(Lindsay Gee) The analogy now is to look on land and see all the things that we we can see and
the progress that we've gone from Maps or something, or on bits of paper, and now
we all have one on our device we carry around in our pocket. But when you look
at the blue pieces of that outside the land, there's there's nothing there. And
our role in mapping is to kind of drain the oceans and make and reveal what's
there for people. (Jamie Wagner) The multi-beam is our way to look at the topography of the
seafloor. Which means we can figure out what parts are higher
and lower and if there are interesting features like sea mounts, or troughs, or
canyons. (Nicole Raineault) Original expeditions they would just go out with this piano wire and
lead weight and make as many measurements as they could in the time that they had -
which is very few. You'd have, you know, maybe five hundred soundings in a
month-long expedition. Now, with one ping with one sound pulse that the sonar
emits we get 864 soundings. So we're, you know, vastly able to get higher
resolution maps and gathering so much more data. And it's allowing us to
understand the earth like we never have before. (Jamie Wagner) It's extremely useful. Without
that, we'd be diving blind on the seafloor. (Lindsay Gee) Be sitting here mapping and
thinking, wow you know, we're in 4,000 meters of water and we've got a swath
width of 8 kilometers and there's sea mounts popping out all the time. They're
huge mountains that people just don't see normally and that that's fantastic.
(Jamie Wagner) You never know what it'll be just beyond that next hill that you're going over.
(Nicole Raineault) Less than about 15 percent of our seafloor has been mapped with a sonar,
which means the rest of the ocean the everyone in sees Google Earth has been
mapped by satellites. And their resolution is about a thousand meters on
a side - so very coarse resolution. You lose all of the detail that you need to
plan actual dives for an ROV. (Jamie Wagner) Someone on board just needs to import the multiband
data into another program called Fledermaus. And that allows us to have a
3D visualization of the seafloor. And higher areas are colors like red. And darker
areas are colors like blue, and so we get a little painted map of that on our
computer screen as we go along. And that way we can go around manipulate it and find
those particular mounds or troughs that look promising. (Renato Kane) We have a very robust operation. There's
bulky data to be moved around. There's there's certain parameters with which we
want to be on the same page while we're processing that data.
Creating products then later we want to make sure that we're being consistent
and what we're outputting and eventually with the idea that those go into public
repositories. So the importance there is organization. And you can't really reach
organization of that level without communicating with your team members.
(Miles Saunders)Teamwork is of the utmost importance. We're living in very tight quarters -
logical thinking, communication is essential, composure under stress are
probably the biggest things. (Renato Kane) Now a lot of the communities that benefit from our
mapping are primarily scientific. However, as we move towards entering this
data into public repositories, eventually they're incorporated on products that we
use every day. (Nicole Raineault) But without the maps, without even the preliminary maps, we
wouldn't have even known there's something strange to look at there, or
something that wasn't explained by our current scientific knowledge.
Without it, we really wouldn't be here. The more we can communicate that with
people the better. (Lindsay Gee) But it also is great for that next generation, you hope that
will follow on in the footsteps and be better than us.