A team of RIT engineering majors built the explorer, an underwater remote-operated vehicle, or ROV--and it has been described as one of the most ambitious student projects ever at RIT. This spring and summer, the device will be used to explore century-old shipwrecks resting on the bottom of Lake Ontario and the Atlantic Ocean--giving human explorers their first glimpses of some all-but-forgotten vessels lost to the seas.
The nine-member RIT team is led by Dan Scoville, a 2005 RIT graduate who has located and explored three "virgin" (previously undiscovered) shipwrecks in Lake Ontario in the past five years. Scoville, who personally backed the ROV project financially, now has his sights set on two undisclosed Lake Ontario shipwrecks (one is an 1800s-era schooner--the names and precise locations of the vessels won't be revealed until this fall) and, working with the Undersea Research Center at the University of Connecticut, the steamship Portland, which sank off the coast of Gloucester, Mass, in 1898.
Some of the fewer than a thousand ships lost in Lake Ontario have been discovered and salvaged, while others are in water too deep to explore, Scoville says. That leaves a small number--perhaps a dozen--in the 100-to-400-foot-depth range in the area from the Niagara River to Oswego accessible to explorers such as Scoville. But they're not easily found, Scoville says. Even after they're located, they can't be salvaged because those between the shores of New York and the international line are considered state property.
"We do it because we love doing it," says Scoville, an electrical engineer with Hydroacoustics Inc. and a scuba d
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Contact: Michael Saffran
mjsuns@rit.edu
585-475-5697
Rochester Institute of Technology
19-May-2006