Two powerful icebreakers — one Canadian, the other American — have just met up in the Beaufort Sea, setting up the latest play in a circumpolar hockey game. More>>

This summer, Val Schmidt is participating with some Canadian colleagues in an effort to map the underside of an iceberg using an AUV. They spent last week conducting pre-deployment tests in a lake in Quebec.

With a warming world steadily eliminating sea ice from the Arctic, Northern nations are busy bolstering their claims to the sea floor, trying to pave the way for future economic interests. More than one country has already claimed the North Pole. But staking your claim at the top of the world is a messy and complicated science.

Kurt Schwehr, a Research Assistant Professor at CCOM, is one of the developers of a web-based oil spill response tool that has been honored as a finalist for the prestigious Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal.

When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill erupted into the Gulf of Mexico last April, the only view researchers and citizens had of the gushing oil was the video feed controlled by BP. A team of scientists says it has now found a better way to track oil spills: sonar. The researchers, from the University of New Hampshire's (UNH's) Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM) in Durham and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), wanted to try sonar because its wide view can look at entire swaths of ocean at the same time. But no one had shown how to use the technology to map or track oil spills. "We were really doing crisis science. ... There were no proven methods for doing this," says team member Thomas Weber, an acoustician at CCOM.

"It will be a very interesting question as to whether this data will be made public like all the other bathymetry we have collected," commented Larry Mayer to Hydro International. Mayer served as chief scientist on the Healy during the previous two expeditions and is director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping in Durham, N.H. "I am not sure how data from the disputed area will be treated," he acknowledged. "We will get the data at the end of the cruise and can process it relatively quickly." Currently all of the bathymetry data that the Healy has collected using its multi-beam echo sounder is available online, whereas the data from the seismic surveys collected on board Canada's Louis S. St-Laurent are not yet public. "I should say that processing is one thing. Analysis is another. The analysis with respect to potential submissions is a longer process," Mayer added.

With most of a once-massive Gulf of Mexico oil slick no longer a threat, environmental experts say the Gulf coast may have dodged the worst nightmare of a massive catastrophe.

The center was one of approximately 12 other oceanographic facilities selected in May to assist with oil spill recovery following a meeting in Washington, D.C., with President Barack Obama's science and energy advisors as well as administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The focus was on what the academic community can bring to the table," said Dr. Larry Mayer, professor and director at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. "That's our job as a natural center of excellence. You hope they would call on us when these things happen."

In a best-case scenario, crew members will use echograms and a fluorometer, which measures light emissions, to identify anomalies and scoop water samples from as deep as 1,000 feet below the surface. But using these tools to seek dispersed oil in such a wide area is an uncertain endeavor, according to Larry A. Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire. "We're not 100 percent sure this will work," said Mayer, who is part of the mission. "But we'll be working night and day to figure that out."

While Little Hercules spent just five days in Durham before heading to Hawaii, where it will explore the waters between there and Indonesia, NOAA plans to return to Chase in April to test an ROV almost eight times the size of this one. "They need a big enough tank to submerge the ROV in a controlled environment," says Andy McLeod, lab manager of the UNH facility, which houses several joint UNH and NOAA programs. McLeod adds that the ongoing testing will mean opportunities for UNH undergraduate students to get involved in research.

Students from Carmel Middle School in Carmel, Ind., welcomed home Christine Hedge, a seventh-grade science teacher who spent six weeks in the Arctic Ocean on board the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy as part of a multi-year, multi-agency effort to collect seafloor mapping and oceanographic data along the North American Extended Continental Shelf. "The discovery of this seamount is a prime example of how little we know about the Arctic Ocean," said retired NOAA Capt. Andy Armstrong, the mission's co-chief scientist and co-director of the NOAA-University of New Hampshire Joint Hydrographic Center. "Christine's keen observations allowed us to react in time to turn the ship and explore this important seafloor feature in closer detail."

James V. Gardner and Mashkoor Malik (of The Center for Coastal & Ocean Mapping (CCOM) UNH and NOAA, respectively) participated on the cruise, and provided details of the discovery in the August 11, 2009 issue of EOS.