June 2021 OES Beacon OES Beacon

Polar Oceans Technical Committee Report

Andreas Marouchos, Chair Polar Oceans Technical Committee

Focus back on Polar research and technology

Andreas Marouchos

The Polar Oceans Technology Committee (POTC) supports the work addressing challenges in science and technology in the Arctic and Antarctic, through relevant streams in conferences and the hosting of workshops and symposia. In particular, we strive to build communities of engineers and technicians across both polar regions in working together to address our common challenges. In the coming year we’ll be looking to identify new opportunities to further strengthen the community and bring together those of us working on challenging polar technology problems. More info on the POTC can be found on our website:  http://polaroceans.org/

 ASOF 2021 Workshop is Back!

Last year the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Forum (ASOF) organizing committee decided to postpone the event to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are very happy to announce that the event is now back on! This year’s event will be virtual and is scheduled to take place during August 4-6th, 2021. In another change this year we are making participation in the workshop free to all. With the start of the UN Decade of Ocean Science (en.unesco.org/ocean-decade), the theme of this year’s workshop is “Addressing Polar technology challenges for the coming decade.” There are a broad range of technical areas of interest under this theme and chances are, if you’re working on polar technology, you will find a category relevant to your work. In addition, we are encouraging participation from both Arctic and Antarctic researchers. With the focus on engineering and technology, sharing presenters will be asked to submit an abstract for review and prepare a presentation of 20 min. A written paper submission is optional for this workshop. Submission of abstracts is now open, so please get your abstracts submitted as soon as possible since we have limited presentation slots. More details on the workshop can be found at asof2020.ieee.org, and page 26 of this issue.