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The maritime and scientific communities have set themselves the ambitious target of 2030 to map Earth's entire ocean floor.
It's ambitious because, 10 years out from this deadline, they're starting from a very low level.
You can argue about the numbers but it's in the region of 80% of the global seafloor that's either completely unknown or has had no modern measurement applied to it.
The international GEBCO 2030 project was set up to close the data gap and has announced a number of initiatives to get it done.
What's clear, however, is that much of this work will have to leverage new technologies or at the very least max the existing ones. Which makes the news from Ocean Infinity - that it's creating a fleet of ocean-going robots - all the more interesting.
US-based OI [(Ocean Infinity)] is a relatively new exploration and survey company. It was founded in 2016.
It's made headlines by finding some high-profile wrecks, including the Argentinian submarine San Juan and the South Korean bulk carrier Stellar Daisy. It also led an ultimately unsuccessful "no find, no fee" effort to locate the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
OI's strategy has always been to throw the latest hardware and computing power at a problem. The move into Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USV) at scale is therefore the logical next step, says CEO Oliver Plunkett.
"We've ordered 11 robots, different sizes. The smallest ones are 21m; the biggest are up to 37m," he told BBC News. "They will be capable of transoceanic journeys, wholly unmanned, controlled from control centres on land.
"Each of them will be fitted out with an array of sensors and equipment, but also their own capability to deploy tethered robots to inspect right down to the bottom of the ocean, 6,000m below the surface."
The boats will be used to search for missing objects, yes; but they'll also inspect pipelines, and survey bed conditions for telecoms cables and off-shore wind farms. They'll even to do freight, says Dan Hook who'll run the robot fleet for OI under the spin-out name of Armada.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @10:19AM (1 child)
But then I met a beautiful mermaid, who told me the ocean floor was not flat, but actually round, kind of like her titties.
After convincing me to share her "air", I found we could both explore together as I no longer required oxygen. I didn't breathe the water, I just didn't need to breathe anymore. She explained that it would only last a few hours. We explored her vagina for a few hours and then I had to return to the surface. While on land, she waved goodbye to me with her giant clit. I would never be the same again.
I could only conclude that further "exploration" by other parties might disrupt the mermaid's kingdom and expose the secrets of happy clams. You might be asking what happy clams are at this point. They are small clams which grow out of the penis and anus of humans who have connected sexually with mermaids (or mermen). They are painless and only grow a few inches before falling off like dead skin, but each containing a note:
"YOU GET WHAT YOU FUCKING DESERVE!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @08:28PM
i heard about these mermaids. but i think you mean "oilmaids" and "oilmen". a sub species.
from memory they inhabit the ocean just off the coast of texas -aka- the mexican gulf.
there seems to plans to devide it into two parts with a underwater wall ...