Drones Map Underwater Barrels Dumped off the Coast of Southern California
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FROM ESRI
Researchers suspected that Montrose Chemical Corporation was likely dumping barrels of DDT pesticide into the ocean waters off the coast of Santa Catalina Island in Southern California. But no one could have guessed the volume of the problem.
In March, a team of researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego worked day and night mapping 36,000 acres of the ocean floor. The project tested using autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) technology to map the seafloor.
The expedition included a team of 31 scientists, engineers, and crew conducting 24-hour, around-the-clock operations to deploy two AUVs (REMUS 6000 and Bluefin) used for the expedition from Research Vehicle (R/V) Sally Ride.
The robots stayed at a constant 20 meters (65 feet) above the seafloor, using high frequency side-scan sonar to send signals 150 meters (490 feet) on each side of the vehicle. The continuous echo-location of these signals reflecting from the seafloor created images of the bottom and the objects resting there. Topside, the science team would recharge the instruments and offload sonar imagery to analyze data.
The team scanned the seabed at a rate of 0.75 square kilometers per hour—roughly the size of 140 football fields. More than 100 gigabytes of sonar data were captured during the expedition. Using AI and ML to pinpoint barrel-shaped objects, analysts identified more than 27,000 targets with high confidence to be classified as a barrel, and an excess of 100,000 total debris objects on the seafloor.
The outcome of the 2-week expedition—on top of getting a glimpse of the magnitude of the problem—was a heat map that used GIS to show concentration and volume of barrel objects in the area scanned.
While the team covered a lot of mileage in a short period of time, there’s a lot more of this DDT dumping ground—let alone other areas of the ocean—to scan and map.
“10 years ago, it would have been impossible to do the type of work we did on this expedition because the technology just wasn’t there,” said Eric Terrill, who led the mission as chief scientist and directs the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
This subsea AUV mapping mission barely scratches the surface of what’s possible when robots, data, and humans come together.
It’s really making waves.
