The Spinnaker Project

The Spinnaker Project was a joint Canadian-American project in which an array of hydrophones was placed on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean about 180 km north of Alert. A fibre-optic cable, 2 mm in diameter, was laid from a building in Alert out to the shore and then along the ocean bottom all the way out to the hydrophones. The American contribution to this project was to build and emplace the hydrophones, multiplex all the hydrophone signals onto one digital data stream and send this data, via the fibre-optic cable, back to shore. The Canadian contribution was to build and operate the underwater vehicle that laid the cable. Since I was more closely associated with the Canadian side, the attached papers and reports are mostly about the operation of the vehicle and the laying of the cable.

The array and cable were installed during the spring of 1996 after several years of planning, building and practice. The system was an immediate success, and we received data for about three months. The data-flow stopped during the summer of 1996, and we immediately started making plans for a repair mission. At the time we did not know whether the problem was with the cable (e.g., a broken cable) or with the electronics and laser that 'drove' the cable. It turned out that the cable was broken. Furthermore, the cable continued to break at different places, and we spent two frustrating field seasons ('97 and '98) trying (and failing) to get all the 'kinks' out of the system. The Newsletters of 1998 describe the efforts of that year. In the end we quit since the batteries in the underwater packages were expected to last only three years.

A description of the trials and tribulations of the three years can be found in the article, "Testing the Waters", published in GPS World, Vol 10, Number 5, May, 1999 pages 23-31. A pdf copy of this article can be found here. The copyright for this article is owned by Questex Media.

The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), which was known as Theseus, weighed 10 tonnes and was 11 m (36 ft) long. Installing and operating it through ice that was 1.8 metres thick in the cold of the High Arctic was a particular challenge. Just to get Theseus into the ocean involved the cutting out and removal of 35 tonnes of ice. A description of all the special logistics used in this project can be found in a logistics paper given at the Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering (OMAE) Conference, St. John's Newfoundland, Canada, July 11-16, 1999. The copyright for this article belongs to the Crown (Defence Research and Development Canada - Atlantic).

The first picture shows the ice that was removed from the access hole and dragged outside. For fun we arranged it into a circle and called it 'Icehenge'. The second picture shows Theseus being lowered into the slot in the ice.

Theseus was, of course, unmanned. This meant that it had no external help with its navigation. Details of how it guided itself for 180 km just above the ocean floor can be found in a navigation paper given at the Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering (OMAE) Conference, St. John's Newfoundland, Canada, July 11-16, 1999. As with the above, the copyright for this paper belongs to the Crown (DRDC - Atlantic).

Another interesting facet to the program was the protection of the cable as it passed across the shoreline. The crushing and grinding action of the ice at the shoreline makes it very hard to keep a cable intact - no matter how well you armour the cable. For this job we decided to drill a curved hole through the bedrock. The hole started well up on shore and it came up into the ocean bottom at a depth too great for the ice keels to reach. The spring field trip of 1994 was pretty-much devoted to this task. Although the job was completed successfully, it was not easy, and it took much longer than anticipated. You can read about the techniques and the difficulties here.

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GPS World Article
Logistics Paper
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