Robotic underwater vehicles to help Canada map Arctic seabed

The Canadian government will move ahead with plans to use autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to help map the eastern Arctic seabed, research officials say.

The robotic vehicles will be used starting in the spring of 2010 for mapping research that could extend Canada's sovereignty in the Arctic, said Jacob Verhoef, director of Canada's mapping efforts for Natural Resources Canada.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Canada, the United States, Denmark and other northern nations are trying to claim sovereign rights to vast — and potentially resource-rich — areas of the Arctic Ocean.

To do so, they must prove that their continental shelves extend beyond their existing 200-nautical-mile economic zones. Canada, which signed the UN convention in 2003, has until 2013 to submit its claim.

In an e-mail exchange with CBC News, Verhoef said the autonomous underwater vehicles will likely be used to map the outer limits of the Lomonosov and Alpha ridges, two large underwater mountain chains in the eastern Arctic that are key to Canada's claim.

The AUVs would conduct bathymetric work — the study of underwater depth — under the ice in those areas, he added.

Unpredictable ice and weather conditions make it risky for researchers to set up large ice camps and send helicopters to those areas, Verhoef said, and using AUVs would help reduce the risks.

Verhoef said it would take until September 2009 to have the vehicles built. Before that, researchers plan to conduct a practice run off Ellesmere Island in March 2009 with an existing, comparable AUV.

Autonomous underwater vehicles are capable of completing a variety of programmed tasks, mainly having to do with underwater mapping and imaging, without the constant aid of human operators.

The federal government first announced its plans earlier this year to use the underwater vehicles in its Arctic mapping efforts.