Sunday, October 31, 2004 Matthew A. Russell has been an archeologist with the National Park Service Submerged Resources Center since 1993. He serves as Project Director for the USS Arizona Preservation Project.

The Team Arrives

After a long travel day from various mainland points, our team of NPS archeologists and photographers, volunteers and partners, has arrived to begin this year’s phase of the USS Arizona Preservation Project.  In addition to members of the NPS Submerged Resources Center, and the staff of the USS Arizona Memorial stationed here in Pearl Harbor, the team assembled for the first week of fieldwork includes Dr. Don Johnson, professor emeritus from University of Nebraska, Lincoln, a metallurgist and corrosion engineer.  Dr. Johnson has been working closely with the NPS team since 1998 and is focused on characterizing the precise corrosion processes taking place on the ship.  Don and his colleagues from UNL are also developing groundbreaking and innovative methods to indirectly measure steel corrosion rate by analyzing several different properties of the concretion that covers Arizona’s hull.  Rounding out the team this week are Jay Schraan and Randy Jones of Inspection Technologies, Inc. in Pomona, California.  Jay and Randy are experts in non-destructive steel thickness testing using an ultrasonic device.  In a nutshell, sound waves are pulsed through the steel hull from a small probe and the echoes that bounce back give a measurement of the metal thickness at that location.

The data we’ll be collecting this week are critical for creating an accurate Finite Element Model, or FEM, which is being created by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  Check out the Research Rationale elsewhere on this web page for details about FEMs and why ours is so important for preserving Arizona.