Sea Technology

SEP 2012

The industry's recognized authority for design, engineering and application of equipment and services in the global ocean community

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environmentalmonitoning US Government, Coast Guard Tests Arctic Operations The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and Department of Defense crews in August completed an oil spill recovery equip- ment exercise off the coast of Barrow, Alaska, while a team of scientists left for a separate Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)-led expedition to study marine life in the Hanna Shoal in the northeast Chukchi Sea. The three-day USCG exercise—the first of its kind to be held in the Arctic Ocean—evaluated the suitability of new equipment for use in Arctic waters. Nor- mally, oil spill equipment used aboard a USCG buoy tender would be staged while the ship is moored to a pier. With the nearest pier capable of supporting the Coast Guard Cutter Sycamore nearly 600 miles away, a tug and barge were dispatched from Prudhoe Bay to Barrow to serve as a staging platform. The first day of the exercise, crew- members on the Sycamore, which served as the exercise platform, tested their onboard spilled oil recovery sys- tem. On the second day, the exercise evaluated a U.S. Navy SUPSALV NOFI Current Buster 600 boom system to de- termine if a USCG buoy tender could be a platform to deploy the boom. Crews tested the DESMI (Nørresundby, Denmark) Polar Bear skimmer, which is designed to recover oil in pockets of water trapped by ice, on the third day. The next week, scientists from U.S. universities and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution departed from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, on the Coast Guard Cutter Healy for a three- week expedition that is part of a long- term study of marine life in the Hanna Shoal area. Information from this study will inform BOEM's future resource management decisions in the Arctic. Previous studies of Hanna Shoal have documented sustained benthic productivity, with high concentrations of water birds, walruses and whales. This new study, scheduled to run until 2016, will identify and measure physi- cal and biological processes contribut- ing to the area's high concentration of marine life. Work will include docu- menting physical and oceanographic features, ice conditions and informa- tion concerning local species. At the end of July, NOAA and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement released the Arctic ver- sion of the Environmental Response Management Application. GPS Measures Ice Melt, Change In Greenland Over Months Researchers have found a way to use GPS to measure short-term changes in the rate of ice loss on Greenland, which revealed a surprising link between the ice and the atmosphere above it. The study, published in the Pro- ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, hints at the potential for GPS to detect many consequences of climate change, including ice loss, the uplift of bedrock, changes in air pressure and possibly sea-level rise. The team, led by earth scientists at the Ohio State University, used mea- surements from the Greenland GPS Network (GNET), which consists of more than 50 transmitters, to pinpoint a period in 2010 when high tempera- tures caused the natural ice flow out 80 st / SEPTEMBER 2012 www.sea-technology.com

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