Engineers at the National Oceanography Centre prepped their Autosub Long Range vehicle this week for a journey toward the center of the Earth. The sub, brilliantly named Boaty McBoatface, will be exploring the Antarctic Bottom Water zones in water that has been measured among the coldest and deepest places on the planet.
After the Natural Environment Research Council launched a promotional campaign to name their $300,000,000 arctic exploration vehicle in 2016 the name Boaty McBoatface found popularity with people online, and eventually won the popular vote. The council decided on the RRS Sir Richard Attenborough as the official name and gave the Boaty label to the ship’s small army of autonomous underwater vehicles.
Boaty’s overall mission is to study the effects of climate change in the Antarctic, taking water flow and underwater turbulence data from the Orkney Passage at depths up to 3,5000 meters. This full expedition is called Dynamics of the Orkney Passage Outflow (DynOPO) and includes scientists and engineers from the British Antarctic Survey, the University of Southampton, and the National Oceanography Centre.
The current operation hopes to find information about the flow of Antarctic Bottom Water, look for evidence of change in properties, and find the major contributors to the flow process. A secondary mission looks for ways that the winds blowing through the Orkney Passage can change the flow and water properties. Moorings were set into the passage in 2015 and the AUV will pull in data from those sources while getting its own current data points. The Boaty AUVs are rated for depths up to 6,000 meters, weigh 700 kilograms, and are 3.62 meters long. The drones have a mission range of up to 6,000 kilometers.
This is the next step in the Long Range UAV’s explorations, before a 2019 mission with the Strategies for Environmental Monitoring of Marine Carbon Capture and Storage (STEMM-CCS) group. A long term goal for Boaty McBoatface is to achieve the first voyage across the Arctic Ocean completely under ice. Eventually the polar research ship Sir Richard Attenborough will be completed and the Boaty line of UAVs will travel with the ship and obtain more data points about water and seabed properties across the ocean floor.
(Video courtesy the BBC, pictures courtesy of the National Oceography Centre)