7 April 2006
Tigress Ltd is proud to disclose an unusual use for its
signature software product, Tigress. Although its products are
usually associated with oil exploration and technology, the company
is a partner in a scientific research project at Birmingham
University which is helping to reveal the spectacular prehistoric
landscape of the Southern North Sea.
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| One of the palaeochannels being investigated using the
Vista centre’s 4.2x1.8m Powerwall. |
Using state-of-the-art visualisation technology provided by the
University’s HP Visualisation and Spatial Technology (Vista) Centre
and software provided by Tigress, the North Sea Palaeolandscapes
Project is revealing details of the submerged terrain of the
southern part of this sea.
The flexibility of Tigress to run on a variety of processing
architectures, ranging from standard 32bit x86 laptops through to
the HP Vista Centre's advanced 64bit dual core, dual processor
workstations, has proved critical for this project. Indeed,
Tigress's ability to run on 64bit hardware, support for which was
first used in this project, has proved of great benefit to the
researchers in handling the large datasets which have been required
to get a good insight into the archaeological landscape of the
Southern North Sea. During the period 16,000 to 8,000 years ago,
this area was a large, emergent landscape which was occupied by
Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups.
The project is funded by UK Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund
(ALSF) and supported by PGS, which provides seismic data for the
team to use. So far it has revealed a wide variety of fascinating
and previously unknown features in this landscape that are of
interest to archaeologists. These range from dendritic fluvial
systems to large rivers the size of the Thames or Rhine. In
addition, the project team has observed coastlines associated with
the flooding event that eventually submerged this area.
Tigress acts as an integration point in this project, as well as
a visualisation layer within the research. Tigress software has
also been used to help with the dissemination of the seismic data
into solid modelling packages, which in turn allows the
architecture and structure of the geomorphological features of this
archaeological landscape to be fully understood.
More information
The North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project team is:
- Professor Vince Gaffney and Dr Ken Thomson, principal
investigators
- Simon Fitch, senior research assistant
- Kate Briggs and Simon Holford, research assistants
You can find out more about this project on the
North Sea Palaeolandscapes website.
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