Aquabots to Explore Ancient Wreck
By Noah Shachtman
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59651,00.html
02:00 AM Jul. 17, 2003 PT
Robert Ballard found the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean floor. He rediscovered the Bismarck, the infamous Nazi battleship. He mapped the Lusitania, the sinking of which became a World War I rallying cry. And he located John F. Kennedy's boat, PT-109.
Now, Ballard is traveling to the Black Sea to investigate what may be the best-preserved ship from the ancient world ever found. He's bringing a robotic archaeologist to scour the vessel. And anyone with an Internet connection will be able to watch the $7 million, 41-day mission live.
The 1,500-year-old ship sits mast-up off the coast of Turkey, buried in Black Sea mud. What makes the craft -- unimaginatively called Wreck D -- remarkable is how intact it is. Usually, shipwrecks decompose rapidly after falling under the surface. But the main mast and stanchions of the Byzantine-era ship have remained whole, despite centuries on the sea floor.
"Most archaeological sites are sticks, stones and bones," Ballard said. "The organic content gets eaten up. And so much of our history has been created on something edible, like people or paper."
On most wrecks, said Ballard, important cultural information is missing. "Who these people traded with, what they were carrying, who they were -- all that's gone -- except on the Black Sea."
Scientists have long theorized that ships sinking to the bottom of certain seas could stay preserved for hundreds, even thousands, of years because almost no oxygen is present -- in science-speak, the site is "anoxic." The wood-boring mites that eat up most wrecks can't live in such environs.
But until Ballard's Wreck D appeared, scant evidence of such preservation existed, mostly because undersea archaeologists had concentrated their efforts in shallower coastal waters.
Right now, all but the upper extremities of the ship are immersed in mud. The task is to examine more of the vessel, and see if the ship's gear -- the rigging, the ropes, the sail, maybe even the even the wreck's cargo -- can be brought up, said mission specialist Dwight Coleman.
To clear away the muck and handle these ancients objects, Coleman and Ballard are counting on a remote-controlled robot called Hercules.
The drone is the first craft ever designed specifically for deep-water archaeology, Ballard said. It's controlled by a pilot in the Knorr, Ballard's ship on the surface. But by using special pressure-sensitive mandibles, Hercules' human operator aboard the Knorr can actually feel what the robot is grasping thousands of feet below.
Ballard has long relied on remote-piloted crafts to assist him in his expeditions. For years, most of his explorations have been conducted without a human ever traveling to the wreck. But the capabilities of the drones are limited.
"Before, all we could do is find, we couldn't excavate," Ballard said. "With a ship (like Wreck D), archaeologists would say, 'Don't you touch that, you clumsy oaf.'"
Hercules' mandibles provide the necessary sensitivity to work with such a delicate find. The robot also comes equipped with special sonar that will give scientists an ultrasound picture of what it's facing down below. That's crucial, because at great depths the sea is nearly impenetrable to the human eye.
Mission specialist LTG Jeremy Werich said data from Hercules will be piped up through a few hundred feet of fiber-optic cable to Argos, an underwater communications platform and light source dragged by the Knorr. The Argos will then transmit the information up to the surface ship.
From there, a specially designed motion-stabilized satellite dish -- capable of maintaining a constant link while its ship rolls as much as 15 degrees -- will upload the feeds back to the United States. Six streams of video, showing what's going on around the Knorr and below from the Hercules, will be sent to about a dozen key locations around the country.
The satellite streams will come at 10 to 13 megabits per second, about 20 times the rate of a cable modem. That's fast enough to allow mission specialist Dwight Coleman to return to the states for 10 days and supervise sections of the expedition from a new Innerspace center at the University of Rhode Island. It's the first time such remote supervision will be attempted.
Coleman won't be the only one able to check out what's going on. According to Richard Mavrogeanes, president of VBrick Systems, which is providing video-technology support for Ballard's crew, live video streams of the mission will be available to anyone at the 200 institutions equipped with Internet2 connectivity. People with a standard Internet connection will be able to see MPEG-4-encoded real-time footage at the mission's website, Expedition2003.
In addition to Wreck D, Ballard and his crew of 52 will examine three other Byzantine-era ships found at shallower depths near Turkey. They will look at two Phoenician shipwrecks from 750 B.C. -- the time of Homer -- in the Eastern Mediterranean. And they will look for evidence of a prehistoric civilization.
In 1999 and 2000, Ballard came upon what may be remnants of a culture nearly 7,500 years old at the bottom of the Black Sea. Evidence suggests these people survived a great flood -- maybe even the Biblical deluge of Noah, some scholars believe. The first expedition found what might be stones that served as foundations for their ancient buildings.
This time around, Ballard's team will use their robotic archaeologist to bring the stones up from the depths of the Black Sea.
Dwight Coleman and Robert Ballard are counting on a remote-controlled robot called Hercules. The first craft designed specifically for deep-water archaeology, it's controlled by a pilot in Ballard's ship on the surface. By using special pressure-sensitive mandibles, Hercules' human operator can actually feel what the robot is grasping thousands of feet below.
Photo: Institute for Exploration
The top of a 35-foot-tall mast comes into view under the bright lights of the Argos, an underwater communications platform. The mast stands upright on a wooden ship found intact 1,000 feet below the surface of the Black Sea, 1,500 years after the ship was built. Photo: National Geographic Society/Institute for Exploration