Tag: antarctica

Antarctica in 650?

A new paper combines literature and oral histories, and concludes that Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, were likely the first people to explore Antarctica’s surrounding waters, and possibly the continent in the distance. They write that Māori and Polynesian journeys to the deep south have been occurring for a long time, perhaps as far back as 650, and are recorded in a variety of oral traditions.

2023-06-24: This claim is false and ideologically motivated.

“These stories, presented without nuance, qualification or critique, make extraordinary claims without offering commensurable evidence”. The Hui Te Rangiora story was a Rarotongan tradition translated by ethnologist Stephenson Percy Smith​ near the end of the 19th century and debunked by Te Rangi Hīroa​ (Sir Peter Buck​) who wrote that “so much post-European information has been included in the native text” he could no longer accept the traditions as accurate and ancient.

This means O’Regan, Tau and the others were in the position of repeating work Te Rangi Hīroa did 100 years ago.

In serious historical circles, relying on Smith is problematic.

“These scholars haven’t learned anything over the past 50 years”.

Subantarctic life

John Priscu’s search for life that thrives under ice took him to subglacial lakes at the South Pole. Now he has his eye on Mars and Europa.

And there are sessile animals under the ice:

The researchers think it’s likely that the drift of this marine snow has been flipped on its side, so that the food source is moving horizontally instead of vertically. The researchers determined that there are productive regions 630-1500 km away. It may not be much, but it’s possible that enough organic material is riding these currents to feed these creatures. That’s an extraordinary distance, given that in the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep near Guam, marine snow produced at the surface has to fall 11 km down to reach the seafloor. To reach the animals on this Antarctic rock, food would have to travel as much as 133x that distance—and it would have to do so by floating sideways.

Robot Exploration

A fleet of 100 robotic submarines could in 5 years’ time be roaming the vast unexplored stretches of the world’s seafloors and helping unlock their mysteries. “The pace of exploration in the ocean is going a little too slowly”. Only 5% of the ocean floor has been explored in detail, which means there may be numerous new species and geothermal processes waiting to be discovered.

NOAA plans to map the oceans floors with unmanned vehicles.
2010-10-25: Antarctica Ocean UAV. Such a baby step. we should have fleets of fully autonomous ocean robots by now, mapping the sea floors.

Gavia, a bullet-shaped robot developed by the University of British Columbia, is currently in Antarctica on a mission to explore heretofore uncharted areas of the ocean.

2013-04-21: Some speculation

excavating the past will mean deploying teams of remote-sensing robotic machines semi-autonomously flying, crawling, gridding, scanning, squeezing, and non-destructively burrowing their way into lost rooms and buried cities, perhaps even translating ancient languages along the way.

2018-11-20: Robot Wreck Discovery

The wreckage of the ARA San Juan (S-42) was found by Ocean Infinity. Ocean Infinity used 5 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to carry out the search. Ocean Infinity’s ocean search capability is the most advanced in the world. Their AUV’s are capable of operating in depths from 5 meters to 6000 meters and covering vast areas of the seabed at unparalleled speed. The AUVs are not tethered, allowing them to go deeper and collect higher quality data. They are equipped with side scan sonar, a multi-beam echo-sounder HD camera, and synthetic aperture sonar. Ocean Infinity is able to deploy 2 work class ROVs and heavy lifting equipment capable of retrieving objects weighing up to 45T from 6000 meters.