Hydro International #3 - 2021

Hydro International #3 - 2021

One of the many treats of summer used to be the summer special or holiday book of the magazine you subscribed to, laden with strips, new stories, posters and puzzles. Often thicker than your regular edition and often with that upbeat feeling that belongs to summer. We want to try and bring back that feeling to you with this special Prestigious Projects edition.

Page 11 - Who Is Going to Map the High Seas?

Saildrone Surveyor, a 22m Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), recently completed a mapping mission that traversed approximately 4200 kilometres and mapped nearly 22,000 square kilometres of previously unmapped seafl oor. Primarily powered by solar and hydro energy, and propelled by wind, Saildrone Surveyor ushers in a new era of long endurance, low impact (LELI) USVs for ocean mapping.

Page 14 - Uncovering the Secrets of German Marine Munitions Dumpsites

In November 2020, a team of researchers from GEOMAR and EGEOS embarked on an unusual round trip across the German Baltic Sea. Their mission was to shed light on the little-known post-war legacy of munitions dumpsites and to improve technologies for their detection. The trip focused on the acquisition of high-resolution multibeam data. Based on this, contact lists, indicating potential munitions objects, were produced immediately on board.

Page 18 - Exploring the Marine Environment in South Africa

The South African Council for Geoscience recently launched an initiative to optimize marine geophysical data collection in South African waters. The main aim of the initiative is to produce marine offshore maps with 100% seafl oor coverage in the highest resolution currently possible, according to IHO standards. Scientists set to work and developed a tool to classify seafl oor bathymetry and a predictive tool that classifi es geological data into substrate maps using machine learning techniques.

Page 26 - Testing and Analyzing Uncrewed Survey Methods

The SHOM – the French national hydrographic service – is planning to replace most of its aging sea-going assets in the near future and, in this context, a four-week sea trial took place in Brest, on the Atlantic coast of France, in September 2020. These trials involved two DriX USVs, as well as the French Navy hydro-oceanographic vessel Beautemps-Beaupré, in an area very familiar to the SHOM, where major differences between traditional survey methods and autonomously executed surveys could easily be spotted and analysed.