Dive Survey
SAMS currently hosts the UK National Facility for Scientific Diving (NFSD), which provides a dive team for scientific dive training and commercial services.
The dive team is currently based on ten active scientific divers who conduct over 650 diving operations a year in numerous environments and countries around the world. The SAMS diving support boat, Tritonia, is a 9.5m rigid-hulled inflatable boat.
SAMS
dive surveys offered include underwater photography or static
underwater video to quantify biological communities or single species
over defined areas. Specimen collection or in-situ measurements can be
taken by employing advanced and novel specimen collection techniques. We
also provide manual benthic coring for the purposes of pollutant or
species analysis back in the laboratory.
Our
dive team can also take coral cores whilst diving. Coral reefs are
ideal sources for proxy studies of the long-term climatic record. The
length of the core is correlated to the time record and analysis of
changes within the core can determine indirectly the climatic conditions
at that point
SAMS
divers can be contracted to deploy, maintain and/or retrieve
equipment/structures underwater. By attaching the equipment to permanent
or long-term moorings using divers means that the whole mooring does
not have to be lifted each time. If a large surface vessel is required
for this lifting process, then it can be expensive. Continual deployment
and recovery of moorings can impact the sea floor in vulnerable areas.
