Ships, Boats, and Helicopters: GeoEO24 Mapping of Victoria Fjord, Greenland
CCOM/JHC
The GeoEO Expedition was a large, multi-investigator, mission to northern Greenland. In addition to work packages focusing on glacial dynamics, sediments and their history, the tectonic evolution of North Greenland, interactions between the glaciers and Atlantic water, and palaeogenomics of ecosystem change, a robust marine geophysical mapping program took CCOM personnel to the Icebreaker Oden and through the challenging environment of the Lincoln Sea to Victoria Fjord to map the seafloor, watercolumn, and icebergs. The environment mandated a number of technologies for mapping including ship multibeam, split-beam, and sub-bottom sonar operations (at many different frequencies), small boat high-resolution multibeam mapping, helicopter-deployed split-beam echosounding, and, for safety reasons, remotely controlled ASV drone mapping with multibeam and split-beam sonars around the ice front, icebergs, and a “river” in the front of the floating ice at Petermann Fjord.
This seminar provides a background on the GeoEO expedition, the research in Petermann, Sherard-Osborn, and Victoria Fjords, and the results (and lessons learned) from operating in this challenging environment during GeoEO24. And some gratuitous pictures of charismatic megafauna.
LARRY MAYER
Larry Mayer is a Professor and the Director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire. He graduated magna cum laude with an Honors degree in Geology from the University of Rhode Island in 1973 and received a Ph.D. from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in Marine Geophysics in 1979. At Scripps, he worked with the Marine Physical Laboratory's Deep-Tow Geophysical package, applying this sophisticated acoustic sensor to problems of deep-sea mapping and the history of climate. After being selected as an astronaut candidate finalist for NASA's first class of mission specialists, Larry went on to a Post-Doc at the School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island where he worked on the early development of the Chirp Sonar and problems of deep-sea sediment transport and paleoceanography. In 1982, he became an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Oceanography at Dalhousie University and in 1991 moved to the University of New Brunswick to take up the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Ocean Mapping. In 2000, Larry became the founding director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire and the co-director of the NOAA/UNH Joint Hydrographic Center.
Larry has participated in more than 95 cruises (over 75 months at sea!) over the last 45 years and has been chief or co-chief scientist of numerous expeditions, including two legs of the Ocean Drilling Program and thirteen expeditions in the ice-covered regions of the high Arctic. He has served on, or chaired, far too many international panels and committees and has the requisite large number of publications on a variety of topics in marine geology and geophysics. He is the recipient of the Keen Medal for Marine Geology, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Stockholm, and was a member of the President’s Panel on Ocean Exploration, the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for the Geosciences, and chaired a National Academy of Science Committee on national needs for coastal mapping and charting, as well as the National Academies study on the impact of the Deepwater Horizon Spill. He was the co-chair of the NOAA’s Ocean Exploration Advisory Working Group, and the Vice-Chair of the Consortium of Ocean Leadership’s Board of Trustees and chaired the NAS’s Oceans Studies Board for six years. He also chairs the MARUM Science Advisory Board and is a member of the State Dept.’s Extended Continental Shelf Task Force and the Navy’s SCICEX Advisory Committee. Larry was appointed by President Obama to the Arctic Research Commission and, in 2017, was elected to the Hydrographic Society of America Hall of Fame. In 2018, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering and, in 2019, was elected as a foreign member in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2020, Larry was the first recipient of the Walter Munk Medal from The Oceanography Society and named a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. In 2021, he was elected to the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research and, in 2022, he received the Sam Masry Prize from the Canadian Hydrographic Association for outstanding contributions to the hydrographic profession and its related disciplines.
Larry's current research deals with increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of seafloor mapping and remote characterization of the seafloor (applications of autonomous vehicles), as well as advanced applications of 3-D visualization to ocean mapping problems and applications of mapping to Law of the Sea issues, particularly in the Arctic.
BRIAN CALDER
Brian Calder is the Center's Associate Director. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, completing his thesis on Bayesian methods in Sidescan Sonar processing in 1997. Since then he has worked on a number of signal processing problems, including real-time grain size analysis, seismic processing, and wave-field modeling for shallow seismic applications.
His research interests include methods for error modeling, propagation and visualization, and adaptive sonar backscatter modeling. His work has focused on developing methods for textural analysis of seafloor sonar data, as well as exploring innovative approaches to target detection and seafloor property extraction.
Dr. Calder is currently focusing on statistically robust automated data cleaning approaches and tracing uncertainty in hydrographic data.
ELIZABETH WEIDNER
Liz Weidner received her Ph.D. in oceanography from a joint program between the University of New Hampshire and Stockholm University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. She also received her M.Sc. in Ocean Mapping from the University of New Hampshire in 2018, her B.S. in Oceanography from University of Washington in 2012, and worked as a geophysicist for C&C Technologies and Oceaneering in Seattle, WA. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut.
Liz is an acoustical oceanographer who uses broadband acoustic systems to study high-latitude oceans. Her work aims to characterize the changes occurring in polar coastal waters by combining active acoustic observations (echosounders) with in situ measurements (CTDs, water sampling) and theoretical acoustic scattering models. This includes the study of marine-terminating glaciers, thermohaline structure, gas bubbles, and fluid emissions.
