Sidscan Sonar Image of Unidentified Wooden Wreck.

Image selected by Elinor Mossip.

I find these scans interesting both for their abstract beauty and for how they are the result of a machine acting as our eyes and hands. At first look the beautiful scans remind me of woven Ikat (a form of Indonesian weaving) fabric in indigo. But they have deeper mystery to them because they extend our senses underwater – in searching the textures of the seabed for “anomalies.” Ghostly and otherworldly, they narrow down the vast unexplored and alien 30,260 acres that this project is working on to manageable areas of interest that beg closer examination. Fascinatingly, the project area is where some of the first English settlers of Maryland were. The searches have led to the discovery of many boats that were burned in 1776 by the owners and left buried underwater. The image shows one of these wooden wrecks, which I would not have recognized! I find it interesting that you have to be able to read the image like a map in order to extract the information embedded in it.

You can view the original post here: http://www.uri.edu/artsci/his/mua/in_the_field/imh4.html

Page source: Institute of Maritime History: 2009 Project Update.


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