Ice Station Amnesia
January 2nd, 2014 - 11:49 am
“All 52 passengers on board a ship trapped in sea ice for nine days off the Antarctic coast have been airlifted to safety in a five-hour operation,” the London Telegraph reports:
A Chinese helicopter ferried the scientists and tourists from the Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy to an Australian icebreaker.
The operation came after days in which blinding snow, strong winds, fog and thick sea ice forced rescuers to turn back time and again.
Three icebreakers were sent to try to break through the ice surrounding the ship, but all failed. The Aurora Australis came within 12 miles on Monday, but fierce winds and snow forced it to retreat to open water.
The passengers were shuttled off the ship and on to the helicopter in groups of seven or eight, with each journey taking up to 45 minutes.
Say….why were they there in the first place? Perhaps because elsewhere in the Telegraph today is a story headlined, “World’s climate warming faster than feared, scientists say,” the reader has to make it past at least ten paragraphs, a video, and three photos in the story of the rescue mission before this passage:
One of the aims of the expedition was to track how quickly the Antarctic’s sea ice was supposedly disappearing.
Oh.
.......
pjmedia.com |
