Researchers have long known that the waters around the Arctic Sea can reveal much about the pace and nature of climate change.
But because of the ice cover around the harsh waters, they had never been able to take consistent readings in hard-to-reach areas.
Until a team at the University of Washington figured out how.
In February the Danish Navy recovered a UW seaglider from the waters around Davis Strait. Developed by the School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory with funding from the National Science Foundation, the device had spent six months gliding itself through hundreds of miles of frigid seas, measuring things like temperature and salinity — even under ice.
“This is really cool. I’m very excited about it,” said Craig Lee, principal oceanographer with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “It’s a big developmental milestone.”
Scientists are concerned that climate change might increase the amount of fresh water exiting the Arctic so much that it could change the density of the Labrador Sea, altering the circulation of the world’s oceans.
Data obtained by UW’s seagliders will help in showing just how quickly that could be happening.
“The way to think about the glider is that it’s one tool in a very large toolbox of instruments we have to measure climate change,” said Lee. “The big thing about this tool is that it allows access to places we couldn’t go before, and potentially measure over long periods of time.”
Lee’s team has built about 18 seagliders it hopes to put into wider use around the world. Each moves without the use of propellers, can dive as low as 3,300 feet below the surface and costs about $100,000, Lee said. Learn more about the seagliders here.