ROVs are remote controlled vehicles used for underwater exploration and resource extraction. They were first developed in the 1960s and are connected to a surface vessel via an umbilical cable. ROVs can explore hostile environments and have led to the discovery of new species and ecosystems. They have also been instrumental in the discovery of billions of dollars of oil reserves on the ocean floor. ROVs can also be used for laying submarine cables.
ROVs, or remote controlled vehicles, are robots that go where humans can’t. Space probes can be considered remotely operated vehicles, although the term usually refers to the ocean-based wired versions: remotely operated underwater vehicles. These are used for all sorts of useful purposes, such as searching for underwater oil fields or observing the underbelly of the Antarctic ice shelf. ROVs are important to the future of humanity, as they will be used to locate deep underwater resource deposits to meet our future needs. For example, the ocean floor contains huge amounts of methane clathrate, a clean-burning fuel, and numerous nodules of manganese, which can be used to create important alloys.
ROVs were first developed with funding from the US Navy in the 1960s. The initial interest was in recovering sunken ships and other lost artifacts from the ocean floor. The world record for an underwater descent is only 318m (1,043ft), but state-of-the-art ROVs can dive as deep as 3,000m (9,842ft). This only shrinks to about half the depth of the world’s oceans, but further improvements will open up the rest. ROVs can explore environments too hostile for human divers, such as deep-sea geothermal vents and polar waters. Science missions using ROVs have discovered a number of new species and ecosystems. The bacteria and extremophile organisms they discovered were seen by some as signs that life could survive in exotic environments on other planets.
To stay in contact with the surface and receive power and instructions, ROVs are usually connected to a surface vessel via an umbilical cable. This cable contains data links, power cables and for high power applications such as trenching, plumbing. ROVs were instrumental in the advancement of oil and gas companies in the 1980s as they took their eyes off land-based deposits to see what the oceans had to offer. Since ROVs have been used, many billions of dollars of oil reserves have been discovered on the bottom of the world’s oceans. Everything that lives in the ocean eventually dies and sinks to the bottom, leaving a deep layer of organic muck that turns into useful hydrocarbons over millions of years.
ROVs can also be used to lay submarine cables, critical to our worldwide communications infrastructure. These cables often have to be buried under a few feet of earth to ensure their stability.
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