The winners of the 2015 Arctic Technology Conference's inaugural Distinguished Achievement Awards have been named for the Individual and the Company/Organization/Institution categories.
Recently retired ice scientist and ice engineer Dan Masterson will take home the award for Individual Achievement.
He will be honored for his significant advancements to the ice sciences and also for advances to the design and construction of pioneering Arctic projects.
His professional achievements began in the 1970's with pioneering engineering work for Panarctic Oils through the design and construction of floating ice platforms to support both drilling operations and floating airstrips for large aircraft.
In more recent years, he also has played a lead role in the development of ice load criteria for Arctic standards including the Canadian Offshore Standard S-471, API RP2N and the new ISO Standard 19906 for Arctic Offshore Structures
The Chukchi Sea Environmental Studies Program (CSESP) and its supporting entities - Olgoonik-Fairweather, ConocoPhillips, Shell and Statoil - will be honored with the Companies' Achievement Award.
The award is to recognize the CSESP as one of the largest, most robust multidisciplinary science programs in the world. Going on its seventh year in 2015, the CSESP aims to characterize pre-exploration baseline information on the ecology of the region and, despite innumerable potential logistical and natural hazards, has operated with zero recordable injuries with over 395,000 man-exposure hours and across 13,000 vessel miles. The CSESP covers 37,000 square kilometers of the northeastern Chukchi Sea and the program focuses on nine main science disciplines including: seabirds, marine mammals, plankton, physical oceanography, sediments, benthic studies, acoustic monitoring, chemical oceanography and fisheries..
The recipients will be honored at the ATC 2015 Distinguished Achievement Awards Luncheon scheduled for Tuesday during the conference being held March 23-25 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
This will be the first time ATC incorporates the Distinguished Achievement Awards into its program. Modeled after the prestigious OTC Awards of the same name, these awards honor an individual and a company/organization or institution for their major technological, humanitarian, environmental and leadership contributions to the Arctic industry.