Category Archives: High Seas

Even though the CDCs No-Sail Order has officially been lifted, it doesnt look like Disney Cruise Line will be getting back on the water anytime soon.

Related:Which Disney Cruise Line Ship Will Set Sail First?

As you can see in the Disney Cruise Line website screenshot above, the cruise operator has officially canceled all sailings through December 31, 2020.

However, all January and February 2021 itineraries have also been removed from the webpage. Previously, Disney Cruise Line Guests had the option to take numerous trips out of multiple ports, including Port Canaveral, the Port of New Orleans, and the Port of Galveston in early 2021.

This indicates that Disney does not expect any of their four ships the Disney Dream, the Disney Fantasy, the Disney Magic, or the Disney Wonder to obtain their conditional sailing certificates by February.

Among the canceled January and February sailings are Marvel Day at Sea and Star Wars Day at Sea itineraries. Disney Cruise Line officials have not announced if these special events will be rescheduled for later in the year.

Related:Disney Wonder is Heading to Florida, Could a Test Cruise Happen Soon?

Disney Cruise Line Blog shared some details regarding the January 2021 cruise cancelations:

Disney Cruise Line decided to cancel all sailings departingthrough January 2021. Sailings are cancelled on board the Disney Magic, Disney Wonder and Disney Dream through February 1 and the Disney Fantasy through February 6.

Guests booked on affected sailings who have paid their reservation in full will be offered the choice of a cruise credit to be used for a future sailing or a full refund. Guests who have not paid their reservations in full will automatically receive a refund of what they have paid so far. Affected Guests and travel agents will receive an email from Disney Cruise Line outlining details and next steps.

Disney Cruise Line Blog also rounded up the next available Disney Cruise Line cruises on each ship in the Disney fleet:

The next bookable cruises on Disney Cruise Lines website are:

The CDCs Conditional Sailing Framework includes regulations about how long cruises can be at this time as a result, Disney has also removed sailings over 7-nights from their available itineraries.

At this time, little is known about exactly how Disney Cruise Line will operate once they get back on the high seas. Stay tuned to Inside the Magic for the latest news regarding upcoming DCL itineraries.

Are you looking forward to booking a Disney Cruise Line vacation sometime in 2021? Let the expert team at Academy Travel help you plan every magical detail!

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Disney Cruise Line Removes All Jan., Feb. Itineraries - Inside the Magic

Resounding presents Rob McClure as Long John Silver in Treasure Island Buy Tickets 25% off w/ code:TIBWW https://www.resounding.live/treasure-island Two LIVE immersive audio performances! Nov. 27 + 28 at 8 PM ET Resounding is the future of live entertainment. With our amazing new technology, we create a virtual theater which places our audiences in the middle of a live, fully-immersive "3-D" soundscape, giving you the sensation of "being there," whether it's a car zooming by on your left, or someone whispering in your ear. The shows are performed and produced LIVE by professional actors and technicians working remotely and giving our audience a unique, one-time-only theatrical experience. Adaptation and Direction by Steve Wargo Immersive Sound Design and Score by Andy Evan Cohen This fast-paced new immersive audio experience, inspired by Orson Welles' 1938 radio play, stars Maggie Lakis (Something Rotten) as Jim Hawkins and Tony-nominee Rob McClure (Mrs. Doubtfire, Beetlejuice) as Long John Silver and narrator. They are joined by Victoria Huston-Elem (Finding Neverland 1st Nat., Addams Family 1st Nat.), Kurt Uy (CBS's Tommy, Vietgone), Rolonda Watts (Divorce Court, Rolonda), and Stuart Williams (The Plot Against America, Turn: Washington's Spies). Prepare to immerse yourself with the crashing roar of the high seas, the roar of cannon fire, swashbuckling and derring-do as only Resounding can deliver. Run-time: Approx. 1 hour Age Guidance: All-Ages

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Voyage to Treasure Island with Rob McClure and Maggie Lakis - Broadway World

Newport Daily News

COASTAL RHODE ISLAND

Saturday:Mostly sunny, with a high near 52. Northwest wind 6 to 10 mph.Saturday Night:Mostly clear, with a low around 37. Northwest wind 7 to 10 mph, with gusts as high as 22 mph.

Sunday:Sunny, with a high near 50. Southwest wind 5 to 9 mph.Sunday Night:Mostly clear, with a low around 44. Southwest wind around 9 mph.

EXTENDED

Monday:Showers, mainly after 7 a.m. High near 59. Breezy, with a southeast wind 10 to 15 mph increasing to 19 to 24 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 36 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%.Monday Night:Showers. Low around 54. Windy, with a southeast wind 23 to 29 mph, with gusts as high as 40 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%.

Tuesday:A chance of showers before noon. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 58. South wind 15 to 17 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Tuesday Night:A chance of showers between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 40. Southwest wind 11 to 14 mph, with gusts as high as 25 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%.

Wednesday:Mostly sunny, with a high near 49. Southwest wind 10 to 16 mph.Wednesday Night:Partly cloudy, with a low around 38. West wind 10 to 14 mph.

MARINE

Saturday: West-northwest wind 5 to 9 knots. Mostly sunny. Seas 1 foot or less.Saturday Night:Northwestwind 6 to 9 knots. Mostly clear. Seas 1 foot or less.

Sunday:Variable winds less than 5 knots becoming southwest5 to 9 knots in the morning. Sunny. Seas 1 foot or less.Sunday Night: Southwestwind around 8 knots becoming southafter midnight. A slight chance of showers after 5 a.m. Seas 1 foot or less.

TIDES, ETC.

Saturday's high tides: 6:16a.m, 6:33p.m. Low tides: 12:07a.m., 11:45a.m

Sunday's high tides: 6:50a.m., 7:09p.m. Low tides: 12:45p.m.

Saturday's sunrise, 6:51. Sunset, 4:18.

Sunday's sunrise, 6:52. Sunset, 4:18.

Thursday's temperatures: High 59, low 50.

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NEWPORT AREA WEATHER REPORT: Nov. 28-29 - newportri.com

On the night of 25 November, at 11.30pm, cyclone Nivar began its landfall at Puducherry on the Tamil Nadu coast. A severe cyclonic storm (SCS) with wind speeds of 120-30 kmph, according the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Nivar finished making landfall at 2.30am on 26 November. It subsequently weakened into a cyclonic storm (CS), but not before dumping vast amounts of rainfall in the coastal areas around Chennai and Puducherry. By then, Puducherry had recorded 237mm of rainfall in 18 hours. In that same time, Cuddalore had recorded 246mm and Chennai, 83mm.

The good news is that the IMD had pinpointed the track of the cyclone as early as 23 November, and this helped with adequate warnings and evacuation from the coast. According to reports, through the 25th, thousands of families were evacuated across Chennai and the state's coastal districts. As many as 1,21,152 people have been evacuated across the state, including Cuddalore, Villupuram, Nagapattinam, Ariyalur, Perambalur, Phanindra Reddy, principal secretary and commissioner of Tamil Nadus disaster management and mitigation department, told Hindustan Times. Although this helped keep fatalities low, the true extent of the cyclones damage is still to be ascertained.

A NASA satellite image of cyclone Nivar. (Photo: AP/PTI) (AP)

A year of storms

2020 has been a year of tropical storms of unusual ferocity; storms super-charged over the open ocean by anomalously high sea surface temperatures. It has been a case of one of the worst scenarios of climate change impacts being played out in real time. And India has felt it more than most.

The fact that a pandemic has been ravaging the world has perhaps distracted people from how alarming this is. Between the evening of 16 May and the morning of 18 May, cyclone Amphan, belying all predictions, had turned into a monstrous super cyclone, the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. The reason for this was a marine heatwave sweeping through the Bay of Bengal, driving up sea surface temperatures to unprecedented levels. Heat is energy, says climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, and cyclones intensify rapidly by turning the potential energy stored in the ocean to kinetic energy.

Something similar occurred to cyclone Nivar. It intensified rapidly between 23-24 November, from a deep depression (DD) to a severe cyclonic storm (SCS), and by 25 November, into a very severe cyclonic storm (VSCS). Koll says that there are two reasons for this. The first and major reason is warmer seas. The Bay of Bengal is already a warm pool region, where the surface temperatures are permanently above 28 degrees Celsius. In November, the sea surface temperatures here are usually at 28-29 degrees Celsius, sometimes 30 degrees Celsius, he says. Observers were expecting a cyclone, especially since cooler La Nia (a weather pattern over the Pacific Ocean) conditions this year would have created favourable environmental conditions for cyclogenesis over the Bay of Bengal. But this is where global warming distorted the natural process.

The track of cyclone Nivar, which shows how the cyclone intensified over the Bay of Bengal. (Photo: India Meteorological Department)

According to the 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC's) Special Report On The Ocean And Cryosphere In A Changing Climate (Srocc), the global ocean has absorbed 90% of the excess heat generated by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since 1970. This has led to anomalous ocean warming, which in turn makes cyclones intensify rapidly. Prior to Nivars formation in the Bay of Bengal, climate change had made the Bay of Bengal hotter. This time the sea surface temperatures were are about 0.5-1 degree Celsius warmer, in some regions it is nearly 1.2 degree Celsius above normal, says Koll. He adds that every 0.1 degree of warmer seas gives a cyclone additional energy to feed off.

The other, lesser, factor for Nivar intensifying is an annual tropical weather fluctuation called the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). It is a band of clouds and winds which initiates in the western Indian Ocean, then moves to the central Indian Ocean and then to the eastern Indian Ocean and then to the Pacific Ocean. So depending on where it is, it can affect the local weather conditions, says Koll. Given its current position south of Bay of Bengal, the MJO would have provided favourable winds for a cyclone to develop.

Koll finds similarities between Nivar and cyclone Okchi from November 2017. Then, as of now, Okchi began in southern Bay of Bengal, rapidly intensified due to warmer seas, and aided by the MJO, trailed a long path of destruction across Sri Lanka and crossed over to the Arabian Sea. Over 800 people died in Sri Lanka. Koll says more analysis is needed, but his observations suggest that the rapid intensification of cyclones is more dependent on higher sea surface temperatures. The role of a warmer ocean is greater. If we check the cyclones that developed during the pre-monsoon or the monsoon onset time, Amphan and Nisarga, there were no favourable winds, and yet the cyclones still intensified, he says.

The Indian Ocean hot spot

The Indian Ocean (including both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal), is a climate change hot spot. According to a comprehensive study from 2017, Improved Estimates Of Ocean Heat Content From 1960 To 2015, published in Science Advances, the Indian Ocean has contributed to 25% of the excess global climate change-induced oceanic heat uptake. This is despite the fact that the Indian Ocean makes up only 13% of the global ocean surface. And this is important for global climate. The MJO, for example sometimes travels as far east as the Atlantic Ocean, affecting the weather in the tropics, in the US and also in Europe. Changes in the Indian Ocean also affect global atmospheric circulation. It also affects global ocean circulation, says Koll.

Koll says theres a need for more and better observation systems in the Indian Ocean. A multinational network of integrated observing systems for the Indian Ocean, called The Indian Ocean Observing System (IndOOS), was established in 2006. Koll is one of over 60 scientists from around the world who give recommendations and provide reports based on the IndOOS. In a three-year evaluation report co-authored by Koll, published earlier in November, scientists have called for better and more in-depth observation systems under a proposed IndOOS-2. In the years since it was established, the (observation) priorities have changed. Temperatures are rising rapidly in the Indian Ocean, the sea level is changing rapidly, and these changes are affecting the monsoon patterns, affecting the cyclones, the marine ecosystems, he says.

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Cyclone Nivar and the shadow of climate change - Livemint

Logistical failures that waste food during transportation can be solved using IT, Singapore port operator says.

One of the largest container port operators is calling on the shipping industry to tackle a growing yet often overlooked major environmental problem: spoiled food from hauling produce around the world.

The food industry accounts for almost a quarter of global carbon emissions. Yet 30% of production is wasted because it doesnt arrive in an edible form caused by logistical failures that can be addressed using information technology, said Tan Chong Meng, the chief executive officer of PSA International Group in Singapore.

Reducing that wastage through digitalization to move food more efficiently is a huge opportunity for the freight industry, which emits about 800 million tons of carbon dioxide, Tan told the Singapore International Energy Week conference.

The shipping companies that move 90% of the worlds goods including food have pledged to decarbonize in the next 30 years by curbing fossil-fuel emissions. That commitment focuses on the pollution caused by fuel, but doesnt include the indirect emissions from food waste. About 1.3 billion tons of global food production is lost before reaching consumers plates every year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Supply disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic have put the spotlight on food security, prompting calls for reduced wastage to boost self-sufficiency. In August, Chinas President Xi Jinping introduced a Clean Plates Campaign to tackle the shocking and distressing problem of food waste.

In Singapore, which relies on imports for more than 90% of its food and increased wastage by 20% over the past decade, President Halimah Yacob urged citizens to help overcome the problem.

Some 10% of developed nations greenhouse gas emissions are created by producing food thats never eaten, according to the UN Environment Programme. About 14% of the worlds food is lost after harvesting and before reaching the retail level, and good infrastructure and efficient trade logistics are key to preventing food losses, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Originally posted here:

Going off on the high seas: Shipping urged to cut food waste - Aljazeera.com

The more Andre Norton I read and reread, the more convinced I am that her real forte, and her real talent, lay in boys adventure. She tried all sorts of genres, and from the Sixties onward she developed a clearly feminist sensibility. My favorite works of hers have strong female protagonists and relatively complicated emotional arcs.

And yet, she seems most at ease in worlds with little or no sexual tension, and nothing to distract from the headlong pace of the action. Usually its a mans world, with womens voices heard seldom if at all. Women exist to die offstage (especially if theyre the protagonists mother) or to act as servants or to play the role of witch or Wisewoman. The relationships that matter are between men.

Yankee Privateer, published in 1955, is a relatively rare excursion into straight historical fiction.

It reads to me like Hornblower Lite. Maybe she had read the first volume of the saga (published in 1950) and been inspired. Or maybe it was in the Zeitgeist.

Norton was no C.S. Forester and I dont think aspired to be, but she did quite a lot of research and made sure to mention it in her front matter. Each chapter header is an excerpt from a song of the period. There are plenty of the tiny, telling details that define a period and encourage the reader to trust that the author has done her homework properly.

The protagonist is her standard-issue plucky orphan pushed through a series of adventures by forces beyond his control. This version is named Fitzhugh Lyon, and hes the son of an English aristocrat and the daughter of a wealthy Maryland family. Hes been raised as a poor relation, and as the story begins, hes riding his mare and toting his long rifle northward to join the American Revolutionary army.

Fate however has other plans for him. When he stops for the night, he runs afoul of a naval officer recruiting for a privateer. After he refuses the offer, by another quirk of fate he finds himself lodged with the captain himself. He still insists on heading for the land armybut ends up being press-ganged and hauled off to the ship.

That is not the stalwart young captains idea, but that of his lieutenant who has taken a violent dislike to poor Fitz. By the time its sorted out, the Retaliation is at sea and the only way Fitz can get back to the mainland is by signing on as a marine and hoping to be sent home either with a prize crew or from the next port of call, which happens to be on the far side of the Atlantic.

Theres a hole in the plot, in that Fitz never makes an effort to ship on any of the prizes captured during an exceptionally lucky voyage. He hangs in until they get to Brittany, then through a series of mishaps and misadventures, ends up back on the ship and being taken captive during a naval battle in the English Channel. This deposits him in prison, from which he and his captain make a daring and clever escapebut fate continues to play games with him. Hes separated from the captain during the escape, and eventually meets his long-lost grandfather and the old mans dissolute rakehell heir.

Despite strong pressure from his grandfather, Fitz has absolutely no desire to depose the heir and take his place, and nothing he sees of the family or its holdings changes his mind. Theyre horrible and hes horrified. All he wants to do is get back to the Americas.

Or so he thinks. Once he has a real, actual choice, he opts to sign on permanently with his doughty captain, and become a wholehearted, fully voluntary Yankee Privateer. And so they sail off together into the sunset.

As happens more often than not in Nortons all or mostly male universes, theres a distinct undertone of male-male romance. When Fitz first meets the captain, he reacts physically the way a romance heroine does on meeting the hero. Of course he never comes out and expresses his feelings, but its clear hes in love, and he follows his love literally through hell and high water. Its presented as the loyalty of a naval officer for his captain, but lets face it, thats not all thats going on there.

Theres an obligatory bit of of-its-time discomfortbefore Fitz went off to war, he earned his keep by serving as an overseer on the family plantationbut the way he expresses it is pretty accurate for the period, and hes not blatantly racist. He has no problem interacting with the free Black man in the ships crew, and theres a reference to the horrors of a slave ship. As these things go, its fairly inoffensive.

All in all its a solid example of its genre. Theres a sort of sequel, Stand and Deliver, published in 1984, which Ill tackle next. It will be interesting to see how the two compare.

Judith Tarrs first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Since then shes written novels and shorter works of historical fiction and historical fantasy and epic fantasy and space opera and contemporary fantasy, many of which have been reborn as ebooks. She has even written a primer for writers: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

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Andre Norton Takes to the High Seas in Yankee Privateer - tor.com

The offical flag of the DEF CON hacker convention bears a striking resemblence to popular pirate iconography.

Church said people typically think of pirates as raising their flags on their ships to set sail on the high seas and have dramatic battles on the hunt to find buried treasure chests filled with gold and jewels. Most of the time thats not what happened. With the swashbucklers and buccaneers there was as much conflict and battles on land as there was at sea. They identified the weak points in travel. They were hacking a network in the same mental framework as someone whos trying to get illegal access to something online today.

In the early modern period, maritime trade traveled through the same circular networks we have now, and the pirates continually tried to hack those networks. Church, who is writing a book on the topic, said you cant have piracy without trade, so you need to follow the trade networks to find the pirates. Since the early modern period, trade networks have increasingly become transatlantic and even global. Church said the largest transformation in the worlds trade networks took place between the 15 th and 18 th centuries. This is where most of the worlds piracy comes from.

"They were hacking a network in the same mental framework as someone whos trying to get illegal access to something online today."

As the world moved from the late 19 th century to the present, the trade transformation has become more and more virtual, starting with telegraphs, moving to telephones and eventually to fiber optics and cloud computing. At one point in history, pirates moved textiles, sugar and slaves and held them for ransom similarly today, hackers will lock down a computer or an electrical grid for ransom money. Church said its not accidental that virtual data is now one of the most profitable goods. While the players have changed, the game has structurally remained the same.

In the early 2000s Somalian pirates, who initially called themselves the Volunteer Somali Coastguard, hijacked international fishing vessels for disrupting the local trade networks. What started as pushback against globalization, gradually lost its high-minded ideals. Somalian pirates found their tactics were successful and quite profitable and continued capturing large transport vessels purely out of financial gain. If you remove the technology, Church says, whats left is human behavior.

One of the biggest economic ties between historical piracy to the present-day hacker is that piracy is profoundly disruptive. In the earlier periods, piracy was often used to the benefit of the state or rather to the detriment of a given states enemies. Queen Elizabeth I hired pirates to disrupt Spanish trade. Church said the shift in piracy becoming a general economic threat (as opposed to a targeted one) happened at the turn of the 18 th century, when the trade with the New World focused on plantation slavery and sugar. When the pirates started working for the highest bidder and stopped calling any one nation home, the powers that be ran a massive propaganda campaign against piracy.

Church noted a similar process starting to take place today with cybercrime and hacking. Hackers were once seen as helping the little guy the only opposition to large corporations and monopolies. Now, people are starting to see hackers as enemies of society. Church said the tipping point will come at some point in the future because of massive losses to the worlds economy. Although, he said its too early to tell if it will end as a revolution against corporate monopolies or as a backlash against public hackers. Historians are loath to make projections.

By understanding how piracy has progressed and evolved since the 15 th century and looking at how its changing today, its possible to see patterns emerge, and while we cant say for certain just how things will play out, its undeniable that theyre escalating, growing in complexity right alongside our global trade networks.

In the cyber world, if we just treat the economic and technical side of security and dont look at the social side or bring in the political and cultural side, then were only addressing one small piece of cybercrime, Church said.

Church points out that if you were to look at a map of fiber optic lines today and compare that to maritime trade routes and the railroads, the two look eerily similar. Data is travelling the same routes, something end users dont often consider when logging into a coffee shops network. Wi-Fi invites this in the cloud feeling but theres a physical there that evolved with maritime trade, Church said.

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The war on cyberspace: Hackers, cybercrime and how pirate history is influencing the future of cybersecurity - Nevada Today

Police have warned it is unrealistic and impractical to expect officers to board North Sea vessels to enforce fishing rules after the Brexit transition.

Deputy Chief Constable Will Kerr told MSPs on the policing sub-committee at Holyrood there needed to be a bit of realism about the forces capabilities.

And he raised concerns tensions could boil over next year, including at fishing ports in Scotland.

Uncertainty has surrounded the UKs ability to police its waters after leaving the Common Fisheries Policy, which currently determines how many fish countries can catch in different areas.

While giving evidence on Police Scotlands preparations for Brexit, Mr Kerr was asked about the role of the force in policing illegal fishing, smuggling and port closures.

He said: There needs to be a bit of realism as well about what can practically be done offshore, as opposed to what evidence we can gather, the role of police in Scotland, onshore.

So obviously this relates to activity outwith the EEZ, so the European Economic Zone, which is set at 12 nautical miles.

But in the middle of the winter, in the middle of the North Sea, its unrealistic and impractical for Police Scotland to be thinking about, even in terms of our preparation, looking at practical onboarding of fishing vessels which are 13 or 14 miles out into the North Sea, in the middle of January.

That just isnt going to happen, realistically.

So what were looking at is contingencies with protocols to gather evidence where there have been breaches and to make sure that onshore we can actually start to address those and, if necessary, engage with the Crown to see what offences have been committed.

Because there are a range of those tensions not just tensions with fisheries and shipping offshore, either within or outwith that 12 nautical miles, or tension within the ports themselves among members of the fishing community, both Scotland-based and further afield.

There is undoubtedly widespread concern within the fishing sector about the heightened risk of illegal fishing in Scottish waters post Brexit and the damage this could do to the industry if these incidents occur.

Speaking afterwards, Orkney MSP Liam McArthur said:Any illegal activity not only impacts on the livelihoods of fishermen but could also result in confrontations that put the safety of crews at risk.

Any illegal activity not only impacts on the livelihoods of fishermen but could also result in confrontations that put the safety of crews at risk.

For this reason, our fishing sector needs confidence that arrangements are being made by Police Scotland, SFPA and others to minimise the risks and respond in a timely fashion to incidents should they occur.

I was therefore pleased to hear the deputy chief constable provide assurances that contingency planning is under way and that additional capacity has been made available to police our ports.

Hopefully this proactive approach will help reduce the risk and address some of the concerns felt by Scotlands fishing sector.

Issues relating to fishing were just one of the potential problems on the radar for bosses at Police Scotland ahead of what they expect to be a busy year in 2021.

Warning of the possibility of a cumulative impact of a no-deal Brexit and the pandemic, Mr Kerr said: As we enter 2021, as the winter weather worsens, hopefully we dont end up with a pandemic flu on top of Covid-19, but next year is going to be very busy, anyway.

There are a whole range of issues, not least the backdrop of constitutional, economic and ongoing operational issues, and all of those things will compound as the year continues.

So we are just looking at all the risks to see how we can actually minimise the impact of those to the people of Scotland, and the disruption to Scotland.

But inevitably there will be some, particularly if there is a non-negotiated outcome before December 31.

Meanwhile, the policing sub-committee also heard from Detective Chief Superintendent Patrick Campbell about the really significant impact of the loss of the European Arrest Warrant, and shared information systems, after the Brexit transition.

He said new systems were being developed, but they would result in slower, more bureaucratic processes that are sub optimal.

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Brexit fishing rules: Police on high seas 'just isn't going to happen' - Press and Journal

Haunting of the Mary Celeste star Emily Swallow explained why the real-life mystery behind the film's concept drew her to the project and more.

Haunting of the Mary Celeste is bringing horror to the high seas. In this supernatural psychological thriller, researcher Rachel takes her assistants Grant and Cassandra on her mission to discover what happened to the Mary Celeste, an American merchant ship whose crew mysteriously disappeared at sea. After boarding a boat captained by Richard Roundtree's Tulls and his crewman Aldo, the disparate group finds themselves caught in a rift between dimensions, from which they may never return.

Speaking to CBR, Haunting of the Mary Celeste star Emily Swallow, who plays Rachel, broke down her experience working on the film. She explained how the real-life mystery behind the film's concept drew her to the project, as well as how she relates to Rachel's insatiable drive. She recalled what it was like to work with director Shana Betz and how they filmed the movie on an actual boat. She also teased her favorite moment, revealed which horror movie scares her the most and more.

RELATED: Haunting Of The Mary Celeste's Crew Summons An Otherworldly Entity In Exclusive Clip

CBR: What would you want viewers to know about The Haunting of the Mary Celeste before they sit down to watch it for the first time?

I'm personally fascinated by it being inspired by a maritime mystery that's still not really solved. I just think that that's so cool, because we feel like we can figure everything out these days. So that's something that's so fascinating to me.

I guess I would also want them to know that it's obviously kind of a psychological thriller. There's also, I think, at the core of it, it's compelling. One of the reasons that the script was appealing to me is that at the core of it, there's this very human story of this woman who's so obsessed with figuring something out, putting something together, finding answers, being proven right, that she kind of drives herself and all the people around her to disaster. I'm always intrigued by people like that. It's fascinating to get inside the head of somebody with that kind of obsession.

Which aspect of the character do you relate to the most and why?

I relate to being consumed by work and being consumed by something that is, in some ways, incredibly satisfying, but that can never fully satisfy you. I mean, I think I feel that way about a lot of my creative work. I love it. I'm passionate about it. I love getting to connect to people, I love having new experiences. And yet, I finish one thing, and then I'm like, "Okay, when's the next one?" There's never an end to that.

So I definitely relate to the obsession that she has. Fortunately, I don't think I would take it to the lengths that she does -- I try to keep that in check -- but I can at least relate to the the core of that.

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I was delighted to see this film was helmed by a woman director, but how did that change your experience on set?

Oh, it was so, so wonderful. I would use the word luscious, because Shana [Betz] is so smart. She comes from an acting background, and so she also was very attuned to the fact that we had this script that's pretty bare bones. You don't get a lot of details about these people. And certainly, the central character is the the mystery of the story and the thriller part of it. But within that, you have to have real people, or why do you care?

There's so many scary movies, and they do so many different things. I think this one, one of the appealing things is that it does have these very flawed humans and you need to find ways to connect to them. So Shana, she really -- we got to rehearse scenes, we did a lot of improvisations to try to figure out what on earth led these people to this place where they are. That was something that was such a huge gift that she gave us, and I think also it helped her help me connect to this character and connect to the mother in her who has lost her daughter and lost her mind because of that. She's not really thinking clearly about a lot of decisions!

We also had a female DP [Director of Photography], and the two of them working together were just a dream team. And Raquel [Fernndez Nuez], you know, we're shooting on this janky old boat that looks like it's about to sink on screen -- it felt like it was about to sink every time we were on it -- and Raquel would cram herself into corners to get just the right shot, because it wasn't like a set, where you can take out a wall and put your camera there. You just had to fit in the space. They were just a power duo that way. They would go to any lengths to get the right angle, to get the right atmosphere, to work out the scene the right way. So it was awesome.

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As I was watching, something that struck me about the movie was how a lot of the shots were tight on faces. How did that impact the way you approached your scenes?

Yeah! I tried not to think about it as much as possible! [laughs] There's so many things, when you're acting, that you just have to block out. It's funny, because you can do all this work to bring something to a character, but if you can't block out all the distractions, it doesn't matter.

That was an area where Shana also really helped, because she would guide us into the scene and she was very aware when something was playing too big for those tight shots. She was just so patient and so, so confident in guiding us to the right place and maybe just doing it again, doing it again, taking the scene and improvising a few moments leading into it and getting us to that place of relaxation, because otherwise, I think that those tight shots would have been horrific, because there would have been all sorts of schmacting going on and you wouldn't really have a way into those characters' minds. They'd be alienating and you'd be like, "Okay, you're all faking it. It's ridiculous."

Tell me a little about those underwater sequences and what the process of filming them looked like for you.

Oh, it was very cool. It was after we'd finished -- so we shot everything with the boat up in the Bay Area, kind of around South Toledo. I just remember driving out in the desert outside of LA to this big pool. It's a pool that they use for shooting, and all of the actors, we were just wearing the clothes that we had to wear and we would have to have a scuba tank and take a breath and then go down and play out whatever vignette she had and try not to breathe, like not have bubbles. It was so surreal.

I've spent a lot of time in the water, but I've never done anything quite like that. It was such a cool feeling, and then seeing it was really exciting, because I didn't know quite what it was going to look like. It was an adventure! We're doing it in the middle of the night. So it was all just like, "What's going on here?" but it was really fun.

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Richard Roundtree is basically a legend, so I'd love to hear about your experience working with him.

I mean, he is just delightful. He's so lovely. He's such a generous actor. He's such a down-to-Earth guy. Of course, he's done so many incredible things. I think he's at the point where he's like, "I've seen it all." But he was just such a -- working on an independent film like that, where you're trying to scrape a lot of things together, in some ways, you feel like you have a lot of time and in some ways, you don't at all, dealing with budget constraints, you really have to have actors who are just on the team and ready to do the work. He was such a team player.

I definitely fangirled a little bit at first, because he is a legend, like you said, but I found it so easy to connect to him. I loved those scenes that we got to play together, because there is something unspoken between those two; they kind of get each other. Every scene with him, it was fun. Sometimes, he would just go off on some random tangent and improvise something, something bizarre, but it all wound up bringing us back to these great moments and how those scenes played out. So I was so happy that I got to work with him.

Can you tease the one scene you just can't wait for viewers to see?

I think maybe the first moment that we get to see the physical representation of what this rift is. That was something, when I was reading it, I was like, "What on earth is this going to look like?" And that was something that was really in Shana's imagination, like how do we put that image on screen in a way that -- like, it's not something literal that you can play out. There's something that's a little poetic about it.

That's one of the reasons I loved working with her, too, is that there were very creative ways that she found to create these moments of mystery and to make it something that your brain doesn't quite know what it's seeing. I think that that mystery around it serves the film well. So yeah, I think maybe the first moment that that happens, I'm excited to see how people -- whether they dig it or not.

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'Tis the season, so I'd love to hear about your favorite horror movies and perhaps the ones that influenced your role in Haunting of the Mary Celeste.

I don't know if there was a horror movie that inspired me. I think that the movie that will always scare me the most is Arachnophobia, because I am truly terrified of spiders. [laughs] So that's the first one that comes to mind. But yeah, I'll have to think about that one for a while, if there was one that actually inspired this particular character. There's nothing that comes to mind immediately.

What do you hope viewers will take away from the film?

I mean, I hope that they get a good little thrill, and I really hope that they connect to the heart of it, because I feel like that's one of the things that is a little different from some horror -- I don't even know if I call it a horror movie. It's like a spooky thriller. I don't know! But I think that what's compelling to me is that the driving force for all the events, all the scary things that happened and all the bad things that happened to these characters, is this woman's obsession and her inability to let go of this thing. Yeah, I hope that people connect to that, and then I hope that they have a few moments where they jump. [laughs] That's all I wish!

Directed by Shana Betz, Haunting of the Mary Celeste stars Emily Swallow, Richard Roundtree, Alice Hunter, Ava Acres, Dominic Devore and Pierre Adeli. The film is now available on VOD platforms.

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Meagan Damore has served as a CBR Editor since January 2015, though she got her start as a staff reviewer in 2013. She discovered comics thanks to the plethora of movies and television she grew up with, like Batman: The Animated Series, Spider-Man, the original X-Men film trilogy, X-Men: Evolution and Justice League Unlimited. She picked up her first comic in high school and fell instantly in love with the medium. Later, she took her love for pop culture with her to college, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts from Suffolk University and a Masters Degree in Literature from University of Massachusetts Boston. She loves to apply her education to her work writing editorials and conducting interviews. You can catch her writing on Agents of SHIELD, the Arrowverse and more right here on CBR.

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Haunting of the Mary Celeste Interview: Emily Swallow | CBR - CBR - Comic Book Resources

To say that 2020 is a year of disruption and change is to understate the obvious. Our daily lives, from educating our kids, managing our health, and working from home, to simple social rituals like dinner with friends, underwent rapid multi-dimensional change. Nascent trends virtualization of the workspace, online learning, virtual health, and e-commerce accelerated exponentially. Changes anticipated to take years occurred in months and, in some cases, weeks and even days. Understandably, leaders have struggled mightily to address these overlapping changes simultaneously, dealing with economic, health, and logistical crises that have unfolded at top speed.

Much as we might like to think of 2020 as an anomaly, it may not be. Conditions for accelerating change have been building for years. Advancements in information technology, automation, human interconnectivity, Artificial Intelligence, and the network effects among them, created a new reality where change is much more rapid, continual, and ubiquitous. Covid-19 and its derivatives laid bare a new normal of change, marked by three dimensions:

This three-dimensional (3-D) change is defining our emerging future and, as a consequence, effective leadership will be defined by the ability to navigate this new reality.

The problem is, our models for leadership werent built for this kind of 3-D change. Human minds evolved for thinking linearly and locally in the face of challenge, not exponentially and systemically. Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil asserted, The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. But, projecting our pasts onto our futures exposes a fundamental error: Linear thinking can never catch-up and adapt to the perpetual, pervasive, and exponential change occurring around us its simply too fast and too complex.

We need a new form of leadership, better equipped to navigate this unprecedented kind of change. For this purpose, we gathered, under the Stanford University umbrella, world-class luminaries leaders who generate impact and change at a global scale for conversations on the future of leadership and change-making. What emerged was a new vision of leadership, which we call Sapient Leadership. A Sapient Leader is characterized by being wise, sagacious, and discerning in navigating change while also being humane in the face of change that can often feel alien. This kind of leadership emphasizes counterintuitively an anti-heroic leader. Sapient Leaders exhibit authenticity, humility, and vulnerability, inspiring the necessary trust and psychological safety that drives shared learning and intelligence, resulting in enhanced collective performance and leading to a better future for all.

In a world thats relatively stable and mostly predictable, where change is incremental, punctuated by relatively few bursts of large change whats often called disruption a model of leadership that relies on linear, local thinking can be useful. Much of the leadership literature focuses on the qualities, skills, abilities of the leader as an individual, and the linear and local maps they use to navigate the world. However, 3-D change presents a high seas environment where the leader navigates multiple domains the waves and ever-evolving weather of change simultaneously. In this environment, linear and local thinking can never adapt fast enough, leaving us increasingly ill-equipped to manage our rapidly changing business and work environments, our physical and mental health and well-being, and the major trends that shape our societies and cultures.

Change, by its nature, leaves people and organizations feeling confused, vulnerable, and fractured at a time when resilience, cohesion, and collaboration are necessary to perform at the highest levels. An emerging body of literature points to psychological safety, shared purpose, and distributed cognition as powerful drivers of leadership, team, and organizational performance, particularly in rapidly changing environments. The days of leader as hero the solo, individualistic leader who inspires certainty in a deterministic way forward are over. This evolution in how we think about change and leadership has only accelerated in the past year.

Fortuitously, our spring course at Stanford University, LEAD 111 Luminaries: Life Lessons from Leaders and Change-makers became a study of how top tier leaders embodied this emerging approach to leadership. Finalized one week before the Covid-19 pandemic struck the west coast, our original plan was to create a new framework of leadership suitable for a time of disruption, accelerating change, and a highly polarized political and social environment, and we designed the course to engage leaders and change-makers in conversations across sectors, generations, and the political spectrum. We wanted to know how change-oriented leaders operate. As the pandemic unfolded, however, we expanded the course to create a new model of leadership. And recognizing that these questions were of immediate and broad interest, we invited more leaders within and beyond the Stanford community to weigh in on how they were navigating this 3-D change.

We engaged leaders across sectors to analyze in real time how they adapted: captains of industry, such as Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Walmart and chairman of the Business Roundtable; innovators in health care such as Toby Cosgrove, former CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, heart surgeon, and White House advisor; global social change-makers such as Halla Tmasdttir, CEO of The B Team, investor, co-founder of Reykjavik University, and runner-up in Icelands 2016 presidential elections; leading-edge technologists and innovators such as Bret Taylor, president and COO of Salesforce, co-creator of Google Maps and the Like button, and board member of Twitter.

The essential question we had was this: If leadership is significantly defined by the ability to skillfully navigate 3-D change, what type of leadership is most effective for our emerging future, one defined by perpetual, pervasive, and exponential change? The answers that emerged formed the basis for Sapient Leadership.

The four pillars of Sapient Leadership emerged out of the discussions with our luminaries as they were navigating 3-D change in real-time each leader, in some capacity, articulated a version of these ideas. Leader humility, authenticity, and openness instills trust and psychological safety. In turn, trust and psychological safety empower individuals and teams to perform at their highest capabilities. Additionally, continuously learning teams are essential for keeping pace with and effectively navigating 3-D change. Finally, shared purpose and common values enhance focus, cohesion, and resilience in the midst of 3-D change.

1. Leader humility, authenticity, and openness instills trust and psychological safety.

In times of uncertainty, leaders often posture themselves, maximizing perception of power and control. In contrast, Halla Tmasdttir modeled authenticity and humility when she reflected on her challenges as a candidate during the Icelandic presidential election. She, along with many of our luminaries, openly questioned the traditional paradigm of a leader as an individualistic hero. Instead, she highlighted the need to build trust through openness, saying, what this crisis has shown us is that the leadership style of I know it all is not a good leadership style for this moment or any other challenge we are going to continue to face and need to deal with collectively, collaboratively, with compassion, and with care.

In a world of 3-D change, leaders need to continuously evolve themselves in order for their organization to evolve and grow. Rather than bending the organization to the will of the leader, a leader must be willing to instead exhibit humility and flexibility and change according to what the organization and circumstances require. Tmasdttir exemplified this notion in her personal philosophy: leadership is not given to the few its inside of all of us, and life is all about unleashing that leadership. This leadership style, which engenders trust and psychological safety within teams and organizations, animates much of her work with the B Team members that shes leading Sir Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Ajay Banga, Mary Robinson, and Marc Benioff, among others.

Our other luminaries echoed Tmasdttirs message about Sapient Leadership in the context of 3-D change. Doug McMillon said: I dont run Walmart, I help lead Walmart asserting that leadership of this sort needs to go beyond words. Leaders, he said, have to live it. It has to be authentic. It has to be habitual.

2. Trust and psychological safety empower individuals and teams.

3-D change amplifies our innate and evolved human tendencies to skew towards threat perception, anxiety, and divisiveness when experiencing stress and encountering ambiguity. As such, psychological safety is even more important during these times change. Individuals and the teams they comprise thrive in environments where trust and psychological safety are present. In a recent extensive study at Google, code-named Project Aristotle for the maxim frequently attributed to him, The whole is greater than the sum of the parts researchers found that the most important factor associated with the highest performing teams was psychological safety. When team members feel safe to be vulnerable in front of one and to take risks, they perform at their best.

A consistent theme running throughout conversations with all of our luminaries was the essential nature of empowering teams and individuals to perform at their highest capabilities, especially now. Change is not a solo sport, said Bret Taylor, president and COO of Salesforce. All great change has been done by great teams, great communities, and great networks. When recalling times of rapid change throughout his career from the creation of Google Maps to inventing the like button to scaling rapidly worldwide during the early days of Facebook Bret asserted the importance of leadership that motivates strong relationships, fluid communication, and a foundation of trust to driving exceptional team performance.

3. Continuously learning teams enable effective navigation of 3-D change.

In a world where change is perpetual, pervasive, and exponential, Sapient Leaders, their teams, and their organizations must continually learn, update mental-maps, deploy new tools, and course-correct based on the best ideas and practices. If you want to make a change in something you have to get into it deep, said Toby Cosgrove, describing his openness to learning transformative ideas from anywhere he could. When he was the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic he regularly immersed himself in contexts where he could learn a better way. If I heard somebody was doing something someplace in the world, I would pick up my pencil and paper and I would go and watch them do it, he said. I traveled someplace, learned something, and tried to bring it back and incorporate it. What he was doing as a leader was both modeling leadership as a process of continual learning so others would replicate in their way, as well as disseminating what he learned throughout the organization in order to improve on existing processes and innovate new ones.

In a world of 3-D change, no one person or organization can master all knowledge across all domains, no single person or organization can master enough skills in breadth, depth, or pace, to keep up. Instead, learning must be inspired by leadership, reinforced by culture, occur across a variety of domains, coordinated through the whole and shared openly and actionably to create the broader picture. The analogy here is to mosaic vision, or the compound eye, where thousands of specific receptor units, oriented in different directions, work in coordination to create a composite perspective with a very wide angle of view, continually updating in real time as the organism moves through time and space. Without data and input to synthesize into understanding and action, a team or organization will be perpetually impoverished. To keep pace with 3-D change, Sapient Leaders need to enhance the breadth, depth, and pace of learning in their organizations to meet the extent and velocity of change.

4. Shared purpose and values enhance focus, cohesion, and resilience during 3-D change.

Professor Bill Damon, our esteemed colleague at Stanford University and one of the worlds leading purpose researchers, defines purpose as a stable intention to accomplish something that is both personally meaningful and serves the world larger than the self. Purpose, necessarily informed by our values and arising from a sense of personal meaning, unites our inner world with our actions in the world around us in a unique and powerful way in service of a vision larger than ourselves.

In times of 3-D change, which by its nature amplifies uncertainty and ambiguity, shared purpose and values increase organizational focus, enhance team cohesion, and amplify personal and collective resilience. They can also powerfully mobilize large numbers of people to solve complex problems together.

Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart and chairman of the Business Roundtable, recounted Walmarts Five Guiding Principles, which provided the organization focus, resilience, and a basis for cohesive action during the early challenging stages of the pandemic.

Doug recounted how these principles guided Walmarts actions during the early turbulence of the Covid-19 pandemic. We received a call from the White House with a request to open drive-through testing stations throughout the nation in Walmart parking lots, he recalled. Although we didnt know exactly how to do it and didnt have a way to charge for it, Walmarts response was fully committed, rapid, at scale, and across distributed geographies. Walmarts ethos during this time: Dont worry about the short-term financials. Go do whats right and it will all eventually work out.

The shared purpose and values articulated in Walmarts Five Guiding Principles allowed collective action that was focused, cohesive, and resilient by many people across multiple geographies in the early times of 3-D change. Focus and cohesion allowed rapid learning of new skills, it allowed decisiveness during uncertainty, and it promoted working together towards a shared goal bigger than any individual or the company. Further, resilience allowed the courage to try something new and execute quickly, without giving up, in the face of ongoing change and challenge.

Along with the myriad challenges it brought, the singular realization of 2020 is that 3-D change is the new normal. Navigating perpetual, pervasive, and exponential change is the quintessential test of effective leadership in this era. Leaders, teams, and organizations that dont skillfully navigate change will fail. Mastering this new reality requires fundamental enhancements to our collective capabilities. Sapient Leadership enables the creation of perpetual, pervasive, and exponential capacity building necessary for handling 3-D change effectively. In addition, our recent conversations with Sapient Leaders have uncovered new ways in which exponential and transformative technologies can further enhance and amplify human capabilities. This topic is the basis for a future article we are preparing.

The key of Sapient Leadership is that it fits into the long history of the evolution of our species. Sapient, in its definition, refers to the nature of humans it is in our nature to adapt or risk perishing. The challenge of 3-D change is that it amplifies the pressures on leaders, teams, and organizations to evolve and adapt faster, or become irrelevant. Change that used to take place over years and decades is now taking place in weeks or days. We, as a species, have never confronted change of this magnitude or at this pace. Sapient Leadership is a framework that enables accelerated adaptation in a wise and humane way. It builds into its structure the imperative for leaders, teams, and organizations to continuously evolve in order to overcome the challenges of 3-D change. Sapient Leaders and their successful organizations change with change itself.

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What It Takes to Lead Through an Era of Exponential Change - Harvard Business Review