Arctic Climate Impact Tour 2011

Nick Toberg and Till Wagner went to the North Greenland Sea in September 2011, to measure the properties and thickness of the sea ice aboard the Greenpeace ship ARCTIC SUNRISE - to document their work they started writing this blog.

As the ice was reaching a new record low (see the NSIDC sea ice extent graph) this year, we went back to carry on our work.

Last year, we were joined by SCANLAB, who performed 3d laser scans of the surface of the ice. They are on board again this year, but now we're getting the bottom as well: Hanumant Singh from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is joining with his team to get 3d profiles of the underside of the ice.

So now, for a historic first, we got the whole 3d picture of sea ice floes in the Arctic Ocean.

On board as well this year was the master of it all, our group leader Professor Peter Wadhams.

After the Arctic Climate Impact Tour, Peter and Till travelled to West Greenland and took part in expedition Operation Iceberg - a BBC funded science project that was subsequently featured in the 2 part BBC 2 documentary Operation Iceberg.

09/07/2012

Heading North Again

(by till)

Hello everyone. We're going back North. And this time we've got some exciting plans. Having shown last year that you can get amazing scans of the top surface of the ice using ScanLAB's scanning expertise, we're joined this year by the world leader in Polar AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) operations, Hanu Singh and his team from Woods Hole. They will put their vehicle under the ice to sonar scan the underside, complementing the laser scanned top and create a perfect 3d virtual replica of the ice floes that we're studying.

We'll try and update this blog (semi-regularly) over the next couple of weeks.
After that, Prof Peter Wadhams and I will join the BBC for Operation Iceberg in Baffin Bay (West Greenland), but more on that later.

Anyway - welcome back and I hope you'll enjoy following us around the great white North the next few weeks. To give you a flavour of what we do, here is a ScanLAB scan of the ARCTIC SUNRISE (this picture actually appeared in the June edition of Wired magazine - see also http://www.scanlabprojects.co.uk/)



at 10:56 0 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)