Polar Robots to Explore the Arctic

Roland Piquepaille writes "It's now almost certain that the world's ice shelves are melting. And while satellites provide lots of data about their evolution, ground-based weather stations could be even more useful. But if scientists can no longer stay on fragile and volatile ice sheets, what can they do? They can use specially designed robots called SnoMotes developed by U.S. researchers. 'The SnoMotes work as a team, autonomously collaborating among themselves to cover all the necessary ground to gather assigned scientific measurements.' More importantly, a SnoMote is an 'expendable rover that wouldn't break a research team's bank if it were lost during an experiment,' according to the lead researcher." Reader coondoggie adds a link to another story on these robots at Network World.

Comments

Re:Extreme temperatures

[Nos.]

It sort of depends. If you're using the battery in the cold, it will discharge more quickly. If you're storing the battery, it will last longer in the cold. That's why those of us in a cold climate sometimes use a battery blanket (electric warmer) to keep the battery warm on those cold mornings. http://chemistry.about.com/od/howthingsworkfaqs/f/coldbattery.htm

Re:Extreme temperatures

[plopez]

Batteries at lower temperatures tend to have longer lives, don't they?

Chemistry 101, lower temperatures mean lower reaction rates. Lower reaction rates mean less voltage, power etc.

Not All

[sycodon]

Not all the world's ice shelves are melting

"Almost certain"???

[Snocone]

It's now almost certain that the world's ice shelves are melting

Funny, that's not what the actual facts show. We're at the highest ever recorded ice cover in the Southern Hemisphere right now:

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/s_plot.html

which already more than balances out the Northern Hemisphere's recent decline,

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/n_plot.html

and now that the PDO has entered a cool phase,

http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/

it's as certain as anything to do with climate is that you're going to see that trend smartly reverse itself as well.

Soooooo ... only for some value of "certain" which equates to "certainly not" is that a defensible statement, methinks.

Re:"Almost certain"???

[Snocone]

Nope. Ice shelves break, that's what they do, even in Ice Ages. That there was a 400 km^2 chunk break off recently is really of no great consequence against the overall 1,000,000 km^2 positive anomaly. I suppose it's 0.04% supported, but it's 99.96% not supported. Not being oafish, that seems to me to be pretty clearly in the "not supported" column.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg

When you see the red line on that graph go below the long term average so that the total amount of ice is actually decreasing instead of increasing, that would contradict the above statements. A chunk here, a chunk there, that's almost certainly due to the wind and wave action of that particular area, not the temperature. If we had daily maps of the thickness of the entire ice cover, then we could see the dynamics of this progress in action and actually know why; however, as we do not have that information, we have to go with the most quantitative factual information we have, which is the graph above, which tells us that ice cover is growing.

Re:Ice caps Melting ? Try again

[Gat0r30y]

For anyone curious, the link feeds you straight to a fairly convincing data set which would lead me to the opposite conclusion. Indeed since 2002 it would appear there has been a slight increase in the area of the Antarctic sea ice, here is a neat graph. 6 years does not a significant trend make my friend. Additionally, the overwhelming theme of the data is the significant loss multi-year sea ice - the stuff that sticks around in the summer. How precisely did you interpret this data to draw the conclusion that the ice caps are not melting, and that the Antarctic is in growth?