 One, thank you for attending a day which I won't say it's likely our fifth, but I don't know how long it is, but my name is Victoria Sampson, and we're the Secure World Foundation. And we're very excited about this panel of experts in this topic that's developed to be given to us. And I'm looking forward to learning a lot from at least in the panel. I think I know most of you, but for those who are new to our organization, the Secure World Foundation is a private operating foundation that works for growth. It's a long-term sustainable use of space, largely because it is intensely tied to our daily lives, our economic activities, and natural security. Our interest in space is not just for its own sake, but for what it brings us so safe and health benefits on earth. As such, we also look at how space can be used to enhance human and environmental security, which is where our interest in agriculture comes in. The Arctic region is changing rapidly. Allowing for new government needs to learn more about this remote area, use of planned economic development, and build up it for national security and political benefits. However, there are challenges involved in ensuring that there is assured access to the Arctic. Monitoring the physical changes is undergoing, using the Arctic in a sustainable manner, and creating a stable environment for a region that could set off due to political tensions. These challenges have created a need for scientific and technological approaches to conservation, research management, and conservation, and governance of the Arctic region. Space-based assets are a critical element in providing information and infrastructure to develop some of those solutions. Space through remote and remote-centric dialects plays an important role in monitoring the changing conditions in the Arctic, both of those caused by human harm, and that which is a naturally turned, and enabling the management of resources there. The Arctic region also depends very heavily on space assets for pain-crucian and hospital-situational artists, primarily their environmentalists. Given that the Arctic State will serve the chairmanship of the Intergovernmental Arctic Council this April, and that the White House just last week issued an executive order to coordinate U.S. Arctic policy, which is currently closed down on the session, will examine the implications of changing Arctic conditions, what the United States and our national communities are, and perhaps more importantly, are not going to meet those challenges and create climate change conditions, and how space can help improve our understanding of and mitigate the disruption from those changes. So, when you guys came in, you should have all received files of our speakers, so I will skip right to our first speaker. Hi, thank you Victoria, and thanks to the Secure World Foundation for hosting this great event. I think I'm probably the only speaker up around the panel who's not a space expert who doesn't know much about the capabilities or limitations of space, so I get the easy task, I guess, of being able to wish for everything and say, these are all the things that we want space to be able to do for us in the Arctic, whether and not be constrained by actual laws of physics or any other limitations. I'll leave that to the rest of my panelists. But as Victoria said, the Arctic is changing, it's undergoing a great deal of change these days, and one of the big implications that is already starting to be seen from that and is anticipated to be even more so in the future, is the increased level of human activity in the Arctic. So, we in the United States government and Arctic countries around the globe need accurate and timely information to be able to make the right policy decisions now with respect to the Arctic, and having that information is critical. We need to know what's going on. And we already get a lot of information from space that we use for the Arctic. I know the ice sets that used to be up, and then Ice Bridge currently going now has been able to provide a constant record to track among other things, just sea ice extent in the Arctic. But there are many other things that we can use, or that we see that space can play a role in giving us this information on the Arctic. So, I'll talk about some of the challenges that we have in the Arctic now. As the sea ice extent continues to recede in the Arctic, it has made more accessible areas of the Arctic Ocean for everything from shipping, including commercial shipping, tourism, oil and gas exploration, even undersea mining, access to fishing grounds as we see fishing stocks look like they're continuing to move north as the water, the ocean water continues to warm or the degree of it moves north too. We don't know what those changes are or how to predict them very well and how to act on those right now. So, the more information we have about what is actually happening in the ecosystem and with respect to the ice, you know, the better. So, there are tremendous opportunities opening up in the Arctic with exploration, you know, shipping routes and mineral exploration. But there are also challenges that this presents. Part of it because of the increased human activity in the Arctic is a challenge. But even if there was no human activity in the Arctic, the challenge of being able to tell what's going on in the Arctic and react to it properly. So, the ocean, the Arctic Ocean is suffering the effects of ocean acidification more than other regions around the world, just like the, as the Arctic itself has been warming more than other areas around the world. The carbon dioxide that's in that area is more soluble and colder water and it has more of an, so the water in the Arctic Ocean is more acidic. We're seeing more acidification of the Arctic Ocean in that area. That's potentially affecting marine life, subsistence hunting in areas, migration patterns of whales, not by the acidification, but the sea ice extent. Polar bears and other marine mammals are also being significantly affected by these changes in the Arctic. So, I don't know if there's a way to measure ocean acidification from remotely to using remote sensing, but as in remote sensing has been used in many other areas by seeing symptoms of what happens and then taking those signals from those symptoms that happen, making inferences or determinations about the underlying cause for that. Maybe there's a way for ocean acidification to be more measured from space. As an example, it's something that's way out there that I don't even know if anybody has even looked at. But ocean acidification is one of the major areas of concern in the Arctic right now and one of the areas where there is not sufficient monitoring or observation terrestrially in the ocean to be able to get a good picture of what is actually happening. Other things that, there's types of scientific observations that are probably already being used from space and that can continue to help us and help us even more in the future. I've mentioned CIS extent trends, methane tracking, both methane that comes from thawing permafrost and methane that comes from any methane hydrates that might be melting and being released in the Arctic Ocean. Glacial melting, that's self. One of the things that we have used satellite tracking for now and what we need more information on too is the shipping traffic that's actually there. I guess I'll let Ron talk more from the Navy about how the Navy uses that. But I know that the shipping picture, the state of Alaska as well as the other Arctic stakeholders around the Arctic Ocean have told us that they do not have a good picture of shipping because ships don't always say when they're going to be transiting your area. And that is a significant problem in the Arctic because with an area that has so much ice and so many natural hazards, if the ship runs into trouble, you might not hear about it until they're actually washing up on the rocks. And then their oil bunkers have already, fuel bunkers are already burst open, you have a large oil spill. And in order to respond to that in the Arctic to get a ship up there or anything to even start responding to it, it may take days. So these are some of the challenges that we're facing in the Arctic. So anything that helps us with knowing what's going on sooner, better, more in advance is helpful. One of the other, in the title of the panel today is Sustainable Arctic Development. I'm the U.S.'s representative headed delegation towards the Sustainable Development Working Group in the Arctic Council. So we talk about sustainable development in our working group a lot about what is sustainable development? What does that look like? And it means several different things depending on who the person is that you're talking to. For indigenous populations in the Arctic, they don't want their traditional way of life to be changed by decreasing access to subsistence hunting resources. But they also want the right to develop economic wealth on their own lands. So they have this struggle where they want things to remain as they are for their traditional subsistence way of life, but at the same time they don't want anybody limiting them based on what they can or cannot do with their land. So in trying to resolve that inherent struggle in defining sustainable development and being good stewards of the land up there, we in the government want to make sure that development is sustainable, meaning it takes into account how all stakeholders can benefit from development in a sustainable way. And again, information is key into making those decisions. So that will conclude my remarks. I look forward to hearing from the rest of my panelists. Thank you. We have Claire Parkinson from NASA. Thank you, Ms. Torres. And thanks very much for having invited me here. I want to follow on Mike's comments in terms of... I do have some slides here that will show some of the results for the sea ice and ice shoes. So I'll return to the first slide. Okay, this one simply shows the extent of sea ice in the winter time, which would be March and then on the left and then in the summertime, September on the right. In the March case, it's an area of 15 million square kilometers. The area of the U.S. is about 9.5 million square kilometers, so it's well over 1.5 times the area of the U.S. Area of Canada is about 10 million square kilometers. So it's about 1.5 times the area of Canada that is covered by ice in the winter time. In the summertime, clearly, it's a whole lot less down to about 5 million square kilometers. Next slide. Because the ice extends over such a wide area and has many impacts, this shows four. The ice really is a strong insulator in between the ocean and then the underlying atmosphere. It also is highly reflective, so an ice surface will reflect most of the solar radiation that's incidental and sending that solar radiation back to space. This is hugely important in the climate sense. So because of the presence of ice in the polar regions, that contributes to keeping them colder than they otherwise would be. It also has impacts on many animals, the polar bear being the one that's most iconic and one that people refer to most often, but also wallaces and seals and Arctic foxes and all the way down to little microorganisms that live their entire lives within the ice. So the ice really does impact a lot of plant and animal species and amongst the animals that it influences would be humans. And we definitely are impacted by the ice. The particular picture there is just a schematic showing the impact on traveling through the ice where it can be hazardous if you're in a ship. Of course the ice helps us if we're on a dog sled instead of in a ship. So it's got many impacts and because of the fact that it has many impacts and that it spreads over such a wide area of the Arctic region, NASA started getting imagery of the Earth back in the 1960s and 70s. CS was one of the many variables that it wanted to try to figure out how can we best measure CS from space. Next slide. We can see CS easily from space with visible imagery. So Landsat takes visible imagery that's the kind of radiation that our eyes see and we see pictures just like what we would see if we were off in a plane. This is great as long as it's light out and as long as there are clouds in the way. Well in the Arctic in the winter time it's dark for months at a time and the Arctic also has a very heavy cloud cover. So therefore in terms of our climate studies we usually don't use visible data. We usually use microwave data instead. Next slide. With the microwaves, the microwaves are coming from the Earth system and so therefore sunlight is irrelevant. So we don't need light. We can get our measurements all times of the year and if you pick the right wavelength and the microwaves they can go straight to the clouds. So therefore we can see through the clouds together data at the bottom. The picture on the left was from the first microwave imager in space. It's from the Nimbus V satellite and it was a proof of concept instrument. It did a phenomenal job in terms of showing us that indeed we can find out something about sea ice and lots of other variables with microwave measurements from space. However, there were lots of missing data. It was a proof of concept instrument and it is nowhere near the quality of what we've gotten subsequently with the follow-on instruments. All those black areas are missing data and that's for a three-day average. The image on the right, which is more typical of what we get now, or the image on the right, you can see there's practically no missing data. There's a very little bit of missing data right smack at the pole and that simply because the orbit doesn't go exactly to the pole. But the image on the right shows the advance that we've had in the measurements through the microwave imaging. Next slide. At first, in the 1970s and 1980s, we were basically looking at the microwave data to try to figure out what can we see about sea ice. We saw a lot of things. We saw that it was a lot more variable from one year to another than people had guessed. But by the end of the 80s, it became clear that we also really would like to see what kind of trends we're getting. And by the end of the 90s, these trends had become clear. Not as clear as they are now, but still clear. The top image here shows a plot month by month of the ice extent in the Arctic from the follow-on instrument to the Nimbus 5 satellite. The follow-on instrument was on Nimbus 7. It was launched in late 1978. And so that's where our data starts here. And month by month, you could see that every winter, it's way more ice than the following summer. And that seasonal cycle is so strong that it does dominate. So if you only have the top picture, it's not all that obvious that there's a strong trend. We remove the seasonal cycle to get the bottom picture. And removing the seasonal cycle then shows this trend that is clear by the time we published this, which we published in 1999. The data went through 1996. And at that time, only three years behind, I mean, this was really pretty good for that time. Now, of course, we have data up till yesterday. So, again, advances in what we can get in space. This particular set of plots came out roughly at the same time as results from a group from the University of Washington where they took some remodeling to look at the thickness of the ice and they found a significant thinning of the ice cover. So here we've got this combination of NASA showing the retreat of the ice spatially, as indicated in the bottom plot there, and the University of Washington showing a thinning of the ice. And this hit the news. I think the combination of the two was very powerful at the time. And since then, many, many more people are interested in sea ice in the Arctic and also in the Antarctic. So we have, next slide. And indeed, the sea ice retreats have become kind of like a poster child for climate change now and just as illustrated by this cover of Time Magazine from back several years ago. And polar bears also have become kind of iconic in this realm of global warming impacts. Next slide. So we have continued to update our plots. This plot goes through the end of 2013. You can see that there were two really steep decreases in 2007 and 2012. And in 2007 in particular, for those of us who have been working on sea ice for many years, it was just remarkable how much that sea ice prompted. And some scientists and others at that time, 2007, this would be September and October of 2007, some scientists and others at the time were saying that we could have an ice-free Arctic a whole lot sooner than had been predicted previously. And some were even saying that might happen within the next few years. Then fortunately, in the subsequent couple of years, there was some rebounding. But then in 2012, it went down further and it's rebounded a little bit in the past two years. Next. September is the month that people talk about most. That's because that's when it gets to a minimum each year. And here are those two extreme cases of September in 2007 and September in 2012. You could see in the 2007 case, the upper left, that you could really do a very easy north-west passage, but northeast passage, you would still have some difficulties. And then you could see in the 2012 case that the northeast passage, you could just kind of sail through that really easily that year. There is inter-annual variability here. And last year, there were 10 recorded cases of ships that did successfully do a northwest passage last year. Next slide. So even though September is the month that tends to be highlighted, every single month shows a negative trend. This plots month by month what the trend is over the period since 1979. And you could see that every month is a negative. At the top of the scale is a negative 30,000 square kilometers a year. At the bottom of the scale is negative 90,000 square kilometers per year. Area of Maryland is like 32,000, 33,000 square kilometers. So every month is showing a decrease of ice that's kind of significant, a decrease per year. So next, we do update our results on a website, which is indicated down at the bottom there. And so this is one of the several types of plots that we update every week. And I just left it through 2014 here just so that you can see the black curve is 2014. You can see it's not as low as either 2012 or 2007, but it is well below the previous decades. Next. Another way of looking at it in a way that's particularly relevant for polar bears is the length of the sea ice season. And there too, we're seeing a prominent decrease in the length of the sea ice season. The primary result is the one on the right. And the length of the sea ice season is decreasing in every place where it's in the red, brown categories. It's increasing just a very few spots, mainly in the Bering Sea in the blue. The other two plots on the bottom left are showing what the same calculation gave when there was only 10 years of data and then when there were only 20 years of data. And you can see that as we've gotten more data to become more and more overwhelming the decreases in the Arctic ice. Next. We do exactly the same sets of calculations on the Antarctic, and this just is put in to indicate that in the Antarctic. Indeed, it's not the same results in the Antarctic. There has been an increase in ice. But if you look at the slopes, you can see that the slope to the Arctic is just way more. In other words, the Arctic is losing way more ice than the Antarctic is gaining. The Antarctic is roughly third gain versus what the Arctic losses. Next. And however, last year in 2014 there was press coverage on the Antarctic case because it reached its maximum from the satellite record period in last September. And so you can see that, yes, it's definitely high and that's definitely of interest to scientists. But it's really not relevant to the fact that the decreases in the ice are really important to the Arctic. And so sometimes people confuse the two. They say we don't have to worry about the Arctic because the Antarctic is going in another direction. The fact that the Antarctic is going in another direction doesn't mean you don't have to worry about the Arctic. Next. So now I've got two slides left that look at the ice sheets. And the ice sheets are particularly important because there is a whole lot of ice left on the Earth, but the overwhelming majority is in the Antarctic ice sheet and the next overwhelming most amount of ice left on Earth is in the lunar. And not ice in these two ice sheets to raise sea level by about 70 meters. So a huge amount of ice left on the Earth but mainly in those two locations. So therefore, since this has the potential of really being important to humans if sea level rises, the Earth can take it there. It's taken much greater sea level changes in the past. The Earth can take it. It's humans that are going to have a problem if sea level rises. So NASA indeed has for many years tried to make measurements of the ice sheets. And these are visible pictures, but in the next slide you will see some results from ISAT which Mike had mentioned in his comments. From ISAT on the left, ISAT does another proof of concept type instrument. It's a laser altimeter and it certainly showed that with laser altimetry you can get information about the ice sheets and this shows changes in the beam of ice sheet from the laser altimeter on the ISAT satellite. And as Mike said, ISAT's no longer up, but there's this bridge measurement program with aircraft measurements that's called ice bridge and it's bridging between the ISAT measurements and ISAT 2 that will be launched in a couple of years. On the right is a whole other concept of measurements. It's from the GRACE satellite which stands for Gravity Recovering and Climate Experiment. And it's really very unusual in terms of it's got two satellites tracking each other and it doesn't have any instruments pointing at the Earth and yet it's giving us information about the Earth. And the way that it's doing that is it's keeping close track of how far away these two satellites are and as one goes over a heavy gravitational field it speeds up. And so therefore the distance between the two gets greater and then as the other goes over that same heavy gravity field it catches back up again in terms of the distance between the two. So with that gravity information you're able to tell changes underneath and in particular the beam of ice sheet as the GRACE satellite has shown decreases in the mass of the beam of ice sheet. So I'll leave it at that. NASA is making lots of measurements relevant to the Arctic and basically we tend to emphasize the measurements and rather than making policy recommendations you are always told make whatever recommendations you want but if you make recommendations it's got to be as a private U.S. citizen not as a mass intruder. Thank you. Thanks. We could do a quick switch. In the meantime we can start with Charity Whitty from the Canadian Embassy. Hi, thank you for your role for inviting me to this panel. There we go. My fellow panelists have already mentioned some great applications that space can bring and there are effects that Arctic environment changes have on Earth and the peoples of the Arctic but today my remarks will focus on the Canadian viewpoint of where and how space and the Arctic intersect and the Arctic is a special place fragile yet full of opportunity both domestically and collaboratively and as its access increases so does its economic potential and human footprint how the region evolves is of utmost importance to Canada as an Arctic leader and is embedded in our national identity reinforced by our national anthem when we sing about the true North strong and free and access to space-based capabilities is integral to the safety, sovereignty, economic prosperity and way of life for Canadians working and living in the Arctic and indeed as interest gains in the region space will play an even greater role in its development. The four pillars of Canada's Northern strategy are ideal in helping to identify how space supports our national interests in the region. First of these pillars is exercising sovereignty over Canada's North. Much of Canada's vast North is a harsh environment and difficult to reach consisting of 1.5 million square miles an area about the size of the Indian subcontinent it makes up 40% of Canada's total landmass and is home to 150,000 Canadians that's one third of 1% of our national population. Canada is also a three ocean nation with two thirds of our 150,000 mile coastline in the Arctic. Of the 77 communities north of 60 degrees 28 cannot be reached by road or rail. While it takes a suite of land, sea, air and space capabilities to monitor this region the unique qualities that satellites play in reaching isolated areas shows how ideally suited space is to monitor, navigate and communicate. Basic requirements to support sovereign operations in the North. Remote sensing satellites and in particular synthetic aperture radar provide wide area detection of transits through the Canadian archipelago fishing or instances of pollution day or night in any weather. Space based automated identification systems or AIS further identify and track maritime vessels helping decision makers narrow down where to send air and sea assets. And global positioning satellites aid in the navigation of territory when inertial systems drip closer to the North Pole. Finally satellite communications pass vital time sensitive information in the event of a search and rescue effort or an environmental disaster. And while communication gaps still exist in the Arctic to support safety and sovereignty operations the government of Canada is pursuing solutions like polar communication and weather, PCW to provide access to secure highly reliable and high capacity telecommunication systems in this underserved region. It's true that space technologies do not replace humans and infrastructure on the ground but they are naturally suited to reduce gaps where physical presence is extremely difficult to maintain and provide critical support in conducting operations in the Arctic. Secondly is promoting social and economic development. In the fall of 2011 ANIC F2 a telecommunication satellite that serves the North encountered a software malfunction. While you and I likely did not notice 39 isolated communities that received phone service via satellite across none of it the Northwest Territories and the Yukon certainly did. The malfunction also affected internet connectivity ATM access, debit machines and even grounded flights. It goes without saying that assured affordable high speed internet access is critical to the economic development of the North. Where there are fiber and microwave while there are fiber and microwave options in a very few select communities satellite broadband of up to 3 megabits per second is currently the only limited option for the majority of our Arctic people. As an example of usage of this technology teleeducation and telehealth services can make positive impacts for communities who would not otherwise have access to specialist doctors or professors. Further weather data and ice monitoring from spaces providing information necessary to allow barges, merchant or cruise ships to safely conduct business and increase the economic footprint of the Arctic. Connecting Canadians no matter where they live is a fundamental reason why Canada became the third nation in space in 1962 and why we were the first in a series of communications satellite developments including mobile services and domestic geostationary communications. And as economic development increases through mining or hydrocarbon exploration, tourism or other innovative opportunities space-based systems are surely to play a central role. The third pillar of our Northern strategy is protecting our environmental heritage. Canada's North has fragile and unique ecosystems which are being affected by the impacts of climate change. It's important to understand and protect these environmentally sensitive lands and waters and space-based capabilities are playing a significant role in doing just that. The atmospheric chemistry experiment on Canada's SciSat satellite has been measuring stratospheric composition and ozone levels in high Arctic and around the world for the past 11 years. Its data are making an important contribution to international environmental policymaking. RadarSat 2 and other remote sensing satellites are measuring both the extent of ice and whether or not it's multi-year ice. An important indicator for the pace of warming in the Arctic which affects the habitat and migration patterns of Arctic animals. As permafrost melts, this technology can also monitor vegetation, changes and measure infrastructure damage. Weather information, much from satellite sources, underpins all activity in the Arctic. Any operation, whether land, sea or air-based, requires accurate forecasting for safety purposes. Should there be an environmental disaster, the effects are felt much more severely in the delicate Arctic environment. Detecting oil slicks or bilge jumps early helps to enforce regulations, expedite a cleanup response and enable the prosecution of the offender. Canada's final pillar in its Northern strategy is to empower Northern communities, providing greater control over their economic and political destinies. Space-based tools are at their disposal to enhance education, healthcare and social services. Self-governance is supported by space through being able to independently monitor resources and communicate with businesses looking to invest in the North. Now, I've been discussing how space capabilities bring benefit domestically to the North, but I'd also like to note that space and the Arctic are natural domains for collaboration. The Arctic Council is the leading multilateral forum that has produced consensus on search and rescue operations in the North, enhancing ship safety and protection of the Arctic marine environment. We all benefit from NASA, NOAA, and ESA science satellites to help understand and monitor the atmosphere and weather patterns in the Arctic and around the world. The sharing of ice and weather data is a public good that can save lives and prevent ecologic disaster. As with many of our space efforts, Canada looks to partnerships for mutual benefit and to obtain services and technologies that would otherwise be unavailable. After all, what affects one affects all of us. Clearly, space-based capabilities bring positive value to Arctic activities, whether through monitoring the environment, providing safety and security or developing economic opportunities. Space assists Canada's commitment to be a consistent champion of the Arctic and do so in a manner that is peaceful, responsible, and in the interest of all Arctic nations. And as I close, I wanted to give you a literal example of where space in the Arctic intersect. And I have an image. That's loading. That's loading. That's okay. If it doesn't work, it's the Aurora Borealis. Exactly literally where space in the Arctic intersect. And it's beautiful. It absolutely is beautiful and stunning to see the Northern Lights dance around. With that, I thank you for inviting me and I welcome any questions you have afterwards. Thank you, Charity. Maybe it'll show up at some point. In the meantime, we'll have Amy Sun from Lockheed Martin. Talk about her work there, too. Hi. Thank you for having me. I'm from Lockheed Martin. We're the prime contractor for the nation's next-generation tactical SATCOM system, the mobile user objective system. This is a evolution of a tactical SATCOM system beyond line-of-site communication system. And what's been exciting recently is this type of communications has been important since about the 70s. And traditionally, we've had incremental improvement on the technologies that give us more gain, better coverage, better links, faster data rates. And recently, with the mobile user objective system, it's MUSE for short. With MUSE, there's a revolutionary change in the underlying technology. And we've discovered that we are able to close high data rate links well into the Arctic. Now, this is pretty exciting because MUSE is a geosynchronous constellation. So when you design a space-based system for Arctic or Antarctic coverage, you find that traditionally you have to go into funny orbits that have their own difficulties or different considerations. And the geosynchronous orbits are very well understood from a user's and Earth observers' perspective. The satellite essentially stays in the same place for pointing. It's symmetric for the Arctic and Antarctic. And it has a more benign or stable space radiation environment. So it's really desirable, if you can, to extend your, in my case, communications capabilities from a geostationary or geosynchronous orbit rather than these more difficult Arctic reaching or Antarctic reaching orbits. So recently, in 2013 and 2014, we, along with a group of other vendors, have ventured into the Arctic and Antarctic, proving that we are able to make these links. It's been pretty exciting. We've flown over the North Pole in a C-130. We've gone out on the Navy's ice camp and maintained essentially network, internet-like network connections for the duration. We've also recently participated in a search-and-rescue-like activity in the, I guess, the high Arctic, so between alert Canada as well as the ice breaker Healy while it was transiting. One of the exciting things about having a geosynchronous system is you don't have separate networks for, say, just an Arctic network and just an Antarctic network that you then have to bridge into your equatorial or otherwise global network. It is the same network, so we expect the same performance, be it latency or quality of service or coverage. I'm going to stop here because I want to break out in equations now, but I welcome any questions. I'll say thank you for stopping for the equations. Actually, before we pull up your presentation, please enjoy. And will we pull up his presentation? And I guess you're running the slides? Okay, please. Very good. Thank you, Claire, and thank you to the Secure World Foundation for having us. Commander Ron Perrette, and I work for the Navy's Task Force Climate Change in the office of the oceanographer of the Navy Admiral John White. I give my regrets for Admiral Titley. Some of you are probably expecting to see and hear him this morning, but he gave me some of his notes, so hopefully I can carry some of the water there. Next time, Claire, too, I think I would like to go first after all these smart people have their say, cleaning up last. I feel like there's a lot of great work going on, and the Navy is looking forward to leveraging some of that interagency work, as well as international partnerships. We've been thinking about the Arctic for a while. We've been operating the Arctic for a while. It goes back into certainly the 1700s when the Genet Expedition went up there with Lieutenant Commander DeLong, not such a successful endeavor. However, we have been continuing to operate in the Arctic continuously with our submarine fleet since 1958, and the Nautiluses surfacing at the North Pole at that time. We can go ahead and go to the next slide. Obviously, the Navy's been aware of the increasing access to the Arctic, and unlike Dr. Parkinson's good radar images, this is the Navy's colors and pictures and our depiction. If you will, of what we see the future looking like, trying to tell a story effectively. Back in 2009, Admiral Ruffhead obviously saw that the Arctic was starting to open up. We can see the impacts of climate change from a security perspective, and he turned to Admiral Titley, the then oceanographer of the Navy, and asked him to stand up to ask for his climate change and take a look at some of these problems and what does it mean for the Navy and the nation as a whole. So we wrote our first roadmap in 2009, really doing assessments and studies, trying to figure out what don't we know, where are we now in terms of our capabilities, and what questions are we not asking at that point in time. We had a lot of success with that, and we did identify a number of things that we needed to work on and start asking those questions in collaboration with the Office of Naval Research and a lot of their partnerships, again with the interagency and international, we pursued those lines. Fast forward again, we had ice minimums in 2007, 2012, and again we're starting to talk about more about climate change, so Admiral Greener, our current CNO, now asked Admiral White, the current naval oceanographer, to update that roadmap. What do we need to do? We've done studies, we've done assessments. Now what do we need to do to prepare, and oh by the way, I'd like to know Admiral White, when is the Arctic going to be accessible to human activity? And there's some smiles in the audience, so you know that's a pretty hard thing to do, trying to model things. So what you're seeing up here is really our depiction of when we see the Arctic opening up about mid-2020s in terms of perhaps a trans-polar route being accessible for maybe two weeks or so in the mid-2020s to 2030 timeframe. So what are the implications of that and what does the Navy need to do to prepare for that human activity and also our formal job is securing the nation's interests with regards to that. We can go to the next slide. So part of the roadmap update was taking a look at our strategic objectives for the Arctic region and you know frankly, they're much similar to everywhere else we are in the world. We ensure our sovereignty and provide defense. We have to provide ready naval forces for any sort of contingencies or crises that may occur, whether it's with our friends or for ourselves. Certainly preserving freedom of the seas and access for not only global trade and economic development, but not for just ourselves, again for our allies. And that opportunity really to promote partnerships both within our own government and with our international allies. And so we produce the roadmap and there's a lot of focus really on leveraging those partnerships. There's a lot of talk about budget austerity and the Arctic is no different and so we have to look for those opportunities, particularly in a region where we have a lot of close neighbors and share a lot of borders in that region. Well, the Arctic Council has stood up in effect to that to recognize that with shared interests also comes opportunity for cooperation and helping each other out and ensuring that the native peoples who live above that 60 degree line also prosper at the same time other nation states do as well. I think you go to the next slide. So these challenges I think everybody can recognize them and they're common I think regardless of service or nation. And our partners have many of those same challenges whether it's ability to operate in that environment, the limited comms and satellite sensors. We have a lot of experience in the submarine fleet but in full honesty the surface fleet hasn't had a need to go up there in a number of years. Certainly the Coast Guard has maintained that presence and ability in the Alaskan waters with the Polar Star and the Coast Guard Cutter Healy as well and some of their summertime deployments. But certainly the search and rescue assets we have two agreements now within the Arctic Council for search and rescue and hazardous spill response. Again a lot of those things generally fall towards Coast Guard first that we work in cooperation so we need to identify those instances where we think we need to complement those Coast Guard activities with regards to that. Kind of putting on my oceanographer hat just quickly we identified some gaps in terms of how do we sense that environment and how do we forecast in that environment as well as predicting, providing the operators some sense of hey this is what's going to happen up there and you need to plan appropriately if we could go to the next slide. So we built this plan in order to try to address these things. There are a lot of great efforts going on right now. I think you can do one more click with regards to that slide or maybe one more after that. Sorry I didn't realize I had animation in there. So we signed, it's always been a year next month that we signed out this roadmap and it's kind of divided into two parts. The first part is the strategy and our focus and how we think about the Arctic and we do think about the Arctic as a place where we have a lot of opportunity to work with our partner navies up in that region and continue to develop those relationships so it remains an area of cooperation and shared interest as the national strategy also promotes it. And so we kind of also then broke it down in terms of the timeframe as the Arctic is going to become more accessible what do we need to do? Well in a good acquisition process we kind of need to figure out do we have the right equipment? What are our requirements? And what are our enablers with regards to that? And that's kind of some Department of Defense speak but if we go to the next slide the enablers are really about what does it take to operate up there safely? What does it take to take a ship, an aircraft, a sailor, soldier, airman and be in that environment that not only allows us to operate there safely but this also has economic impacts with regards to the people who work up there whether it's the petroleum industry whether it's fishing fleets migrating to the north whether it's mining operations and so on these are all the things that we really need to kind of solve and get at so that we humans can work in the Arctic not only in a sustainable economic fashion but also with regards to stewardship that all kind of links together. So under law, if you will, Title X, the Navy is really, you know responsible for the safe and effective effectiveness of all the maritime traffic whether it's aircraft, forces or any sort of allied shipping on the water that's not from a commercial aspect but it's for the Coast Guard our own Navy, any of our survey vessels that might go up there as well and we first need to understand that environment understand the physics in that environment and apply that in improved modeling high resolution modeling and coupling the air and the ocean together and that's not something that we do extremely well right now and so we have efforts on going not only regionally but globally some of you may be familiar with the earth system prediction capability and again that's a number of agencies that are working together now to have a globally air-ocean-coupled high resolution model to predict weather and have ice characterization and things of that nature with regards to that so again, how does space come into all of this? Well obviously it's a tough environment and if you ever try to put a tide gauge in the Arctic or anywhere else or put a buoy in the water nothing wants to stay for very many seasons right doctor, so remote sensing satellite-based capabilities are really a key factor for us to get synthetic aperture radar and the imagery associated for ice prediction as well as communications for the safe operation of vessels up in that area Major Weedon also mentioned about AIS or what we also use in terms of marine or excuse me maritime domain awareness kind of ships who's going up there understanding the risks involved it's a very fragile ecosystem and knowing the cargo, the type of vessel where it's coming from can allow us then to increase our response with regards to search and rescue or figuring out what kind of risks and risk models we're having up in that region and as Mike noted Alaska and the leadership in Alaska really wants to know who's transiting through the Bering Strait in their backyard that may impact their economic livelihood for the people on the North Slope as well so I'll leave it there so that we have time for questions and I appreciate the opportunity to speak in front of the group, thank you Thank you Ron, we'll have time now for questions and answers I'd ask you just please wait for the mic and identify yourself but in the meantime I thought I'd start off with a question ahead for the panelists Mike, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the US's upcoming head of being the Arctic Council are there goals or objectives that we'd like to accomplish by the role and how can international cooperation work on that? I don't want to take up the rest of the time here that's normally the topic that I get to speak on the most I wanted to relate it to space but as I was listening to the other panelists speak I was thinking of areas in our chairmanship program that tie into that so the Canada right now is the chair of the Arctic Council and the US will be taking over as chair of the Arctic Council in April of this year in just a couple months here and we have proposed some ideas for our program of what we would like to do during our chairmanship or what we'd like the entire Arctic Council to work on during our chairmanship and a couple of those areas do have direct relevance to what we've been talking about today and one of those is telecommunications in the Arctic I think every panel step here has talked about why communications are important in the Arctic and what role they play right now communications in the Arctic need to be drastically improved in order for us to have better search and rescue capability better services to the inhabitants of the Arctic just from simple emergency communications all the way up to having broadband internet access for telemedicine, for education for everything else that the rest of us start to take for granted that we have access to and benefit from by having broadband internet access but having been to the northern slope of Alaska and seeing what the internet rates are on your phone data rates and that I realize that how much you rely on that and take it for granted when you're not in a place that has it and you see everyone else having to live day to day without that so telecommunications will be a big emphasis of our chairmanship and there are multiple other areas but climate change, the effects of climate change in the Arctic and understanding those and being able to take actions to improve the resilience and adaptability of residents in the Arctic is also an area we want to focus on and I think that is mentioning the knowing what's happening by getting information from satellites and from space will help with that as well but we have an ambitious program during our chairmanship we've got three areas improving economic and living conditions of residents in the Arctic addressing the impacts of climate change in the Arctic and then also safe and secure shipping and stewardship of the Arctic Ocean so those are the three areas and then kind of as a side thing extra that we as the US want to get out of it is we want to improve the awareness of the American public of what's going on in the Arctic and help make sure that American citizens are aware that the United States has Arctic territory by having a significant part of Alaska is in our Arctic and American citizens are affected by it and so we need to make sure that we want to make sure that American citizens are educated about that through public relations campaigns actually building off that charity Canada is the current head of Arctic Council yes that's correct legacy things you guys want to accomplish the next couple months things you guys have accomplished you're very proud of if you allow me our Arctic subject matter expert from the Canadian Embassy is here of course Nikola would you like to answer that do you mind using the mic hi so my name is Nikola and I'm responsible for Arctic issues sort of at large at the Canadian Embassy although obviously charity and others the experts on specific things but in particular I cover sort of the Arctic Council I think I don't want to assume what decisions will be taken by the minister by the ministers at the end of April but I think some key issues for us is work on black carbon and methane challenges which you know have a big impact on people living in the Arctic and we're hoping I think it's the U.S. plan to take this forward I think I should just add that the Arctic Council is a consensus based organization so we're sort of going through the process of discussing the U.S. proposals and hopefully we'll have agreed to by ministers at the end of April another sort of key thing for us is the Arctic Economic Council which is an independent body that was agreed to by ministers in 2013 and it's sort of for businesses to exchange best practices to coordinate east-west because pretty much all economic activity happens north-south so I think another part of our chairmanship is sort of raising awareness about traditional life traditional and local knowledge so complimenting sort of western science with what the people who are living there actually have seen for themselves so I know there's sort of several examples of that where often western scientists only go up in the summer and stuff like that these people live there year-round also have a long history to reflect on what they're seeing how does this fit in with western science and sort of meet the records of that but also recognizing that importance so I could probably talk for a long time about Canada's chairmanship priorities I guess one last thing is the agreement on oil preparedness and prevention to sort of how to deal with that particular challenge but yeah I think I'll sort of end there and pass it on to other questions and thanks to me for being on the spot but that was very helpful, thank you first question from Mr. Young, I'm Mark Brender I'm the executive director of the Digital Globe Foundation of course Digital Globe, the company owns and operates high resolution earth imaging satellites but with the change in the Congress as a control and the upcoming chairmanship do you get any anecdotal sense from the appropriate new committee chairman how they're going to look at the Arctic now that they are in control of both chambers Senator Murkowski has made well known that she's always been a big supporter of the federal government to be more involved in the Arctic and now that she holds a prominent position on a couple different committees with appropriations and that she has indicated that she would like to use that to help support Arctic development and whatever she can as far as how the details of that will be worked out I don't know what she has in mind or how that will work its way out amongst the rest of members of Congress and then once it comes to the executive branch but I know there's a strong interest there, yes Hello Melissa Hirsch, I'm a risk consultant I have a more of a geopolitical question that I think would go probably to the State Department and to the Navy maybe a little bit to Lockheed basically with the U.S. taking the helm for the Arctic Council what's likely to be the information exchange between the U.S. and Russia predominantly based on the seemingly tactical advantages that Russia's had in the Arctic and based on the current relationship Well, with regards to Russia the United States despite what the sanctions that we have on Russia because of their actions in Ukraine which we're obviously going to keep in place and keep trying to influence Russia to withdraw from Ukraine the Arctic is a region that where cooperation with Russia is in our own national interest and it's in the interest of the entire region it's in Russia's national interest to cooperate in the Arctic internationally as well and so both sides see that so both sides want to maintain that cooperation Arctic has it been affected by what Russia did in Ukraine of course but both sides are trying to minimize that effect to maintain the the degree of cooperation that all Arctic countries share on Arctic matters how that will eventually play out you know I don't know but so far how it's played out in the Arctic Council is there have not been any detrimental effects to that and we still enjoy discussions and cooperation with Russia on Arctic Council matters I can comment briefly certainly we would take the guidance with regards to our relations with Russia from the Department of State and we had been having several discussions up until the situation in the Ukraine occurred and since then those conversations have become much less frequent with regards to that I will say though that we have hopes for collaborative efforts in the future you know if those differences can be resolved there's lots of opportunities in the Arctic with regards to charting and information sharing that would benefit both nations I'm Jim Baker from the Clinton Foundation I was interested in your thoughts about the increasing push by the oil industry to do more drilling obviously there was an article in New York Times about the big platform that had some problems but there's a continual push and as the ice declines there will be more but that will obviously have a big impact on all the things happening in the Arctic what does the panel feel about that push by the oil industry I can start out with the Arctic for some years from very early on any of us in the time to see that we see the danger of oh yeah we really wish that the oil and other valuable things would not be discovered in the Arctic because we see the potential of environmental destruction and then this is really stated as an ecosystem and then certainly with the opening of the more twice the more passive areas, oil skills are going to become much more likely that some ships are going to be up there and then with the drilling and catching and also it's just disasters are much more likely so certainly as a scientist is definitely yes interesting question and I read the articles it goes to show that operating the Arctic is still not an easy endeavor ice free is not a word that is commonly used because it's ice reduced in the summer but navigating in the north is still an issue with knowing where ice is and boundaries etc so from a government perspective making sure that infrastructure and the right responses to an emergency search and rescue or environmental disaster are clearly important in our interest I'd like to comment a little to so the US government's policy is that we are not opposed to oil development in the Arctic but we are but we want to ensure that it is responsible and I would say that of the of the other Arctic countries right now the US probably has the is the most leaning on putting more emphasis on the responsible side of that as opposed to the oil development side of it just by the nature of the different governments and different national interests around there so we are not opposed to oil development in the Arctic at all we need to make sure that it's responsibly done and the technology to be able to do that right now does not really exist the technology to explore for oil responsibly exists even though there are obviously you can't count for poor judgment as in the case of the CULIC the technology to actually produce in well offshore wells in the Arctic does not currently exist and one of the areas that we're working on in the Arctic Council right now is the task force on oil pollution prevention that's kind of twofold it's the shipping aspect that we've been talking about you know if a ship runs a ground or something is fuel bunkers are ruptured but there's the other one if there's a blow out from an oil well in the Arctic which everyone looks back to deep water horizon and thinks you know if that were to happen in the Arctic you know it would be so much more disastrous than it was even in the Gulf of Mexico because not only is it remote and you can't get resources there it could potentially be under ice the oil is mixing with the ice not able to be cleaned up or dispersed even so when you talk about risk management production and including exploration in the Arctic it has the standard has to be so much higher than it does offshore than it does for anywhere else in the world and like Charity was saying you know the Arctic is not an easy place to operate even with things opening up there's been a lot of hyperbole you know in the media about how the Arctic is opening up and suddenly everyone thinks oh it's almost like a step function it was closed and now it's open everybody rush you know forward and that's not the case at all it is still very difficult to operate up there there are technological challenges we have overcome some of those technological challenges before the oil companies have done amazing things on the Alaska north slope with their ability to develop the Prudhoe Bay fields and building the translaska pipeline system and that but when you start going offshore it's a whole different realm and you know if you're going to be producing offshore you want to be producing 12 months of the year not just one month and producing under the ice you can't have a platform that's on the surface you know no amount of you know structural strengthening is going to keep a oil platform on the surface from the sea ice engulfing it and the sea ice moves and so the sea ice you know those forces are just insurmountable you have to either build an artificial gravel island like we've done in some of the cases up the North Shore which is basically creating a land based shore in shallow water that we're able to put enough gravel down but if you do it in water where you can't do that you don't have a way of grounding it to the sea floor where the ice isn't going to be able to move it so you have to be able to produce basically a remote well head that's produced remotely under the ice in the dark if everything goes great that's works out well but you can imagine if you're producing remotely this well head and then something goes wrong to the pipeline you know that it goes up to land you know how do you respond to that and so there are several challenges that need to be overcome in order to produce responsibly so we're not opposed to producing responsibly but it does need to be responsible good question a follow up question on that in terms of underwriting and indemnifying any of the potential commercial operations in the Arctic is the U.S. looking to work with the private sector are they looking to share some of that burden themselves is there discussion on how that's going to take place I'd have to refer you to the Department of Interior and I'm not familiar with those issues I guess I'd just like to make for the comment echoing what Charity and Mike have said but also to realize that there are two at least two very distinct Arctic's and it's important to note that for example Norway has been extracting oil and gas from its Arctic for about 50 years so this isn't new they're able to do this however because of the Gulf Stream Canada has issued some exploratory leasing that no drilling is actually taking place there right now because of the challenges that it's identified so I think just to add the U.S. and Canada face these huge challenges but it's important to note that it's already happening in other parts of the Arctic for reasons because it's very different there Richard Rogers from Stellar Solutions I have a general question can someone clarify what the sovereignty situation is in the Arctic where the boundaries extend to and who owns what just for the record before this event started I asked who's been to the Arctic before and I was told there's many different versions of what the Arctic is so actually I had that question myself I'm probably as the State Department I'll take that since it's a sovereignty question so this is another one of those things it's written about in the media that's not portrayed quite the correct way and it all stems from the extended continental shelf claims so actual land in the Arctic they're very well there's one little tiny little island that's disputed between Canada and the Kingdom of Denmark but other than that there are no actual land disputes there are maritime boundary disputes so the US has one with Canada and the Beaufort Sea but what you're probably referring to probably based on those articles is when they say that there have been these claims so the Kingdom of Denmark just made a claim that they submitted to the commission on the limits of the continental shelf to claim a huge area of the Arctic Ocean Russia has previously claimed that Canada last at the end of 2013 made their claim those claims are done through a very structured and scientific process through the Law of the Sea Convention in article 76 and it spells out based on certain criteria the bathymetry and the sediment composition everything of the ocean floor if you can show that you meet the criteria beyond the 200 nautical mile normal limit of an exclusive economic zone there's a natural extension of your continental shelf then you can claim rights to the seabed floor and below so it's getting those rights it's not getting extra territory or land so those rights could be very valuable if there are mineral resources under their oil, gas magnesium, nodules whatever you have but the process for making those claims is you do a lot of research of size testing to find out what the composition of the seabed floor is if you have a ridge that extends from your continental shelf then you can prove that it's connected to your continental shelf then you can say that that ridge is also an extension of your continental shelf and can make claims to the other side of it so there's a ridge that goes across the floor of the Arctic Ocean called the Lominovsov ridge that goes between basically where Canada and Greenland come together all the way over to Russia and so that ridge is one of the main reasons that creates the basis for all three of those claims and and so as far as where all the commission on limits of the continental shelf will decide which is a group of scientists is whether your data that you've provided is in accordance with Article 76 and it proves that you have a valid claim it does not arbitrate claims where there are overlapping claims between different powers so in cases where there are overlapping claims that's either a bilateral issue or if there are more than two places that have a trilateral issue for those countries to sort out themselves just like a normal maritime boundary you know claim so it's not a if we don't grab it and someone else will get it type of scenario so hopefully that answered your question a little bit but I'd point out that there's a very big difference though because the Antarctic is land and the Arctic ocean is ocean and so even legally there's a big difference but one of the things during Arctic Council chairmanship that we want to explore with the other Arctic states is whether the Arctic ocean should be there should be some sort of regional seas agreement or regional seas program whereas we can manage the Arctic ocean in a way just to explore the possibility of that not saying that we have an idea of exactly what that should look like but we think that the Arctic ocean is definitely a maritime environment and it should be explored because it is very fragile and it's very important ecosystem that the countries that border that ocean should explore the possibility of managing that ocean collectively but there are areas of the Arctic ocean that are on the high seas according to international law it doesn't belong to anybody you couldn't exercise with extended continental shelf claims that's only for the sea floor and below it's not the pelagic resources so it doesn't involve fishing or anything like that so when you talk about managing a regional sea how exactly what that would look like we're going to explore just building off of that the national maritime organization adopted international code for ships operating in polar waters is something like I was very interested to hear about that because for the space community there's discussions of a code of conduct and I'm wondering if there's some sort of similar mentality for entities operating in the Arctic or not I'm not sure I'm understanding your question completely sorry my idea of is there sufficient international cooperation to have some sort of code of conduct for countries that are operating for example maritime domain awareness in the Arctic or looking at is it just surely does it need to be done via legal treaties or can we do it in an agreement of what the norms of behavior for responsible actors in the Arctic and again I don't have that answer still might fall into Mike's realm in some respects with regards to treaties and the law of the sea if you will but you know the nation states do recognize the law of sea we do operate underneath those conventions and it seems to work well across the globe speaking of the IMO the IMO recently adopted the polar code which is I'm not familiar with the code of conduct in space I'm not qualified to compare and contrast the difference between those but the polar code that was recently adopted by the IMO does require vessels to legally vessels for all members of IMO which is pretty much everyone in the world to abide by certain regulations in both the maritime pollution agreement and the safety of life at sea agreement so there are pollution standards that were adopted as far as both discharging bilge water and also air emissions from stacks operating in the Arctic there's more that some people say the IMO could do or should do but the IMO is a very large organization and you need to get everyone to agree to it but the polar code was agreed to and that will be going into force soon. Hi, Cory Springer from Bollero Space there's been a number of mentions about methane in the discussions and that in combination with the recent administration policy on methane reduction is that translating into any particular program in monitoring or measuring methane obviously it's technically possible to do it from space doing it from space would be lots of advantage from doing it from space but I'm just wondering if that's actually translating anything at NASA and then considering a question earlier if so how do you think that may actually get any traction with the new Congress? If I take off my locking pin for a moment and I can say that this is maybe an area where the sharing of scientific data with Russia comes into play the majority of trapped methane that can be released by receding sea ice is north of in the region north of Russia it's somewhat known or well known in published literature that the Russians have had various kinds of monitoring and experimental programs looking at and predicting the release of methane and as far as I know the British Americans and Canadians don't do it as much we don't have as much trapped methane in our sea ice