In spring of this year MMT was awarded the marine route survey contract for the NordLink Submarine Cable.
Since the mid nineties several power cable connections between Norway and Germany have been on the drawing board. The landfall areas in Norway have all been in the Lista and Fedafjorden area, while several landing points between Norderney and the north of Hamburg, Germany have been evaluated. Statnett SF ordered a route survey from MMT that partly followed routes already surveyed in order to get a complete and updated picture of the seabed conditions.
The planned NordLink submarine cable connection is a power transmission link between Norway and Germany.
The first step in this project was for MMT to perform a detailed Multibeam, sidescan sonar and sub-bottom profiler survey of a 50 m – 600 m wide route corridor. The total length is approx. 514 km. The aim of this survey was to provide a 50 x 50 cm (to 50 m water depth) or 100 x 100 cm (in deeper waters) Digital Terrain Model (DTM), side scan images and sub bottom profiles simultaneously.
MMT also preformed a geotechnical investigation of seabed sampling by use of a gravity corer and a vibro corer.
Based on the detailed survey data collected, a task plan for an ROV site inspection was developed by MMT and Statnett representatives onboard for inspecting areas of interest. The aim of this inspection was to provide more details of the seabed conditions and to identify shipwrecks, debris, corals, pipelines, cables and other seabed features with potential impacts on routing or cable installation operations.
MMT used the vessels Franklin, IceBeam and Seabeam for this assignment and is very pleased with the collaborative effort with Statnett SF.
[mappress] Source: MMT, August 25, 2011;