{"id":183721,"date":"2025-12-14T19:33:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T19:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/183721\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T19:33:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T19:33:19","slug":"tiny-robot-lost-under-antarctic-ice-for-8-months-comes-back-with-rare-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/183721\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Robot Lost Under Antarctic Ice for 8 Months Comes Back With Rare Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

A tiny robot explorer traversed the vast, frigid waters of Antarctica\u2014even diving under the ice at one point. After miraculously surviving all that, the robot brought back souvenirs for scientists.<\/p>\n

In 2020, researchers with CSIRO, Australia\u2019s national science agency, deployed an Argo float\u2014a free-floating, robotic instrument collecting ocean data\u2014near Totten Glacier in East Antarctica. To their surprise and disappointment, fickle Antarctic tides sent the float farther south, where it reappeared and soon sank under the Denman ice shelf.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feared the worst,\u201d admitted the researchers in an essay for The Conversation<\/a>. \u201cBut nine months later it surfaced again\u2026 And it had collected data from places never measured before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AntarcticaA map of Antarctica. Credit: CSIRO <\/p>\n

Indeed, from its unlikely dive, the float gathered never-before-sampled data on water temperatures and salinity beneath the Denman and Shackleton<\/a> ice shelves. Analyzing this dataset allowed researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the ice shelves\u2019 vulnerability and health as climate change continues to affect Earth\u2019s polar regions.<\/p>\n

A paper describing these findings was published recently in Science Advances<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Icy vital signs <\/p>\n

Ice shelves\u2014giant, thick platforms of floating ice\u2014act as a natural bumper between Antarctica\u2019s glaciers and the ocean by partly preventing the ice from melting into the seas. But as sea temperatures rise, warm ocean water accumulates at the bottom of ice shelves.<\/p>\n

That gradually weakens the base of these ice shelves, which adds more ice to the ocean and raises sea levels.\u00a0However, ice shelves can be hundreds to thousands of feet thick, making it incredibly challenging for scientists to study exactly how ice shelves collapse.<\/p>\n

An unlikely dive <\/p>\n

And so, the Argo float\u2019s trip under the ice turned out to be an incredibly lucky accident. During an eight-month period, the float measured temperature and salinity profiles from the seafloor to the ice shelf base every five days\u2014the \u201cfirst line of oceanographic measurements beneath an ice shelf in East Antarctica,\u201d the researchers explained.<\/p>\n

In total, it collected 195 profiles over 2.5 years, many of which came from never-before-sampled regions in East Antarctica.<\/p>\n

\"ArgoThe float\u2019s estimated route. Credit: CSIRO <\/p>\n

\u201cAgainst the enormity of such a wild region, this is an amazing story of the little float that could,\u201d Delphine Lannuzel, an oceanographer at the University of Tasmania in Australia, said in a statement<\/a>. Lannuzel was not an author of the paper but had collaborated with the authors for a similar project earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Submersion essentially disabled the float\u2019s GPS capabilities, but the researchers found a way to infer where measurements were made by noting when the float bumped its head on the ice.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach time the float bumped its head on the ice, it provided a measurement of the depth of the ice shelf base, or ice draft,\u201d explained Steve Rintoul, study lead author and a CSIRO oceanographer, in the statement. \u201cWe could compare the ice draft measured by the float to satellite measurements of draft to work out the path of the float beneath the ice.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result, they were able to confirm that the northernmost Shackleton ice shelf wasn\u2019t yet exposed to warm water, although the Denman Glacier appeared to be melting already. The float also captured a delicate thermal system under the ice shelves, which seemed to be holding together the ice\u2014for now, that is.<\/p>\n

Floats at sea <\/p>\n

Given the Argo float\u2019s unexpected capabilities, the researchers now hope to send several more like it to underexplored regions. However, as the researchers admit in the paper, the general environment inside and under ice shelves is still poorly known, and float measurements can\u2019t directly penetrate the thick ice.<\/p>\n

Still, this is better than nothing, the researchers added. If anything, \u201cfloat measurements will be used to improve how these processes are represented in computer models, reducing the uncertainty in projections of future sea level rise.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A tiny robot explorer traversed the vast, frigid waters of Antarctica\u2014even diving under the ice at one point.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[21453,273,3090,116332,111,139,69,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-183721","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-antarctica","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-global-warming","11":"tag-ice-shelf","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}