Fast Moving Fronts Comments by Peter A. Jumars

ESI Special Topics, July 2003
Citing URL: http://www.esi-topics.com/fmf/2003/july03-PeteJumars.html

From •>>July 2003

Peter A. Jumars answers a few questions about this month's fast moving front in the field of Engineering.

Field: Engineering
Article: "Overview of SAX99: Environmental considerations"
Authors: Richardson, MD;Briggs, KB;Bibee, LD;Jumars, PA;Sawyer, WB;Albert, DB;Bennett, RH;Berger, TK;Buckingham, MJ;Chotiros, NP;Dahl, PH;Dewitt, NT;Fleischer, P;Flood, R;Greenlaw, CF;Holliday, DV;Hulbert, MH;Hutnak, MP;Jackson, PD;Jaffe, JS;Johnson, HP;Lavoie, DL;Lyons, AP;Martens, CS;McGehee, DE;Moore, KD;Orsi, TH;Piper, JN;Ray, RI;Reed, AH;Self, RFL;Schmidt, JL;Schock, SG;Simonet, F;Stoll, RD;Tang, D;Thistle, DE;Thorsos, EI;Walter, DJ;Wheatcroft, RA
Journal: IEEE J OCEANIC ENG|26: (1) 26-53, JAN 2001
Addresses:
USN, Res Lab, Marine Geosci Div, Stennis Space Ctr, MS 39529 USA.
USN, Res Lab, Marine Geosci Div, Stennis Space Ctr, MS 39529 USA.
Univ Maine, Darling Marine Ctr, Walpole, ME 04573 USA.
Univ N Carolina, Dept Marine Sci, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 USA.
SEAPROBE Inc, Picayune, MS 39466 USA.
Univ Calif San Diego, Scripps Inst Oceanog, Marine Phys Lab, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA.
Univ Southampton, Inst Sound & Vibrat Res, Southampton SO17 1BJ, Hants, England.
Univ Texas, Appl Res Labs

Photo above taken by Chris Jones of the Applied Physics Lab of the University of Washington of his and our jointly researched "Portable Acoustic Laboratory" (PAL) tripod, about to be deployed off the pier of the Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island in Puget Sound, Washington. We manipulated the sediments and the biological community in the view of this circularly scanning sonar and listened to the results.

  Why do you think your paper is highly cited?

SAX99 is perhaps the most interdisciplinary attack to date on the issue of high-frequency sound propagation in surficial marine sediments at low angles of incidence. As a consequence, an unusually large number of parameters that might influence sound propagation were measured at the same place and time. For this reason, the paper is of interest in a large number of disciplines. In my own discipline of benthic biological oceanography, for example, acoustics provide the only potentially available means synoptically over large scales and with high spatial resolution to monitor activities of organisms that live in marine sediments.

  Does it describe a new discovery or new methodology that's useful to others?

The novelty lies more in the integration than in the individual methods.

  How did you become involved in this research?

My interest dates back to a project off California on "Sediment TRansport Events on Shelves and Slopes" (STRESS, sponsored by the US Office of Naval Research) when I was working with the interaction of seabed organisms with sediment transport and discovered a putatively biological signal in some 40-kHz acoustic records collected by Darrell Jackson of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington. From then on, I have been piggybacking with acousticians to help realize the possibility of collecting biological information on seabed and near-seabed organisms acoustically.

  Could you summarize the significance of your paper in layman's terms?

One fundamental result of incorporating so much environmental information on one location is the realization that acoustically detectable change on the seabed is fast. From the standpoint of studying the biological processes responsible for some of these changes, or from the much more practical standpoint of detecting changes that might be due to the delivery of mines to an area of seabed, the implication is that one has to scan acoustically at a much higher scan rate than appreciated previously in order not to miss intervening changes. Once a day is way too infrequent.

Peter A. Jumars
Professor
School of Marine Sciences
Darling Marine Center
The University of Maine
Walpole, Maine, USA

Read the comments of this paper's lead author: Michael D. Richardson.

Return to Fast Moving Fronts | Return to Special Topics main menu

ESI Special Topics, July 2003
Citing URL: http://www.esi-topics.com/fmf/2003/july03-PeteJumars.html