What a year it was! December 2012
Posted: January 8, 2013 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project Leave a commentIn December CSIRO Education’s magazine, The Helix, featured a poster all about Australia’s Marine National Facility and Southern Surveyor.
The ship kept growing skyward, as more work continued on the superstructure, in the shed, the blasting chamber and the Investigator Erection Area.
While RV Investigator was looking ship shape on the wharf, there was still lots of work happening in the Investigator Fabrication Site in the giant shed.
We were in the final stages of assembling the blocks in the Investigator Erection Area, in the Sembawang Shipyard in Singapore, with the top two blocks, 401 and 402 well underway. You could see how they had that finished look, rather than seeming like there might be another layer to go on top.
And, we wished you Season’s Greetings…
From Toni Moate, Executive Director and the Future Research Vessel Project Team at CSIRO.
We’re looking forward to launching into 2013 with you!
RV Investigator is being designed, built and commissioned by CSIRO through the Future Research Vessel Project, an initiative of the Australian Government, under the Super Science Initiative and financed from the Education Investment Fund.
(Make sure you check out the penguins in the Santa hats!)
What year it was! November 2012
Posted: January 7, 2013 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project Leave a commentIn November, after seeing so many keel blocks, it was great to finally have some doors on show! We were up to block 303 on RV Investigator, which is up above the deck.
The ABC kindly gave us permission to post this audio, which was recorded during an interview with Dr Bernadette Sloyan, when we opened up Southern Surveyor, the current Marine National Facility vessel, for free public tours in Darwin. Dr Bernadette Sloyan spoke to Drive Presenter, Vicki Kerrigan, from 105.7 ABC Darwin If you missed the interview you can listen to it here:
More information on the outside broadcast can be found here: http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2012/10/12/3609801.htm.
In the shipyard we celebrated 1,000,000 man hours worked without a loss time injury. A lot of effort is being put in to making sure that during the construction of Australia’s new Marine National Facility research vessel, Investigator, the site is a safe place to work. Congratulations to Teekay Australia, Sembawang Shipyard and the CSIRO Site Team in Singapore.
The details from Australia’s Marine National Facility’s 2014-15 application process for sea time on Investigator were released, with 28 applications received for sea time, representing over 836 days of ship time. An excellent result! The Marine National Facility Steering Committee put out a communiqué to update the scientific community, and the full text is available at: http://www.marine.csiro.au/nationalfacility/news/index.htm
Block 204 was blasted, painted, moved to the wharf area and lifted into place, changing the whole look of RV Investigator and the propellers and the retractable bow thruster, which is like a propeller on a stem, arrived at the shipyard.
Three years ago 10-year-old Clare Cameron won a national competition to name Australia’s new Marine National Facility (MNF) research vessel. Clare’s entry, The Flinders Investigator, was the joint winner – the new ship has been named Investigator. Clare Cameron and her family toured the current MNF vessel, Southern Surveyor, met the scientists who’d returned from a research voyage to the Coral Sea and was presented with a LEGO® Investigator.
And, the research team onboard Southern Surveyor, ‘un-discovered’ Sandy Island. Dr Maria Seton from the School of Geosciences at The University of and her team were in the under-explored region between the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, taking rock samples from the ridges and plateaus at depths of up to 3.5 km. They were also endeavouring to map about 8000 km of seafloor and they took gravity and magnetic data, to help to better understand the type of crust that underlies the region and the age of these basins, to give a more complete geologic and tectonic history of the area, during the last one hundred million years.
At the outer limits of the Coral Sea, some of the maps the scientists were using showed a 26 kilometre long island, which was identified on the maps as Sandy Island. However, when Southern Surveyor arrived at the location, there was no island to be found. You can read more about the discovery in the media release below.
Here’s some of the global coverage of the ‘un-discovery’:
http://www.channel4.com/news/scientists-discover-sandy-island-doesnt-exist
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-22/australian-scientists-un-discover-pacific-island/4387012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20442487
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/11/22/sci-south-pacific-island-missing.html
THIS ONLINE ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY ON 23 NOVEMBER 2012 REGARDING THE RESEARCH VOYAGE:
When is an island not an island?
In a reversal of the centuries-old tradition of explorers undertaking ocean voyages of discovery with the hope of finding new land, a scientific party has done the complete opposite.
A team of Australian and international scientists led by the University of Sydney has solved a mystery regarding the existence of a supposed island in the Southwest Pacific.
The detective work took place on the RV Southern Surveyor, Australia’s Marine National Facility research vessel during a research voyage aimed at understanding the tectonic evolution of the eastern Coral Sea.
“We became suspicious when the navigation charts used by the ship showed a depth of 1400 metres in an area where our scientific maps and Google Earth showed the existence of a large island,” said chief scientist Dr Maria Seton from the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.
The maps that the scientists were using are based on a combination of the CIA World Data Bank and the World Vector Shoreline Database. Even Google Earth shows a black blob in the area of the mythical island.
The rogue island has regularly appeared in scientific publications since at least the year 2000.
“So we decided to solve this modern day mythical island mystery. We found the navigational charts were accurate and there was no island in the area, so global maps including Google Earth need to be corrected.”
Dr Steven Micklethwaite from the University of Western Australia said, “We all had a good giggle at Google as we sailed through the island, then we started compiling information about the seafloor, which we will send to the relevant authorities so that we can change the world map.”
As well as mythbusting the existence of islands, the team have been collecting submarine data and rock samples from a little-explored part of the eastern Coral Sea. After 25 days at sea, they have collected 197 different rock samples, collected over 6800 kilometres of marine geophysical data and mapped over 14,000 square kilometres of the ocean floor.
Not only did they uncover rocks formed around 100 million years ago as Australia, Antarctica and New Zealand broke apart, but they also found extensive limestone samples at 3000 metres below the waves, revealing a massive drowning of the region over time.
The original copy can be found on the University of Sydney’s website: http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newscategoryid=2&newsstoryid=10619&utm_source=console&utm_medium=news
What a year it was! October 2012
Posted: January 4, 2013 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project Leave a commentIn October, RV Southern Surveyor was working to the north of Australia, in East Timorese waters recovering and replacing three Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) moorings, which had been monitoring the Indonesian Throughflow since June 2010.
We created a graphic designed to help keep you up to date with where the construction project was up to. This is what it looked like in October.
We got hold of some fabulous photos showing how bright blue Investigator will be when finished.
At the shipyard the mystery box was revealed – and it turned out it was a pair of beautiful, big, bright blue propulsion motors. RV Investigator has two huge electric propulsion motors that drive two propellers, which can propel the ship to a top speed of 15 knots.
Southern Surveyor returned to Darwin where we open the ship up for free public tours, from Friday 12 to Sunday 14 October at Stokes Hill Wharf. We had some great media coverage on the Drive program from 105.7 ABC Darwin with Vicki Kerrigan on board on Friday doing an outside broadcast, ABC TV News came and filmed a story, and NT News printed a story about the ship tours [All on board for science – NT News 14 October 2012]. Check out this ABC Online story with some great photos of the outside broadcast.
The block we’d been waiting for with bated breath, block 101, or the bow section of the keel, to be finished and was getting very close to being finished! Off to the paint shed…
And, ABC 7.30 Tas reporter, Felicity Ogilvie, turned up with her crew to film a great story on RV Investigator. Here it is again in case you missed it!
Permission was granted by the ABC to post this story. It can be found on the 7.30 Tas website: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-05/taking-shape/4298794
TRANSCRIPT:
ABC 7.30 TAS PRESENTER, AIRLIE WARD: The CSIRO’s new research ship will be Australia’s largest research vessel and a game changer for the way ocean science is done. The Investigator, as it is to be called, will eventually be berthed in Hobart, but as Felicity Ogilvie reports, the ship is being built in Singapore.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: In a shed the size of two football fields, Australia’s new research ship is taking shape. A traditional Singaporean welcome has been organised for the woman at the helm of the project, Toni Moate from the CSIRO in Hobart.
TONI MOATE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FUTURE RESEARCH VESSEL PROJECT: The steel cutting ceremony started in January and that was amazing because we had been designing the vessel for so long, so to actually get the steel, to cut the steel, see construction commence was exciting for the team, and since then it really has been quite a rapid progression.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: The ship will be called the Investigator and it’s the stuff of scientists’ dreams.
DR BRIAN GRIFFITHS, FUTURE RESEARCH VESSEL PROJECT TEAM: the development of a state of the art, first class research ship which will be able to do all sorts of things that I never dreamed I would ever be able to do.
TIM MOLTMANN, INTEGRATED MARINE OBSERVING SYSTEM (IMOS) DIRECTOR: It’s just tremendously exciting, and the day when it comes down the Derwent will be a fantastic day for Australian marine climate science. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s just great to see it being put together.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: The boat is being built in pieces, and they’re big. Some sections of the hull weigh more than 140 tonnes. It will be another year before the ship is completed.
TONI MOATE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FUTURE RESEARCH VESSEL PROJECT: It’s a massive scale operation. The logistics are incredible, ah, so the vessel will have over 1100 sheets of steel , weigh over 3800 tonne, when the vessel’s finished, ah and so it’s, you know, there’s thousands of people working on the vessel itself, thousands of drawings that we have had to review here in Hobart.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: The one off design has had to be tweaked as the ship takes shape. As the project leader, Ms Moate has been visiting Singapore every month to oversee the $120 million project that’s been funded by the Commonwealth. The ship will replace the CSIRO’s current research vessel, the Southern Surveyor. The Surveyor has been the nation’s only blue water research vessel for the past two decades.
TONI MOATE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FUTURE RESEARCH VESSEL PROJECT: We will keep the Southern Surveyor for a transition period with the Investigator, and we’ll be using her up into 2013, and then we’ll look to sell. We’ve kept her in good nick.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: the 66 metre-long Southern Surveyor used to be a fishing trawler until it was modified by the CSIRO. The Investigator will be almost 94 metres long, and it’s set to be a game changer for marine science. That’s because the ship has been designed just for research.
TONI MOATE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FUTURE RESEARCH VESSEL PROJECT: the current vessel can go for 6000 nautical miles, and this one goes for 10,000 nautical miles, so that means that people like oceanographers can go way out into the ocean and sample parts of the ocean that they’ve never been able to get to before.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: the Investigator is luring Oceanographer, Brian Griffiths out of retirement. He spent more than 40 years working for the CSIRO, but never on a ship like the Investigator.
DR BRIAN GRIFFITHS, FUTURE RESEARCH VESSEL PROJECT TEAM: In the early days, there were two of us on the vessel, now there will be 40 scientists and we’ll be able to do such good, multi-disciplinary work. Can take a look at a problem, tackle it from the point of view of the chemistry, the physics, the biology, the biogeochemistry, the geology, the ocean atmosphere interactions. It’s just such a step, huge step forward in the ability to do marine science in this country.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: The Investigator will be fitted with specialised equipment such as eco-sounders. That will enable scientists to explore up to 6 kilometres below the surface. While biologists are interested in what lives down in the dark, geologists plan to take samples of the mud from the ocean floor.
DR BRIAN GRIFFITHS, FUTURE RESEARCH VESSEL PROJECT TEAM: It allows us to get down into the deep ocean. It’s a bizarre place. It’s the world’s largest habitat, the abyssal ocean, and you get really, really strange creatures. You get fish that are all teeth and mouth, and virtually nothing else. We can now be able to bench mark the deep ocean and look for potential changes should the climate change. We’ve never had that capability before and now we’ve got it and it’s just amazing.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: Scientists from the Integrated Marine Observing System are also looking forward to getting on board. They’re using ocean gliders to measure surface currents and collect data to measure the water temperature, salinity and tepidity.
TIM MOLTMANN, INTEGRATED MARINE OBSERVING SYSTEM (IMOS) DIRECTOR: Well it’s going to help us put those gliders into parts of the ocean we couldn’t get into otherwise. Probably the main ways, the main things it does for us, it enables us to work much more effectively in the Southern Ocean, so the vessel that is operating now, the Southern Surveyor, it can only go to about 50 degrees south safely, so this new vessel will go all the way to the ice edge.
ABC REPORTER, FELICITY OGILVIE: scientists from around the country are already queuing up to join in the maiden research voyage.
TONI MOATE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FUTURE RESEARCH VESSEL PROJECT: We’ve just gone out for the call for applications in 2014-15. We’ve got about 300 days available and we’ve got requests for 850 days, and so it’s a huge step forward, but if someone would like to give us another vessel, we’d be happy to have it.
What a year it was! September 2012
Posted: January 2, 2013 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project Leave a commentIn September, we introduced you to one of the Future Research Vessel Project Team members, Dr Brian Griffiths who was profiled in ECOS Magazine http://www.ecosmagazine.com/?paper=EC12402: Biological oceanographer Brian Griffith officially retired from CSIRO in 2010. But, with an impressive ocean-voyaging record behind him, it’s no surprise the sea lured him back. In the article, Brian talks to ECOS about playing soccer on sea ice, and his work on the technical design team for RV Investigator.
A mystery box weighing 52,600 kg arrived on the wharf in Singapore.
Southern Surveyor headed up the west coast of Australia with CSIRO researchers, teachers and school students, to help research the problem of marine debris around Australia. The data was collected to complement surveys by CSIRO scientists around Australia’s coastline, which back then had been conducted at 100 kilometre intervals from north of Cairns and across the south coast to Perth.
The limited edition LEGO® Investigators made their way around Australia. Twelve were posted off to Marine Discovery Centres Australia to use as giveaways during National Science Week and beyond. In Victoria the Marine and Freshwater Discovery Centre at Queenscliff, ran a drawing competition and the winner was 6 year old Oliver Hall.
At the Sembawang Shipyard in Singapore, the HSE Department ran an evacuation drill at the Investigator Erection Area and it was considered a success. It only took five minutes to evacuate the ship, and the fire engines, ambulance and rescue vehicles all arrived in time to find everyone present and accounted for.
Later in the month, CSIRO scientists headed to the Ombai Strait and Timor Passage to collect data vital to understanding how an ocean current in the region affects Australia’s climate and weather onboard Southern Surveyor. Leading the research team was oceanographer Dr Bernadette Sloyan who is a specialist in ocean circulation with CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Flagship.
And, Investigator was coming along very nicely!
What a year it was! August 2012
Posted: January 1, 2013 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project Leave a commentIn August, we caught up with our very own Dr Lindsay Pender who was in Norway inspecting all the scientific winches to be installed on Investigator. Lindsay had a reely good time!
At the Sembawang shipyard in Singapore, work started on so many new areas of RV Investigator. We saw the mock-ups for the bathrooms, the first blocks to have the blue and green design and work on the superstructure began.
Researchers from the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania headed into the Indian Ocean to try to understand more about how currents affect Australia’s climate and coastal waters. IMAS Oceanographer Dr Helen Phillips led the team on board Australia’s Marine National Facility research vessel Southern Surveyor. Collaboration between the UTAS researchers and scientists at the United States’ governmental marine research organisation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also saw a long-term mooring and 20 ocean surface drifters deployed, as part of a global array of moored instruments, designed to monitor the role of the oceans’ influence on climate.
Full application for use of Investigator during the period July 2014 to June 2015 closed on 24 August 2012. Further details on applying for use of Investigator and application forms were made available through the MNF website http://www.marine.csiro.au/nationalfacility/Investigator/index.htm.
And, we announced that Australia’s Marine National Facility research vessel Southern Surveyor would be heading to the tropical north on two marine research voyages in September and October and then the ship’s doors would be thrown open for free public tours in Darwin.
What a year it’s been! July 2012
Posted: December 31, 2012 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project Leave a commentIn July, the Marine National Facility and the Future Research Vessel Project teams were at the AMSA-NZMSS Conference in Hobart to tell delegates about the amazing research capabilities of RV Investigator.
The call for applications to use Investigator in 2014-15 went out. A brief pre-proposal needed to be submitted by 27 July 2012 and full applications submitted by 24 August 2012. Further details on applying for use of Investigator and application forms were made available through the MNF website www.marine.csiro.au/nationalfacility/Investigator/index.htm.
Australia’s Marine National Facility research vessel, Southern Surveyor, returned to the Southern Ocean for a pilot project to measure the air-sea exchange of heat, moisture, carbon dioxide and oxygen in the sub-Antarctic ocean, and at the same time to test the continuing ability of moored instruments to withstand the roughest ocean conditions anywhere. Southern Surveyor deployed three moored measuring systems to be anchored at a depth of nearly five kilometres, 580km south-west of Tasmania.
Investigator’s propulsion motor was built, tested, approved and shipped from Spain to Singapore. Here are some of the team members who made this possible, standing next to the motor.
We held the monthly safety incentive awards ceremony at the shipyard and celebrated the ongoing effort everyone’s putting into make it a safe place to work. To date we were maintaining zero Lost Time Injuries (LTI), which meant no lost time due to an accident or injury. At the time, when you add up all the hours everyone’s put in, that was over 450,000 man hours!
CSIRO’s Dr Melita Keywood and Dr Sarah Lawson told us all about the new and exciting atmospheric research possibilities on Investigator: RV Investigator will have a two dedicated laboratories for atmospheric research:
- Aerosol laboratory located at the bow of the ship
- Air chemistry laboratory adjacent to the foredeck
Air will be drawn into the laboratories via an aerosol sampling mast (part of foremast) with an inlet located 24 m above the sea surface, which point into the direction of the wind. Various instruments will be mounted on the foremast for the measurement of sea-air fluxes and a weather radar will compliment the range of detailed meteorological observations that will be routinely made. Sites for two containers on the foredeck will supply laboratory space for intensive measurement campaigns. Atmospheric research on board the RV Investigator will take the form of ‘routine’ climate tracking observations and mission driven campaign experiments.
And, we saw the latest photos from the shipyard.
What a year it’s been! June 2012
Posted: December 26, 2012 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project Leave a commentIn June, we announced a competition to win a LEGO® Investigator, to celebrate World Oceans Day. All you needed to do, was to subscribe to this blog by midnight Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on 8 June 2012. Our winner was Natalie Strickland.
Professor Richard Arculus from the Research School of Earth Sciences, part of the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, led a research team of geologists on a three-week research voyage over May to June onboard Southern Surveyor.
What Professor Arculus and his team found was that the region to the north of Fiji is one that joins the colliding Pacific and Australian plates. These plates are respectively being driven beneath each other, the Pacific beneath Australia along the Tonga Trench, and Australia beneath the Pacific along the New Hebrides Trench. In between the ends of the trenches is a zone of faults and ridges where huge amounts of magma have erupted on the ocean floor, forming lots of underwater volcanoes and mineral-laden hot spring deposits.
On the transit voyage from Fiji to Hobart, a PhD student from The University of Western Australia, Julia Reisser, undertook research to create the first map to show the distribution of floating marine plastics in Australian waters, and models that chart the likely pathways of these plastics and sea turtle hatchlings.
In Singapore we took delivery of a very large package all under wraps. A big, beautiful…
And, we released the first instalment of time lapse footage of the construction of RV Investigator, which was filmed at the time of the Keel Laying Ceremony in May.
