 Great. Thank you very much. My name is Alan Mix and as co-chair of this study, I'd like to welcome everyone to the community workshop of the National Academies Committee on the Future Directions for Southern Ocean and Antarctic Neershore and Coastal Research. To start, I'd like to acknowledge that the National Academies is physically located on the traditional land of the Nicoch tank at coast and Piscataway peoples past and present. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations and the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and the nations and this land. I would also like to review our expectations for conduct. Here at the academies, we're committed to fostering a professional, respectful and inclusive environment where all can participate fully in a harassment-free and discrimination-free atmosphere. We looked to each and every one of you to help us maintain a professional and cordial environment. Details on the academies policy on preventing discrimination, harassment and bullying is available on the website. For a bit of background, the National Academies is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that is the nation's preeminent source of expert evidence based and objective advice on science, engineering and health matters. The National Academies provides independent objective advice to inform policy with objective scientific findings that spark progress and innovation and confront challenging issues for the benefit of society. This committee has been formed to produce a consensus report based on our statement of task, which you can see here. Importantly, we are tasked to identify high-priority near and long-term science drivers for the Southern Ocean and Antarctic near shore coastal research. Based on previous reports and studies determined the capabilities essential to support these science drivers and identify how NSF might address any gaps between the science drivers and the existing portfolio of capabilities. This slide shows the committee membership. If any committee members want to stand up when I say your name, that would be great. We'd like to have everybody see who you are. First, Paula Bontempi, the co-chair of the study from University of Rhode Island. Kim Bernard from Oregon State University. Ed Boyle from MIT. Dan Costa from UC Santa Cruz. Jamin Greenbaum from Scripps. YT Lin from Woods Hole. Heather Lynch from Stony Brook. Barry Lyons from Ohio State. Jill McCuckey from University of Tennessee. Ted Maxim from Woods Hole. I think Ted is online. Is that correct? Yep. Wayson Shen from Stony Brook and Andy Thompson from Caltech. Thank you all. The agenda for today is shown here. The intent of the community workshop is to assist the committee in its information gathering by hearing from a broad subsection of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean research community. I think that meant cross-section, not subsection. This committee will examine the information and material obtained during this and other public meetings in an effort to inform its work. Comments made by individuals, including members of the committee, should not be interpreted as positions of the committee or of the academies. In addition, committee members typically ask probing questions in these information gathering sessions that may not be indicative of their personal views. So please feel free to speak your mind and brainstorm. We will begin the workshop by hearing from sponsors of this project, National Science Foundation. We will then have presentations from our invited experts. The first session will be on solid earth processes. The second will be on sea level. The third will be on emerging tools and technologies today. At 3 p.m. eastern time, we will move into breakout rooms. These breakout rooms will be specific to each session and the participants will work together to identify the top research priorities and necessary capabilities to complete the science. We will have both virtual and in-person breakout rooms and hope that the experts here will be able to participate in those very important sessions. A final note about those sessions, we will be using Slido to take questions and comments from both the virtual and in-person audience. This approach has the benefit of saving time and equalizing in-person and virtual participation. You may ask questions of the presenters in the Q&A tab and leave your comments about important science priorities in the ideas tab at any time during the session. Slido allows participants to upvote questions and it also allows participants to reply to or comment on questions. While we may only have time to answer directly one or a few questions per speaker, your questions may be answered by the presenter or other experts. Additionally, your questions and comments that we don't get to or all of them will be saved for later consideration by the committee. So please scan the QR code from your phone in person or online, Slido.com, on your computer and input the code that is listed up at the top, 3088868, and you'll get to our Slido page. Just a second for people to mess with their phones and get that live. I see people targeting the screen. Good. It's like waiting for popcorn to pop, right? When the phones go down, then I'll continue. Okay, looks like people have pretty much got it. We will now hear from our study sponsors at the National Science Foundation. I'd like to welcome Jim Ovestad, Director of the Office of Polar Programs as of, what did you say, two weeks, one week? For one week. So thanks, Jim, for taking that on. We'll also hear from Tim McGovern, the Ocean Projects Manager from the Office of Polar Programs who will have a presentation for us. And Mike Jackson, Acting Section Head. And Tim and Mike are online. I hope we got that right. So thanks, Jim. Come on up. And I'll hand it over to you. Thanks, Alan. So I believe Tim is going to show the slides from his remote location, so we'll see if that all works. So you're all probably looking at me and saying, well, this person has never been to an AGU meeting. How can he possibly be here? So I'll give you a couple words about my background. I've been at NSF since 2010. I'm an astronomer by trade. One of my recent jobs in NSF was as Chief Officer for Research Facilities in the Office of the Director. And I spent four years there. And in that capacity, I chaired a couple of internal NSF reviews and made the recommendations to the Director for the Antarctic Research Vessel to be accepted into the design stage and then later to be advanced from the conceptual design phase to the preliminary design phase. So although I'm not an ocean scientist, I'm quite familiar with the ideas that we talk about for the vessel. I'm looking forward to learning more from you folks over the next day. I'll be here part of the time and online part of the time. But I look forward to hearing more from you about the science, which is the area I need to be educated in. I mean, I don't really know how ships work either. I just know how telescopes work. But there are people at NSF who can teach me that. I do want to acknowledge a number of NSF people in the room. I had a list of names. I was going to read them, except I discovered yesterday that I'm not actually connected to the printer in the new place yet. So I will just acknowledge them globally. Thank them for being here in their participation. Some of them will be our key ocean science experts who will be connecting most with the committee on the science aspects. As Alan said, I'm sharing this presentation with Mike Jackson and Tim McGovern. Mike is the acting Antarctic science section head. Mike will be talking a little bit about some of the, at a high level, some of the key science drivers that you'll hear more about later. Tim will be talking about the current efforts that we have in design, what we're thinking about, where we are today. And then I'll come back and give the thing that I always ask the director to do, which is tell people about the budget, which nobody ever wants to hear about, but that's my job. So I'll do it. With that, I think I will step aside and turn it over to Mike. And hopefully we can get Mike's, Mike unmuted and go from there. So thank you for being here. I appreciate all the committee members especially. Thanks. Perfect. Thanks very much. Hopefully everybody can hear me. Okay. So the message from the science community has been very clear. Acquiring the next generation ice breaking research vessel is essential for U.S. scientists to continue to maintain a strong global leadership role in the Southern Ocean region by having enhanced technology and year round access to the region. As evidence of shifts in the earth climate grow, the role of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and global impacts of climate change is becoming unequivocal. In the following slides, I want to highlight three brief examples that illustrate the scientific drivers that have helped us frame the specific design that's being brought forward for this Antarctic research vessel. One of our largest scientific challenges is to gain a better understanding of the potential sea level rise we face in a warming planet. As we all know, the issue is complex for sure. And gaining the insight can only come through direct observation of the ice, the ocean, and the air interactions that are all occurring simultaneously. On the left image, you see winter and summer ice coverages around the Antarctic continent. And you can see that they can act as a barrier to getting in and making some of these observations. We're showing the median extent of the ice coverage in orange. Superimposed on this picture are some of the larger glaciers on the continent with the two dark red dots identifying the much talked about Pine Island and Foates glaciers. Having predictable access to regions like this of high glacial instability will be key to understanding the factors that control how fast and how much sea level could rise in the future. This past summer, our current research vessel, but methane will be Palmer, was hosting an international research team that had limited access to the high priority Foates glacier, which is definitely a high profile target for studying glacial dynamics and sea level rise. The limited access was due to changing sea ice conditions in this critical area and it kept the vessel from the near shore. Now around on the other side of the continent, the East Antarctic ice sheet, it contains an equivalent of about 19 meters of global sea level, roughly four times the at-risk marine-based ice of West Antarctica. However, relative to Antarctica, there is even greater uncertainty about the potential of the East Antarctic ice sheet to contribute to rapid sea level rise. The offshore environments of East Antarctica are right for understanding past, present, and future sea level. In the diagram on the right, we show that the ocean ice interactions are one of the primary driving forces of ice mass loss in Antarctica. This is a complex environment with fast moving ice that's influenced by snow accumulation winds, a calving front, and the interaction of the circumpolar deep water. To better understand this complex environment, we need a state-of-the-art vessel that allows us to determine near shore bathymetry using seismology, revimetry, and magnetics to determine the cross, shelf heat, and freshwater exchange that will allow us to measure sea ice data including remote sensing and direct measurements of melt rates from underneath the ice shelves and the ability to coordinate and offshore sediments. We need a vessel that will allow us to explore the seabed, ocean conditions, and the near shore ocean ice environment using sophisticated geophysical and chemical sampling instruments and autonomous vehicles above, at, and below the ocean surface. There's a saying in seismology. If you want to study earthquakes, you go to a place where there are earthquakes. If we want to study ocean ice interactions, we need a ship that can operate at close range at the ocean ice interface that can break ice to get there and position itself for long observational periods as ice conditions change quickly due to variable winds and currents. Next slide, please. Covering only 30% of the Earth's ocean surface, the Southern Ocean plays an outsized role in the global climate model. It's the meeting point of several ocean currents and an important connector between the atmosphere and the deep ocean for the transfer of heat and carbon. As scientists, we need the ability to obtain year-round direct measurements to clarify uncertainties about how the Southern Ocean is affecting the Earth's carbon budget. Right now we know that rates differ by season and by ice coverage, but we have nowhere near the coverage needed to fully understand the magnitude of these changes in time and space. Collecting more ocean carbon data from regions and seasons, particularly in areas that have historically been under-sampled and then using those findings to improve ocean global models will be crucial for understanding the global carbon budget. Observations from floats, ocean profilers and moorings and autonomous subsurface surface and above ocean vehicles will allow development of more robust and accurate ocean chemistry, thermal circulation, and climate models. These activities highlight the need for a year-round science platform to operate in the Southern Ocean, particularly in ice-covered areas. During the Antarctic Vessel design, year-round capability was identified as a key performance parameter of any new ship and a critical need if we want to meet our science goals. Year-round performance requires greater ice-breaking capability, a modern hull design, modern navigation, and positioning instrumentation. Collectively, these characteristics will allow us to work in rougher seas, nearer to shore, and in areas with greater ice-covered areas. Next slide, please. Finally, the Southern Ocean is rich in marine life, including commercially important fish species such as krill and tooth fish, and the region also harbors unusual species with potentially great pharmaceutical benefits. Native Southern Ocean biota have adapted to the region's extreme conditions over many millions of years, and this unique biota is now challenged by rapid environmental change and the direct impacts of human activity. This slide shows the inter-relationship between physical, chemical, and biological aspects that govern ecosystem structure and function. The relationship of organisms with their environment are enormously complex with many components to observe and measure. Along with other projects, our ships support a Western Antarctic Peninsula long-term ecological research program that has been running for over 30 years. This program provides internationally recognized baseline data documenting ecosystem changes. We are seeing direct evidence that organisms are vulnerable to changes in ice cover, the effects of ocean acidification from enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide absorption, extraction of natural resources, and ocean temperature changes, all of which are altering species distribution and abundance. Ship-based year-round interdisciplinary science is essential to continue organismal and system-level integrated research to better protect and conserve Antarctic ecosystems and their biodiversity that impact ocean function, productivity, and fisheries. There's a critical need for year-round observations, state-of-the-art instrumentation, and science capabilities with enhanced birthing and longer cruise times to support interdisciplinary teams studying ecosystem structure. In summary, these slides highlight that a new research vessel must be nimble, must be able to break through thicker ice and position itself near shore for longer periods of time. The ship needs to house and deploy state-of-the-art instrumentation and be able to operate year-round and for extended deployments. Such a ship, along with other U.S. fleet capabilities and the potential partnerships that we can explore with other countries, would allow us to continue to lead in Southern Ocean research. So I thank you very much for your attention and I'd like to hand the presentation over to Tim McGovern to discuss the ship design capabilities. Thanks, Mike. Can everybody hear me? Thumbs up from anyone? We can hear you. Great, thank you. So most of you know we've been operating our current ice-breaking research vessel, the Nathaniel B. Palmer, or NBP, since it was delivered in 1992. Soon after its delivery, the science community began discussing an NBP replacement vessel that was larger and more capable. For the next few years, various studies and reports were put out trying to capture the requirements of this new polar research vessel, or PRV, which was envisioned to regularly operate in both the Antarctic and the Arctic. Now the NBP replacement effort ultimately led to the establishment of a PRV science mission requirements, or SMR refresh committee in 2010 and 11. A large workshop was held in February of 2011 that was attended by many researchers as well as naval architects, designers, technical experts, ship drivers, and I know for a fact some of the members of this workshop participated. So the resulting report was delivered in February of 2012. The PRV, as specified in these refresh science mission requirements, was for a roughly 390 foot long, almost 14,000 long ton polar class 3 vessel. The polar class, or PC, is an international maritime designation indicating what polar conditions a ship can safely operate in. Internally at NSF, a proposal for the vessel characteristics defined by the PRV science mission requirements was developed and ultimately submitted to the NSF director and the MRAFC board. Unfortunately, this proposal was denied for a few reasons. First, there was a blue urban panel study underway and the board wanted to wait until that report was delivered to determine whether the scientific demand for a ship of this size and capability was sufficient. The board also wanted the OPP team to further the analysis of alternatives, or AOA, specifically to look at leasing options. And third, while these two efforts continued, we also continued to look at the operational costs of a PRV-like vessel and came to the determination that it exceeded our combined MVP and Ellen Gould operational budgets. And I'm sure you all know, but the Gould is the other research vessel that we operate. So, we started over. We then further explored leasing vessels that were either like the MVP or had some PRV-like capabilities such as increased ice breaking or birthing capacity. Unfortunately, this also led us to a dead end. We found that leasing vessels not only exceeded the combined MVP and Gould operational budgets, but did so on the order of about 400% due to the need for commercial entities to recover the full construction costs of building new ships. Further, putting the nail in that coffin was new Office of Management and Budget or OMB Capital Leasing Requirements that would have required NSF to front fund the full 30-year lease costs prior to entering into a leasing contract. So, that's around $2.5 billion that we would have had to start out with. So, we reverted back to the MRFC approach. We tasked our OPP Advisory Committee to stand up an ad hoc subcommittee to review all the science mission requirements reports developed over the prior decade, reach out to the science community to validate those requirements and provide a refresh that we could use to develop a new MRFC proposal. At NSF, we were very careful to moderate the size and capability of the proposed ship so that it would remain within our operational budget forecasts. This time, the resulting ARV was successfully allowed to enter into the MRFC process entering at the conceptual design phase. So, that occurred in June of 2021 and by September of 2021 due to the advanced readiness of the ARV design, we successfully conducted a conceptual design review. By December of 2021, the NSF director approved our advancement to the preliminary design phase and in January of last year, we started that new phase. The ship has grown slightly, but we remain confident that we are still well within our anticipated operational budget. Later this month, we are going to be holding our preliminary design review and if successful, we will be advancing to the final design phase. So, the current design of the ship is a significant enhancement over the MVP. From all the science community reports on the desired capabilities of a new ice breaking research vessel, there were three key elements that Mike hinted at and those were the significant cost drivers and that's ice breaking capability, endurance and the number of science and technical personnel the ship can't accommodate. So, those have been identified as our three key performance parameters which absolutely must be achieved. So, at present, the ARV is roughly 20% longer, holds about 20% more researchers and technical staff, there's about 20% more lab space, a whopping 80% more deck space, 40% longer endurance and a full 50% increase in ice breaking capacity. This new ship will be a massive increase in our overall science support capabilities. Now, to give you all a better sense of for the structural capabilities of the new ship, this slide shows a side by side comparison of our existing capabilities, the MVP compared to those of the new ARV. So, the image on the left, these are ice conditions from July 1st of last year showing PC4 or 5 restrictions which is comparable to the MVP's ice breaking capabilities. The light green areas are regions of ice that the MVP could readily navigate through. The orange is more difficult but doable and the areas in red indicate those regions where a PC4 or 5 vessel like the MVP just can't get through. The image on the right was also taken from July 1st of last year but shows a polar class 3 accessible areas which the ARV is being designed to. So, there are no red regions meaning the new ship will be able to access most regions even in the middle of winter. This includes the Plain Island and Thwaites Glacier regions, the Larsen ice shelf and essentially the entire Eastern Antarctic. One of the things the ARV design team did was develop a design reference mission which helped the designer to fully understand all the different requirements and operating environments and tempos the ship would need to be to operate within. Now, we looked at a few different scenarios including the three regions identified in the previous slide. So, the Waddell along the Larsen ice shelf as well as the Eastern Antarctic. With a lot of input from NSF scientific and technical staff, members of our science advisory subcommittee and through reaching out to members of the research community, we ultimately settled on a design reference mission based upon a historic 62-day MVP cruise to the Thwaites Glacier but we expanded that to reflect the three key performance parameters of the new ARV. So, again, independent ice breaking at four and a half feet of ice at three knots and endurance of 90 days and birthing for at least 55 science and technical personnel. The mission was broken down by activity and categorized into average vessel operational modes like you see in the table on the top left. From there, a specific daily tasking broken out to replicate what a complex multidisciplinary cruise like this would entail. An example of that is shown in the table on the bottom left. The mission included ROV and AUV work, CTD ops, gliders, multi-beam, deployed moorings and arrays, coring, net toes, trawls, autonomous surface vehicles, drones, ship aquaria, deck incubators, science work boat operations. Basically, if it was a pizza, it would be a deluxe. So using this DRM, designers were able to then determine the exact sizing of fuel tanks necessary, the anticipated ice breaking duration requirements, the use of dynamic positioning and a whole host of data to be fed into the design to make sure that when constructed, this ship could actually accomplish a realistic complex mission like this. Now, just to give you all a general sense for the ARV's layout, the main deck level of the ARV is almost entirely dedicated to lab space or open deck working spaces. Starting at the stern on the left, we have our aft and starboard side working decks. Along the port side of the aft deck, we've got marine tech shops, a three-van, partially covered lab van bay, then changing rooms, and a dual entry staging bay. As you move forward, you enter the aquarium and wet labs and Baltic rooms on into the main dry lab and what we are calling our science operations center with a whole host of computers and racks and displays. Think of it as command central for all science operations. On the port side, we've got walk-in reefers and the hydro and biochemical analytical labs. Then continuing forward, you'd have your electronics lab and ET shop spaces for servers and finally, science stores in the bow. Other labs can be found on different decks higher up, including a neurological lab, marine mammal observation deck, UAV hangar. So a presentation covering the full design and capabilities of the ARV would take several hours. So I will just conclude the design overview by pointing you all to this website where a lot more info and details on the ARV's capabilities can be found. So from a project perspective, we are well into the preliminary design phase, which is the second of three design phases all NSF major facilities go through. This slide shows our full 10-year high-level schedule for the ARV project. All NSF major facilities are required to pass through several stage gates or off ramps before MRFC funding is awarded to start the actual construction stage of the project. During the design stage, there's the conceptual preliminary and final design reviews, which are the formal hurdles that the project must pass through, with each followed by thorough internal NSF review and approval process with the NSF director making the decision to proceed. Now, as mentioned, we've successfully completed the conceptual design review in September of 2021 and began preliminary design phase early January of last year. Our preliminary design review will start in less than two weeks and is the next stage gate coupled with the director's approval to enter the final design phase and the national science board approval to include ARV project in the FY26 budget request. The MRFC funded construction stage consists of detail design, construction, and then transition to operations phases. Transition operations would include outfitting and provisioning the ship, crew training, science trials, ice trials, and then, if all goes according to plan, we'll have file acceptance by NSF in early 2031 and start 40 years of service, which you'll note coincides with the MVP roughly reaching 40 years of age. So this is our plan. Now, just a brief word about costs. There are two elements that we look at when designing a ship. First are the construction costs. So what elements drive the cost of the ship? Certainly it's the size that plays a large role, but so do the number of personnel to be deployed and the endurance. So that drives how much fuel we need to be able to store, which drives how large the ship needs to be. Designing the ship to be a polar class three vessel means it needs to be double hulled. So figure roughly twice as much steel as a non-polar class ship, along with a myriad of other design elements to meet these stringent safety requirements. And unlike virtually all other foreign research ice breakers being built, we need to build the ARV in the U.S., which is simply more expensive. For you sharp-eyed folks out there, these are shots from an RC ARV currently under construction. The other element we need to look at when designing the ship are the estimated annual operational costs. So these include crew costs, as well as technical staff. Unlike lease vessels, the NSF will need to cover the costs of all the major overhauls, dry docking, etc., which are required to be completed at set intervals by the U.S. Coast Guard and the American Bureau of Shipping. Fuel consumption for a vessel of this size will obviously be an enormous operational cost. And if I can just throw in some final thoughts before I pass it to Jim, USAP vessels account for roughly 20% of the annual U.S. Antarctic program budget, and these are rising. The PRV and the leased vessel approaches were ultimately abandoned due to the inability to afford to operate the vessel. The current ARV design remains within our operational expectations. However, adding other significant design elements, such as a moon pool or full-sized two-helicopter deck and hangar, would drive the ship to be substantially larger than ARV, pushing the vessel back into the range where we just can't afford to operate it. Also, as I noted in the project schedule slide, we are on track to deliver the ARV around the time the MVP turns 40, which is roughly 10 years beyond the service life of most vessels. So there is a strong concern and risk that significant delays to the project could result in the USAP not having any ship at all to support science. So we really do need to stay on schedule. And with that, I will pass it back to Jim. Thank you. Thanks. Come on up, Jim, and just remind everybody to get your questions into the Slido. Thanks, Tim. So Tim talked about the three key performance parameters. So I look at the three key performance parameters in trying to do a major project like this as being the science. What is the science we wanted to do? So that's a lot of what this group is about. Engineering, okay, what do you need to build? How do you build it? How big does it need to be? You know, double hull, things like that that Tim referred to. And the last leg of that is the financial, which is, okay, is something that delivers the science and engineering, you know, basically something that has to be made out of unobtainment, namely something that you just can't afford. So I think I'm here to talk about the third leg of that. Mike talked about the first. Tim talked about the second. I'm going to talk a little bit about the third. So this chart is actually a chart that was made by Linnea Avalon, who was my successor as chief officer for research facilities. So it's a budget chart of NSF's major facility construction projects going back to 2017. What you see on the left, you know, I can just, I'm not going to go through all the acronyms that you may know what RCRV is, Regional Class Research Vessels. Ames is the Antarctic Infrastructure Modernization for Science, transitioning to Antarctic Infrastructure Recapitalization. So those are the projects that are now in construction in this major research equipment budget line. Off to the right is the ARV. We don't know the cost exactly, but Tim gave you the approximate schedule. So the cost gets refined as you go through these design stages, but if you look at this wedge here, it's of order 10 to the $9. So one significant figure. Well, it's probably a little better than one significant figure because we know it's one and not five. The line drawing that you see is actually the authorization for this account for the NSF in the Chips and Science Act. Okay, you may know if you follow congressional budget ledger domain that appropriations never make the authorization level. They're always underneath it. So the ship that Tim described that we're envisioning now is a budget challenge for us to construct in a few years and fit into this account. I'll also note that there are other communities out there that want things constructed. They're not shown on this chart. Okay, there was an astronomy decadal survey that came out recently. They've got big ambitions. There's a next generation high performance computer that's in the design stage in NSF kind of similarly in the design stage as the Antarctic research vessel. So this is the context we've got to operate in. Okay, looking at this authorization going up to 400 million and looking at a peak funding for ARV going up to perhaps 600 in the peak year, that will be a challenge for us to manage financially. So Tim, next slide, please. So this is, right, you're scientists, you like data. So I'm just showing data. This is what this account has looked like for the last 25, almost 25 years going back to 2000. So it has typically been in the 200 to 300 million dollar a year range for the last decade. It touched 400 at the time that we had stimulus funding. Okay, you all may remember the complete financial meltdown back in 2008. And that was actually, there was a lot of government stimulus funding. Some of that went into construction. Some of that went into NSF construction. So the Cikuliak is a research vessel that we typically use in the north that you may be familiar with there. But 200, 300 a year. So getting to that 600 number as a peak will be a challenge for us because ARV is not going to be the only thing in this budget line. That's not to say it's not doable. That's just to say that we need the science case that really justifies it. So that's what this group is about. You've got to be able to really tell us how important the science is and you've got to tell us what the choices are and think about some hard choices because, as Tim said, if you don't make, we, you, the community, the foundation, don't make some hard choices. We run the risk of not being able to afford the vessel that we really need to replace the MVP. So that's just something to keep in mind in your discussions. Next slide, Tim. So this is just a slide I made the other day. This is the total project cost of all of the NSF major construction projects that have been completed between 2010 and of order the middle of the next decade or the current decade. So the two that are scheduled for 2024 there, they're not finished yet. So this is our best current estimate of the cost. But you see an envelope there where the biggest construction projects we've done have been in the range of 500 to 600 million. And we're talking about a vessel here that's on the order of a billion, say on the order of, because I don't know the final number. Once you say a real number, then people start quoting it forever and you can never change it. So I'm just going to give you the one significant figure number. But again, this is not to say that a billion dollar vessel is undoable. But it's probably a good indicator that a three billion dollar vessel is not doable. And so that's just again, keeping this envelope in mind as you think about the science and priorities. So I'm going to close just to come back to the task which Alan showed earlier on. So next slide, Tim. highest priority science drivers. Why do we need this? Why do we can't can't we live without a ship in Antarctica? Well, I don't think any of you think that. But why do we need it? We don't just need it because we want a ship. We needed to deliver science. We needed to deliver some of the things in much more detail than what Mike talked about earlier. Next slide. We've got science, okay, that you want. What are the capabilities that you have to have to support those science drivers? So for instance, Tim talked a lot about polar class three and where that can get you where you can't get with polar class four and five. So let's do the science drivers really require that polar class three. We think there's a good case for it. But we've got to make sure that that case is made. We've got to not pretend that this is the only ship that's in the sea. Okay, we've got other vessels. We've got Secouliac. We've got the RCRVs. There are vessels that belong to other agencies. Okay, Tim mentioned the helodeck. I wasn't going to mention it, but Tim did. So I will. The Palmer has a helodeck. It's been used three times in 30 years for three vessel three voyages. Tim showed you the outline of sort of the ship. If you want to have a helicopter deck, it's got to be in the front. You've got to completely clear off the front for the helicopter. That means pushing all those labs, sorry, pushing them, not pushing all of the labs, sort of that Tim showed in the forward part back to the aft and building a big superstructure in the aft. And it also means you've got to have room for crew, which means you lose science because you've got crew for helicopter. You've got helicopter crew birds. So I just highlight that as one of the trade-offs. But for the Palmer, as I said, we have three helicopter missions in 30 years. Well, if there's key science there, we need to think about, okay, are there other ways that we can do that? And if you have to do it on this ship and it's going to make this ship more expensive, that's a risk to being able to do the ship. Last slide. A key thing here is if you think about the overall portfolio, not just the ARV, but the other vessels and capabilities that you think might exist, tell us about the gaps that none of them are covering because we need to understand how to cover those gaps if they're important. And it may not be that the way to cover those gaps is to load everything on the ARV, but it may be that we can do other things to help cover some of those gaps. But we can't do that unless we understand where the science community thinks the gaps really are. So that's a really important part of the charge for us is to help us with that. And I will stop there. I think we're done with the slides. We've got, you know, 27 seconds for questions. That's okay. We'll take a few questions. So thanks to Tim, Jim, and Mike for that very illuminating presentation. We do have a bunch of questions out there on the Slido, and we aren't going to have time for all of them, but we'll run over by a few minutes here so we can take a couple. So I'll just read them from the top down and we'll run out of time, but rest assured the committee will deal with all these questions later and with follow-up from NSF, I'm sure. So the first one is from Aaron Pettit online. Did the discussions about the example missions based on real cruises include the aspects of science that were cut before the cruise left the dock? The example you showed to Amundsen Sea had science objectives cut because the capabilities of the ship couldn't handle everything that was proposed. And then there's a little amplifying comment. For example, did the discussions about the example missions include aspects of science? Oh, wait a minute. Here it is. Sorry. I'm scrolling down. In particular, helicopter-based ice penetrating radar was one science objective that was cut from that cruise. Tim, can you take that, please? Sure. I'm just rereading it myself. I can't say that we looked at everything that was cut in addition to everything that was planned for the cruise itself. We looked at the existing cruise and then extrapolated on that or built on that for extending the research period and the number of participants. We can follow up with more on that later if needed. Next question is from Kim Bernard. Can you provide further detail on the oversight capabilities of the ARV, please? I think we're talking about winch wire, A-frame, side A-frame, et cetera. Sure. Whatever. Launching. I will, I'm going to probably get to be a broken record on this just to keep us on track, but the future.usep.gov slash ARV site has a ton of information, including all the different winches and overboarding systems we intend to, that are included in the design of the ship. Yeah. I don't know how to quickly go down and say everything that's going to be on the ship. Yeah, sure. I mean, we, well, there was a relevant question that didn't quite get to the top, but in our briefings, we haven't, we received the documentation of the ship, but there are a bunch of referenced reports on some of those detailed capabilities that we have not seen. Is it possible to see those? Are those public documents? I think, are you talking, so let's see, I'm looking at Jill McCuckey's question about the project memoranda for Helo and Moonpool. Those are on the future.usep.gov site. Those are public. Yep. So this is, this is all the references in the report we've got in front of us. Yep. Yeah. So that everything's there, if not, we'll, we'll ask. No problem. We have time for maybe one, one more. Let's see. They've been shuffling. From Ted Scambos jumped, jumped up further to Aaron's point. How would the ARV as proposed presently support the, sorry, my screen is jumping as people are adding things. It's a moving target here. That one just disappeared. Well, I see Ted's question. I'm happy to answer it. Okay. You, you got it in front of you. Yeah. Okay. So the question you can see it, it just jumped to the top. It's a moving target based on people's rankings, right in the slide. Yeah, it's like, catch that. Okay. So I'll just go ahead and read it. Further to Aaron's point, how would the ARV as proposed presently support the full intended mission? South Korean ice breaker was able to accomplish much more of its mission specifically because of helicopter operations. Aeron, the Korean ship is also a polar class vessel. So yes, the Aeron has a helodeck and it had a helicopter. It also has the same ice breaking capabilities as the MB Palmer. And therefore it also could not get in front of the Thwaites Glacier. The ARV with its polar class three would be able to get through. And so instead of having just a couple of people on a helicopter be able to access the area, we'd be able to bring the entire ship there in the full complement. So there's the trade-off. Oh, I apologize. Do you want to ask my own question? Sure. Until what point in the ARV development timeline can the science communities or this committee weigh in on science capabilities or needs? So the science community has and is continuing to weigh in on the design. The science advisory subcommittee that we stood up last year, early last year, which is composed of active researchers in the field participate in interim design reviews on the project. They look at the design as it's evolving. They provide feedback to the designers. They reach out to their colleagues to get input that goes into the design of the ship. Those recommendations are submitted to NSF and we pass those along to our designer who incorporates a vast majority of them. So this is a the science community is involved. It may be not particular members of not maybe not everybody on the phone or you know on this meeting, but your colleagues are involved. And the members of the science advisory subcommittee, all of their email addresses are on our ARV site. Go ahead, Jim, sorry. Let me frame the question, which is we've got a committee here. They're just starting. They're going to produce a consensus report. You're designing a way. How do those work together? Yep. That's your question, right? Okay. And I don't know the timeline exactly. So I can't give you the answer to that right now. Yeah, I guess I'm looking for like so, you know, the explanation you gave Tim is acceptable. You know, if the pathway for the science community on this particular call is to go to the website and contact, you know, your subcommittee directly, that's important information. I think the follow up is is, you know, you've got your your stages of design review is is PDR after PDR is this over? You know, are you still entertaining a cost versus science capability trade studies? The design continues. So the study that the workshop report that this group produces at the end of this calendar year will absolutely be fed into our design. We will look at the recommendations. We will see what we can incorporate and the gaps, the gaps identified we will try to address. Does that answer your question? Yes. Yeah. So even after preliminary design review. Yeah, so final design or two weeks. Yeah. But final design review isn't until 2025. So we are going to continue this design churn until then. But I'm going to take it that in things like the Hilo pad are off the table. You're you've taken those completely off the table, even if this committee were to recommend that is the top thing. The the moon pool is completely off the table. The Hilo deck, we are we are confident that we can modify our UAV, our drone deck to support the landing of a single light helicopter. So it wouldn't be able to go in the hangar. Probably wouldn't be able to refuel, but it could land and participate in joint operations with another ship that did have full helicopter support. So for example, if we partnered with the British and the Javid Attenborough, we could help get that ship into deeper into the ice than it can. And it can help us by providing the augmented Hilo support. Thank you. Okay, great. I think we're going to have to move on with the agenda. We're running a little late already. But thank you. And we will save the rest of the questions and get to them through the committee. Thanks for everybody. And it looks like the Slido process is working pretty well. All right, we'll move on to our session one, I'd like to welcome our moderator for this session will be Waysen Chen, speakers for session one come on up and sit at the table to be ready to speak. Some are online, however, in this one. Is that correct? Two minutes ahead of time, which is good. This session will be focused on the how solid the earth processes would influence the high southern latitude. Our first speaker is Christine Sidaway. Christine is a professor and the chair of the geology and the Colorado College in Colorado Springs. I think if we can start. Do we have sound? Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to begin the session with an emphasis on crystal geology of Antarctica that immediately underlies the ice sheets. Do I have control? I'm having trouble advancing. Or could you advance the slide, Miles? I'll begin with this slide showing the exposed bedrock geology of Antarctica upon the measured and modeled topography of the continent. The east Antarctic Cretan on the right is the old cold thick lithosphere. West Antarctica on the left represents a zone of crystal additions from convergent tectonics in the phanerozoic and these younger crustal materials are responsive and continue to be in a geodynamic state. The tectonic research for Antarctica falls into three broad categories of solid earth investigation. Next slide. The structures and provinces with, could I have the next slide, please? Within Antarctica are here shown with dark and light lines bounding geological provinces that have a shared origin and history. A second category is the setting for neogene volcanism and falting. Neogene volcanics in west Antarctica and at that boundary are shown in red. An Antarctic bedrock geology within the context of the Gondwana supercontinent, a majority of which can only be discovered by geophysical remote sensing. Next slide, please? We can see that three, circled in the last slide, there were three areas where province boundaries trend out to locations that the new research vessel may reach in the map on the lower left. Let's just use the slow speed operation areas as some of the distant locations where tectonic sutures and boundaries tend off Antarctica across the continental shelves. The details in the continental shelves are very poorly known. Next slide. Those boundaries trend into neighboring land masses that were joined in Gondwana. In this slide, let's start at the lower left and go around counterclockwise. Based on exposed geological relationships, the reconstruction of Gondwana continent is made by sparse rock exposures and rigid plate rotation. It may seem as though this is established science, but ongoing, quite innovative research is now using conformed aeromagnetic and satellite magnetic data to make refinements and use detailed magnetic anomaly patterns that show nodes of strong magnetic intensity and correlative structures. For example, in frame A on the right, the Greenhugna Cretan ties to mineral-rich Kalaharine Cretan in Africa. In the lower right, strong magnetic highs and lows spanned from Lambert-Groben area in Antarctica into India. Those are sites where we expect false domains to bound distinct areas of physical properties of the type we see to tie solid earth to other disciplines represented at this workshop. Next slide. The data aid the interpretation and interdisciplinary work of understanding variations in subglacial geology and topography that are affecting and will influence the ice sheets. For the near shore setting, there's great potential for discovery and characterization of crystal structures, specifically faults that localize glacial and isostatic adjustment and our sites of anomalies and heat flow. ARV capabilities for magnetic gravity and seismics are critical to new discoveries. Next slide. Variations in the quantity of heat producing elements arise from variable bedrock Antarctica. For example, irregular distributions of plutonic rocks that have high heat producing elements. Some of these are annotated in purple in the map on the right. Ocean access to new rock exposures such as a stiff island shown in the photograph on this side. And a study of shelf sediments with iceberg grafted class is a future priority because the scale of contribution to GHF from bedrock may be great. Next slide. Here is a new multivariate empirical model that brings in four components to geothermal heat flux. Next slide. The bedrock contribution. Next slide, please. And I apologize if I am experiencing a delay. The bedrock contribution here from Redding et al's publication show that heat production in the orange box on the lower left can span a wide area tens of kilometers or more in a second only to vulcanism in the heat contribution. In Antarctica from what is known some Jurassic granites have a remarkably high uranium content as indicated in the figure in the upper right. It is sufficient to influence the overlying ice sheet. Together with the heat production from bedrock units another aspect of solid earth processes that we seek to explore is crustal structures as fluid pathways which I will examine next. Next slide. Using sparse rock exposures in west Antarctica we have determined that there is an existence of high angle strip faults with a steep configuration that affects fluid pathways. This is supported by ever improving bed topography models that confirm the presence of strong topographic lineaments, a few of which I have annotated here. One of the most prominent ones in this diagram is the David crop which extends for over 500 kilometers. The near shore regions are mantle by thick glacial sediments so with geophysical remote sensing we will be able to identify locations where those structures extend across the shelf and have corresponding effects. Go forward two clicks please Miles. To the next slide. To the neotectonic component lithospheric faults are a solid earth priority because deep penetrating structures can accommodate changes and be responsive and going to motion when there are changes in ice sheet and extending thickness with reductions in vertical load that cause a crustal response. Fault reactivation or dilatant states may allow movement of fluids, geothermal heat or magmas upward. Next slide. Compartmentalization of hydrothermal fluids including magnetically derived fluids can cause even adiabatic upflow of fluids and heat to arise. Next slide. Those may effectively channel magmas as in this near shore example from western Marie Birdland where a basaltic neck that contains ultramarphic xenolus from the lower crust have been channeled along a fault. The lavas are around 1.1 million years which was a time of climate fluctuation of the Antarctic ice sheet. Detection of the features offshore by the new ARV will require some comprehensive geophysical survey capabilities. Next slide. Basaltic magmas of the type pictured in the last slide would be detected by magnetic gravity and would appear with characteristics imagable and marine seismics. So I would stress that for solid earth priorities these capabilities for the vessel are crucial. Next slide. I'll conclude my presentation by showing recent advances brought about by geophysical characterizations for a major part of the west Antarctic rift system that lies beneath Ross ice shelf. What I'm showing on the left is the Ross Sea embayment portion of the west Antarctic rift system. The Ross Sea shelf is deeply buried in glacial sediments. The strong trends we see are imparted by troughs formed by glacial erosion. The ice shelf and the marine cavity can seal the bed south of Ross Sea so the bathymetry had been essentially unknown as was the bed roughness. Locations of faults were known only for the Ross Sea for marine seismics. The Rosetta airborne survey across the grid shown on the left figure collected new gravity and geophysics over the ice shelf. On the right the gravity data were used by Tinto et al to calculate the sub shelf bathymetry and crystal structure. Their significant bed roughness calculated in a lithospheric boundary not previously known was identified. Next slide. Scaring forward further weren't used the bathymetry and bed roughness which range in depth from 200 meters in the white colors to 800 below sea level in deep blue to calculate the basement or we could say the bedrock topography that you brought in airborne magnetic data. This model gets at the region below glacial erosion and sedimentation into the crustal structure. The basement highs and elongate troughs show clear characteristics of fault control in particular beneath the Cyple Coast grounding zone where there are narrow deep troughs that exceed depths of 4,000 meters. The physical characteristics show these to be sediment filled basins. Next slide. Work by Gustafson et al at the grounding zone along Cyple Coast show that these do contain porous permeable sediments and groundwater and brine indicated with our interpretations of the locations of fault in map and cross-section view that are likely locations for conduits of geothermal fluids and circulation related to meteoric influx from subglacial melting. The numerous interpretations that arise from these discoveries made from geophysical investigations are of the type we anticipate for coastal regions that can be reached by the new ARV. So to summarize with my last slide, which is next, here are my points on solid earth considerations for high south latitudes. Last slide please. That fault zones may accommodate relative motion between adjacent blocks due to variations in ice sheet mass above the Earth's crust provide pathways for magma and magnetic fluids impound basinal waters and groundwater and bound troughs that link marine and glacial settings. Thank you very much and if there's time I'm happy to take questions. Thank you Christine. We perhaps have only one question. And again if you have any questions please add them to the Slido. Okay so we must move on. Thank you Weishan. Thank you everyone. Our first five five-minute flash talk is by Doug Wings. Doug is a Robert S. Brookings professor in the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. And one thing Doug, if you click on your slides in the zoom link you can advance them once we get them displayed. Yeah can I have, hello can I have my first slide? Okay so imaging, I'm going to talk about imaging the Earth beneath Antarctica and surrounding shelves and oceans and this is extremely important for studying Earth processes in the far south. Geology results from processes deep in the Earth and geophysical imaging seismic imaging helps us to resolve and understand many of the topics addressed by Christine things like the source regions of volcanoes and magma in the mantle, the estimation of heat flow for example. But seismic imaging the properties of the deep Earth is also important for understanding ice sheet dynamics and that is an aspect that I will highlight here today in my talk. So on the left you see that the map of seismographs across Antarctica these were deployed by myself. Most of them were deployed by myself and my collaborators over the last 20 years or so. But what you'll notice of course especially coming to the middle figure is that Antarctica of course is surrounded by oceans where we have no seismographs and so this really limits the imaging that we can do along the coastal and shelf regions in the far southern oceans around Antarctica. But we do the best that we can and so my student, former student Andrew Lloyd did a very nice imaging project where he used the earthquakes surrounding Antarctica to and in the past along those from those earthquakes to the seismographs to get image of the structure of the Earth beneath Antarctica down to about 800 kilometers deep. He did this work on a supercomputer using about 6 million CPU hours and the results are shown on the right some of the results. This is the shear velocity structure at 150 kilometers depth and you see the the blue colors represent fast seismic velocities which are generally very cold upper mantle. So we see that East Antarctica is a craton with very cold continental lithosphere beneath it. But then West Antarctica is very different. We see a lot of red colors representing hot upper mantle and that's what I'm going to be talking about here. Let's see. So one of the surprising things that we found in this study is that West Antarctica coastline is underlain by very slow seismic velocities in the mantle indicating very hot upper mantle conditions. And we can understand this better as the cross section on the right where we see that this hot upper mantle pools beneath the Amundsen Sea in an area where we have a lot of some anomalous topography and volcanism and then up wells beneath West Antarctica near the Amundsen Sea coast and Murray Birdland and there's indications of a plume beneath Murray Birdland also. This is an area where we have quite a bit of volcanism. I think Kurt Panter in the next talk will talk about some of that and so that's one of the effects of this hot upper mantle. But the implications of this earth structure for ice sheet dynamics becomes a little clear when we use the seismic structure to estimate mantle viscosity. The image on the left shows mantle viscosity at 100 kilometers depth that's estimated from the temperature anomalies that are determined from the seismic images as well as the rheology of mantle rocks. And so this is an estimate based on the seismic structure and it predicts mantle viscosity in this area on the order of 10 to the 18th to 10 to the 19th Pascal seconds. And this implies that glacial isostatic adjustment, in other words the uplift of the solid earth in response to the melting of the ice sheet should occur over a couple hundred years rather than thousands of years as was previously thought. Another data set that's relevant here is actual measurements of uplift rates from geodetic studies using GNSS receivers that we deployed as part of the poll net project led by Terry Wilson. And these are shown in here as these white arrows pointing up. And you'll see that this data set is dominated by just huge uplift rates in the islands and sea area where we also know that there's a tremendous rate of ice mass loss. These uplift rates, something like 50 millimeters per year are the largest in the world. And the only way we can get such a large uplift from the glacial isostatic adjustment is with very large mantle or very high or low mantle viscosity and a very large ice mass loss in this area. And this rapid land uplift has important implications for the future of the ice sheet and sea level, which will be more thoroughly discussed by Natalia Gomez in the next section. But just very briefly, the land uplift may reduce the effect of the marine ice sheet instability as shown here on this figure on the right. Basically, the idea is previous models from 10 or more years ago assumed that the land was stationary and didn't respond to the ice sheet. But now assuming that the land uplifts very rapidly in response to ice mass loss, then this land uplift will reduce the effect of the marine ice sheet instability in which the warmer ocean water goes underneath the ice sheet and enhances the melting and the destabilization of the Antarctic ice sheet. So this is one of the effects of this very rapid glacial isostatic adjustment and more modeling efforts are needed to understand the total implications of that. So I will close by just mentioning what we might need for improved imaging of the Antarctic coastal areas. Ocean bottom seismographs, such as this deployment we did on the LM Gould, ship supported helicopters to better instrument coastal regions that we currently cannot access. And in seismic systems for imaging the shallower structure, including things like air gun arrays and streamers. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Doc. We will save the questions for the end of the flash talks. Our next flash talk is by Kurt Panter. Kurt is a professor at Bowling Green State University. Thank you. Thank you, Weissen. Get the first slide, please. Thanks. All right. So I've been charged to talk about some of the volcanism within Antarctica. So the volcanism ranges from 50 million years, at least in the sun isoic to present times, and includes active volcanism. So this slide highlights the eight volcanoes that are considered to be active, including the southern most active volcano, Mount Erebus. The volcanism here, as Christine and of course, Doug were talking about, is related to the West Antarctic rift system. So extension within that and possibly a mantle plume, as Doug was talking about, for Murray Birdland. On the Antarctic peninsula, these are arc-related volcanism, including some active subduction occurring at the very tip of the Antarctic peninsula. And then host subduction and some very young volcanism that occurs due to a slab window. So those are kind of the origins for the volcanism. From a survey really of people, I was just in a meeting in New Zealand of volcanology and really looking at the community. These are kind of the main science priorities that we're looking at is really understanding the heat flux and flow that is the contribution of magnetism. The second one is really having a better understanding of explosive volcanism. And then, as you're seeing in the third one, really understanding that feedback or the interplay of glaciation with magnetism and volcanism. So as Doug was talking about, a lot of geothermal heat flow measurements have been made. These are mostly remotely sensed through seismic curie depths and so forth. And of course, the understanding of heat flow is very important to understanding the stability of the ice sheets as well as the stability of ice shelves. But most of this data is land-based and there is some petrology, volcanology relates to xenolus that are brought to the Earth's surface and we get thermometry from that. But there's been very few measurements made directly overall and then very few within the seafloor itself. So what we want to try to be able to do is really couple making direct measurements, systematic direct measurements on the seafloor that coincides with very careful mapping of the seafloor, which is of course very important for regard to the research vessel for this. The targets that we wanted that we think are very important here are of course the southern raw sea, southern southwestern raw sea, where we have high concentration of volcanism. We have highly extended lithosphere and crust and of course magmatic activity, most of the volcanism less than five million years. This is also in Amundsen and area coastline, we also see volcanism and fairly young volcanism, less than five million years. So the other, so heat flow is very important and getting heat flow within from the seafloor is very important for that. The next thing was explosive volcanism. So we have thousands of layers of ash and crypto ash within ice cores and these of course are from land-based ice and glacials, but we have very very limited sampling within marine settings. So again the capability of a new vessel would be to capture records within the sedimentary records. So this is going to allow us to understand better the distribution of eruptions, the type of eruptions that occur and of course the hazards that might be posed by eruptions. And one important aspect of the hazards is that we have several of these active volcanes, volcanoes, Mount Ritman and Mount Melbourne that are in the direct flight line of flights that come down from New Zealand and back and including commercial airlines that are coming out of Australia into Antarctica, do flybys and out Airbus and the McMurdo Sound Region. So part of increasing our record by getting more marine sediment record that would be from shipboard recovery would be to understand this frequency, understand the hazards posed to these bases as well as flight lines and set up, develop a monitoring system for these for these volcanoes. Eric, could you please wrap up your time? Oops, went back. There we go. The last thing real quickly is just the third main priority was just loading and unloading of ice on with regard to magmatic systems. And by loading of ice we complete, we increase compressional stress, we trap magmas beneath your surface. Those are allowed to to evolve. And then with release of ice or our retreat of ice we get the circulation and pathways opening up in the crust, which allow magmas to the surface. This has been studied a lot in Iceland. We have long periods of volcanism. We have lots of glacial cyclicity within Antarctica. So we need to understand these processes better in Antarctica and in shipboard aspects will be really important to these investigations. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Kurt. We will save the question after the last flash talk. Our next flash talk is by Stephanie Brechfeld. Stephanie is the Acting Vice Provost for Research at Montclair State University. Okay, thank you. Okay, so why is the geomagnetic field an essential science priority? This is already too far ahead. There we go. Okay, so the geomagnetic field is the surface expression of convection in the fluid outer core of the earth, which is driven by heat transfer across the core mental boundary and cooling and solidification of the solid inner core. Geomagnetic field observations and seismology are the only tools that are capable of yielding information about this inaccessible center of the earth. The geomagnetic field also has direct societal relevance. The magnetic field shields the earth from solar and cosmic radiation that would otherwise erode the atmosphere, which is hypothesized to have occurred on Mars after its dynamo shut down. And the geomagnetic polarity timescale provides foundational chronology for sedimentary records and for the oceanic crust. Okay, and so for all of those reasons, my community considers the geomagnetic field to be an essential priority. And our main focus is understanding the origin and the evolution of the geomagnetic field. That's a four-dimensional problem that requires globally distributed records so that we can reconstruct the three-dimensional geometry of the magnetic field at time slices of interest. So for example, during the initial onset of the geodynamo, before, during and after a geomagnetic field reversal, right, during an excursion, or doing supercrons. And the southern hemisphere and high southern latitudes in particular are a really prominent data gap. The figure on the left shows a compilation of full vector records of the Lechamp geomagnetic excursion. And excursion is an aborted reversal. And 41,000 years ago should be well within the range of piston cores in the in the ocean. But there's very few records in general and practically none at high southern latitudes. A full vector record means the core was oriented so that both inclination and declination are preserved. And that's necessary both as input into geomagnetic models and also for ground truthing the output of those models. The orange line and the blue line on the figure on the left is explained in the figure in the middle. Those are the latitudes where a phenomenon called the tangent cylinder, and I'll explain that in a moment, intersect the core mental boundary in orange and the earth's surface in blue. The tangent cylinder shown in blue in the middle figure is an imaginary solid that encases the inner core coaxial with the rotation axis. And it's thought that the spin of the inner core inside the fluid outer core imparts an additional helical motion superimposed on the convection currents. And that leads to enhanced directional and intensity variations at high latitudes, but we have no records to test those ideas. Antarctica contains just a wealth of untapped datasets that can answer these questions across the entire geologic timescale. And that's shown on the far right. The blue histogram is a recently published compilation of Zircon single crystal ages derived from the east Antarctic Cretan, and the entire Archaean is represented. We don't know when the inner core began to grow. It could be anywhere between 0.5 and 3.5 billion years ago, depending on what thermal model you use. Zircons that contain magnetite inclusions are excellent geomagnetic field recorders, and so Antarctica can potentially answer that question. The breakup of Gondwana produced volcanics, which are also excellent field recorders, those span the Cretaceous long normal supercron as well as numerous reversals up through time. And then, of course, sedimentary records provide continuous magnetic field recording over the length of those records. Sorry. Okay, so the needs for my community include increased ice breaking, so we can access sites of interest and accessing the tangent cylinder in particular means we need to get above 70 and 79 degrees latitude. We'd also like to see improvements in coring technology. For example, autonomous or remotely operated coring equipment that can be deployed underneath the Ross ice shelf and the Ronnie Filchner ice shelf again to access the tangent cylinder and also to access to indigenous rich sediments, which are better recorders than bioselitious sediment. We'd like to be able to penetrate through LGM diamond to get to the sediment underneath and again longer cores oriented cores. And the bottom two figures are a reminder to myself that underway geophysics and toad magnetometer should continue to be part of underway geophysics. And we'd like to be able to deploy field teams for terrestrial sampling. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Stephanie. We now have a few minutes for questions for the flash talks, panelists, and we will read out those questions that are coming in from the Slido. Just a reminder when you are adding questions to Slido, put them under the audience Q&A tab. There are also an ideas tab, but we will try to move questions over from the ideas to the Q&A section. A few questions for our flash talks. The first one, Doug noted that OBS deployments would be better image in the subsurface coastal and offshore areas relative to the existing land based seismometers. Can you provide some scale of what would be needed and how that would improve our understanding? Yeah, that's a great question. I've considered submitting such a proposal, but I haven't done it yet. Maybe I won't have time in my career. But anyhow, I would suggest something like 30 ocean bottom broadband long period ocean bottom seismographs deployed for about two years in the coastal regions off of Marie Birdland and the Elmins and Sea embayment area would greatly enhance our imaging of that region. We couldn't really, with current technology, deploy them in the ice covered areas, the areas that are ice covered during the summer, but a deployment further offshore in the areas that have open ocean during the summer would greatly help the imaging since there's no seismographs there for thousands of kilometers. Thank you, Doug. Another question for you. Are land based seismometers limited in some areas by access would improve access to relative, excuse me, oh, it just moved on me, would improve access to remote areas by the ARV change the approach to the distribution of land based seismometers specific infrastructure needs for this that effort? Yes, I mean, one of our goals in the pole net project has been to reach and instrument these coastal regions, but it turns out to be logistically very difficult using land based logistics, due to the, you know, distances and poor weather conditions and rough environment. So being able to reach these locations from the ship would be would be great, and that would also benefit the the geodetic studies that were using GPS receivers. You know, ideally this would be with helicopters. I don't know if other methods such as the over the side, you know, access to ski dues or something like that might be useful or workable on a smaller scale. One idea is to deploy the seismographs on ice shelves. We were very successful deploying seismographs across the raw size shelf and using them for deep earth imaging. And so that's kind of been proved to be a successful strategy. So I could envision deploying seismographs on ice shelves, the smaller ice shelves in West America, you know, from the ship. And those seismographs would be very useful also for some kinds of ice dynamic studies. There's all sorts of interesting ice shelf signals that can give us better insight into the mechanics of the ice shelves. Thank you. Question for Stephanie. Can you give a few more details about what you would gain scientifically from having access to land based studies or surveys? Let's see. All right, so I guess I can't catalog them all. But in general, there are members of my community who specialize in volcanic records of the Earth's magnetic field. Volcanic records allow us to, again, give a full vector record with absolute intensity of the geomagnetic field, where sediments only give you the relative intensity of the geomagnetic field. And so those members of my community need access to particular areas around the coast, where volcanics are exposed, and where we can bring heavy equipment such as heliomag drills, cooling water for the drills, and be able to, you know, pick up a large load of rocks and bring them back to the ship. Some of the areas offhand are fairly easy to access. South Shetland, James Ross Island. But then to harvest zircons, you can do that through terrestrial sites by sampling lateral moraines along ice streams. You can also do that by, again, penetrating a core into a diameter and recovering sandy gravelly sediment that way. Thank you. Thank you for the questions. That marks the end of the session one. We will now move directly to session two. Session two will be moderated by the committee member, Jamie Greenbaugh. Session two speakers, please come to the stage. Thank you, Waysen, and all the speakers from session one. This second session is focused on the interaction between Antarctica and global sea level. Our first speaker is Natalia Gomez. Natalia is an associate professor in the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University and a Canada research chair in ice sheet sea level interactions. Thank you. I have been tasked to discuss how Antarctica contributes to global sea level. I will begin by looking at why this is an imperative question to answer. This does not seem to be. There we go. Global population is concentrated near the coastlines. Nearly 10% of the global population currently live in low-lying coastal zones that are vulnerable to the effects of rising sea levels. This population is going to increase in coming decades as sea level rise continues. The cost of sea level rises substantial. For example, the cost of habitation along US coastlines alone is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2100. As we have heard today, it is important to understand how fast and how much sea levels will rise along coastlines in the future. The polar ice sheets are going to be the major contributors to future sea level. The Antarctic ice sheet in particular is considered a wild card in making future sea level projections. Sea level has been seen to be accelerating in recent decades. The recent IPCC report suggested that by 2100 global mean sea level rise will reach between about a half a meter to a meter depending on the warming scenario. However, this dash red line here is suggesting that if under a high emission scenario, there could be processes in the Antarctic ice sheet activated that could lead to substantially higher sea levels nearing the end of the century and continuing beyond that time frame. Even without this particular process included projections of the Antarctic ice sheet contribution to sea level differ widely in the literature, for example, looking at the ISMAP-6 predictions. It's important, especially when talking about ice sheets, to remember that what happens by 2100 is just the beginning of what is to come. So here we're looking out to 2300 and we're seeing that the ice sheet contribute several meters or more to sea level and we're really seeing the distinction between high and low end emission scenarios here as well. The sea level experienced along a particular coastal site can differ substantially from the global mean sea level values that we see so often discussed in the literature. And this is due to earth gravitational rotational and deformational effects. So for example, for West Antarctic ice loss, sea level will actually fall substantially near the West Antarctic ice sheet and then rise by progressively more at greater distances. And the peak sea level rise for West Antarctic ice loss occurs around North American coastlines and in the Indian Ocean. But this pattern of sea level change globally is dependent on the location of ice loss. And so we need to know not only how much ice is going to melt in Antarctica, but also where along the periphery of the ice sheet it's going to come from. Recent work has also looked at the rapidly uplifting solid earth beneath marine basins can expel water out of Antarctica and increase sea level rise in the far field. And we've also, this is an example of a review paper looking at the inequitable impacts of sea level rise. So it's important to notice that the areas such as coastal, such as island nations are experiencing the worst impacts of sea level rise now and will continue to experience greater than average sea level rise going forward. So sea level rise does recede shorelines and lead to land loss in areas permanently underwater. But it also increases the reach of storm surges and the impact and frequency of tidal or sunny day flooding events. So here is an example of that we're already seeing this happening along the US coastline. So here is a prediction of the number of days per year. Back in the 1950s we had a few days per year at these sites of flood events and going forward to 2015 we're seeing more like tens of days per year. And this is going to continue with continued sea level rise in future. So here's an example of projections from Charleston, South Carolina and San Francisco where we may see nearly daily flooding in these areas by the end of the century. So now we can turn to why is it so difficult to predict what the contribution from the Antarctic ice sheet will be. So here is a summary of the processes and currently available observations in Antarctica. And the Antarctic ice sheet is difficult to predict because it interacts strongly with the surrounding ocean, solid earth and atmosphere and processes and feedbacks are operating on a range of different spatiotemporal scales. Most of the key observables which are taking place around the periphery of the ice sheet where these systems interact are often buried under either grounded ice or beneath floating ice shelves. So for example we need to know the ocean circulation beneath an ice shelf to know how much the ice shelf is going to melt. We are particularly concerned about marine sectors of ice so these are areas where the ice sits on top of bedrock that's below sea level. These areas gain mass through accumulation, snowfall from above and flow outwards losing most of their mass through flux across the grounding line into floating ice shelves. And the loss of ice across the grounding line increases as the edge of the ice retreats into deeper water leading to a runaway ice sheet retreat event. More recently there's also been a marine ice cliff instability proposed that leads to these really high end projections that I showed earlier. And in this case if we break up the ice shelf through surface melting then we're left with an unstable cliff at the grounding line which will retreat across the marine basin. And in both of these cases we really need a detailed understanding of the elevation and conditions at the at the bed near the grounding line in order to better simulate these processes. Here I'm showing recent ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet over the last two decades both from grace gravity data and altimetry with gps uplift rates in the pink arrows in response to the ice loss. So what we see is that the ice loss sort of hot spots are concentrated around the coastline and also in particular in the altimetry data we see that conditions are varying around the periphery of the ice sheet. So we need to better sample these areas especially ones that are going to be current and future hot spots of ice loss but these are often difficult to access and maybe not near not near land-based base camps and so accessing through the ocean could improve our records here. Paleo records are also important for understanding the behavior of the Antarctic ice sheet. First longer-term records provide a context for the recent changes that we're seeing and in addition paleo constraints can show that show evidence of large scale retreat events during past warm periods which we have not seen yet in the instrumental record. Here on the left I'm highlighting a recent review paper that's showing a compilation of data that gives us a better understanding of the Holocene and bridges the record the instrumental record with the geologic record and we also need to bridge these time scales in modeling efforts. These kinds of paleo records are really important and useful for modeling efforts so as an example on the left I'm showing a study where we incorporated ice-wrapped debris records grounding line sea level and exposure data to gain a better understanding of the processes driving Antarctica during the last deglaciation and on the right is a study where we applied paleo sea level constraints during past warm periods here in particular we're highlighting the last interglacial to constrain the parameters the range of parameters possible for future projections. Glacial isostatic adjustment predictions also rely on ice history as well as earth structure as inputs where earth structure is typically derived from seismic tomography as we saw earlier and GPS inferences of the structure the viscosity structure and due to uncertainties in these two inputs we can see on the right that predictions of GIA associated uplift of the earth at present differ widely in the literature and this has implications for interpretations of records such as grace data and as we heard from Doug earlier we also have areas of very low viscosity in the coincide with areas of active ice loss in the west Antarctic so here as an example is a prediction of sea level change over the instrumental record and into the future adopting a range of different earth models and we see the viscous effects are coming into play on the timescales of melting from recent instrumental record ice loss as well as going to continue to lead to further sea level fall at the edge of the ice sheet in future and this can feed back into the dynamics of the ice sheet there so in summary it is imperative to improve Antarctic ice sheet predictions given the constant impact of ongoing and future sea level rise and a scaled up investment in ice sheet research is really needed to achieve this ice loss key processes and feedbacks that need to be observed are concentrated in a band around the periphery of the ice sheet and the surrounding ocean and we've seen that input from and collaboration across a wide range of fields is needed and so resources such as ice break ice breakers really need to be leveraged to be able to serve multiple fields at once thank you thank you Natalia we now have three minutes for questions which we'll read out from Slido what aspect of this research must must be accomplished in the next 20 years before 2050 and how will this answer be different in 20 years from now so after 2050 that's a big question okay I think that it's important especially to sample where we're seeing the most action now so really near the periphery in these hot spots of ice loss this will be able to better provide better constraints on on ice processes and and sort of narrow the range of projections from the Antarctic ice sheet contributing to sea level that was a sort of broad answer for a broad question but I'm sure that we're going to hear a lot more from the other speakers as well on this that was the only question in Slido so if anyone has a question they're entering I'll give you a minute to enter it now otherwise we'll move on I could sort of add to that that being able to understand both modern you know modern observations of what's happened recently or now and ongoing are important but it's if we're we're headed into a zone that we haven't seen yet with the instrumental records so it's also important to be able to get at paleo records in these areas which are also difficult to access because they're buried under under ice so for example a past grounding line record in the Ross Sea really helped us to be able to constrain what was driving retreat in that area over the last deglaciation which in turn can improve our predictions of glacial isocytic adjustment for example I'll type this in the Slido after I ask it that's okay so I appreciated in your talk how you used a number of observational tools and capabilities from institute to satellite and then also touched on modeling capabilities and infrastructure that you need to do the work that you just talked about I wonder in the context of this panel statement of task if you could attempt any sort of prioritization as to where you see some of the drivers of observational capability or modeling capability and needs yeah so I think we're we're about to hear more about this in the in the talks but um in particular understanding of sort of the conditions and elevation of the bed in these areas both at the location of currently retreating grounding line and future grounding lines is going to be important it's not just sort of the big picture of what the bed slope looks like but also the detailed structure whether there are bumps that the grounding line could get stuck on that's one of the areas that I think is really important that we might hear more about um and also understanding the the sort of fate of the ice shelves and how they're being melted from from below and maybe also from above um is yeah and I think it's sort of continue to to identify those as uh say the rest of the session all right thank you again Natalia our first five minute flash talk is by Ted scambos Ted is a senior research scientist at the cooperative institute for research and environmental sciences at the university of Colorado yeah uh thanks very much um thanks the national academy and also to the funding agencies that have supported research that I've been involved with and with a lot of colleagues I only have five minutes I think maybe the best way to summarize my talk is what she said because uh you're going to see quite a few of the same slides but let's run through them quickly and see if it helps with me saying some words alongside of them first of all you already saw this slide about the forecasted sea level rise and the fact that flying above all of the predicted sea level rise rates due to the three processes thermal expansion ice sheets glaciers uh that those um have an additional possibility uh coming from the ice sheets and in particular from Antarctica uh and these um marine based uh large glaciers I also wanted to point out that there is a past record of sea level rise at rates that would astonish us today up to as much as two to four meters per century so these forecasts for the end of the century reaching as much as 30 millimeters per year are not unprecedented in the in the geologic record what areas are losing ice um clearly these red areas that have lost elevation over the past 20 years are areas that are losing ice they're all along the coast of Antarctica but they're importantly along both the east coast and the west coast or excuse me east Antarctic coast and west Antarctic coast the main driving um mechanism for the mass loss that's going on is thought to be this marine ice cliff instability which may have gotten underway to the point where um it's irreversible and that will eventually see the west Antarctic ice sheet um disappear however um it's clear from several studies recently that a lot of the pace of that retreat and eventual um loss of the west Antarctic ice sheet is um within our control if we uh stop forcing the earth system in ways that lead to warm water reaching the coastline of Antarctica which I'll show in a second all of these regions of the red dots are areas that are bounded by excuse me that have a deep marine area behind them and are likely to retreat rapidly and as you can see from this map of the elevation of the bedrock of Antarctica there's large blue areas meaning below sea level behind many of these large glaciers all of these are likely areas that will inform us about the future of sea level rise from Antarctica um main reason or the main mechanism for delivering this warm water which is at depth not on the surface in Antarctica is um basically wind shear from westerlies and easterlies acting over the continental shelf break this raises the ice of picnals across that shelf break and allows circumpolar deep water which was always there it is warming slowly but it is now allowed to reach the edge of the ice sheet more frequently than it used to because of changes in the wind pattern those changes in the wind pattern are directly tied to the effects of greenhouse gas forcing and in particular the effects on the central Pacific so components of a warm deep outlet system we're not going to go through all of these it's complex it reaches across many many disciplines this is the kind of area that we want to get to with the new icebreaker and explore it in a variety of ways installing instruments both on the ice and on the ocean floor underneath the ice shelf um and also um and access is going to be the most important thing obviously that the ARV can do for the science community well this is what the area looks like and i'm telling you that not even a uh polar class three is really going to be able to get into this kind of area and yet there are key places on this kind of a surface and this is typical of the red areas that i showed in the earlier map red dots where we would want to go and what we want to learn from being in these areas in addition to these point places that we might want to visit for CTD CAS for ice shelf cavity moorings for drilling to deploy sensors at the grounding line where student flying high resolution aero geophysics eric padott mentioned that in one of her questions we're also interested in tagging seals in areas that aren't immediately by a coastline or someplace that's accessible to the um ship the seals can get in there and pinning point surveys landing on these isolated high spots in the ocean that actually do a lot to suppress the acceleration of some of these outlet glaciers this is the most recent map for the ice mass balance in a comparison experiment in b and what you can see here is that the ice sheets are contributing greatly to sea level rise but the future is quite a bit more extreme and we can expect that we're going to see this continue and that um uh and that the exploration that'll be conducted for the next 40 years for the next two or three generations of scientists by this arv will be the ones that are addressing the issues that come up during that period of rapid ice loss and i'll take any questions after the other talks thank you thank you ted our next flash talk is by adrian jenkins adrian is a professor of ocean science at northumbria university i think he'll be joining us on zoom uh yes can you hear me yes yeah okay um well first of all um good morning to you um and thank you to the the national science uh to the nsf and the committee and the national academy for giving me the opportunity to address the meeting and for joining remotely um so my task is to to spend five minutes just talking about the importance of the interaction between the ice shelves and the oceans and how we um probably might set about observing them do i have control of the slides yeah was that me i can this delay i'm sorry i might so this map of our task is kind of it's it's similar to what you've seen before it shows um actually in cyan it shows the thinning and the lowering of the surface so particularly west antarctica those blobs of cyan over pine island swains glaciers in the amazon sea sector that's the primary contribution of antarctica to sea level so that's what we're trying to understand um so the main driver is coming at the moment it's coming from the ocean um you can see there in the ocean plotted in the ocean in the colors there is the um it's the temperature of the ocean average between 200 meters and uh and basically a thousand meters or the seabed so that's actually the the level of the ocean they can access the region beneath the ice shelves which are shown there the floating parts of the ice sheet which is shown there in in gray so you can see a distinctive pattern there in that around most of antarctica those shelf waters are cold so the the edge of the continental shelf is shown by the um the solid black line um and the reason we've got one effectively a warm situation off-shelf and then um it's just like an advance yep there we go okay that's gone too far I apologize okay so essentially there's warm water all around antarctica no second but a deep water that's that red that you can see there um if you look below the surface then then you see just that warm that that warm water there's a cold layer on the surface everywhere on the solid ocean and that thickens over the continental shelf so essentially the reason those continental shelf regions are cold is because of the deepening of that surface layer um and that essentially shields many of the ice shelves around antarctica so wherever second by the deep water can get on the shelf it's kind of at the seabed um now in certain areas around antarctica um whether it's particularly the wetal sea and the ross sea are the ones that really um a prime example of this are other areas where the sea ice production is particularly strong then what forms is a water mass it's denser so it's the same kind of temperatures near the freezing point but it's denser than the circumpolar deep water and that's two important impacts so one is if that means if the circumpolar deep water can access the shelf it rides above this this dense water and so cannot it essentially has access to the cavern the cabinet beneath the ice shelves is largely blocked um it also means that where waters leave the shelf then they're dense enough to sink and that's the source of the antarctic possible water which contributes to the the lower limit of the global measuring and long-term circulation so these presses on the shelf are absolutely key to determining um ocean the global ocean circulation and the mass balance the antarctic ice sheet um now the regions that are particularly warm and are particularly worrying at the moment are ones where actually that surface layer doesn't thicken enough to block the warm water so the warm water is there at depth it gets into cavities um and that that means that the the ice shelves melt much more rapidly these are the processes that we're trying to understand absolutely to understanding this role of antarctic both in sea level and in the global ocean circulation um the main barrier to doing that of course is just the ice okay so wherever you go on that region the continental shelf you'll encounter some of the ice um or beneath the ice the ice shelves are completely impenetrable right that the ice 200 meters to 2000 meters thick you simply can't get there with however powerful the ship is so the key to observing these regions and turning what basically data deserts at the moment into something where we can actually observe enough to actually observe process the key processes is to extend the reach beyond the ship um and essentially so I can think of two ways of doing that one is um if you want to penetrate through these ice masses and measure beneath them then presently the only way to do that is put people on the ice and that requires helicopters so they've come up and though we've been discussed at length I'm sure in this meeting but you need heavy lift helicopters they're going to put gear and people on the surface if you're going to access from above and put in instruments that are going to stay there beneath the ice shelf either that or you've got a long process of technology development which may eventually get there with my partnership to get autonomous vehicle autonomous technology to do that then to get beneath the other way then beneath the ice um is to use autonomous for muscles by you can use remote operation and that's one but then you're limited by tether length so it's real full autonomy is the only way to really explore these the large of these ice shelves are basically 500 kilometers by 500 kilometers is a massive area which essentially is a data black hole at the moment and so the key is to extend the reach through autonomous technology um into the future uh let's finish off now just by commenting that although you know having an autonomous ability to reach beyond the ship autonomously there's an absolutely essential to get any to get any data data in these regions but actually having that capability allows you to expand what it can do anywhere and just multitask in and the ship so having that kind of technology which will come on board um is a way of essentially extending the return from any route that goes to these regions particularly these ice shelves is absolutely essential and that's what I wanted to finish thank you thank you adrian our next flash talk is by peter neff peter is is an assistant research professor at the university of minnesota uh thank you jamon and thank you to the nsf and academy for having me here i'll be talking to you about uh coastal ice rises and the potential for drilling and recovering ice cores to reconstruct uh climate ice dynamics in the marine environment right at the ice ocean atmosphere interface around the periphery of antarctica so this map here of course has ice rises outlined in red um these are essentially miniature ice sheets independently grounded and accumulating masses of snow and ice um that are ideal sites for ice coring and we have drilled some ice cores to bedrock on ice rises you can see these blue dots here are our cores that have been drilled to bedrock um and we have additional opportunities in critical areas to recover more of these ice cores the main challenge in this sort of work is that we do have to get on the ground recover the ice and return it to our labs back in the states um we can't do that work uh with with drones um there we go so zooming in on west antarctica so what I have here is a map of west antarctica on the right uh have a light overlay of the united states on here just to show you that the size that we're talking about here existing ice cores uh part of our our west antarctic ice core array our open circles and potential ice rise cores at the coast are the the filled circles so we do have a fantastic ice core array thanks to the work of colleagues um in the late 1990s early 2000s um but it does have this california sized west coast sized uh blind spot right where as natalia and ted and adrian have made clear all of the change is happening um so we're not sampling these low elevation uh coastal regions that are very different than the high dry interior of of the ice sheet and thankfully we have these ice rises that have been sitting there accumulating snow and ice and recording environmental conditions with the chemistry um that's it's attached to the snow um and all we have to do is get there and recover these these records the inset there at bottom left shows uh an overflight with ice thickness data that was collected by nasa operation ice bridge some of the only data we have over these ice rises to give us uh a sense of of what we can do here and a piloted martin peninsula for a very exciting reason i think it's the first place that we will be able to get on the ground uh as soon as next next year um an important thing here as well is is that our our waste ice core array was collected about 20 years ago so if we do recover new ice cores on the coast we don't have an existing array that's actually up to the present day one of the main things we do with with ice cores of course is put in context the extremes of any uh you know temperature or changes in the winds changes in snowfall of current decades put them in context with the longer record we can't do that without an updated record as well so we have a bit of of work to do in inland Antarctica that that is very very feasible um so my final slide here i just want to highlight what we can can uh reconstruct with these sorts of records so of course ice cores give us annual climate environmental information via chemical proxies for the last uh centuries to millennia at these sort of sites we also using ice penetrating radar can understand uh some of the past ice dynamics of these locations and use them as dipsticks for for past ice thickness um we if we were to drill all the way to bedrock at these sites you could get exposure ages for past ice extent borehole temperatures give a very direct perspective on any um any uh temperature trends in recent decades and better understanding the mass balance across these sort of features at a sort of kilometer scale is really helpful for improving our models uh climate models and the models that are used to to reconstruct uh surface mass balance on on a larger scale um so as i said i'm excited to be able to share with you that we are partnering uh with the the Crane Polar Research Institute in the RV Aeron as soon as next season um pending a few approvals and organizational details and that would allow us to get access to the first of these ice rices and for the first time collect a 150 meter deep ice core supported from a research vessel so we in ice core community are very much uh terrestrial folks that rely on on access traditionally uh via fixed wing or tractor support and so that is uh somewhat possible for these locations but of course access via ship where you can get right near any of these ice rises you have a lot of options for ice rises given uh the changing nature of of sea ice conditions um so again that ship with helicopter support is um is really crucial and having a refrigerated shipping container on on deck as well and just to give you a sense of of the time we're talking about so for the 150 meters that we've proposed for next season that's sort of on the order of one to two weeks of work very simple we've done it thousands of hundreds of times uh drilling ice cores in the past um if we wanted to recover a quarter bedrock you're looking at a much larger logistical footprint due to the the drilling fluid that we need and the the structures to support that sort of work but because these ice rises are also likely frozen to the bed you could be looking at records of climate extending back to the last glacial um but in you know locations that are directly adjacent to changing places like flakes glacier that sort of thing so thanks again for having me it'll take questions after thank you peter we now have about 10 minutes for questions we'll read out those questions that are coming in from slido right first question is for ted um i was surprised to see you attributed recent mass loss to mi ci marine ice cliff instability i was not aware that any of this loss was mi ci related i thought it was due to mi si at marine ice sheet instability can you please clarify yeah i did modify a slide from a paper that talked about mi ci i was talking about marine ice shelf instability i may have been spoken but no i agree ice cliff instability is possibly occurring on some of the greenland glaciers right now it's sort of a slow rate it's part of the thwait study to model the possibility of ice cliff runaway periods for the retreat of the west anardak ice sheet but right now that retreat that we've seen the red areas on the um elevation difference map are mostly due to processes closely related to marine ice shelf instability thank you um this is for the instable thank you for the panel what is the relative importance of maintaining a presence in west antarctica versus working in the data sparse east antarctica mr bro again uh this is for the whole panel so whoever would like to uh jump in did you say it again oh yeah yeah um what is the relative importance of maintaining a presence in west antarctica versus the data sparse east antarctica clearly both are important and over the course of the next arv all those areas are likely to be visited which is kind of why i wanted to show as peter also showed areas of interest all around the coast of antarctica let me expound on that places that are going to be very difficult to impossible to get to from the land-based logistics side because of crevassing or because of the distances involved and the the long logistical chain that's required to put a group of people out there with equipment to study the area or drill the ice stones yeah i mean i would add that our logistical infrastructure and our our history of expert field work is is strongly anchored in west antarctica as are a lot of the more pressing questions on thinking of the timescale of of sea level rise and ice sheet change so maintaining our presence in west antarctica i rate very highly and i think uh you know the work around the east antarctic margin is is perhaps more right for partnership with other national antarctic programs yeah i would also add that the understanding more about the east antarctic is really going to impact the longer term projections of where we're headed so what we'll see in the coming few decades is sort of the beginning of the fate of the ice sheets on longer timescales and that's really important to get at and we have very little knowledge of eastern antarctica right now so thank you um this question is specific for adrian i lost it um for future there you go for future deployment of long range AUVs that may be larger more capable and are and there are there critical ARV issues that we deal with now for example over the side or stern lift capability development excuse me can't read today deployment recovery appliances ship lab support facilities uh data communications technologies etc let me know if you need me to read that again okay so probably the um it depends on the model that's run so so the main the main thing you'll need is is deck space so i was impressed to see that that's actually that's uh it's bigger and and you're you're planning to have a large deck space and that's the key thing so um if if it's designed as a um there's something that's it's going to be there permanently then then i guess you'll need some of that sort of if you like garage space might get get used for a for AUV preparation and storage and then it's basically then it's just cranes to get them over the side um if it's going to be more of the case that the research groups are going to come on with their their um their platforms then again it's either cranes or they'll bring their own launch facility um and then the main thing will be just having a deck space to to do that and not get in the way of other things um so the larger ones in particular um they end up taking up quite a lot of deck space at times and that i think that's probably your main your main requirement but it looks like you've got that well covered i think thank you a question for peter are light helos enough or do you need heavy lift helos for the coastal domes um or any alternative technologies yeah thanks for that question i guess the quick answer is we'll see we'll try next season with light helos uh with the the korean polar research institute and uh i think it would be more if you do want to recover a court of bedrock when you're talking uh you know that many thousands quite a few thousands of pounds of equipment and ice that you need to move back and forth that might require heavier lift but um yeah for the scale that that i'm proposing to to begin with i think light helos are going to be great i think my general uh approach to to the coastal ice rises and any work out there i think for for many of us is a sort of a mountaineering style fast and light is the way to get things done because we know that there are many variables that play out there thank you peter can one of the speakers clarify through ice access needs into the marine cavity beyond helos i.e drilling access needs for instrument deployment well i can say something about this at the moment then there's all is done through hot water drilling on melting holes essentially and that requires quite a lot of heavy gear to go onto the ice and a team of people um i mean there there has been i've been proposals and people have attempted to develop be like uh almost like the filbert approach style thing a heated capsule which will melt its way through um and then deploy once once you've got through and that's there is a potential there for something lighter and perhaps more autonomous but i don't know if anyone has ever got anything like that to work um so at the moment it's a question of heavy gear and melting holes is the way is the way to get through um but possibly on the timescale of the of this ship who are looking 40 years away then then other technologies might might come along does actually answer the question yes thank you for peter are those drilling rates set in stone based on current technology do you think technology will evolve to increase rates in the future um yeah they're they're not necessarily set in stone there's not a large drive for for the you know adding maximum speed for ice core drilling but we certainly would work with with the us ice drilling program to convey that time is of the essence in these sort of places where where you have a lot of pressure from other but vessel timelines and weather and that sort of thing but um yeah so you can certainly would want to try to keep a deeper drilling to one one season and the shallow drilling we would try to work as hard as possible to keep it within sort of a one-week timescale of just get the core and get out with a few other peripheral measurements thank you what are the logistical logistic political limitations to doing this sort of work in collaboration with international researchers using one of the international uh Antarctic research vessels that can support helos um i if nsf can't add helos what can they do to support this sort of work um i've worked with several of the international and arctic programs um typically what happens is that um the international program has an idea that is similar to something that you're interested in working on and they can take a few us researchers on board or one or two and uh and add them into a project that they already had underway and what you can't really do is ask for a large project that consumes a lot of the resources of the ship in order to thoroughly investigate an area and support whatever array of interests the us side might have but the other hurdles are things like getting both nations to approve the field work and the timing i know i've worked with korea and their schedule for saying yes we're going to do that this coming austral summer is much closer to the actual austral summer than the nsf's and that makes it difficult to to plan and and uh and execute that said it has worked wonderfully well to work with the koreans who want to you know acknowledge that they've been good partners because they've been interested in some of the same areas for now yeah it's the difference of you know being a passenger with fantastic colleagues or being in the driver's seat and if we have helicopter capability for for the sort of work that i'm interested in you know we can can lead on that and i think that's really important to consider that marks the end of session two uh thank you everyone uh the additional questions that were entered in slido will be looked up by the committee and we'll send answers as we can we will now be having lunch um in the great hall back where we had coffee and and like breakfast earlier and then we will be back in the auditorium here at 115 so please be back seated ready to listen to presentations at 115 and thank you all to all of the speakers this morning stage but also any other tools and technologies or approaches that may be deployed from a vessel or through other means for example satellite remote sensing which i did not ask them to put that in there our first speaker is going to be matthew sigphreed matthew is a glaciologist who runs the mines glaciology laboratory larry's eight come on out okay so just to be clear i think these are ten minutes off right yeah eight with eight with two okay uh is this forward a mac yes cool hello thank you thank you for the introduction welcome back to the uh welcome back for the technology section uh and i'm a glaciologist and geophysicist so that's kind of going to color uh everything i say uh and we'll be talking about technology and technology gaps really uh looking at ice water ocean and solid earth processes uh and when i was thinking about the little clicker's not working well there we go uh when i was thinking about this as a geophysicist i think about you know the next 50 years this kind of long-term time horizon and the question that i kept coming up with is where actually will the coast be this is actually something we can't do well today so projecting this out for 50 years and thinking about the processes and constraining all of this change is a a big challenge with some key technological gaps and the really two coastlines that i like to think about there's the grounding line where the ice actually meets the ocean then there's the ice margin and both of these coasts matter a lot to the ice sheet and so i'll go through two um or sorry three uh processes that are kind of key in setting where the coastlines are in the the near shore processes that are related to these coasts the first will be solid earth earth motion which we talked about already a little bit today so that'll be great uh then we'll talk about a little bit about grounded ice freshwater dynamics because that really can change the the morphology of the coastline and it changes the um biogeochemical cycles that are happening at the coast in these pseudo estuary environments finally we'll hop out to the ice margin talk about polyneas and marginal isone evolution uh so i don't need to introduce any of this gia stuff because the best people in the world who do it already did it's actually a a little scary to follow natalia and dug talking about the solid earth uh but gia is really important we need to understand how the solid earth is deforming to understand where the coastline is even going to be and then the processes that are involved in the near shore environment we we measure solid earth deformation across the low latitudes all the time and we can look at an entire range of timescale of processes i just have one example from sushil adus milley uh who we know from that his Antarctic work but he also did some great work looking at terrestrial water storage changes in north america we have over a thousand gnss stations from which we can infer solid earth motion we can also look across coast uh at uh with geodetic observations uh to look at solid earth earth deformation environments looking at tectonic regimes going from sub aerial geodetic instrumentation to seafloor geodesy tools which usually is you know fixing a monument on the seabed and then coming back and surveying it in repeatedly over multiple years in Antarctica uh we've already talked about how we take these solid earth deformation measurements and it involves finding solid earth which is a problem in Antarctica we go to none attacks anywhere there's exposed bedrock we put a gnss instrument on it uh and then we wait and collect data until we can uh figure out what the uplift rates are if you look at kind of how many measurements we have uh over thousand kilometer length scales 1500 kilometer length scales you're talking about something like six um on the left we have the amundsen sea environment on the right you have the totten region you know we don't have a lot of observations uh and so this to me is one of these key technological gaps we have this process we know is important we don't have the tools to measure it at the scales we need it and so in the the seafloor sense looking in seafloor geodesy we're really limited by the ocean logistical capabilities these tools are to do seafloor geodesy are well established we have nsf facilities for this to develop the technology to deploy it but we need to get to these iced over areas we need to be be able to get there repeatedly to take these measurements over years and years to see what these uplift and deformation rates look like the grounded ice is a different story because i don't think we've ever actually taken a measurement like this underneath grounded ice we have the geophysical tools likely to take these measurements but it's we're kind of at the error thresholds of them so we need to work both on deployment strategies and the tools themselves to increase the precision we also have this problem where if we want to look at one point on the bed all of your surface instrumentation is effecting over it fine and slow ice areas but the places we care about are fast ice areas and so you need networks of sensors right to image one spot on the bed as all of this instrumentation is flowing across when we talk about networks of sensors that means we need to care about power systems and communication systems and we've actually fallen a little bit behind in that sense this is an example from a korean gnss deployment from a boat from a helicopter um and you know this is about 10 percent of the weight of the the pole net style gnss sites that we deploy we need to get to this level and then beyond it to be able to do these sorts of geodetic measurements at scale looking at um coastal processes and freshwater interaction uh we need to understand the the networks of rivers and lakes underneath the ground ice sheet because all of that flows out into the southern ocean at the coast um controlling the biogeochemical cycles um we know that there's carbon exchange between the sediments and the water we know there's micronutrient circulation john hawkings is going to talk about that tomorrow uh and we know that's teeming with microbial life we also know that these things change on on time scales from days and months all the way through centuries an active um lake underneath ice sheet fills and drains over you know six months to maybe a decade the lake will stay there for about 200 years and so we need to go to these lakes often to be able to instrument them we need to image a lot of these lakes uh to understand the diversity of the hydraulic system here's the logistical footprint of the two times we've access to sublacial lake and Antarctica in human history uh the logistical footprint looks exactly the same six years difference and this is all actually 2008 funded um technology so we've made no progress in advancing this technology and so we can't access the freshwater systems we need we need to increase the agility of these access tools the scalability so we can deploy it from a boat from a twin otter from a basilar this is all traverse supported at the moment and we need to increase the power efficiency because that's really what controls the size here uh finally looking the ice edge um as the oceanographers in the room know we throw a lot of tools at the southern ocean but all of them kind of generally fall into this snapshot science uh style so we take a boat out and we do see tt casts maybe we got a seal to measure for nine months maybe we got a glider for one or two years all of these processes are happening at depth but are continually varying there's huge seasonal variability huge interannual variability and decadal variability that we need to understand um and we don't have the instrumentation out there yet we don't have any sort of backbone network to to put these snapshot records into context we're trying to do year-round um information from space which is a huge advance these uh snapshot records are seasonally biased to when we can get there so we have some ability uh to combine ground and satellite data but that only works in some places not the most important places necessarily and so we need to uh let me get the next slide thank you we need to think about you know big observing networks to understand the ocean at depth at the time and space scales we needed uh I personally think that fiber optic technology is the path forward here it's proven in Antarctica both in the ocean and in subglacial environments and it's proven at low latitudes where we can use fiber for any number of science questions on the coast we've looked at you know whales and ship traffic we've looked at uh near near shore tectonics with fiber optics and so you can imagine that we can lay out fiber optic curtains for example in front of an ice shelf and start to look at heat exchange and close our heat budget we can look at salinity potentially with fiber optic cables we can look at basal melt rates with fiber optic cables they really enable a lot of technology but we're going to need to adapt it from the low latitudes to do this right and well the good news is we uh we have a great target right in our backyard at McMurdo station the Ross Colinia is one of these huge features where we can dig into these processes in detail and so we we have a great location to do this and we have the tools uh so it's just you know getting out there and deploying fiber fiber's great uh next slide please next slide fiber's great but uh it's not going to tell us everything if we're looking at frontal processes we need to look at the top the bottom and the front all at the same time in high resolution and so we need to extend these networks with the things everyone else will talk about uh which give you kind of that detailed process scale that we're looking for with that I'll just leave you with a little tour of what the latest subglacial lake logistical footprint subglacial lake access logistical footprint looks like and it's it's big and we need to scale this down thank you thank you so much Matt we're going to hold all the questions until the end but just a gentle reminder to drop your questions and into Slido we're continuing to use that platform so um uh I already said that yes sorry um our next speaker is going to be Chris Zappa Chris is a lecturer in earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University Chris entering the speed talk realm hello thank you for inviting me up here so so but I just introduced was a um uh technological capability uh UAV um and I wanted to start with that because it gives you a real sense of what potential capabilities are for working from ships in any kind of coastal area or on the open ocean so gliders have been around for decades now and are used in many um systems but drones have are really in their infancy in terms of the capabilities for doing science and with science payload so I wanted to talk here about a single capability with this this specific drone but you can apply this to many other drones of varying endurance or payload this one specifically um is a vertical takeoff and landing capability let me go back there so as you saw it takes off off the deck and then it flies has forward flight um it can laugh it can fly for eight at least eight hours typically potentially up to 20 hours depending on what your payload is I can carry payloads from say 15 kilograms up to 20 kilograms you can take off in 30 not winds off of a ship or land um key thing we're working on now is um to be able to fly in ice ice zones where you would have icing on the wings or the aircraft but we're also developing payloads where you have a modular base and you could add in whatever sensors you want and then that would snap onto the front of the aircraft we've already developed a number of payloads they're um essentially visible thermal infrared imaging hyperspectral imaging um direct coherence heat fluxes momentum flux um lidar scanning lidar systems radiation sensors all these things that we can use to measure um air sea ocean interaction um so just some of the capabilities we have right now with this aircraft or many aircraft you can have complete autonomous takeoff and landing from ships or from land and it's critical to have multiple multiple aircraft for continuous flight operations but also um you want to fly high for certain imaging and fly lower for for measuring fluxes or other properties um we have this high endurance flights as I mentioned a key thing is that we have a long range capability so you can fly 50 nautical miles away from the ship have all your data telemetered back to the ship in real time so you can retask where if you have a set flight plan and you want to retask because you see something that's very interesting um you can look at it in more high resolution or you can continue on it or just adjust to your flight path also with this long range capability you can send out a one and continue on with another one for another hundred you know another 50 nautical miles or so or you get to talk to surface vehicles or underwater autonomous vehicles um and as I alluded to it's there are a lot of pictures from the tropics but I've done this in Antarctica a lot of the examples later um but it allows you to go um send your aircraft out if you have a flight plan you can continue on that flight plan if you're really searching for something say a bloom an algal bloom you can send it out you can fly around and so you find it you find this nice beautiful bloom you bring the ship over where you are you send all your assets in the water put your gliders out you map it with the drone and we can look at um say here the ocean color and the thermal imaging impact or the heat structure the temperature structure from the thermal imaging this also leads to a kind of convergent um convergent mission which is part of this real-time mission control where you have all this data coming back there's a serious challenge with how to handle all that data so there's storage movement analysis visualization all happening real time so this is a future objective of this new paradigm for computational science or earth science in real time so it's going to take teams of data scientists and software engineers working on data flows from the UAV or the surface vehicles to the ship back to shore so kind of a whole team working on this simultaneously um and I'll just want to the last point here about edge computing where you can do there's a whole burgeoning field of working with data processing on board before you kilometer the kilometer data back so what do I see future capabilities um say five to ten years from now everything we see here we were able to do what I've shown so far and I see 10 to 20 years from now you can have three line deployments more you more um payloads as they things become more miniaturized you can have do more um studies specifically one right now that I didn't mention we have um we're working on a group revenue group emitter at LeMond to miniaturize it and potentially fly it from the aircraft and then 28 to 40 years from now you could have an armored armada of UAVs or autonomous aircraft carrier or a remote recharging station where you could have a number of these flying um simultaneously without enough without people or around or required so I just wanted to touch on a few things all these are are in the presentation you can look at later but it allows for precise tracks low levels of vibration so you can make great trivillage measurements low prop low profile aircraft allows for clean radiometric measurements um and the unoccupied craft we fly over the sea ice where it's not safe for piloted or aircraft emergency landings um so I mentioned that the some of the payloads we have the visible thermal infrared visible um near infrared hyperspectral imaging for ocean color ice type and no pond distributions for instance you can do radiation unobstructed ocean ice albedo measurements the um uh direct covariance fluxes lidar to look at ocean waves ice surface topography and the gravimeter that we're um using to measure eventually used to measure bathymetry and I'll just stop there for now thank you that's okay it won't bite all right thank you so much Chris our next talk is by Oscar Schofield Oscar is a distinguished professor and chair of the department of marine and coastal sciences at Rutgers the state university of new jersey thanks all right so I'm going to take a view of you know where we're going to be 30 to 50 years from now um especially since if 2031 we get our ship it's just under a decade out um and really my theme is building on everything we've heard so far from this morning there and really the future is going to be about sensor web networks it's no longer going to be about a single platform and if you look at the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean really fundamentally what limits us is access and so I think the sensor webs are going to transform that uh next slide so just to give you an idea of how much things change in 30 years that was my first cruise as a graduate student and we had this amazing technology called a fax and it sent us a sea surface temperature satellite map and it actually was fundamentally a change of how we went to sea and it was a unique opportunity if you look now and you go to breezy or some of these sites you can get ocean winds you can get temperature forecasts you can get ocean forecasts and so that's a timeframe we're talking about and so um I think it's important for us to sort of keep a big view because we're going to be able to have a much clearer view of the dynamics of the system and as an ecologist the dynamics drive the biological responses and so you can't solve one without the other so first off if you go to see what you need to do is have context and so if I'm going to a site and you know I'm obviously partial to the western order peninsula um where there's lots of land stations I should have a complete map of everything that's happened in the ocean a month prior to me deploying that's actually a doable thing you have land bases that will require international collaboration and those are landing ports for autonomous vehicles so this is a picture of a glider that was launched from Palmer station went up visited King George and then eventually went down to Rotheron was picked up by UK scientists there is no reason you can't now rebattery and send it back and maintain a complete backbone so that if we get people on the ship this amazing new tool we have a full context to maximize the efficiency of the science so we spent a lot of the time as I was trained to go map the ocean before I started my experiment I want the map so I can spend the entire time at sea doing my experiments so I think that's going to require a new culture it's been evolving very nicely at NSF with international partnerships and over the next decade or two I really hope that accelerates so that really we're leveraging all the resources in this remote location you know and then you embed postal maps within things like the so-com array of the bioargo system that is deployed and hopefully will continue you when you're on the ship you know if you're an ecologist really the first thing you got to do is separate out the physical transport of your ecosystem from the transformation within the ecosystem and solving the transport problem has been a fundamental hindrance for doing ecology at sea so I can go on a ship I can have a ctd rosette I really need 1020 mobile ctd rosettes flying again the cost of doing these missions is less than a ship day and so the ability for a ship to have a 500 kilometer watch circle adrian mentioned it before lunch I think that's where the future is so I know whether to go right left whether I sample on Thursday or Tuesday depending on the process I want to do at the same time we're undergoing a major revolution right now in sensor technology so this is a glider bay that's getting designed right now to do holographic imaging of organisms on a glider and they do this on bioargo platforms now with the uvp and so we can do biology physics chemistry in ways we couldn't and what I think for the future if a ship comes with an array of autonomous vehicles that can be controlled shore side you don't have to dedicate a birth on a ship for at least these kinds of vehicles smart ones like adrian was talking about you do need a dedicated team you know that the scientist now writes a proposal for a science bay not to go buy a glider and then you insert it and you got your mobile array at the same time the ship is an amazing tool and increase access we do flow through systems right now ucar does the pc o2 measurements that so many of us use but getting essentially the ability to add new technologies that are emerging into that system really is a heavy lift and it's not because people don't want to because it takes work it's people time but the sensors are getting better and so what I envision is I could write a proposal and have an advanced array plugged in to the ship system and with improved technology have it shipped back to me during the cruise you know because the bandwidth is increasing at the same time you know sort of imaging systems like shore base you know ship based lidar systems reflectance sensors will essentially tie us directly to the nasa and no arrays so we can constantly calibrate and improve the algorithms so that there's not a disconnect between agencies and algorithms we develop finally you know we should be taking you know we should be taking advantage of smart things you know evolution is an amazing process and if you want to find fronts close heat budgets and everything you know the elephant seals did it for us not all our ship cruises you know and so the idea of studying dynamic things requires that you put you know sensors on but you also increase the throughput directly to the scientists in the field at the time so that they can essentially mission plan around features they want and then sort of my final part is where you automated and this has actually been done in temperate waters where essentially you run several numerical models in forecast mode within that model you embed hypothetical robots you then hand over the flight control of the actual gliders in the water to the model you as a scientist sit in the middle you say I want to hit a river plume I want to hit a algal bloom feature and then you let the model essentially do all the waypoint commands so you can fly a swarm of things and not kill your technicians eight gliders will kill a technician that's about where they spontaneously combust at the same time you're getting real-time data simulation going in to allow you to essentially hone in if you're running for forecast models which one's giving you the best answer with the fidelity you want and it becomes a recursive loop to support the scientists in the middle and so I think automated sensor webs with this great ship vehicle as the mothership is going to change how we go to see thank you ask her I'm not sure that I want to know how you know eight gliders will kill your technician but I trust I trust you've tested it safely all right thank you so much ask her our next speaker is britney schmitt britney is an associate professor in the astronomy and earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell university oh nice to see everybody um so i'm going to spend some time talking about robotic under ice platforms and the many scales that we might use these to observe in the future so we've seen Antarctica obviously a number of different ways today but the point that I'd like to make of course as many have already is that you know about half of this coastline is comprised by ice shelves by really thick ice that's at the margin between the solid earth and the ocean it's a very very difficult barrier to make observations through and we have a surprising dearth of observations as a result perhaps the best studied of these regions now from at least from an ice shelf perspective is is the Ross and now thwaites we're doing a lot more work there too there's a couple of examples of under ice robotics in other places but i'm going to focus on kind of these two stories for today just as a to kind of maybe inspire where we may go in the future so this is a figure that Justin Lawrence put together as part of a proposal to work with the New Zealand program to start to get perspectives underneath the Ross ice shelf and so the Ross ice shelf is roughly a thousand kilometers across so that's kind of the scale where we've got really high resolution information from the front of the shelf where you can understand material forming in the plenia how that ocean forcing affects the front of the shelf we have one or two data points from underneath the ice shelf and the hot water drilling programs through A and Z have really made a lot of progress in that so that we can kind of move backwards and get bigger and bigger pictures about what's happening underneath the ice shelf relating back to the same process that Adrian mentioned this morning but the point here also is that at each place in this system there is a robotic observation platform that's ideally suited and those are going to change over the next couple of years and i'm going to focus on recent rov operations because that's our our work but i'll talk a little bit about where all of these processes can be explored by robotic platforms um so this is ice fin which is our underwater uh it's a hybrid a uv rov so it can do autonomous motions but it's tethered and it's done like that so that we can get through thick ice and so a lot of the time we use rov is thinking of them as kind of swimming eyes um but this one is really modular this is an ocean class a uv on a string and much smaller and modular so that we can change everything about the system in order to observe different processes in different environments and so it's long and relatively thin it has the same kinds of sensors it's got about 10 science sensors depending on how we deploy it similar to an open ocean a uv but it only weighs about 250 pounds and each of those pieces comes apart and so we can make it portable into the field and so i'm going to show you two different cases um the cold base and the warm base and why we'd want to see all of those together um and this is just the rov perspective on that so this is near the grounding line of the cam ice stream um as explored in 2019 and what we know is that those those crevasses so those kind of up and downs that you can see in this image here we're not resolved by the radar or by seismic and so the vehicle at first at first glance can actually resolve features that we don't see with the others there's also a lot of detail at the sea floor which we'll zoom into um and this is from an upcoming paper should be out in maybe three weeks in nature geoscience led by a phd student uh jesson morrence but we can also zoom in into the individual processes and get this kind of spatial awareness of what's going on underneath the ice so you notice these crevasses become real-world places i'll show you some zoom in data of that in a moment but you can see seafloor processes that involve bioturbation we can see the imprints of the of the crevasses where they used to reside on the seafloor and where they are now with the ice now lifted off of the seafloor so a lot of perspectives on the ocean the solid earth and the ice processes all in one view and then we can zoom in and look at how the spatial characterization of the ocean impacts what we see in the ice and so here we've got everything from pretty much stable um ice ocean interactions in balance at the very bottom of this which you can observe not just from the ocean temperatures which you can get from moorings but also in the texture of the sidewalls of the crevasse so we actually drove ice and up into the crevasse and what you can see also at the very top of this is the transition into freeze on at the top of it so we're actually observing the ice plump directly in in morphological terms in oceanographic terms and in glaciologic terms so now how about the worm base so this is the work that's actually coming out next week in nature from the melt project in itgc so what we did is we did the same project but at the grounding zone of thwates glacier and so this is all data from the vehicle and what it gives you is that heat budget in the water column so this is in terms of thermal driving so you can see the very warm water making it all the way to the grounding line of thwates but you can see the real importance of the very very fine scale detail right at the surface and that's the real story of the two papers that are coming out next week is that what you would measure from the ocean mooring and what you would measure and assume from the vertical melt rates is not the story underneath the ice we get something like five meters a year of vertical melt rates but when you get in situ you see it's actually maybe 30 or 50 meters inside of the crevasse and creating all of this topography along the bottom of the sea a bottom of the ice that's not resolved other ways this is just a perspective on how the melt rate changes as a function of the ice shelf geometry which is an unresolved parameter in everything we're doing so you think about a place like thwates where rifting and crevasses are becoming a major part of its disintegration well all of the processes that are accumulating in there from a glaciological process but also from an ocean influence perspective are not resolvable until you get in with with tools on this scale and so that's what underwater vehicles allow us to do and in particular what rovs allow us to do so they allow us to do things like this which is drive directly to the sites of the melting you can see this is basal ice uh losing particulates we've got sensors on there to measure the oceanographic conditions as well as oxygen levels things like that you'd need to understand for ocean and for microbial processes this is the actual arrival at the grounding line right here um where you can see the ice here and we're going to see it actually sitting on the seafloor back here this is the first in situ measurements of melting at the grounding line by a platform and so these rovs allow us to get in there and actually ask those questions here's just a sub sampling of pictures of physical processes that we can resolve by going into the environment so those are particulates uh in basal ice we think kind of uh accreted upstream that's perhaps subglacial water accreted onto the base of the ice shelf and now we're uh or sorry upstream of the grounding line that we can now observe in the ocean we've got basal ice processes and terraces farming in the lower and then you can actually see some of the interactions between materials being plucked off of the um off of the continent and then dragged out into the ocean so all of these are processes that become uh resolvable when you can make it to the ice ocean interface and so that's the story here is if we think about this in terms of the scales of robotic platforms we need and what their accommodations are like then this is what we're talking about we've got a thousand kilometer system here we have rovs that can really make it into these very very tight spaces and they have a place they have a role to play which is to get up to the ice ocean interface to get into lakes to get to these very tight constrained areas all of the water columns I've just shown you are not accessible by AUVs because of their keepout range if you're taking a five million dollar asset in it needs to stay away from the ice and so all of the measurements that are left in the last meter that's the melt rates that's the ice ocean interactions those can't be made by AUVs because of this idea of vehicle safety it makes it very very hard it's a challenge even in open ocean environments to drive autonomous platforms in changing geometric conditions so ROVs have a role to play in that and they'll continue to be enabled by what we do but AUVs are getting longer and longer I think we're at 100 kilometers or so is the longest under ice route um mission single mission um we'll probably be able to extend that but again we've got uh we're in the deep water environment with the AUVs not up close to the ice ocean interface and then we've got gliders also and all of these technologies can be improved by having networks of acoustic sensors that we can use for navigation underneath the ice so all of these can be enabled by um by future work and so just to touch on a few things we've got long range exploration goals and these will be really useful we need to fund technology development they need to be scientists in the loop of developing that we dot we're not interested in an algorithm we're interested in a science result and so that's where it's important to have engineers and scientists working together but I want to mention as well access and support because most of these critical observations really do need to get to the places and in particular the ROVs if we're drilling through the ice we need to be able to access those places it means scalable products it means scalable drills it means new thinking about mobility and access infrastructure so uh planes sea planes helos these kinds of things and uh more capable but smaller drill platforms sorry for running over thanks thank you so much it's great all right thank you britney our next speaker is maureen walzik maureen is an assistant professor in the college of earth ocean and atmospheric sciences at organ state university i didn't no no no worries at all never marry a poll if you ever want anybody to say your name right when i keep getting people changed wrong i'll just say it say it cover it um it's walzak walzak walzak which i'm sure is not correct and polish but that's my husband's family goes with that and we're gonna go with it for here um thanks very much for having me um my name is mo and i am an assistant professor at organ state university where i'm a paleo oceanographer but i'm not here to talk to you about research i'm here to talk to you about instrumentation um so i'm going to agree with britney that this is definitely the popular projection of the day um so so for those of you who study Antarctica i'm sure you're devastated to know that the ice sheets are grinding it away all right so the ice sheets are doing a very efficient job of taking all of that rock of the continent turning it into dust essentially or cobbles and then and then all of that material gets transported out to the edge of the ice sheet by the ice itself and then carried off over the shoulders of the continental shelf and actually thousands of kilometers away into the southern ocean where it's mixed with biogenic components forming these very very thick deposits so the seismic line that you can see there that's a seismic line from the raw sea and you can kind of see is there a is there a mouse that i can use no you can use your eyes you guys are all good at this right so so you can see that that contact line between the bedrock and all of those those linear things on top that's all mud and this is problematic for some people right in our first session we talked about how these these thick burdens of sediment on the shoulders of the continent obfuscate the beautiful geology and the bedrock geology underneath but one man's trash is another man's treasure there are advantages to these very thick sediment deposits and specifically if you know how to get at them they have very high resolution histories in them essentially they can be geomagnetic histories they can be paleo environmental histories at the ocean they can tell you things about the history of the ice sheet and its outlet glaciers there's a lot of opportunity there we just have to get to it and how do i change the slides the green oh nice no i did bad well anyway who cares my slides my slides do not have the production value of the earlier talks so so how how do we get this mud home at the smallest scale we we use hydraulically braked cores that sample the sediment water interface so this example here is something called a multicore there's a variety of different styles of those but essentially this is this is an instrument that gets you just the very very top of the sediment surface but unsurprisingly that doesn't super matter for research vessel design right we don't design our research vessels over the smallest things that we do we design them for the biggest the heaviest things that we do and so unless you're a very specific kind of gearhead the next five minutes are probably going to be among the longest five minutes of your life to keep you awake try and think about what you think the most central important component of ship design should be when it comes to overboarding handling systems everybody get that think about what what matters there even even that sentence was boring i'm sorry so this this here is on the on the large scale of technologies that are currently available in the us or not currently anymore i guess the ship's actually been retired this is the research vessel nor out of hui and if you look you can see this long skinny pipe running alongside of the ship it's red on the left hand side yellow on the right hand side it's got long skinny pipe on the left hand side there's like a big round chunk of what's led you'll have to trust me it's led on the top and so that is a jumbo piston coring system jumbo piston coring systems are the largest kinds of systems we can use to sample the seafloor from most platforms if you go above that right now in the u.s really your only option is the joy d's resolution for those of you who don't do mud that's that's a drill ship next slide i'm sorry i'm very capable person how do i yes thank you okay um so so uh in terms of what we can do with a jumbo piston coring system um the the uh pour that you saw on the the um nor in the previous picture that's called the long core um because people who we are super creative about what they call their stuff it's the long core you'll remember that right this ones you're seeing in these pictures here this is designed by the french um it's called the calypso core because it's more romantic there uh on the left we're seeing the um the calypso core on the rv pour pour which means why not why not build a big fabulous research vessel and on the right hand side you're seeing a cluster of pictures of the um at the system being deployed from the crumb prince hawken which is the new uh the new um norwegian research vessel so um you can see again the way that these things work on the left hand side of that quadrant four the red and yellow striped thing with the going vertical to the right just a little bit right and then down just a little bit and then right just a little bit more to the right yes that one that's right there so so that one there um that's showing the the core in its uh deployment and recovery orientation um however you obviously can't get 50 meters of core out of the core barrel when it's stuck like that you have to bring it up alongside the rail of your ship and so what the other pictures are showing on the on the right hand side lower right this one's simple right that's the thing coming up and there's a variety of ways to do it on the top in the crumb sprint hawken you can see that they have these hydraulic there's a little white l shaped things in the top those are hydraulic arms that like grab the core barrel and bring it in so you can work on it and take the four out of it on the pork wapa they have these little davids with chains that's the lower left hand side again but but essentially like these systems are very very simple um it's they have not changed a lot since the mid 20th century this is basically like the shark of oceanographic design um it doesn't it doesn't have to evolve much because it's very very good it's elegant it's simple it works scalable this is a good tool to have on your research vessel next slide but it's limited right so this this basically this works by gravity that the piston core is they punch into the seafloor just based on the weight that's above them in the in the piston core head that we call them the bombs even though probably that's not that's sort of incendiary but but yeah so that the piston core head it's the only thing that gives you weight into the bottom and if you're working you're an ice sheet where you have rocks that can be problematic so if you want if you want records from the shelf if you want to have a chance at getting through rocky sediment and if you want to have a chance to fully capitalize on those really high resolution records and go back longer in time right that the the converse of high resolution is that you have to have a really long record to capture a meaningful interval of time and as we go forward into the future we're starting to understand that we're going to have to go further and further back in time to capture the the climatologic analogs that are most relevant for what's happening now and so that means we need to go deeper into the mud and again right now in the us the the only capability that we have for doing that is the joint east resolution and the joint east resolution the future of that program is kind of in peril and so we actually have an opportunity with this Antarctic research vessel to turn the paradigm of under sampling the Antarctic on its head right now the Antarctic is was one of the poorest regions understood from occupations by the joint east resolution if we put one of these bad boys on it we have a chance to change that so this is what's called the mebo system and depending on how long this takes it seems like maybe it takes 30 or 40 years to build a research vessel it's actually honestly kind of terrifying this this project seems like it started when i was about six um but if if current technologies are still relevant when this thing comes off the line this is probably what we want this is called a mebo system they were actually designed in the us and then refined in germany they've been online for i think almost two decades now and so what you're seeing on the left there is a launch and recovery device a lars it's just like a ctd lars but much bigger the mebo is that big blue box on top of it it's about the size of a shipping container and this is being deployed in this picture through the stern a frame of the sauna in order to deploy this thing you have to have enough deck space for its control carrier so basically the way this you can think of this is like a coring rov so it's it's moved over to the side of the ship and then there are videos that describe this better than my hand puppetry but the thing is tilted upright and then lowered the seafloor in that orientation when it hits the seafloor those little legs come out and then it's connected back to the ship with an umbilicus an electromechanical umbilicus that allows it to talk to that control room which is one of those containers in the deck diagram on the top so it comes with an entourage it's like a star with its entourage kind of like the jason thing you you you sit in that control room and then you start steering this thing and it has two magazines of pipe one magazine of pipe is the liner the other magazine of pipe is the coring systems that are the cores themselves and so basically it spuds a hole puts down a pipe puts a core liner in that pipe gets a core recovers that first liner adds another section of wall pipe drills down another section with a new liner in it so on and so forth actually i reverse that so you you you put the whole thing in the first time core goes down pull out the core add a new empty core then add another liner there's a youtube video that does this better than i can but trust me it's awesome and you can get about 200 meters in the best cases which is what gets you about to the science mission requirements of of this platform so last we're almost done now um so what are your platform considerations then what do we have to think about when we are trying to design these these uh systems with the capability to deploy these systems on the ship so on the upper right hand here we have a i just snagged a diagram of a icebreaker the crump and talking to talk about this because i imagine that i but thank you yes with pointer um so so the first the first thing for piston coring is you need to have that long space along the rail and the ability to ability to work along the rail that's very important here because we don't have a moon pool in particular you also have to have to have a handling system that's capable of pulling things out to routinely 50 000 pounds and maybe up to 100 000 pounds so you need a crane that's really pretty heavy duty to be able to pull those piston cores out at the bottom for the mebo system so on the on the left this is again the mebo on the sona the mebo has been marketed all over the world now many many nations have one they're all over europe they're in in uh asia we don't have one yet but in order to deploy the mebo system you have to have space for that lar's device that has the the mebo itself you have to have space for its winch um what do you guys think at the end of this talk what do you guys think is maybe the most important design consideration when thinking about really heavy ops from this research vessel anyone very close it's related to the apron but it's even more basic very close getting closer your wire larry gets it all right so next slide i have an animation designed to your strength member um so that turns out the single most important thing that you can do is think about how strong you need your line to be and then make sure every other component of your system is strong enough to handle that and that means like your deck your stability your winches everything else has to go around that strength member in this case we really should be thinking about a strength member um on the order of like a two inch synthetic probably in terms of safe working loads and i also want to make one more point when i was reviewing this with the um the marsham group which is the nsf sediment coring group and we were looking at the specifications we noticed that the current specification for the a frame on the arv is um 30 tons and 30 english tons is not going to be sufficient to do this that's not going to work so we think there might have been a translation problem if you look at the specs for the mebo on the website it says 30 tons but they're talking about metric tons a 30 ton english ton a frame would be about equivalent to what we have on the armstrong ride class of ships so they're pretty small um and much less than we have on for example the atlantis so somebody pay attention and fix that that's it because you're free all right thank you maureen our next speaker is larry mayer larry is a professor and director of the center for coastal and ocean mapping at the university of new hampshire thank you pauler um i've been asked to talk about uh acoustic mapping uh in support of anardic science and i start off with a beautiful slide of peter been fjord in greenland and that's for a full disclosure i've never been to anardica i've never worked there but i have uh participated in these 15 or 16 expeditions in the high arctic and uh northern greenland and i hope those experiences are quite relevant i'm sure they're quite relevant um when i think about the science drivers i can speak for hours about reasons to map the seafloor and all kinds of for all kinds of different purposes but i think we've heard already today wonderfully from atalia from ted from adrian um the compelling compelling reasons that we need to map the seafloor and that's indeed to understand the pathways of the uh circumpolar deep water and how heat is transferred and transported onto the shelf and into the ice cavities and that's really what we need to do much better prediction of uh global sea level rise and we look at the area of uh wilf's land there virtually unmapped that only the dark green lines are existing mapping data and that's an area as has been pointed out before of a potential 12 meter sea level rise capacity and so we we have a compelling problem and it implies that we need to map and we know where we're working so it needs we need to have a mapping system on an icebreaker and a multi beam system to give us a complete map we have lots of icebreakers around that have multi-beam sonars on them we're very lucky about that globally if we look at the us fleet it's a little smaller and of course by time we see the calmer out of service and even the hilly we're stuck with whatever you guys come up with so it's very very important when we think about multi-beam sonars on icebreakers we have to be very careful it's not the standard multi-beam sonar most multi-beam sonars are put on a gondola beneath the hull you cannot do that when on an icebreaker so if we look at icebreakers and this is the odin the multi-beam sonar has to be flush with the hull which is difficult to do often behind the nice knife and after that it has to be reinforced with titanium rods and all kinds of special coatings and even at that it takes it takes a beam so we have to think about the special aspects of multi-beam sonars on icebreakers um but an icebreaker is just a single platform and we need to be able to expand that footprint we have large-scale mapping we do the entire area of wilk's land needs to be mapped and we're not going to do that in our lifetime from a single icebreaker and so we need to expand the footprint and we're making lots of progress now with the small autonomous surface systems that can carry mapping sonars on them that can work at high speed that have a very good seat caping keeping capabilities they can be deployed from the vessel if we have that capability to deploy them and we're also making progress with uh autonomous sailing vessels that can have much longer duration sail drone uh surveyor up there we launched from san francisco spent 30 40 days up in the illusions and came back to san francisco so we have this possibility for long-range missions and we have to keep track of course of where those are those areas are going to be ice free at particular times because these vessels will not be able to break through the ice you'll have to avoid the ice we're making tremendous progress along these lines the duration the vehicle i showed you there had a five to seven day duration we're looking at the next generation with 30 to 40 day endurance for some of these vessels and ranges like 2,530 uh 3,000 nautical miles and so we're making progress as we look to the years ahead with these force multipliers of autonomous surface vehicles and the beauty of the surface vehicle is it's constantly in touch with the satellite system we can use low earth orbiting satellites and have full situational awareness we can actually operate these often from the shore but as uh britney talked about um we really need to get under the ice um for a lot of the areas that are of interest um we've had as britney said the autosub has gone 100 kilometers or so uh under the ice um years and years ago a canadian company built the as a uv called theseus made a 200 mile mission under the ice and back so 400 miles uh back and forth um but this indeed as we look to the to the future it's going to be the real challenge to have the power of the positioning communication situational awareness truly autonomous sensors that let us operate under the ice and i think britney addressed some of that progress they are very very nicely um aside from the broad scale mapping again as was pointed out by adrian and others we have all the issues of understanding the processes at the ice margin and under the ice and this is a much finer scale mapping uh issue and there again we need to deliver our mapping sonars under the ice but here we will have uh as um i think natalia pointed out this morning looking at the geology and the sub-bottom uh processes to understand the history how can we get there we've made some progress alan mix and i uh working with swedish colleagues again in northern greenland shown the power i think of mapping and high resolution in this case uh peterman fjord be able to be able to look at the history of grounding wedges as they've retreated to understanding the history of ice movement in response to environmental conditions but also understanding in great detail the flow conditions here we were in peterman fjord again able to reconstruct the history uh recent history of the ice movements of comparing that to uh sherrod osmond fjord or where rider glacier is where the history of the ice sheet has been quite quite differently particularly the floating ice tongue of peterman uh has fallen back tremendously in the last several thousand years while in uh sherrod osmond fjord the ice tongue has actually blown or stayed stable and why is that difference well when we look closely at the weaponry we see that in one there was a deep passage of the loud warm atlantic water in to directly touch the ice sheet in uh rider or sherrod osmond fjord there was a second seal that prevented that and so again the important power of seeing that that fine scale with symmetry for understanding the processes and what's going on at the ice margin at the same time our soldiers can look at the water column two and with a multi beam sauna up in the upper left there we can actually see milk looms coming up along the ice face what we can get even closer and higher resolution with broadband so our soldiers that were developed fisheries that we've now adopted physical oceanography where we can see processes like thermal healing staircases we can look at the mixed layer the distribution of the mixed layer near the ice front and even seeing again freshwater freshwater looms coming out so we have this capability with the sensors to see what's going on at the ice front um very very nicely and the problem is it's dangerous to work though we're not going to send crude vessels right at the ice front so we're working on a generation of now small autonomous platforms surface platforms that let us get right to that ice front get high resolution sonar images with lidar with lidar above the uh the surface and with high resolution sonar looking at the ice front looking at ice cavities and again with the broadband acoustic sensors on them being able to look at the milk processes at the same time here again this is touching on what britney talked about we really need to get under the ice sheet though in a green land perspective 40 to 50 kilometers in an Antarctic perspective a thousand kilometers and so this is really where we have to start pushing hybrid vehicles rov slash au v's that can really allow us to move under the ice and also as we've heard time and time again some all have long-term year-round presence there which is going to be key and so i end up with what i really think the future may be we're seeing an evolution of autonomous systems that can have remarkable ranges we'll see four five thousand kilometer range on these vehicles but these vehicles can in themselves be then a platform for either an autonomous system or a hybrid system and you can launch them and again within a 40-year framework we were asked to look at i think this will be quite feasible the challenges of course are going to be again the bottleneck of communication for being served by low-earth low-earth orbiting satellites is going to help us tremendously but the acoustic communication through the water column too but again i think in a 40-year framework we're talking about we're going to make tremendous progress there and so to end up i think the bottom line is we have the senses and we know what to do with them at least from an acoustic perspective the key as oscar said and many other people said it's going to be access we need access to the broad region to the ice margin under the ice and we need year-round presence and in my mind even though we're supposed to talk about mapping it's really the platforms and the delivery systems that are going to be the key and i think there's going to be tremendous a tremendous feature in broadband excuse me in uncured platforms they offer us greater flexibility safety as long as we can overcome the problems of broad-range communications power position and situational awareness we have time to do that and i think we will thank you oh yeah all right thank you very much larry and to all of the speakers we are right on time and we have about 25 minutes for questions we can do both virtual and in-person and participants can input their questions into slido or if you're in the room you can come to either of the microphones and ask your question and if you're participating remotely you can also raise your hand and wait to be called upon so we'll start with a few zoom questions okay first one is for oscar what features need to be included in the ship designed to facilitate to facilitate future tech that you described a lot of the vehicles that i work with are on the smaller side so having small boats that can easily be deployed that's going to be the same thing that's going to enable things like looking at whales and animals so that needs to be facilitated there are smart sort of platforms you can put on the side of ships or you know on the back a frame for capturing vehicles of different sizes and different values and so you know if you have a Ferrari you're going to need a different system on the back a frame to pick it up as opposed to a glider which is like a ugo yeah where it's not worth that much relative to everything else so i think flexibility is the key but it's not like it used to be in terms of it if you can do the stuff you were talking about you can handle most of the vehicles easily thank you um all right for matt can you comment on how the arv in or existing vessels could support a seafloor geodesi network yeah great question um so there are a couple different ways to do seafloor geodesi right now you have things like genesis acoustics where typically you bring a ship back to survey it in but you can do that with gliders so a ship that's capable of sending out fleets of gliders to go survey in all of these monuments you put on the seafloor you can do it with just pure pressure sensors at this point and so you know we're talking about deploying relatively small instruments off the side so if you can throw giant floor drills uh to the seafloor you can put a little you know sonar buoy uh on the seafloor uh larry can multi-beam systems on icebreakers with the inherent design limitations of the hull reach the same resolution or other capabilities of mb systems on other ships yeah that's a that's a great question um there's no single type of multi-beam system everything scales with frequency the higher the frequency the higher the resolution but the less the range and so the decisions that have to be made there have been discussions with the other committees that are that are looking at at the equipment on the vessel is do you go with the lowest frequency systems which are full depth range with the lowest resolution or try to scale up and you try to find that sweet spot you can increase the resolution of a multi-beam system by increasing the rate the ray length and so the beauty of the ice breaker is that you have a lot of space on it so you actually can get from a lateral resolution perspective a relatively high resolution multi-beam sonar on deep water multi-beam sonar on an ice breaker and so it's the same as any other vessel our nearshores surface vessels have have have very high resolution sonars that only work in a few hundred meters or less um midwater sonars work in midwater depths um and for something like the ice breaker we'd expect a full ocean depth sonar that will have a very capable resolution and potentially a second high very high resolution sonar as it gets into the shallow water and the trick is finding the proper overlap of frequencies in the sweet spot so we maintain the best possible wherever we are there's always going to be a small compromise with an ice breaker because the ice windows that are necessary do limit somewhat how far out and they add to the attenuation so how far out the swap will be but for the most part the physics is the same and um there's been lots of thought about trying to get that sweet spot between a full ocean depth system and a second high resolution system so when you're in the shallow waters you can get that full really high resolution and still get maintained coverage and cost effective mapping elsewhere thank you next questions for britney these hot for these high basal melt rates about 20 meters per year is there a way to know if these are persistent over long time scales i.e. month to year what is the capacity for ice fin to make persistent observations near the grounding zones yes so those are good questions so um i should note so there's a like so there's two papers coming out ones from mooring data as well as prospectus kind of in the open ocean and so it's a grounding line mooring or very near the grounding line and then further out on the glacier tongue for thwates and so um i guess there's there's two ways to answer this one is that you know the the vehicles give you the spatial scales that we are unable to get otherwise the long term so far moorings mostly but also other types of deployable sensors are really the answer for these longer term rates and this is only for one particular part of the system so the important parts to think about is is the the takeaway is that you can see the difference in these two relatively similar types of environments between one thermal regime and the other and so having multiple to compare tells you what's really in all of these systems rather than assuming that we're all talking about one flat base ocean comes in this way it goes back out this way when really it's going along the coast and and there's these dynamic interactions and so that says that there is a spatial aspect to problems that we don't always think about because we've been limiting ourselves to one in two dimensional measuring techniques so that's a sales pitch i guess in terms of what the vehicles can do we are currently limited by the fact that we have to pull out of the water to recharge and go back down and so the rov approach is limited by battery length and the ability to recharge but that doesn't have to be so anything you're putting through the ice as long as you think about its dimension and what your access is going to be that can be mitigated so things like deployable either wired or wireless charging platforms there's things that we've now proposed multiple times to technology programs and not yet been funded but will happen those technologies exist for open ocean platforms they've enabled a lot of the surface resources that have been mentioned here and so those kinds of things can be deployed under the ice they're a little bit different but the other thing i forgot to maybe mention is that as we and i think it was really importantly mentioned in this last one is that it's access to everything and so for grounding zones which is this marginal environment that we know very very little about we really do need to go through the ice and get as close as possible and so your tether length is what's limiting you there in terms of amount of observations or the duration of those observations you'd really like to make those seasonal that may not always be possible so small vehicles can also deploy sensors and so we're trying to work on the kinds of sensors that we could send out but back to this need for communication if you were to melt through do all of your experiments but as a part of your mooring leave behind an acoustic calm system that you could communicate to deployed sensors that would give you your your change in time at a specific location rather than just the access point which i think is really the frontier for that and the other part i wanted to mention too is that the sea ice the nice thing about the small vehicles like this is that we can use the sea ice as a platform and so if we have the ability from an icebreaker to go out onto the sea ice and get into a marginal zone that would actually help us because we can then core through 10 inches or meters and meters and meters of ice you know just put in a small hole to access and get under and still do that high spatial resolution work so there's a lot of thinking about AUVs and their their longevity parking them under ice shelves for a long period of time i'm not sure you want to park a platform that's that valuable for that long they can certainly be able to do it but how do you recover that and then your emergency plan for vehicle safety becomes a real issue so the robustness of those platforms might be really it's this fusion of deployability and then and then using it to get these high resolution spatial pictures of of processes that we can't resolve otherwise thank you very much question for chris could the UAVs communicate with and collect data from instruments deployed on the seafloor that's a good question um you would need to have some surface expression probably to have just to limit other data back or um um yeah probably need to have a you need to have some surface expression yeah or you have some autonomous vehicle that is underwater and comes up to the surface do we get to all the slido ones uh there's still more but if you want to jump in please well i do i have a question um it's more of a philosophical question um i don't know who's online but um i was struck this morning by the comment of how to get input to the national science foundation outside of this report if you're in the community um if you would like to see certain capabilities added to the ARV or other needs addressed and i can't remember who said it but someone spoke to the fact that um there was a subcommittee or committee in place and their email addresses are on the website and i just have to say after 18 years in the federal government and being back in academia i'm so tired of people pushing me to websites to find email addresses of people that i have to write 18 page emails to to appeal to them to get a requirement on the table i'm not saying that's the wrong way to do it but i wonder if we could think about or what the panelists think about as far as pathways to get your input as far as requirements to federal or other agencies international partners for some of these requirements outside of the academies the reason i bring that up is i feel like we need more workshops in less conferences do you know what i mean um so i just i welcome any thoughts on that i'm not sure how to capture that as a requirement in our report for an open dialogue yes yeah yeah right because i i i think that you know you come to a national academy meeting like this there's lots of smart people you start thinking about things you hadn't before and too early we go back to our lives and can capitalize on it right you know given the post pandemic world with a lot of this virtual stuff figuring out new models for collecting the information i think would be awesome and i feel like people think the burden it's like booking your own travel it's like all the burdens on you to go and figure out all the research it's it's becoming that way you know and we have um somebody at the mic oh yeah i mean i'll just speak up because i am the chair of the committee that is working on the design team to try to incorporate on the community input so my name is the one that's on the really i'm here to listen i have taken a lot of notes i have lots of information and please you know feel free to contact me to come talk with me i'm here at all the meals and just want to hear everything that you talk to say i also have lots of information that if you don't want to pick through the website i can tell you there are so many documents that on our committee sometimes we're asking each other questions and the information is all there but there's a lot of a lot of paperwork to go through but if people want to know you know what are the different you know which is why are a frames what kind of small boots are do we have in mind please come talk to me i can show them to you i can take notes and get that information back and then also to remember i think at the time pointed out we're still really at the beginning i mean when you said preliminary it really means preliminary you know i already you know have notes from mo i think we have the wrong number there because i thought if i just looked it up it's 40 000 it should be 60 000 right so that's a kind of information about me and i'm sorry that if it happens then it's easy to get all of us but anyhow here i am so please talk to me no i'm great i greatly appreciate that you came forward i also don't think it's practical for everybody in the room to come talk to you for the because of your time right i mean you can't do that kind of lift and have your day job so i wonder sometimes how we best push information out rather than have to go pull it to ourselves um and it's not just the arv i find that on there many other things yeah i'm so i'm so glad that Amy yeah Amy got up and introduced herself and because i have to admit as an outsider for the whole process but somebody who's spoken to both committees i'm quite confused um and and i'm hoping that there's a mechanism that really rationalizes this and the biggest danger is what you brought up earlier this morning is that when you build a something like an arv it's it's it's a giant ball that starts rolling and at some point there are things that are immutable you know things get fixed and if that happens too early on without that input yeah we can end up with a product at the end of the day that that really is less than less than the best yeah no thank you larry and thank you for coming forward and saying that appreciate um sorry i'm sure we have other questions in the flight oh as well uh a question for larry could water column under ice shells be monitored acoustically by long-term deployments of multi beams on the ice surface or via boreholes as you showed with the ship mounted multi beams yes absolutely and it's it always boils down to the same thing it's it's a question of access and power um and and you know i i don't know if i should it i i've been wondering what you know the power problem is quite solvable um we just as a as a nation drifted away from from small and clear reactors long ago but um our competitors are now instrumenting their seafloor instruments this way and and i think we need to take a another look at that as a as a hopefully a very safe but potential source of of very very long-term power for some of our interests i think it could be a real game changer thank you question for britney does ice finn have water sampling capability uh yeah great question um yeah so ice finn has hopefully and vehicles like that the idea behind how it's developed is to allow the scientists to drive literally the boat uh or the sub in this particular case um and so the the science bay that the image i showed had a had a mapping sonar in it um that can all be swapped and so we have a water sampler um we haven't deployed it deep under ice yet because it takes space on the vehicle and so it really depends on what the science drivers are um so we've deployed it under sea ice and under the front part of the McMurdo ice shelf um we've done uh we have a paper in the works on a microbial imager a holographic microscope um that we've developed so a whole bunch of different flexible uses for those science packages so it's hard with very small vehicles to gather enough water samples but they're at least able to be targeted so this one um has six um like 100 mil capabilities so um it'd be nice to do nice to do more um but uh the through going through the ice is the is the biggest limiter for that vehicle thank you um question from matt regarding the fiber instrument instrumented network would there be any synergies with the proposed McMurdo New Zealand subsea telecom science cable that is looking at concepts for smart repeaters distribute distributed fiber sensing and branching units for future science cable extensions yes i mean it's all part of the same backbone i mean we're using telecommunications uh the cables across the oceans right now to do to listen to wales we can do this we know we can do this and so i'm imagining a network that basically ties into a subsea uh data transmission cable and then these you can put you know anchors on this for autonomous vehicles too and then they communicate their data they go back home to their base station they communicate the data out and so it's a multi-use network we the entire world is covered in fiber at this point it crisscrosses the globe except in Antarctica thank you uh quick and on ice fin and and there are rov's that lay cables that's how telecoms do it so sometimes but that's that that teeth you teeth you special um a uv that i showed you its purpose was to lay a cable on the under the arctic ice uh for mo how long is the um umbilicus on mebo um the mebo 200 ambilicus i believe is around 2000 meters uh with most most of these things it's sort of there's what comes off the shelf and then you can work with the designers to change that i think up to like 2500 or 2700 meters would be desirable and i believe that's possible with that system thank you from experience we know that autonomous vehicles in polar ice environments often need rescuing what resources are needed on the ship small boats helos others that could allow the ship to focus on shipwork and not spend too much time on rescuing uh autonomous vehicles and this is an open question so whoever would like to jump in britney's probably britney's probably more expert but but i'll make it i'll make a comment you know we were asked to look at a 40 year window and we're in such an early day with autonomous vehicles that they're unquestionably issues of reliability and i think you know as we start thinking about this longer and longer window we hopefully will increase the reliability tremendously we'll increase a number of the capabilities particularly communication and things like that and so there's no question but that's the kind of things we talked about are not necessarily realistic right now but but we have to take a look at that window in britain you have more experience than i i mean and we have we don't have any or i don't personally have any for doing you know open ocean recoveries but although really like record breaking under ice under ice robotics is done under sea ice because it can be it can be rescued easily right so we you can drive across and cut a hole as i mentioned so the ability to operate from the sea ice or operate get out to the site is is pretty easy and that doesn't need the entire vessel to go do it i also mentioned this idea of of acoustic networks or ways of communicating with the vehicles and that's really what's needed is things like usbls or beacons that you can you can put out because then it's like a breadcrumbs to get back to where to where the vehicle knows where it is because that's actually the that's actually the issue so most people are used to you know their cell phone and their constant gps access now put it underwater and now put a lid on top of it and have the entire geometry train chain you know we have autonomous cars that can't park in a place with constant right constant conditions like being monitored and positioning information and that's what we're dealing with is it's a really challenging environment to operate and so anything we can do to help with awareness or at least hey come home here's safety is really the biggest thing so i think there's two sides of it one is access and the other side is just building up some communications framework and the other thing is expectations build for robust conditions think about what the operations are going to be like sea ice is not ice shelf ice and so those types of things just need to be considered as part of the mission ops um as well so we think a lot about the technology and the people being separate that's something else i didn't get a chance to mention is that you know the technology doesn't get rid of people in the field there will be people in the field it just allows you to do different and more things with it i hear a lot of people talk about well one day just the the thing will go do it and then we'll be sitting on the side it's true from a certain perspective there's still technologists there's still scientists in the loop and there's still these parts of the operations that that we're very very good at and that our and our ability to react in the moment is very useful and so those things just have to be thought about from a mission design perspective from the beginning and if we if we think about the the losses we've seen of avies under the ice and the way the few that have been recovered have been recovered it's been with an rov and so i i think if you if you think about a kit that you'd have on board you'd have the the avies but you'd have a could even be a very small with hybrid rov that can then on a fiber go out and actually locate the avie again your idea of acoustic sensors around the proposition that is great but could actually attach something to it if necessary so i think there are ways to approach it but let's let's hope you get a little i think there's also like for open ocean where there might be distance involved it's about building behaviors into the robots where i'm going to go into panic mode and i'm going to go on conservation and then my battery storage could be two years you know um and so there's this and the other way i think when we move to these new technologies which give us a whole new way of doing things is you have to think about the dollar per data byte and so if a glider goes out and gives you 20 000 ctd profiles you know and you compare that to the cost of doing a single ship ctd profile you know it's a different way you scale the problem if you're talking about science outputs yeah i think that's completely true you mentioned the the vehicle the algorithm is part of it right um the biggest problem is that right now most things just surface right there that's the the default and so you surfacing can't be the answer so we lose things under the ice because they don't know where they are and so if we can get away to to talk to them um or at least to help let them know where they are and where to come to then that's really the that's really the answer all right i think we're at our time let's thank our speakers for this afternoon okay thank you speakers um so stay with me for one more minute we're going to take a break in just a moment um but we just want to set up the structure of the afternoon breakout sessions um before we go to break we're just going to have a look at the slide that shows you the organization of the breakouts this afternoon we're going to be using um sort of a workshop prioritization approach called the kj technique and some of you may have used this in breakout sessions before it's actually rather clever um it uses sticky notes that are both virtual and physical to identify group priorities um before there's discussion about the priorities so we'll spend the first 30 minutes in each session brainstorming or organizing our ideas as individuals and then the second 30 to 40 minutes clustering those ideas into priorities and then discussing those priorities and whether anything was left out that you may have noticed this morning we talked about solid earth and we talked about sea level and we spoke about science and we spoke about capabilities and those will be the focal points of the breakout sessions as well so first uh please decide if you'd like to participate in a breakout room session on solid earth which is related to the first session from today or if you'd like to participate in one on sea level rise which was related to our second session today once you've identified the session you're interested in please go to the room listed here that corresponds to that thematic area and please do it by the first letter of your last name so in other words um a through m under solid earth would go to room 118 whereas um m through z would go to room 120 okay and if you find you go to a room and it's super full virtually or physically and you want to switch that's okay so um if you uh sorry if you're a moderator facilitator or rapid tour you should report to your assigned room which is shown here a reminder that the rapid tour will be reporting back at the end of today's session their interpretation of the discussion to the full group when we come back in main session so please take notes and prioritize or highlight as best as you can and please everybody report to your room by three o'clock and then come back to the auditorium to report findings by 430 and I'm happy to answer any questions if that's not clear to people that clear everybody just wants to get to coffee I get it okay all right let's break for 15 minutes and we'll get to our rooms by three o'clock thank you everybody I'm going to resurrect us um first I just want to take one minute and acknowledge not just the hard work of the committee members especially Alan the co-chair but all of the academy staff who literally have done a herculean lift in a matter of months scripted us to the nines this week have done a beautiful job pulling together expert speakers you guys have done a fabulous job today um and just literally have kept us completely on track so thank you everybody okay now comes the fun part as if the rest wasn't fun already we will now hear from the rooms each rooms rapid tour rapid tours please if you're in the room um or virtually come sit on the stage you're up at the table I want to remind everybody that the report back presentations are not necessarily the personal ideas of the rapid tour nor the committee but rather the collective ideas from the individual breakout groups and I understand somewhat very smoothly some are a little bit more hairy so bear with everybody as we craft the message um so if um the folks from room 118 are here let me see I'm gonna abs check for a second who that was was it solid earth so so my understanding is solid earth did all the virtual and in person together in one general session yes okay and who is the report out okay come on up lucky winner so I get the time for all three groups yes you do right and I did try to pass this off on to someone else but I lost okay okay so all three of the solid earth groups met together and so and as a result of our padlet exercise we identified the following items as our major science drivers so our group is interested in studying the heat flux and heat flow beneath Antarctica and around the Antarctic margin so that includes the study of volcanism uh crustal geology um major tectonic boundaries and how they might conduct heat up to the surface and how heat flow impacts the base of the Antarctic ice sheet we're interested in the role of tectonic boundaries and faulting on ice sheet processes and routing groundwater our group is interested in mapping the earth's structure which includes its layers its rheology mantle viscosity which impacts glacial isostatic rebound rates and understanding the geodynamo okay so the ice breaker capabilities needed to achieve those science goals include multi beam mapping and there we're interested in looking at sea floor geomorphology uh past records of ice sheet interaction with the seabed for ice past ice sheet thicknesses for mapping the surface expressions of tectonic boundaries and also for selection of coring targets we needed a variety of over-the-side capabilities for sample collection for deploying instrumentation recovering instrumentation every all of the different things that you heard about in the talks this afternoon uh coring and drilling are high priorities for past records of the Antarctic cryosphere uh which as you heard from mo has impact on wire size winch and a-frame capabilities um underway geophysics are also high priorities for our group and we're using this very broadly to include things like gravity magnetics and sediment imaging while the ship is in motion seismic profiling using air guns and recovering data from deployed instruments such as moorings and ocean bottom size monitors all right and then we figure that ice breaking is a given so we put that off in a separate category but we'd like to reinforce that ice breaking is just a really critical capability to access challenging heavy sea ice areas thank you nice job pulling together multiple sessions that was great okay so uh i think now we're going to hear next from the session on sea level that met in the board room board room is that correct okay and um the rapid tour is natalia govans is that correct do i have that right okay oh you're gonna come up together okay sorry thank you okay so the main goal of this session was to focus on uh knowing as soon as possible how much and how fast sea level will rise and there is a discussion that a transdisciplinary approach is needed and sometimes it was challenging to order one thing above the other because we really need both uh so the science priorities uh were ocean heat transport there was some focus on circumpolar deep water here and the regions identified were the front of the ice shelf and ice shelf cavity the continental shelf break and the grounding zone and um there was some debate about the order of the above three and the suggestion that we should consider them all as one but they might need different uh field capabilities uh the second priority was atmosphere ocean forcing so both the modern and current um and as well as the paleo where the paleo included centennial to millennial timescales um and beyond so past warm periods in the deeper time uh which would come from ice sediment rock cores and then the recent long term so the 20th century especially and sort of pre satellite and pre and instrumental records uh the second the the next one was the fate of melt water so how is this feeding back on circulation whereas the water going uh where will this melt water be what will it be influencing in 20 to 30 years from now and then solid earth uplift so both the question will uplift slow or halt the grinding line retreat uh in the future and uh the point that every measurement of mass balance on the Antarctic ice sheet includes an estimate of uplift in gia uh that we currently um don't know very well yeah i'll hop in on the capabilities that we identified as priorities so first is the having multi-platform year-end access to sea ice um and then access to the adjacent continent price outcrop and subglacial records the ever-present discussion of needing helicopter access um next is the capability to to drill on the seafloor including the sort of beginnings of that process which includes geophysical surveys for site selection um and then very clear need for for ROV and other autonomous systems support um i think that captures much of what we discussed and then we sort of had the broader point again here yeah so at the end we came back to the question of what do we really need more broadly to know how much and how fast and for that um there is a need for not only more observations but sustained funding and support to be able to build the capacity to integrate all of these new observations with modeling and develop model capabilities to improve projections and this sort of funding needs to be not attached to short-term grants that are dependent on getting a high-impact paper out really quickly but really extra support that continues and is sustained on longer time scales yeah thank you so um i have a thought that we don't have to address right now but maybe after the next um repertoire report out we could do it i wonder to what extent and this is not my field the science priorities are the capabilities that are listed from each of the breakout groups actually address the science priorities that are listed do you see what i mean like are we if we were to give a comprehensive exam question to our graduate students and say here's your science priority what do you need observationally or whatever to address this would we have those covered yes you have your right right right yeah i was thinking well why don't why don't we let the next repertoire go and i don't want to lose that point because i think a bad assumption for all of us and i do it too is to assume something's there right and not listed okay sorry um thank you to um Natalia and peter over to url wilson who was um in the sea level session that met virtually and they did a fabulous job url uh hello um so i'll do my best to summarize a very lively discussion um we had in our session and so um we have um we organized our ideas into two separate themes of science priorities and um capabilities and much like the the previous session um one theme that can't one sort of resounding idea was the idea of how fast and how much um and and and and that we thought wrapped up a lot of the ideas we have in mind and so with regard to science priorities um we highlighted um broadly speaking ice shelf um ocean processes near the grounding zone as the the most critical and and within that um we there were questions that came up such as um you know very basic questions such as you know what is the basal melting rates in these different regions how do they vary over different timescales how do they vary spatially um what are um potential stabilizing feedbacks um for ice shelf retreat and so forth um and the one thing that um came up a lot is just the idea that you know there's so many unknown unknowns and um and there were there's a sense that you know there was just there still needs to be a lot more observations before we can really ask like very pointed scientific questions um and on the second point um ocean sea ice meltwater processes um this is really getting at um the the the processes that bring warm circumpolar deported to the shelf and um people highlighted um mechanisms such as um the potential feedbacks between polineas and um and um ocean heat loss and that potentially setting up a feedback um where um cdw can stay on the shelf and um and contribute to melting long term um and then the third point um was about the fate of east east Antarctica um this is something we didn't get to discuss too much but um there was a sense that for longer term for a longer term vision over decades um we really need to think about how to expand our observational capabilities in this region and so on the capability side um the the the the the the big theme that came up rose on top was the idea of um just better logistics and access to these regions and um and on the on the topic of logistical support um people we've had several people highlighted the need for better international collaborations and um how much of these collaborations are happening very on a very personal level where individual pis make ad hoc agreements without international partners and so there was a sense that there needs to be higher level agency agency level um communication and and collaborations to facilitate these international efforts um there was the lively discussion about the about the use of helicopters and how best to leverage them um on one hand everyone acknowledged that helicopters can greatly expand their capabilities or scientific capabilities on the ice um a human on the ice can do a lot more than any drone or rover um can accomplish um but at the same time um there um it was clear that these um potential platforms are underutilized at least on on the us side of things and um and one of the things that we thought that needs to happen is that these helicopters if they're if they're going to be utilized they need to be readily available so that ps can plan around them and and design their science around their around them being there um and also um there was a there um there's an identified need that we also need to take advantage of um icy move icy moon missions that are developing autonomous means of serving the ice and we can leverage that here and on on on um in Antarctica um and lastly there were a few things that kind of popped up that we didn't know how to um just place um in categories categorically speaking and one of them being how to use models and how to use integrate models in in both addressing scientific questions and also guiding observational um work um so I'll stop there thank you thank you Earl that was great um so uh I don't want to uh co-chair push us to the last minute today just because we have extra time but I have a question I I wonder if in the solid earth one um it came up any discussion about um like ocean worlds so to speak and whether there was a conversation about the relationship of studying this planet for analogs on other planets or other heavenly bodies any discussion on that cross fertilization with that yes oh yeah because we have online people forgive me sorry about that um there was one uh very short uh talking about uh how to utilize the geophysical uh infrastructure to detect the ocean water temperature change okay but nothing about like uh icy moons of other planets okay just curious I just am always trying to get communities to start thinking about working together in cross disciplinary fashion um so I don't know if there's any other comments anybody felt compelled to make what's really nice is in the science priorities and in the capabilities I see some common threads which is great um it's about integrating those and making sure they can they can be solid feedback to the academies and to to NSF and to the committee subcommittee looking at the ARB in particular any closing parting thoughts oh somebody's waving in the back yes oh sorry uh I didn't bring any of what you just asked for about about ocean worlds up because I was at a meeting about Antarctica but all of the vehicle stuff we showed was actually originally funded as development by NASA um through through its p-star program so um and that's the a lot of that development as well so it's definitely in all of this stuff okay and nothing oh that's great thank you other comments closing thoughts yes okay ocean world okay because I know a lot of uh some of the PR uh but investigators actually is using the Antarctic boundary to test some of the platform uh payers for ocean world okay no thank you for that any other parting thoughts comments all right so um thank you everybody I think that marks the end of our first day of our workshop a reminder to the um invited speakers and committee members to join us for dinner at six o'clock please plan on arriving at the building between 9 15 and 9 30 tomorrow morning as we'll start promptly at 9 45 and thank you everybody wonderful first day