Weddell Sea Phenomenon

Scott Centenary: where Britain is still in pole position

Between 1897 and 1922, the period now known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, there were 17 expeditions to the continent, eight of them British. In total, 17 lives were lost, five of them on Captain Scott ’s Terra Nova expedition. The last man to perish, albeit of natural causes, was Scott’s sometime companion and later rival, Ernest Shackleton, in 1922.

For Shackleton and his kind, achievement and heroism lay in making it through to unreached places against appalling odds. But for others – particularly for Robert Falcon Scott – danger, suffering and the risk of death were confronted both as an aspect of exploration, and in the cause of science . When Scott’s ship sailed back into British waters in 1913, it came freighted with fossils, charts, surveys and a rich array of other scientific findings.

It was the start of a process of discovery that has made Britain a pioneer in polar science. By 1924, there were 25 volumes of Antarctic research in botany, geology, glaciology, meteorology, physiography, terrestrial magnetism and zoology published as a result of Scott and his team’s endeavours. There was, however, so much more to learn. So, in 1934, the British Graham Land Expedition embarked from England on the three-masted schooner Penola, with the aim of extending our knowledge of what is now known as the Antarctic peninsula, and determining whether there was a seaway to the Weddell Sea from the west that could be an alternative to the eastern approach that had been so disastrous for Shackleton (it turned out there wasn’t, since the peninsula was not an archipelago, but an integral part of the Antarctic continent). The expedition, which was away for three years, deployed the latest technologies of the day: a plane for airborne reconnaissance, early radio communications and a new understanding about nutrition.

The next step resulted from strategic rather than scientific considerations. In 1944, the clandestine Operation Tabarin was undertaken by the Admiralty and Colonial Office to deter enemy ships from anchoring in the Falklands. At the end of the war, the mission was renamed the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS), with several bases for overwintering scientists and support staff established in Antarctica over the succeeding years. Then, in 1962, the FIDS was renamed the British Antarctic Survey (BAS); today there are two British research stations open all year round in Antarctica, Rothera and Halley, together with bases on the sub-Antarctic Bird and Signey islands and on South Georgia. The total budget last year was approximately £47 million – £11 million spent on the science, and £36 million on enabling researchers to reach and survive in the icy environment.

Polar Sea Ice Math and Climate Change - University of Utah News ...

In 1994, University of Utah mathematician Ken Golden went to the Eastern Weddell Sea for the Antarctic Zone Flux Experiment. The sea's surface is normally covered with sea ice, the complex composite material that results when sea water is frozen. During a powerful winter storm, Golden observed liquid sea water welling up and flooding the sea ice surface, producing a slushy mixture of sea water and snow that freezes into snow-ice. With his mathematician's eyes he observed this phenomenon and said to himself: "That's percolation!" Golden is an expert in mathematical models of percolation, a physical process in which a fluid moves and filters through a porous solid. Soon after the 1994 trip he started trying to understand how the mathematics of percolation could describe aspects of the formation and behavior of sea ice. His results appeared in a landmark paper in Science in 1998, written with co-authors S. F. Ackley and V. I. Lytle. Ever since then, Golden has been a leader in the international effort to model polar climate dynamics and has brought a new level of rigor and precision to this area of research. in "Climate Change and the Mathematics of Transport in Sea Ice", which will appear this month in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. His article marks Mathematics Awareness Month, celebrated each year in April. For 2009, the theme of Mathematics Awareness Month is "Mathematics and Climate". Golden is serving as chair of the Mathematics Awareness Month Committee this year. Sea ice is very different from icebergs, glaciers and ice sheets, all of which originate on land. Sea ice is a polycrystalline composite of pure ice with liquid brine inclusions, plus air pockets and solid salts. As the boundary layer between the ocean and atmosphere in the polar regions, sea ice functions as both ocean sunscreen and blanket, playing a key role as both an indicator and agent of climate change. Golden discovered that, as a percolation phenomenon, sea ice has similarities to compressed powders used in the development of stealthy (or radar-absorbing) composites. He was able to build on existing models developed for these powders to create a percolation-based model for sea ice. His model captured one of the key features of sea ice: When the volume of brine is under about 5 percent, the sea ice is impermeable to fluid flow.

The Transantarctic Mountains, Rocks, Ice, Meteorites and Water

Numerical investigation tidal processes and phenomena in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica

Irreversible phenomena and dynamical systems analysis in geosciences

Microwave remote sensing of sea ice

Brief history of polar exploration since the introduction of flying