Bernard Coakley has a joint appointment with the Geophysical Institute. His research interests include quantitative modeling of sedimentary basins, marine geology and geophysics and the collection, reduction and analysis of underway data from vessels small and large. His research projects have ranged from continental stratigraphy to traditional "blue-water" marine geology and geophysics to, recently, "brown water" studies of contemporary sedimentary environments.
He has been involved with the geophysics program of SCICEX, a series of unclassified cruises to the Arctic on US Navy submarines, since the inception of the program in 1993. He is currently working with data collected during these six cruises for a variety of science applications.
He is involved with international collaborative projects for Arctic science and exploration, particularly the development of new bathymetry (see; http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/bathymetry/arctic/ ) , as well as first ever scientific drilling cruise to the central Arctic.
Understanding gross controls on sedimentary processes has been an important theme in his research activity. For this purpose, he has utilized historic hydrographic data sets from the Army Corps of Engineers and collected repeat swath surveys in the Mississippi River to examine channel evolution at decadal and annual time scales. Since arriving at UAF, he has renewed his interest in foreland basins, particularly the Colville Trough in Northern Alaska.
Last year, Dr Coakley co-lead a cruise on the US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, collecting a transect of Seismic Reflection, chirp sub-bottom profiler, gravity and sonobuoy data and cores from northern Alaska across the Arctic Ocean.
Projects in development include advocating the use of submarines in tandem with an icebreaker to map the Arctic extent of the US EEZ and an engineering study to prepare for cabled seafloor observatories on the Beaufort Shelf, north of Barrow.
Dr Coakley regularly teaches Basin Analysis (GEOS 438/638) and Applied Geophysics (Geos 416) in alternate years.
Two graduate students are currently working with Dr Coakley. Christina Williams (MS candidate) is studying the Alpha Mendeleev Ridge in the central Arctic Ocean and Dayton Dove (MS candidate) is working on the MCS data collected last Summer on the Mendeleev Ridge.
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