Utah
What a BYU researcher learned about Antarctic icebergs — including 1 bigger than Utah Valley
Vacationers get near icebergs and the Antarctic coast throughout a brief tour on a Zodiac boat in Brown Bluff, Antarctica, December 2005. A brand new BYU research compares explorer observations from the 1700s with trendy satellite tv for pc datasets. (Brian Witte, Related Press)
Estimated learn time: 4-5 minutes
PROVO — David Lengthy was a professor at Brigham Younger College in 1999, utilizing a satellite tv for pc distant sensor to check sea ice, tropical forests and icebergs — when he and his college students by chance stumbled upon a misplaced iceberg.
“I needed to name the Nationwide Ice Middle to seek out the title of this iceberg. … After some time, they got here again and mentioned, ‘Oh, that is iceberg B10A, which is an iceberg that we had been monitoring and we misplaced observe of it 4 months in the past. You discovered it — it is in a transport lane,” Lengthy, a professor {of electrical} and laptop engineering, recounted.
He then started offering the middle with all of the iceberg monitoring information he may discover, utilizing his scatterometer.
“That is how we obtained began in icebergs, and since that point, we have continued to keep up our iceberg database,” Lengthy mentioned. “It was kind of serendipitous.”
The iceberg he and his college students found was greater than the Utah Valley. The chunk of ice would stretch from Nephi to Bountiful, measuring 60 miles lengthy and 20 miles extensive.
Now, 24 years later, Lengthy was a part of a research evaluating present observations of enormous Antarctic icebergs with explorer observations within the 1700s, utilizing trendy satellite tv for pc datasets, exhibiting the large icebergs are present in the identical areas they had been pinpointed in three centuries in the past.
Utilizing primarily the journal data of Captain James Cook dinner’s 1772-1775 Antarctic circumnavigation on the HMS Decision — through which he famous the positions of a whole lot of icebergs — Younger, together with researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the College of Washington’s Faculty of Oceanography made comparisons with the 2 largest trendy information units accessible in the present day: the BYU/Nationwide Ice Middle and Denmark’s Alfred Wegener Institute information units.
“In actuality, that is extra of a human curiosity story than it is a vital scientific end result,” Lengthy mentioned.
The group’s current discoveries confirmed that regardless of the outdated and tough strategies utilized by 1700-era explorers, these explorers had been in a position to precisely decide the placement of icebergs; and iceberg motion patterns have behaved persistently for greater than 300 years.
They are not the identical actual icebergs noticed three centuries in the past, Lengthy mentioned, however they’re breaking off from glaciers and shifting by the ocean in related patterns as they had been within the 1700s.
Seelye Martin, Lengthy’s co-author within the research, extracted Cook dinner’s iceberg observations from a line-by-line search of Cook dinner’s journal-turned-book about his journey: “A Voyage In the direction of the South Pole, and Around the World.”
Martin, Lengthy and one other co-author, Michael Schodlok, then in contrast the positions of the icebergs famous in Cook dinner’s journals of the iceberg plume east of Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf — together with iceberg distributions within the Weddell, Ross and Amundsen seas — with trendy information.
“We discovered that they are usually in settlement, which is sweet, as a result of that kind of (reveals) that icebergs in the present day will not be so completely different from ones again then, 300 years in the past,” Lengthy mentioned. “We added these collectively, and that is when the cloud of factors type of matched up between what these outdated explorers noticed and what we see now.”
Lengthy, a famous fan of puns round BYU’s campus, mentioned that he likes to make use of the phrase “cool” when describing the sensation his group had once they realized the information units had been in settlement, noting that his description is “type of redundant when speaking about icebergs.”
“Scientists are principally working, type of, on arduous work, and plenty of what I do is type of tedious and boring — taking a look at these footage, establish the icebergs and observe the place they’re and go to the subsequent image,” Lengthy mentioned. “If you get to see it apply and compared to one thing like this, it is actually type of enjoyable.”
Lengthy’s greatest takeaway from his analysis endeavor?
“You by no means know when your journal can be helpful,” he mentioned, referring to Cook dinner’s data.
“He was recording one thing that was type of trivial in his thoughts — seeing some ice within the water. As soon as you’ve got seen it a few times, it is like, ‘Eh, I need not write that down,’ however he stored doing it and since he did that, we now have this information and it was helpful,” Lengthy mentioned. “Who may’ve thought that one thing that any person wrote 300 years in the past would nonetheless be helpful in the present day, 300 years later?”
The analysis was printed final month within the Cambridge College Press Journal of Glaciology.