Written by Sean Beckwith, PhD student
GULF OF MEXICO 鈥� Ninety miles west of Tampa Bay, the crew and scientists aboard the watched a monitor relaying images of seafloor height captured by the multibeam sonar instrument.
Matt Hommeyer, who was operating the multibeam at the time, immediately recognized a suspicious vertical blip on the outer beams 鈥� something he suspected to be a shipwreck. His hunch turned out to be right.
Hommeyer, who is a Research Engineer at the 黑料网吃瓜爆料College of Marine Science (USFCMS) and a member of the (C-SCAMP), has enough experience with multibeam mapping to take notice when a feature of the seafloor looks to be more than naturally occurring habitat.
Fellow multibeam scientist on the cruise, , explained, 鈥淚t was the first uncharted wreck we encountered that day during regular, 鈥榤owing the lawn鈥� type survey operations.鈥� To build an accurate 3-D image of the seafloor, the multibeam swath on each pass back and forth across an area must overlap 鈥� much like mowing a lawn.
The team would go on to find two more wrecks that day in a 28 square mile patch of seafloor, bringing the total to three and surprising everyone onboard. To give an idea of how rare it is to find undocumented wrecks, the three found on this single day of mapping in early April brought the total for the life of the project to four. Four newly documented wrecks to add to the public record of dozens of wrecks off Tampa Bay.
To build detailed images of the suspected wrecks, Hommeyer and Brizzolara returned to the location of each wreck, performing multiple passes from several angles to avoid any gaps in data caused by 鈥渟hadows鈥� from the overlying features.
The first undocumented wreck that the C-SCAMP team encountered was mapped in July 2017 aboard the R/V Bellows. While working west of the Florida Middle Grounds, the group came across a struc