OKEANOS Explorer – Ship ahoy
Getting a tour of the NOAA exploration vessel OKEANOS Explorer was a real treat. The ship is packed with high tech remote sensors. For example, they showed us an accurate 3D map of a portion of ocean floor that they made on their way from Seattle to SF. You can see it on some monitors in the video below. I’ve worked with bathymetry data (ocean floor maps) during my geoscience studies and was curious about how they actually made the particular map that they showed to us. I actually found what I was looking for on the web. NOAA has pretty good web resources about the ship, it’s equipment, and missions. http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/
A neat feature of that web page is the ship tracker map that allows you to follow the ships path. It actually has the route the ship took a couple of days ago. The google maps image shows part of the route the ship took down to SF. Before they reached the bay, they moved in a zig zag pattern to scan the ocean floor with their sonar collecting bathymetry data. That’s how they made the ocean floor map, have a look at NOAA’s 3D ocean floor maps here. If you have a closer look at the ship’s route above, you can see that the lines are further apart where the ocean is deeper. Just like the beam of a flashlight, a sonar beam gets wider when the object is further away, so the ship “sees” a bigger piece of ocean floor when it is in deep water. OKEANOS has to do fewer zig zag lines in the deep ocean.
There’s plenty of other cool stuff on the NOAA Exploration pages, including ocean floor maps and fantastic video footage of the ocean floor.
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/
Enjoy.
VIDEO Link
1 Comment to OKEANOS Explorer – Ship ahoy
Great video and so much info in NOAA Exploration pages.
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October 15, 2009