Cadell Backman, aged 6 from Ely asks:

Hi Cadell,

Thanks for your question…

I asked Kelly Hogan about your question. Kelly is a geologist from the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. She says that it is very difficult to give a single value for the rate at which ice is retreating around the world as it does so at different speeds.

Glaciers which are high in the mountains in some parts of the world, such as the Grinnell Glacier in the USA, are retreating at a rate of 10’s of metres per year. In the Antarctic it currently seems that it is much slower. There is not much evidence that most of the Antarctic ice sheet has changed in the last 150 years but some local changes are underway. Sea ice extent appears to be decreasing, and some ice shelves are breaking up. The most spectacular of these attract considerable publicity, particularly the collapse of part of Larsen Ice Shelf in 1995.

Chris

Bethan Evans, aged 6 from Ely asks:

Hi Bethan,

Thanks also for your question. I spoke to Gwyn Griffiths about the data we have been collecting from the ROV Isis during this cruise. Gwyn is an engineer working at the Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Gwyn has been closely involved with the Isis ROV from the drawing board.

According to Gwyn’s records, which go as far as the 6^th dive of this cruise (Isis is underwater on the 7^th dive as I write this), Isis has spent a total of 84 hours in the water and 66 hours on the sea bed. The deepest Isis has reached is 3500m which we got to today. We have recorded approximately 800 digital still photographs over these dives and also recorded 1843 frame grabs. A frame grab is a still image which is taken from a video recording. We have been recording from 2 digital video cameras on each dive which have so far produced about 150 hours of video to analyze. We have also generated almost 58 gigabytes of navigational data.

Hopefully in the next couple of days I will be able to send out some images for you all to see.

Chris