Gas bubbles in the ocean are produced by breaking waves, rainfall, methane seeps, exsolution, and a range of biological processes including decomposition, photosynthesis, respiration and digestion. However one biological process that produces particularly dense clouds of large bubbles, is bubble netting. This is practiced by several species of cetacean. Given their propensity to use acoustics, and the powerful acoustical attenuation and scattering that bubbles can cause, the relationship between sound and bub-ble nets is intriguing. It has been postulated that humpback whales produce ‘walls of sound’ at audio frequencies in their bubble nets, trapping prey. Dolphins, on the other hand, use high frequency acous-tics for echolocation. This begs the question of whether, in producing bubble nets, they are generating echolocation clutter that potentially helps prey avoid detection (as their bubble nets would do with man-made sonar), or whether they have developed sonar techniques to detect prey within such bubble nets and distinguish it from clutter. Possible sonar schemes that could detect targets in bubble clouds are proposed, and shown to work both in the laboratory and at sea. Following this, similar radar schemes are proposed for the detection of buried explosives and catastrophe victims, and successful laboratory tests are undertaken.
Objects that have come within the inventory are the effect of whaling activity carried out in the region of South Shetland Islands in the first half of the twentieth century. They include mainly bones of hunted animals, rarely wooden or metal objects, part of which may be related to the whaling industry. In this paper the areas of particular accumulation of these objects have been determined, and the attempts to explain the reasons for such accumulations have been made. In addition, certain suggestions for further investigations into whaling activity in the South Shetland Islands region have been put forward. During the work 158 large fragments of whale skulls, among others, have been inventoried. The total number of individuals whose preserved relics have been explored within the surveyed sections of the Admiralty Bay shores has been estimated to be 210-230.