It's hip to be (kinda) square

[samhexum]

NASA Finds Perfectly Rectangular Iceberg In Antarctica As If It Was Deliberately Cut

NASA just shared a stunning image of a nearly perfect rectangular iceberg in Antarctica. The monolithic slab of ice, floating just off the Larsen C ice shelf appears quite unnatural given the 90-degree angles.

 

NASA took the image as part of Operation IceBridge, a mission to image Earth's polar regions in order to understand how ice (thickness, location, accumulation, etc.) has been changing in recent years.

 

While the iceberg is quite strange to look at, it is an entirely natural phenomenon. Most of us are used to seeing pictures of angular icebergs with just a small tip jutting out of the water. However, there is an entirely different type of iceberg called tabular icebergs.

 

Tabular icebergs have steep, nearly vertical sides and a flat plateau top. Tabular icebergs typically break off of ice shelves, which are tabular bodies of thick ice. When there is a clean calve of the iceberg, the angles can be close to 90 degrees. In this case, the iceberg is likely not very old as wind, waves and sea spray will eventually winnow away the sharp edges of this iceberg and round it out, Kelly Brunt, a NASA scientist, told Live Science.

 

As you may know, typically only 10 percent of an iceberg sits above the ocean surface when floating. However, it's unclear in this particular image whether the iceberg is fully floating or partially sitting on the ocean bottom.

 

While this iceberg hasn't been measured, some tabular icebergs can be amazingly large. The world's largest recorded iceberg is Iceberg B-15, sitting at 183 miles long and 23 miles wide. The tabular iceberg, which was larger than the island of Jamaica, calved off the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000.

 

 

 

To put the two icebergs locations into perspective, the map above highlights the location of the Larsen C Ice Shelf. Towards the bottom of the map, you will notice the Ross Ice Shelf, which produced the largest iceberg in history.

 

Antarctic ice shelf diagram

 

Ice shelves form where land meets the ocean. As ice flow from the continental land mass down to the ocean, it eventually spills out over the ocean, in some places floating and in other places partially supported by the ocean floor. The ice that sits over the ocean but is attached to the land is an ice shelf. A normal process for these ice shelves is calving, the breaking off of distal ice from the larger ice shelf.

 

NASA intends to study this calving process through Operation IceBridge as a way of measuring melting due to global warming. As the planet warms, these ice shelves much more susceptible to calve off and melt as they float off into the ocean. This is a key variable in the continued sea level rise NASA has been measuring for decades.

[+ Avalon]

Fascinating!

[samhexum]

A researcher stationed at an Antarctica base was stabbed by a colleague earlier this month after the attacker suffered an apparent emotional breakdown, reports say. UPDATE BELOW

 

Russia’s Pravda news agency reported that the victim of the Oct. 9 incident was flown to a hospital in Chile – the nearest country to the remote Bellingshausen station on King George Island.

 

His co-worker, also a researcher, voluntarily surrendered to the station chief.

 

According to reports, the incident was triggered by “tensions in a confined space.” A motive for the attack was not immediately clear.

 

Sergei Savitsky stabbed his co-worker Oleg Beloguzov in the chest while they were in the base’s dining room, Pravda reported.

 

Savitsky was flown to St. Petersburg and he was arrested at the airport. He was charged with attempted murder.

 

On October 22, Savitsky was reportedly put on house arrest.

 

The Bellingshausen Station, named after 19th-century Russian Antarctic explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, was founded by the Soviet Union in 1986.

 

Edited October 31, 2018 by samhexum

[samhexum]

How an explorer’s obsession with crossing Antarctica solo led to his death

 

Alone in the vast expanse of ice and snow, where temperatures drop to minus-30 degrees, dragging 300 pounds of supplies, feet blistered, body ravaged by fatigue — who would choose this?

 

One man did.

 

Henry Worsley is hailed today as “one of the greatest polar explorers of our time.” His perilous — and ultimately deadly — trek across Antarctica in 2015 is the subject of a pocket-sized book by New Yorker writer David Grann.

 

“The White Darkness” has already been optioned for the big screen — and no wonder. Worsley’s story is almost too astounding to believe.

 

On Nov. 13, 2015, 55-year-old Worsley, a retired British Army officer, embarked on coast-to-coast tour of Antarctica alone and without aid. There would be no food buried along his path, no outside assistance, no sled dogs — all for a distance of more than 1,000 miles over a period of 2¹/₂ months. No one else had ever even tried such a feat.

 

“As is true of many adventurers, he seemed to be on an inward quest as much as an outward one — the journey was a way to subject himself to an ultimate test of character,” Grann writes.

 

Worsley was in his teens when he first read a copy of “The Heart of the Antarctic,” written by British explorer Ernest Shackleton. When Worsley realized that his relative, Frank Worsley, was in Shackleton’s expedition party, he became obsessed.

 

Then, in 2008, Alexandra Shackleton invited Worsley to retrace her grandfather’s doomed mission to the South Pole, a grueling 66-day trek. Though Shackleton and his expedition never made it that far, Worsley and his two-man crew completed the journey.

 

Worsley was hooked. Five years later, he returned again, this time armed with a satellite phone and an iPod loaded with songs by David Bowie, Johnny Cash and Meat Loaf. His sled, weighing 325 pounds, was filled with the food he would eat on his journey — freeze-dried dinners and protein bars. He wore cross-country skis and held poles to propel himself across the ice cap more than 10 miles a day. He was entirely alone.

 

“He pushed off and heard a familiar symphony: the poles crunching on the ice, the sled creaking over ridges, the skis swishing back and forth. When he paused, he was greeted by that silence which seemed unlike any other,” writes Grann.

 

The threat of death was constant. “One misstep and he’d vanish into a hidden chasm,” writes Grann. Get wet and Worsley had four minutes, tops, to dry off before hypothermia did him in.

 

He had left behind wife Joanna, 21-year-old son Max and 19-year-old daughter Alicia, who had scrawled this message on his skis: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”

 

By his 10th day — Nov. 22 — things started to turn. Worsley hit a whiteout that trapped him in his tent for days.

 

One brutal day followed the next. “It was a real physical battle with fatigue,” Worsley wrote in his journal. “I was stopping literally every minute or so to catch my breath or just get ready for the next exertion required.”

 

By mid-January, Worsley had traveled more than 800 miles.

 

He reached the South Pole on Jan. 2 and ignored the offers of help from well-wishers there. His goal was to get to the coast unaided, so he trucked on.

 

By the time he reached the Titan Dome five days later, he had lost more than 40 pounds. “I felt pretty awful,” he said in his audio messages, which he had been routinely updating for people following his journey. “The weakest I felt in the entire expedition.”

 

Wife Joanna recognized the fear and fatigue in her husband’s voice and tried to deploy a rescue team, but they insisted that Worsley be the one to make the call.

 

“Virtually every part of him was in agony. His arms and legs throbbed. His back ached. His feet were blistered and his toenails discolored. His fingers started to become numb with frostbite,” wrote Grann. “One of his front teeth had broken off, and the wind whistled through the gap.”

 

To keep his spirits up — by now his iPod had broken — he listed his favorite foods: “Fish pie, brown bread, double cream, steaks and chips, more chips . . . Ahhhhh!”

 

During yet another whiteout, Worsley noted that his body “seemed to be eating itself” and called his son in the middle of the night to say: “I just want to hear your voice. I just want to hear your voice.”

 

On Jan. 22, after 71 days and more than 900 miles, Worsley pushed his panic button and called for rescue.

 

“My journey is at an end. I’ve run out of time, physical endurance and the simple sheer ability to slide one ski after the other to travel the distance required to reach my goal. My summit is just out of reach.”

 

The rescue planes arrived, rushing Worsley to the city of Punta Arenas in southern Chile. But soon after he arrived, his liver and kidneys failed.

 

Worsley was posthumously awarded the Polar Medal, which was also bestowed upon his hero Shackleton. In 2017, Worsley’s wife and two children flew to icy South Georgia Island to bury his ashes on a peak that overlooks the cemetery where Shackleton is buried.

 

“He was always the invincible man — not physically but mentally — and I still expect him to come back,” Max told Grann. “If I’m even half the man Dad turned out to be, I’d be so pleased.”

 

[MsGuy]

Seems like an unnecessarily complicated way to commit suicide.

[samhexum]

Antarctica scientist stabbed colleague for spoiling book endings

 

In the first attempted murder ever on the frozen continent of Antarctica, a Russian scientist reportedly snapped and allegedly tried to stab a colleague to death because the victim kept giving away the endings of books.

 

Sergey Savitsky had been trying to use literature to pass the lonesome months at Bellingshausen Station on King George Island, but his colleague Oleg Beloguzov was making it impossible to enjoy his hobby.

 

“[He] kept telling [him] the endings of books before he read them,” The Sun reported, citing an unnamed source.

 

So on Oct. 9, the 55-year-old Savitsky finally had enough and allegedly plunged a kitchen knife into the chest of his 52-year-old tormenter. Part of Beloguzov’s heart was wounded, Russian authorities said.

 

Beloguzov, a welder, was flown to the nearest hospital, in Chile, where he is expected to survive.

 

The men previously had spent four frigid years working together at the facility. Officials said that while the reading dispute was the final straw, the close confinement in the camp on remote Antarctica played a role in fueling the attack.

 

“They are both professional scientists who have been working in our expeditions, spending year-long seasons at the station,” deputy director of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute Alexander Klepikov told the Russian news outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda.

 

“It is down to investigators to figure out what sparked the conflict, but both men are members of our team,” he said.

 

Savitsky was deported to St. Petersburg, Russia, and charged with attempted murder on Oct. 22, according to Pravda.

 

Savitsky admitted to the stabbing but claimed he didn’t mean to kill him, the Russian news outlet Nevskie Novosti reported, citing law-enforcement sources.

 

The station, which was set up by the Soviets in 1968, is located in one of Antarctica’s few mild regions — where winter temperatures hover around a balmy 15 degrees.

 

Workers can spend time flipping between two Russian TV channels, exercising at a gym — or reading in the research library.

[samhexum]

Scientists in Antarctica got a unique gift this holiday season: access to a mysterious lake buried under more than 3,500 feet of ice.

 

It took about two days of drilling to reach Mercer Subglacial Lake on Dec. 26, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) announced in a blog post.

 

A team of researchers — which includes 45 scientists, drillers and other staff members — with the organization were able to send an instrument down a borehole the next day, capturing rare footage of the body of water which is “twice the size of Manhattan,” according to the journal Nature. They will also lower a remotely operated vehicle down the hole to capture more footage and take more extensive measurements.

 

The group plans to study the depth, temperature and cleanliness of the lake over the next few days.

 

“We don’t know what we’ll find,” John Priscu, chief scientist for SALSA, told environmental news site Earther Monday. “We’re just learning, it’s only the second time that this has been done.”

 

The SALSA team flew to Mercer Subglacial Lake on Dec. 19 and began drilling days later, on Dec. 23.

 

“Part of the drilling process involves sampling the drill water to test its cleanliness. The water has been tested twice thus far, and both tests showed the water was ‘as clean as filtered water can get’, in the words of SALSA PI Brent Christner,” SALSA explained. “The drill water is run through filters that catch 99.9 percent of bacteria and particles.”

 

The organization has scheduled at least eight days dedicated to sampling the lake’s water and sediment, a previous blog post states.

 

Priscu told Earther researchers hope to gain more information about life that exists thousands of feet under ice, noting it will take years to study all the samples they collect.

 

“We’re knee-deep right [now] sampling the deepest standing water body humans have ever accessed beneath Antarctica,” Matt Siegfried, a glaciologist and SALSA member, told Earther. “[so] it’ll take some time to process what the ‘most’ exciting part [is].”

 

Mercer Subglacial Lake was first discovered via satellite more than a decade ago, according to Nature. There are reportedly around 400 lakes hiding beneath Antarctica’s ice sheets.

[samhexum]

East Antarctica’s ice is melting at an unexpectedly rapid clip, new study suggests

 

By Alex Fox

 

Antarctica’s melting ice, which has caused global sea levels to rise by at least 13.8 millimeters over the past 40 years, was long thought to come from primarily one place: the unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Now, scientists studying 40 years of satellite images have found that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet—considered largely insulated from the ravages of climate change—may also be melting at an accelerating rate. Those results, at odds with a large 2018 study, could dramatically reshape projections of sea level rise if confirmed.

 

“If this paper is right, it changes the ball game for sea level rise in this century,” says Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who was not involved in the new work. East Antarctica’s ice sheet holds 10 times the ice of its rapidly melting neighbor to the west.

 

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, whose base is below sea level, has long been considered the most vulnerable to collapse. With an assist from gravity, a deep current of warm water slips beneath the sheet, melting it from below until it becomes a floating shelf at risk of breaking away. In contrast, frigid temperatures and a base mostly above sea level are thought to keep the East Antarctic Ice Sheet relatively safe from warm water intrusion. A collaboration of more than 60 scientists last year, published in Nature, estimated that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet actually added about 5 billion tons of ice each year from 1992 to 2017.

 

But as climate change shifts wind patterns around Antarctica, some scientists think warm water carried by a circular current off the continental shelf will start to invade East Antarctica’s once unassailable ice. “People who study Antarctic ice know that East Antarctica has the potential to start losing significant amounts of ice, but it’s never been clear how fast that would [happen],” Oppenheimer says.

 

To find out how fast that ice loss is happening, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues combined 40 years of satellite imagery and climate modeling. The models were used to estimate annual snowfall, which over time adds ice to the region’s glaciers. Then, the team measured the speed of ice flowing out to sea by tracking visual landmarks on the glaciers through time. This allowed them to estimate how much ice each of the continent’s many glaciers sent out to sea each year from 1979 to 2017. By subtracting the amount of ice added annually by snow from the amount of ice lost to sea, the researchers determined how much ice was gained or lost.

 

“After staring at satellite photos for hours you go a little cross-eyed, but it’s basic statistics—you beat down the noise by adding more data points,” Rignot says. “Tracking down these old satellite photos and spending months analyzing by hand was worth it to create this long-term record.”

 

Overall, the study found that Antarctica now sends six times more ice plunging into the sea each year than it did in 1979. During the 40-year period of the study, Antarctica added 13.8 millimeters to sea level, with the majority coming from West Antarctica. But East Antarctica, particularly the area known as Wilkes Land, was responsible for more than 30% of Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The more we look at this system the more we realize this is a fragile system,” Rignot says. “Once these glaciers are destabilized there is no red button to press to stop it.”

 

If intensifying polar winds are responsible for the intrusion of warm waters beneath East Antarctica, the situation is likely to get worse, Rignot says. The increasing strength of those winds is owed in part to the contrast in temperature between Antarctica and the rest of the world. As greenhouse gases warm much of the planet, this temperature differential is likely to intensify, driving even stronger westerlies, he adds.

 

But the bold new results won’t be accepted without a fight, says glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in either study. “There will be a lot of comparisons between the methods used to create these estimates and those in the [previous study],” he says. In addition to the ice-tracking method used in the current paper, the previous one also gathered two other measurements: one that estimated ice loss by repeatedly “weighing” the ice sheet via satellite, and one that estimated changes in elevation on the glacier’s surface from planes and satellites.

 

No matter the outcome, Rignot hopes the study brings greater attention to a part of Antarctica that has traditionally been understudied. Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, agrees. “We need to monitor the entirety of Antarctica and we just can’t do that without international cooperation,” Fricker says. “We can’t take our eyes off this ice.”

[samhexum]

Fascinating!

 

Rare Fossil of Triassic Reptile Discovered in Antarctica

 

The fossilized remains of an early reptile dating back some 250 million years have been uncovered in the unlikeliest of places: Antarctica. The discovery shows how wildlife recovered after the worst mass extinction in our planet’s history, and how Antarctica once hosted an ecosystem unlike any other.

 

Needless to say, paleontological work in Antarctica is very different than it is elsewhere. Unlike Alberta or Montana, for example, which feature abundant rock outcrops, Antarctica is covered in a massive sheet of ice, obscuring much of its paleontological history. And it’s not as if Antarctica doesn’t have stories to tell—it very much does. It was only recently, within the last 30 to 35 million years, that the continent froze over. Before that, it was home to a warm climate, lush forests, rushing rivers, and a remarkable abundance of life.

 

To find fossilized traces of this forgotten life, whether it be in Antarctica or elsewhere, scientists need to find rocks. Antarctica provides only two possibilities: islands along its coastline and the Central Transantarctic Mountains—a spine of mountains that cut a swath through the middle of the continent. The tops of these mountains poke through the glaciers, creating a rocky archipelago—and a place for paleontologists to do some prospecting. It’s here, on the Fremouw Formation of the Transantarctic mountains that Brandon Peecook, a paleontologist with the Field Museum of Natural History and the lead author of the new study, discovered the rare Triassic reptile.

 

“Standing on the mountain, it was difficult to imagine how truly alien Antarctica must’ve looked like back then,” Peecook told Gizmodo. “Looking around, I could see no trace of macroscopic life for miles in every direction.”

 

Indeed, Antarctica may be desolate and inhospitable today, but it wasn’t always that way. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Fremouw Formation was home to a vibrant forest filled with life, from winged insects to four-legged reptilian herbivores. The discovery of a previously unknown iguana-sized reptile, dubbed Antarctanax shackletoni, is now adding to our knowledge of the continent’s former ecological glory.

 

Antarctanax means “Antarctic king” and shackletoni is a tip of the hat to British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. A. shackletoni was an archosaur, sharing a common ancestor with dinosaurs and crocodiles and living during the Early Triassic Period some 250 million years ago. It’s now one of the earliest reptiles to appear in the fossil record. Details of this discovery were published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

 

The partial fossil consists of an excellently preserved vertebrae (including neck and back), a partial skull, two feet, some ribs, and an upper arm bone. It was discovered during an expedition to the Fremouw Formation during the Antarctic summer of 2010-2011. Analysis of these fossilized bones (particularly the skull) and the fossils found alongside it suggests it was a pint-sized carnivore, munching on bugs, amphibians, and early proto-mammals.

 

The Early Triassic is of great interest to paleontologists because it came in the wake of one of the worst episodes in Earth’s history—the end-Permian mass extinction, a time when extreme and prolonged volcanism wiped out nearly 90 percent of our planet’s life. It resulted in a sweeping ecological reboot, setting the stage for the survivors to take over. Among these survivors were the archosaurs, who took full advantage.

 

“A pattern we see over and over again with mass disturbances like the end-Permian mass extinction is that some of the animals who managed to survive quickly filled in the empty ecospaces,” Peecook told Gizmodo. “Archosaurs are a great example—a group of animals that were able to do practically everything. This clade just went totally ballistic.”

 

Indeed, archosaurs, including dinosaurs, were among the greatest beneficiaries of this recovery period, experiencing enormous growth and diversity. Prior to the mass extinction, these creatures were limited to equatorial regions, but afterwards they were “everywhere,” according to Peecook—including, as we now know, Antarctica. The continent was home to A. shackletoni some 10 million years before the appearance of true dinosaurs. As an aside, Antarctica did host dinosaurs, but not until the Jurassic Period.

 

This discovery is also shedding light on Antarctica’s distinctive animals. Because Antarctica and South Africa were physically connected at the time, paleontologists worked under the assumption that the two regions had much in common in terms of the local wildlife. And because fossils are abundant in South Africa, paleontologists used this record to make inferences about the kind of life that likely existed in Antarctica. But as Peecook explained, this is turning out to be a mistake; Antarctica hosted an ecology unlike any other.

 

“We know the South Africa fossil record really well, but in Antarctica we’ve only discovered around 200 species,” he said. “But we don’t find these species anywhere else. Paleontologists have only gone to Antarctica a few times, but every time they go they find new species, and surprising new occurrences—it’s really exciting. The original argument that you could connect these two environments together is now incorrect. The Antarctic record has lots of unique things happening.”

 

That Antarctica featured a unique set of species is not surprising. Like today, the continent was at a high altitude, featuring prolonged days in the summer and extended nights in the winter. Animals and plants had to adapt to survive, thereby adopting novel physical characteristics and survival strategies.

 

Seems like an unnecessarily complicated way to commit suicide.

It's hip to be (kinda) square

Scientists discover 'disturbing' cavity roughly two-thirds the size of Manhattan beneath Antarctica

A massive cavity that is two-thirds the size of Manhattan and nearly the height of the Chrysler Building is growing at the bottom of one of the world’s most dangerous glaciers - a discovery that NASA scientists called “disturbing.”

 

The hole, which is almost 1,000 feet tall, was seen during the space agency’s study of the disintegrating Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, NASA said Wednesday. It’s big enough to contain 14 billion tons of ice, most of which has melted over the last three years.

 

Thwaites Glacier, one of the hardest places to reach on Earth, is responsible for around 4% of the global sea rise. Scientists had long predicted the glacier was not tightly attached to the bedrock underneath it and expected to find some gaps.

 

Yet the immense size and fast-moving growth rate of the hole in Thwaites was called both “disturbing” and “surprising” by researchers.

 

"[The size of] a cavity under a glacier plays an important role in melting," the study's lead author, Pietro Milillo, said. "As more heat and water get under the glacier, it melts faster."

 

Thwaites holds enough ice to raise the world ocean just over 2 feet and backstops neighboring glaciers that are capable of rising sea levels an additional 8 feet if all ice were lost.

 

The cavity was seen using NASA’s Operation IceBridge, an airborne campaign beginning in 2010 that studies connections between the polar regions and the global climate.

 

Researchers hope the new findings will help others preparing for fieldwork in the area better understand the ice-ocean interactions.

 

“The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers' undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change,” according to the study by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Edited February 1, 2019 by samhexum

[samhexum]

An ambitious expedition to locate explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance is closing in on the Antarctic wreck site.

 

Endurance, which was lost in an ice floe off Antarctica more than 100 years ago, is one of the world’s most famous undiscovered shipwrecks. The search team, however, is conducting its work in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

 

The Weddell Sea Expedition icebreaker, S.A. Agulhas II, broke through heavy pack ice to reach Endurance’s last recorded position Sunday. “We are the first people here since Shackleton and his men!” said Exploration Director and Expedition Archaeologist Mensun Bound, according to a tweet by the team.

 

Researchers will use Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to locate the remains of the famous ship, which was crushed by pack ice and sank in November 1915. Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition had planned to make a land crossing of Antarctica.

 

In a blog post on Sunday Bound wrote that the expedition crew was using a probe to measure water temperature and conductivity, before deploying an undersea drone. The underwater search by the expedition’s AUV 7 will last about 45 hours, he added.

 

Water depth at the location is 3,038 meters (9,967 feet), according to Bound, who notes that “multi-year ice” is present.

 

After Endurance was destroyed in the frozen wastes of the Weddell Sea her 28 crew members survived on ice floes for five months before using the ship’s lifeboats to reach Elephant Island near Antarctica. From there, Shackleton and five companions traveled 800 miles in a lifeboat to the South Atlantic island of South Georgia, where he arranged the rescue of Endurance’s remaining crew from Elephant Island. The survival and rescue of the ship’s crew are regarded as an incredible feat of human endurance.

 

Endurance’s Captain, Frank Worsley, carefully recorded the ship’s final coordinates before she broke up and descended below the ice.

 

The Weddell Sea Expedition recently completed scientific research at the Larsen C ice shelf that made headlines in 2017 when a huge iceberg dubbed A68 broke off the ice mass. The iceberg is the size of Delaware.

 

Experts are intrigued by what they may find at the wreck site. In a blog post last month Bound noted that Endurance poses a unique set of challenges. “Whereas the overwhelming majority of shipwrecks that have been studied by archaeologists are all within a depth of, say, 50 meters [164 feet], and thus reachable by people with aqualungs, the Endurance, by contrast, is 60 times deeper, at 3000 meters [9,843 feet],” he wrote. “The Endurance takes us into the archaeology of hyper-depth of which there is very little experience and thus a dearth of reliable data.”

 

The Expedition has also noted that the female members of the research team have made history. “These are the first women to ever be over this location of the Weddell Sea. We are proud of the large group of woman (scientists, engineers, doctor, film crew and off-shore management from SA and Europe) on this expedition!,” it tweeted Monday.

 

The BBC reports that the Weddell Sea Expedition has allocated itself five days to locate the remains of Endurance.