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Preventive Methods for Coastal Protection pp 1–27Cite as

Towards Mitigation of Environmental Risks

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Abstract

This introductory chapter describes the background of a preventive technology for environmental management of remote risks associated with potentially dangerous offshore activities. The notion of environmental risk caused by shipping and offshore activities is introduced as the product of the probability of an accident and the cost of its consequences. A new paradigm of remote environmental risks of contemporary ship traffic is presented, with examples of the remote impact (such as oil spill or wake waves) and a short outline of the challenges for ship routing based on environmental criteria. Several pioneering solutions towards decreasing both the local and the remote impact of ship traffic are discussed. The concept of the quantification of offshore and remote areas in terms of their potential as starting points of pollution that after some time hits vulnerable areas is introduced, and related challenges are discussed. While the impact of wind and waves on pollution transport is relatively well understood, the largest challenge is to take into account the presence of semi-persistent patterns of currents and quantify their role in pollution propagation. An approximate solution to this inverse problem of pollution propagation can be obtained using statistical analysis of a large pool of trajectories of selected particles. There exist several meaningful ways of such a quantification of offshore domains, for example, in terms of the probability of hitting vulnerable areas or of the time it takes for the pollution to reach such areas. An engineering solution can be developed using any of these quantifications. A prototype technology for the selection of optimum fairways combines four ingredients: a high-resolution circulation model, a method for calculating Lagrangian transport, a measure of environmental risk and a method for selecting an optimum sailing line.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.imo.org/blast/blastDataHelper.asp?data_id=22581&filename=A720(17).pdf.

  2. 2.

    http://www.cbd.int/doc/meetings/mar/ebsa-sio-01/other/ebsa-sio-01-imo-en.pdf.

  3. 3.

    There is, however, a clear parallel with the transport of adverse impacts by air flow after the release of some gaseous substances in mainland accidents. These aspects have been studied in detail in the context of acid rains and accidents in nuclear power stations (e.g., Vach and Duong 2011).

  4. 4.

    Note that in industrial shipping, ship routing is frequently interpreted in the narrower context of scheduling, where the objective is to minimize the cost of a fixed fleet of ships.

  5. 5.

    http://www.tu-berlin.de/fb10/MAT/searoutes/.

  6. 6.

    The solutions are targeted at smart fairway design in the context of contemporary fast ferry traffic, where as a by-product long and high waves are created by ships moving with a specific (critical) speed, creating a large problem in shallow areas (see Soomere 2009 and references therein). U.S. Pat. No. 6171021 proposed to design an underwater ramp (equivalently, the fairway crossing such ramp) so that the water depth abruptly changes. By doing so the ship avoids as much as possible sailing with critical speed and generating dangerous waves. U.S. Pat. No. 7082355 consists of a combination of devices that warn the captain when the ship is entering the critical regime in relatively shallow water. A practical use of this device consists in adjusting the sailing line so that the danger to the environment caused by vessel waves is minimized.

  7. 7.

    http://www.safedor.org/resources/1023-MEPC392.pdf.

  8. 8.

    The Eulerian specification of the flow field is a way of treating, measuring or calculation the motion properties for each fixed location in space as time passes. In marine conditions one has to use fixed moorings in order to properly measure the Eulerian velocities. This framework is mostly used in circulation modelling. The Lagrangian specification is a way of looking at fluid motion where the observer follows an individual water particle as it moves through space and time. The transport of different substances and items in the marine environment is obviously Lagrangian. The Lagrangian velocity and transport can be directly measured using drifting buoys. An overview of these specifications and their implementation in the developed technology is presented in Chaps. 3, 4 and 7.

  9. 9.

    Although several hydrodynamic or oil spill models are formally invertible (Ambjörn 2008), realistic 3D fluid dynamics is, in principle, non-invertible. Moreover, a unique solution to the governing Navier–Stokes equations only exists during a finite time. Therefore, solving even the direct problem of oil spill propagation overrides this fundamental feature of fluid dynamics.

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Acknowledgements

The underlying studies were performed in the framework of the BalticWay project, which was jointly supported by the funding from the Estonian Science Foundation and the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP 2007–2013) under grant agreement No. 217246 made with the joint Baltic Sea research and development programme BONUS. The follow-up research was partially supported by the Estonian Science Foundation (grant No. 9125), targeted financing by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (grant SF0140007s11), and by the European Regional Development Fund via support to the Centre of Excellence for Non-linear Studies CENS.

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  1. Wave Engineering Laboratory, Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21, 12618, Tallinn, Estonia

    Tarmo Soomere

  2. Estonian Academy of Sciences, Kohtu 6, 10130, Tallinn, Estonia

    Tarmo Soomere

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  1. Inst. Cybernetics, Laboratory of Wave Engineering, Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia Tee 21, Tallinn, 12618, Estonia

    Tarmo Soomere

  2. Inst. Cybernetics, Laboratory of Wave Engineering, Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia Tee 21, Tallinn, 12618, Estonia

    Ewald Quak

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Soomere, T. (2013). Towards Mitigation of Environmental Risks. In: Soomere, T., Quak, E. (eds) Preventive Methods for Coastal Protection. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00440-2_1

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