CSA onshore staff share real-time subsea survey insights with offshore crews

CSA Ocean Sciences, a global marine environmental consulting firm, is deploying real-time subsea video monitoring to support its consultancy work for offshore environmental projects.

Subsea video can help identify benthic habitats and hazards in offshore projects, the company said. CSA specialists are using satellite communications and video routing to monitor the video feed round the clock from shore-based locations.

Live video can be transmitted from the vessel to any one of the company’s international offices, allowing onshore and offshore teams to review and discuss in real time. This approach, the company added, permits analysis of imagery while it is being collected, providing the offshore survey personnel with swift feedback on image quality, height off the seabed, and features observed that may warrant further inspection.

“It’s about enhancing timely scientific insight while, at the same time, reducing the logistical and environmental burdens associated with conventional offshore surveys.”

—Dr. Alexis Weinnig, senior scientist and deepwater coral specialist, CSA

CSA's busy summer

In July, CSA was awarded several additional contracts to conduct marine and metocean studies offshore Suriname. The company said at the time that these awards include multi-year contracts from major oil and gas operators in the region.

That same month, CSA reported that an environmental monitoring survey of waters around the Chevron-operated Leviathan gas production platform in the eastern Mediterranean Sea revealed an unusual natural phenomenon. According to CSA's field teams of environmental consultants, numerous colonies of the soft coral species Dendronephthya hemprichi, which are native to the coral reefs of the Red Sea to the south, were found to be growing on the platform’s subsea structures in water depths of up to 30 m.