Just like the Endurance22 Expedition science team, I love to get out on Weddell Sea ice floes every chance I get. I was the first to sign up when Chief Scientist Dr. Lasse Rabenstein came looking for volunteers to help with an ice thickness survey recently. I put on all my warmest clothes and met 11 other expedition team members on the deck of the S.A. Agulhas II. We gathered a large load of scientific tools and loaded it onto a basket attached to one of the deck cranes. Once the gear was loaded, four people at a time stood on the edge of the basket, holding onto the rope netting, and we took a short but exciting ride from the ship deck down to the ice floe below.
My job was to pull a high-tech sled that sends electro-magnetic signals down into the ice. These signals travel easily through snow and ice, but bounce back as soon as they hit the sea water directly underneath. So, the sled measures the total distance from the bottom of the sled to the water below. As Lasse and I headed off in a straight line from the ship toward a distant colony of Adelie penguins, another sea ice scientist named Aly from Switzerland walked behind us with a special pole that measures just snow thickness.
