SeaBED AUV Gets First 3-D Images Under Antarctica
SeaBED was deployed off the British research vessel James Clark Ross. Photo courtesy Hanumant Singh/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
This week, research teams from the U.S., U.K. and Australia published results of a successful test of an autonomous underwater sonar vehicle, named SeaBED, which mapped the underside of previously inaccessible sea ice floes off the Antarctic Peninsula.
Development of the six-foot, 440 pound twin-hull vessel and its deployment were funded by the National Science Foundation to advance maritime remote sensors in extreme environments, according to a foundation press release.
Typically, oceanographic survey instruments look down from surface vessels at the seafloor, but SeaBED is designed with upward-facing sonar that creates three-dimensional maps of the ice.
“SeaBED’s maneuverability and stability made it ideal for this application where we were doing detailed floe-scale mapping and deploying, as well as recovering in close-packed ice conditions,” says Hanumant Singh, engineering scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “It would have been tough to do many of the missions we did, especially under the conditions we encountered, with some of the larger vehicles.”
The specific application allows scientists to observe areas of thick ice for the first time to get a more complete picture of sea ice changes.
“What this effort does is show that observations from AUVs under the ice are possible and there is a very rich data set that you can get from them,” says Ted Maksym, coauthor of the paper, which was published in Nature Geoscience. “This work is an important step toward making the kinds of routine measurements we need in order to really monitor and understand what’s happening with the ice and the large-scale changes that are occurring.”
