Alaska News

Unmanned vessel aids in charting Arctic waters

When those discussing the expanding Arctic talk of the greatest obstacles facing development and shipping in the region, one of the first topics to come up is the lack of good nautical charts. As was discovered in Unalaska this summer when Shell's rig Fennica ripped a hole in its hull while entering the harbor area, there is no such thing as too much charting.

But there are hundreds of thousands of miles that need to be charted, and only a few ice-free months to do so. That's where the newest technology in chart surveying -- the autonomous surface vehicle -- comes in, says one of the leading surveyors in the Arctic, TerraSond. This summer, the company, which contracts for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as many other clients, started using an unmanned craft to assist it.

The Lego-like bright orange vessel was used to perform bathymetry in the Alaska Arctic this summer, surveying alongside TerraSond's mother vessel.

"This is a force-multiplier for data acquisition," said Tom Newman, president of TerraSond in a release. "Operated in a semi-autonomous mode, unmanned but supervised, one person can replace the three person crew it would normally take to operate a survey launch; it is definitely the future of seafloor mapping."

Charting demands across the nation have gone through the roof in recent years. According to a 2012 estimate, some 511,000 square nautical miles of the U.S. seafloor is classified as "navigationally significant" and in need of a survey. Without advances like autonomous vehicles, TerraSond estimates it will take decades or even centuries to survey all the navigationally significant areas in the United States.

The survey on which the autonomous surface vehicle was used surveyed locations such as the Cape Prince of Wales Shoal.

The vehicle was manufactured by ASV, the leading manufacturer of autonomous marine systems across the globe. Thomas Chance of ASV supported the effort. Deployment and recovery was onboard the R/V Qualifier 105 survey vessel, funded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Coast Survey.

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TerraSond has been providing surveys under contract to NOAA for updates of the U.S. nautical charts since 1998.

Headquartered in Palmer, TerraSond operates both domestically and internationally through its multiple U.S. and foreign locations.

The domestic locations are Seattle, Houston and Corpus Christi.

This story first appeared in The Arctic Sounder and is republished here with permission.

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