A suggestion to the roboticists, who MUST have thought of this but for some reason ...? Mount four cheapo little lasers that are set up to sweep out parallel lines, two vertical, two horizontal, that define a rectangular prism with a square cross section one foot on a side. Or a meter, whatever ... something that will give an observer or researcher an approximate scale, it could strobe once a second or be steady-state on or off, but it would be useful (IF the beams are parallel!) to the limits of vision (human or robotic).
I'm struck by the condition of a 1952 Air Force C-124 crash in Alaska, the wreckage of which was essentially chewed up for 60 years by a glacier rather than 75 years by a crushing surf, but the results are about the same. Google "Colony Glacier C-124 recovery" and you'll find it, I don't know if I can post URLs here. This is a new aircraft recovery, the wreck was spotted in June. Photos of the debris field are astonishing for the reduction of material to incomprehensibly tiny bits, and just look at the Norwich City in Bevington's photo as compared to today. The NC wasn't made to be aground, but neither was it built to fly.
I second the call for the .avi or .wmv or .mov or .mp3 of the 'debris field' pass, whenever you can find time! I was thinking that it might be possible, if the camera is at an angle rather than shooting nose-on (it'd have to be, right?) that running two windows side by side but a couple of frames offset from start would make a sort-of poor-man's 3D. Two videos running in color could be viewed by the "cross-eyed" or "wall-eyed" binocular separation method, or running one in red-only and the other in blue-only and compositing them to make a red-blue anaglyph that wants funny little cardboard glasses. (The binocular separation is definitely a better choice for this type of viewing: the eye and brain compensate for some of the mismatched motion merging if you're deliberately and independently moving the eyes out of normal position, whereas mismatching two videos into a single red-blue screen is conducive to nausea, headaches, and a fear and loathing of funny little cardboard glasses.)
Another thing I'd like to see is your underwater Digital Elevation data ... I'd be interested in seeing (or building) a 3D model of as much of the island as you have data for, particularly the reef and the Norwich City debris fan (which would help determine currents, storm surges, etc). I wonder what a series of little (tennis ball or soda can sized) sondes, set to sink at different rates of speed to simulate aircraft wreckage of different buoyancies, would tell us about the currents around Niku at that time of year, once a year? Would the Republic of Kiribati possibly find such data useful, particularly in light of rising sea levels? It would be interesting to see if there's some little 'sargasso sea' nestled in the lee of Niku's little apostrophe that captures and collects flotsam and jetsam. There might be more than one. These would be places of interest, sort of like the LaGrange libration points where space debris collects. And, having roughly an airfoil shape (with the prevailing currents sweeping over the north side of the island, west to east) I would expect an ocean gyre, corresponding to the slower, high-pressure air on the underside of an aircraft's wing, somewhere south of the atoll.
I didn't get to see the program, either, but have worked with enough TV productions to know that, come hell or high water, the show was going to go on. I thought the silence after presumably making port in Honolulu was ominous, but like you said, Ric, there were tons of material to wade through, and I hope you're really on to something extraordinary, even for TIGHAR!
So: how much do you need to pay the bills and launch Niku VIII? -- Bill Warren, #3480