The group accomplished in just a few days what it would take divers years to do. The project, the first in a new collaboration between U.S. and Greek researchers, demonstrates the potential of new technology and imaging capabilities to rapidly advance marine archaeology.
Greek scientists and archaeologists discovered the ancient shipwreck sunken 4th century B.C. in 2004 during a sonar survey. But the ship might never have revealed its clues to ancient Greek culture until a research team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Greek Ministry of Culture, and the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) joined forces. Using a novel autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named SeaBED developed and operated by WHOI, the team made a high-precision photometric survey of the site using techniques developed by WHOI and MIT researchers over the past eight years.
Hanumant Singh and team at the WHOI Deep Submergence Laboratory (DSL) designed and built SeaBED. DSL has been a leader in developing and building submersible robotic vehicles for a variety of underwater environments, including the towed ARGO vehicle that found the wrecks of Titanic and Bismarck and the JASON II remotely operated vehicle that explores the seafloor today.
For a single three-hour dive, SeaBED was programmed to ?fly? over the shipwreck site in precisely spaced tracks. Multibeam sonar completely mapped the wreck while a digital camera collected thousands of high-resolution images. The vehicle never touched the wreck, leaving it in an undisturbed state, important for future studies.
Most human diving time on archaeological sites is consumed with basic mapping tasks. Typically it takes hundreds of diving hours over several years to make a site plan using tape measures and clipboards. The new robotic techniques produce results very quickly. Robotic vehicles can map and create a photomosaic of a site with quantifiable accuracy in as little as a few hours.
?By using this technology, diving archeologists will be freed from routine measuring and sketching tasks, and instead can concentrate on the things people do better than robots: excavation and data interpretation,? contends Singh, an engineering and imaging scientist. ?With repeated performances, we'll be able to survey shipwrecks faster and with greater accuracy than ever before.?
The historic value in ships, such as the Chios wreck is the information they provide about ancient trade networks. The wreck is ?like a buried UPS truck,? said David Mindell, a professor of engineering history and systems at MIT. ?It provides a wealth of information that helps us figure out networks based on the contents of the truck.?
Source: WHOI/Múlt-kor
