Shoo Re/Cappers, our lead story ain’t got time for humans; it’s all about uncrewed sea floor mapping!
But if we see further because we stood on the shoulders of giants, then for sea floor mapping, few were as consequential as Marie Tharp.
Her work remains staggering, both for its scientific contributions and the challenges endemic to male-dominated fields. Born in 1920, Tharp was drawn to mapping through her father’s work as a soil surveyor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After earning degrees in English, music, geology, and mathematics, the polymath joined Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory in 1948, where she began her storied collaboration with Bruce Heezen.
Barred from ocean expeditions due to her gender, Tharp worked on land to analyze data collected by Heezen and his lads. Via physiographic mapping techniques, she meticulously plotted thousands of sonar readings onto charts, profiling the ocean floor’s topography. She integrated data from sources like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and seismic readings from underwater earthquakes to ensure accuracy.
In the early 1950s, Tharp made a pivotal discovery: a continuous rift valley running along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This provided crucial evidence for the theory of continental drift, which was largely dismissed at the time. Initially, even Heezen rejected her findings as “girl talk,” but the evidence eventually became irrefutable. Together, Tharp and Heezen published their first physiographic map of the North Atlantic Ocean in 1957. Over three decades, they would map the entire ocean floor, culminating in the publication of The World Ocean Floor map in 1977.
With help from the General Bathymetric Chart of the World, Tharp’s maps revealed a 40,000-mile underwater ridge girdling the globe and demonstrated that seafloor spreading from central ridges drives continental movement - a foundational concept for plate tectonic theory. Weeks later, however, Tharp’s cherished ally Heezen died of a heart attack while exploring the mid-ocean ridge, near Iceland.
And the sun had set on Marie’s illustrious career. She retired.
Despite her achievements, Tharp faced a barrage of barriers throughout her career. She was often excluded from recognition during her collaboration with Heezen; her name did not even appear on numerous papers. However, her legacy has since been celebrated. In the final decade of her life, Tharp was honored with prestigious awards from renowned institutions, including Lamont (now the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) and the Library of Congress, which recognized her as one of the four greatest cartographers of the 20th century.
Marie Tharp laid the groundwork for every modern effort to map the floors of our planet’s last frontier. Just as her hand-drawn maps revealed Earth’s unseen landscape, today’s autonomous vessels are mapping vast underwater territories with stupefying speed and accuracy, as we’ll cover shortly. In this new era of exploration, her legacy is both a touchstone and a springboard for what’s to come.
So thanks Marie, for mapping what’s under us, and ahead of us.
What’s Cappenin’ This Week
Shakespeare’s The Tempest told us that “Full fathom five thy father lies,” AKA some dude’s dad shipwrecked and was on the seafloor.
Phew, good thing that’s had centuries to be resolved, because now we’ve got DATA in the same place to get to. Lots of it - in the name of the Florida Seafloor Mapping Initiative. The best part? A massive team-up is collecting it, without getting wet.
Not your dad’s/Beatles/normal yellow submarine - it’s Chance Maritime’s MC29! Image credit Chance Maritime
The mission co-captains are 1) Woolpert, boasting their renowned LiDAR & sonar bathymetry/hydrographic survey acumen, and 2) Chance Maritime, whose uncrewed ocean drones’ power & endurance are like if a linebacker and marathoner had a kid with fins.
It comes at the request of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, seeking coastal resilience, and hurricane/flood inundation mitigation. Set sail on Woolpert’s press release below, highlighting Chance’s Mission Capable 29 survey vessel, unique round-the-clock staffing requirements, hydrography teams, extreme weather, and what can be achieved as a result of this humanless trek.
Like Marky Wahlberg says in The Depahted, “Maybe. Maybe not.” The next line, well, IYKYK.
But RDO Equipment’s Dennis Howard sure thinks so, based on his decades in construction equipment, wide net of contractor contacts, and recent contribution to For Construction Pros.
It rejects the common but slightly fictitious pursuit of one total, instant, jobsite tech solution, for something that resembles great barbecue - low and slow, deliberate strategizing. Or at least, doing so in stages. Three to be precise. Through a lens of infrastructure, agriculture and transportation, the first stage laid out by Howard is understanding - developing a true comprehension, not a feeling. He cites OEMs like John Deere that as far back as 2000, worked tirelessly to grasp telematics, fleet management software, and other jobsite tech, and what that now yields them; especially in complementing survey equipment.
Common technologies comprising fleet management systems. Image credit appinventiv
Click below for that total tech timeline, and stages 2 and 3 that explore fleet management dashboards, preventative maintenance, GPS data, grading information via LiDAR, real-time survey info for pavers, thermal profiling, and digital twins of roads for optimal compaction.
Missouri is known as the Show Me state.
It might have to rebrand as the Save Me state, on account of how innovation is protecting pedestrians, sharpening driver awareness, reducing accidents, and illuminating behavior in and around work zones.
Don’t images like this really make the notion of texting while driving frightening? Image credit Ouster
It’s from the work of engineering researchers at the University of Missouri, anchored by Associate Professor Yaw Adu-Gyamfi and graduate student Linlin Zhang. Their LiDAR & AI-based method is a new way to interpret how pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles interact, with particular focus at stoplights and work zones. It couldn’t be at a more opportune time, with self-driving cars possibly seeing a supernova of adoption.
UMizzou has got all the exciting deets below, including work with manufacturers, speed and distance measurements, cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X), green light timing, IDing pavement problems, point cloud completion, algorithm building, and a whole glove box more.
Regardless of industry, digital transformation has mostly manifested by word of mouth.
Now, it’s the word in mouth!
For decades, dentists had no choice but to opt for traditional impressions to model the oral cavity, relying on physical materials to capture teeth, soft tissue, and implants. But these methods often require retakes, causing discomfort, contamination, and added costs. Prone to deformation and inaccuracies, they struggle to deliver the precision complex implant cases demand.
Well demand, meet supply, in the form of photogrammetry.
IOS = intraoral scanning. Image credit Dentistry Today
Photogrammetry at its core is not brand new to dentistry; but IPG, or intraoral photogrammetry, is, uniting the precision of photogrammetry with the convenience of IOS - intraoral scanning.
In short, IPG allows clinicians to capture both implant positions and the surrounding tissue in a single scan without the need for separate images from two different capture devices or manual data merging.
In long, you really should bite down on Dentistry Today’s recent write-up, flossing through cone beam computed tomography (CBCT), digital workflows combined with milling machines, the particulars of full-arch implants, CAD/CAM applications, extraoral photogrammetry, and much more. Warning - vivid oral imagery.
The Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse, Kansas City, 1981. Image credit The Kansas City Star
In the space between design and execution lies a profound truth: our greatest engineering disasters are rarely failures of materials, but failures of diligence, communication, and humility. This week, we explore how a single altered detail cascaded into catastrophe.
In 1981, Kansas City’s Hyatt Regency Hotel stood as a monument to engineering and architectural prowess. Its soaring atrium, adorned with suspended walkways, promised a spectacle of design and functionality. Little did anyone know that it was about to become one of the most tragic engineering failures in American history.
7:05 PM, July 17. The hotel's atrium buzzed with the energy of 1,600 souls gathered for a lively tea dance. Some revelers, seeking a better vantage point, ascended to the suspended walkways that crisscrossed the atrium.
Suddenly, a series of ominous sounds pierced through the festivities - popping noises, followed by a loud crack. The fourth-floor walkway, bearing the weight of dozens of partygoers, trembled and then plummeted onto the second-floor walkway below. The combined mass of steel, concrete, and bodies then crashed onto the crowded lobby floor, transforming the once-elegant atrium into a scene of unimaginable horror.
At the heart of the disaster lay a fateful design change. The original plan called for a single set of rods to support both walkways, running from the ceiling through the fourth floor and down to the second. However, in a misguided attempt at assembly simplification, separate rods were used for each walkway, with the second-floor walkway suspended from the fourth. This doubled the load on the fourth-floor connections, pushing them far beyond their capacity. Additionally, the longitudinal welds of the box beams, meant to bear the weight of the walkways and their occupants, were simply not strong enough.
But the tragedy of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse goes beyond mere technical failures. It serves as a stark reminder of the consequences of assumptions, miscommunication, and abdication of responsibility. Engineers assured architects that details had been checked when they hadn't. Workers noticed irregularities but remained silent, deferring to the supposed expertise of others.
In the aftermath, the toll of this cascade of errors became painfully clear. $140 million dollars in damages, 114 lives lost, over 200 injured, and countless more forever changed.
The Hyatt Regency collapse remains a stark reminder of how critical precision is in engineering, and how technology ameliorates our human foibles - oversight, miscommunication, and sometimes, plain lethargy. That applied in 1981, and will still apply, somewhere, in 2081.
Modern reality capture technologies can mitigate, or even prevent, such catastrophic downfalls through keen insight into structural integrity.
That last-minute change to the suspension rod design? Made during fabrication, it bypassed a full structural analysis. With BIM and digital twin technology, engineers could have simulated the effect of the design change before approval. Load distribution modeling would have exposed the fatal flaw, demonstrating that the lower walkway’s connections were never meant to carry such a burden. Immaculate 3D models born of photogrammetry or laser scanning could have evaluated the box beams, detected deviations from the original design, and flagged the critical difference in suspension rod placement.
Outside what was once the Hyatt Regency, a memorial stands - a bronze sculpture evoking a couple dancing, frozen in time, forever unaware of what was coming. It is a reminder of the lives that should have never been lost, of a night that should have only been filled with music, and of a tragedy that should have never been written into history. And given today’s AEC innovations, the question is no longer whether we can catch mistakes just like it before they become catastrophes - the question is whether we will choose to.
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