Well, there's no word from Caspar yet despite attempts to get everything set up - ftp accounts (apparently its easier to ftp text from a Sat phone than to email it) touch typists at the ready... So can only presume that the phone is not working. Either that or C is so blown away by Saya that he has been silenced by sheer awe & grandeur.
Anyway, here's a bulletin he sent some days ago that arrived after several subsequent ones & which I decided to hold back till such a time as this... It contains prophetic words about the Sat phone - & useful background on Mineral Accretion Technology.
Wolf tells me how mineral accretion, the key technology for Saya 2002, came about. "I grew up on the Elbe [river] in what is now Czech. Elbe had a lot of mud. I was happiest playing in the river, making dams in the mud. That's where I really grew up. Playing with water. Very often I came home covered in mud. My mother, a schoolteacher, always believed kids should play: 'Homo Ludens'! [Man, the playing animal]. She had reacted against Victorian values.
"I was always interested in building in water. An incredible affinity. I cannot explain it. When I was a little bit bigger I built islands in creeks. And then something really for me incredible happened. I was nine or ten. My parents were out at night. My sister and I were alone in our very little flat. Why I did it I don't know. I had no idea of physics or electro-chemistry. I look flat pan and two how you call them in English cut throat razors. I connected these two blades to the electrical outlet with wires and put them in a pan full of water.
"The water was fresh water so nothing happened! I went downstairs to the common kitchen part and grabbed a fistful of salt. I came upstairs and threw the salt in the water. Almost immediately I was engulfed in blue and green sparks and steam. This was a big thing to me. I don't know where I got the inspiration from. It was not through school. We had a Goddammit late start with school because of the war. Nothing was functioning because of that thing.
"Four or five years later, I read about an article about Fritz Harber, the German-Jewish scientist who was jointly responsible for the Harber-Bosch process [used to make ammonia by reacting nitrogen and hydrogen together]. He won the Nobel Prize for it. He was a German nationalist who believed in Order and the Kaiser. Harber, more than anyone, began the poison war [chemical warfare].
"After World War One the Allies imposed incredible reparations on Germany. We would still be paying today! Harber was commissioned by the new government at Weimar to look at distilling gold out of seawater. He was given plenty or research funds and did his calculations. He found he could get the gold out but that it would cost more than the gold was worth in terms of energy. The figure is something like 3kg of gold in a cubic mile or so of seawater.
"I was keenly aware since I read this article that not only gold but nearly every element known to man was in seawater. The sea is an inorganic soup as well as an organic soup. Later, when I studied architecture and began to teach, I retained my interest in working in the sea with inorganic materials. I saw the potential of shell- building organisms.
"One evening in the early '70s I was sitting with my students [from the University of Texas] at Shultz's beer garden in Austin. It was a beautiful summer evening. We talked about architecture to come as we always did. I had been doing some experiments pouring seawater over various objects, including a column of straw, and observing how they crystals formed as they dried out.
"That evening I said let's try one thing. Let's take a bucket of seawater and put in two electrodes connected to DC [direct current]. I had read up on how corals grew their skeletons and that electrical potential was involved - so I had rudimentary knowledge of how corals built their skeleton.
"I was out of seawater in the lab. Another liquid with many compounds is urine. We went to the lab and all pissed into a big bucket. That night I could hardly sleep. In the morning we had mineral accretion on the cathode. This was something new.
"Sir Humphrey Davy [a scientist who worked in the first part of the 19thC] was the first one to notice that a calcareous coating was formed on a cathodically charged piece of metal. But he could not explain how it was formed and did not dwell on. To my knowledge, cathodic protection [an electrical charge through metal hulls to protect against erosion] only came about in the late 1920s.
"The same day I took some students down to the Gulf in my bashed up Volvo and we got a lot of seawater. We were in full swing". In a short time, Wolf applied for and was awarded three patents: mineral accretion as a means to create structures in seawater; the protection of timber pilings and other components in seawater using a cathodic mesh; and the repair of concrete structures in water.
Wolf thought that one of the most valuable applications for mineral accretion would be in the Louisiana delta, an incredibly rich biome and area of great natural beauty. This is now only around a third the size it was in the early 1800s. It is washing away as engineering works a dredging cause the rich - albeit now heavily polluted - silt of the Mississippi - to shoot off into the abyssal depths of the Gulf of Mexico rather than allowing them it to accumulate in the delta.
In the early '80s a friendly Louisiana congressman took up the cause. Together, they proposed a pilot coastal defense structure at Grand Isle and substantial funding was agreed. "Then the granite lobby from Arkansas stepped in. My funding was cut to a tenth, and my project site was moved to a shifting sand island - an impossible location.
"I tried my damndest, and the stripped down structure we built survived through a first hurricane - something that was said to be impossible. But it was swept away in the second hurricane. This discredited me, politically speaking. Coastal defense is a highly lucrative trade. Come in as an outsider and they really kill you."
Wolf says that the process under his second patent has proven its worth at test sites all the Gulf Coast. "The pilings I put in are still in excellent condition over 20 years later whereas you normally have to replace the pilings every 4 to 6 years with a process that is highly polluting and energy intensive [creosoting or injecting copper, chromium and arsenic using autoclaves].
"I presented to the Admiral of the Coastguard up in DC, accompanied by Senator Nunn, of all people. But I could never convince the Coastguard that we could do more. It doesn't come down to price. It's a question of established ways. My technique is not in the engineering handbooks and so people don't trust it...There's an American saying you invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Utter bullshit!"
The method under the third patent - the repair of [reinforced] concrete structures in water - could be used to repair very large structures at low cost that otherwise are ruined. Often seawater penetrates into even the thickest concrete and corrodes the steel framework inside. Rusted steel expands to eight times the volume and so cracks the concrete. To counteract this Wolf connects the rusting bars to an appropriate DC source to make them into cathodes. This makes the steel reform again, while mineral accretion closes the cracks. This has never left the pilot stage.
In the early 1990s Wolf took out a fourth patent jointly with Tom Goreau for the accelerated growth of creatures that produce CO2 in seawater (with special reference to corals and bivalves). "I published some of the first results in the magazine Ambio late in '92. I took a cathodic wire and wrapped it around an elkhorn coral. In a short time the wire accreted calcium carbonate. It had killed parts of the coral immediately underneath, but the calcium carbonate which had accreted on the wire had been settled by polyps from the mother coral.
"We have gone on to demonstrate conclusively the accelerated growth of healthy normal corals by this method. But none of the establishment want to listen. Tom, who they have pigeon-holed as the Enfant Terrible of coral science, is too honest, too blunt, too straightforward. He is not half a percent of a diplomat. When he says we have the only method that actually works to save corals marine biologists they are pissed off.
"He's right of course, but people try to do everything against us. As a result it is very hard to get funding. Whenever we do get a grant nothing goes into personal support. No grant covers our time. Criticism doesn't interest us any longer. We don't worry about funding. We just do it. We have been through some very hard times. The funding from the Lighthouse Foundation is a miracle. I didn't believe it myself, but Prinzip Hoffnung! [the principle of hope].
Wolf has had a chance to let off a little steam, which greatly improves his grim mood. It's been a frustrating day for all of us. Nothing works in the Seychelles on Sunday so we have been unable to make progress with provisioning or to access the equipment to inventory and checking it. And there is still no sign and no word of the Orphee, our main expedition boat.
Frank spends a lot of time trying to send email via the Inmarsat satellite phone. Receiving emails is slow, but presents no essential problems. However we are completely unable to send emails. We try again and again, using various options. Every connection costs three dollars, plus three dollars for every minute thereafter. It's like burning money.
Later that night, over good wine and an excellent meal for the whole team cooked by Hartmut and Caroline on the Vakalele, Wolf reveals the true purpose of our mission. "In reality, this is part of a study by the US National Institutes of Health to determine the effects of extreme frustration on human beings". Fortunately, we can still laugh.
Caspar Henderson
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