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When the MV Clipper Adventurer cruise ship ran aground in the middle of the Beaufort Sea last month, a University of New Brunswick researcher, John Hughes Clarke, was dispatched to the area to help rescue the stranded vessel.
ENLARGE PHOTO
The Daily Gleaner/James West Pho
The University of New Brunswick is recognized worldwide for its underwater studies, says John Hughes Clarke, who holds degrees in geology and oceanography.
"The ship effectively ran into an underwater cliff," he said.
Hughes Clarke and his team were brought in to map the ocean floor so rescue crews could safety manoeuver around the marooned ship.
The UNB team, the Ocean Mapping Group, which includes 14 scientists and graduate students, is charting underwater terrain to keep Arctic shipping safe.
The passengers of the Clipper Adventurer were evacuated two days after the ship ran aground Aug. 27, but the Coast Guard is standing by to help dislodge the vessel as the extent of the damage to the hull is still unknown.
"The MV Clipper Adventurer remains aground near Kugluktuk, Nunavut. Transport Canada is monitoring salvage-related activities to ensure safety and any potential environmental issues are addressed. A marine safety inspector is also on site to ensure compliance with the Canada Shipping Act, 2001 and the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act," said Melanie Orlowski, regional communications officer for the Prairie and Northern region for Transport Canada, said in an email late last week.
Hughes Clarke said the collision illustrates a growing problem. Few people realize that most of the ocean floor in the Arctic is largely uncharted.
As ice cover in the Arctic Ocean shrinks and sea traffic increases, Hughes Clarke said he expects collisions with the sea floor could increase.
"Cruise ships don't want to be in the shipping lanes," he said.
Captains want to steer their passengers into quieter waters near the scenic Arctic coasts where the walruses and whales tend to congregate.
The major shipping lanes were mapped decades ago but outside these passage ways the undersea landscape remains a mystery.
Hughes Clarke, who has degrees in both geology and oceanography, said UNB is recognized world-wide for its underwater studies.
He said charting the peaks and valleys of seabed terrain is more complex than on-land mapping.
Unlike on land, light can't be used to measure depths because the ocean water is often murky.
Historically undersea surveys were done haphazardly by helicopters that would land on a point every six kilometres or so and collect data about the depth of the water, he said.
Hughes Clarke's team uses a newer form of sonar that extends the area that the sonar sweeps underwater thereby increasing the overall geographic data gathered on any given trip.
The team's research ship, the Amundsen, uses multi-beam sonar to map wide swaths of the seabed.
The study of ocean geography near the North Pole has major challenges. For one, GPS satellites do not travel over the Pole and compasses do not point north, which makes mapping difficult.
And then there are the additional problems with underwater measurement - different temperatures and salinities of water change the data, explained Hughes Clarke.
Even the tides are hard to measure because polar bears tend to eat the equipment
Coast Guard spokesperson, Carol Launderville, said a second vessel, the MV Nanny, a commercial ship operated by a subsidiary of Newfoundland-based Woodward's Oil Ltd., ran aground off western Nunavut on Sept. 1.
Launderville could not give details on the number of ships stranded in the Arctic but there have been three reported in Nunavut alone in the last month.
As the Coast Guard stood by to monitor the salvage of the still stranded Clipper Adventurer, the Amundsen was on its way back to the Beaufort Sea to resume its scheduled seabed exploration.
FMI: nbbusinessjournal.com - A different kind of ocean rescue | Nicole Visschedyk - Breaking News, New Brunswick, Canada
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