Ice Drones Over Alaska

Ask anyone in Nome, Alaska right now how they feel about surveillance drones and you’ll likely get unequivocally high praise. Had a remotely-piloted surveillance aircraft not been monitoring Bering Sea ice flows over the past week an emergency shipment of 1.3 million gallons of oil may not have reached the iced-in, snow-drifted town as soon as it did.

Don’t get the wrong idea. The drone, which was launched from Nome’s shores by University of Alaska – Fairbanks Geophysical Institute researchers, isn’t the sort of eye-in-the-sky most often associated with the U.S.’s various hulking, 40-foot wing-spanning reconnaissance planes that are cruising over the Middle East to keep tabs on suspected terrorists. The Aeryon Scout micro unmanned aerial vehicle resembles a “smoke detector with wings and legs,” according to the Anchorage Daily News, and is part and parcel of a rapidly expanding fleet of mid- to micro-sized sky robots being flown domestically for all manner of tedious or risky intelligence gathering gigs.

Because really, how else were navigators aboard the good ship Healy, the U.S Coast Guard icebreaker that broke open a path for a Russian oil tanker that crews could begin unloading as early as today, supposed to get any sort of idea of what they were up against? Put another way – and to echo the prime rationale for all drones, whether for surveillance or combat – how else were navigators and researchers supposed to jointly chart the massive ice ridges, at spots 25-feet thick, outside of Nome’s harbor efficiently, on the relative cheap and without risk to life and limb?

Read the rest at Motherboard.