Our ability to do deep-ocean archaeology is, of course, the product of modern technology. Although much of the needed technology was first developed by the military, and for commercial applications such as the placement of transoceanic telephone cables, its widespread availability is largely the product of the oil and natural gas industry. Everyone - at least on television - has seen oil and gas offshore installations - drilling and pumping platforms standing out in the ocean. Building such offshore platforms requires specialized equipment; servicing them and the drills and pumps that penetrate the seabed below them, requires technology. While many of the platforms do not stand in terribly deep water, most of the technology that works at 50 m can be made to work at 500. Some oil and gas platforms - many in the North Sea, for example, both fixed and floating, are in deep water - 200 m, 500 m deep. Whether they are floating or standing on the bottom, they need technology to manage their drills, pipes, and moorings.
In the early days of deep ocean oil drilling, in the 1970s, oil companies found ways to send hard-hat divers to considerable depths, but the costs were very high and the risks were great. Technology - much of it developed originally for military use - came to the rescue. Robotic submersibles - that is, ROVs - were equipped with video cameras and a variety of manipulators and suction devices so they could swim down to the bottom under remote supervision and perform functions ranging from opening and closing valves to moving multi-ton pieces of equipment. As these ROVs became more common their cost declined, and they began to be within the economic reach of people other than oil companies. They became the basic tools of deep ocean archaeology (Figure 1).
Of course, before one can excavate a shipwreck one has to find it, and the technology to do this in the deep oceans is also largely the product of the oil and gas industry, together with the defense establishment and the telecommunications industry. Oil and gas companies have to run pipelines across the ocean floor, telecommunications companies lay fiber-optic cables, and the military has to know a great deal about the seabed to allow its submarines to navigate safely and stealthily through the depths. These practical requirements have resulted in the development of remote-sensing technology. Remote sensing in the ocean involves electronic equipment that can be towed behind a ship or fitted to the hull and is able to map the contours and features of the ocean floor using sound waves. With high degrees of accuracy, such technology can pinpoint anomalies like shipwrecks that can foul cables and trip up pipeline laying equipment. Coupled with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology - the satellites that give you interactive street maps in your car - these remote sensing systems have made it possible to locate and accurately measure the position of shipwrecks on the seabed.
World History
