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Jeremy Weirich: The Map Room
Overall, our main objective going back to the Titanic was to do a degradation assessment of how the outside has changed. But we had to be more specific than that so we made sure we came up with a good science plan and specific areas we wanted to look at that had been examined over several years. Areas like the anchor, the upper promenade decks that had degraded and specific areas that we can systemically go back and look at and acquire good video image of that can tell us how fast the Titanic is degrading. This rate of degrading can help us tell the rate of degradation of other ships.
As with any mission preparation is very important. In the case of the Titanic, we are going back there to do a degradation assessment and comparative analysis of how Titanic looked in 1986 and now. Dr. Ballard produced a photo mosaic when it was first discovered and we are using that as a baseline to not only be able to navigate around the ship to know what we were looking at but also figure out what has changed. In the map room we had a very large layout of the photo mosaic and that is what I'm examining right there.
With some of the marine archeology projects I worked on we didn't have the luxury of knowing what the wreck was we were looking at. We find new wrecks all the time. In the case of Titanic it was nice to be able and have a whole model of the ship to look at and examine. Not only did we have the photo mosaic to look at, but we actually had a large model of all the different superstructures, data, and all the different items that we would expect to find when visiting the Titanic using the ROV's. In the case of the Titanic we used two different types of maps. We used the close up one, the photo mosaic, large-scale image that you saw before that was acquired my Dr. Ballard in 1986. The second map was an overall sight map that told us where the bow was in relation to the stern in relation to the debris field. About half a mile separates the bow and the stern with debris in between. This map helped us to navigate the different areas of the debris field to find certain objects and go back to them, which Dr. Ballard first visited in 1986.
The computers behind me are part of the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown's hydrographic survey systems. Basically they have sonar equipment that allows them to map the ocean floor. This powerful sonar can see several kilometers on either side of the vessel. While we were out at Titanic we were able to do some exploratory mapping from when we left port to Titanic and then back again. Along the way we never knew what we would find and it was always good to know the systems were working anyway.
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