Sonar scan for Loch Ness

Press, 23 September 1987, Page 39

Sonar scan for Loch Ness

The lady of Loch Ness is in for an ear-bashing. She has eluded everyone from St Columba to self-styled American bounty hunters but the monster is facing her sternest test

In a few days the most expensive, high-tech search yet will take to the lake to try to solve what organisers describe as ‘‘The World’s most popular mystery.” Nessie will probably feel the need for ear muffs or a Walkman and a comfortable underwater cave.'

The scientists will be on her tail with an “almost inescapable” curtain of sonar beams from 20 launches which will systematically blitz the 37km long Loch. The equipment will be able to pick up the smallest fish hundreds of metres below the eerie surface. State-of-the-art underwater vessels and cameras from the North Sea oil industry will spring into . action once any "contact” is made.

Operation Deepscan, a 10-day super-search, Is been given odds by William Hill, the official bookmaker to the project, of 250 to 1 against the monster being found.

But there are many physical factors which

stop even the most sceptical from concluding that “a large unknown fish predator” could not exist in the frigid depths. Adrian Shine, an amateur naturalist who has led a project investigating Loch Ness for 10 years, doubts that a humpbacked, long-necked monster as portrayed by witnesses’ photos exists. But something unusual is undoubtedly in residence.

“There is fauna on the lake bed which has been there since the last Ice age,” he says. “There is quite a community way down there because there is a remarkable amount of oxygen.”

Loch Ness has such a huge volume that the world’s population could fit into it several times. It is more than 200 metres deep, with steep sides.

Unique underwater currents up to 25 metres deep sweep through the loch as strange thermal patterns change.

The Loch’s extraordinary physical wonder — caused by glacier movement millions of years ago — has added to the age-old monster legend.

Mr Shine, who will lead the Deepscan search starting early next month, carried out small-scale

sonar exploration in parts of the Loch in 1982 and last year. “We made contact with several large unexplained spots in 1982 — some of which proved,” he says. “That is what we are interested in. We know what we are looking for.” The fleet will carry equipment from a United States electronics company. Any "contact” will be followed up by the unmanned underwater craft with cameras. Operation Deepscan’ will be a multi-million dollar effort. But do Mr Shine and his team of technicians, scientists and locals really expect to find Nessie? They regard the mission as “one of the last adventuresJnto the truly unknown in Britain.” ' Mr Shine says: “If we do not find anything it will not necessarily mean the legend will be called off.” Their task will be to expose a monster of a myth which started in 565 A.D., when St Columba apparently encountered a strange beast at the water’s edge. The international ’ “birth” of the Loch Ness monster was in the 19305. A road was opened to the Loch and sightings flourished.