If an oil well or pipeline should ever spring a leak in the Arctic, let's hope it doesn't happen under the ice: a 3D map of the contours under an ice sheet has revealed that such a spill would spread more than 10 times further than previously thought, due to the complex nature of the ice.
Until now, computer models and small-scale laboratory tests could offer only simplistic predictions about how bad an oil spill from a broken pipeline or the "blowout" of a well under an ice sheet would be. This is because information about the ice sheet's subsurface structure tends to be based on sporadic data from boreholes.
Jeremy Wilkinson from the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban and his colleagues wanted to create a more detailed model and so sent an autonomous underwater vehicle beneath the ice off the coast of Greenland in 2004. The team ...
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