Assessing and monitoring Earth surface processes in extreme environments often requires the development of challenging scientific approaches leading to the raise of innovative techniques. From the highest mountains to the deepest oceans, passive to active monitoring techniques are in constant progress and push further terra incognita boundaries. Recent advances in in-situ geophysical instrumentation (e.g. geophones, Doppler radar, sub bottom profilers, etc.) or remote sensing techniques (e.g. inSAR, unmanned aerial systems, unmanned maritime systems, etc.) have made remote monitoring and data acquisition a reality. These novel techniques represent more affordable, practical solutions for the collection of spatial and temporal data sets in challenging environments.

Most remote monitoring systems installed in extreme environments are site specific and often custom-made by research and development teams to cope with challenges related to power supply and/or weight limitations, poorly accessible areas, and hostile environment characteristics (extreme temperature and pressure, underground and underwater systems, hazardous gas emissions, changing topography). As a result, scientists have to deal with data from a plethora of prototypes installed for different purposes and at different time generating heavy maintenance and logistics burdens.

This session aims to bring together research on holistic, novel and/or in-development monitoring solutions coping with challenging and hostile areas. We welcome contributions from a broad range of disciplines and applications (from landslides, snow avalanches, glaciers, cave systems, marine/lake and submarine systems, to volcano and permafrost monitoring) with the aim to initiate discussions and developments of novel approaches and cross-disciplinary transfer of techniques for passive and active monitoring. We are also looking forward to discussing lessons learned from unsuccessful monitoring attempts.

Solicited presenter: Zack Spica - University of Michigan (USA)