Gozo

In addition to collecting information at various sites throughout Malta, we’ve been able to go to several sites on the smaller island of Gozo. Gozo is only 14km long and 7km wide and has approximately 31,000 residents. It is known as being much more green compared to Malta and the industry is more focused around agriculture. Below is a view over part of the island, as seen from the citadel in Victoria (also called Rabat) which is the capital city of Gozo.

Our sites on Gozo (on Monday) were focused on water galleries (as opposed to cisterns or wells). It was a neat change of pace to see the lay out horizontally instead of relying completely on sonar and video data from the ROV to get an idea of the layout and general structure of the cistern.

We did two sites on Monday. The first one, Ghar Ilma (Water Cave), was at a private residence and was apparently very important in supplying most of the water for the citadel back when residents of Gozo would have to sleep within the protected walls of the citadel (to stay safe from pirate attacks). I was surprised at the extent of this gallery. There were several different passageways and the main one extended for over 900 ft. We collected data for a lot of it, but were unable to map everything due to the limited length of our cable (only 250 ft) and the fact that there was a pile of debris blocking part of the main passageway.

Our second site was another private residence in someone’s garden. We set up in a small grove of tangerine/orange trees and ran the cable down to the water gallery. The depth readings on our control box were still not working properly, but we were able to get good sonar scans for the entire gallery.

After we finished collecting data, we packed up quickly and drove to the ferry in order to catch it on time (so we could meet our driver on the other side at the scheduled time). We got there in time, but almost missed the ferry anyways due to complications getting all of our equipment (a large generator, several large robot boxes, and various other bags and toolboxes) into a luggage container. We did end up making it, enjoyed the beautiful ride back to Malta and concluded another successful day of data collection.