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SIMBA Antarctic Sea Ice

 

Hi Sarah,

How far are you from the coast of the mainland and would you be able to tell when you got there, or is it a just a continuation of ice and snow?

How about subing for me while I am  on the Ice?

Thanks

Kirk

Mon, 10/22/2007 - 14:03

Sarah Anderson

Hi Kirk - hope your upcoming adventure will be as interesting as mine...good luck finding a sub...I'd love to help out, but I'm hoping my job is still available when I return!! We're pretty far from the mainland...a quick latitude calculation yields in the neighborhood of 200 miles. That doesn't sound too far if you are driving your car, but even in an icebreaker progress would be slow, if you could get through the ice at all. I know that the Swedish icebreaker, Oden, cuts a channel through to McMurdo in early December - early summer in Antarctica! Peter I island is quite close to us, only a few miles. We are headed there on our way out of the ice station day after tomorrow.
Would we notice if we encountered land...though Antarctica is quite mountainous it's covered by thick ice sheets. People on board who have been to South Pole station say the landscape is quite monotonous, nothing but on the horizon but more flat, white ice. It's obviously quite icy here, but there are icebergs to break up the horizon and open pathces of water you can see from the bridge. The ice is breaking up some now as you would expect for this time of year. I just heard a report on the radio that one of our groups was not able to make it to a remote data collection site (we call it "the zone of death") this morning - don't know if the floe has split or if snow cover from a recent storm prohibits the snowmobiles from going there.
Thanks for writing, hope the Texas hill country is treating you well!
Sarah