Submerged city’s mysteries revealed
A SYDNEY University student has unlocked the secrets of a 5000-year-old submerged city off the coast of Greece.
A SYDNEY University student has unlocked the secrets of a 5000-year-old submerged city off the coast of Greece.
Ari Friedman (pictured) and his colleagues from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, mapped the ancient city of Pavlopetri using an underwater driver rig, operated by Friedman, and an autonomous underwater vehicle to create a photo-realistic, three-dimensional image of the 50,000 square-metre site.
As a result, Friedman and his supervisors won the CiSRA Extreme Imaging competition and will share $10,000 in prizes.
“I feel very privileged as a PhD student to have had the opportunity to work on such exciting, cutting-edge stuff,” he said.
“Seeing the reactions of the archaeologists when we showed them the results was pretty exciting, because they have never been able to get data like this before.
“It is essentially like removing all the water from the site and then being able to zoom in to view individual shards of pottery, or zoom out to see an overview of the entire site – something that they have never before been able to do for an underwater site in such high detail, over such a large scale.”
AJN STAFF
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