 I'm going to try to talk without standing behind the podium. But if you can't hear me, let me know. But I've also been warned I can't walk in front. I like to walk and talk at the same time. So I'll try to stay just on this side. It's really a pleasure for me to be here. I've had long ties with both the Navy and the Coast Guard. And I think this is the epitome of it all right here. So it's a real thrill for me to be here. When I'm going to talk about two different things, I'm going to talk about law of the sea, because that's what's got us involved at the University of New Hampshire in the Arctic. But then I'm really going to focus on our operations in the Arctic, mapping and support of law of the sea, and hopefully on some of the logistical aspects too, which I think there's not that much or although there's some people with a little experience in that, but not that much experience with. And feel free to stop me at any time if you have questions. If not, we can just have questions at the end. So really what this is all about is this book about this thick. You guys all familiar with the Law of the Sea Treaty? I assume the Constitution for the Oceans covers all kinds of aspects, environmental, navigation, and so on. But with respect to the mapping aspect of what I'm going to talk about, it's really focused on one little article, Article 76, which is just 617 words that redefine the concept of the continental shelf. And I'm a geophysicist, a geologist. I've known since I was little what the continental shelf was geologically. But what the Law of the Sea Treaty does is redefine that in legal terms, a juridical continental shelf. I don't know why they used that word, actually. I wish they would have used something else because it's very confusing. But the continental shelf that they define is actually, as I'll show you, much, much potentially, much wider than the geologic continental shelf. And this 617 words provides a mechanism for a coastal state to extend its sovereign rights over the resources of the sea floor and the subsurface onto this, what we tend to call the extended continental shelf, although that's not a term in the treaty itself. And this can be phenomenally valuable, the estimate in 2000 of the resources of the extended continental shelf for the US alone was on the order of $1.3 trillion, that you can probably use a multiplier of 10 by now. So something like $11 trillion worth of resources. What it really was all about was oil and gas. It was the realization in the late 70s that the exploration for oil and gas was progressing offshore, and that the 200 nautical mile limit that was established for every coastal state by the treaty was really not quite enough given where the resources were thought to continue on. And you'll see in a second that the idea of a natural prolongation, of a material that was a natural prolongation of the coastal state, the coastal states with large margins, what they were called the broad margin states, wanted to have a mechanism to have sovereign rights over those resources too. They felt they were their resources. And so what happened for something like 12 years is the folks negotiating the treaty went back and forth between the broad margin states who wanted those resources and the narrow margin states who didn't have more than 200 nautical miles, and those people with no access to the ocean to try to come up with a compromise. And Article 76 is supposedly this compromise. So look at what this looks like. You're familiar with the typical maritime zones from a geologic perspective. I said we understand the continental shelf as this flat area that comes off from the beach till we have a break and slope. Remember these things are tremendously exaggerated. That's only about a one or two degree slope in real life where that break is there and this is about a 10th of a degree in real life. Continental slope, continental rise, and then finally the deep sea, the defined maritime zones. But what happened with the law of the sea treaty is that we now have a continental shelf that is potentially much, much larger than that geologic self, potentially running way out to the deep sea itself. And so I said very confusing, I wish they'd called it Joe or Jim or something, anything different, but for some reason they chose to call it the continental shelf. And the distinction there is between the continental shelf and what's beyond that, which is known as the area, the area was part of that compromise. That would be the common heritage of mankind and a lot of things in the treaty about how resources are controlled in the area and how they're distributed with some sense towards some of the non-coastal states. When we talk about the resources, I said it was mostly oil and gas, gas hydrates, which is a big issue in the Arctic, mineral resources. There are some living resources associated with it, but they have to be living resources that are defined as sedentary. So at a particular point in their life cycle, they have to be on the bottom so things like clams and scallops are in those resources. And then, well, there's arguments about DNA and those kinds of resources. But for the most part, it really was focused on oil and gas. If we look at a picture of what the general bathymetry of, let's say, the Atlantic margin looks like, we see those broad state nations here that had continental margins much broader than 200 nautical miles, Canada, US, a lot of the European nations, Brazil. Those were the big pushes, Russia, the big pushers. They all came together as the broad margin nations pushing for this idea of the extended continental shelf. And they were fighting against folks like Peru, Chile, with very, very narrow margins. Who said 200 nautical miles was just fine. If you look at these just few words of the treaty, they're quite complicated, very compact. They're this remarkable combination of law and geology and geophysics. It's really an amazing mixture. And it takes all the ambiguity of the law and mixes it with the ambiguity of at least geology and gives you an ultra-ambiguous document, which I guess I've learned that treaty negotiators use this all the time, something called creative ambiguity, just to get it done. It took 12 years to negotiate. But still, if you make it ambiguous enough, everybody finally says, well, yeah, I can agree to that. But it kind of passes on to the next generation, the burden of finding out what it really means. What did they mean by that? And that's the situation we're in now. But what the treaty says is that to establish this extended continental shelf, you have to demonstrate that the region is, I used that word before, natural prolongation, no definition of that in the treaty of the continental landmass. And then once you've made that demonstration, you then can set limits on how far you go. And those limits are defined by the depth and the shape of the sea floor. In particular, something called the foot of the slope, which is the point of maximum change ingredient at the base of the slope. At the base gives some ambiguity. The 2,500 meter contour comes into play. You can also look below the sea floor at the thickness of the sedimentary unit there. And there's a point where the sediment thickness is 1% of the distance back to this foot of the slope. Again, very complicated. I'll show you a picture of it in a minute. That's another way to extend the continental shelf. And these are either ores, so you can use whichever is to your advantage. And the only simple one, a simple criteria of 350 nautical miles from the territorial sea baseline, from the shoreline, but again, that's an either or with the 2,500 meter contour. The bottom line is that with respect to mapping, to do this, you have to map the sea floor. And that's how we got involved as at UNH, the National Center for Excellence in Sea Floor Mapping. Congress came to us about 13 years ago and said, first do a desktop study, see what we had, what do we have in hand, and where would you need to go out and map more? And we did that, and then since that time, we've been going out and doing that more mapping. Let me show you what it looks like pictorially. Every coastal state is entitled to 200 nautical mile, continental shelf. This is kind of the thick sediments that are typically seaward of a coastline on a broad margin state. That's where the oil and gases in those sediment, in that wedge of sediments. In this kind of very simple cartoon, we have the shelf, the geologic shelf, the geologic slope, the rise in the deep sea, and the foot of the slope is a single, clear change in gradient. It never really looks like that, but this is back when the negotiators were writing the treaty, they had a very simple-minded view of the way the deep sea worked and didn't quite really understand, had none of the new mapping techniques that I'll describe in a few minutes. So in this picture, you can extend your margin, you're to what they call formula lines, by finding that foot of the slope and adding 16 nautical miles. So that's one limit, excuse me, not limit, one extension. The other possibility is basically finding the foot of the slope again and then finding the point where the distance to the foot of the slope is 1% of the sediment thickness. It's very, very complicated, but just take my word for it. And you can mix and match, whichever is to your advantage. So you basically, in this case, say, well, here we're better off with the sediment thickness formula and here we're better off with the, oh no, here we're better off with what we call the distance formula for the slope of 16 nautical miles and here we switch to the sediment thickness. So the extension would be that far, but there's a but and that's that there are limits because in some places, like the Arctic, the sediment is so thick that every nation could extend right to the North Pole. So they established some limits to how far you can extend and those limits are, again, two, one is find the 2,500 meter depth contour and go out 100 nautical miles. So in this case, if this was the only limit we had, we would have to use the extension line here, but then we'd be cut off here. So the end, at the end of the day, the extended continental shelf would be that part of the yellow and that part of the purple, but we have another choice, which is 350 nautical miles from the baseline. You can mix them again. And so in this case, it gets very complicated again. We take which is ever to our advantage here. We're under the purple limit. So the yellow goes beyond. So we take that segment here. They're kind of all the same. And in this segment, we're beyond the purple, but under the whatever color that is. And so it becomes like that. So again, very complicated. You don't have to worry about it. Just remember, from this perspective, to do this, you have to map. You can't just use existing data. You have to go out and collect high quality, new data, demonstrate the quality of that data and present that to a commission that basically reviews what you've done and says, are these limits that you've established? Because only a coastal state can establish its limits. It's not a commission that can establish the limits. A coastal state has to do it. The commission just makes recommendations and says, we agree that you've done it appropriately or we don't agree. And if they don't agree, well, you can negotiate with them. You can try to demonstrate that you're right or you can ignore them because it's the right of the coastal state not any commission to determine the limits of your continental shelf. And so you can just arbitrarily say, well, no, we establish our limits here. The problem is, in that case, you have not done it within the context of the treaty. It's not final in binding and it's not recognized by the other treaty members. So it's an interesting trade-off. And I think as you all know, the US is not party to the law that, well, we actually, we have not given the Senate's session to the treaty and it doesn't look like that's gonna happen at least maybe not in my lifetime. So we have to come to grips with how we are gonna treat the law of the C treaty, which we do treat as customary international law for the most part, most of it, but how are we gonna go about establishing limits to the continental shelf being outside the treaty? And that's something that's being debated quite vigorously at the State Department. Okay, so at the end of the day, those are the limits. You submit those to a commission if they agree with you, then they become final in binding. And so you have now exclusive sovereign rights over the resources of the sea floor and the subsurface to that distance, way beyond 200 nautical miles. Okay, the actual process is very complicated. Here's an example of this case off Newfoundland and show all the different seismic data to get the sediment thickness, bathymetric data to get the foot of the slope, and then the analysis that are done to establish all those limits and cutoff lines, and then coming up with the final picture. Okay, so we have to map. How do we map? People have been mapping the sea for many, many years. You guys know that. 2000 BC, Egyptian hydrographer there, sitting at the, this is a statue actually, from a tomb from 2000 BC. And there he is with either a rock or a punkalette at the end of the rope, measuring how deep the ocean is. If I jumped the next picture I was able to find about 3,600 years, 1,450 wood carving from the Thames River. There they are again measuring the depth of the sea floor. Same way, punkalette at the end of a rope, a lead line. But now if I jump another 500 years and we see how the technology changed, I'll jump to 1940. And here we are with a coast and geodetic survey crew using the exact same technique. So 4,000 years, there was really not much change in how we mapped the sea floor. It was with a lead line. Some changes, it's unfair. They went from hemp to piano wire. There's always a hollow in the bottom of the lead line. And so they can tell that they actually hit the bottom and actually get a little sample sometimes. And they always used to use tallow in it. But at some point I haven't been able to trace exactly when this happened. They switched to peanut butter. And those are, I think the two innovations, piano wire and peanut butter, in 4,000 years of sea floor mapping. Until the Second World War when echo sounders started to become perfected, they actually had been developed about the time of the First World War, but it was really in the Second World War that it came into common use and started to be a common tool on many, many vessels. The problem with the single beam, what we call the single beam echo sounder is that sends out a single beam of sound in a large cone that spreads. If I had a little flashlight here, you'd see a big spot on the bottom. And all we get is a single return from that. And we can only assume that it comes from directly below the ship. But that single return comes from the shallowest point in that cone of insanification. So if you have a shoal out here, that's the first return you'll get, but you'll report its position over here. So you get a blurry picture. And that circle on the bottom, that's on the order of the water depth. So if you're in three kilometers of water, you're gonna have an ambiguity of about three kilometers in where that point came from. So we get this blurry picture, but it's certainly a lot better than throwing down a lead line and waiting to tell if you hit the bottom at 13,000 feet or 14,000 feet. You guys use feet, huh? So I should talk in feet. Okay, that's a tough one for me, but I'll try. Okay, so 3,000 meters, 10,000 feet, 11,000 feet. But what we got from the single beam echo sounder again, much more accurate than the lead line, much more rapid obviously, is a kind of two-dimensional picture of a profile of the bottom. But through this blurry lens of lateral, poor lateral resolution. From that combination of lead line measurements and single beam sounders, we see most of the navigational charts that we use today. Most of it, that's still about 50% of the soundings on our navigational charts are based on lead line measurements, that's really quite remarkable. But we get this product that has selected soundings, representing shoals, and then somebody's imagination of connecting the dots to tell us the contours about what the regional variation in depth is. That's the shallow water. If we look at the deep sea version, coming out of where I went to school in San Diego, all the ships transiting out with their single beam echo sounders, getting those two-dimensional profiles, somebody connecting the dots and producing these contour maps. 1999, 2000, that was the best picture we had of the sea floor off Southern California. That was it, it's based on all those tracks and then somebody connecting the dots and that's it. Okay, around about, well, came out of the classified world in about the late 70s into the academic world, early 80s, something called multi-beam sonar. So instead of one single big cone of sound, we now use some beam-forming techniques and some fancy electronics and we produce a series of laser-like beams of sound on the sea floor, but not one, hundreds of them simultaneously across a wide swath. It has a beam that's very, very narrow in the 4F direction, a long ship, fan-shaped, very wide across and then it listens in all these slices. It actually has two transducers, they're orthogonal. You transfer it on the one that's along the ship on the heli, that's about seven meters long, oops, that's about 25 feet long and it's about 15 feet wide. They're not small, they're quite large, they're quite expensive, several million dollars to buy one and install it, but it produces a totally different picture of the sea floor instead of that one blurry picture. We now have a very precise, in this case, hundreds of individual depth measurements that are accurate in their vertical dimension and very small in their lateral dimension. And so we've gone from a picture like that with the single beam to now a picture like this where each one of these little tiny yellow dots is an individual depth measurement and it really radically changed the way we look at the sea floor. We've gone from pictures like this in Portsmouth Harbor, where I am in the chart, to pictures like that, where we now see this is just time of flight, just a depth information, uh-oh, I'm sorry. We now, it's really hard for me, I wanna, we now see just from the depth information you can see whether a mobile sand waves or the rocks and things like that, so I even can tell a little about what the bottom is just from the depth information. We actually get another piece of information from these sonars, which is called backscatter, which tells us much more about what the bottom is, so we're looking at where it is and what it is, but we get this full coverage. Those other results were based on really sparse measurements and you missed a lot and every time we have a multi-beam survey that covers an area that had been charted previously with single beam or lead line, we're always finding even navigational hazards that were missed because you can't count on it and everything when you're just doing sparse measurements. So that's the shallow water picture. If we look at it in deep water from a bathymetric sense as opposed to a hydrographic sense, we've changed the picture of what we've seen off Southern California from that to that. And to me that, as it says, this new perspective provides all kinds of new insights about processes, about all kinds of things going on in the ocean, all the things we really want to understand aside from just the simple hazards of depth. And it has many, many different strategic applications too. This was a result of literally two months of work. That was it. To change that picture from that and that, that to that. And that's really the potential we have. With that in mind, when it came to the law of the sea effort, the law of the sea treaty was written before these sonars were developed. There's no requirement for that kind of imagery. But we realized that if you could see a picture of the foot of the slope that looked like this in three dimensions, and there's no way you can take that old data and turn it into a three dimensional picture, it's just too sparse. I mean it just would give you this ugly, ugly image. We would have a much, much better idea where the foot of the slope than many of the other things we needed were. We would have no ambiguity. And so what we recommended to Congress is that we go out, and no matter what data we had in the past, it's not that expensive in the deep sea to collect this data, that we collect new multi-beam data. And they agreed, and so we've been charged since 2003 with mapping wherever the US has the potential for an extended continental shelf. And there are many places, the Atlantic margin, the Gulf of Mexico, some of the Pacific possession, Guam, the Marianas around there, Necker Ridge, Kingman Reef, Paul Meyer, and so on, Gulf of Alaska, Bering Sea. But you can see most of the effort has been in the Arctic. We've had eight cruises so far, and I'm not sure we'll have more, we'll see. We're still talking about that. But starting in 2003, and the reason is this, this is an example in the Bering Sea. The very first trip we went out, this was the very best data that existed of what's called the Beringian margin, a place where the US has a potential extension over here. And that's the very best data we had before we went out and mapped. When we look at the data we collected, and this was just in probably a week and a half or so, and deep sea, it comes fast, there we go, it looks like that. And that, again, not only radically different, but from a law of the sea perspective, you're allowed to connect promontory to promontory up to 16 nautical miles. So if we had to use this kind of data, we would have put a foot of the slope here. Now we can trace the foot of the slope way out here. It has a huge impact on how far we can extend the continental shelf. And we have found this every single place that we've looked. The Atlantic margin, which we thought we knew better than any of the margins, this was the data before we started mapping the New England seamounts and so on, and that's what it really looks like. Again, spectacular picture of canyon processes, all kinds of interesting things that are gonna, we're gonna go and make an argument that we define the foot of the slope, not at this sharp point here, but at the limit of downslope movement. That's a process of the slope. And that will extend our continental margin tremendously there. We don't know if they'll buy that argument, but we never could make that argument without this kind of data. The Marianas, again, indication of all kinds of seamounts out there, a lot of this information coming just from satellite altimetry, the gravity signal from an altimeter affecting the sea surface, but that was the best map we had. That's what it really looks like. 10 seamounts less than 500 meters deep, 116.4 meters, none of them recorded. And I think you all are familiar with the San Francisco and the problem it faced with hitting an uncharted seamount at full speed. And there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of more of those out there that we haven't charted. And so we can't ignore this. And they're not gonna show up in the satellite altimetry, at least not accurately enough. With respect to the Arctic, the reason we focus so much of our time on the Arctic is that the Arctic is really different than any of the other ocean basins is in that 52% of the Arctic basin itself is this geologic continental shelf. We start with the geologic continental shelf and extend further than that. The next closest is something like the Atlantic which is only 17% or so. And so this is the place where there's really a tremendous potential for extended continental shelf. But even more importantly, if you look coming up off Barrow Alaska here, we have, and this is the original maps that we had in 2003, our best guests, we had this feature here called the Chuck G Plateau which is clearly a natural prolongation of the shelf. Ambassador Richardson, during the negotiations of the treaty, made a statement that we considered a natural prolongation. The US considered it that way, nobody objected to it. And so we start with the assumption that the foot of the slope could be somewhere around there. Of course, the resource potential of the Arctic, I'm sure if you don't know that now that through this study group, you'll certainly talk a lot about that. Tremendous research potential of the USGS estimating 13% of undiscovered oil, 30% of undiscovered gas, 20% of undiscovered natural gas resources in the Arctic. And the very interesting shape of the Arctic which has all these nations facing each other, each one with the potential to extend their continental shelf and almost all of them overlapping, which has tremendous potential in terms of conflict. The most interesting thing is that we have no conflict with Russia because that's the only nation that we have a negotiated maritime boundary with. Not fully accepted, the Russian Duma has not signed off on it but they have respected it in their submissions to the commission. They've used that as we have. And so there seems to be no contention about that. When they negotiated that boundary in 1982, it went just to the EZ but the wording of it was very clever and said that it'll extend northward through any other international treaty. And so if an extended continental shelf is established that boundary continues on right to the North Pole. And so we have no parent conflict with Russia. We have a huge issue with Canada. Where's our Canadian? We overlap tremendously with Canada and there's gonna be huge issues that go way beyond just the issue of the Northwest Passage because we have not yet even resolved the exclusive economic zone in the Beaufort Sea. And when I show a picture later, you'll see that there's a flip in terms of extending the Canadian recognition of their delimitation in the Beaufort Sea. If they extend it that way, it would be tremendously to their disadvantage in the extended continental shelf and advantage in the exclusive economic zone. So the flips. And so it makes it a very intriguing negotiation. Okay, here's this Chuck G. Plateau, kind of circa 2003, our picture of it. And that's why we clearly thought that we had tremendous potential up there. The desktop study we did in 2003, looked at all the existing data, looked at the foot of the slope, all those kinds of things I talked about. There's a little bit of seismic data that had been collected over the years, but great evidence at very thick sediment. So basically the limit line for the sediment thickness would be way out here. And so we were really constrained by the constraint lines then. And so what we looked at is, given the fact that we thought the foot of the slope was around here, everything starts at the foot of the slope. These black dots representing foot of the slope points. The gray line, the EEZ, 200 nautical mile EEZ. This is the Russian US maritime boundary here. What would we expect an extended continental shelf to look like in the Arctic? If we come off Alaska in this area, the two constraint lines are either 350 nautical miles or the 2,500 meter contour plus 100 nautical miles. 2,500 meter contours here. 2,500 plus 100 nautical miles only gets us not even to the EEZ, so that one's useless, but 350 nautical miles gets us up here. So we would be able to extend the shelf from here to here from 200 to 350 nautical miles, but as we come around Chukchi Cap, North Windridge here, now the 2,500 contour comes up this way. 2,500 plus 100 nautical miles is out here and we now switch and we can use that constraint line. And so this was our original picture. And this is an area about twice the size of California in terms of extending sovereign rates over a resource-rich area, so it's not trivial. So clearly we got to go ahead and try to map up there. We can extend our sovereign rights over all that. The normal cutoff is 200 miles here, but we get all of that area there, which we have the responsibility, we have the sovereign rights over resources. We also have the responsibility from an environmental perspective of protecting it too. So when I, in different crowds, people start screaming at me and say, oh, you know, this is all just oil and gas revenue. Yeah, it is, but at the same time, it also gives us the responsibility to do environmental protection as opposed to just leaving it for anybody to do whatever they want. So that was the picture, but the question was how do we go map there? Because this sonar mapping that we do is hard enough to do in good conditions as things get noisier, it's harder and harder to hear that very faint return that comes off the seafloor. And I know, at least Greg has had the experience of breaking ice. Anybody else been on an ice breaker? It's damn noisy when you break ice. It is really noisy. And so the question was, is it even feasible to try to break ice and hear a sonar return at the same time? And so we went out just in 2003 as a test trip, basically to see a 10-day trip to see if this was feasible. At that time, the Healy had a sea beam, multi-beam sonar on it, it's since been replaced with a newer Konesburg system. But the test trip basically said, let's head up. We ran into the ice line. This was our first experience there, about 75 north and almost every year, except for last year, that was the case. So we'd always hit the ice edge about 75, 76 degrees north. And just see what happened. And what happened was that, if we look at this in the context of the annual ice minimum, I think everybody realizes we're on this downward projection of the ice extent. 2003 was just kind of a normal year in the downward extent of the ice margin. But what we ran into was first year ice. It was what they called cheesy, it was pretty forgiving. And we had planned our cruise at three knots, thinking that's what we would be able to map. But on that trip, we were able to go about six knots in mostly eight tenths ice. If I start using terminology that you're not familiar with, just stop me and I'll explain it. And what we were really wondering is, could we go through the ice, A here or a turn? And if we heard a return, we need to follow a feature. We were out there to map the 2,500 meter contour, because remember that's the limit up there. And so we don't know where it went. We had an idea, this red line was the idea of where we thought it had been from whatever little existing data we had. But could we actually steer the ship in the ice and follow a feature? And at that time, there was no repeater on the bridge. It was really, we were learning how to handle this in many ways. Well, it turned out we could. And here we were following where the real feature is. Now think of the scale of this, that's 10 miles here. So every mile we've pushed that contour, we're adding sovereign rights over territory to the US. And again, remember we can connect promontory to promontory, so we're adding all this area. And so we found out that the existing map was not ridiculous, but certainly not accurate, in that we were able to follow along a contour while we're breaking ice that year. And so we were able to go double the speed. We just were gonna do a little test, but we were able to come all the way around to this part of Chukchi. We saw out in the outer beams of the sonar some features sticking up. So we went to explore it, because any 2,500 meter contour is useful. If we had one further out, that would be helpful. And what did we find? A 3,100 meter high 10,000 foot high seamount that came to within 2,700 meters water depth. Do that right. So we go from 4,000 meters, so we're down at 13,000 feet, 14,000 feet here, up to 10,000 feet. And the interesting thing about that is that that had not been on the existing charts. Starting back a few years before, a lot of the submarine data, starting in the 1950s, and particularly submarine operation, anybody familiar with SISX, the Scientific Ice Experiment, it was a program that basically allowed science riders on Arctic transiting submarines, at first just a rider, passive, and then actually allowed them to do experiments. And so at one point we were able to put a swath mapping system, not quite a multi-beam sonar, but a broad swath mapping system, system called a SCAMP, on the Huckbill. And it turns out that during those cruises, the Huckbill transited right over that, what's now called Healy Seamount, but it didn't see it. And so it's very scary, with the submarine not just going active occasionally, but having a fully active swath mapping system went over a feature that's 12,000 feet high and didn't see it. And so we forensically twice, I should say, we forensically went back to try to figure out what was going on, and it turns out that the submarine was not really there. That's where its positioning was reporting, it was actually about five miles off, and then it matches up what they mapped. And that's not to be unexpected, in those days, certainly with the inertial nav systems, you submerge in Bainbridge Island or Hawaii and you don't surface for a while, there's drift, there's large drift in the navigation. And so as we get all this submarine, whoops, submarine data into the database, we actually have to give it a very large uncertainty, about 10 miles plus or minus five miles, 10 mile uncertainty in terms of the position of those data. But we're still getting data, still getting data declassified, that's going into the graded products for the Arctic. We just got a batch last week, actually, they have, CISEX came to an end, but they have things they now call science accommodation cruises, where they will collect in a certain box called the Gore box, they'll collect some data and make it available. And I think the inertial systems getting a little better, but not much. I mean, without seeing a satellite and being submerged for a while, we always have to put a grain of salt in those data. Based on that success, we came back the next year to finish up, our plan was to finish it up and then start finding the foot of the slope. And that year, same as 2003, in terms of that general curve, that year we just got hard stuck in the ice. And it was a real lesson to us that it doesn't matter what that general curve of the ice looks like and it doesn't matter what people say, we're gonna have an ice-free Arctic, the ice-free doesn't mean truly ice-free. What it matters is where you are and what the wind conditions are and what the accommodation in the ice is at that time in terms of whether you're gonna be able to operate or not. And so we actually got stuck for 18 hours backing and ramming a ridge. And I was still just, this was just my second year, so I again was a little naive about this. I'm at the daily meeting with the officers and they're talking about, well, do we winter over? Or even worse, do we call a Russian icebreaker, a nuclear icebreaker and try to break us out? But fortunately we did finally get out and just skadoodle back down south. And really it was just a question didn't, even if that was the only little patch of ice around, if the wind's blowing your clothes and there's no place to push it and there are thick ridges, you get stuck. And so again, just because we're talking about diminishing ice doesn't mean we don't need an icebreaker fleet in this country. So we skadoodle back and we always have backup work because we need to find the foot of the slope along here too, so we spent our time moving down there. We also are developing techniques that year in terms of how to actually get, when you're backing and ramming, it's really noisy and you don't get much of a return. But we found out that if we, we called it ratchet serving that if we go and ram into the ice, we don't get a return. We back down, then all the ice is scraping below the sonar, we don't get a return. But in the next ram forward, we get one or two returns. And it's very slow. You're just moving ahead of a knot and a half or so in terms of over the ground, but you actually can put together a picture. So we call that ratchet serving. And then with the new sonar, I'll talk about a new technique we developed. The plan for the next year was to now start finding the foot of the slope. We had managed to finish at least the 2,500 meter contour in 2004. And the next year we came back with seven. And that was the year that the Russians planted the flag on the North Pole. And it really had a tremendous effect on us, mostly because nobody paid any attention to anything we were doing before that. But suddenly this was in the news everywhere who owns the Arctic battle for the Arctic. You know, even New York times with very provocative terms like that to scramble for the Arctic. Arctic land grab and National Geographic. Colbert had six episodes. Six episodes. I mean, my kids never paid any attention to what I did until Colbert started that. I don't know what it is, but he had six episodes called the smoking pole, the fight for the Arctic, for Arctic riches. And he talked all about the fighting cartographers. And it was really, of course it was a riot, but I don't know why, but he really was big on this. And I had a situation where we were leaving for the Healy for Barrow in 2007. It was only about two weeks after the Russians planted the flag. And of course the Russians had, there were headlines all over about in Russia and Russian newspapers saying that the U.S. was going in response, that we were going up on the Healy in response to their flag planting. Because Putin was using this, of course, internally for political motivations. And our crews had been planned for three years already. We weren't going in response. But as we're in Logan Airport carrying our Arctic gear under our arm, the big jackets and everything, some lady and her son comes up and says, oh, are you going to protect us from the Russians? And we go, yes, ma'am. The fighting cartographers once again. But 2007 was a remarkable year because this was the Wrecked Ice Minimum year. And it was really quite different and it was tangibly different. Instead of hitting this first year ice as we moved further north and got into the multi-year ice, what we saw was the ice was broken. The multi-year, this thick, this is 10 foot thick ice. The multi-year ice, so the first year ice is kind of two, three feet thick. But this was big multi-year ice that had been broken, the ice pack basically, that had been broken into small pieces. And so we really saw it quite, quite different. And that had quite an effect as we were looking for the foot of the slope back and forth and back and forth and not finding it, not finding any evidence of it. And finally we said, what the heck, you know, the ice is so, general, we still ran into the ice margin about 76, but it was really easy. That's easy to map through that ice. I always say it's good for mapping bad for the Arctic, but because those big blocks push aside and nothing scrapes on the bottom and we were able to map just like a doddle. And we said, let's just keep going. And so we just took this line north and this is what happened. We went back and forth and back and forth couldn't find any evidence for the foot of the slope. No real change, sharp change ingredient and nothing about the way the seafloor connected, but then we took this long line and boom, it was different. So this is the way things looked like up here. And this is all the top, the sediment that's on top. You see it just kind of gently follows the seafloor with a small change in break there. But when we got out there, this is what it looked like. A, a much steeper change in slope and all these really flat-lying stuff flooding up against it. That's the foot of the slope. So that was just an absolute eye-opener and that is hundreds of miles. So in terms of further extent of the US continental shelf. And so we were able to find that, follow that around North Wind Ridge, which really obvious here, and just follow it, follow it along. We also find all kinds of other stuff every time you go out and map like this. These are giant pock marks, applying gas coming out, which is part of the idea of the Arctic so rich. All kinds of features on the seafloor indicating that ice sheets had been there that people hadn't known about. So there's all kinds of scientific spin-offs on there too. And so this was really exciting to think that the foot of the slope was much further north. We went back the following year and started to try to trace that around more, how far, even onto Alfa Mendeleev Ridge, because who knows how far we can push, if we can follow the foot of the slope continuously, how far could we push our extended margin. But we also need to show that there is some continuity geologically between this and this. And so we tried something that hadn't been tried before and that sampling from the Alfa Mendeleev Ridge and the top of Chuck's Sheet to see what the rocks look like themselves. And that's not so easy to do. I mean, sampling is usually done with a drill ship. That's the proper way to do it. Well, we don't have a drill ship up there. What we had was what's called a dredge, a steel bag that you put at the end of a wire. We were in pretty heavy ice though, and so it's pretty scary because that wire gets 10,000, 20,000 pounds of tension on it as it gets dragged up a rock face, trying to break off fresh rock. But we were relatively successful and got a whole bunch of samples that are still being analyzed now and have kind of turned understanding of Arctic geology on its head too. So at the bottom line here then is that the EEZ was here. Our original thought was the foot of the slope was there. The extended continental shelf looked like that. That was pretty good to begin with. That's twice the size of Canada. But what we found by 2007 was that the foot of the slope came. We could guarantee at least to here, we saw it here, we didn't know what was going on in here, but that could have all kinds of ramifications on where we would put. And this is all part of the overlap with Canada because Canada's just coming from the other side. So we're gonna overlap almost completely with the extended continental shelf there. Interestingly enough, despite this issue with Canada, starting in 2008 and 2009, we started to have joint cruises with them because from a scientific perspective, we have to map kind of the same area. It's so much easier to work, so much safer to work with two ice breakers, much more efficient, you can switch who's breaking. They had the ability to collect the seismic data, the sediment thickness data. We had the ability for the fancy bathymetry, the sonar, the multi-beam sonar, they don't have that. So starting there, we had joint operations with them. It was focusing on at first, getting sediment thickness data, so it was focused mostly on Canada Basin, heading up much further north, really difficult to work. Inevitably, I guarantee every time you go places like this that haven't been mapped, we see new things. That was the, at this site C there, that's what the pre-existing map looked like. And what's there? You had another one of these, and again, I guarantee there are hundreds if not thousands of these unmapped features still in the Arctic. 2010, more of this joint work, again, focusing in the middle of the basin, but very good collaboration between the two ships. 2011 was a remarkable trip, and I wanted to just point out how far we went, up to 88 in change, 92 miles from the North Pole. And collecting some remarkable data together, it really was a phenomenal example of collaboration. A lot of ancillary data I'll mention in the end, oceanographic data, and ocean acidification data. We, I'm sure, have the Guinness Book of World Records for the two vessels that have come closest to the North Pole, could go to the North Pole quite easily. We were actually two days ahead of schedule at that point. Given the two ships, it would have been a little tough, but everybody wanted to go, we wanted to go, they wanted to go. We had a representative of the State Department on board, I guess spread the word home that we were heading off to the North Pole, and I got a message from the State Department with 16 reasons why we shouldn't go to the North Pole, of which about three were reasonable, the other kind of bogus. But I came back and said, well, at this point, the way this worked is that, whoa, the US program was up to about that point, and after that it was the Canadian program. So when we were sitting up here, we were now supporting the Louis Saint Laurent, the Canadian ship. And I said, well, you know, I understand you're concerned, but at this point we're supporting the Canadian ship, we can't abandon her. So if they choose to go to the North Pole, we have to go along. And the next day they got an email from the Prime Minister's office that said you shall not go to the North Pole. And we can talk later about why that is. Okay, so this is just to show you what some of the seismic data looks like, that's how we measure the sediment thickness and just a spectacular record that went up there. Logistically, we had lots of interesting operations. There was a very, very heavy ice, really heavy ice up there, but the Canadians launched an autonomous underwater vehicle, did a 200 kilometer, 400 mile mission, and made some beautiful mapping. It really was quite a technical, and came back to the ship almost, pretty close enough that they were able to get it back, put it that way. So pretty impressive, we planted lots of ice buoys on the ice, always, if you can, an opportunity to get off on the ice, which is a wonderful experience. Anne had an airdrop, I guess, supported by the Coast Guard from where? Nome? Not Nome. What? It was NOAA. Okay, well, we'll see the plane in a minute. And that was, yeah, that was exciting. I don't think it was really critical, but I think they just wanted to do it, just to do it. Anne, a remarkable transit through very heavy ice over a bottom that is one of the grand mysteries. We just don't understand this bottom. Bottom shouldn't look like this. It implies that it's all chaotic. And we think it might represent a meteorite, actually a meteorite impact, many, many, many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago. So that's a proposal we'll write to go back to try to explore that. Anne, again, the AUV deployment. I mentioned ancillary programs. I've been always disappointed that the Navy hasn't, starting when, I guess, when Admiral Titley first became the oceanographer of the Navy, he and I had a discussion and we provided an opportunity. I said, look, you know, we're working in an area that's gonna be important, strategically, tactically. We don't have much experience in the Navy in this area. And so he sent riders, both Medoc people and a swole even to get some experience driving in the ice. Actually, the captain's brother, the first one, I guess, the Coast Guard captain's brother was the Navy commander who came up. It was, yeah, interesting situation. But that kind of went, when Admiral Titley left, that kind of faded away. And I think that's a shame. I think we do need much more experience up there. Collecting real-time observations that can feed into the models and things like that that are going on. Lots of oceanographic information that we collect all along and a lot of buoy data that we collect from the National Ice Center to plunge different ice buoys. This was a really interesting situation where I guess they finally this year, Greg, they finally this year, we had for at least seven years been asking permission to launch a small autonomous aircraft from the Heli and it had been denied, denied, denied. One year we had a, this is an Air Force captain who came with permission from, all the way up the chain of command as far as he can go. And it wasn't until we were on board that the permission was denied. So we just put them on, we put them on the Canadian ice breaker where they said sure and showed that that wasn't going to damage the Heli. I wish I, I don't know what the concern was. But this year, I guess for the first time Heli had operations. But to me, this is a tremendous capability. The Heli doesn't carry helicopters anymore. And so it gives you a forward look at the ice conditions, marine mammals or whatever else. And really, we can treat them as expendable, these little guys and infrared. So it was really quite nice. Okay, I gave you the picture of where we were. The big problem we had was in this area here. So that was the focus last year of our operations. The foot of the slope, as I said, we thought was there, but this is these kind of pictures that tell us where the foot of the slope really is as we come along here. And we were confident up to there, but we didn't know what was going on in here. Last year, I'd said of 2007 in terms of minimum ice extent, was the minimum. Last year, beat all those minimum. Last year was remarkable, absolutely remarkable. And, or 2012, I should say, this year it came up again a little. It's more to the normal track. But 2012 was just remarkable. You always see these pictures and it gives you one sense, but I knew we had been in the same place at the same time over those years sometimes. So here we are at 80.29 North. Basically, I'll show you another picture of the same position, 2007 on September 6th. There we are, 2012, same spot. And there's the ice margin. Every year, even 2007, it had been 75, 76, we didn't hit the ice toe, beyond 80. Which was interesting from an operas, another two same plot. Interesting from an operational perspective, because now we're not in the ice till we're up here. And so we did what we had to do here with much less serious ice. Got that done very, very quickly in terms of mapping the foot of the slope up there. And it was exactly where we had hoped it would be coming around. But then we're able to map in open water, something we just had never done before in the Arctic. And now start getting, this was the kind of data we would collect before, would be single lines as we're breaking ice. But now we can get this complete coverage and saw some remarkable features like this huge deep-sea channel, which we called the Weather Channel in honor of the people filming. The Weather Channel was filming a series about the heli at that time. And some more dredging, and here I have to compliment Greg and the crew because actually open water was harder than because of the winds. You're trying to put that bucket on a target that's maybe no more than the size of that screen in 3,000 meters of water at the end of a wire that's 6,000 meters long or 8,000 meters long. And it's a lot of positioning the vessel to get the bucket in the right place. We don't really have a, we're not tracking the bucket actively. We can only guess where it is. And they did a remarkable job. And again, corals, that's gonna be an exciting story about corals at 80 degrees north. Okay, so let me just finish it up. 1906, I mean, I'm old, not that old, but 1906 is not that long ago. This was the picture of the Arctic, just totally unknown. The Fram had just translated through there, collected seven soundings. Nansen produced a remarkable map showing a basin in the Arctic. But over the years, we've really improved. This is the sources of data that go into the compilations. There's a big thing called IPCAO, the international bathymetric chart of the Arctic Ocean. The thing I wanna point out here is, notice all the colors. The red is the hilly, purple, Japanese vessels that have been up there, Korean vessels now up there, all providing data into this compilation. So we have an idea what the Arctic looks like. But look at this side. And this is one of my biggest fears. The Russians have not shared any of their data. They're now starting to collect multi-beam data. They now own two multi-beam systems. They have submarine systems. They're collecting data. They refuse to share it. And if the law of the Sea Treaty is enacted, if their extended continental shelf goes on, they then also retain the right to deny other people permission to work in their waters, which they've now denied more than 50% of the applications to work in their EEZ. So this is something, I think, of great concern to the community that about half the Arctic may be shut off from any kind of operation, at least scientific exploration. So it's something we need to worry about. So over the eight years we've been there, we've extended the mapping by about data in the Arctic by many, many hundreds of times. We've really changed our understanding of not just the law of the sea issues, but many, many other scientific issues that we'll hopefully be pursuing over the years. But we shouldn't get too cocky because all that still just represents 11% of the Arctic Ocean. And there's just much, much more to map and to explore. And I think that's it, except for an Arctic Studies group, one of the neat things in oceanography, we always end pictures with a sunset, but in the Arctic it could be a sunset and a sunrise at the same time, which that was. So thank you. So certainly, I think a few minutes for questions, yeah? Yeah, please. Commander Shanno from the French Navy. Really? In France, it's good? It's good. It's good for tomorrow. It's life. So you mentioned environmental protection during your speech, about the assessment and the climate change to confirm the rise of sea levels, the acidification of ocean. I've seen in the Canadian base that it was also fishing, coast was a bit more fishery and ocean. Yeah, Department of Fisheries and Ocean, is it? It seems to me there is some connection between mapping, fishery, the characteristics of the sea. How do you consider the cooperation between mapping experts, the marine biologists, and the military in the future going that the assets are very expensive? Right. Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't have a clear-cut answer. I can only talk from my experience. From a mapping perspective, we've kind of kept the mapping program separate in that sense. We've had tremendous cooperation except with our Russian colleagues. Each year, since about 2004, we've had a meeting of the Arctic Five about the mapping efforts. We hosted one in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last year. Everybody always comes. Everybody speaks wonderfully about cooperation. The cooperation has been tremendous with the Canadians, as I said, the Danes, the Norwegians. The Russians always say they'll cooperate, but they never follow through. And so that's been an outlier. Interestingly enough from, I think about another no-esponsored program that deals more with the physical oceanography and the biological aspects in the Arctic program called Rosalka, which has been going on for many years. There is much more cooperation. That is a specific US-Russian collaborative program, and there's been a lot of cooperation there. So maybe there's something about biological and physical oceanographic aspects that they're less concerned with than sharing the mapping data. I think one of the big concerns we've had, at least from the mapping perspective, is that every year it's a different group of people. I think there's lots of internal struggle within Russia about who is controlling this. And until that gets sorted out, we're never gonna get a straight answer. And I think they're taking the path of least resistance about not sharing. I think the Arctic Research Council will be probably the best mechanism to try to promote that kind of much broader picture. There's no question that the Arctic is the canary in the coal mine, in terms of acidification, in terms of climate change. And that's why I'm so concerned about with the marine science research aspect of the Law of the Sea Treaty, which extends the requirement to ask permission into the extended continental shelf too. I'm very concerned that if half the Arctic is shut off for us from research perspective too, we're not gonna be able to stay on top of the climate and environmental issues. Yeah. I was gonna ask you about how does this affect any given on at all the rights of innocent passage or right of transit passage? And as you mentioned in the end, that they can deny operations in certain areas based on these rules. Okay, and Andy will be much better, who's a real lawyer instead of me. But the Law of the Sea Treaty very much protects the right of innocent passage and transit, those are just ingrained in the Law of the Sea Treaty, it's this extra step for marine science research, we call MSR, Marine Scientific Research that requires the permission. And so I'm speaking from that perspective. I think the issues of transit are gonna be issues of whether the Northwest Passage is an international straight or not. And I don't know what, whether the Russians have any thoughts about the Northeast Passage, about calling that territorial sea or areas that will require much closer control, but I think certainly any transit across the top of the Arctic no matter what happens in terms of extended continental shelf within the Law of the Sea Treaty, my understanding, Andy correct me if I'm wrong, still will fall under the innocent passage and it should not have an impact. Yeah, A? Hello Larry. Thanks very much for a great presentation, Steve Delverall of Canadian Navy. My question is in terms of the cooperation that you spoke of. I know that there's a bit too much cooperation, as you said, Canadians, Americans, the Danes, Norwegians and sharing the information, even the other non Arctic State actors, such as the Japanese. I noted your comment about the Russian approach. I'm curious if at the end of the day, the mapping creates a set of data that is to be submitted in more formal capacity to the UN under unclassed for endorsement, I suppose. And if there's been collaboration leading up to that then based on advice from folks like yourself and others who will help them walk through that, at some point the Russians will have to submit theirs as well. So will it not become part of the public domain at that point? No, the data that's submitted to the commission, what's called the commission on the limits of the kind of shelf is held, is protected. So they don't have that aspect. We're hoping that after they submit it then they may be more willing, but we've seen no real indication of that. The US has taken a remarkable, it's interesting, and I've been a huge proponent of this and now sometimes I regret it. Because the US has taken the attitude that any data collected with public funds is made publicly available unless there's security, security concerns, and they've not deemed that there are security concerns with this. Making the data public has no strategic advantage with respect to the law of the sea treaty. That's a relatively open process. And so the interesting thing is the Russians have access to all our data, but we don't have a lever because had we been a little more protective of it we could have said, well, we'll trade you our data for your data, and I'm very proud of the US for making it public, but it sometimes works to your disadvantage. Canadians have not, I should say. They will, I know they will, and they provide it to us, but whenever we do a joint cruise we have to, in terms of we publicly disseminate, we put the boundary at the Canadian border, but it's not, I think it's a different attitude. It's wanting to have the ability to publish it. They're scientists to publish it, and I know they'll make it public after that. Yeah. First thanks for the trip down memory lane. My question is in regards to your sly work. Did you get the truck to cap in the middle of the bridge and the potential for the line to extend as much as it looks like six or seven, maybe 800 miles? Six, 600, yeah, 600. My question is twofold, first one's kind of rhetorical, and what point does that become ridiculous for a coastal state to reach that far offshore and let the more legitimate part of the question is, is there any precedent internationally for the commission actually validating somebody's? Yeah, those are great questions because, these rules were 12 years in the making to establish some limits and we're following all the rules and yet still we can, although there's still interpretation and the interpretation has been exactly what you've said and what the commission seems to be doing is saying we get real uncomfortable when we see anybody go beyond 350 nautical miles, and although they've allowed some, but to get beyond 300 nautical miles, they call upon a different clause that says not natural prolongation, but natural component, again, which is undefined and the implication that they're in their decisions or their recommendations, I should say, the implication is that they're defining natural component as having exactly the same geology, which the treaty, I mean, the treaty lawyers will tell you, well, the treaty doesn't say anything about that. And it's the words of the treaty and so there are many countries like Australia and New Zealand who argue vehemently that that's not following the law, that they've gone beyond that and we don't know what'll happen. I suspect we would get pushed back and that's part of the strategizing and all that stuff is overlapping with Canada anyway, so there's a delimitation there and so it's a very interesting game that's going on now in terms of the US establishing where we think the delineation is, the delineation of the extended continental shelf at the same time negotiating with the Canadians for the delimitation of the maritime boundary and it's a real interesting give and take. Oh, I'm sorry. The auspices of ratification of undefined clause, do you see that? Does that play into any of the American work in the mapping and any potential submission in having not ratified undefined clause? Does that shape any of the discussions or decisions in the work here? Yeah, okay, and I think I give you a little insight into that without going too far. First of all, we study very carefully that there've only been about 11, I think, recommendations that have come back. There've been 60, 70 submissions but it's a very slow process. The commission goes through these very carefully, takes the original in three years for every submission. So at that point, we figured if the U.S. would submit now, they wouldn't get to look at ours till 2030 something. So everybody working on it now would long be gone. But we do take a look at the recommendations, although the lawyers will tell us that this is not really precedent setting, although it certainly establishes at least the mood of the commission. The commission changes every few years too, so that could change also. And that, looking at some of the recommendations and the decisions they've made, has indeed affected some of our mapping strategies that maybe it's not worth spending $10 million doing this because the chances of that are almost nil. Or the other way around too, there were situations that really surprised us that the commission gave a very extensive allowance to a nation, and we said, well, we have that situation too, so maybe we should map there. So it's worked both of those ways. If that was what your question was about, there was another part to it too. That was part of it, but I'm just warning you, is in simple terms, is it gratification or not gratifying on clause? Has that factored into any of the commissions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, I don't wanna say too much, but I think it's safe to say that should the U.S. have to take a route of unilaterally, it's a U.S. view that an extended continental shelf is an entitlement, that you do not have to be party to the treaty because if you read article 76, first paragraph, it says if a coastal state, not if a member of the party to the treaty, and that there's a long history of international customary law that has established the concept of a continental shelf. I think that should the U.S. have to take a route that is a unilateral declaration of limits to an extended continental shelf. Outside of the treaty, my suspicion is that it would be more conservative than going through the treaty route because the only way it would really have any bearing is if it was accepted by the international community. And so I think any of the controversial, the ones that there's typically a give and take with the commission, you just leave all those out and just do what you, that nobody would ever question that it was outside of the, so that's, I think that's about as far as I should say about that. Okay, well thank you.