UNH scientists discover seamount

By Robert Emro, CEPS

Using state-of-the-art ocean-mapping technologies, a team of UNH scientists has discovered an undersea mountain in arctic waters north of Barrow, Alaska, where current charts show only a small knoll.

The team, led by Larry Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM) at UNH, detected the seamount last summer, while surveying aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, a 420-ft ice breaker. Mayer recently received notice from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names that his request to name the mountain for the Healy has been granted.

The research cruise was part of the United States’ Law of the Sea ocean-mapping survey, which could expand the internationally recognized U.S. continental shelf on both the East and West Coast. According to a 2002 report by the journal Science, the underwater territory gained by more detailed mapping could net the United States up to $1.3 trillion in resources such as oil, minerals, and fish.

The United States has yet to agree to the Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was proposed in 1982 and took effect in 1994, but last Wednesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously backed the treaty. It now goes to the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required to recommend ratification.

Compared to older maps, the new data from the arctic cruise depict much more complex, detailed and — from a Law of the Sea perspective — advantageous bathymetry, or seafloor topography.
The team of scientists from UNH, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Naval Research Lab, the Navy’s Arctic Submarine Lab, and guest scientists from Denmark and Sweden, were testing the feasibility of multi-beam sonar mapping of ice-covered waters from a single ship. The cruise team mapped 1,530 nautical miles, significantly exceeding pre-cruise expectations.

Seamount Healy abruptly rises more than 3,000 meters from the ocean floor to about 925 meters of depth. While mapping the seamount, the cruise team also discovered waters more than 4,000 meters deep. Such depths had never before been measured in that area of the Arctic Ocean. The U.S. mapping program for the Law of the Sea began in 2002. The initial effort provided for a study to determine the availability of existing data for Law of the Sea purposes, and to identify where additional mapping would be required.