All the equipment will be used for both long and ultra-short baseline subsea positioning operations.

The systems are scheduled for delivery to Gibraltar at the end of this month when mobilisation of the Allseas fleet will begin. The ships involved include its newbuild Audacia, the deepwater pipelay vessel Lorelay, and the pipeline survey vessel, Highland Fortress. They will join Solitaire, the world’s largest pipelay vessel which was equipped with a Fusion Wideband USBL system earlier this year.

Separately, Sonardyne reports that a variant of its Compatt 5 transponder has been successfully used as part of a tsunami early warning detection system deployed in the Bay of Bengal. Shortly before midnight on 25 July, it detected changes in water pressure generated by an earthquake registering 6.2 on the Richter Scale.

The tremor occurred some 24 miles underground near the Nicobar Islands between the Malaysian Peninsula and Sri Lanka. Deployed in 3,500m of water, the seabed transponder detected the changes prior to automatically triggering an acoustic signal to a surface radio link buoy for subsequent relay to the Indian National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) in Chennai. The monitoring team there was then able to assess whether it was necessary to issue an official tsunami warning to highly populated coastal communities of India (they concluded it wasn’t).