It takes far more than your average photogrammetry of disintegrating wooden planks beneath the water’s surface to impress Dwight Coleman.
As director of ocean imaging for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Coleman has more than 35 years of experience that includes dozens of research expeditions, including archaeological investigations of the RMS Titanic. He’s an expert not only in deep-sea exploration, but also in things like integrating robotics to expand human access to the deep ocean. If Coleman is excited about an expedition, there’s usually a serious reason for it.
The recent Heroic Age Expedition to survey the shipwrecks of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Quest and Capt. Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova—to create “digital twins” of the wrecks using modern technology—had Coleman more than a little excited.
“Certainly the allure of Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott — these are big names in exploration,” Coleman says. “This was over 100 years ago on these ships, and here we are today doing a lot of the same thing. You can’t get there without the ships. These ships were technologically advanced for their time. They had to raise money to do these explorations, much as we have to raise money to do our explorations. And that we were able to pull this off in three days, that was remarkable for me.”
What they pulled off, in cooperation with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, was the first comprehensive visual survey of both wrecks using a
combination of high-definition 5.2K video cameras and Canadian VOYIS photogrammetric technology. Also helping with the expedition was the U.S. National Science Foundation, which let the team use the research vessel Atlantis, as well as the human-occupied vehicle known as Alvin.
It’s not the first time something like this has been done, Coleman says, but the specialized equipment let the team collect and process the data far faster than in the past. What would have previously taken at least a week required only three days. “We use two different systems for the imaging of the shipwrecks,” Coleman says. “We have the Alvin, which is a famous submersible that can go down and bring its cameras and lights, and we use that for the archaeological inspection, to zoom in on artifacts, to take photos and do some basic imaging.
“The other system was used on our remote-operated vehicle,” he adds. “It’s not a manned submersible with any humans inside. We operate it from a tether to the ship. We can see all the images that it collects live. The Canadian company VOYIS rented us one of their discovery imaging systems. It’s a stereoscopic camera with LED lights, a specialized system. We were able to integrate it onto the ROV, which let us get the photogrammetric imagery.
We use the camera system to acquire the data, and then we use other software for generating the models.”
Teams at Woods Hole have been doing similar things for quite some time, he says, but the result of all the work is usually a two-dimensional photomosaic. With this technology, Coleman says, not only could they do it all faster, but they could also achieve a 3D result.
“One of our jobs at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is to develop technology for imaging in the deep sea,” he says. “We want to be able to create the best images possible of this environment that you can’t see, that’s in perpetual darkness. Sometimes we only get one shot at visiting these places. They’re remote and hard to get to and under pressure.”
In the case of the Quest and the Terra Nova, there were also concerns that the wrecks are deteriorating due to age. One goal of the expedition was to document the baseline of each wreck’s condition.
The condition of Quest surprised Coleman, he says. She’s nearly 1,300 feet down, beneath the Labrador Sea off Newfoundland. “I was thinking that the Quest off Labrador, in such deep, cold water, would be a little bit better preserved than it was,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting all the fishing gear as well as the hundreds of thousands of codfish and redfish around that wreck. That surprised me. They were everywhere.”
The Terra Nova, which is more than 900 feet down off Greenland, was in a decent state of preservation, he says, “but it really hit the bottom hard and splayed open. The wreck was in large pieces, sort of split down the middle. The stern section was sort of buried in the mud. A lot of the decking was deteriorating and falling down.”
Coleman says the findings will become available to the public in numerous ways, including through a documentary film that is being made. Meta donated Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses to the expedition; the AI-powered wearables provide a hands-free way to capture and share this kind of exploration as it unfolds.
In the future, Coleman says, the Woods Hole team hopes to do more exploration work of this nature, including by partnering with outside agencies, other governments and industry. “We’re in some challenging times with funding, financially, so this is part of the strategy to look for other opportunities,” he says.
“We’re diversifying our portfolio. It’s exciting for us to partner with another organization that cares about the ocean and cares about science.”
This article was originally published in the October 2026 issue.
