Underwater Site News

The wreck of a World War Two German U-boat and a freighter that sank 72 years ago have been discovered off the North Carolina coast by U.S. researchers, officials said. The submarine, the U-576, and the Nicaraguan-flagged freighter Bluefields were found about 30 miles (48 km) off Cape Hatteras in an area known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic for its number of wrecks, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said on Tuesday. The discovery underscores how close the battle for the Atlantic Ocean came to U.S. shores and is a rare view into the underwater battlefield landscape of World War Two, researchers said. "These two ships rest only a few hundred yards apart and together help us interpret and share their forgotten stories…

Statoil shut oil production at its Snorre B platform in the North Sea and evacuated a quarter of the personnel there after detecting a soil shift under a drilling template and then oil leak, the company said on Monday. The Snorre field in the northern part of the North Sea is Norway's fourth-biggest oil producer with output averaging 88,000 barrels of oil per day in 2013, data from Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) showed. The field has two production platforms but Statoil declined to provide a breakdown between Snorre B and Snorre A, which is operating normally.

The Duke University Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness (CGGC) recently completed a study on ocean technologies, including remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), for a consortium led by Nova Scotia’s Department of Economic and Rural Development and Tourism (ERDT). Excerpts from the report on the market and technology trends in ROVs and AUVs are provided in this article. Global ROV vehicle sales in 2010 totaled approximately $850 million.

The security of many countries is being threatened from sources within and outside of their borders. For the lawman, having the right tools in his crime fighting arsenal is often critical to an operation's success. Today, a new set of high tech tools help law enforcement agents perform underwater searches safer, and more effectively, than ever before. In their investigative operations police routinely search for weapons used in the commission of crimes, hunt for drowning victims, and survey underwater structures looking for smuggled goods or explosives. For the police diver, one of his most effective weapons is the underwater metal detector. Used in evidence recovery operations, these detectors have been directly responsible for putting many criminals behind bars.