Easter Island News

AMS Global helped out in a most unusual project for the marine consulting and safety firm, helping to return The Floating Head back to the water,  33 years after it was first created.The Floating Head, a sculpture created by artist Richard Groom, was the centrepiece for Glasgow’s 1988 Garden Festival. It has been carefully restored over the past six months, and is now on public display at Canting Basin at Govan Docks, adjacent to Glasgow Science Centre, for the next four weeks.Inspired by the carvings on Easter Island…

Run by the British technology firm Satellite Applications Catapult and backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, project 'Eyes on the Seas' will open a "Virtual Watch Room". Computers will be able to watch satellite feeds of the waters around Easter Island, a Chilean territory in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, and the western Pacific island nation of Palau, which lacks the resources to monitor all the illegal fishing taking place near its waters. The project is now live and capable of monitoring waters across the world's oceans.

Run by the British technology firm Satellite Applications Catapult and backed by environmental groups, Project 'Eyes on the Sea' will open a "Virtual War Room". Experts will be able to watch satellite feeds of the waters around Easter Island, a Chilean territory in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, and the western Pacific island nation of Palau, which lacks the resources to monitor all the illegal fishing taking place near its waters. The technology analyses numerous sources of live satellite tracking data, enabling monitors to link to information about a ship's country of registration and ownership history to spot suspicious vessels.

From Conny Martin's standpoint, the vast empty expanse of the Pacific Ocean where flaming chunks of Russia's Mir space station may find their watery grave does not feel empty at all. Martin is one of 2,800 people living on Chile's Easter Island, a triangle of volcanic rock marooned in the ocean, 3,200 km (2,000 miles) from the nearest big population centers in South America or Tahiti -- and potentially in Mir's flightpath. "As we are the most affected ones, we get the least information of all of you," the tour operator said. "It's business as usual here and we're just hoping that nothing will land on us. What can we do? We can't move out of the way," she said, uneasy at the thought of 130 tons of red-hot space junk crashing down from above later this week.

Spanish explorer Kitin Munoz set sail on Sunday from Barcelona in a primitive reed boat to try to prove that ancient seafarers could have crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Munoz, 43, and his multinational seven-man crew hope to reach Colombia's Caribbean coast on the 20-m (65-foot) Mata Rangi III. He made two attempts to cross the Pacific Ocean during the late 1990s, but both ended in disaster. "We have constructed a boat identical to the boats used by ancient navigators, without any modern materials such as plastics," he said. The boat was built in the Olympic port of Barcelona from reeds specially imported from Lake Titicaca on the Peru-Bolivia border.

The crew of a replica of an ancient Hawaiian canoe reached their final destination - Easter Island - traveling some 15,000 miles (24,000 km) and using only the stars and weather patterns to navigate. The Polynesian Voyaging Society said the Hokulea, which left Hawaii on June 15 on a voyage that first took them to the Marquesas Islands and Mangareva, was set to land on the remote Chilean island early on Oct. Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson relied on the stars and currents to steer the double-hulled canoe, a wood and fiberglass replica of the type used by ancient Polynesians to settle the Pacific some 2,000 years ago. "They're just very…