On this New Year’s Day, fresh off sea trials, the SA Agulhas II, one of the largest and most modern polar research ships in the world, will quietly weigh anchor and set sail for the Weddell Sea in Antarctica.

As with oceanographer Robert Ballard’s historic search for the Titanic, the mission is two-fold. There’s a main mission — science and research into the real-world effects of our growing climate emergency — and a less publicized but no less worthy mission, to find the remains of polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ship Endurance.

It was thought unlikely, if not impossible, for example, that anyone would find Sir John Franklin’s HMS Terror, which was abandoned to heavy sea ice in the high Arctic — together with Franklin’s flagship, HMS Erebus — in Britain’s disastrous the mid-19th century expedition to find a way through Canada’s Northwest Passage.

All 129 men on the Franklin expedition died, making it the worst disaster to strike Britain’s Royal Navy during its long history of polar exploration.

And yet, little more than two years ago, a diving team on the non-profit Arctic Research Foundation’s research ship Martin Bergmann found the Terror in virtually pristine condition, its three masts broken but still standing, at the bottom of the aptly named — and previously uncharted — Terror Bay, just south of Victoria Strait, in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Nearly a century later, the Irish-born polar explorer Ernest Shackleton found himself mired in similar circumstances on the other side of the world — literally — when his ship Endurance became trapped in sea ice during an attempt to make the frist land crossing of the Antarctic continent.

Endurance was slowly crushed in the thickening ice; the crew escaped certain death by camping on the sea ice until it, too, disintegrated.

Unlike Franklin, however, Shackleton managed to lead much of his crew to safety and eventual rescue, by sailing 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) from the Antarctic to South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic in a seven-metre (23 feet) lifeboat, in one of the great tales of survival in maritime history.

Fast-forward to Jan. 1, 2019, and the SA Agulhas II is about to set sail on a 45-day scientific expedition deep into those areas of the Weddell Sea that are still covered in ice, despite it being the height of the Antarctic summer.

The Agulhas crew will study the effects of climate change and global warming.

In July, 2017, a giant iceberg twice the size of Luxembourg — or four times the size of Greater London, if you prefer — calved off the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsular, the northernmost arm of Antarctica and a hotspot for research because its retreating glaciers are a significant contributor to the global rise in sea levels.

The expedition includes more than 30 international scientists in numerous different fields. The 13,500-tonne, 135-metre (450 feet) icebreaker Agulhas is equipped with drones, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and deep-diving Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) for collecting data well below the sea’s surface.

National Maritime Museum/archives - Photo by Frank Hurley

The Endurance is there, just waiting to be found, as the 2016 discovery of Terror proved.

The bigger picture though, appropriate to the increasingly heated conversation about climate change due in the coming year, is all this melting ice — in both polar regions — and what it means to the planet’s future, in both the medium and long term.

As Martin Siegert, professor of geosciences at Imperial College London told The Guardian just days after the iceberg A68 calved off the Larsen C ice shelf in July, 2017, “There is enough ice in Antarctica that if it all melted, or even just flowed into the ocean, sea levels [would] rise by 60 metres.”

Of course, as the Shackleton expedition proved — not to mention the disastrous Robert Falcon Scott “Scott of the Antarctic” expedition just three years earlier, Antarctica has a way of dashing the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men.

“Antarctica is a place of extremes,” John Dowdeswell, director of Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute and the Weddell Sea expedition’s chief scientist, told Guardian science editor Ian Sample just days ago.

“But if we are that close to one of the most iconic vessels in polar exploration, we have got to go and look for it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/26/expedition-scientists-map-larsen-c-ice-shelf-weddell-calving-

Winter is coming — not here, perhaps, but in Antarctica. For those increasingly worried about climate change, the Antarctic winter can’t come a moment too soon.

Earlier this month, researchers with the British Antarctic Survey released new aerial video showing the widening crack in the Larsen C ice shelf — a chasm so deep and so long it stretches to the horizon.

February is high season for scientistswho monitor the ecosystem of the planet’s coldest, windiest, most remote continent, so this is the time of year when the most important, telling scientific findings are made.

In all, the Larsen C crack is 160 kilometres (100 miles) long and some 460 metres (1,500 feet) wide at its widest point. Left unchecked, the rift will cleave off a monster iceberg the size of Wales — or Delaware, if you’re thinking in U.S. terms — in the foreseeable future.

If, or more likely when, it happens, the iceberg will represent 10 percent of the entire ice shelf. As recent findings in the Arctic have shown, ice melts increase more rapidly in pace once they begin. Today’s 10 percent will be tomorrow’s 25 percent, and so on.

There is precedent, even in Antarctica. The Larsen A and B ice shelves collapsed in 1995 and 2002 respectively. The Antarctic research group that monitored the Larsen B collapse at the time noted that the event followed a sudden and unsustainable band of warm air in one of the world’s fastest warming places.

Ice shelves play an important role in Antarctica’s ecosystem, scientists say, because they act like bookends, holding together massive stores of loose ice on the continent.

If those bookends collapse, it will cause land ice to melt and glaciers to split off into the ocean, boosting sea levels. Since the Larsen B shelf’s break upglaciers behind it have flowed into the sea at a rate six times faster than before the shelf’s collapse.

Satellite imagery shows the western edge of Antarctica is also developing cracks, including the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf.

Not all ice melt can be spotted from the surface. Massive meltwater lakes deep inside ice fields can flow out to sea through tunnels deep under the ice, making them harder to spot.

Ice breakup in the Arctic has been measured more closely than in the southern continent, for obvious reasons.

The Arctic is closer to major population centres, and more exposed to warming air in the more populated Northern Hemisphere. Melting ice has given rise to the real possibility that the Northwest Passge will be ice-free during the summer in just a matter of years. That will open the entire region to shipping, not to mention oil drilling. Before long, the Northwest Passage will a realistic geographical and economic alternative to the Panama Canal. International shipping lanes will be affected, and along with them the economic prospects of Panama, Russia and Canada, among other countries.

The recent findings in Antarctica have prompted renewed interest in the work of nature photographer James Balog and filmmaker Jeff Orlowski’s 2012 documentary Chasing Ice, in no small part because Balog photographed a massive ice calving in the Arctic while on assignment for National Geographic.

Video footage of an ice shelf the size of a small city cleaving off into the sea off Greenland's coast went viral. A four-minute excerpt of the largest glacier calving ever filmed has 46 million views on YouTube.

What makes Chasing Ice particularly relevant today is that Balog was initially a climate-change skeptic when, more than 10 years ago now, he took on his first National Geographic assignment in the far north.

It wasn’t long, however, before he became convinced of the impact humans are having on the planet. He has been working ever since to get the message out.

This past November, the Arctic was 20 degrees warmer than average, warmer even than the most liberal projections had predicted.

No one can predict with any degree of certainty, of course, what effect melting sea ice will have in the immediate, short-term future, let alone future generations.

One thing is immediately clear, though: The planet is skating on thin ice.

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“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen

From ‘Terror’ to ‘Endurance,’ a New Year’s Day expedition for the ages.

Skating on thin ice: Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf.

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