getting desperate,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 think we are going to see a sharp increase in the number of leaking ships in five to 10 years鈥� time.鈥�

鈥淭here is evidence that a large number of wrecks in US coastal waters are spills waiting to happen鈥�

In recent years there has been a steady trickle of leaks. In August 2001, a sunken US military oil tanker, the USS Mississinewa, began to leak into Ulithi Lagoon, in Yap state, part of the Federated States of Micronesia. The tanker had been carrying 20,000 tonnes of aviation fuel and fuel oil when it was sunk on 20 November 1944. And there it stayed for 57 years, a largely forgotten wreck lying in about 35 metres of water. Then in 2001 a typhoon struck and the islanders woke up to find thick fuel oil smeared over their beaches.

Quite when a wreck will leak oil depends largely on how fast its steel corrodes. 鈥淥ne millimetre a decade is the long-term average for corrosion,鈥� says MacLeod. 鈥淲e鈥檝e got a pretty good handle on this now.鈥� Marine engineers normally reckon that a ship would lose its structural integrity once its steel plate has lost between a quarter and a half its thickness. Most ships sunk during the second world war were made of plate between 19 and 25 millimetres thick.

However, the rate of corrosion depends hugely on the circumstances of individual wrecks. 鈥淚t is vital to inspect and measure,鈥� says Rean Gilbert. 鈥淲hat may be true of one wreck is not necessarily the same for another.鈥� Most of the second world war wrecks were damaged when they were sunk, which is likely to have compromised their structural integrity. Any holes might also allow local currents to maintain a constant supply of oxygenated water, accelerating corrosion.

What鈥檚 more, the use of different metals in ships can set up galvanic coupling, essentially creating a battery with the steel plate as the anode. This causes the steel plate to be eaten away, even if no other metals are in contact with it. 鈥淥n one US wreck we found very high corrosion rates within 5 to 10 metres of the carpenters鈥� store. When we investigated we found the store had 5000 copper nails in it,鈥� MacLeod says. On the other hand, accretions of calcium carbonate and organisms such as barnacles can form a protective coating on the steel that retards the rate of corrosion 鈥� though violent storms can strip off this coating.

A lot depends on how a wreck is lying on the seabed. If it is not sitting upright, the rate of corrosion can be a lot higher due to the stresses placed on its structure. 鈥淪hips are designed to float, not to be wrecked,鈥� MacLeod says.

鈥楶eak leak鈥� soon

The crucial question is just when a wreck has reached the point at which it will start to gush oil. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have a lot of the answers,鈥� admits Lisa Symons, who heads a team at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, responsible for potentially polluting wrecks. But the general picture is clearer. As steel plates corrode and lose their strength they reach the point where the next storm will trigger a catastrophic release of oil. MacLeod believes that in five to 10 years we will enter a period of 鈥減eak leak鈥�, which he expects to last for 50 years or so.

For most countries, these old wrecks are out of sight and out of mind, until they start to leak. In the early 1990s oil started to come ashore in NOAA鈥檚 Gulf of the Farallones marine sanctuary, south of San Francisco. Initially blamed on pollution from passing ships, it continued to come ashore sporadically throughout the 1990s. In late 2001 there was another spill that went on for months. It killed about 50,000 seabirds and eight sea otters, and polluted 100,000 square kilometres of tidal marshes. Chemical tests showed that the oil was not from Alaska 鈥� the usual type carried by tankers passing the Californian coast 鈥� and that it matched previous mystery spills. So NOAA turned its attention to eight wrecks off the Californian coast. Divers and satellite imagery eventually pinpointed the source as the wreck of the Jacob Luckenbach.

鈥淔or most countries, these old wrecks are out of sight and out of mind, until they start to leak鈥�

Although not a wartime wreck, the Jacob Luckenbach is of a similar vintage, having sunk after a collision in 1953. Fifty years later, researchers found that the ship rocked from side to side on the seabed every time there was a heavy storm, releasing oil. NOAA and the US coastguards decided it would be best to remove the oil, so in 2003 salvors bored holes in the ship鈥檚 tanks and heated the oil with steam lances to lower its viscosity, then pumped it out. This technology for removing oil, known as hot tapping, is well established but it can be expensive, depending on the state of the wreck. Emptying the Jacob Luckenbach cost $19 million.

It is important to NOAA to understand the potential impact of leaks on fisheries and marine sanctuaries, and their timescale, says Symons. Partly as a result of the Jacob Luckenbach incident, . This is a catalogue of the wrecks around the US coast that could cause oil spills, together with what is known about their oil load, location and state of corrosion. It lists some 1700 of these wrecks, their oil carried either as cargo or as bunker fuel. Taken together, they could potentially leak more than 15 times the amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez. The wrecks are not evenly distributed around the coast: there are hotspots such as the Gulf of Mexico, where German U-boats were particularly active in the months after the US joined the war.

The US is one of the few countries to have started planning for peak leak. 鈥淣OAA is working to narrow down our list of RUST sites to determine those which are of greatest potential threat to economic and environmental resources,鈥� says Symons.

In 2009, the American Salvage Association (ASA) helped to set up the to identify high-risk wrecks that could threaten the US coastline, either damaging the marine environment or threatening economic interests such as fisheries and tourism. Etkin, the ASA and the not-for-profit North American Marine Environmental Protection Association successfully persuaded Congress to give $1 million to WORP in 2010. 鈥淭he first phase of the project is to do a risk assessment 鈥� the probability of leakage multiplied by the consequences of leakage,鈥� says Etkin. As part of this work, NOAA is organising a workshop of the world鈥檚 leading corrosion experts at Newport News, Virginia, in October. The aim is to develop standard tests for deciding what to do about any given wreck. Ultimately, though, it is the US coastguard that will decide whether to remove oil from a wreck.

Close to the top of WORP鈥檚 list of priorities is likely to be the that was torpedoed by a U-boat in 1942 and sank off the coast of Long Island, New York, in 55 metres of water. Carrying a cargo of 11,000 tonnes of lubricating oil, the tanker broke into three parts and has been a chronic source of oil pollution over many years.

Away from the US, in the Pacific about 85 per cent of the wrecks are Japanese and the rest are mostly American. In the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Indian Oceans about are British and 16 per cent American, says Rean Gilbert. In general, most wrecks are the responsibility of the owners, but outside the armed forces not many of these owners still exist. And flag states are reticent about accepting liability. The British government, for example, failed to reply to 快猫短视频鈥�s questions about the Coimbra.

The cost of dealing with these wrecks is daunting. It cost about $5 million to pump 6000 tonnes of oil from the USS Mississinewa, for example. The cost of cleaning up the oil once it has leaked is also dismaying. In 1999 Etkin put it at , depending on a wreck鈥檚 depth and location. 鈥淎s the situation in the Gulf of Mexico has made abundantly clear, once the oil spills it is a very expensive exercise to clean it up,鈥� says Rean Gilbert. Poorer countries face exceptional difficulties here. The Federated States of Micronesia and the Solomon Islands are among the world鈥檚 most impoverished countries, with little leverage when it comes to persuading richer countries to take responsibility for their wrecks.

While the cost of pumping the oil out of all of the world鈥檚 rusting hulks would be enormous, it is possible to spread the cost as well as carry out surveys to identify those most at risk of creating a serious spill, says MacLeod. But the first step should be to put so-called sacrificial anodes on bunker-fuel tanks. A sacrificial anode is a piece of metal that alters the local electrochemistry and then slowly dissolves. This not only halts the corrosion of the steel it is attached to but also raises the local pH of the seawater, encouraging protective marine deposits to grow. 鈥淚t will gain you some breathing space,鈥� says MacLeod. 鈥淲hat we need is time.鈥�

Over the course of a six-week study researchers monitored the behaviour of 82,000 pedestrians.

Messages like 鈥渢ake the stairs鈥� and 鈥渟even minutes of stair climbing daily protects your heart鈥� were printed on stair risers in a UK shopping centre. This led to a 190% increase in the number of people passing up the stairs each day.

Simply decorating the risers with attractive patterns made no significant difference to the number of people using the stairs, suggesting that the increase was entirely due to the healthy messages.

The messages also seemed to have a knock-on effect, increasing the number of people who took nearby flights of stairs by more than half, even though these stairs did not carry health messages.

Encouraging signs

The researchers behind the study, Oliver Webb of the University of Kingston and Frank Eves of the University of Birmingham, both in the UK, even found an increase of 25% in people walking down the staircase 鈥� although the messages are not visible from the top of the stairs. Webb and Eves say this suggests that stair messages would encourage people to develop the habit of taking the stairs.

Beckie Lang of the in the UK welcomes the study. 鈥淚t鈥檚 great that it makes people think about what they are doing.鈥�

But she also suggests complementing the positive message on stairs with negative ones in lifts: 鈥淵ou would have a reinforcing effect if you get the message in both places, and catch people who don鈥檛 want to feel lazy.鈥�

Four day鈥檚 food

According to the World Health Organisation, one billion adults are overweight, and 300 million of those are obese. About 22% of British adults and about 30% of American adults are obese, according to the US .

Webb and Eves estimate that an 80-kilogram man walking up a flight of stairs eight times a day for a year would burn off the equivalent of four days鈥� intake of food.

鈥淓ven small changes can make big differences,鈥� says Lang. 鈥淧eople often think they have to make drastic changes, but that isn鈥檛 really the case.鈥�

Lang also argues that the design of buildings often encourages obesity: 鈥淲e want to make the healthy option the most attractive option, the default option, rather than the most difficult.鈥�

Journal reference:

Just over 100 years after the Wright brothers first flew into history, the burgeoning aviation industry is suffering growing pains. In 2003, 1.7 billion passengers criss-crossed the skies. If current trends continue, that number will rise to a staggering 3 billion by 2030. But despite the economic benefits, those passengers will also bring concerns about noise and air pollution, terrorism and the spread of disease.

The two leading plane makers 鈥� Europe鈥檚 Airbus, based in France, and the US aerospace giant Boeing 鈥� have very different strategies for dealing with increased passenger numbers. The Airbus answer is to build big 鈥� their A380 will be the world鈥檚 largest passenger aircraft. The plane, which made its maiden flight in April 2005, can carry up to 850 passengers 鈥� double the number a Boeing 747 can carry.

Boeing believes small will be beautiful. Its new 7E7 Dreamliner only carries 200 passengers, but can fly directly between small airfields at which large aircraft cannot land. Boeing鈥檚 thinking is that passengers will no longer have to change planes to reach their final destination, easing overcrowding at major hubs, such as London鈥檚 Heathrow.

Safety in the sky

Will Airbus鈥檚 challenge to Boeing鈥檚 supremacy succeed? Perhaps, but the last one ended tragically, when the Anglo-French Concorde crashed in flames near Paris in July 2000. The world鈥檚 only supersonic passenger plane started flying again in 2001, but not for long. Concorde never achieved commercial success, but the crash hastened its end, and the final flight came in 2003. It will be at least 20 years before there is another supersonic passenger plane.

In a bid to squeeze more planes into our crowded skies, Europe halved the minimum vertical distance between planes in 2002, although experts warned this was too close for comfort. Shortly after this, an overstretched Swiss air-traffic controller overruled a Russian plane鈥檚 onboard collision avoidance system. The pilot was told to dive, not climb, causing a mid-air collision in which 71 people died.

Lessons learnt from crashes such as Swissair 111, which pitched into the sea off Canada in 1998, are a painful way of improving air safety. The plane鈥檚 flight recorder stopped working six minutes before impact, because the aircraft lost power. 快猫短视频 called for black boxes to have back-up power. In 2005 the Federal Aviation Administration decreed that black boxes should have batteries that could keep them working for at least 10 minutes after a crash.

Other safety problems that have hit the headlines in recent years include the continuing problems of metal fatigue, unclear air traffic control displays, worries about maintenance procedures and the threat of collisions with birds. Entirely new threats to safety have also emerged, including the risk posed by automatic unmanned aerial vehicles, deadly junk on runways and the quality of tests that assess both the lifetime of modern aircraft materials and check for surface defects.

Health and terror

Terrorism has always been a concern of the aviation industry but, since the devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the threat has become even more worrying.

Airport security has been enhanced by installing improved equipment, such as 3D scanners and sophisticated bomb detectors to scan luggage. Onboard safety has been bolstered with: air marshals; stun guns; emergency autopilots; concealed cameras; double-door security barriers on cockpits and biometric techniques that verify the identity of a pilot.

Despite increased airport security, a Russian plane crashed on the way from Moscow to a Black Sea resort in 2004, killing all 46 people onboard. Investigators found traces of RDX explosive in the wreckage. Terrorists have also struck planes with anti-aircraft missiles. The US government is considering attaching laser-based missile-defence systems to civil aircraft for protection, though it may be too expensive.

The flying public also faces some less obvious threats to their wellbeing. Sick passengers are the main reason for diverting a plane. But the A380 is less likely to divert because few airports boast terminals that can cope with its colossal size.

Planes also spread infectious diseases. Twenty-two passengers caught SARS on a flight from Hong Kong in 2003 and spread the disease around the world while jet-setting mosquitoes have caused cases of malaria near Heathrow in 2002 and close to Geneva airport in 1989.

Pollution pressures

As air travel grows, so does its impact on the environment. The UK鈥檚 Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution calculates that, by 2050, emissions of greenhouse gases from aviation will account for more than half of the UK鈥檚 impact on global warming.

Part of the solution could be to run planes on soya oil, or to reduce their cruising altitude by between 1000 and 3000 metres to cut contrails. Or governments may force the industry to clean up its act. In February 2005, German and French ministers suggested a new tax on aviation fuel.

Studies show prolonged exposure to noise in people living near airports is linked to high blood pressure and stress and that it damages children鈥檚 memory and impairs their reading ability. A variety of ideas have been proposed to silence noise from aircraft engines, including putting electrodes in the exhaust to change the airflow, using active noise and avoiding noisy turns by lengthening the glide path into airports.

Another idea that surfaces at regular intervals is to use airships, which would slash noise and pollution. But not since the Hindenburg went up in flames in 1937 has any airline had plans for airship-based passenger services.

Record breakers

As the industry has grown and aviation technology has improved, pioneers have pushed themselves to the limit in breaking a series of records.

In recent years an unmanned NASA scramjet smashed speed records by flying at 10 times the speed of sound, a private consortium broke civilian altitude records by sending the rocketship SpaceShipOne to the very brink of space, a millionaire adventurer was the first to complete an around-the-world solo aeroplane flight without refuelling, having already completed the first solo around-the-world balloon trip.

Other records remain to be re-broken. Balloonists have their eyes on the record for the highest ever crewed balloon and skydivers are planning the highest free-fall jump in history.