Autosub made headlines recently when it became trapped under
200m of ice in Antarctica.Here we explore the ideas behind the £5.86
million research programme, and look back at an earlier expedition
which took place last summer off the coast of Greenland

Griffiths, G.

English

Autosub made headlines recently when it became trapped under 200m of ice in Antarctica. Here we explore the ideas behind the £5.86 million research programme, and look back at an earlier expedition which took place last summer off the coast of Greenland

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

30  INGENIA INNOVATIONISSUE 22 MARCH 2005 31AUTOSUB UNDER ICETHE AUTOSUB UNDERICE PROGRAMME Autosub Under Ice is a five-year£5.86 million programmeexploring the marineenvironment beneath floatingice shelves and adjacent areas of sea ice.Ice shelves are thefloating edges of the ice sheetscovering Greenland andAntarctica,and they containover 70% of the world's freshwater – enough to increase sealevel by 80m if they meltedentirely.But what takes place in the vast water cavitiesbeneath the ice shelves (whichcan be over 1000m thick) islargely unknown.Funded bythe UK Natural EnvironmentResearch Council,theprogramme brings togetheroceanographers,glaciologists,biologists,modellers andengineers from 14 institutions to investigate the role of sub-ice shelf processes in theclimate system using Autosub.THE AUTOSUBVEHICLE The Autosub AutonomousUnderwater Vehicle (AUV) was developed and built atSouthampton OceanographyCentre.Capable of diving todepths of 1600m,Autosub gives scientists access to someof the last uncharted areas in the world,and gathersinformation for a broad range of environmental sciences.However,there are still manychallenges in using AUVs in realenvironments.A particularchallenge is how to balance trueautonomy with command andcontrol via a communicationlink.Long-range acousticcommunication underwater isfraught with difficulties becauseof time-varying dispersivepropagation channels.Thevehicle also has to rely onacoustic sensors to provideinformation for interpretation by the on-board missionmanagement and collisionavoidance systems.The missions themselves are also risky;18 months ago anAutosub mission to investigatePine Island Glacier in Antarcticawas threatened by deterioratingweather.The ship's captaindecided to abandon the missionand retreat from an area of seaice.His decision was the rightone;the following day,pancakeice had amassed to formimpenetrable sea ice that mighthave prevented the ship's returnto open waters.Last summer,Autosub’s latest Arctic cruiselooked to be heading the sameway…ARCTIC EXPEDITION:MISSION 365The two-part Autosubexpedition took place in thesummer of 2004 off the coast ofeastern Greenland.The first part,led by Professor Peter Wadhamsof the University of Cambridge,focused on measurements ofsea-ice thickness off north-eastGreenland using the vehicle'smultibeam sonar.The second,led by Professor JulianDowdeswell of the University of Cambridge,was amultidisciplinary study of thegeology,oceanography andmarine biology of the glacier-fjord-shelf system ofKangerdlussuaq Fjord in south-east Greenland using sonar,a suite of physical sensors and a high-definition still camera.The vehicle gathered uniquedata in all of these areas.DRAMA UNDER ICEAfter successfully completing a24-hour mission under 140 kmof continuous ice gathering seaice thickness data for ProfessorWadhams' group,Autosub wasdue to return to its launch pointoutside of the edge of fast seaice.But,after the mission hadbegun,strong winds from theeast caused drifting sea ice topile against the edge of the fastice.By the scheduled recoverytime,the rendezvous point wascovered by shifting ice floes,making it extremely risky forAutosub to surface.The newly-developedacoustic homing system wasthen put to the test to redirectAutosub to a safe,ice-freerecovery site where the vehiclecould surface and return to theship,RRS James Clark Ross.Alow-frequency acoustic homingbeacon was lowered into thewater from the ship.On the AUV,a trio of acoustic transducersformed an ultra-short baselinenavigation system,where theangle of arrival of the homingsignal was determined andinstructions were issued to thevehicle's mission managementsystem to home to the acousticsignal rather than its preset finalwaypoint.While the receivers onthe vehicle were in anacoustically quiet environment,those on the ship listening fortelemetry from Autosub werenot.As a result,at a distance over4km at first,contact betweenAutosub and the ship was poorand intermittent.It was seriously nail-bitingstuff.Dr Ken Collins,the AutosubUnder Ice Science Coordinator,wrote in the web diary that wasposted daily:“The captain positioned the ship in a small gap in the broken ice.Normally we would have stayed in one spot using the ship'sdynamic positioning system.However,the ice was drifting fast.The captain steered the shipagainst the current and wind sothat the ship stayed with the openpatch of water,all the time withthe homing beacon hangingbelowthe ship.“We were gripped as wewatched the acoustic trackingcomputer screen count down the distanceto the ship.At 250mrange,just clear of the icesurrounding us,the signal wasgiven for Autosub to surface.And itdid – fiveagonising minutes later.There was huge relief whenAutosub was back on boardbeforethe iceclosed around us.Wedon't carry a spare £1.5millonAutosub!”INTERPRETING THE DATATransferring data from thevehicle,the scientists learnedthat it had not been an easyunderwater mission,even beforethe drifting ice arrived.Datashowed that the vehicle hadaltered its depth several times toavoid deep ice keels,icebergsAUTOSUBUNDER ICEAutosub made headlines recently when it became trapped under200m of ice in Antarctica.Here we explore the ideas behind the £5.86million research programme,and look back at an earlier expeditionwhich took place last summer off the coast of Greenland.Autosub in Greenland © Southampton Oceanography Centre32  INGENIA AUTOSUB UNDER ICEand a shoaling seabed quiteunlike that on the chart.Moreremarkable,even to theengineers who had programmedthe collision avoidance system,Autosub had had to negotiatean extensive obstacle 30m belowthe surface on its way back – aseabed bank which blocked theway.Operating entirelyautonomously,the vehicleturned and retreated along itstrack,turned again,and tried atan offset to the left of theintended track.Finding its pathstill blocked,the vehicleretreated again and tried anoffset of double the distance tothe right,succeeded in passingthe obstacle and manoeuvredback on track.CONCLUSIONThis demonstration of Autosub'sability to 'think for itself' marked a significant milestone in theadvancement of AUVs used forpolar exploration,and illustratesthe interplay of autonomy versuscommand and control.It is with sadness,therefore,that we learned on 16 February2005 that a mechanical failurehad left Autosub stranded 17kminto the cavity of the Fimbul iceshelf in Antarctica.Only a fewdays earlier,the mission hadbeen highly successful,asAutosub became the first vesselto enter the waters beneathAntarctica and gatherenvironmental data and images.It is now unlikely that the AUVwill ever be recovered.However,as engineers,we learn from suchsetbacks,and a new Autsoub willbe unveiled in September.ABOUT THE AUTOSUB UNDER ICE PROGRAMMEAutosub Under Ice has been established toinvestigate the marine environment of floatingice shelves with a view to advancing theunderstanding of their role in the climatesystem.Fieldwork for the programme comprisesthree seasons in Antarctica and Greenland,using Autosub to gain unprecedented access to ice-covered regions.Some of the questions motivating theprogramme are:• How do ice shelves affect the ocean bycontributing to water mass transformation,both near surface and at depth?• How do we interpret the sedimentary recordleft by ice shelves in past climates?• What is the bathymetry beneath perenniallyice-covered regions?• How does the ice cover affect the ecosystem of continental shelf waters?The scientific theme of Autosub Under Ice ismultidisciplinary and the programme seeks tobuild an active and collaborating community of researchers.AUTOSUB FACTS• Since 1996 Autosub has completed 382deployments,demonstrating the capability for unescorted missions,routine launch andrecovery in Force 6 conditions,sensor or data-driven path determination and terrainfollowing.•The vehicle has been employed in projectsranging from herring stock assessment in theNorth Sea to mapping manganese distributionsin a sea loch.Autosub has also successfullyundertaken biological and oceanographicmissions beneath sea ice in the marginal icezone of the Weddell Sea.• Autosub measurements can includeconductivity,temperature,transmissivity,fluorescence,photo-synthetically active radiation(PAR),current velocities,turbulence,ice draft,and water depth.Sub-bottom acoustic profilingcan reveal structures of glacial origin in theseafloor sediments,while a water sampler cancollect samples for geochemical and biologicalanalyses.Swath bathymetry and sidescan sonarcan provide measurements of ice shelf,sea iceand ocean bottom relief at high resolution.Other instruments can also be accommodatedon the vehicle.VEHICLE SPECIFICATIONSDimensions: Length 7 m,diameter 0.9m.Batteries:Up to 5160 D-cell Mn alkalineproviding more than 500km range or 6 daysendurance in optimal conditions.Depth rating: Carbon fibre pressure vesselsrated to 1600m.Propulsion: DC brushless motor driving 5-bladepropeller with no reduction gearing andseawater-lubricated bearings.Navigation: Bottom or ceiling tracking usingdoppler log from 150 kHz and 300kHz ADCPswith 500m range.Inertial navigation systemprovides navigational accuracy of better than0.2% of distance travelled.Standard sensors: PHINS fibre optic attitudesensor for heading,pitch and roll.Digiquartz 430kT 700 bar pressure sensor for depth data.Simrad Mesotech 808 echo sounder with 300mrange for altitude information and collisionavoidance.Seabird SBE9 CTD and 150 KHz RDIADCPs.Scientific payload: 1 cubic metre or 100kilograms in water.Optional sensors: a variety of commercial andtailor-made packages can be fitted including afluorometer,transmissometer,oxygen sensor,in situ manganese sensor,flow cytometer,50 x0.25l water sampler,turbulence probe,additionalADCPs,upward-looking sonars,sidescan sonars,swath bathymetry and digital cameras.BIOGRAPHY –Professor Gwyn GriffithsProfessor Gwyn Griffiths is headof the Underwater SystemsLaboratory at SouthamptonOceanography Centre.He hasbeen involved with Autosubfrom concept to operationsover the past ten years.The Autosub Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) © Southampton Oceanography CentreTHE 10 YEARFRAMEWORKThe UK is embarking upondelivery of a 10 Year Science andInnovation Strategy.Announcedby the Chancellor of theExchequer in July 2004,it is theGovernment’s largestcommitment yet to globalexcellence in research andinnovation.The ‘10 YearFramework’places investmentinto areas designed to make theUK a world leader in basicscience and translatingknowledge more effectively intoinnovation.These funds will alsoenable the UK to become aleading place for research anddevelopment and high value-added business.In broad terms this is verysimilar in substance and rhetoricto science policy initiated 40years ago.The WilsonGovernment of the 1960s andthe influential Robins Committeeexpressed two goals:economicgrowth and the promotion ofhigher cultural standards.Indeed,it is extraordinarilysimilar to that adopted in theUSA by Vannevar Bush’s 1946recommendation to focusexpenditure around nationalsecurity,the war on disease,science and jobs and theinternational exchange of ideas.What has changed from both ofthese previous initiatives is theevidence upon which it is based,the effectiveness of its deliveryand the level of financial support.The 10 Year Framework hasbeen supported by an average5.8% annual real growth in theScience Budget during the 2004Spending Review period.Thiswill see the Science Budget riseto over £3.3 billion per annumby 2008.The allocation of thismoney to the Research Councilsand Learned Societies will helpto set the foundations of the 10Year Strategy by improving thesustainability and infrastructureof the research base,the healthof key disciplines (includingengineering),knowledge transferand exploitation,the supply ofscientists and engineers andpublic awareness andconfidence in science.The Government iscommitted to making sure thatscientific research is properlyfunded and that the UK’sresearch base is put on a secureand sustainable footing.£120mper year,rising to £200m by2007–08,will enable ResearchCouncils and Learned Societiesto pay 80% of the full economiccost of the projects they fund.The Government’s intention isthat this percentage will reach100% by the start of the nextdecade,taking into accountcapital funding streams.Together with maintaining theScience Research InvestmentFund at £500m per year and theincreases to qualitative researchrecently announced by HigherEducation Funding Council forEngland,universities will beconsiderably better supported.PROMOTINGRESEARCHFrom this firmer footing,weintend to address the health ofunderlying research disciplines.For example,additional fundinghas been found to strengthenunderpinning energy researchto develop UK capability acrossthe full range of future energyoptions,translational research inthe biomedical area and areas ofmathematics and advancedengineering.The increasingbudget awarded to The RoyalAcademy of Engineeringrecognises the crucial role thatit plays in this area.This emphasisupon sustainability and health of disciplines reflects therecognition among policymakers that a world-class scienceand engineering base is aprerequisite to its successfulexploitation.The 10 Year Frameworkhighlights the importance ofknowledge transfer for publicgood and economic advantage(with a target for the UK toincrease its R&D investment as apercentage of GDP from 1.9% to2.5% by 2014).To help facilitatethis change,the HigherEducation Innovation Fund(HEIF) will increase to £110m by2007-08.The move towards aformulaic approach will ensurethat HEIF has a predictablestream of income with which tostrengthen knowledge transfercapacity.A retained amount forallocation on a competitive basiswill allow additional funding forthe most innovative ideas.Alongside HEIF,the PublicSector Research EstablishmentFund will also be expanded to£20m per year.The keychallenge for the next few yearsISSUE 22 MARCH 2005 33SUSTAINABILITYSir Keith O’Nions,the Director General of Research Councils,outlines the funding allocated by Government to deliver its 10 Year Science and Innovation Strategy.Sir Keith O’Nions

Autosub under ice

NERC Open Research Archive

30 INGENIA INNOVATIONISSUE 22 MARCH 2005 31AUTOSUB UNDER ICETHE AUTOSUB UNDERICE PROGRAMME Autosub Under Ice is a five-year£5.86 million programmeexploring the marineenvironment beneath floatingice shelves and adjacent areas of sea ice. Ice shelves are thefloating edges of the ice sheetscovering Greenland andAntarctica, and they containover 70% of the world's freshwater – enough to increase sealevel by 80m if they meltedentirely. But what takes place in the vast water cavitiesbeneath the ice shelves (whichcan be over 1000m thick) islargely unknown. Funded bythe UK Natural EnvironmentResearch Council, theprogramme brings togetheroceanographers, glaciologists,biologists, modellers andengineers from 14 institutions to investigate the role of sub-ice shelf processes in theclimate system using Autosub.THE AUTOSUBVEHICLE The Autosub AutonomousUnderwater Vehicle (AUV) was developed and built atSouthampton OceanographyCentre. Capable of diving todepths of 1600m, Autosub gives scientists access to someof the last uncharted areas in the world, and gathersinformation for a broad range of environmental sciences.However, there are still manychallenges in using AUVs in realenvironments. A particularchallenge is how to balance trueautonomy with command andcontrol via a communicationlink. Long-range acousticcommunication underwater isfraught with difficulties becauseof time-varying dispersivepropagation channels. Thevehicle also has to rely onacoustic sensors to provideinformation for interpretation by the on-board missionmanagement and collisionavoidance systems.The missions themselves are also risky; 18 months ago anAutosub mission to investigatePine Island Glacier in Antarcticawas threatened by deterioratingweather. The ship's captaindecided to abandon the missionand retreat from an area of seaice. His decision was the rightone; the following day, pancakeice had amassed to formimpenetrable sea ice that mighthave prevented the ship's returnto open waters. Last summer,Autosub’s latest Arctic cruiselooked to be heading the sameway…ARCTIC EXPEDITION:MISSION 365The two-part Autosubexpedition took place in thesummer of 2004 off the coast ofeastern Greenland. The first part,led by Professor Peter Wadhamsof the University of Cambridge,focused on measurements ofsea-ice thickness off north-eastGreenland using the vehicle'smultibeam sonar. The second,led by Professor JulianDowdeswell of the University of Cambridge, was amultidisciplinary study of thegeology, oceanography andmarine biology of the glacier-fjord-shelf system ofKangerdlussuaq Fjord in south-east Greenland using sonar,a suite of physical sensors and a high-definition still camera.The vehicle gathered uniquedata in all of these areas.DRAMA UNDER ICEAfter successfully completing a24-hour mission under 140 kmof continuous ice gathering seaice thickness data for ProfessorWadhams' group, Autosub wasdue to return to its launch pointoutside of the edge of fast seaice. But, after the mission hadbegun, strong winds from theeast caused drifting sea ice topile against the edge of the fastice. By the scheduled recoverytime, the rendezvous point wascovered by shifting ice floes,making it extremely risky forAutosub to surface.The newly-developedacoustic homing system wasthen put to the test to redirectAutosub to a safe, ice-freerecovery site where the vehiclecould surface and return to theship, RRS James Clark Ross. Alow-frequency acoustic homingbeacon was lowered into thewater from the ship. On the AUV,a trio of acoustic transducersformed an ultra-short baselinenavigation system, where theangle of arrival of the homingsignal was determined andinstructions were issued to thevehicle's mission managementsystem to home to the acousticsignal rather than its preset finalwaypoint. While the receivers onthe vehicle were in anacoustically quiet environment,those on the ship listening fortelemetry from Autosub werenot. As a result, at a distance over4km at first, contact betweenAutosub and the ship was poorand intermittent.It was seriously nail-bitingstuff. Dr Ken Collins, the AutosubUnder Ice Science Coordinator,wrote in the web diary that wasposted daily:“The captain positioned the ship in a small gap in the broken ice.Normally we would have stayed in one spot using the ship'sdynamic positioning system.However, the ice was drifting fast.The captain steered the shipagainst the current and wind sothat the ship stayed with the openpatch of water, all the time withthe homing beacon hangingbelow the ship.“We were gripped as wewatched the acoustic trackingcomputer screen count down the distance to the ship. At 250mrange, just clear of the icesurrounding us, the signal wasgiven for Autosub to surface. And itdid – five agonising minutes later.There was huge relief whenAutosub was back on boardbefore the ice closed around us. Wedon't carry a spare £1.5millonAutosub!”INTERPRETING THE DATATransferring data from thevehicle, the scientists learnedthat it had not been an easyunderwater mission, even beforethe drifting ice arrived. Datashowed that the vehicle hadaltered its depth several times toavoid deep ice keels, icebergsAUTOSUBUNDER ICEAutosub made headlines recently when it became trapped under200m of ice in Antarctica. Here we explore the ideas behind the £5.86million research programme, and look back at an earlier expeditionwhich took place last summer off the coast of Greenland.Autosub in Greenland © Southampton Oceanography Centre32 INGENIA AUTOSUB UNDER ICEand a shoaling seabed quiteunlike that on the chart. Moreremarkable, even to theengineers who had programmedthe collision avoidance system,Autosub had had to negotiatean extensive obstacle 30m belowthe surface on its way back – aseabed bank which blocked theway. Operating entirelyautonomously, the vehicleturned and retreated along itstrack, turned again, and tried atan offset to the left of theintended track. Finding its pathstill blocked, the vehicleretreated again and tried anoffset of double the distance tothe right, succeeded in passingthe obstacle and manoeuvredback on track.CONCLUSIONThis demonstration of Autosub'sability to 'think for itself' marked a significant milestone in theadvancement of AUVs used forpolar exploration, and illustratesthe interplay of autonomy versuscommand and control.It is with sadness, therefore,that we learned on 16 February2005 that a mechanical failurehad left Autosub stranded 17kminto the cavity of the Fimbul iceshelf in Antarctica. Only a fewdays earlier, the mission hadbeen highly successful, asAutosub became the first vesselto enter the waters beneathAntarctica and gatherenvironmental data and images.It is now unlikely that the AUVwill ever be recovered. However,as engineers, we learn from suchsetbacks, and a new Autsoub willbe unveiled in September.ABOUT THE AUTOSUB UNDER ICE PROGRAMMEAutosub Under Ice has been established toinvestigate the marine environment of floatingice shelves with a view to advancing theunderstanding of their role in the climatesystem. Fieldwork for the programme comprisesthree seasons in Antarctica and Greenland,using Autosub to gain unprecedented access to ice-covered regions.Some of the questions motivating theprogramme are:• How do ice shelves affect the ocean bycontributing to water mass transformation,both near surface and at depth?• How do we interpret the sedimentary recordleft by ice shelves in past climates?• What is the bathymetry beneath perenniallyice-covered regions?• How does the ice cover affect the ecosystem of continental shelf waters?The scientific theme of Autosub Under Ice ismultidisciplinary and the programme seeks tobuild an active and collaborating community of researchers.AUTOSUB FACTS• Since 1996 Autosub has completed 382deployments, demonstrating the capability for unescorted missions, routine launch andrecovery in Force 6 conditions, sensor or data-driven path determination and terrainfollowing.• The vehicle has been employed in projectsranging from herring stock assessment in theNorth Sea to mapping manganese distributionsin a sea loch. Autosub has also successfullyundertaken biological and oceanographicmissions beneath sea ice in the marginal icezone of the Weddell Sea.• Autosub measurements can includeconductivity, temperature, transmissivity,fluorescence, photo-synthetically active radiation(PAR), current velocities, turbulence, ice draft,and water depth. Sub-bottom acoustic profilingcan reveal structures of glacial origin in theseafloor sediments, while a water sampler cancollect samples for geochemical and biologicalanalyses. Swath bathymetry and sidescan sonarcan provide measurements of ice shelf, sea iceand ocean bottom relief at high resolution.Other instruments can also be accommodatedon the vehicle.VEHICLE SPECIFICATIONSDimensions: Length 7 m, diameter 0.9m.Batteries: Up to 5160 D-cell Mn alkalineproviding more than 500km range or 6 daysendurance in optimal conditions.Depth rating: Carbon fibre pressure vesselsrated to 1600m.Propulsion: DC brushless motor driving 5-bladepropeller with no reduction gearing andseawater-lubricated bearings.Navigation: Bottom or ceiling tracking usingdoppler log from 150 kHz and 300kHz ADCPswith 500m range. Inertial navigation systemprovides navigational accuracy of better than0.2% of distance travelled.Standard sensors: PHINS fibre optic attitudesensor for heading, pitch and roll. Digiquartz 430kT 700 bar pressure sensor for depth data.Simrad Mesotech 808 echo sounder with 300mrange for altitude information and collisionavoidance. Seabird SBE9 CTD and 150 KHz RDIADCPs.Scientific payload: 1 cubic metre or 100kilograms in water.Optional sensors: a variety of commercial andtailor-made packages can be fitted including afluorometer, transmissometer, oxygen sensor,in situ manganese sensor, flow cytometer, 50 x0.25l water sampler, turbulence probe, additionalADCPs, upward-looking sonars, sidescan sonars,swath bathymetry and digital cameras.BIOGRAPHY –Professor Gwyn GriffithsProfessor Gwyn Griffiths is headof the Underwater SystemsLaboratory at SouthamptonOceanography Centre. He hasbeen involved with Autosubfrom concept to operationsover the past ten years.The Autosub Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) © Southampton Oceanography CentreTHE 10 YEARFRAMEWORKThe UK is embarking upondelivery of a 10 Year Science andInnovation Strategy. Announcedby the Chancellor of theExchequer in July 2004, it is theGovernment’s largestcommitment yet to globalexcellence in research andinnovation. The ‘10 YearFramework’ places investmentinto areas designed to make theUK a world leader in basicscience and translatingknowledge more effectively intoinnovation. These funds will alsoenable the UK to become aleading place for research anddevelopment and high value-added business.In broad terms this is verysimilar in substance and rhetoricto science policy initiated 40years ago. The WilsonGovernment of the 1960s andthe influential Robins Committeeexpressed two goals: economicgrowth and the promotion ofhigher cultural standards.Indeed, it is extraordinarilysimilar to that adopted in theUSA by Vannevar Bush’s 1946recommendation to focusexpenditure around nationalsecurity, the war on disease,science and jobs and theinternational exchange of ideas.What has changed from both ofthese previous initiatives is theevidence upon which it is based,the effectiveness of its deliveryand the level of financial support.The 10 Year Framework hasbeen supported by an average5.8% annual real growth in theScience Budget during the 2004Spending Review period. Thiswill see the Science Budget riseto over £3.3 billion per annumby 2008. The allocation of thismoney to the Research Councilsand Learned Societies will helpto set the foundations of the 10Year Strategy by improving thesustainability and infrastructureof the research base, the healthof key disciplines (includingengineering), knowledge transferand exploitation, the supply ofscientists and engineers andpublic awareness andconfidence in science.The Government iscommitted to making sure thatscientific research is properlyfunded and that the UK’sresearch base is put on a secureand sustainable footing. £120mper year, rising to £200m by2007–08, will enable ResearchCouncils and Learned Societiesto pay 80% of the full economiccost of the projects they fund.The Government’s intention isthat this percentage will reach100% by the start of the nextdecade, taking into accountcapital funding streams.Together with maintaining theScience Research InvestmentFund at £500m per year and theincreases to qualitative researchrecently announced by HigherEducation Funding Council forEngland, universities will beconsiderably better supported.PROMOTINGRESEARCHFrom this firmer footing, weintend to address the health ofunderlying research disciplines.For example, additional fundinghas been found to strengthenunderpinning energy researchto develop UK capability acrossthe full range of future energyoptions, translational research inthe biomedical area and areas ofmathematics and advancedengineering. The increasingbudget awarded to The RoyalAcademy of Engineeringrecognises the crucial role thatit plays in this area.This emphasisupon sustainability and health of disciplines reflects therecognition among policymakers that a world-class scienceand engineering base is aprerequisite to its successfulexploitation.The 10 Year Frameworkhighlights the importance ofknowledge transfer for publicgood and economic advantage(with a target for the UK toincrease its R&D investment as apercentage of GDP from 1.9% to2.5% by 2014). To help facilitatethis change, the HigherEducation Innovation Fund(HEIF) will increase to £110m by2007-08. The move towards aformulaic approach will ensurethat HEIF has a predictablestream of income with which tostrengthen knowledge transfercapacity. A retained amount forallocation on a competitive basiswill allow additional funding forthe most innovative ideas.Alongside HEIF, the PublicSector Research EstablishmentFund will also be expanded to£20m per year. The keychallenge for the next few yearsISSUE 22 MARCH 2005 33SUSTAINABILITYSir Keith O’Nions, the Director General of Research Councils, outlines the funding allocated by Government to deliver its 10 Year Science and Innovation Strategy.Sir Keith O’Nions

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Autosub under ice

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