Have you ever lost a memory card with important files on it? Did you lose it in an annoyingly inaccessible place, like a train or Disney World or the wild seas around Antarctica?
One team of scientists on the icebreaker Araon really wanted to avoid this. On a gorgeous, tranquil Antarctic night this week, the researchers set out on the ship’s inflatable boat to retrieve two memory cards from inside a sleek yellow underwater robot.
Now that the ice-drilling team has gotten to work on the Thwaites Glacier, other scientists traveling on the Araon have been able to use the ship’s resources to make headway on their own research.
Polar scientists ponder grand mysteries about the planet, the climate and humanity’s shared future. They also ponder the mysteries of misbehaving equipment, buggy software and leaky O-rings. They have to, because if their gear can’t survive the extreme conditions and hang onto the data it collects, then all their other pondering is just theorizing.
“Science,” declared Brenna Hatch, a master’s student at the University of California, Davis, and a member of the team operating the robot, “is 80 percent troubleshooting.”
On the Araon’s last expedition to this part of Antarctica, in 2024, two oceangoing robots were lost at sea, a fact that nobody on this voyage has forgotten.
Two days into this year’s expedition, Won Sang Lee, the chief scientist, told the team, “I don’t want to lose another one.”
This year’s robot is roughly six feet long and is named Gull. Scientists at U.C. Davis and the Korea Polar Research Institute are using it to study how warm water is moving around Pine Island Glacier, one of Antarctica’s most degraded ice masses.
The team deposited Gull in Pine Island Bay on Jan. 14, and a colleague in California fed it instructions by satellite on where to go. For days, the robot took oceanographic measurements, diving up and down and traveling in a slow rectangle, 22 miles by 11 miles, through the bay. This week, the ship was scheduled to sail near Gull’s path, and the researchers decided to retrieve the robot — and the data it had collected — rather than risk losing it.
On Tuesday evening, Ms. Hatch waited for Gull to surface and report its coordinates by satellite. She gave the location to the Araon’s captain, who brought the ship within several thousand feet. Soon, with the help of binoculars, we could see the robot’s bobbing tail.
“The captain has eyes on it, so it should be fast,” said Mahren Hudson, a research associate at U.C. Davis. “Famous last words.”
There was no wind, and the sea had a satiny, luscious look. A crane on the Araon’s deck lowered the inflatable boat off the starboard side. Ms. Hudson and her teammate Romane Bouchard, a master’s student at the University of British Columbia, sat at the front as a crew member steered the smaller boat straight toward Gull’s floating tail.
Then they drove on top of it. “No, no, no, it’s under us!” Ms. Hudson cried.
She and Ms. Bouchard leaned over the edge and, with oars and a pole, managed to lever Gull out from under the boat and pull it aboard.
“Beautiful,” Ms. Hudson said.
The next morning, she and Ms. Bouchard gently unscrewed the robot’s nose and tail. With careful concentration, they reached inside the tangle of wires and circuit boards and extracted their prize, which they held up like precious gems: two two-gigabyte memory cards.
The team plans to have Gull back in the water for its next mission soon.
Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times.
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