Exploration of Wake Island's Deep Sea

As with most aspects of ocean exploration, the first step in searching for maritime heritage sites is mapping. For the areas around Wake Atoll involved in the Battle of Wake, we've used the Norbit WBMS multibeam sonar. The Norbit is a 400-kilohertz (kHz) compact, lightweight multibeam sonar that is depth-rated to 4500 m for mapping subsea data from a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) platform. By "mowing the lawn" back and forth with this sonar, the team can create very high-resolution terrain maps and potentially identify exploration features of interest for up-close ROV exploration that may not have been resolved on a lower-resolution map.

Spotted! E/V Nautilus off Wake Atoll as it explores a variety of mapping targets in search of maritime heritage sites from the Battle of Wake. Thanks to the air traffic control team on Wake for the unique perspective!