Discovery News, MSNBC, etc: At the AGU, a transformer submarine to get to the bottom of Ross Ice Shelf
A remotely operated submersible 28-feet long, and made with a cleverly hinged frame so it can squeeze down a deep hole and check things out in waters never before explored, made its bow at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week. If tests in Lake Tahoe and elsewhere go well, in a few years a research project led by a Northern Illinois U. man will make a 30-inch wide hole through the thick, floating tongue of glacial ice called the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The team will insert into it the custom-made, slim-packed robot trailing a communication and power cable. Operators will, when it reaches water thousands of feet down, order it to open and fold in a different way, and then steer it around in the dark depths with cameras and sensors at the ready. The aim is a better understanding why such shelves protruding from the Antarctic mainland appear to be melting from beneath. They’re pretty sure it’s because the water is getting warmer but they need details.
A few outlets picked up the news, and lots more reporters went down to the exhibition hall in Moscone Convention Center to take a look.
Stories:
- LiveScience/Our Amazing Planet – Jeremy Hsu : Robot sub to see what lies beneath Antarctica ;
- Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Robotic Sub to Probe Antarctic Ice Melt ;
- San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman (save this space!. Dave tells me his story was scheduled for yesterday, got bumped. Then for today, bumped again. Now due out Saturday).
Speaking of Perlman, he is the only newspaper reporter among the scores of freelancers and writers for smaller outlets in the press room. Seems so recently there’d be a dozen at the AGU (Perlman’s been going for at least 40 years). No major wires are there either. The news conferences are on line, so many outlets are covering the formal news events remotely. But there is so much to be said for being at a meeting, not just listening-in over a phone link or watching streaming video.
I happened to be there a bit later and went down to look at this machine myself. Its 
manufacturer, DOER Marine, built it across the bay at its facility in the port town of Alameda. DOER is for Deep Ocean Exploration and Research. It manufacturers a line of standard-issue remotely operated vehicles, and has an embryonic program to build a sub that can take scientists to the deepest parts of the ocean, 30,000 feet down, while seated in a sphere of “massive glass” so they can see all around, not just get cramps trying to peak out little portholes.
This bespoke, one-off machine for the Antarctic is called the Sub-Ice ROVer. Thus its name has a formal ring: the DOER SIR. The President of the company that built it, Liz Taylor – daughter of oceanographer and company founder Sylvia Earle – explained how it works. It took me a long time staring at it to realize how it folds. Its aluminum chassis is a rhombus, a parallelogram with sides of equal length, and hinged bits at the corners. It can get real skinny and tubular by flattening out in one direction to go down the hole, and then stretch itself flat in the other direction while exposing its working bits as it pokes along the ice shelf’s bottom. See Grist for an explainer at the WISSAR website. The glossy smooth outer shell in the renderings has been supplanted by an open latticework skin to save weight.
Notably, it’s taxpayer stimulus money at work, largely. Looks okay by me, and I’m sure some skilled workers got hired to make it. (CORRECTION: Ross Powell of NIU, leader of the project, let us know that while some stimulus money reached the overall project, the SIR machine is paid for by NOAA and the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation.) This is one fancy piece of fabricated fiberglass, aluminum, and lots of motors, instruments, gears, and gadgetry whose names I don’t know. I forgot to President Taylor how much the company is charging for this one-off, under-ice robot. Another reporter who did ask told me it’s $2 million. It is a key to a $10 million project to explore the bottoms of ice streams, glaciers, and floating ice tongues managed by NIU and Montana State. The stimulus money arrived via the NSF. The company’s motto seems honest and catchy: “Make a dollar, make a difference.”
Boy, the stuff you learn by being around in person, and after the press conference is over. Besides that, going to a meeting is collegial. Yesterday evening the press room hosted the two winners of AGU’s science writing awards. The previous evening they got the hardware formally from the poobahs in tuxedos, all very nice. But this was the more pleasant follow-up with some wine, beer, and nibbles but no black ties. One learns a lot about the trade listening to award winners reminisce how they did it. Roberta Kwok got the Walter Sullivan Prize for features, and with accompaniment of a researcher, Peter Dennisken, described how she got the story of the only (and tiny) asteroid that’s ever been spotted by telescope on its way to collide with Earth, and its air-bursted fragments picked up on the ground.
And the winner of the David Perlman Award for breaking news, Pallava Bagla of New Delhi and Science magazine’s man in India, told reporters what a tough but rewarding time he had finding out that the IPCC had really screwed up when it formally declared that Himalaya’s glaciers all would be gone by 2035. Fascinating. And eponym Perlman introduced them both.
Grist for the Mill:
WISSAR (ice sheet drilling program) DOER SIR info sheet ; NIU Press Release ; DOER Marine ; AGU Journalism Awards Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
