4 ms·

I see someone's mentioned Heraklion/Alexandria, as well as Dogger bank in the North Sea - add to the list Dhaskalio in Greece, Yonaguni in Taiwan, Mahabalipuram

I see someone's mentioned Heraklion/Alexandria, as well as Dogger bank in the North Sea - add to the list Dhaskalio in Greece, Yonaguni in Taiwan, Mahabalipuram and Dwarka in India, as well as ruins in Crete and even the Caribbean (can't find link). I think the point I was trying to make is that there clearly are examples and I don't think that we've barely even begun looking. You're right that healthy sea waters aren't ideal for preservation of human-derived metals and organics, but then silting and run-off from tributaries leads to preserving types of environment, sat in geographic areas of interest to humans anyway. That aside, stone - a material much used in ancient times - is fairly durable. When you were diving, were you actively looking for signs of ancient human activity, or might it have entirely slipped you by even if you stared straight at it? I'd suggest the littoral region is the next frontier of archaeology, because clearly a lot of our history was on-shore, and that on-shore is now off-shore... . - ed spelling

detritus 6y ago
Moreso: I think when we start digitally encoding these environments - much as we have over ground in South America, using LIDAR to discover previously unseen, but right in-sight structures such as those of the Maya - we'll realise there's a lot of our old culture not far off. Drone submersibles with high resolution sonar doing fully-realised coastal scans would, I'm sure, yield hugely interesting results. - ed: drone wouldn't need to be submersible. that would just be cooler.
- vidarh 6y ago
  22 years ago I worked on a communications relay app to make up one tiny part of a control system for an autonomous submersible used for mapping. My part was a relatively unimportant add-on - the system relied on a 2400bps acoustic link from the submersible to a small ship that needed to stay right above to get a reliable link. To allow relaying data real-time to shore or a bigger ship nearby I was contracted to write code to pass the data stream reliably over a 9600bps GSM data connection (it was intended for testing and demos in coastal regions, not for production use). Ended up using a slightly modified z-modem protocol that kept the session alive across redial. But the best part of that contract was to get to go out and see the real system in operation. Given what results they had back then I wonder what the state of the art in that field looks like now - the biggest problem with automating this seemed to be the tight tolerances for communication with the submersible. You won't be able to make it small and cheap if it needs to be tethered (dragging a heavy cable), but if untethered like the one I got to see, maintaining a reliable enough and fast enough connection becomes a challenge instead.

detritus 6y ago

Moreso: I think when we start digitally encoding these environments - much as we have over ground in South America, using LIDAR to discover previously unseen, but right in-sight structures such as those of the Maya - we'll realise there's a lot of our old culture not far off. Drone submersibles with high resolution sonar doing fully-realised coastal scans would, I'm sure, yield hugely interesting results. - ed: drone wouldn't need to be submersible. that would just be cooler.

vidarh 6y ago
22 years ago I worked on a communications relay app to make up one tiny part of a control system for an autonomous submersible used for mapping. My part was a relatively unimportant add-on - the system relied on a 2400bps acoustic link from the submersible to a small ship that needed to stay right above to get a reliable link. To allow relaying data real-time to shore or a bigger ship nearby I was contracted to write code to pass the data stream reliably over a 9600bps GSM data connection (it was intended for testing and demos in coastal regions, not for production use). Ended up using a slightly modified z-modem protocol that kept the session alive across redial. But the best part of that contract was to get to go out and see the real system in operation. Given what results they had back then I wonder what the state of the art in that field looks like now - the biggest problem with automating this seemed to be the tight tolerances for communication with the submersible. You won't be able to make it small and cheap if it needs to be tethered (dragging a heavy cable), but if untethered like the one I got to see, maintaining a reliable enough and fast enough connection becomes a challenge instead.