Eideard

The University of Washington has surpassed its 2-year-old world record for operating a glider under the ice, this time by successfully operating one of its seagliders for six months as it made round trips hundreds of miles in length under the ice at Davis Strait.

The result contributes to the longest continuous measurement of fresh water exiting the Arctic through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Davis Strait and into the Labrador Sea.

Scientists worry that climate change may increase the amount of fresh water so much that it impacts the formation of very dense water in the Labrador Sea. That dense, cold water is a critical component driving the circulation of the world’s oceans, according to Craig Lee, a principal oceanographer with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory…

Seagliders developed by the UW School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory are small, reusable underwater vehicles meant to operate on their own, gliding without propellers from the surface to as deep as 1,000 meters, or 3,300 feet, while collecting such information as temperature, salinity and level of dissolved oxygen. When seagliders are at the ocean surface they can be commanded remotely from nearly anywhere in the world via the Internet and can transmit their data via satellite telephone. Unlike faster-moving propeller-driven autonomous underwater vehicles, which may need to be retrieved by ships only days after being deployed, UW seagliders can operate on their own for months at a time…

In the latest deployment, two Applied Physics Laboratory seagliders went into the water Sept. 5…One operated for 25 weeks, spending 51 days and traveling more than 450 miles under the ice, before being collected Feb. 26 by the Danish Navy. During under-ice operations, the glider periodically sought small openings in the ice cover and succeeded in surfacing 10 times to transmit data. It made two round trips under the ice of about 230 miles each…

RTFA. Lots of interesting news and design discussion. Fascinating stuff.