Researchers Sample Antarctic Sea Ice amid Rapid Melting

. Today we’ll follow her as she and her fellow passengers hit the ice—literally disembarking onto one of the many ice floes that drift through the Southern Ocean. They’ll have to navigate tricky terrain and frigid temperatures to collect samples of pristine ice, which is crucial for helping scientists figure out how the world’s waterways will change as our warming climate melts this region’s glaciers and ice shelves..

The researchers had been sampling for a little more than an hour, collecting snow from the surface and drilling ice cores with noisy machines, when we saw a line of black dots a few miles away, behind the ship. The shapes were moving quickly toward us.Soon enough we realized it was a group of Adélies. They moved across the ice in a huge line—some walking clumsily, others sliding on their belly.They went around the ship and straight to the spot where the researchers were sampling.

Thick ice floes often surrounded the ship. Thousands of them were spread across the ocean surface like gigantic pieces of an incoherent puzzle. As the ship moved, their huge masses hit the hull, making thunderlike sounds.The researchers needed to find an ice floe that was sturdy enough for us to step on but not so thick that the top was out of reach from the small inflatable boat we used to navigate around the floating ice.

These ice cores capture the seasonal ice that is formed in a year. Laura will melt them onboard and analyze the water later in the lab back home. Not long after we got back from the cruise earlier this year, satellites registered an alarming low in Antarctic sea ice during the Southern Hemisphere summer for the third year in a row.

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