SonarMapping
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Sonar-mapping ship looks for baby lobsters, finds dead volcanoes
You never know what you might find when you're looking for lobster larvae. Iain Suthers, a marine biologist at the University of New South Wales, recently led a team of 28 scientists on board Australia's latest research vessel, Investigator. They set out to study nursery grounds of lobsters when they accidentally stumbled upon four ancient underwater volcanoes off the coast of Sydney. The massive cluster of craters, said to be about 50 million years old, stretches across 12 miles on the seafloor but had gone unnoticed until now.
University of Victoria's Mano underwater robot to prowl Arctic waters for legendary ships
Canadians well-versed in their history are very aware of Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage: a British voyage that set out to establish a sailing route through the Arctic and ended with the untimely, mysterious deaths of its two ship crews. No human ever found the abandoned ships, which makes it all the more fitting that the next best shot at discovery might come through a just-launched autonomous underwater vehicle from the University of Victoria and Bluefin Robotics. Meet the Mano, a new sonar-toting robot that can produce detailed undersea maps all by its lonesome while keeping a steady altitude above the ocean floor. It can only operate for 12 hours at a time, which will keep humans in the area, but its ability to run untethered below storms and cold Arctic winds should dramatically expand the territory that researchers can cover during their share of a larger five- to six-week journey. There's no guarantee that the Mano will hit the jackpot, or find something recognizable even if it does. Still, any mapping should improve navigation for modern boats -- and hopefully prevent others from sharing Sir Franklin's fate.
New expedition to capture the ever-deteriorating state of the wreckage of the Titanic
Shipwrecks -- especially ones which are located and explored -- hold a special fascination over people, and none more so than the Titanic. The ship has been photographed (and plundered) over several exhibitions since its re-discovery by side-scan sonar in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 1988, about 76 years after sinking. A new exhibition to the site is seeking to discover the extent of its recently advancing state of decay. Using a combination of sonar and acoustic mapping and high resolution photography conducted by submersibles, the 20-day Expedition Titanic hopes to conduct the most exhaustive archeological study of the state of the wreckage to date, culminating in a 3D replica of the two by three mile debris field. As you see from the rough sonar image above, it's quite a beast down there on the ocean floor, and if you hit up the source, you can see the work in progress.
