To See in the Arctic, Darpa Might Stick Sensors on Icebergs

Hyped-up fears of a coming Arctic war have, appropriately, cooled down recently. But Arctic ice is melting faster than ever, which could mean more activity ' military and commercial ' in an environment notoriously unforgiving to sensors and other location tools. Leave it to the Pentagon's far-out researchers at Darpa to work on a solution: an all-seeing network of sensors to track what's going on in the Arctic all year round ' including, it seems, sensors placed on icebergs.

According to a Darpa briefing, the agency wants to leverage 'mobile floating-ice' for electromagnetic and acoustic sensors, and to help track ships and submarines. In the briefing, floating icebergs are illustrated with networked sensors stuck on them (.pdf). The electromagnetic sensors are seen stuck on top, with acoustic sensors attached to the icebergs' undersides, which could help with mapping the Arctic seafloor. The reason why is the icebergs drift up to six kilometers per day ' which has been speeding up with global warming ' which can allow the military to 'leverage ice movement.'

It's all part of an umbrella program Darpa calls 'Assured Arctic Awareness,' or AAA. Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) won a $2 million contract late last month to develop it. And while much of the program is vague, interviews with its architects and agency documents provide a glimpse of how the Pentagon plans to see through the Arctic fog.

'Most of the specific technologies planned for investigation under the first phase of AAA cannot be discussed until contracts are in place with the performers,' Darpa program manager Andrew Coon tells Danger Room. 'However, the program will emphasize remote distributed sensing as a way to provide standoff situational awareness in the Arctic.'

We've heard the background to this story before. As the planet heats up due to global warming, the Arctic ice cap could melt to the point where the summer season becomes nearly without ice coverage. (By the way, this summer's loss of Arctic ice hit a new record.) Putting aside the staggering environmental consequences, that's good for companies that want to use new Arctic shipping routes, and it gives an opening for energy companies zeroing in on the Arctic's deposits of oil and natural gas.

Then there's the 'Arctic War' theory. Per that much-hyped ' but far-fetched ' theory, the scramble for energy and the messy overlapping claims to Arctic waters could one day provoke a largely submarine-fought naval conflict between Russia and the U.S., Canada and Norway.

'Detection of submarines is an obvious application' for the agency's network, Coon says. But so is observing the increase in shipping brought on by the melting ice, which means tracking 'both ships and potential hazards like drifting ice, along with other remotely occurring activity that may hazard the stability of the region.' SAIC wouldn't comment on the program, but the company has worked on underwater acoustic networks for the Arctic since at least 1990. The Darpa contract mentions one in specific, called FLOATS, which the agency wants SAIC to keep developing.

But how Darpa wants its sensors to work is a bit more radical. According to the solicitation, the agency wants to use electromagnetic and acoustic sensors to track both submarines and surface ships across 'the entire summer ice extent.' Although decreasing, that's currently more than three million square kilometers. The solicitation also wants FLOATS to turn the hostile but unique features of the Arctic ' normally disadvantages to sensors ' into advantages. Even though the ice is melting, and the unbroken ice fields are disappearing, there's still more than enough scattered ice floating around for now to be hazardous to ships, and also plenty of potential spots to stick the sensor network.

Darpa even wants its sensors to use the ice movement for 'mechanical energy harvesting.' Ships navigating the Arctic also give off a unique 'signature' by using their radars at low angles to detect hazardous ice, which the sensors could then pick up to spot the vessels. Arctic ice also has the bad habit of scattering acoustic signals, which makes tracking submarines a challenge. Darpa wants to use 'ice dynamics' and 'opportunistic active acoustics' as leverage, but doesn't explain how that would work.

Still, tracking what's going on the Arctic is really, really hard. On the surface of Arctic waters, air surveillance is hampered by cloud cover, especially during the summer, and weird ionospheric effects around the North Pole can disrupt satellite signals. The winter months feature an extended dark period when the sun doesn't come above the horizon. And the temperatures in the Arctic are, well, really cold ' which is why Darpa needs the sensors to withstand an extreme temperature of -65 degrees Celsius.

And the extreme latitude makes even reaching the satellites problematic. Friendly submarines can get cut off from geostationary orbiters, which means limited access to GPS systems. There's also ' during the winter months ' a lot of ice that can block access to satellite signals.

'A key challenge of operating under the ice is the ice itself,' says Coon. For example, 'the ice blocks access to satellites,' he continues. 'Even undersea systems operating in the mid-latitudes rely on GPS and satellite communications when operating in the open ocean by surfacing periodically.'

Those submarines would be the decisive force in any Arctic war, which the U.S. already wins handily. That makes the whole concept of a potential conflict over the Arctic seem exceedingly remote. And if an all-seeing sensor network that actually works is in the mix, and it's even harder to see why an adversary would pick a frigid fight with the United States.