Rubber Ducks Deployed in Attempt to Track Melting Glacier
September 25, 2008 · Print This Article
What was a rocket scientist’s solution to help figure out what’s happening inside the fastest-moving Greenland glacier? An army of rubber ducks. It sounds like a joke, but a U.S. rocket scientist really did send 90 rubber ducks into the ice in the hopes that someone will find them if they emerge in Baffin Bay.
From Reuters:
“Right now it’s not understood what causes the glaciers themselves to surge in the summer,” Behar said. One theory is that the summer sun melts ice on the top glacial surface, creating pools that flow into tubular holes in the glacier called moulins.
The moulins can carry some water all the way to the underside of the glacier, where it acts as a lubricant to speed the movement of ice toward the coast. But because it cannot be seen, no one really knows what occurs.
That’s where the rubber ducks come in, along with a probe about the size of a football loaded with a GPS transmitter and instruments that can tell much about the glacier’s innards.
The ducks are labeled with the words ‘science experiment’ and ‘reward’ in three languages, along with an email address. So far, they haven’t received any emails, but the places where the ducks might end up are pretty remote.
What an awesome idea – sort of low-tech (the rubber ducks), but high-tech (the probe) at the same time. Who would have thought rubber ducks could play a part in global warming research?
Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: EarthFirst composite - REUTERS/Konrad Steffen/University of Colorado/Handout
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I’ve seen something on this kind of thing before, but it wasn’t this instance. I think this was inspired by a ship wreck full of rubber duckies (and as I recall, other similar bath toys). The toys were showing up every summer along some coast, as they would be released from winter ice. The story had a terrible migratory birds pun, I think.
It was ever so much more than 90 ducks in that case, being a load of them from China, etc. Unfortunately this is from the “I know I saw this on the Discovery Channel or something a couple years ago” category…. anyone else remember what I’m talking about?