FORENSIC GEOPHYSICAL SURVEYS IN GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS

摘要

The Allied invasion and capture of Guadalcanal from late 1942 to early 1943 was one of the most significant operations of World War II (WWII). The legacy of the six-month ground conflict, as well as a prolonged naval and air campaign, between Japanese and Allied forces is a land and waterscape that serves as a de facto cemetery for missing (MIA) servicemembers. The U.S. Department of Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) conducts worldwide operations to account for Americans missing from past conflicts. As part of this effort, in May of 2016 the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) and DPAA performed geophysical surveys at six sites on Guadalcanal to locate meaningful battlefield features or burials. The team used metal detection, magnetometry, electrical conductivity profiling, and ground penetrating radar. The team used at least two geophysical methods at each location and at one site performed all four methods. Initial results indicate that data quality is quite good although no anomalies have been associated with burials. Significant landscape modifications, however, make interpretation of these data quite complex. Detecting individual burials is one of the more difficult tasks in near surface geophysics, because there is a very low signal-to-noise ratio between buried human remains and surrounding soils. This difficulty is exacerbated by the relative age of WWII burials as well as by the inconsistencies of battlefield burials.