KeysQuestions4Vehicle1<\/p>\n
The Southern Ocean absorbs roughly an eighth of all human CO2 emissions annually, yet scientists openly admit their confidence in that number is shaky \u2014 and this autonomous drone is the first tool capable of filling the biggest gap in the data.<\/p>\n
Within 24 hours of departure, SD-1092 was already punching through 22-foot waves and 35-knot gusts, and that was considered an unremarkable day for where it was headed.<\/p>\n
Two hundred days, 13,000 miles, zero crew, zero engine \u2014 if this boat makes it back, it will have gathered winter measurements from waters that research vessels simply refuse to enter.<\/p>\n
What it finds could quietly reshape how we calculate humanity’s carbon budget, and that affects every climate policy, every emissions target, and every assumption your government is making right now.<\/p>\n
Ask The Box \u2192<\/p>\n
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Accord vs rival?Best trimReal MPG<\/p>\n
AI-generated summary from reviews, comparisons and articles by AutoNotion<\/p>\n
Last Friday we ran a story about a 1,500-pound drone sailboat that sailed into the eye of a Category 3 hurricane<\/a> off Pensacola and came out the other side still floating. At the time, that felt like the hardest thing you could reasonably ask a 23-foot boat to do. Then I read what one of its sister boats is doing right now, and I\u2019m not so sure anymore.<\/p>\n On September 20, a tow boat let go of Saildrone Explorer SD-1092 in Storm Bay, just south of Hobart, Tasmania, and the boat turned south on its own. It\u2019s going to keep going until it has sailed all the way around Antarctica, which its operator says should take about 200 days and cover more than 13,000 miles. Nobody\u2019s on board. There isn\u2019t an engine to run out of fuel, either. It moves on a rigid wing, the electronics run off solar panels, and the whole point of the trip is a box of sensors that measures how much carbon dioxide is moving between the air and the water.<\/p>\n Within days it was sailing through winds of up to 50 knots (about 58 mph) and waves over 26 feet, according to Saildrone<\/a>, the California company that builds and pilots these boats. One of the engineers who deployed it posted a frame from the onboard camera taken on September 21, with 35-knot gusts and a 22-foot significant wave height, and from what I can tell that counts as a fairly ordinary day in the water it\u2019s headed for.<\/p>\n So why sail a robot around Antarctica at all?<\/p>\n What the boat is actually measuring<\/p>\n The ocean soaks up about a third of the CO2 people put into the air every year, according to NOAA, and scientists estimate the Southern Ocean alone handles about 40 percent of that. Do the math and that one ring of cold water around Antarctica is taking in roughly an eighth of everything we emit. I\u2019d stress the \u201croughly,\u201d because the entire reason this mission exists is that nobody is especially confident in those numbers.<\/p>\n Measuring it isn\u2019t complicated in principle. The key instrument on the boat is a NOAA-built sensor that reads how hard CO2 is pushing on the air side and how hard it\u2019s pushing on the water side, which chemists call partial pressure. If the water side is higher, the ocean is giving CO2 back to the atmosphere. If the air side is higher, the ocean is drinking it in. That\u2019s basically it.<\/p>\n The hard part\u2019s getting a sensor to the right spot. The Southern Ocean isn\u2019t fenced in by continents the way the Atlantic or the Pacific are. It\u2019s defined by a current, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which runs clockwise around the whole planet with nothing to stop it, and that current drags deep water up to the surface and pushes surface water back down. Research ships go there in summer. In winter, according to NOAA\u2019s Adrienne Sutton, who co-leads the project, the traditional tools simply haven\u2019t been able to make those observations, which is a polite way of saying nobody wants to be out there in July.<\/p>\n Hull length<\/p>\n 23 ft<\/p>\n Saildrone Explorer, 15-foot wing, about 1,500 pounds, 1 to 3 knots.<\/p>\n One lap<\/p>\n 200 days<\/p>\n More than 13,000 miles around Antarctica, Hobart to Hobart.<\/p>\n First week<\/p>\n 26 ft waves<\/p>\n Winds up to 50 knots within days of leaving Storm Bay.<\/p>\n ACTIVE<\/p>\n The fleet<\/p>\n 4 boats<\/p>\n One launched, three more at three-month intervals during 2027, five years total.<\/p>\n The last time one of these went around Antarctica<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first attempt. In 2019 an earlier Explorer, SD-1020, left Bluff, New Zealand, on January 19 and came back on August 3, after 196 days and 11,879 nautical miles. On the way it took 50-foot waves, 80-mph winds and, according to Saildrone, collisions with icebergs. Saildrone had actually sent out a pair of boats, and the other one\u2019s conventional wing got wrecked by the first storms. The one that made it had a square-rigged wing built specifically for the trip.<\/p>\n Autonoci\u00f3n Newsletter<\/p>\n No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Privacy policy (opens in new window)<\/a><\/p>\n Two things came out of that voyage. The first is that the boat survived, which apparently surprised a few people. The second one is what the people paying for the new fleet actually care about: in winter, the deep water that the Circumpolar Current churns to the surface is loaded with old CO2, and when it comes up it can release CO2 into the air instead of absorbing it. Robotic floats had been hinting at this, but as far as I can tell the 2019 boat was the first thing to measure the exchange directly, at the surface, through a Southern Ocean winter.<\/p>\n Which is a problem if your climate models assume the Southern Ocean is a steady, reliable sponge. One boat doing one lap in one year gives you a hint. It doesn\u2019t give you a dataset, and a dataset is what the people building climate models actually want.<\/p>\n What\u2019s different this time<\/p>\n Scale, mostly. Instead of one boat and one lap, the plan is four boats cycling continuously for five years. SD-1092\u2019s the first one out. NOAA says the next three go out at three-month intervals during 2027, and once a boat finishes a lap it comes back into Hobart, gets its sensors swapped for fresh ones, and heads out again. If that works, there should be a Saildrone somewhere around Antarctica at every point of the year, including the months when there\u2019s nothing else out there taking measurements.<\/p>\n The routes aren\u2019t fixed, either. Researchers at Columbia University\u2019s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are running the data analytics, and they\u2019ll use machine-learning models to work out where the gaps in the carbon data hurt the most, then steer the boats through those regions. Columbia\u2019s Galen McKinley, who co-leads the project with Sutton, says the team expects to adjust the plan over the course of the five years. NOAA calls it \u201cAI-directed,\u201d which sounds a bit grander than what it is, but the idea is sound: you send the boat where the model is least sure of itself.<\/p>\n The boat changed too, though not by much. Saildrone kept the square-rig wing from 2019 but made it heavier and tougher, and added a camera. A square rig is worth explaining for a second. The standard Saildrone wing works like an airplane wing stood on end and can sail toward the wind. The square version gives that up and mostly runs with the wind behind it. In the Southern Ocean, where the wind blows west to east around the entire planet more or less without stopping, that\u2019s probably the right trade. You don\u2019t need to go upwind if you only ever need to go one direction.<\/p>\n You may also be wondering who\u2019s paying for all this. The money comes from Schmidt Sciences, the philanthropy set up by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, through a program called the Virtual Institute for the Carbon Cycle. NOAA, Columbia, the University of Washington, Australia\u2019s CSIRO and South Africa\u2019s CSIR are all involved. Nobody\u2019s put a dollar figure on the program that I could find, and Saildrone hasn\u2019t published a public tracker for SD-1092, so I can\u2019t tell you where it is this morning. CSIRO\u2019s Elizabeth Shadwick says each lap should cover more than 24,000 kilometers, and that\u2019s where the 13,000-plus miles comes from. NOAA\u2019s own release rounds it to roughly 12,000 miles, so take the exact number with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n A sailboat at walking pace, for 200 days<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a number I keep coming back to. An Explorer averages somewhere between 1 and 3 knots depending on the wind, call it 2 or 3 mph. That\u2019s a brisk walk. SD-1092 is going to keep up a brisk walk for roughly 200 days through the roughest water on the planet, with nobody aboard to fix anything that breaks, and the people flying it are sitting at desks in California.<\/p>\n Compare that with the alternative. A crewed research vessel costs a fortune to charter, needs a full crew of sailors and scientists, and loses days to weather whenever the Southern Ocean decides it\u2019s had enough visitors. It also goes home in winter, which is exactly when the data is most interesting. A 1,500-pound boat that just keeps going strikes me as a pretty good deal, even if it has to limp back into Hobart with half its sensors dead. We\u2019ve covered a lot of drone boats lately, most of them parked offshore watching for drug runners<\/a>, and frankly this is the more interesting use of the hardware.<\/p>\n Where it all ends up is the Global Carbon Budget, the yearly accounting of what people emit and how much the land and the oceans take back. CSIRO says<\/a> the 2026 edition is due in November, and NOAA\u2019s announcement of the full fleet<\/a> went out on October 13. SD-1092 is due back in Hobart roughly 200 days after it left, which puts it in port around early April 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KeysQuestions4Vehicle1 The Southern Ocean absorbs roughly an eighth of all human CO2 emissions annually, yet scientists openly admit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":889667,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[79],"class_list":["post-889666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/889667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}