Seazone Solutions for Crossrail and Scotland

This is being used for identifying a safe and effective route for transportation of waste material arising from construction of the new 74 mile railway link for London and south east England in what is now Europe’s largest civil engineering project.

The Hampshire UK based company, which announced in November that it was backing a major campaign to establish marine protected areas around the UK with a donation of detailed coastal maps to the Marine Conservation Society, has also been actively involved with the provision of digital mapping and software to IXSurvey, which has been engaged in identifying possible sites for a prototype tidal turbine installation in northern Scotland. It would claim to be the UK’s first tidal power scheme.

For the Scottish project, IXSurvey has completed around 100 days of fieldwork in the Sound of Islay and Pentland Firth as well as the Orkney Isles and Northern Island. The Edinburgh company was able to produce detailed sonar mosaics with the use of a GAPS USBL positioning system together with a multibeam echosounder, sidescan sonar, sub-bottom profiler and a vessel mounted acoustic doppler current profiler.

SeaZone’s charted vector data was used for the planning stage of the project which has been carried out on behalf of Scottish Power Renewables and Hammerfest Strom AS as part of a high profile development of offshore renewable energy.

Also used for the venture was SeaZone’s GeoTemporal Editor software for analysis and interpretation of current profiles and flow data. According to Rebecca Seymour, IXSurvey’s resident GIS specialist, the charted vector data in particular has been invaluable as a background tool, as it is dynamic and allows data layers to be switched on and off as required and therefore provides significant benefits over Admiralty raster or paper charts.