EU-SITAR Project

 

SITAR stands for “Seafloor Imaging and Toxicity: Assessment of Risks caused by buried waste”.

 

SITAR's goal is to investigate and develop innovative solutions to the technological and scientific problems that up to now have prevented the assessment of the environmental risk connected with toxic dumpsites in the seafloor, where a significant part of the toxic waste is buried within the bottom sediments. Currently, the major obstacle to risk evaluation at a given dumpsite is due to the fact that state-of-the-art technology has been proven ineffective at determining extension and location of buried dumped containers, and potential or already present toxic effects due to bioaccumulation and prolonged exposure to contaminants. Lack of a reliable mapping of a given dumpsite, and failure in assessing in situ bioaccumulated toxicity, may ultimately lead to erroneous decisions in monitoring and management of the dumpsite, with severe environmental and economic consequences for the marine life and human related activities.

 

The University of Bath’s Acoustics group is heavily involved in this project. The research team includes:

Dr. Philippe BLONDEL

Task Leader

Dr. Nick G. PACE

Dr. Peter F. DOBBINS

Model-based imaging and acoustic 3-D reconstruction + sea trials data processing

Dr. Nic JAYASUNDERE

Scaled tank experiments + sea trials data processing

Mr. Mario COSCI

Engineering student from the University of Pisa, on placement at Bath

The official SITAR logo,

designed by Dr. Peter DOBBINS (Bath)

More about our research (and our results) will be coming soon

 

 

as soon as the main SITAR web page comes on line J

 

 

 

Our team’s work has already yielded several international publications.

 

SITAR aims at:

-        developing acoustic methods and instrumentation for imaging of waste barrels/containers of small dimension buried in unconsolidated sea sediments; the objective will be pursued by following two main research lines. The first is investigation and test of a conceptually innovative sonar system based on the principle of the bottom-penetrating parametric sonar, but with the imaging capabilities of the traditional side-scan sonar. The second research line will focus on the study and experimental verification of "Multiple Aspect" acoustic sub-bottom scattering measurement techniques, and related automatic data processing strategies.

-        developing biological testing methods to determine the relative in-situ bioaccumulated toxicity at a contaminated site; the objective will be pursued by investigation and test in the field of the technique of nanoinjection into fertilised fish eggs of extracts of seafloor sediment collected in situ at a dumpsite. Observation of the percentage of abnormally reproduced fish will give a relative indication of bioaccumulated toxicity.

-         integrating and making accessible the acoustical imaging data and the biotoxicological information to end-users and decision makers; to achieve this objective, a GIS-integrated data presentation system (Geographical Information System) will be developed. The system will allow for user assessment of the dumpsite state in terms of distribution of containers and toxicity indicators. Verification of the system will be conducted through end-users evaluation.

 

 

This multi-national project (contract # EVK3-CT-2001-00047) is conducted under the 5th Framework Programme of the European Union.

It belongs to the Specific Programme: Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development, and the Sub-programme: Environment and Sustainable Development, Key action 3: “Sustainable Marine Ecosystems", item 3.2 (Reducing the anthropogenic impact on biodiversity and the sustainable functioning of marine ecosystems, and facilitating the development of safe, economic and sustainable exploitation technologies) and item 3.2.3 (Technologies for safe, sustainable and economic exploration and exploitation of marine resources).