Ship of Fools
Like many others, I’ve been intrigued by the misadventures of the Ship of Fools. Dozens of tourist vessels visit the Antarctic without becoming trapped by ice. So it’s entirely valid to inquire into why the one tourist vessel led by a “climate scientist” became trapped by ice.
The leader of the expedition, Chris Turney (also a secondary Climategate correspondent and co-signer of Lewandowsky’s multisignatory letter in the Conversation), claimed that the incident could not have been predicted. He said that they were trapped by a sudden “breakout” of multi-year ice (“fast ice”) that had previously been part of the ice shelf and that there was no way that they could have anticipated this. Turney’s claim has been uncritically accepted by the climate community e.g. Turner of the British Antarctica Survey here.
However, like other recent claims by Turney, this claim is bogus. In fact, Turney was trapped by sea ice that had been mobile throughout December 2013. This can be easily seen by examining readily available MODIS imagery (see MODIS here) leading up to the incident, as I’ll do in today’s post.
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Turney’s Excuses
By this time, many questions were being asked about the Turney expedition. While gradual increase of Antarctic sea ice (in contrast to the Arctic) had been widely discussed by skeptic blogs over the past few years, Turney’s plight drew attention to the remarkable fact (not previously known to skeptic blogs) that Mawson had sailed directly into Commonwealth Bay, which was now blocked for 60 km by permanent ice, with Mawson’s entry to Commonwealth Bay even being recorded in an early movie. While the expansion of Antarctic sea ice in this area was well known, the irony of a vessel of warmists being trapped by Antarctic sea ice attracted attention far beyond skeptic blogs.
This unwelcome attention did not and has not amused the academic climate community, which, for the most part, tried to dismiss the expedition as a tourist, rather than science venture, a framing that Turney has stoutly resisted.
Even usual supporters began to ask questions. For example, Andy Revkin wondered about the wisdom of landing the Akademik Shokalskiy in the polyna when “any satellite image could show you was surrounded by sea ice that could move.”
Turney defended himself against such questions, by arguing that the pinning sea ice did not come from mobile sea ice, but from a sudden “breakout” of multiyear ice, an untrue excuse that has been too readily accepted by specialists (e.g. John Turner of the British Antarctic Survey in a BBC interview here ^).
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Discussion
Back to the original questions.
First, while Turney has repeatedly described his expedition as a “scientific” expedition, its technology was that of adventure tourism and was not what, for example, would have been used by the Australian Antarctic Division. The Akademik Shokalskiy is an ice strengthened vessel used in adventure tourism, whereas the AAD uses ice breakers. In addition, the AAD does not try to carry out scientific missions by a couple of hit-and-run day trips with an eye on the clock. They maintain permanent Antarctic bases equipped with helicopters. Alternatively, scientists (such as Turney’s own prior work) will travel by air from Puntas Arenas to an airfield in Antarctica, with onward transportation to their site by helicopter, with logistics being handled by professional logistics companies.
Some scientists have blamed the events on tourism, but while Turney used the technology of adventure tourism, he did a number of things that seem unlikely to have been done in a responsible adventure tour. (On this point, I note that co-leader Greg Mortimer, a distinguished mountaineer, was a highly experienced operator of adventure tourism in the Antarctic. None of us knows the precise allocation of decisions between Turney and Mortimer.) Most Antarctic adventure tours go to the Antarctic peninsula and do not venture into more problematic polyna, especially ones in a region known for gale winds (Commonwealth Bay has among the world’s highest winds and was named by Mawson as the “Home of the Blizzard”). The Scott Polar Research Institute’s Robert Headland said that such areas require ice breakers, rather than ice strengthened passenger vesselss, and even then, are risky. Further, Turney clearly had no maritime experience with such polyna. His prior Antarctica experience appears to have been via airlift and helicopter, experience which may not be much more relevant than having stayed in a Holiday Inn (note – this is an allusion to a North American advertisement). Nor is it certain that co-leader Mortimer, a distinguished mountaineer and experienced adventure tourism leader, had maritime experience with polyna either.
Even if an adventure tour ventured into a polyna, it is doubtful that a tour leader would decide to moor the vessel on the exposed shore of the polyna with an impending easterly gale. Or if such a decision were made, to allow passengers to disembark. But the most startling aspect of the affair is surely Turney’s decision to authorize passengers to go well out of immediate contact with the vessel so that they were not immediately recallable in a matter of minutes. As discussed above, it seems beyond dispute that Turney was pinned by pack ice that was unstably perched to the northeast of Mertz Glacier and not by a sudden break of more or less ‘permanent’ shelf ice; that this “peninsula” of pack ice was highly exposed to the easterly gale that had already developed; and that heavy blowing of this (and other mobile ice) onto the southwest shore of the Mertz Glacier polyna was not only a possibility, but a probability, if not, near certainty.
One can see why Turney wants to characterize the movement of sea ice as something that could not have been predicted or mitigated, but there is no reason why anyone else should accept Turney’s characterization and many reasons to reject it.
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