Critter-finding mission to Antarctica’s Larsen C iceberg scrapped

Too much ice prevented the research vessel from reaching the calving site

Antarctic ice

PACKED ICE  Floating ice — 4- or 5-meters-thick in some places — choking the Weddell Sea ended a British Antarctic Survey research vessel’s mission to the Larsen C ice shelf in February. The mission planned to explore seafloor life newly exposed after a giant iceberg split off from the shelf last July.

Susie Grant/BAS

Thick sea ice has thwarted researchers’ plans to explore what creatures lived beneath an Antarctic ice shelf. A mission to study seafloor life suddenly exposed by the breaking away of the Larsen C iceberg last July was delayed as it tried to navigate through floating ice, some chunks as thick as 5 meters. With 400 kilometers still to go, the captain of the vessel, the RRS James Clark Ross, canceled the mission February 28.

“It was nature [that] defeated us,” said principal investigator and marine biologist Katrin Linse of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge in a video released by BAS March 2. “We knew this mission was high risk and high reward.”

Not all is lost, though. The vessel is now heading to the nearby Larsen A ice shelf, where an iceberg broke away in 1995. There, researchers will study a never-explored deep-sea seafloor ecosystem 1,000 meters beneath the ocean’s surface.

Linse will have another opportunity to visit Larsen C, however. She’ll join a 2019 expedition led by the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany.

Carolyn Gramling is the earth & climate writer. She has bachelor’s degrees in geology and European history and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Use up and down arrow keys to explore.Use right arrow key to move into the list.Use left arrow key to move back to the parent list.Use tab key to enter the current list item.Use escape to exit the menu.Use the Shift key with the Tab key to tab back to the search input.