Mushy ice and lost kit: The scientists studying Antarctica as it melts
With Antarctica's climate warming at an unprecedented rate, scientists are battling with dangerously thin ice and equipment falling through into the sea beneath.
For 20 years, Simon Morley has been cutting holes in Antarctic sea ice and diving into the frigid waters below to study strange and colourful sea life – including sea squirts and sponges. But climate change is thinning out this ice, meaning it is often no longer safe enough to travel over.
"'We'd get 100 or more dives through the sea ice in the winter period [in the past]," says Morley, a marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). "Last year, I think [my colleagues] managed maybe five to ten dives through the sea ice."
The ice is creating a Catch-22 situation. "It's too thick for them to get the boats out but it's not thick enough to cut holes in with the chainsaw and actually do the diving," he explains. A helpful way around this, however, is to keep boats ready and standing by during the winter, so that they can launch immediately when a window opens to use them, he says.
We tend to think of Antarctica as a perennially ice-bound world. But while the continent remains a challenging and inhospitable environment for humans, it is changing. The volume of frozen water in Antarctica is plummeting, vegetation is spreading across the landmass and air temperatures are rising.
