2007 antarctic cruise ship sank

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- More than 150 people have abandoned a sinking cruise liner that collided with an iceberg in Antarctic waters, a Chilean navy captain told CNN.

The ship sent out a distress call at around 10 p.m. ET Thursday.

Passenger ship Explorer reported problems near the South Shetland Islands, south of Argentina. The area is in a sector of Antarctica claimed by the United Kingdom.

Capt. Carlos Munita of the Chilean navy said they received a distress call from the Explorer, saying the vessel had hit an iceberg around 10 p.m. ET Thursday.

He added a Norwegian rescue ship had arrived at the scene.

Tour companies describe the Explorer as a passenger ship which runs tours between South America and Antarctica.

Some 154 people are reported to be on board ship, which carries a Liberian flag, including 100 passengers. However the nationalities of those on board is not yet known.

Passengers and crew have been evacuated onto lifeboats, but the captain and the first officer are reported to have stayed on board.

"The great majority of people, including all the passengers, have been safely taken off the Explorer and are now being recovered by the first of the vessels to arrive on scene in response to the distress call," Dave Jardine-Smith, head of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency's (MCA) search and rescue team in England said.

• Antarctica: March of the tourists

"The passengers and crew from the Explorer have not been in lifeboats very long," Jardine-Smith said. "They should be, hopefully, in good condition. We are told that there are no injuries."

Earlier, Mark Clark, a spokesman for the MCA told the Press Association five ships were on their way to help the sinking vessel.

"She hit something and is taking on a serious amount of water, that is all we know."

The temperature in the area is said to be at around minus 5C, with a sea temperature at around minus 1C, forecasters told the Press Association.

Stephen Davenport, senior forecaster with MeteoGroup, said:"It wouldn't take long for hypothermia to set in at that kind of temperature in the sea.

"They do get very bad storms down that way, and gale force winds especially, because there is no land in the way," he told PA.

Copyright 2007 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.

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M/V Explorer – Investigation into Sinking of An Eco-Cruise Ship

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An investigation conducted by the Liberian Bureau of Maritime Affairs into the circumstances of the sinking of M/V Explorer concluded that the decision by the Master to enter the ice field based on his knowledge and information available at the time was the primary reason why the Explorer suffered the casualty.

The Liberian registered cruise ship, which was on an 18 day round trip voyage from Ushuaia, Argentina to areas in Antarctica, sank on November 23, 2007 in a position 25 miles southeast of Penguin Island in the Bransfield Strait near the South Shetland Islands, in about 1,300 meters of water.  All 54 crew and 100 passengers were forced to abandoned ship into lifeboats and RIB’s and were later rescued by the Norwegian registered Nordonorge.

As stated in the investigation report:

[The Master] was under the mistaken impression that he was encountering first year ice when in fact,… [the ice] was much harder land ice. The ice pilot who made the assessment of the passenger video also believed that the ice was thicker and harder than the Master’s assessment… The Master of the eco-cruise ship M/V Explore r was very experienced in Baltic waters but he was unfamiliar with the type of ice he encountered in Antarctic waters. The Master should have altered course to open water and not have entered the ice field during darkness. However, once he had entered the ice field and approached the “wall of ice”, there is no indication that he reduced the Explorer’s speed as he approached and then made contact with the “wall of ice”.

The video referred to, to our knowledge, has not been made public by the ship owner.  The report went on to say that the Master and crew should be recognized for the actions taken to ensure the safety and survival of the passengers on board.

The Master’s decision to have the passengers abandon the vessel as well as the Engine Crews efforts to restore and maintain power so that the passengers could be successfully abandoned into lifebaots, in all likelihood, saved lives.

You can download the full report HERE , as made available by The Bureau of Maritime Affairs.

A couple items to note:

• The ship had controllable pitch propellers and at some point the control was lost putting the ship in full astern.
• It appears from the report that only one of the lifeboats engines was able to be started.
• There were scuppers in the internal decks (referred in the report as down flooding ducts) that sent flood water into the machinery spaces from the upper decks causing problems later on since the pumps could not handle the flooding.
• The Engineering crew really were heros in this whole operation by keeping the plant running, etc.
• The Captain seems to have intentionally left the VDR onboard.
• Progressive flooding through the ship’s sewage system made saving the ship impossible as every toilet, sink and shower drain started to back up.

The news reports at the time gave the impression that the ship was in mostly open water and just happen to hit some ice but as you can see from the photos in the report, the vessel was in ice.

Thank you to Fred Fry for help with this post.

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- More than 150 people have abandoned a sinking cruise liner that collided with an iceberg in Antarctic waters, a Chilean navy captain told CNN.

The ship sent out a distress call at around 10 p.m. ET Thursday.

Passenger ship Explorer reported problems near the South Shetland Islands, south of Argentina. The area is in a sector of Antarctica claimed by the United Kingdom.

Capt. Carlos Munita of the Chilean navy said they received a distress call from the Explorer, saying the vessel had hit an iceberg around 10 p.m. ET Thursday.

He added a Norwegian rescue ship had arrived at the scene.

Tour companies describe the Explorer as a passenger ship which runs tours between South America and Antarctica.

Some 154 people are reported to be on board ship, which carries a Liberian flag, including 100 passengers. However the nationalities of those on board is not yet known.

Passengers and crew have been evacuated onto lifeboats, but the captain and the first officer are reported to have stayed on board.

"The great majority of people, including all the passengers, have been safely taken off the Explorer and are now being recovered by the first of the vessels to arrive on scene in response to the distress call," Dave Jardine-Smith, head of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency's (MCA) search and rescue team in England said.

• Antarctica: March of the tourists

"The passengers and crew from the Explorer have not been in lifeboats very long," Jardine-Smith said. "They should be, hopefully, in good condition. We are told that there are no injuries."

Earlier, Mark Clark, a spokesman for the MCA told the Press Association five ships were on their way to help the sinking vessel.

"She hit something and is taking on a serious amount of water, that is all we know."

The temperature in the area is said to be at around minus 5C, with a sea temperature at around minus 1C, forecasters told the Press Association.

Stephen Davenport, senior forecaster with MeteoGroup, said:"It wouldn't take long for hypothermia to set in at that kind of temperature in the sea.

"They do get very bad storms down that way, and gale force winds especially, because there is no land in the way," he told PA.

Copyright 2007 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Cruise ship strikes ice in Antarctic waters but all passengers are saved

By Graham Bowley

• Nov. 23, 2007

A small cruise ship with an imperfect security record was on the verge of sinking Friday after it struck ice in Antarctic waters, with all 154 passengers and crew members evacuated by lifeboat, the cruise operator and coast guards said.

Pictures from a Webcam on a rescue ship earlier in the day showed the red and white ship - named the Explorer but known affectionately as "the little red ship" - listing to starboard in steely gray waters below a low sky. Another photograph taken by a passenger on the rescue ship showed a flotilla of small lifeboats floating on the vast sea.

The vessel sent out a distress signal at 5:24 a.m. GMT after it began to take in water through "a fist-sized hole," said Dan Brown, a spokesman for GAP Adventures, the Toronto-based tour operator that owns the ship. He said the "running assumption" is that it hit an iceberg.

As nearby vessels were alerted, the ship's 100 passengers - 24 of them British, 17 Dutch, 14 American, 12 Canadian and a smattering of other nationalities - were awakened and told to don life preservers, said Mark Clark, a spokesman for Britain's Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which was one of the first authorities to receive the distress signal. They clambered down ladders on the ship's side to board lifeboats.

Clark said they were taken aboard a small research vessel, the Endeavour, which was nearby, and then were transferred to a Norwegian cruise liner, the Nordnorge. But Brown said open lifeboats bobbed in frigid waters for a few hours until all passengers could be helped.

It was not immediately possible to reach the passengers, who had paid somewhere between $8,700 and $16,700 for the 18-day adventure expedition. Brown said they were being taken to King George Island in Antarctica. He said there was confusion about where exactly they would be taken from there.

"The Chileans think they are taking them to Chile, the Argentinians think they are taking them to Argentina and the Brits are talking about taking the British passengers to the Falklands," he said.

Brown said the company had not yet been able to speak to anyone on board, but some radio stations had managed to speak to the captain of the Nordnorge, and he had reported that "everyone is healthy, uninjured and comfortable," Brown said. The families are in the process of being notified about the accident, he added.

According to the BBC, First Officer Peter Svensson told Reuters: "We were passing through ice as usual. But this time something hit the hold and we got a little leakage downstairs.

"No one was hysterical, they were just sitting there nice and quiet, because we knew there were ships coming."

The Chilean authorities said the passengers were being taken to the Chilean Air Force base in Antarctica, the President Eduardo Frei Montalva Base, on Rey Jorge Island, and later the commander of the base was quoted as saying that the Norwegian ship had arrived at the shore of the base around midday, but the passengers had not been able to disembark due to bad weather conditions.

The Explorer - which Brown emphasized was not a luxury cruise liner but an expedition vessel - is registered in Liberia. It embarked from Ushuaia, on the southern tip of Argentina, on Nov. 11 and was due to return Nov. 29. The ship has a swimming pool, sauna, fitness center and lounge.

The Explorer was built in Finland in 1969 and specially designed to operate in Antarctic and Arctic waters, he said, and has operated for most of its life in the Antarctic. The Explorer had a double bottom, a second sheath of steel to protect it if the ship ran aground, but the vessel did not have a double hull, a complete second complete sheathing of steel - developed after the Titanic, with a double bottom, sank. Built in 1969, it was small so that it could move swiftly through dangerous waters.

Brown said "some deficiencies" in the Explorer were discovered during safety tests in March in Chile and in May in Scotland. On its Web site, Lloyd's List said the British authorities reported deficiencies, including missing search-and-rescue plans and lifeboat maintenance problems, while watertight doors were described as "not as required," and fire safety measures were also criticized.

The ship later passed a safety test while in dry dock in the Canary Islands, and Brown said the earlier problems "were not serious enough for the boat to be taken out of use."

Argentine, American and British coast guard vessels were watching the Explorer, determining whether and how, to try to stop the ship from going down.

The ship's operator is part of a growing niche industry of adventure cruises. GAP Adventures was founded in 1990 by Bruce Poon Tip, who immigrated to Canada from Trinidad as a child and eventually specialized in adventure travel, and offers cruises to the Antarctic, Greenland, Scotland and the Amazon. It sends 30 cruises a year into the Antarctic, all on the Explorer.

GAP said it had never had an accident with one of its ships before. But in March, two Canadian women and an Australian man died after a safari van chartered by the company collided with a truck in Kenya. A company spokesman could not immediately comment on this.

On the Antarctic tour, the passengers stop at the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island, disembarking at both locations before finally heading for the tip of Antarctica. Scientists on board give briefings and lectures on wildlife, geology and climate change.

While it is privately held and does not disclose financial information, GAP says on its Web site that it handles about 60,000 travelers a year and has about 500 employees.

GAP is one of 38 full members of the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, a voluntary group based in Basalt, Colorado. That organization has hundreds of rules largely devoted to environmental concerns that, among other things, limit ship operators to landing no more than 100 tourists on shore at any time.

Dorothy Spears contributed from the Antarctic, Ian Austen from Ottawa and Pascale Bonnefoy from Santiago.

Stricken ship sinks in Antarctic

Passengers and crew reach safety after spending hours in frozen waters.

Arnvid Hansen, the ship’s captain, said: “They are in good condition. There is no hypothermia, they all have food and clothes. Everything is OK.”

The Explorer usually made two-week cruises around the Antarctic at a cost of about $8,000 a cabin. 

Smaller than most cruise ships, it was able to enter narrower bays off the continent.

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Why did an Antarctic cruise ship sink?

Big ice chunks, misjudgment, and faulty doors doomed the MS Explorer. New limits are set on tourists and cruise ships to the region.

• By Colin Woodard Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

April 20, 2009

The MS Explorer was purpose-built for the Antarctic, a nimble expedition cruise ship with an ice-reinforced hull that pioneered the polar tourism trade in the early 1970s.

But on Nov. 23, 2007, she sank in what appeared to be the most routine of Antarctic circumstances: cruising through young pack ice in mild weather.

The 154 passengers and crewmen aboard were plucked unharmed from open lifeboats by other cruise ships the following day, just two hours before gale-force winds struck the area.

Until now, the causes of the ship's sinking have remained a mystery, with her owners, Toronto -based G.A.P Adventures, refusing to comment beyond initial reports that she struck submerged ice and succumbed to uncontrollable flooding.

But last week the results of an official investigation became public. It places blame on the captain having misjudged ice conditions and the failure of one of the ships' watertight doors.

The report by the Liberian Bureau of Maritime Affairs , through which the Explorer was flagged, described how the ship was damaged after the captain attempted to plow through what one passenger described as "a long wall of solid ice," presumably a ridge of broken ice forced up by pressure.

The report – which vividly illustrated how a single misjudgment can lead to disaster in the harsh, poorly charted waters of Antarctica – made a series of recommendations to improve safety on polar cruises. Among them: that these ships carry at least partially-enclosed lifeboats and enough immersion suits for everyone aboard, and that training requirements for ice navigation be better spelled out. Currently, the International Maritime Organization doesn't have formal competency training requirements for ice navigators.

Mind the glacial ice chunks

A Chilean naval icebreaker that reached the scene shortly after the Explorer's passengers were rescued, concluded that the ship had not been traveling through a thin ice field, as her captain had thought, but rather an older, thicker field containing a mix of dangerous glacial ice chunks, some reportedly as large as 15 feet high with underwater rams as long as 45 feet.

The Explorer "sustained puncture and slice wounds" that extended for more than eleven feet along her hull and sank because flooding could not be contained within the affected watertight compartment, the report said. Crew members told investigators that a hatch between engine rooms turned out to have faulty seals, allowing other parts of the ship to flood.

The report concluded that Bengt Wiman , on his first Antarctic cruise as captain, "transited the ice field with an overconfident attitude regarding the capabilities of the Explorer and, in all likelihood, struck the 'wall of ice' at a rate of speed that was excessive."

Tighter rules for Antarctic ships

The report was released as representatives of the 45 signatory nations to the Antarctica Treaty were attending their annual meeting in Baltimore where they tightened some regulations on cruise ships. The Explorer report caused "a big shock" at the meeting, says James Barnes , executive director of the Washington -based Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition .

"There was great surprise at the realities revealed by the report compared to the information that had been available before from G.A.P., Chile , or Argentina ," Mr. Barnes says. "Everybody is congratulating Liberia for what is a most thorough report, but if the ship's owners had released this information right away, we could have gotten to work on addressing this 18 months ago."

Steve Wellmeier , executive director of the International Association of Antarctic Tourism Operators describes the report as "very sobering reading" which "represents a wake-up call for all of our members."

Ship owners dispute findings

But the founder and CEO of G.A.P. Adventures, Bruce Poon Tip, expresses dissatisfaction with the investigation. "We dispute pretty much everything in the report," he says, but declines to offer his own version of events or to respond point by point to the report's findings. "They are entitled to their opinions, but I am not interested in getting into an argument with a flag state."

Mr. Poon Tip says that Liberia's investigators had "come to these outrageous conclusions" without ever speaking with anyone in his company. On further questioning he concedes – and the report indicates – they had corresponded with G.A.P's attorneys and conducted telephone or e-mail interviews with some of the Explorer's officers and crew who no longer work for the company, including Captain Wiman.

Poon Tip does not directly answer questions about the causes of the Explorer's sinking, confining his answers to the quality of the company's rescue effort.

"We're very proud and happy about how it went," he says. "We got everyone out of there safely and everyone in the world has been nothing but complimentary about how the company handled the situation."

Praise for the captain and crew

The report also praised the captain for his decision to evacuate the passengers to lifeboats early in the incident, before the crippled ship drifted back into the ice field, where lifeboats would have been difficult or impossible to deploy. The chief engineer was commended for jury-rigging a fuel supply for an auxiliary generator, which allowed the captain to maneuver the ship into a position where the lifeboats could be deployed.

Crew members told investigators they called Argentine authorities three times for help, but were told each time "to call back." Fortunately, they were able to make contact with nearby cruise ships themselves.

There have been several serious incidents involving Antarctic cruise ships in recent years. In January 2007, all 371 people were evacuated from the MS Nordkapp after it ran aground. That December the MS Fram lost power and smashed into a glacier, forcing an abrupt return to South America . This past December, 122 passengers and crew were rescued from the MV Ushuaia after it struck a rock in Antarctica's Gerlache Strait. And on Feb 19, 105 people had to be rescued when the US -operated Ocean Nova ran aground in heavy winds.

Delegates to the Antarctica Treaty meeting approved a resolution that bans vessels carrying more than 500 passengers from conducting landings in Antarctica. In recent years, Princess Cruise Lines has sent its 109,000-ton megaships Golden Princess and Star Princess to the Antarctic, even though neither is ice-reinforced. Each carries more than 3,500 passengers and crew.

"If the Golden Princess struck ice and got in trouble, everyone knows that there isn't the capacity in Antarctica to deal with an emergency like that," says Barnes. "Those vessels should not come into ice infested waters at all."

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Ship accident highlights Antarctic tourism dangers

All 154 passengers and crew of a cruise ship that sank in Antarctic waters have now been flown to safety in mainland Chile.

The MS Explorer went down after hitting an iceberg and the passengers spent several hours in lifeboats in sub-zero temperatures.

While the tourism industry in Antarctica is booming, this incident highlights the potential dangers.

The iceberg collision on Friday near the Antarctic Peninsula left the passengers and crew with little time to get out.

"The water was already this high in our cabin in a matter of minutes," one passenger said.

"We grabbed our thermals before we left and that was it. The rest is gone," another said.

The group of 154 people, including 10 Australians, spent several hours in lifeboats before help came.

"The worst moment was being in the lifeboats," a passenger said.

"We were there for four or five hours and it was very cold and we were very exposed."

Another passenger says the water was about minus three degrees Celsius and the air was probably at about zero.

Arnvid Hansen is the captain of the Norwegian ship that went to the rescue.

"The operation went very smoothly. In about one hour we had picked all the 154 passengers and the crew members from the Explorer, so the operation went very smoothly," he said.

There's relief that all passengers and crew are now safe and have been flown to mainland Chile.

"We are very glad that we are alive and that's all," one said.

But Sue Werner, the ship's operation manager at the Australian company Aurora Expeditions, says the loss of MS Explorer will be felt deeply by those working in the Antarctic tourist industry.

"She was a pioneer ship that started Antarctic tourism and a lot of people within the industry have worked on her, and myself, I worked on her in '96-'97, and she was a lovely ship," she said.

"It's really sad to think that she's at the bottom of the Bransfield Strait in 500 metres of water. It's a bit of a shock."

Growing industry

The accident has highlighted the growing tourist industry in the Antarctic.

Dr Marcus Haward is the policy program leader at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart.

He says if a similar incident were to happen off the Australian Antarctic Territory, help would not necessarily be so close at hand.

"We have a small and developing industry that visits mostly the sub-Antarctic islands of Macquarie Island, but the distances to the Antarctic from Australia are much higher and longer and the waters are much rougher," he said.

"So in a sense the ship-borne tourism in what we call east Antarctica is much less than that off the Antarctic Peninsula.

"And because of those distances and the extreme conditions that can be faced there, the management of tourism in east Antarctica is actually even more problematic."

But Sarina Bratton, the founder and managing director of the Australian company Orion Expedition Cruises, which operates in east Antarctica, is confident disaster would be avoided.

"We have the sonar that is forward-looking and downward-looking sonar," she said.

"Obviously the crew are also very highly trained in all of this.

"I think you may have seen images of lifeboats that were not covered; we have fully covered lifeboats. We have rations for days on end.

"It could take a couple of days, at worst, to get another ship to the area. But the response time is purely speculative as in the summer period there's a number of ships that are operating out in the peninsula.

"In fact just last summer in the east Antarctica there were some emergencies with both the fishing fleets and the Sea Shepherd, and support was just hours, not days away."

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MS Explorer sinks

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Survivors of Antarctica shipwreck heading home

The last group of survivors from the Antarctic cruise ship that struck an iceberg and sunk into the icy sea have been flown back to the...

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PUNTA ARENAS, Chile — The last group of survivors from the Antarctic cruise ship that struck an iceberg and sunk into the icy sea have been flown back to the South American mainland Sunday.

A Chilean military transport plane ferried the final 77 of the 154 passengers and crew to Punta Arenas, Chile’s southernmost city and a jumping-off point for Antarctica travel on Sunday. All had been rescued from the sinking MS Explorer on Friday.

“Everything is fine, very fine,” said Argentine crew member Andrea Salas as she climbed from the plane. Sunday’s airlift was composed of 11 passengers and 65 crew members, most of whom declined to comment on advice from lawyers.

A Chilean air force plane flew the ship’s first 77 survivors back from the King George Island air base, 660 miles south of this remote tip of South America, on Saturday.

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The MS Explorer, operated by the Canadian tour company G.A.P. Adventures, smashed into submerged sea ice in Antarctic waters before dawn on Friday. The ship took on water and sank about 15 hours later.

All on board made it into lifeboats and were rescued by a passing Norwegian cruise ship.

On Sunday, many still toted the life vests they wore while shivering for hours in the bobbing rafts while awaiting rescue. Some carried plastic bags with a few belongings, heading for medical checkups and visits with consular officials from a host of countries on hand to help them get home.

The Explorer’s captain, Bengt Wiman, walked past shouting journalists and gave a thumbs-up sign to crowds who welcomed the plane.

The ship’s 91 passengers came from more than a dozen nations, including 24 Britons, 17 Dutch, 14 Americans, 12 Canadians and 10 Australians. Nine expedition staff members and a crew of 54 were also aboard the ship, operators said.

The Explorer had been on a 19-day tour of Antarctica and the Falkland Islands, bringing passengers to observe penguins, whales and other wildlife.

Survivors on Saturday told reporters they were overjoyed to have been swiftly rescued.

While bobbing in a life raft on the frigid sea, Danish citizen, Jan Heikel, 42, and his girlfriend Mette Larsen, 29, said they decided to speed up wedding plans.

“There were some very frightening moments but the crew was very professional and the captain very good and had everything under control,” Heikel said.

The Explorer sank in 3,300 feet of water in an area about 40 nautical miles from Chile’s Presidente Eduardo Frei air force base.

• Under the sea
• 1st cruise ship to sink in Antarctic Ocean (2007)

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Sunken Antarctic cruise ship left oil spill

About 2,500 penguins en route to their Antarctic mating grounds could be sickened by a diesel fuel spill from a cruise boat that struck an iceberg and sank last week, Chilean scientists said Friday.

Areas surrounding the mile-long spill site include breeding grounds for Antarctic and Adelia penguins, and the largest mating colony for Papua penguins, said Maria Jose Rosello, a Chilean marine biologist.

"The danger is that this fuel spill will impede the journey that species like Papua penguins make at this time of year," Rosello said.

Veronica Vallejos, director of the scientific department at the Chilean Antarctic Institute, said the spill could also affect other Antarctic fauna, including sea lions, seals and sea birds as well as fish, krill, algae and plankton colonies — key elements of the Antarctic food chain.

"There's always environmental danger when fuel leaks, and even more so in a zone with high biodiversity," Vallegos said.

The MS Explorer, an adventure travel ship on a 19-day cruise off Antarctica, hit an iceberg on Nov. 23, forcing its 154 passengers and crew into lifeboats in the middle of the night. They waited more than three hours in icy waters until they were rescued by a Norwegian cruise ship.

About 50,000 gallons of diesel, 6,300 gallons of lubricant and 260 gallons of gasoline were on board when the Explorer then sank hours later.

Chile's navy said Thursday that bad weather has kept clean-up crews from containing the spill, which is for now penned in by large chunks of floating ice in the Bransfield Strait, about 50 miles east of King George Island.

"The diesel oil continues flowing" from the ship, which now rests 4,800 feet below the sea, Vallegos told Cooperativa radio.

Vallegos and other Chilean experts who toured the spill site reported seeing no contaminated birds this week, but noted they hadn't been able to fully assess the damage the diesel might have done.

Studies by scientists who regularly conduct research in Antarctica at this time of year will be key to establishing the extent of the damage, she said.

Diesel is the least harmful type of hydrocarbon product, scientists told a news conference Thursday.

Veronica Vallejos, Chilean delegate to the Environmental Protection Committee of the Antarctic Treaty and an official at the Chilean Antarctic Institute, said it is hard to monitor the remote spill area, or to know how much oil is still seeping from the Explorer, which has sunk 4,790 feet below sea level.

AOML Communications

Floating ice, freezing temperatures: Four facts about the I08S GO-SHIP cruise to Antarctica

Floating ice, freezing temperatures, and streaks of lights in the night sky.

Traversing from Fremantle, Australia to Antarctica’s Prydz Bay and back again, the crew aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson successfully concluded the I08S GO-SHIP cruise on April 1, 2024.

Scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory ( AOML ) and the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences ( CIMAS ) co-led and participated in the nearly six-week cruise from Antarctica to the Indian Ocean led by the U.S. National Science Foundation ( NSF ).  

With towering waves and days sequestered inside the galley playing cards, the crew proved resilient against incredible conditions to collect crucial oceanographic data from one of the most critical, yet difficult-to-reach regions of the world – the Antarctic. Keep reading to learn more about the cruise, the science, the people who made it possible, and what they saw – in 4, 3, 2, 1…                                                                                                                 

FOUR Occupations

This cruise marks only the fourth successful venture along the I08S transect, with previous cruises in 1994, 2007, and 2016. The I08S is one of 58 cruise tracks (i.e. “transects”) covering the Earth’s oceans where scientists decadally measure fluctuations in salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, inorganic carbon, and other key properties in ocean chemistry and physics from the surface to the seafloor as part of GO-SHIP . 

Short for “Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program,” this international effort, funded by the U.S. NSF and NOAA, is fundamental for understanding heat transfer and carbon storage in ocean waters globally under a changing climate. 

THREE Instruments . 

Along the I08S transect, scientists collected ocean data using three main instruments: conductivity, temperature, and depth ( CTD ) instruments, Argo floats, and surface drifters . CTD data were collected at 66 sites along the transect, measuring how temperature, salinity, and a suite of chemical properties change from the sea surface to the seabed. For the first time along the I08S, the team analyzed water samples collected by the CTD for environmental DNA (eDNA). AOML researcher and member of the I08S science party Rob Bremer said these data are important for “learning more about what role microbes are playing in the overall ecological and biogeochemical structure of the ocean.”

Fifteen Argo floats were deployed, which will allow for longer-term monitoring of physical, chemical and biological aspects of the ocean at a range of depths. Ten surface drifters were also deployed as part of NOAA’s Global Drifter Program , and will provide continuous measurements of sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure across the Southern and Indian oceans.

TWO Degrees Celsius.

When first steaming towards Antarctica in the early weeks of the cruise, water temperatures dropped to two degrees Celsius, and Co-chief Scientist Katelyn Schockman, Ph.D., called out, “Ice on the starboard!”

Icebergs appeared large on the horizon, but the research team was after even colder waters from the continental shelf in Prydz Bay, Antarctica.

Here, a unique water mass called Antarctic Bottom Water is produced, a critical component that drives ocean circulation across the planet. This cold, salty, dense water flows away from the Antarctic continent, where it mixes with warmer, fresher ocean water. Density-driven mixing of these waters transfers heat, moves nutrients, and contributes to the global conveyor belt of overturning ocean currents. By successfully sampling this water mass at its point of origin, researchers can now determine how it may have changed since it was last measured by GO-SHIP in 1994. 

On April 1st , the I08S cruise came to a successful close. After almost six weeks of 12-hour shifts spent deploying instruments to the deep amid freezing temperatures, stormy seas, and blustery winds, the science party arrived at the docks in Fremantle, Australia, bidding farewell to their time at sea. 

“I’m really proud of the high-quality scientific data we were able to collect on I08S despite the unrelenting weather conditions of the Southern Ocean. This was a difficult cruise and the scientists and crew of the Thompson should be commended for their efforts.” – Katelyn Schockman, Co – Chief Scientist

The Southern Ocean is known for rough weather, with strong westerly winds. Sailors refer endearingly to the waters between 40 ºS and 50 ºS latitude as the “Roaring Forties,” and the legendary waves there dwarfed the 274-foot R/V Thomas G. Thompson. The crew masterfully endured the storms while covering miles of open ocean and collecting data that will unlock vast findings about how the ocean is impacted by climate change in one of the most remote regions of the world. Reaching the shelf of Antarctica is a feat to be celebrated – one with challenges and long days and nights of hard work but made worth it by the natural beauty of the Southern Ocean seen along the way.

The I08S GO-SHIP cruise was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the NOAA Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing program.