My line manager Dave Barns has been given a grant to look at sea ice movement from the Sheldon Glacier which is <50 km to the West of Rothera. I have been tasked with the mission to look after this camera over the winter.
The aim of this project is to look at how the ice breaks away from the Sheldon Glacier and then which direction it goes, also to see if it looks like it scours the bottom of the sea bed as it moves. In a years time there is going to be sea bed mapping project in front of the Sheldon glacier, with these two techniques coupled together we can start to look at how ice bergs scour the sea floor and damage the benthic species.
Dave Barns explains: ''This sea ice camera will remotely photo sea in front of a rapidly
retreating glacier and help understand how sea-ice loss in the polar
seas is helping life on the seabed grow more, capturing more carbon and
fighting back against climate change. This fits into work by a
multinational group of scientists working on the Antarctic Seabed Carbon
Capture Change project (www.asccc.co.uk) and can be seen at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13157/full. The paper is
also in the latest darwin Newsletter.''
(http://darwininitiative.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ad90159af3938cb51a14696ac&id=e07e4e5711&e=031778ba30
retreating glacier and help understand how sea-ice loss in the polar
seas is helping life on the seabed grow more, capturing more carbon and
fighting back against climate change. This fits into work by a
multinational group of scientists working on the Antarctic Seabed Carbon
Capture Change project (www.asccc.co.uk) and can be seen at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13157/full. The paper is
also in the latest darwin Newsletter.''
(http://darwininitiative.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ad90159af3938cb51a14696ac&id=e07e4e5711&e=031778ba30
First mission: to secure the camera in a place where the Sheldon Glacier can be seen.
Bradley (the Feild Guide), Octavian (our person electronics guy), Dave and myself headed from Rothera in the Snowcat, we then roped up to walk to Badger Buttress which is a ridge opposite the Sheldon Glacier.
The reason we are all roped up is because this area is not used much in recreation as there are a few crevasses about. We are roped up so that if someone does fall then we can get them out easily.
This is a sign of a crevasse but Al and Bradders had checked out the area the day before.
Once we got to the top we set straight to work to attach the camera safely, this camera could be seeing 80 mph gusts over winter so we are preparing for the worst (note how many rocks we've used as weight). It looks a bit sci-fi. The top camera is a standard SLR with a wide angled lens to capture the Sheldon Glacier which you can see in the background and then how it breaks away. There is also a solar panel attached which charges a lithium battery as the camera is rigged up to a timer to take a photo at midday everyday. In addition to this we are comparing the setup to an all in one GoPro version which is the black box!
Yay mission complete, now to come back in a few months to check that the battery or SD card hasn't failed.....also to check it has not blown away or got covered by snow........