By Elizabeth Weidner.

Over the past year, the Broadband Acoustics Lab, led by DMS Assistant Professor Elizabeth Weidner, designed and built a new kind of seafloor lander to investigate how melting glaciers are transforming the coastal Arctic ocean.

The custom-built instrument houses several advanced sonar systems that use sound to observe processes that are otherwise difficult to capture in remote, ice-covered environments.

The lander was developed, assembled, and tested at the University of Connecticut, in close collaboration with Professor Tom Blanford from the University of New Hampshire. A new DMS graduate student, Cloé Mueller, who joined the lab in the fall, played a key role in system testing and preparation.