Did you know that some of the best hardwood can be found underwater? When people built hydrodams and created lakes in valleys to get quick, cheap power, they flooded the trees and essentially forgot about them. There are about 300 million trees underwater, all of them lying still in a deep freeze, inert because the lack of air prevents them from sequestering carbon.
A small underwater logging industry has ensued, but no company has taken it as far as Triton Logging of Vancouver, BC. Instead of sending human divers underwater, Triton built a giant yellow submarine called the Sawfish — a 5,500-pound unmanned logging device capable of finding, chopping, and floating trees.
Guided by sonar, video cameras, and GPS, the Sawfish dives down under the surface and finds forests to harvest. Once it finds the tree, the Sawfish grabs onto the bark with its grapples, which are like giant arms. It inserts a rolled up airbag that bolts onto the tree. Compressed air inflates the airbag. The saw on the Sawfish then cuts the trunk just below the airbag and stays there as the usable part of the tree shoots up to the surface. Then it moves on to the next one. When the airbags surface, a boat corals the floating trees and pulls them over to a barge area, where they are then transferred to a tugboat that takes them to shore for processing.
"By putting these trees on the market, we potentially displace land-based logging," Hayhurst of Triton Logging says.
Now THIS is the kind of technology we should invest in - seriously, one of the coolest things i've seen in ages. As an Oregonian, I am accustomed to driving around a bend, only to see a clear cut field, littered with stumps. It breaks my heart every time. So thank you Canada for my favorite new fish - the Sawfish. You can't make sushi out of him, but he still rocks.
Thanks to Lisa Katayama at boingboing.net for posting this awesome story.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/14/the-sawfish.html
