Nobody lives in this yellow submarine
[Posted by Dave Haber on Monday, 01/05/09 6:50 pm] [Comments] [Full Blog] [Tweet This]British polar scientists are using a small, unmanned yellow submarine, not to fight against Blue Meanies as in the Beatles movie, but to explore the mysteries beneath the Pine Island Antarctic glacier.
Autosub, as the scientists call it, is bright yellow and 23 feet long. It has a maximum range of 248 miles and is powered by 5,000 ordinary D-cell batteries. On its current mission, it will travel 40 miles underneath the glacier, a journey that will take 20 hours.
Dr Adrian Jenkins, who is leading the British Antarctic Survey research, said,
"We really have very little idea of what is actually going on beneath the ice as we have not been able to see through the ice to find out. We are talking about ice that is over a kilometre thick in places. The only way is to send our instruments beneath the ice to get measurements."
(Information thanks to The Telegraph.)
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