You Can Now Tour the Gowanus Canal Without Catching Syphilis or Other Ailments
Conversations about the Gowanus Canal are usually accompanied with a quip about STDs or mutant dolphins, but all joking aside, there’s no denying its murky waters also carry quite a bit of mystery and allure. The infrastructure, the architecture, and of course what’s floating within, is nothing short of intriguing, because really, what’s actually down there? Researchers at the Brooklyn Atlantis Project are just as curious as we are and they’ve constructed an unmanned water vehicle to go where no sane man dare go.
Be sure to wave to those daring passersby in their kayaks
The researchers created the Aquatic Robotic Vehicle (ARV) with the goal of measuring water quality in the canal in addition to documenting, in photographs, what’s above and below the water level. The images they’ve retrieved so far have just been put up on Google Views and Maps and are now available for your touring pleasure.
But there’s more to this. The Atlantis Project team wants your help completing the story of all the images collected. On the site they write: “We need help tagging all of the images that our ARV collects, whether it is a fish, a rock, or an unidentified object. The aggregate data will help us study the conditions at the canal in different places and over time. Helping is simple: just login or create an account here and press Participate to start tagging.”
Explore the canal here or here, or just have a look in our gallery below.
[Via Gothamist]
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