Thursday, December 10, 2015

Chilly!


This video clip caught my eye the other day.  It shows the formation of a brinicle in Antarctic waters.  It was filmed for the BBC series Frozen Planet, and is narrated by David Attenborough.  Watch it in full-screen mode for best results.





That's pretty amazing, watching the cold encase in ice and kill every living thing in its path. I wonder whether there were actual human beings filming that?  If so, what precautions did they have to take to avoid being frozen to death themselves?  Or were remote-controlled underwater drones used instead? If anyone knows the answers, please tell us in Comments.

Peter

4 comments:

Josh said...

Did a contract at McMurdo so I used to know some of the divers involved in this video. If I remember correctly, they put in time lapse cameras for this video since it takes a bit longer for this to happen than one can comfortably dive. The precautions they take are the same as those taken by normal ice divers save the fact that the regulators are heavily modified to make them work better in the cold conditions.

Snoggeramus said...

Was just about to add that a lot of the footage was time lapse.

lpdbw said...

The linked Wiki article for "brinicle" has a link to a story about the filming process, including safety and equipment.

Anonymous said...

Let me guess . . . global warming is responsible for melting ice into "freezing water" that streamed downward through cracks where it met warmer water and then re-froze.

I mean, it has to be Al Gore Warming. Otherwise, how are they going to fund research and abatement measures, which will suffer from "re-direction" of funds, thereby generating a need for continuing and ever more funding, which will in its' turn be "re-directed", ad nauseum . . .