Word: oceanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...incentives for undersea exploration extend beyond the historical and archaeological benefits. High-tech fortune hunters are locating sunken treasure ships and recovering their precious cargo. New remote-controlled vehicles are prowling the ocean depths, some dropping listening devices and scouting out potential hiding places for missile-firing submarines. Others are seeking mineral deposits and clues to the movement of the earth's tectonic plates, and charting the two-thirds of the earth's surface that until recently has been largely inaccessible...
...team painstakingly swept 120,000 linear miles of ocean with magnetometers, devices that detect irregularities in the earth's magnetic field--anomalies caused by, among other things, iron cannons, armor or anchors. They used side-scan and sub-bottom sonar and even commissioned an aerial survey, but the search did not yield a verifiable Atocha remnant. Says Fay Feild, an engineer and consultant to Treasure Salvors, who designed a special magnetometer for Fisher: "With a magnetometer, even in a limited area, only one in 100 'hits' has anything to do with a wreck. With a side- scanner...
...recover (from a depth of 2,850 ft.) an H- bomb that fell into the Mediterranean after a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker collided over Spain in 1966; discovering peculiar new life-forms, including tube worms 10 ft. long, while probing hot-water vents in the ocean floor 8,000 ft. below the surface of the Pacific...
More advanced craft are on the way. The Navy's National Ocean Systems Center in San Diego is developing ROVs that operate free of a tether. These AUVs--autonomous underwater vehicles--will be programmed for missions before they are dropped overboard. "The next step," says Howard Talkington, head of NOSC's engineering and computer science department, "is to do away with the umbilical cord and operate the ROV completely in a robotic manner...
...Says Hydro Products Executive Bob McKee: "You can just throw it into the back of your pickup, run out to the site and throw it into the water." Prices are also dropping for such devices as side-scan sonar, which generates high-resolution images of the ocean bottom, and sub-bottom sonar, which can distinguish the shape of buried objects...