Adrian McCallum

DepartmentOrganizationEmailPhoneLos Angeles , CaliforniaUnited StatesBioDr Adrian McCallum is a remote area field scientist and engineer.

He is fortunate to have led a life of adventure and exploration around the globe and is an expert in remote area science & engineering.

He holds a PhD from the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge and additional degrees in oceanography, meteorology and civil engineering. In 2002 he was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for his stewardship of the 2001 Australian Army Centenary Everest Expedition and he is a Menzies Scholar and Director of the Menzies Foundation; a non-profit, non-political organisation created to promote excellence in research, scholarship and postgraduate study by Australians.

During twenty years service across the Australian Defence Forces he served in numerous diverse roles such as helicopter navigator, meteorologist and civil engineer and he has led or participated in adventurous scientific expeditions around the globe. These investigations have taken him to many far flung locations including Svalbard, Greenland, across the Arctic and Antarctica, and to the Himalaya and the ice caps of Patagonia.

He orchestrated Sir Ranulph Fiennes' ground-breaking 2013 winter Transantarctic expedition, he owns a company specialising in remote area science and engineering and he regularly consults to the Australian Antarctic Division, the British Antarctic Survey and other international agencies on polar infrastructural and operational matters.

Interests

Sea Ice

Science Specialties

Cone Penetration Testing (CPT) particularly in frozen geomaterials, geohazards, snow mechanics, snow physics, GPR, polar oceanography, alpine glaciology and hydrology, cold regions engineering, polar traverse logistics, polar infrastructure, light-weight scientific expeditions, development of Remote or Autonomous Vehicles (RAVs) for remote area site investigation, climate change adaptation.

Current Research

I specialise in the remote or in situ assessment of remote areas. Founded upon my broad training in oceanography, glaciology and engineering, I continue to stimulate advances in research in the field of AUV development for polar applications.

In 2014 I presented a paper to the International Conference on Radio-glaciology on the use of UAV-mounted Ground Penetrating Radar for remote radio-glaciology. I am currently supervising a PhD student who is developing a UAV-mounted Software Defined Radio (SDR) Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) for use in hostile polar environments. This device will also be adaptable to sea ice assessment.

I am currently supervising numerous Honours students who are developing innovative bespoke instrumentation for the physical assessment of polar water masses:

One is developing an autonomous depth-sounder that when released en masse can provide real- time Lagrangian bathymetric information,

Another is developing a bespoke autonomous CTD that can deploy/recover at defined intervals allowing autonomous profiling of water masses, and finally

Another is developing a bespoke cheap and lightweight Doppler radar system that can be used to monitor the movement of ice sheets and sea ice.

Additionally, I am interested in the strategic geopolitical implications of a warming Arctic.