As I write, Australia's national icebreaker RSV Nuyina steams southwest from Hobart, heading towards Antarctica on its first dedicated maritime science voyage.
There are over 60 scientists and engineers on board. Many are first research cruises, growing ocean legs as the ship navigates the mulch of mulch and low spirals of the southern seas.
After a week of travel, they pierce the sea ice and arrive at their destination for the next 50 days. This is the remote Denman Glacier Ice Shelf System in the East Antarctica, approximately 5,000 kilometers south of Australia.
As the planet warms, this is a new and concern of concern over Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise in Antarctica, and this mission is important for Australia's future and the welfare of the global community.
The 110-kilometer Denman Glacier is a vast ice river that drains the ice sheets of the East Antarctica. It is located on the seabed of a canyon about 3.5 km below the surface.
As the northernmost ice shelf system outside the Antarctic Peninsula, Denman Glacier is already one of the fastest retreating glaciers in the Australian Antarctic region.
If Denman melts completely, it could contribute about 1.5 meters to the world's sea level rise.
This voyage has been around for a long time. It is the culmination of nearly ten years of planning a dream experiment to investigate the interaction between ice shelves and seas from both oceanic and terrestrial aspects.
However, its origins began even earlier. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) marked a turning point with the perception that ice sheets are the global sea level rise problem and that ice shelves are “soft abdomen.”
We noticed that the Antarctic was moving. In 2008, scientists showed that changes in glacial flow have “a great, if not dominant effect” on the loss of mass from the Antarctic ice sheet.
In 2011, scientists tagged the seal and swam through a deep trough in a sea bed near the Denman Glacier, measuring unusually warm water.
In 2019, a new elevation map of the continental bedrock beneath the Antarctic ice sheet revealed the deepest valley on Earth beneath the Denman Glacier.
For months starting in the end of 2020, Australian oceanographers tracked robotic floats moving under ice shelves on the Denman Glacier.
Before it disappears under winter sea ice, the float sends measurements, indicating that it is flooded through deep valleys into the ice shelf cavity, sufficient to rapidly melt the glacier from below.
Therefore, the purpose of this voyage will not only discover how vulnerable the Denman Glacier is to warming oceans, but it could also make a huge and fast contribution to sea level rise over the next few decades.
Denman Ocean Voyage Under the Australian Antarctic Program, various researchers will be brought together to answer important questions about the ocean, ice and climate. The inflight medicine team, with a considerable number of early scientists and doctoral students, primarily from universities, covers a wide range of biological, oceanographic, geological and atmospheric studies.
As an oceanographer, perhaps what I am most excited about is the prospect of measuring the properties of seawater from both under the glaciers and from the continental shelf.
In January, as part of the Denman ground campaign from the land, a series of events was held. Mooring sensor It was hanging from a hole in a floating ice shelf and hanging in a deep underwater canyon near the glacial ground line.
Every day, mooring allows researchers to automatically send water temperature, salinity and current speed. These data help track deep, warm, salt water paths to access ice shelves.
And now, as the RSV Nuyina moves into position to take simultaneously measurements just in front of the glacier, there is a need for an important link connecting the warm currents that detect what is just above the ocean under the ice shelf.
The only way to get this kind of information is to be there. This will allow us to refine our forecasts and better understand the dangers Antarctica presents to the coastline from global sea level rise that we can expect or avoid in this century.
