Ira Dyer and MIT Arctic acoustics research

Ira Dyer and his colleague Art Baggeroer began MIT’s Arctic Acoustics research efforts in the latter half of the 1970s. In this pre-GPS and newly digital era, Ira helped define an ambitious program for the Office of Naval Research that brought large-aperture high-quality acoustic array data acquisition to bear on the problems of Arctic acoustic science. Supporting a generation of graduate students, this work explored ambient noise generation mechanisms in the ice, Arctic basin reverberation, seismic reflection and refraction studies to understand the underlying crustal structure, and long-range propagation that is now exploited for acoustic thermometry to study global climate change. Advanced signal processing, combined with fundamental physical understanding and modeling of the ice, water column, and underlying crust vastly increased our understanding of these phenomena in the Arctic. I will show some of the results of this work, and how it has been extended for use in active sonars and measurements of sea-ice dynamics over large areas of the Arctic.