Mine Burial Experiments at the Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory
Abstract
Several experiments to measure the burial of seafloor mines by scour and fill have been conducted at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory (MVCO). Two sets of mine scour burial experiments were conducted during the winters of 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 with a single optically instrumented mine in the field of view of a rotary sidescan sonar. Sixteen mines were deployed from October 2003 to April of 2004, along with several systems to image mine behavior and to characterize bedform and oceanographic processes. The sedimentary environment at MVCO consists of a series of rippled scour depressions, which are large-scale bedforms with alternating areas of coarse and fine sand. In fine sand the sonar imagery of the mines reveal that large scour pits form around the mines during energetic wave events. The mines fall into their own scour pits, aligning with the dominant wave crests and become level with the ambient seafloor after one or two wave events. Infilling of the scour pits appears to be a slower and more variable process and often takes several months before the scour pits infill. The coarse sand supports large wave orbital ripples with wavelengths of 50 cm to 150 cm and heights of 10 cm to 20 cm. In the coarse sand the mines were observed to bury until the exposed cross-section was approximately the same size as the large wave orbital ripples. (5 figures, 5 refs.)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 03, 2004
- Accession Number
- ADA425833
Entities
People
- John A. Goff
- Larry Mayer
- Michael D. Richardson
- Peter Traykovski
- Roy Wilkens
Organizations
- United States Naval Research Laboratory