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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: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 14 2020, @02:01PM
This sounds like a great project. I hope it succeeds. Mostly I hope it locates shipwrecks and sunken dwellings so underwater archaeologists can dive on them and uncover new chapters in the human story. For example, we've learned a lot from chance finds in Doggerland [wikipedia.org] and from shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and Black Sea [nationalgeographic.org]. They could probably also use them to map the bottoms of our large fresh water lakes for the same reasons.
Washington DC delenda est.