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ROV Icefin Ascertains How Ice Melts

Britney Schmidt and collaborators are publishing two papers related to melting rates and how melting occurs at Antarctica’s hottest glacier: Thwaites Glacier. The team designed and used its Icefin ROV, “basically an underwater robotic oceanographer,” for first-of-their-kind observations regarding how the ice is melting.

“These new ways of observing the glacier allow us to understand that it’s not just how much melting is happening, but how and where it is happening that matters in these very warm parts of Antarctica,” said Britney Schmidt  , associate professor of astronomy and earth and atmospheric sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and Cornell Engineering.

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    00:00:03 [MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Thwaites Glacier is one of the fastest changing systems in Antarctica. It's located in a place of Western Antarctica where it's kind of the coastal buffer between ice that's already floating in the ocean and a whole bunch of ice behind it. So the ITGC, which is the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, is this big project between the US and the British to get everybody's instruments and everybody's perspectives on this really fast

    00:00:38 changing system. TEXT: In late 2019, Britney Schmidt’s research team joined the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration ... to capture first-of-their-kind observations at the glacier’s grounding line. SPEAKER 1: The grounding line is this place where a glacier meets the ocean so it's sliding off the continent, hits the ocean, and that place where the ocean, the seafloor and the ice meet is called the grounding line. It's the first place that in Antarctica, when the water is warming up and starting to affect the ice, that's the first place that the ice and the ocean start to interact. And we've never really been able to measure

    00:01:10 what's going on in this really important place. And so, Icefin was developed in part to be able to get us to those places that aren't reachable by any other means. Icefin is basically an underwater oceanographer, a robotic oceanographer. It's an ROV, which means a remotely operated vehicle. And so, its purpose is to take instruments that we commonly used to understand glaciers and the ocean and how it's changing and then kind of put it on a mobile platform and take it everywhere underneath the glacier.

    00:01:43 As the glaciers are moving, as they're moving backwards and retreating, they leave a record of that on the seafloor. As they're melting. there's a record of that on the surface of the ice. And so by using all of these instruments together, you get a much more holistic picture of what's going on. SPEAKER 2: At Thwaites Glacier, we worked with the British Antarctic Survey and they used a hot water drill to make a hole through about 500 meters of ice. And then we have the lower Icefin very carefully through that hole. And then we were able to drive it out about two kilometers from there. We're looking at the temperature of the water

    00:02:19 and how fast the water is moving and the shape of the ice, because those things all impact how much heat goes from the water to the ice. So those are some of the main physical parameters that we're looking at and mapping with Icefin while it’s underneath the glacier. SPEAKER 3: You know, while those data were collected, you can see like parts of the ice raining sediment out as it melts. You get to see these different formations with the video footage that's indicative of turbulence and therefore strong melting. But then we're able to back up what's visualized.

    00:02:53 You know, no one else would have been able to collect that. So kudos to Britney for having the vision to create Icefin and then to navigate it in a very bold manner to collect these kind of data. And so with those data, we're able to say something very meaningful about how the ice is melting in different ways, right. SPEAKER 1: Glaciers aren't just one piece that matters, it's the whole system. But what we we were missing was this picture of exactly what's happening right at this really critical place.

    00:03:24 So we don't have any data until this field campaign of what's going on at the grounding line of a major glacier ever. And so, by being able to go in there and say, okay, this is exactly how this works right in the system, then we have this this piece of the puzzle that we didn't have before. TEXT: Icefin is now back at Cornell University undergoing improvements for future expeditions. SPEAKER 1: We're bringing down things we built to go places we haven't been before. And so it's very it's very challenging. And I think that then inspires your work when you get home, as well.

    00:03:59 So, you know, science is, you know, the search for kind of truth and facts and things like that, but it's still a very human experience. And so that's a big part of working in a place like this is it takes so many people and it's really kind of coming together that makes that work out. That's why you build things like this at a university. You have creative people, you have a chance to work across disciplinary boundaries, and that's part of what appeals to us about being here at Cornell.