I'm quite biased, however if enough money appeared for a whole new icebreaker I would spend it on people and systems to fully utilise #Nuyina first. Then think about adding capacity as demand saturates...
Right now, another Australian icebreaker is idle capex.
...for the butbuts, yes I understand about leasing ships for specific needs. I'm very happy to discuss as a paid consultant. Permanent hire to run a frozen ocean program is also acceptable ;)
Somehow a meme now exists that Australia relying on a single icebreaker for its polar program is a risk.
...🤷 idk seemed fine since 1991, and also for Germany, Norway, Japan etc etc.
Also there's afaik no plan or funding to do things (ie science) that really need an icebreaker aside from an annual early summer punch in to Davis station, and absolutely no will to hire people who know how to deploy in pack ice...
Ah whatever. I'm just a train hoser now.
honestly a career path from solid polar field research tech and aspiring (on the path) snow professional to PhD/published researcher/polar innovator/speaker/mentor and open source geo community leader to... manual labour...
...wasn't really on my bingo sheet.
With no surprise to anyone after this last 2.5 years - I miss the Arctic / jeg savner meg den Arktisk
...I know *exactly how hard* trying to change research field practice is. And what happens when you point out that standard issue gear presents a safety hazard.
Still, persist. You are worth it. You are the most important thing to take care of out there.
Let your stories be about wonder, not body function sacrifices.
..this applies especially to new/young researchers or other field workers. That lifetime experience in cold regions might be your last.
Do not let *anyone* pressure you into risking body part damage that might not show up for decades and may impact you for decades.
Older researchers: be better.
one of my favourite #polarResearch "things" was always wearing gloves.
there are so. many. sea ice researchers with hand problems because they insist on repeatedly plunging bare hands into -1.8C seawater when it is -10 and colder out to grab their precious sample.
I've repeatedly said in field briefings "you only have one pair of hands, they are more important".
"can't do [thing] with gloves on". why not? work it out, or change [thing]. I know. I don't remove gloves, except to change pairs.
buried treasures found during some personal data curation.
9 years ago I made this plot of sea ice draft and surface elevation from 3 different expeditions to similar regions of East Antarctica, from top to bottom 2004, 2007 and 2012. I'm pretty sure the aim was to show how the 2012 expedition changed the boundaries of what sea ice "looks like". I was involved in both 2007 and 2012 campaigns, organising sea ice drilling teams ;)
📢 New in the ‘Explain it in Two Ways’ series!
This time, Torsten Albrecht (@PIK_Climate) explains tipping elements, while Tony Payne (@LivUni) dives into the science of ice sheets and tipping points.
🎥 Videos available for both general audiences and scientists!
🤝 Thanks to @PolarRES for the collaboration.
🔗 Watch here: https://ocean-ice.eu/explain-it-in-two-ways-tipping-elements-and-tipping-points/
#ClimateScience #TippingPoints #PolarResearch
(@)br00t4c(@)mastodon.social:
#AntarcticIce #PolarResearch #FastestWarmingRegion #GlobalWarming #UnexpectedDiscovery
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/antartic-ice-melting-robot-warming-b2643948.html
The Independent
A robot got stuck under Antarctic ice years ago. Its data has now revealed an even bigger problem
By Julia Musto
#memories in the course of web site tidying.
2012, someplace off Antarctica, GPSes and total stations making floe-local reference frames. I still have to write something about how tripods were anchored, it was a cool system that I've never seen used on other expeditions...
Source story: https://www.spatialised.net/drifting-sea-ice-and-3d-photogrammetry/
A long time ago in a galaxy far away, an audacious team of researchers did things like this - flew lidar in helicopters off icebreakers, worked out how to get sea ice elevation and uncertainties for every point, then modelled sea ice thickness at metre scale.
Then the funding was pulled and none of those researchers have science jobs anymore.
Read all about it here: https://eprints.utas.edu.au/23441/, ch 4. Want a paper? just add funding ;)
A little timewarp back to 2012. On SIPEX-II we did a little alt- group photo (the idea of Jan Lieser / Andy Chianci ).
My contribution was convincing everyone to lie still until the helicopter did 3 passes, so we could make a 3D group photo model 🙌 . This is a screengrab of the dense point cloud from an 2012 Agisoft processing run - going to have to push this image set through modern @opendronemap and see how it rolls!
...lining up on-ground work with satellites in polar regions on sea ice? That is a whole new story - computing image footprints and snapshot times, coordinating ship location, timing of ground observations... it's complex, risky and expensive. A perfect icesat lidar underflight hampered by cloud, a perfectly timed radarsat image only to be too windy to fly a drone...
...and so on...
It can be done - we just don't ever control all the variables. 2/3
I've got a couple of essays / analytical pieces in the works on beautifully imperfect data.
Here's a sneak peek - using point cloud structural analysis to segment ridges in sea ice. I talked about parts of this at ESA's #LPS22, the idea goes way back to 2007 or so - patchy / lack of ongoing work in research makes progress... slow. More soon!
#arctic #seaice #polarResearch #dronemapping #landscapeAnalysis
Arctic ice is on my mind today (well, ice and snow are never too far from my thoughts, and I'm writing something related about beautifully imperfect data)...
A short clip of some icebreaking in 2022. It was a stunning day, steaming through really nice ice. There's sound, just be careful - it's noisy! I've tried to filter out the wind, remaining sound is mostly the ship slipping across cronchy salty snow.
Hand shot on an Olympus OM10.
Breaking some ice in the Arctic basin
https://makertube.net/videos/watch/7e215c41-5dd7-48a5-ab43-6a2daba5281b
@koen_hufkens this effect is common in #polarGeophysics and general #polarResearch also.
...and a fair bit of the ecology modelling commentary applies.
My views on how to progress are more cynical (if a system is problematic look up etc) - based on being locked out of a research career because good polar calval is slow to publish and may raise awkward questions.
Ultimately, being forced to slow down and evaluate our work is a good thing.
