Cambridge Expedition Probing Larsen C Ice Shelf, Will Try Search For Wreck Of Shackleton's Ship

[hatrack]

In the comings days, a team of scientists, technicians and other specialists will gather onboard the SA Agulhas II, a 13,500-tonne ice-breaker moored off the coast of Antarctica, and make final preparations for one of the most ambitious polar expeditions in decades. Guided by satellite imagery and drones flown from the research ship, the vessel will set off on New Year’s day through the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, part of the Southern Ocean in the Antarctic. The ship’s destination is the Larsen C ice shelf where a trillion tonne iceberg, four times the size of Greater London, calved away in July 2017.

Antarctica has a way of dashing even the best laid plans. But if the Weddell Sea expedition can reach the Larsen C ice shelf, the fourth largest on the continent, the researchers will have an unprecedented chance to study how it and others like it melt, fracture and collapse, and what life ekes out an existence in the sheltered waters beneath. But there is more to the expedition than science. The Weddell Sea is infamous in Antarctic history as the place where, in 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance became trapped in ice for 10 months. The crushed vessel finally sank in more than two miles of water.

One the way home, pack ice permitting, the Agulhas will head for the spot where Endurance went down and, for the first time, hunt for the wreckage with autonomous robotic submarines.

EDIT

The robotic submarines will also map the seabed under the ice shelf with downward-looking sonar. If the Larsen C ice shelf has disintegrated before as part of a natural cycle of growth and collapse, researchers should find scars called “ploughmarks” on the seafloor, created as the icebergs are dragged around by ocean currents. No ploughmarks will be bad news: it will suggest that the recent breakup of the Larsen C shelf is unprecedented over the past 20,000 years. The east coast of the Antarctic peninsula once had four main ice shelves, named Larsen A, B, C and D. The Larsen A and B shelves collapsed in weeks during 1995 and 2002 respectively. “With those already gone and with A68 cleaving off Larsen C, there is a concern something similar may happen there,” said John Shears, the expedition’s voyage leader. “It could be a precursor for something big.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/26/expedition-scientists-map-larsen-c-ice-shelf-weddell-calving-

[sinkingfeeling]

1. I wouldn't think there'd be much wreckage as it was so crushed

by the enormous pressure of the ice.

[hatrack]

2. True, but they did find the wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, similarly crushed

Of course, they sank in substantially shallower water than the Weddell Sea.