Maritime salvage law is always interesting as it feels like it was mostly written in the 1600 and 1700's :-)
It does not use AIS but Iridium, so the device can relay custom information. In this case, it could have been useful to know about the vessel's health from how it was moving: it would have been very easy to know if it was going to sink if it would have begun to list to one side permanently, for example. It would have been just a matter of dropping our box and a big solar panel on deck.
The Chinese have some too, but I guess they only bother with their back yard. ESA were doing something commercial too, but I haven’t been following details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9HW5361bBs
There were rumors the Air Force got to use a water-landed SpaceX booster for target practice back in 2018, too. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18343/did-the-u-s-air-...
[0] Large 300 ton+ ships are type A: https://help.marinetraffic.com/hc/en-us/articles/217631867-H...
So GPS won't help much.
But I can imagine an other kind of beacon could be useful to recover things from the sunken ship.
What do you mean by GPS beacon? It gets a GPS-position and transmits it... where? Using what carrier?
You do have AIS already, and it is absolutely battery-operable, but I’m not sure to what extent the equipment is battery operated in the real world.
A typical aid transmitter
There's very little intersection between hardware that would last in those conditions and would be cheap enough that coast guards would be willing to just leave it on a ship. Or maybe I'm underestimating the budget of the Coast Guard, but leaving this thing adrift in the first place seems to indicate otherwise...
[Interviewer:] So what do you do to protect the environment in cases like this?
[Senator Collins:] Well, the ship was towed outside the environment.
[Interviewer:] Into another environment….
[Senator Collins:] No, no, no. it’s been towed beyond the environment, it’s not in the environment
[Interviewer:] Yeah, but from one environment to another environment.
[Senator Collins:] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in an environment. It has been towed beyond the environment.
[Interviewer:] Well, what’s out there?
[Senator Collins:] Nothing’s out there…
[Interviewer:] Well there must be something out there
[Senator Collins:] There is nothing out there… all there is …. is sea …and birds ….and fish
[Interviewer:] And?
[Senator Collins:] And 20,000 tons of crude oil
[Interviewer:] And what else?
[Senator Collins:] And a fire
[Interviewer:] And anything else?
[Senator Collins:] And the part of the ship that the front fell off, but there’s nothing else out there.
1. Climb onto ship 2. Fire up blowtorch 3. Profit
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
They would like to regain control of said coastline. In fact, they have a holiday to commemorate said loss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_del_Mar
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2015/05/09/beaches-of...
If I had access to a list of companies who held their entire supply chain to a certain set of standards, I'd be willing to pay a little more for my toothbrush.
We buy our toothbrushes from a retail store, many transactions removed from the manufacture of the toothbrush, and every organisation in that chain would have to voluntarily agree to honestly report its transportation details. This is unlikely.
Even if it did happen, the onus would then be on consumers to interpret these details, perform a comparison between a number of available brands, and determine the most conscientious choice. And then review this decision periodically, because transportation contracts come and go. This is a substantial amount of work.
Even if consumers were able to do that amount of work, they'd then have to replicate that work for every single product, because everything goes through a similar transportation process. There is absolutely no way that any individual has enough time in their lives to research the transportation details of even a reasonable sampling of products used.
And that's not even considering the transportation issues in the supply chain!
As you observe, individual organisations also cannot act, because doing so makes them less competitive.
This is basically the same reason why individuals can't effectively tackle climate change. There is far too much information that's hidden, and far too much time required to effectively assess information, for individuals to influence anything.
Like with climate change, there is a solution, and it's regulation. The problem would vanish overnight if the EU, the US, and I guess now the UK all refused to allow docking of ships with flags of convenience, or even just ones flying flags from countries that don't ratify the maritime treaties.
And like with climate change, the solution is hampered not because of technical difficulties or cost, it's hampered by lack of will to spend a relatively small amount of money on something that only has a social good and not an economic good.
Really - it is quite common for mariners not to know who the owner is.
So what's the story behind this mysterious ship without a crew?
This is actually the meaning of the term "ghost ship".
Any of the big salvage companies, Titan or Smit or Mammoet, can deal with such a wreck if paid to do so. It's expensive, but routine. Ireland has local salvage companies, too. Once it's decided who pays the bill, one of them will probably be brought into deal with the mess.
It might conceivably matter that the wreck is now in a somewhat more convenient place rather than the middle of the ocean, but probably it's just too low value for it to be economic to volunteer. Somebody will have to get paid explicitly to tidy this up.
Sounds like that was written on behalf of public companies who imagined they'd always want to assert their ownership rights. It was not written while mindful of the possibility of anonymous LLCs who have a salvage bill, an environmental problem, and rescue operations expenses tied to the ship and would rather it sank in the middle of the ocean...
I wonder if the mythological archetype of the "ghost ship" originated from cases like this: unidentified, unmanned ships roaming the seas on their own, in a time before there was a global record of abandoned ships. Doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to assume they're crewed by ghosts.
