The British Antarctic Survey is planning to move its research station 23km away from a massive chasm that has formed in the ice underneath it.
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The Halley VI Research Station has been aloft the floating 150m-thick Brunt Ice Shelf since 2012, and was designed with just this kind of problem in mind. The first four Halley bases were all consumed by snow (1.2 metres falls each year), crushed and abandoned, while Halley V lasted 20 years by being able to raise its steel platforms using extendable legs. Halley VI is made up of eight modules, each fitted with four, four-metre-high hydraulic legs with skis on their ends. The modules will be separated and then individually towed upstream by tractors, a process that will take three years in total, including the preparatory ice studies to ensure the route is safe. In the interim, temporary housing will be set up for the staff - usually 70 in summer and 16 in winter. The Antarctic is now heading into summer, so the team is getting ready to tow Halley.
The Brunt Ice Shelf flows west towards the sea at a speed of 0.4km per year, and the BAS team always knew there was a strong possibility the station might need to be relocated if a chunk of the shelf came apart as an iceberg. As a result, movements have been closely monitored. Satellite data showed in 2012 that a chasm - a crack that goes all the way to the sea - that had been innocuous for 35 years was starting to move. Ice-penetrating radar technologies monitored the chasm, and in October 2016 a second crack was identified 17km north of Halley. If it continues to grow, there is a strong possibility it would hinder resupply operations.
“Over the last couple of years our operational teams have been meticulous in developing very detailed plans for the move and we are excited by the challenge,” said Tim Stockings, director of operations at BAS.
“Antarctica can be a very hostile environment. Each summer season is very short - about nine weeks. And because the ice and the weather are unpredictable we have to be flexible in our approach. We have planned the move in stages – the science infrastructure that captures environmental data will remain in place while the stations modules move.”
Data gathered at Halley VI is vital for understanding Earth and space weather, and ozone measurements have been taken there since the 1950s when a hole in the ozone layer was first discovered using data gathered in Antarctica. The BAS says a “severe space weather event” would cause $6 to $42 billion daily losses, just to the US economy - estimates made by a Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies report, imagining a catastrophic solar storm.
There was no hint, from a statement released by the BAS, that the crack was the direct result of anything other than natural movements in the ice shelf. But there has been a recent spate of bad news relating to climate change.
Research released by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage this week estimates that polar bear populations will shrink by a third by 2050, due to a loss of Arctic sea ice.
Antarctica and Arctic sea ice are also reportedly at record lows, with an area the size of India missing. Director of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, Mark Serreze, told Reuters “some really crazy things [are] going on,” referring to a combination of greenhouse gases, El Nino and other factors. Antarctica sea ice has not been this low since 1982, and Arctic sea ice since 2006. Serreze warned, "Antarctica is the sleeping elephant that is beginning to stir".