I have actually worked in bathymetric survey projects in 4 different continents, and I can tell you there is a good reason why the ocean floor hasnt been mapped yet.
For one its cost. A single survey ship (their rates are cheap now due to low oil prices), cost about USD30000 a day, A single ROV (>5k a day), ROV crew, divers, backup ROV(yes there needs to be 2 ROV's) why? one needs to recover the other in deepwater, ships crew, the survey crew etc... all usually comes to about 50k-70k a day in cost (and this is being really conservative). I am not including cost of bunkering (refueling the ship), crew transport to location, rotations, food, water, waste disposal etc and the list goes on. If you take USD100000 a day at an average of 60miles a day in length and probably a mile width, USD18.5 mil would probably not cover much of a distance. Dont forget the cost of processors to process the multibeam data (yes multibeam provides higher resolution because it collects more data points), the mappers-charters, engineers etc...etc. Just the cost alone is enough to put most people off. There is a reason why MH370 couldnt be found, and the cost was enormous that they had to call of the search.
It seems to me one could add sensors to existing cargo or other ships and have them collect data during their regular activities. You could pay them to deviate from their optimal course in a systematic way so as to cover more ocean with each voyage. No need to charter a ship or pay a crew to do this stuff.
This is similar to how OpenStreetMap uses GPS to gather mapping info from normal people making normal trips. Granted a lot of people go out of their way to gather extra data, but if everyone contributed a GPS track of every journey that would not be necessary.
Same thing, if every GA plane had a GPS and downward facing camera we could gather detailed imagery from much of the world.
TL;DR; Don't charter mapping expeditions, instead add automated mapping gear to vehicles that are already going places.
The only place that map showed with no traffic was sound of the horn of Africa, and the arctic. Between those latitudes there is traffic everywhere even if some is more sparse. You don't need to deviate far, increasing a long route by 5 percent can give a large lateral displacement. Remember, I said to pay them to do this too. Timely shipments are nice, but not always a priority.
In their roadmap [1], they talk about using their activities to drive additional funding:
Seabed 2030 will create a series of programmatic guidelines to be submitted
to national and international funding agencies, with the goal to promote
funding opportunities that will support and share the Seabed 2030 vision.
They also talk about crowd-sourcing the shallower areas, which presumably will only have a cost in data-processing.
There's an information note [2] which describes in brief how the $18.5M will be spent:
The funding will cover funding of the Director and some personnel at the five
centers, with some travel and meeting costs. It would not cover any actual
survey costs.
You'd think with "drone technology" you could just send these things out there and have it surface and beam back images by satellite. Sphere designs. Haha just a ball that sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
What about sea floor changes how long would these maps be valid for? Anyway that's crazy.
Won't be deploying my gold-finding crabs anytime soon.
Specialized vessels (e.g. heavy crane ships, pipelay) can cost 250k-500k per day. A smaller survey vessel will obviously be much cheaper, but there's crew to pay, operating costs, specialized labor costs (ROV engineers, scientists), logistics, fuel, etc. It all adds up.
>You'd think with "drone technology" you could just send these things out there
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that aren't tethered to a ship are in wide use. However, you still need a ship to deploy, maintain, etc.
How much work do they get? Because in theory, at that rate they could get 3.65 million dollars a year if they didn't take breaks (and maybe "only" 2 million dollars a year if they did).
Don't forget the leverage they get from charging out juniors at high rates as well. Magic circle law firms could easily charge 500 pounds per hour for an associate and a significant part of that will go into the partners' kitty
Why use ROVs for mapping? AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) are so much better suited for pure-mapping tasks when compared to ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles). There is no need to have a full pilot/team operate a ROV 24/7 for tasks when most underwater mapping can be done with autonomous vehicles. The cost of developing and operating an AUV is near half of what it costs to operate a ROV, since you don't need nearly as complex of vehicles or as many staff on the ship - write the software once for an AUV and the important things can be replicated. I agree that the search space is huge, but human operated vehicles (especially humans driving via expensive ships) are absolutely not the answer. The cost of processing the multibeam data is negligible when compared to running vehicles in the deep ocean. (source: engineer for underwater vehicles)
More than this, because there are lost days when you work offshore. You'll travel from the coast to your point of interest. You do not chart at night if you can avoid it. There is not point in using your instruments in previously well known areas so you are not charting all the seawork hours. Some days the weather will not allow you to deploy the instruments safely, and things can break also ruining the entire campaign.
I had my part of this also (in a local scale) and is not an easy task. When the climate is suboptimal you need to fight against your desire to throw up constantly; at the same time that manipulating very fragile and expensive material in an always moving and often slippery platform.
It sounds like a lot but really isn't when you look at where else the money is going, even just within the research community. For example, that is about one year's worth of pointless medical research (the final reports are of no use to anyone due to bad design, terse descriptions, etc):
Then you need to maintain it all the year and hire the crew, and rent an area to 'park' your ship. Cheaper or not depends on your load, location and expected duration of campaigns.
The Spanish Oceanographic Institute own five ships and a ROV for example, with labs and all the stuff http://www.ieo.es/flota
For long expeditions (antartida) larger ships are shared directly with the army.
Yes, but in many places you can only do work in some months each year (because weather) and can only map the bottom if the ship is not reserved for studying other things (fisheries, ecosystems, geology, red tides, black tides, phyto blooms...). And people have children and family and teach duties. Your campaign just can't last for 12 months.
Having a ship in a port for eight months is also expensive and moving a big ship eats a lot of gaz, so for coastal areas... "We're gonna need a smaller boat".
What will the resolution be? If it's fairly detailed, I could see this turning into a Google Maps for armchair treasure hunters searching for lost vessels. Who knows how many ships/planes are down there.
Edit: Looks like they're aiming for ~100m resolution. They specifically mention the search for Malaysia Flight MH370 as an example for the need for adequate ocean floor mapping.
Firstly the US has no jurisdiction whatsoever over international waters.
Secondly most of the countries involved in this are US allies, and in fact US scientific institutions play an essential role in it. Why wouldn't they? This sort of thing is what us marine scientific research organisations exist for.
Thirdly US mining companies could stand to make billions off the back of this sort of data. Why pass that up, or drive such benefits abroad?
Finally, imposing such a ban would be tantamount to the US declaring unilateral sovereignty over all of the Earth's oceans and their contents. I know the current administration doesn't seem too bothered about snubbing it's closes allies, but even if the US wanted to do this, they couldn't. They don't have anywhere close to the assets to monitor and interdict all the Earth's oceans. They certainly don't have the capacity to do that and also carry out the security and defence missions their naval and air assets are already assigned to.
So what part of their current security commitments do you think the US would be willing to give up to try and enforce such a ban? Do you think alienating all their allies would make it easier or harder to carry out those existing commitments?
Why would they be more concerned about this than with several countries with the capability to do this same thing on their own? Who probably already have mapped or are in the process of mapping the seabed in high-resolution detail via satellites and surface and submersible devices and vehicles?
And while that's a very long sentence, this is just a "public" version of the same.
well, given the number of thermonuclear warheads that have been misplaced, it does seem reasonable that we should at least try to prevent those kind of missions.
The article makes it sound as though the seafloor is virtually unknown outside of areas surveyed with multibeam sonar, which is a relatively small fraction of the seafloor. In fact, other technologies have been used to map the entire planet to a resolution of 15-60 arc second resolution (roughly 500-2000m). See http://topex.ucsd.edu/WWW_html/srtm30_plus.html for one such widely used, freely available dataset. What multibeam provides over extant dataset such as that one is much higher resolution.
It depends on what you're interested in. Admittedly, if you want, say, a global map of all hydrothermal vents, 500-2000m is not going to cut it. But the time and cost required to map the entire ocean with multibeam sonar is huge, on the order of 120 ship-years for the deep oceans and 750 ship-years for the shallow (<500m) continental margins [1].
Global coverage at 500-2000m resolution from satellite gravitometers represents a very cost effective middle ground between that huge effort and what is currently available, which is a patchwork of soundings that has gaps 10s to 100s of km thoughout much of the ocean. (See Fig 2 of [1]).
At a resolution like that, a major city would be 20-50 pixels across. It's likely great for tracking large geological features, but still must miss a lot of interesting and important things.
Fun fact: My dad worked on the TransAmerica Pyramid as an electrician. He once took me to work. I was always asking him about the very top.
That day, he took me to the top. He opened a steel door, and set up a 6' wooden ladder. He climbed up the ladder, and there was a 1' x 1' square that you could fit your head through. He stuck his head through, and said it wasn't that great. I knew he was playing it down, for my sake.
I asked him one more time if I could climb up and look.
He climbed down, picked me up, and he climbed the ladder, and put my head through the hole. The hole was unfinished, and it was dirty inside the space. I remember seeing a gum wrapper, and that fine construction dirt up there. Looking back it was probably Sheetrock dust.
I vaguely remember I could see the city, but the glass, or plexiglass, was dirty. It was neat though. The kids at school didn't believe me. He didn't want me to climb in, but I asked.
The best part of that day was being with my dad. We ate lunch, and my dad said, 'Well at least your mom took the wrapper off the cheese today.' (This was the late 60's, or 70's, and my mom hated being a homemaker.)
icantdrive55, you've been shadowbanned for a long time, and I see no obvious reason for it in your comment history. I'd suggest getting in touch with the site admins to inquire.
Indeed. I have them tagged as 'shitposter' (with the HN Enhancement Suite Chrome extension), but I just had a look and I'm not even sure why I felt that tag was justified.
At worst there's a lot of 'low-quality' rambling, but usually I then tag the user as 'shitty poster' (my approach to categorization can be a bit odd) and I'll downvote the worst of the comments when I see them.
Could it be that after a certain number of heavily downvoted comments it causes an automatic shadowban? Or maybe some deleted or edited comments that were reason to do so?
I suspect it's because he posts reddit-style free writing stories. Maybe a year or two that was unacceptable on HN, but given that at this point, HN and reddit are indistinguishable from each other, I agree that there's no point in keeping him shadowbanned.
I'm not sure where your hostile tone is coming from -- I prefer reddit to HN, and don't have any issues with them being (more) similar. I only used that as a descriptor for his stories because I've heard that used as an explicit reason for people having downvoted/flagged similar types of posts in the past.
No mention of the impact on marine life of this blanket of sonar... Maybe I'm too environmentally concerned, but it would seem a bit foolish to do something like this without having a pretty solid understanding of what negative impact it could have.
If the sonar is hitting these animals, shouldn't the sonar operator be able to detect it? Can you beamform sonar? Would it be feasible to narrowly direct the sonar towards your target?
If you want a good idea how deep is the deepest part of the ocean (Mariana Trench), look up in the sky and find a jet flying at full altitude (37,000 feet).
Something like 11.2km I think. For some reason I often hear altitudes given in feet even alongside other values using metric units. Might be an international standard in aeronautics?
They’re not directly correlated, but generally, when you see lengthy contrails behind an aircraft, it’s probably cruising at altitude. Again, not directly related – it’s an atmospheric phenomenon[0] – but visible contrails are a safe indicator an aircraft is at or near cruise and are quite common. (Their absence, on the other hand, is not necessarily a counterindication.) And yes, an aircraft will pretty much always be visible to the naked eye, even up to 45-50k where some business jets live now. You may have to squint, but your eyes are pretty good at finding fast motion against a static background.
The article mentions the USS San Francisco, but I think the details are interesting. They highlight how little we know.
The San Francisco, a nuclear attack submarine, operating at flank speed at a depth of 525 feet, collided with an underwater mountain. Extensive damage, 98 crew injured, one dead.
>It’s a common sentiment among Earth scientists—often a lament—that we know more about other planets in the solar system than we do our own. Indeed, astronomers have a more complete topographical understanding of the moon, Mars, ex-planet Pluto and the dwarf planet Ceres than we do of the seabed. This is shocking, because the topography of the seafloor plays such a huge role in keeping the planet habitable—a role we need to fully understand in order to predict what the future of our climate holds.
>The reason we have no comprehensive map is dumbfoundingly simple, considering that we’ve traversed and charted our solar system: “It’s not so easy to map the ocean, because the water is in the way,” says Jakobsson.
and there are military applications as navigating near the sea floor is greatly facilitated by having accurate maps. I am a bit surprised this isn't an NGA effort.
But why would the military share those maps with the public? After all, that would facilitate military applications by the enemy. Much better to quietly make the maps and not tell anyone.
To avoid navigational errors and save civilian lives, and presumably to make everyone depended on US-operated satellites (at least the last one is probably the reason why Russia and the EU both now operate their own system)?
Honestly, I struggle to find any reasoning on why GPS is shared with the world beyond "Korean Air Lines 007 crashed, so Pres. Reagan made GPS free to (save the world|gain political capital). Later we removed the civilian precision restriction because that's cheaper than maintaining it", which I find a bit weak. Maybe somebody can enlighten me
KAL 007 showed the US government that there were important civilian uses for GPS, and they realized that they could do a lot of good by opening it up.
The idea of government is that it lets us do things for the collective good what we would not do for ourselves individually. The US government, for all its faults, does sometimes follow that idea. It's not much different from maintaining the highway system. True, it covers the world, not just the US, but the nature of satellite navigation means that it wouldn't be any cheaper or easier to restrict the system to only work in the US, so why bother?
It wasn't so much Google. The big players lobbying for the civilian degradation to be turned off in the late 1990s were the airline industry. Within the government, the FAA was also a big advocate, hoping it would be able to retire various other expensive systems if it could count on a reliable GPS.
> presumably to make everyone depended on US-operated satellites (at least the last one is probably the reason why Russia and the EU both now operate their own system)?
This is also why the US said they’d shoot down the EU system unless the EU would construct it in a way that the US could easily jam it. Now it has that backdoor in it. We shouldn’t have let them extort us like that.
They don't share GPS. They share a low-resolution subset of GPS. And they control the satellites and thus have the power to selectively disable it should their enemies decide to rely upon it.
The part they share is literally called "Coarse/Acquisition" and the part they don't share is called "Precise". (This has nothing to do with Selective Availability; they're broadcast in two completely different bands.) The GP's characterisation is broadly accurate.
Selective Availability was turned off in 2000, everybody gets the same GPS signal now. GPS III won't support it, so it won't be able to be turned back on.
It can which is why the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans are all rushing to finish their constellations.
Iirc the Chinese are a partner in Galileo (the European program).
This is a good thing, hardware will rapidly appear that supports 2 or more of them meaning that either all the partners would simultaneously have to agree to disable theirs or (more unlikely) someone was shooting down the satellites which since that would realistically only happen during a global conflict means I'd have bigger things to worry about at the time.
Sadly, the EU system has a method for the US to shoot it down, as the US said they’d pre-emptively shoot down all satellites we put up unless we build such a backdoor (especially due to the chinese partnership in Galileo).
Now we have a system where the chinese stopped being a partner, and the US forced us to add a backdoor and reduce the quality. I’m not sure I can see anything good in this.
Thanks but I do not see any mention of a backdoor. A different frequency is not one, it allows for local jamming (which is also possible with GPS) and that's all.
The whole point was to put GALILEO on frequencies that overlap with military BeiDou and military GPS, so that no government could jam civilian GALILEO without jamming their own military tech.
The whole point of galileo is to have a system which is not dependent on the US and their GPS switch.
Jamming is a local action, the US will be able to jzm Gallileo like we are able to jam GPS - again locally.
Frequencies can be switched, if we only relied on the fact that they are the same then the US could switch theirs (and have equipment which is compatible if course) and there goes our security.
I work in security and have worked for 12 years for a huge provider of telecom systems and hinestly do not see any real advantages to match the frequencies.
Also, if we had the same frequency, WE could not jam GPS if we wanted to.
> “Mines on land are soon going to run out,” Scott says. “Every electronic device in the world has rare earth [metals] in it ... we need raw resources.”
Rare earth mines on land are nowhere near running out.
And they can (apparently, I'm not an expert) be reclaimed. It's very technically challenging and expensive but they are still in all these old devices in Chinese landfills. They are not used up, I'd call them 'raw materials' not 'raw resources'. Oil and coal are 'raw resources' that you can't get back after they are used up.
One could even make an argument that time and money could be better spent researching a better recycling process for e-trash than trying to mine the ocean floor.
>Scott agrees that habitats around mining operations will be impacted. Still, based on his experience, he says, “I think [the effects] will be less substantial” than mining on land, which is known to have catastrophic environmental consequences ranging from acid mine drainage that pollutes water to toxic clouds of dust. “None of those things will be a problem in the ocean,” Scott says.
So people are worried that a scientific expedition that vastly increases our knowledge of our world is controversial because it will make mining easier/more profitable?!?
Per the quote above that it will be less damaging than the current mining we do on land. We should be doing everything to make this type of deep ocean mining more economical. In addition, it should be easier to enforce environmental regulations on deep ocean mining as the mining operations will be international waters and susceptible to visits by various navies and interested parties on boats. This would also help with a lot of the problems we have with land mining (opacity to the outside world, conflict materials, human rights abuses, displacement of existing populations due to mine locations).
Even if we were to take this guy's word for it (which we obviously shouldn't)...
> it should be easier to enforce environmental regulations on deep ocean mining as the mining operations will be international waters
Precisely which regulations are you talking about, and who do you imagine enforcing them? The International Seabed Authority, of which the US is not a member state, and whose Law of the Sea Convention they have repeatedly declined to ratify? Good luck with that.
How exactly is moving the mining operation thousands of kilometres out to sea and thousands of metres below the surface going to increase transparency? I don't follow.
> Per the quote above that it will be less damaging than the current mining we do on land.
That's a fact-free assertion by a person providing PR. I should be surprised people here are gullible enough to take that at face value, but obviously not.
For one its cost. A single survey ship (their rates are cheap now due to low oil prices), cost about USD30000 a day, A single ROV (>5k a day), ROV crew, divers, backup ROV(yes there needs to be 2 ROV's) why? one needs to recover the other in deepwater, ships crew, the survey crew etc... all usually comes to about 50k-70k a day in cost (and this is being really conservative). I am not including cost of bunkering (refueling the ship), crew transport to location, rotations, food, water, waste disposal etc and the list goes on. If you take USD100000 a day at an average of 60miles a day in length and probably a mile width, USD18.5 mil would probably not cover much of a distance. Dont forget the cost of processors to process the multibeam data (yes multibeam provides higher resolution because it collects more data points), the mappers-charters, engineers etc...etc. Just the cost alone is enough to put most people off. There is a reason why MH370 couldnt be found, and the cost was enormous that they had to call of the search.