This summer, in the depths of Greenland, a series of high-tech gadgets and robots will be deployed, James Bond style, at dangerous points where glaciers meet the sea. Their mission: to study the melting ice in unprecedented detail.
Data from the expedition, funded by the British government’s secretive New Inventions Agency, will power the latest climate models. The idea is to predict when melting ice will cause climate-regulating ocean currents to stop, and to try to develop an early warning system that would let humanity know when glaciers are changing in alarming ways.
The voyage, launched July 16, “addresses a fundamental data gap in one of the most important parts of the climate system,” says Hari Vishnu, an expert in sea ice acoustics from the National University of Singapore, who is not involved in the work. “We cannot model what we cannot observe.”
Until recently, such a mission would have been impossible. Where Greenland’s glaciers meet turbulent waters, “ice cliffs tower over the ocean surface—sometimes 100 feet high, sometimes a hundred—fracturing, collapsing, and throwing house-sized icebergs into the fjord without any warning,” says oceanographer Jonathan Nash of Oregon State University in Corvallis. Nash is a member of the project, named GIANTfor the Greenland ice sheet and the Atlantic. Tipping points linked to ice loss.
Beneath the sea’s surface, Nash says, chaotic plumes and swirls rise and swirl. It is difficult and dangerous for scientists to place instruments close enough to the key area of interest: the centimeter-thick boundary layer between the ice and the ocean.
The element of danger, combined with the challenges and scale of collecting many different types of data simultaneously above, on and under the ice, meant that previous projects could only work on one aspect of the problem at a time, if at all.
“We always wanted to create a project that could simultaneously observe and model all parts of this process,” says Paul Holland, an ice specialist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England. So when Holland and his colleagues saw a call for grant proposals from the UK government’s recently launched Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which supports high-risk projects, they jumped at it.
Icefall: on Her Majesty’s Research Service
From the royal research vessel Sir David Attenborougha daring mission will launch drones, sensors and submarines to study sea ice in unprecedented detail, from above, on and below its surface. The Unmanned Squadron, which includes Internet-famous submarines McBoatface Boxwill brave natural traps like a dangerous mix of sea ice and icebergs on the surface and turbulent waters below.
The £20 million ($26 million) funding comes at a time when unmanned technology is becoming sophisticated enough to listen to ice at close range, traversing dangerous waters and crumbling ice rocks without putting researchers at risk.
“We are at a moment where our tools have finally answered our questions,” says marine geophysicist Kelly Hogan of the British Antarctic Survey. “We can explore glacier-ocean interactions in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. »
Climate models do not‘does not take into account the subtleties of melting ice
As the Earth warms, Greenland is already lose several times more ice than just a few decades ago. If enough fresh water from melting ice entered the ocean, it could reverse vital ocean currents. One, the Atlantic Southerly Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, transports warm tropical waters north before cooling, sinking, and returning south. An interruption of the AMOC this would make Europe colder and drier, and would also significantly alter tropical monsoons, affecting agriculture and food supplies.
“If AMOC is a pot of hot, salty, perfectly flavored soup, then it’s like adding cold tap water to the pot. Greenland’s icebergs are ruining the soup,” says Earth scientist Kristin Poinar of the University at Buffalo in New York, who is not involved in the expedition. “AMOC relies on dense, salty ocean water to sink, and too much fresh water from icebergs will slow or stop this process.”
Several lines of evidence suggest that AMOC is already weakening. The actual shutdown of power and its impacts would extend over decades, if not centuries, although much uncertainty remains.
Part of the reason is that climate models have until now treated ice melt as a simple process: warm water arrives, heat is transferred, and the ice melts. They fail to take into account the physical complexity of the environment, where immense glaciers meet rough seas.
One of these nuances involves tiny, ancient air bubbles trapped in glacier ice that are released when melting and then rise up the face of the ice. They can intensify the mixing of the ice-ocean layer and lead to more heat transfer. But they were impossible to observe and therefore to complete existing models. Although the bubbles are small, Nash says, they could have “huge” implications for sea level rise projections when multiplied across hundreds of glaciers.
Heat transfer by such bubbles may also be one of several equally small but important factors in iceberg calving events – when chunks of ice break off at the edge of a glacier or ice shelf and fall into the sea. Glaciers release many icebergs into the ocean in some years and fewer in others, a phenomenon that the mission data should help explain, Poinar says. The expedition’s planned millimeter-scale observations of phenomena such as bubbles, she says, will be “like watching a crack form in a windshield before it shatters.”
The observations will feed into a climate model called the UK Earth System Model. It’s “already a very good climate model, and it’s poised to get even better,” Poinar says. The trip “will give him an immediate upgrade, with brand new data from some of the rarest places on the planet.”
A flotilla of robots will fill in the details
The mission will deploy a fleet of submarines, robots, drones and sensors from a mothership, the Royal Research Ship. Sir David Attenboroughwhich is itself a floating laboratory. The ship will spend much of July and August near the rugged glaciers of Kangerlussuaq Fjord in southeast Greenland. Next summer, measurements will take place on the Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland.
Many robots are tested in the field and continually tweaked to make them work as hoped, Holland says, so “the reality is perhaps more experimental than what one might see in [James Bond] movies. »
The ship will launch rugged flying drones to study the ice from above, at a closer distance than the satellite data the team is already obtaining. Drones are designed to stay airborne when the weather turns hostile or when ground access collapses.
The ship’s helicopter will drop small sensors to measure changes to the surface of glaciers, terrain naturally trapped by crevasses and ice flows. The sensors are essentially a GPS in a javelin. The javelins sink into the ice at one end and track the movement of the ice as the glacier melts, while transmitting data to researchers from the antenna at the end above the ice.
A robotic surface boat designed to avoid icebergs will scan glaciers with sonar to continuously track changes in melting rates. Its data will be supplemented by two types of marine robots measuring only about 1 to 5 meters long. They will dive hundreds of meters below the surface to map the melting of submerged glaciers.
Likewise, an unmanned submarine (humorously nicknamed McBoatface Boxthe name much sought after by Internet users for the mothership) will dive under the semi-melted ice to map its geometry and its impact on the behavior of glaciers.
Meanwhile, another underwater vehicle will sneak behind enemy lines, so to speak. It is thin, just 23 centimeters in diameter, so it will pass through a hole drilled in the ice to peer at the ice sheet below. It will be customized with sensors capable of exploring conditions beneath ice shelves.
Finally, one of the tiny submarines will carry sensors that screw into the ice cliff, between 50 and 100 meters below sea level. These will measure temperature, turbulence and melting rates in real time, periodically screwing deeper to keep pace with the ablation face. These will record how tiny air bubbles affect heat transfer between warming ocean and melting ice.
The team also uses AI algorithms to determine where to deploy these gadgets to best collect data. The AI will merge existing data to create a map of different variables such as temperature and snowfall, and the team will then use “the uncertainty in those maps to find our blind spots,” as Nash puts it.
The hope is that these more realistic data will produce climate models that can tell scientists with more confidence why and when ice melt will occur. According to Nash, this could lead to “decision-relevant predictions that societies navigating a rising ocean will urgently need.”
After all, even though the criminal organization James Bond foils, Specter, is fictional, the specter of climate change is terrifyingly real.
