As many of you are probably aware, the Canadian government is funding an expedition to find John Franklin's lost ships, the
Terror and
Erebus. It's mostly about domestic politics, trying to prove that little 'ol Canada can actually send our lone icebreaker to the North and mount expeditions, I'm posting this for two reasons:
1 - They are using an AUV to do much of the exploring, in fact the approach seems very similar to Niku VII. The main difference is the search area is much wider, there is ice that may have ground the evidence to a pulp instead of currents and a reef and it's funded by the government (my tax $$ at work) so they basically have an unlimited budget.
2 - The obvious historical reasons. We know Franklin and his men died and roughly where, but we don't know exactly HOW. There are many, many parallels to the Earhart mystery here. They have found a lot of artifacts on prior occasions, including skeletons of the crew members.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/features/franklin/ - Main CBC News page about the expedition.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/franklin/story/2012/08/22/franklin-arctic-search.html - Article about the AUV being used. It looks VERY similar to the one used in Niku VII. I'm going to be interested to see how well it performs with the icebergs and on an un-mapped ocean floor given the difficulties in Niku VII.
If nothing else, following this expedition gives us something to do while we wait for more information to be developed from the Niku VII information.
Nathan.