A Controlled Experiment on Oil Release Beneath Thin Sea Ice and Its Electromagnetic Detection

This paper presents a multidisciplinary research on the thermodynamic and geophysical effects of crude oil released underneath thin sea ice, and further evaluates the ability of a combined frequency- and time-domain approach toward its detection. To this end, a controlled oil release experiment in an artificially grown sea ice mesocosm was performed during the winter of 2017 at the Sea-Ice Research Environmental Facility located at the University of Manitoba. Ice cores extracted during the evolution of the sea ice prior and post oil injection allowed the investigation of the profile’s properties and the oil distribution. Furthermore, chemical composition and microstructure analysis were performed via a gas chromatography-time-of-flight mass spectrometry and X-ray, respectively. The time-series radar signature of the profile was measured utilizing ground penetration radar at 500 MHz and a C-band scatterometer. For this experiment, it was shown that the retrieval of the oil presence underneath the young sea ice layer was feasible, provided that the measured data were utilized simultaneously in a unified cost function.