Author: Bernadette Ballantyne
Partner: Fugro
On the 8th March 2014 one of the world’s greatest mysteries began to unfold. A mystery that has never been solved. “This event was the catalyst for the most difficult ocean search operation ever undertaken and what we found transformed our understanding of the sea bed forever,” says David Millar, a geomatics engineer and Fugro’s director for government accounts in the Americas region.
David didn’t know it at the time but his company was about to embark upon the largest ever search operation of its kind bringing in over 100 of Fugro’s ocean surveying experts and three survey vessels utilising hull mounted echo sounders that allowed exploration of the sea floor, generating transformative data critical to future ocean science.
The search for MH370
MH370, left Kuala Lumpur International Airport in the South of Malaysia at 12:41 am on the 8th March on course to Beijing in China carrying 239 people. It was a journey that should take less than six hours but after 38 minutes, as the plane flew over the South China Sea, it stopped reporting to Malaysian Air Traffic Control. To this day no one knows why.
Military radar tracked it for another hour. The plane had diverted from its planned route north to Beijing taking a u turn. Instead it flew westwards back over Malaysia and the Andaman Sea. All efforts to communicate with the plane were ignored, and at 5:30am search and rescue efforts began in its last known location which was initially understood to be in the Gulf of Thailand
Until analysis of military radar signals placed the plane somewhere above the Andaman Sea north of Indonesia. But then even more data emerged. British Satellite company Inmaarsat reported picking up routine signals from the plane until 08:19 local time.“The biggest challenge there was really not knowing exactly where the plane went down,” says David who has been mapping oceans for over 30 years .
Seabed data sparse
The satellite data gave investigators a sweeping arc across the Indian Ocean that could theoretically have become the final resting place of MH370. This arc fell into an area which was the responsibility of Australian Search and Rescue . Just as there was uncertainty about the exact location of the plane, no one knew exactly what the ocean bed in this area looked like because in 2014 only 5 percent of the world’s sea beds had been directly measured and mapped.
Despite oceans covering 70 per cent of the earth’s surface, we only knew what a tiny fraction of this looked like. And the data that search teams had on this area was calculated from low resolution satellite measurements making it just an estimate, and it wasn’t always correct.“We saw vertical errors in the satellite derived bathymetry, from satellite altimetry that were plus or minus 1800 metres. So you know that that’s almost 30% of error in the measure,” he says.
Preparing to search
Before a detailed search for MH370 could begin, early surveys of the enormous 278,000 km2 search area had to be conducted. “First, we had to map from the ocean surface, because the resolution and accuracy of the existing bathymetry in that part of the ocean was inadequate to support a high resolution sea floor search.”
Fugro’s technology could detectdebris as small as the size of a chair, “but we can’t fly our high resolution tools above the sea floor if we don’t know where that is,” says David.
Collecting general bathymetric data, which is the bed depth of the ocean floor, is done using sonar. So a ship sends out a sound. The sound bounces off the sea floor, returns to the source and a depth can be derived. “In the case of MH370, our search went as deep as 5000 metres, meaning that our swath was up to 15 kilometres wide,” says David.
The new data from this first survey produced maps of 15 times higher resolution that had ever been created in the area before giving new geological insights about the 40 million year old sea floor. But more urgently it enabled phase two, the detailed seafloor search to begin using deep tow sonar vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles operating close to the seabed. These vehicles were equipped with multibeam echosounders, sidescan sonars, subbottom profilers, cameras and other sensors to find the aircraft and map the debris field.
Sadly despite months of searching aircraft MH370 was never found but the result is that the Australian government, and in fact the whole world has 730,000 square kilometres of new bathymetry data and 120,000 square kilometres of detailed sea floor data that it never had before.“It is now one of the most thoroughly mapped areas of the deep ocean in the world,” says David. “We discovered vast undersea mountains, underwater, sediment, landslides and highly complex series of volcanoes, ridges and valleys. And we even found a couple of shipwrecks, which were not expected.”
Importantly this data is now being used by the ocean community to model oceanography, habitats, climate events and even tsunamis. But had it existed already, search efforts would have been accelerated. Fortunately searching for lost planes is a highly unusual situation but there are many other reasons why having accurate seabed data is really important.
Seabed 2030
Jamie McMichael Phillips, is Director of the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 project being run by Japan’s Nippon Foundation with Gebco which is the group behind the General Bathymetric Chart of the Ocean. Their Seabed 2030 project was launched in 2016 and is seeking to map 100% of the ocean floor by 2030. “We’ve only mapped 5% of the ocean yet the oceans are fundamental to a whole range of ocean processes. So ocean current circulation, the prediction of the tracking of current circulation depends on the shape of the seabed. And that current circulation drives weather patterns, it drives climate change,” says Jamie explaining that the shape of the seabed is fundamental to the path and strength of tsunamis, and how those are modelled how others are predicted. The shape of the seabed is fundamental to safety of navigation he says, to the monitoring of a whole range of activities in terms of ecosystems, managing those ecosystems, and a whole host of other geological processes. “They’re actually fundamental to the way we go about our everyday business. But people just don’t realise that there has been, for a number of years an element of sea blindness, we’re surrounded by the ocean. But we have been guilty as a world of taking it for granted.”
But all of this is set to change. This year, 2021, marks the start of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. A decade which is all about transforming and enhancing our understanding of the world’s oceans.
UN Decade of Ocean Science
Transformation has been enabled by the evolution of technology.“If you wind back to the early days of ocean mapping, you know, it was done by a lead line,” says Jamie “So a simple weight on the end of a very long piece of rope, that people put over the side of a ship and plumb the depths literally plumb the depths and you are getting one depth in one position.”
Hence the meaning of this well know expression for hitting a low point. Technology then moved on with the introduction of sound waves to map the seabed sending the sonar ping out, measuring the two way distance applying a little bit of mathematics for the speed of sound in water and calculating depth. “We then had the advent of multibeam sonars, where instead of one ping, you’ve got a multitude of pings across a wide swathe. So big search like that can hoover up vast tracts of the ocean. But even so, there is still many, many 1000s of kilometres of ocean still to map,” says Jamie.
In fact Jamie calculates that it would take a single ship using a multibeam echo sounder two hundred years to map the oceans. Fortunately we don’t need to rely on a single ship. In fact the global shipping fleet has massively expanded in the last couple of decades. This means that there is also a lot more data being gathered. In fact some areas of our oceans have been mapped. It is just that not many people know about it. Jamie says this is one of the Seabed 2030 objectives – to get people to share the data that they have about the seabed.
Sharing data to save oceans
This is where Fugro came in. David Millar was attending the GEBCO global forum where the initiative was launched and he knew that his company was collecting exactly this sort of data for clients all over the world. He knew that automation and remote operations were making it easier to collect data than it had ever been before. And he felt, deep down, that this was the right thing to do. The first step was talking to clients to see if they were willing to share this information with the project, which a large number were. The second area was taking new measurements of unmapped seabed areas using vessels and equipment that was already out at sea and moving between projects or back to shore from carrying out work for clients. “We saw an opportunity to essentially keep our equipment running between projects, as we were moving ships around from project to project and from continent to continent. Thereby collecting data and making those data available to Seabed 2030 and Gebco,” says David.
Putting oceans first
“They are in between projects, they could simply relax, but no! They are willing to collect as much data as possible.” says Marco Filipone a former Italian naval officer who became an expert in collecting hydrographic data and has a PhD in systems engineering. There is nothing he doesn’t know about gathering data, processing and sharing it. He, along with teams of surveyors and other marine experts spend weeks and months at sea gathering data for clients and even when a project is complete, they are happy to keep the sonar running.
He explains that bathymetry data for seabed 2030 is measured using multibeam echo sounders and then processed into point clouds which can then be used to generate a surface profile.
One of Marco’s fondest achievement was the collection of a huge amount of sea bed data for the Norwegian Government, which was one of the first large scale contributions to seabed 2030. As part of the Mareano project his team collected more than 100,000km2 of data over a decade.
Norway was collecting data on bathymetry, sediment composition, biodiversity, habitats and biotopes, and pollution in the seabed in Norwegian waters. It was one of the first countries to share its data with Seabed 2030. But it was not always easy. “Norway is one of the most challenging areas to gather data hydrographic data because of starting from the easy because of the ice, and in particular, Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean,” says Marco. “ So you must have a very detailed and adequate planning to make sure that in the given time window, you have available, that usually every year is somewhere between May and October, you are able to transit the vessel in the in the area and you are able to collect the data in the most efficient way, because you have to live with very rough and extreme weather condition that are making the survey planning very difficult.”
Communication and navigation can also be difficult in some of the world’s most remote places. “One of the challenges is that more you go north the less communication or less bandwidth you have available that is one of the main issue that is not only leading to poor communication, but is also leading to issue to get their satellite positioning,” says Marco who has been working on communication systems that are able to work consistently even in the polar region, that provide very good bandwidth that provide the capability to transfer the data. This, he says will help in future projects when Seabed 2030 moves into unexplored regions
Global ocean enlightenment
Creating a digital atlas of the world’s oceans is important for all of the reasons that Jamie explained from understanding ocean circulation to tsunami prediction and preserving precious ecosystems. But there is much more that we don’t know about ocean science and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission is determined to bring about enlightenment.
“I think we are now used to living in the state of crisis. We all know what it is. And the crisis that we are living in now is apparent. But there is now a crisis in the ocean, that is much less apparent to people. But it is clear to scientists,” says Vladimir Ryabinin, CEO of the IOC – also known as the home of ocean science within the United Nations.
Five years ago the UN published the world’s first ever ocean assessment and the findings were frightening. “This report states that the humankind is now running out of time to start managing the ocean sustainably. And that is the most alarming notice that you can get. Because previously, we thought that the ocean was so vast, so invincible, that this is just impossible,” says Vladimir.
Sadly we were wrong and there are lots of what Vladimir calls “stressors” acting on the ocean from warmer temperatures, carbon absorbtion, changing chemical reactions and ocean acidicty, to pollution. “The easiest illustration would be that if you are attacked by several hooligans, and they are hitting you from different angles, that’s what is happening with the ocean, and we are the hooligans,” says Vladimir.
It is not too late for us to improve ocean health. But we don’t have long. “Now the situation is critical. And now we are trying to engage science to basically turn the tide,” says Vladimir.
A decade of ocean science
The activity is a ten-year initiative called the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. “So the UN decade of ocean science is a UN wide initiative that is really trying to create a revolution in the way we generate knowledge about the ocean and the way that we use that knowledge,” says Alison Clausen, programme specialist who works with Vladimir at the IOC.
Alison explains that what the UN decade of ocean science is trying to do is make sure that we have the right knowledge about the ocean so that the ocean can really contribute in a positive way to human wellbeing and to the to the conservation of life on Earth. It means creating a global movement that brings in nations, organisations, the public sector, charities, private companies and the general public to set up the reporting infrastructure that oceans need if we are to manage them sustainably. And it all starts with an implementation plan.
“This is really a framework document. It aims to be non-prescriptive. But it aims to set out some broad priorities for the next 10 years in terms of what are the key things that people need to work together to learn about the ocean? And what are the key ways in which we need to use that knowledge,” says Alison.
The plan was accepted by the UN in January 2021 and it sets out a roadmap for turning the tide starting from a vision of “the science we need, for the ocean we want” and it sets out a series of seven outcomes. “They’re things like, we want a clean ocean, we want a safe ocean, a healthy ocean, a productive ocean, and accessible ocean, an inspiring and engaging ocean and a predicted ocean. So that’s really the ocean we want in 2030,” says Alison.
The plan also explains the challenges facing the world’s ocean stewards in getting the ocean that we want and not surprisingly as the plan involved thousands of stakeholders and three years of discussion there are plenty. But the plan has narrowed it down to ten different categories from knowledge, for example knowing more about pollution and how to remediate it, to protecting and restoring ecosystems and creating a sustainable ocean economy.
What is clear is that the decade will require a huge amount of work if it is to succeed and that every organisation that uses the oceans can contribute from local fishermen with unique understanding of the island communities where they live to national oceanographic institutes
By sharing data from its surveys for global organisations and carrying out additional mapping in between projects Fugro has contributed over 1 million square kilometres of ocean mapping to the Seabed 2030 project, which has made incredible progress since it began four years ago. “So we’ve gone from 5% and we’ve pushed up the area of ocean mapped to 19%,” says Jamie.
To put that into context we have now mapped 69 million square kilometres of ocean surface, which is more than the combined total of Africa, North America and Europe. But there is still a lot of work left to do to map the entire seabed by 2030 and support the ambitions of the decade for ocean science. “But that still leaves us 293 million square kilometres to go. So we have still got to mobilise all these communities that have an interest in ocean mapping, all those sonar systems and multibeam systems that are described, and bring them together and get out there and gather new data.”
The good news is that the technology is available to gather the science we need for the oceans that we want. The challenge now is mobilising the world to collect, analyse and maintain it.
