TELEMARK WATERWAY PROJECT (2010-2011)
The Telemark Waterway is 105km long and rises to a height of 72m through 18 locks, and eventually passes the cities of Skien and Porsgrunn before flowing out into the North Sea.
Between 2006 and 2009, while working in the historic lakes, rivers, canals and fjords of the Telemark Waterway in south-central Norway, Fredrik Soreide from ProMare and Pål Nymoen from the Norwegian Maritime Museum located more than a dozen historic shipwrecks in a remarkable state of preservation which range in age from the Medieval/Viking Age to the mid-nineteenth century.
In August 2010, an international team from ProMare (US), the Norwegian Maritime Museum (Norway), the Norwegian University of Science & Technology (Norway), and Hafmynd EHF (Iceland) located nearly two dozen, well-preserved shipwrecks in the lakes of the Telemark Waterway in south-central Norway. The waterway has been used for transportation of people and goods for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and these remarkable shipwrecks are suspected to range in date from the Medieval/Viking Age to the mid-19th century. The team will return to the area in the summer of 2011 to continue exploring the waterway for more shipwrecks and evidence of historic and ancient watercraft and commerce.
To locate the shipwrecks the team deployed a state-of-the-art, autonomous-underwater-vehicle, GAVIA, provided by Hafmynd EHF (www.gavia.is), equipped with the latest sonar imaging and inertial navigation systems, coupled with a modular build and a depth rating in excess of 500m. The Gavia vehicle was used in several locations from a vessel during the course of three days onsite, and gathered astonishing images of ships lost for centuries. The Gavia AUV proved to be an invaluable asset during the operations in Telemark due to the very steep walls of the virtually uncharted deep lakes, which would have made surveying with a standard towed side-scan system extremely challenging.
