Multi-Stage Seismic Survey for Seafloor Massive Sulphide (SMS) Exploration

WiMUST: A cooperative marine robotic system for autonomous geotechnical surveys

“…Major applications of marine robots include military (Ferri et al, 2017, 2018), environmental, and scientific missions (Leonard et al, 2010), as well as challenging tasks that arise in the oil industry and ocean mining (Birk et al, 2018; Camilli et al, 2010). In what concerns the latter application area, multistage seismic surveys employing AUVs for seafloor massive sulfide exploration were recently performed in Japan (Asakawa et al, 2018) and they share some similarities with this study. A number of survey articles (Bandyopadhyay, 2005; Rudnick, Davis, Eriksen, Fratantoni, & Perry, 2004; Yuh, 2000; Yuh, Marani, & Blidberg, 2011; Zereik, Bibuli, Miskovic, Ridao, & Pascoal, 2018) report the most common applications.…”

Inactive Sulfide Ecosystems in the Deep Sea: A Review

“…Investment is also being made in detailed geospatial analysis of geological features to develop probabilistic maps of favorable prospective regions of mid-ocean ridges (Ren et al, 2016;Juliani and Ellefmo, 2018). New seismic (Asakawa et al, 2018) and electromagnetic (Schwalenberg et al, 2016;Müller et al, 2018;Safipour et al, 2018) tools are being developed and tested to detect sulfides in the absence of physico-chemical water column anomalies, even when buried beneath 10's of meters of sediment. Future avenues of sub-sediment exploration may include gravity coring and shipboard analysis of metals in sediments together with AUV-based self-potential, electromagnetic, hyperspectral, and bathymetric mapping that might be used to locate sulfides as much as 20-km off-axis (Petersen et al, 2017(Petersen et al, , 2018Dumke et al, 2018).…”