Okeanos, Nautilus Broadcast Simultaneously To Bay Campus

The University of Rhode Island’s Oceanography Professor Robert Ballard’s ship Nautilus and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Okeanos Explorer simultaneously broadcasted live to the Inner Space Center in the Ocean Science and Exploration Center at the URI Bay campus Tuesday, and scientists on board gave reports about what they are currently working on.

The Nautilus broadcasted live from the coast of Turkey in the Black Sea, and the Okeanos Explorer broadcasted from the Mid-Cayman Rise in the Caribbean.

In addition to those at URI watching the high definition video broadcast from both ships, another group of people were in on the broadcast from NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research in Silver Spring Maryland.

The Okeanos Explorer has been traveling around the world to map the seafloor and characterize largely unknown areas of the ocean. The ocean’s features can be discovered using the deep water multi-beam sonar mapping system.

Both the Nautilus and Okeanos Explorer are using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), that are based on Robert Ballard’s ‘Hercules’ model, which can travel down to a depth of 4,000 meters and send high definition images and video through a fiber optic cable back to shore in real-time.  The ROVs are also tethered to the ship so that they have power for as long as they are needed on the seafloor.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Nautilus' rover was around 100 and 200 meters below the surface of the ocean looking at several previously unexplored shipwrecks. Aside from exploring three new wrecks that have never been discovered, they have been revisiting a few that have been reconfigured due to fishing nets being pushed around on the seafloor by fishermen.

“Some of these wrecks are from the byzantine era,” said Michael Brennan, chief scientist on the Nautilus and a URI graduate student. “We are so far down that there is no oxygen and the wood is being preserved.”

Within the next few weeks the Nautilus will be changing it’s focus from shipwrecks to exploring trenches and fault lines.

URI Marine Research Scientist Dwight Coleman explained what the Okeanos Explorer had been discovering and what the video broadcast was showing.

“In the Cayman Trench, we are finding hypothermic vents where heat is being generated and it’s causing water to circulate through the rocks, and once it gets heated it causes gases, nutrients, and minerals that small organisms are living off of,” Coleman said.

The Okeanos is on its way to homeport at Quonset and will be arriving later this fall after heading down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Katy Croff Bell, vice president of the Ocean Exploration Trust and a ’11 URI graduate spoke of the three main goals of the Nautilus’ explorations.

“First we want to explore the world’s oceans, secondly we wish to develop technology to enable even more extensive exploration of the seas, and thirdly we want to bring what we are doing to the public and have public education and outreach programs to share what we are doing and finding,” Bell said.

Catalina Martinez, regional manager of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research at the Bay Campus pointed out NOAA's goals that they hope to achieve with Okeanos.

“We really want to go to areas we know nothing about and discover and learn about all those areas,” Martinez said. “So we’ve only explored about 10 percent of the world’s oceans and we want to explore that 90 percent that's never been touched.”

To learn more about Okeanos Explorer's explorations and travels click here. To learn more about Nautilus and its discoveries, click here