Building and testing a new ROV-based vibrocorer for precisely located coring and coring of sandy substrate in water depths of up to 6000 metres

我们对海底的看法目前强烈偏向于泥泞地区，仅仅是因为我们不能有效地对沙地进行采样。振动钻探是对海底富含沙子的部分进行取芯的唯一有效方法。这将是世界上唯一一台可以在4000米以上水深作业的可控震源，也是唯一一台可用于全球科学项目、作业深度超过2000米的可控震源。这将是对海底大片区域进行采样的唯一有效工具。基于水下机器人的可控震源还可以在水深达6,000米的大范围内采集非常精确定位的样品(砂子或泥浆)。这种获取精确定位岩心的能力(由于在ROV潜水期间使用其他技术绘制海底地图，其背景被很好地理解)也将使广泛的海洋科学成为可能。加州蒙特利湾水族馆研究所提供了基于ROV的可控震源的设计。这大大节省了成本。MBARI之前已经建造了三个基于ROV的可控震源，已经在加利福尼亚州近海的蒙特利峡谷及其周围采集了数百个岩芯。因此，这种基于ROV的振动钻采技术风险很低，因为它已经由MBARI进行了尝试和测试。

Our view of the sea floor is at present strongly biased towards muddy areas simply because we cannot sample sandy areas effectively. Vibrocoring is the only effective way of coring sand-rich parts of the ocean floor. This would be the only vibrocorer worldwide that can operate in water depths greater than 4,000 meters, and the only vibrocorer available for scientific projects worldwide that operates deeper than 2,000 meters. It would provide the only effective tool for sampling large areas of the ocean floor. The ROV-based vibrocorer can also take very precisely located samples (of sand or mud) in a wide range of water depths down to 6,000 m. This ability to take precisely located cores (whose context was well understood due to sea floor mapping using other technology during the ROV dive) would also enable a wide range of marine science. The design for the ROV-based vibrocorer has been provided by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. This has resulted in a substantial cost saving. MBARI have previously built three ROV-based vibrocorers that have taken many hundreds of cores in and around the Monterey Canyon offshore California. This ROV based vibrocoring technology is therefore low risk because it has been already tried and tested by MBARI.