Ghost Wrecks and Side Scan Sonar

[mad4wrecks]

Here is an exerpt from a previous posting from Wreckdiver about a possible WWII sub found off of Alaska. Some good information for all of us to remember:



Several false 'eureka!' moments

Sonar images can deceive even those who interpret them for a living. Elongated boulders look like submarines; outcrops resemble ship's prows.

"It's a rocky seascape," said Art Wright, survey manager for Williamson. "We went over the areas several times to differentiate between rock and ship and look at things from three to four different aspects."

They looked first for the Japanese destroyer Arare, sunk by the U.S. submarine Growler, to test the sonar and see what a known wreck would look like against the seafloor. The sonar captured shapes that appeared to be two halves of the Arare, Wright said.

There were several false "eureka" moments, Lowney said.

"We put down the sonar and I thought I saw two destroyers and got excited," he said ruefully. "After that point, I stopped jumping to conclusions."


Tom

 

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[ScubaFinder]

I hear you there Tom, and yeah, we should all remember that. When i did my SSS training, Cal told us "we are going to go right by some really cool stuff, what I want to see is that you don't miss anything, and that you know WHERE it is on the bottom from the SSS data. We dove on a "houseboat" as we identified it, that turned out to be an old hot tub. Then we jump in to see the amazing cannon, which was just a strange depression in the mud. Finally, we jumped in to explore the old deteriorating wreck that was an algae bed.

THEN he laughed at us, and towed us over a REAL aircraft...then we laughed at ourselves. My eyes can still see lots of things in those scans...but I was on the bottom too, and I know there was actually nothing there.

Good post.