Seabed sediments of commercial ports are often characterized by high pollution levels. Differences in number and distribution of bacteria in such areas can be related to distribution of pollutants in the port and to sediment conditions. In this study, the bacterial communities of five sites from Leghorn Harbor seabed were characterized, and the main bacterial groups were identified. T-RFLP was ...

Analysis and interpretation of monitoring data for the seabed bathymetry local to offshore windfarm foundations has shown how the scour develops in time and highlighted variations between sites with different seabed sediment characteristics, i.e. sands and clays. Results from European offshore windfarms have generated a unique dataset for comparison with previously published data. Where surfici...

Recently, a technique has been developed to image seabed layers using the ocean ambient noise field as the sound source. This so called passive fathometer technique exploits the naturally occurring acoustic sounds generated on the sea-surface, primarily from breaking waves. The method is based on the cross-correlation of noise from the ocean surface with its echo from the seabed, which recovers...

In ratifJingthe United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1994, Australia took responsibility tor a marine jurisdiction that is more than 1.5 times the area of the landmass. While ownership of offshore resources provided under UNCLOS hestows certain rights (including exploitation), it also carries a range of obligations, including the protection and preservation of the marine environme...

The multibeam echo sounders (MBES) can acquire accurate positional but low-resolution seabed terrain and images, whereas side scan sonars (SSS) can only acquire inaccurate positional but high-resolution seabed images. In this study, a new method for superimposing corrected-positional SSS images on multibeam bathymetric terrain is proposed to obtain high-resolution and accurate-positional seabed...

Measurements of the transmission of seismic survey signals in Australian waters are presented. The measured transmission loss showed: high variability of received signal sound exposure level at similar ranges when comparing all surveys (mean of standard deviation across ranges of 3-12 dB); high variability within a seismic survey (mean of standard deviation at any range of 2-4 dB); typical shot...

Wind, wave and current interactions control the boundary fluxes, momentum and energy exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean, and within the water column. The wind wave effect on the circulation is investigated in a threedimensional time-dependant ocean circulation model. This POM (Princeton Ocean Model) based model is implemented with realistic coastlines in South China Sea and emphasize...

a procedure is presented that synthesizes fractional crystallization separation processes to obtain pure solids from multi-component solutions. the method includes a procedure to generate a network flow model to identify alternative process designs for fractional crystallization. the main advantage of this systematic procedure with respect to other reported procedures is using non-equilibrium s...

Recently, a method has been developed that exploits the correlation properties of the ocean's ambient noise to measure water depth (a passive fathometer) and seabed layering [M. Siderius et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 120, 1315-1323 (2006)]. This processing is based on the cross-correlation between the surface noise and the echo return from the seabed. To quantitatively study the dependency betwee...

This work concerns modeling of very high frequency (>100 kHz) sonar images obtained from a sandy seabed. The seabed is divided into a discrete number of ID height profiles. For each height profile the backscattered pressure is computed by an integral equation method for interface scattering between two homogeneous media as formulated by Chan [IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. 46, 142-149 (1998)]. Ho...