Pilot, this is dive super. Dive super, pilot? Control room ready to launch? Control room is ready to launch. Copy that.
This area is sort of referred to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic because of the high degree of shipwrecks that have occurred in this region.
We have World War II shipwrecks, including German submarines and a lot of 19th century sailing vessels.
So we have really quite the range of shipwrecks that date from every period of sailing.
Part of Okeanos' mission for the last 10 years is to work with our partner agencies identifying and imaging potentially historically significant wrecks on the seafloor.
I've got the backskatter here we surveyed last night and as you can see, we ran two lines over it, one with it in our port beam and one with it in our starboard beam in hopes to get the best acoustic imagery of this wreck.
These are really, really tiny objects on the seafloor, on this massively large scale, so it's essentially like finding a needle in a haystack
and so the more information that you have, and that's what those archaeologists do on shore, they're gathering history and archives and position and information to try to pinpoint and give us a smaller search box.
Vessels like the Okeanos Explorer, with their high-def cameras, their lighting system, really enables us to see what's on the seafloor that otherwise we would not be able to.
As archaeologists, one thing we hate is the word treasure. The treasure that we're interested in is the treasure of knowledge and understanding, not something intrinsically valued.
All these sites are very interesting features because they are of course time capsules and are windows into the past.
We're actually going to do a mapping video survey, driving back and forth, taking very good video of the area.
This is something that used for photogrammetry, so a technique used to do 3D visualizations or reconstructions.
Shipwrecks often act as artificial reefs as well, so when we do locate a shipwreck, we are interested in what is the biological community that has inhabited that wreck since it reached the seafloor,
and that can be informative as far as connectivity or population studies for these organisms as well.
When it all comes together and you find that shipwreck on the seafloor, it can be such an invigorating and exciting experience
because there's something about that kinship to the sea farers that were sailing hundreds of years before you, doing the same thing
to explore, to understand, to sail these seas and it's this connection with those people and the past that really round out the human experience and our interaction with the ocean.