This movie was made using Vistapro software and sidescan sonar images collected using a 900Khz Marine Sonic towfish. The raw sidescan was processed using Sonarweb v. 2.79. The large symmetrical ripples seen in the video are ~35cm high with wave lengths of ~1.2m. The ripples bifurcate as they approach the sharp contact edge (dark line running down the image) between the coarse ripple hash facies on the left and the fine smooth sand facies on the right. Vertical exaggeration is approximately 4.7X. Vistapro software interprets the intensity or color of each pixel as an elevation such that the brightly imaged faces on each ripple show up as heightened features while the shadows to the lee are interpreted as depressions. Once the topography has been created then the sidescan sonargraph is draped over the landscape. A more accurate rending of the relationship between topographic features and acoustic variation would be conducted using high resolution swath bathymetry to make the landscape upon which the sidescan would be draped.
This brief rough montage of video highlights a day in the field with Don Wright and Bob Gammisch collecting samples along beaches of the Coromandel. Beaches in the video include Hot Water, Te Karoa Bay, Tairua, and Pauanui.
Some highlights of reconnaissance video taken by divers Bob Gammisch and Rick Liefting showing facies contact sites, short cores and pod site seabed features. Wayner Reisner is seen taking cores with assistance from Prof. Don Wright
This video scans some of the diver cores collected during March, 2001 offshore of Tairua across a sharp sediment facies contact.
