NASA to rubber ducks: Call home!

I'm laughing at a BBC report about a rather strange-sounding NASA experiment.

The US space agency (Nasa) would like its rubber ducks back, please.

Ninety bathtub toys were hurled into a drainage hole on the Greenland ice in September - an experiment to see how melt waters find their way to the base of the ice sheet.

It was hoped the ducks would flow along subglacial channels and eventually pop out into the sea. They may still, but nothing has been seen of them so far.




"We haven't heard anything from them yet," said Nasa's Alberto Behar. "If somebody does find one, it will be a great breakthrough for us."

Dr Behar is a robotics expert with the agency at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He has been studying the tubular crevasses that appear on the surface of the Greenland ice known as moulins.

These "plug holes" can drain vast lakes of melt water that settle on the top of the ice during summer months. Scientists would like to know how and to what extent this water can help lubricate the base of the ice sheet, moving it faster towards the ocean.

If plastic fowl seem a very low-tech way for a man who has also worked on Mars rovers to investigate the problem, it should be stressed he also has a more sophisticated approach.

Dr Behar has been developing a Moulin Explorer, a probe that can travel through the chutes. He has been describing his work here at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting 2008.

Dr Behar started out with a simple ice borehole camera on the end of a tether and then gradually built up the instrumentation and improved the packaging so that the probe moved more easily with the waters.

"We've found the moulins are complex; they're not just a shaft that goes all the way down to the bottom and creates a pipe out in a certain direction," he told BBC News.




"There are stair-steps and there are breaks in the ice where it seems the water goes in many directions and then comes back together."

This past summer season, he finally released an untethered Explorer into a moulin alongside the great Jakobshavn outlet glacier in West Greenland - together with those ducks.

The PVC cylinder - about the size of an American football - contained an accelerometer, a pressure transducer, GPS with satellite modem link, and an antenna; all powered by high-capacity lithium thionyl chloride batteries.

Like the ducks, the Explorer was supposed to pop out somewhere having gone through the subglacial plumbing. It was also supposed to call home.

"We did not hear a signal back so it probably got stuck under the ice somewhere," said Dr Behar. "It was a bit of a long shot but we thought it was worth a try. We've got to go back and scratch our heads and think about what we do next."

Even seeing a few ducks emerge from their subglacial adventure would give some clues as to what is happening down below.

Actually, Dr. Behar, I think I know what's happened to your ducks. Have you looked at the calendar lately? That's right - they've all headed South for the winter!



Peter