On Thanksgiving Day, 47 scientists set off on a two-month voyage
to explore uncharted seas. No ship’s hull has ever parted the
waters they’re headed to. That’s because until a few years ago
the 3,000-square-kilometer region was underneath the Larsen B
ice shelf just east of the Antarctic Peninsula. It may have been
2005 and Hurricane Katrina that etched climate change into
public consciousness, but for many scientists the first clear
casualty of global warming came in 2002 with the sudden collapse
of the Larsen B ice shelf. (Watch the time-lapse satellite
imagery here. A 200-m-thick chunk of ice the size of 1.4
Luxembourgs vanishes in about 90 days.) Always on the lookout
for silver linings, scientists realized that what the collapse
left behind was unstudied water and uncharted seafloor. Or
“unchartered” as the Cousteau Society website unfortunately
wrote – please people, remember your copyeditors. So they
mounted an expedition to kick off the International Polar Year
and contribute to the Census of Antarcti