“It was a huge bang and I was expecting to die,” says Peter Wadhams. Last week the University of Cambridge oceanographer was aboard the British submarine HMS Tireless – which was under the Arctic collecting data on the thickness of the ice – when air purification equipment exploded. Tragically, two men did die.
Wadhams was using sonar equipment to determine how global warming is affecting the ice. “I could see the thinning since my last cruise in 2004,” he says. The state of the ice worried him, though it did save the sub, because after the explosion it had to smash its way through the ice. “The sonar was crushed as we surfaced,” he says, “but before the accident we got data from across 2000 kilometres of the Arctic from Spitsbergen to Alaska.”
The next question is whether the data will be fully analysed. As 91av reported last week (p 16), Wadhams is in dispute with the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council over funding.
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