Bill Russell-Cargill
Bill has over 40 years of offshore survey experience that has entailed working mainly in marine diamond mineral exploration, offshore oil & gas field construction and subsea IMR Operations; undertaking the navigation and positioning, seafloor mapping, geophysical and geotechnical survey tasks, on projects conducted off the Southern African and Australasian coasts. In 2018 he joined INPEX as a survey specialist supporting subsea implementation operations. At the start of his career as a Professional Land Surveyor he became keenly interested in underwater acoustics and applications use in hydrographic surveying. He joined IMT, the Institute for Maritime Technology to undertake post-graduate engineering research in underwater acoustics at CAL while studying for an MSc at the Central Acoustics Laboratory, University of Cape Town. In 1983 he left CAL to found Underwater Surveys Pty Ltd, a survey contracting company providing offshore survey services to the marine industry, in particular the diamond mining industry off Southern Africa’s west coast where seabed mapping and positioning services were in demand to help mine diamonds in the sea. In 1998 he sold Underwater Surveys to Fugro, a leading International Geo-data specialist company and stayed on as the Managing Director while being rebadged as Fugro Africa. In 2001 he relocated to Fugro Survey Pty Ltd, Perth as a Director. In 2005 he joined CMST, Curtin University of Technology as a CRC Adjunct Research Associate to work on their Coastal Habitat Mapping Research Program. On completion of the CRC’s habitat mapping research program in 2006 he joined the newly established Perth branch of Geo Subsea, an International Norwegian company, as the local Survey and Inspection Manager. This later became named DOF Subsea and at the end of 2014 he left DOF to spend some time fishing off Cape Town, along the African coast. He returned to Perth in 2017 to join Scope Resources as Managing Director; and in 2018 he became a survey specialist consultant working in INPEX contracted through Scope Resources.