If we don’t see them, then we’re in a slightly more concerning situation. By bouncing signals off the sea floor, one of the things the expedition is hoping to look for is ‘iceberg keels’ – these long and deep trenches in straight lines, like plough marks, which will indicate that the ice shelf has broken up and managed to re-form once before. One of the really pressing questions of our time is, “What will happen if the world continues to warm and the last of the sea ice shelves break up?”. Can you explain the primary objective of The Weddell Sea Expedition, and how the findings might be used? Not only this, but the international team hoped to use their high tech Autonomous Underwater Vehicles to locate and lay eyes on the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship, Endurance, for the very first time since it was crushed in the Weddell Sea’s ice and sunk beneath its surface.īefore they set off, we spoke to Charlotte Connelly, museum curator at the Scott Polar Institute, the research centre at the core of the epic Weddell Sea Expedition 2019, to learn more about the brutal challenges faced by the team, and precisely what they were hoping to achieve. In January 2019, a major and unprecedented 45-day scientific expedition set off to explore this isolated, forbidding and barely studied location, armed with state-of-the-art technology and the goal of gaining an insight into the form and flow of the Antarctic ice shelves. Unauthorized use is prohibited.īut 9,842 feet (3000m) beneath its thick and unpredictable ice lies a testament to its destructive dark side.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |