Would the Titanic hit that iceberg if it had a thermal camera installed? Probably not.
Protecting oil tankers is an essential process not only for the many people who work on board, but also for the environment. Oil spills into the sea can have a catastrophic effect on the balanced ecology of oceans, affecting marine life, contaminating water and causing millions to be spent in clean-up.
Oil tankers can carry huge amounts of highly dangerous crude oil as well, so hitting an iceberg in dangerous waters could quite easily sink the ship and spill gallons up gallons of oil directly into the sea.
In response to the increased demands of oil tankers navigating dangerous, ice-infested waters, FLIR has developed a thermal imaging camera solution that allows ship navigators to see exactly where chunks of ice are in the water long before they become a danger.
Normal Ice Detection: Not so Good
As it stands, oil tankers generally don’t have a comprehensive way of detecting ice in dangerous waters. Although sonar is used to an extent to detect the larger chunks of ice, some smaller ice chunks can go unnoticed because sonar also picks up the effect of waves, effectively rendering it useless in extremely dangerous waters.
This often means that somebody has to check visually for ice instead, which again isn’t an ideal solution as ice could easily be missed by human eyes in the darkness, or simply by human error.
Since the oil tankers are working in areas of the arctic without much artificial light and constantly having to fend off weather such as fog, snow and rain, this process becomes increasingly more difficult depending on how the weather feels like behaving on that particular day and effectively spotting ice in the murky waters almost becomes impossibility.
Thermal Ice Detection: Marvellous Stuff
The number one problem facing navigation offices is seeing the dark. Given that they’re relying on the searchlight of the tanker, which doesn’t have that wide a beam to begin with, means that it’s often impossible to see what’s going on in the dark.
Thankfully, there’s a solution. Step forward, thermal imaging camera!
These rather marvellous devices are the perfect solution to navigation across the open seas because first and foremost, they can see in darkness. As thermal cameras don’t see visible light and instead rely on infrared radiation to see the environment, they see a very different picture to human eyes.
This means that the thermal cameras affixed to a ship allow the navigation officers to effectively see through the dark, providing a much more comprehensive image of what’s in the way of the ship.
Infrared radiation basically refers to the heat emissivity of an object, and because icebergs are kinda cold, this means they appear on thermal cameras clearly as an exceptionally cold object, allowing users on the bridge to clearly see when an iceberg’s coming.
