Curiously Polar

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POLAR NEWSREEL: Soon we may be start to talk not only about the Polar Regions of Planet Earth, but maybe even about the Polar Regions of the Moon! Meanwhile, a volcanic fissure opened in Iceland creating a beautiful touristic eruption. And the British Antarctic Survey starts its event series Extreme Antarctica.

OUTER SPACE, SO CLOSE: Outer space and the polar regions are so different and yet so similar. They’re both defined by remoteness and extreme conditions making any activity dangerous and expensive. Within the US State Department, the lawyer for cold, dark and dangerous places is charged with responsibilities for the arctic and outer space. But that is not the only connection of the polar regions and outer space.

Antarctica is the closest you can get to space without leaving Earth. It’s an isolated, confined and extreme environment where Antarctic expeditioneers live remotely for up to nine months of the year. Today space agencies from around the world send their people to Antarctica to actually test the human factor in almost total isolation.

This episode dives into the many things that make the polar regions and space so similar, shows how science in either place influence each other and explains why Antarctica is the best place to find meteorites - what could be closer to space on earth?

This is an episode of the Curiously Polar podcast

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Polar Newsreel: One of the most bizarre news of the polar regions comes from China where recently a so-called polar bear hotel opened, praising all its rooms having an exceptional view on the completely enclosed polar bears.

In Antarctica, renowned German research icebreaker Polarstern squeezed through a narrow ice channel between new mega iceberg A-74 and the Brunt Ice Shelf it just recently calved off. A spectacular view and incredible scientific chance.

Running AMOC: One of the largest and fastest ocean currents on earth is believed to be a key indicator for climate change and part of the complex climate regulation mechanisms of the planet. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - publicly known as Gulf Stream System - is an integral part of the thermohaline circulation that transports heat from the equator to the poles and operate like a large engine for the global climate. Its length of 10,000 km makes it one of the largest and fastest currents on Earth, and it’s very warm. At roughly 2 m/s it brings up to 100,000,000 m³ of 30°C warm water per second from the Gulf of Mexico towards Europe where it introduces crucial heat to the continent. In order to produce the same heat that it brings to the shores of Europe, we would need 1,000,000 nuclear power plants why it's also called the heat pump. Without it, the temperature would be significantly colder here, at least five to ten degrees.

In the last few years, scientists and pundits in the media have repeatedly expressed the fear that the Gulf Stream could come to a standstill due to climate change and the question everything revolves around is whether the Gulf Stream System aka the AMOC has already weakened? And indeed, the most recent research paper delivers evidence: The weakest state of the Gulf Stream System in 1,000 years.

This is an episode of the Curiously Polar podcast

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Polar Newsreel: Our North American correspondent, Robert, forwarded us the film Drifting North: Into the Polar Night by Amy Richman, a collaboration between the University of Colorado Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, from the first leg of the historic MOSAiC expedition led by the Alfred Wegener Institute from late 2019. We recommend to give it a try. / Iceberg A-68 is fragmenting further with the crumples being picked up by the southern front of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. A team of the British Antarctic Survey is on its way to take the chance to research the impact of the massive piece of ice on the fragile marine ecosystem around the island of South Georgia. / Chris introduced Project Cybersyn, a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy from 1971 to 1973 often referred to as Chile's socialist internet. After the CIA-backed military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed.

The Polar Vortex Anomaly: For a few years now, the buzzword of the Polar Vortex has been making the rounds particular in combination with recent weather patterns of snow in Spain and, at the same time, a freezing cold snap in North America. New data reveal, the freak weather of the last few weeks is due to an extraordinary disturbance of the polar vortex. During this "Berlin Phenomenon” (Sudden Stratospheric Warming) the polar stratosphere suddenly warms up by dozens of degrees. This breaks down the polar jet stream that forms a wind barrier that normally keeps arctic air away from mid-latidues. To explain this extraordinary event we dive into the atmosphere layers with their distinct features, get a closer look on the particulars of the Troposphere, analyse the atmospheric flow and the special atmospheric features of the polar regions before looking at the formation of the polar front as barrier between the cold, dense, so-called arctic air and the tropical, much warmer air and finally unveiling the current anomaly of the polar vortex. Thanks to ESA's Aeolus satellite, we can for the first time directly follow such an event. This satellite is the first to be able to measure polar winds directly from orbit. The current analyses show that the polar vortex has weakened unusually strong since mid-December 2020. An event can be observed in which the polar vortex is split into two parts - one air mass circles over the North Atlantic and one over the North Pacific with the wind direction reversing in large areas of the polar vortex. The interesting thing about it: A few years ago, scientists discovered that weakening of the polar vortex and the rarer Sudden Stratospheric Warming are becoming more frequent. A likely cause of this is the retreat of the Arctic sea ice and the increasing warming of the North Atlantic. Because according to models, the associated influx of heat into the atmosphere promotes the sudden warming of the stratosphere. But we need to understand better whether and to what extent climate change intensifies this polar weather phenomenon. It is still too early to draw concrete conclusions from the Aeolus data.

This is an episode of the Curiously Polar podcast

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Polar Newsreel: A wallet lost by US navy meteorologist on Antarctica in the 1960s turned up during demolition work])https://future.usap.gov/demolition-new-aims-construction/= at McMurdo base 53 years later. Nornickel must pay €1.62 billion for the huge Arctic oil spill.

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It was James Cook’s second voyage of 1772-75 which finally destroyed the dream of a vast, inhabited and prosperous “Terra Australis Incognita” and ushered in the new age of South Polar exploration.

Who actually discovered the southern continent has been heatedly disputed, chiefly on nationalistic grounds, primarily between the British support of Bransfield and Smith, and the Americans for Palmer. The controversy raged for over a century with accusations of wilful misinterpretation of the accounts and logs right up to claims and counter-claims for forgery.

In fact, the first person to actually see the continent was neither British nor American but was almost certainly the Russian Admiral von Bellingshausen. However, this wasn’t realised until his records became available in the West, almost a century later. Today it’s believed that the Russian expedition reached on 28 January 1820 a point within 32 km (20 mi) from Princess Martha Coast and recorded the sight of an ice shelf at 69°21′28″S 2°14′50″W that became known as the Fimbul Ice Shelf.

Further reading (affiliate links): Jakob Sondergard Pedersen & Philip Curtis (2012) The Mapping of Antarctica, The Map House of London, Robert Clancy, John Manning & Henk Brolsma (2013) Mapping Antarctica: A Five Hundred Year Record of Discovery, Springer Praxis Books, Peter Fretwell (2020) Antarctic Atlas: New Maps and Graphics That Tell the Story of A Continent, Particular Books

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Polar Newsreel If lockdown is taking it too hard on you, you might find some ease drawing some icebergs and see how they float. | To see an actual iceberg the size of Greater London you can follow the brand new one recently calved from Brunt Ice Shelf. | At the same time the first commercial vessel sailed the Northern Sea Route during winter. | After being fined $2 billion for the damage caused by the major fuel spill last year, Nornickel is making headlines again when three people die in a partial collapse of its ore processing plant in Norilsk. | Turkey plans it’s very own year-round Antarctic Research Station at Horseshoe Island in Marguerite Bay.

When Dinosaurs lived in Antarctica Wo would expect to find Dinosaurs in the coldest and most remote place in the world? But it hasn’t always been that way. There used to be a time when Antarctica was covered in forests and dinosaurs roamed the continent free. And in 1986 a group of Argentine scientists made their way to James Ross Island under expedition leader Eduardo B. Olivero. The expedition came back home with a sensational finding - the excavation of a few fossils, namely a partial skeleton and bony plates of some sort of body armour of a new plant-eating species, later to be named Antarctopelta oliveroi. And the area seems to be the dinosaur hot spot in Antarctica at the moment. In 1986 an expedition of the British Antarctic Survey discovered the second dinosaur on neighbouring Vega Island.

The places those fossils have been found so far are ice free and rather easy accessible. The more the Antarctic ice sheet will retreat, the more area the ice will set free, the more likely is that scientists may unveil more fossils to get a better picture of how Antarctica looked like in previous periods. And that in turn will give us a better understanding of how things have changed in the past.

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News: Get a glimpse on the current seismic activity around the South Shetland Islands and embrace the break-up of Iceberg a-68a into smaller fragments that still are incredibly large or dive into geopolitics, architecture, glaciology, photography and conservation of Antarctica and more with the videos of the seven-day-online-festival Antarctica Now!

While logistics for Antarctic research stations are already challenging in ‘normal’ times, the pandemic has put them onto a new level and pushed everyone involved to their limits. The US Antarctic Programme and the National Science Foundation boarded their field staff in San Francisco and other cities to sail them down all the way to Antarctica. The Russian Antarctic Programme did the same, staffing icebreakers in Murmansk to send them all the way down to the 7th continent to bring the so-called winterers for the Russian stations. Most Antarctic Programmes have either cancelled or drastically reduced their research seasons in Antarctica due to the ongoing global pandemic. The British Antarctic Survey has evacuated staff from a number of research station but puts finishing touches on the upgrade on Rothera station. For those constructions, workforce have been brought to the Falkland Islands and then shipped down to the Antarctic Peninsula. And also the German Antarctic Programme operated by the Alfred-Wegener-Institute faced the necessity of becoming creative and almost causing a diplomatic incident to get the turnover staff to its Neumayer III research station.

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Hostile conditions in Antarctica make scientific research rather difficult, so most scientists rarely visit the 7th continent, instead using satellite data to complete their work. But sometimes even scientists are baffled when they find structures on satellites pictures they cannot explain right away.

That happened when scientists got hold of a picture that showed something that appeared to be a crash site forming long stretch in the ice. Aviation experts agreed that it could be formed by something landing there and skating to a halt. This theory wasn’t completely out of the blue since the site where this picture has been taken from is quite close to the incident site of one of the world’s worst aviation accidents when a passenger aeroplane crashed into Mount Erebus back in 1979. But the theory couldn’t hold for long once the shadows of the shown objects got taken into consideration and NASA scientists revealed an unusual type of glacier forming a seven-mile-long wall of jagged ice on the frozen sea of McMurdo Sound.

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Antarctica is a very special place in many ways. The sheer size of its ice cover, the astonishing wilderness, the inaccessibility, being Earth's only continent without a native human population - it seems like the last vastly untamed place on earth. It is because of that that the 7th continent turned into an Eldorado for scientists despite its inhospitality. The Antarctic Treaty has put all territorial claims on hold and devotes the continent to Science and Peace since 1959 and besides the 12 original signees a total of 54 countries operate seasonal research stations in Antarctica.

However, all claiming states operate a number of research stations to underline their claim, some of them even tried to [establish permanent civil settlements]((https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/science/can_you_live_in_antarctica.php#:~:text=There%20are%20two%20places%20in,tip%20of%20the%20Antarctic%20Peninsula) and send pregnant woman to give birth to "native Antarcticans" to support such claims.

Aiming for the lowest possible “disturbance footprint” on the planet the research facilities are largely planned as temporary structures. In 2018 the Australian government considered a new infrastructure project in the area that is claimed as Australian Antarctic Territory. While the project remained largely undiscovered in the public eye in past years, resistance is now forming in the group that is supposed to benefit most from the project. Scientists are largely critical of the project, as it represents a significant interference with the extremely fragile balance of the continent and its ecosystems and could create a real bad precent in terms of the scale of investment and the impact on the environment but certainly would turn Australias footprint in Antarctica to the biggest of any nation. Beyond environmental questions, the project’s long term and more troubling impact may be the altering of the political conditions on the frozen continent.

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A story about space archaeology with Alice Gorman at the Ologies podcast brought us the story about a nuclear-powered Soviet reconnaissance satellite. Part of the Soviet Union's Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite programme, or RORSAT (Russian: Upravlyaemy Sputnik Aktivnyy, US-A), the satellite was assigned the number Kosmos 954 and launched in 1977. The low orbit satellite operated in about 260 to 280 km (160 to 170 mi) and could track marine traffic in real-time if operated under perfect conditions. However, poor weather and high seas could greatly interfere with a RORSAT's tracking ability. RORSATs also had a short lifespan of two to four months. As a result, they were only launched when the U.S.S.R. was expecting a large increase in NATO or U.S. naval activity, for example, just before major naval exercises or during a crisis. Shortly after launch, the satellite became uncontrollable and the emergency boosting manoeuvre necessary to lift the reactor into graveyard orbit could not be carried out. The United States, closely watching Russian satellite activity, realised in November 1977 that Kosmos 954 is in serious trouble and threatened to enter the atmosphere with a possible impact area somewhere on the North American continent. Despite a quick huddle with key allies of NATO and OECD, the public was kept in the dark about the incident. Fearing that the satellite might re-enter over the U.S., raining radioactive debris across heavily populated areas and several major cities, the Department of Energy, with support from the Department of Defense, prepared for the possibility of Kosmos 954 impacting on U.S. territory.

In late January 1978, about 3 months after Kosmos 954 was launched, the satellite fell back down to Earth, raining a trail of debris across the Northwest Territories in Canada. Covering a total area of 124,000 square kilometres (48,000 sq mi) a joint American-Canadian team began a clean-up effort codenamed Operation Morning Light and would spend most of 1978 combing over northern Canada, searching for any fragments of Kosmos 954 that survived re-entry. The teams had to deal with difficult terrain and sub-zero temperatures. The sensitive equipment used to survey the environment for radiation did not always work well in such conditions. However, the team was ultimately able to recover twelve large pieces of the satellite, ten of which were radioactive.

Under the terms of the 1972 Space Liability Convention, a state which launches an object into space is liable for damages caused by that object. For the recovery efforts, the Canadian government billed the Soviet Union C$6,041,174.70 for expenses and additional compensation for future unpredicted expenses; the USSR eventually paid C$3 million. Kosmos 954 has not been the first nor the last of such incidents and have become merely a side note of an era called the Cold War. Today the reactors of many dead RORSATs are still in burial orbit and will eventually fall back down to Earth, which means that humanity will have to launch missions to clean up the reactors sometime in the next couple hundred years.

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