Exploration ships are like survey ships in terms of design, complement, characteristics, and capabilities, but with a subtle difference: exploration vessels are often required to venture into more challenging, harsh, remote, and uncharted environments.
As the name itself suggests, ‘explore’ essentially attributes to the capability of the vessel to travel to different locations, including those never discovered before, and carry out research and study work for a host of purposes in the field of ocean and earth sciences and technology.
This includes all those ambits of deep-sea explorations discussed in our previous article on survey ships like hydrography, geophysics, geology, multi-physics, hydrodynamics, marine biology, oceanography, coastal and offshore engineering, environmental sciences, and so on.
Exploration vessels are mostly equipped to assimilate data related to various ocean parameters and use it for research.
In other words, exploration vessels have two functions: discovering locations of interest and conducting observation, study, and research work for various applications.
Thus, for all practical purposes, exploration ships can be considered a special kind of survey vessel (and a subclass of the broad category of research vessels, of course) that are used in more challenging environments and suited for more complex operations.
For example, if there are theories about a location where it is highly feasible to discover oil and natural reserves, an exploration vessel may be sent to initially reconnaissance the area and report on the validation of that theory.
If the vess…
CONTINUE READING THE ARTICLE FROM MarineInsight HERE
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.