Testing an ROV

How do you test an ROV? In the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary's training and #dive tank! With 600,000 gallons of water, it's handy for training everyone from marine archaeologists to ROV pilots. #EarthIsBlue

Transcript

Tane Casserley here at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary and we're standing on the deck Thunder Bay training and dive tank.

This facility is wonderful because we can bring in other sanctuary sites. We can bring and other NOAA partners. We can teach them how to do archaeology in a controlled environment If they need to learn how to use ROVs we can do that here.

Here's the inside of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary dive locker. This is where we keep all the gear. This is all the good stuff. You can see here we have all our BCDs.

Our bouncy compensator devices all our dry suits. We do we're dry suits here at Thunder Bay the water can be quite cold range anywhere between the mid 30s to the low 70s. We also use gear in Thunder Bay such as rebreathers we have to dive deeper to see some these pristine wrecks.

Here's a really good example of that. This is called the megalodon closed circuit rebreather. But sometimes you know we use regular open circuit dive gear.

We have two compressors here we have an air compressor and nitrox compressor that can blend 22% to 40% nitrox. Air is 21% oxygen and the rest is nitrogen and what this machine does here this compressors actually adds more oxygen to the air so you could take up to 22% to 40% and its a safety benefit and sort of a health benefit as well.

This is a wonderful resource that use here for our NOAA divers and for our partners. This is probably one of the only training and testing tanks in the great lakes. Just the sheer size that were lucky enough to be on the location of former paper plant so this is all ready part of that industrial infrastructure.

We were lucky that it will be used we could fill it up use it for our purposes. Again 80 FT across 18 FT deep and 600,000 gallons. A controlled environment for outreach, education, test equipment and search and rescue training.