$7 Million Xprize For Deep Ocean Exploration (businesswire.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Peter Diamandis announced today the launch of a new Xprize competition. $7 million is available for teams who are capable of pushing the boundaries of ocean exploration. "Our oceans cover two-thirds of our planet's surface and are a crucial global source of food, energy, economic security, and even the air we breathe, yet 95 percent of the deep sea remains a mystery to us," Diamandis said. The competition goals are as follows: "In each round, teams will complete a series of tasks, including making a bathymetric map (a map of the sea floor), producing high-resolution images of a specific object, and identifying archeological, biological or geological features. Teams also must show resiliency and durability by proving they can operate their technologies, deployed from the shore or air, at a depth of up to 4,000 meters."

Comments

This is helping drill for oil

[rgbe]

This is not about discovering the oceans and what lives there or the geology of the depths. This about helping Shell (the sponsor) create cheaper technogolies such that they can drill for oil. The requirements they have laid out are weak, for example "depth of up to 4,000 meters". The ocean deepest point is almost 11,000 meters. The drilling technology in the future will be reaching 4,000 meters.

I usually envisage Xprizes as advancing the worlds technologies on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge, such as sending a rocket to the moon and taking a photo of the surface and beaming it back to Earth.

Re:This is helping drill for oil

[Solandri]

Sigh. Yes, and all space exploration isn't about discovering what's out there, it's about keeping the defense contractors fat. If you take anything and cherry-pick one reason for doing it, of course you can make it sound like it's for nefarious purposes.

I usually envisage Xprizes as advancing the worlds technologies on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge, such as sending a rocket to the moon and taking a photo of the surface and beaming it back to Earth.

As someone who's actually worked with AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles), I can tell you that our technology when we're deprived of electromagnetic waves as a means of communication and sensing is pitifully primitive. When Challenger exploded and fell into the sea, some friends asked me why it was taking so long to recover the pieces off the ocean floor. I had to explain to them that comparing radar with modern sonar, it was easier to locate stuff on the moon than it was to find stuff on the ocean floor. Sometimes the thermal profile of the ocean even form a refractive layer which makes it impossible for sound from the surface to reach beyond a certain depth, and you're effectively blind unless you can get down below that thermocline.

Advancing technology on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge about is precisely what's needed in the fields of underwater acoustic sensing, underwater acoustic communication, and underwater operations (imagine how difficult designing equipment would be if air conducted electricity - that's basically what you're dealing with in the ocean). Honestly, the biggest advance I've seen in the last four decades is computer tomography of sonar signal returns to recreate an image field, a process which borrows heavily from x-ray CAT scans (except the source and sensor are in the same location). And we're still not very good at doing it in an open environment like the ocean - a process dolphins, toothed whales, and bats seem to have perfected. Imagine if this was the best image a camera could produce of a bicycle. That's pretty much the technological state where sonar is currently at.

The primary problem is multipath due to density changes in the water caused by uneven temperature and salinity. It's like shooting video through the heat waves rising off a long asphalt road baking in sunlight. Due to a lot of the equations being the same, advances in the mathematics governing sonar and sound transmission are mostly interchangeable with the math governing radar and radio transmission. If you can lick the harder problem (sound), you will dramatically advance the easier problem (radio). WiFi connections from your home router could maintain high speed out to longer range despite having to travel through several walls or moving tree branches and leaves.

Or who knows, maybe there's some as-yet uninvented means of sensing objects using something other than EM waves or sonar. And we just haven't thought of it yet because EM is so easy to use in the air and in space that it hasn't needed inventing yet.

how about taking high def pics of K129?

[k6mfw]

The Soviet sub sunk and which Glomar Explorer got only a portion of it. Supposably when they were raising it (according to a documentary) and when the sub began to break apart when one of G.E. lifting arm broke, one of the missiles slid out of its tube. The documentary had an animation of the missile leaving the sub and then vanishing into the blackness of the depths. It left me the impression the Glomar Explorer crew were thinking, "if we are still here in a few moments, then it didn't explode." (actually there are many steps and procedures to make the bomb go boom, much more than dropping it). OK getting back on topic, can this be used to examine what was left over? Many examine other submarines (or maybe Navy already did but that's all hush hush)?