On the Antarctic research ship Sir David Attenborough, engineers are gathered around a 4-metre square opening in the hull, known as the moon pool. A white robot floats in the water, its headlights illuminating the sides of the pool.
“Now push it forward and drop it to the bottom,” says Jamie Neilson, an engineering supervisor at Seatronics, the maker of this remotely operated vehicle (ROV).
With a press of a joystick, the thrusters whirr into life and the ROV disappears beneath a spurt of bubbles. Its job is to scour the hull of the ship for damage or invasive species and perform tasks with its controllable arms, like installing cameras on the bottom of an Antarctic ice shelf.
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This isn’t Antarctica, however, but the North Sea, where the Attenborough is testing key equipment before its maiden science voyage to the Southern Ocean. Though the ship has been on the water for two seasons, bringing supplies to research bases and undergoing polar sea trials, this November it will finally start doing real research in Antarctica.
“It’s much better to spend a month now testing than to go all the way down south only to find out that there’s actually a critical problem, and we can’t deploy our instrumentation,” says Carson McAfee, the ship’s electronics engineer.
These sea trials, which begin with a safety announcement recorded by David Attenborough himself, are the first time that journalists have been on this ship at sea. As it leaves the Rosyth Dockyard near Edinburgh, UK, the Attenborough’s diesel engines are burning hydrotreated vegetable oil, or HVO, made of leftover cooking oil and animal fat. If that is successful, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) could decide to run the ship on HVO all the way to Antarctica, which would slash emissions by up to 95 per cent, but also double fuel costs.
The bright red vessel slowly navigates through a narrow lock and under three bridges. Its dynamic positioning system, a set of four thrusters that keep the ship positioned exactly on a GPS coordinate or route, is also being tested in these trials. Crew members on the helicopter and observation decks wave back at the onlookers standing above.
The Attenborough is 129 metres long, weighs 15,000 tonnes and can break through ice more than 2 metres thick. With 12 decks, 13 laboratories and even an experimental aquarium, it has as much space for research as the entire BAS headquarters in Cambridge.
Its greatest strength, however, isn’t its size, but its complexity. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs helped design the ÂŁ200 million vessel’s state-of-the-art operational systems and research equipment, which are connected by more than 1000 kilometres of wires. Some of its steel instruments have been duplicated in titanium so they won’t taint measurements of iron concentration. It is probably the only ship with a delicate scanning electron microscope on board.
The next few months will test not only whether all that equipment works, but also whether the crew of 30 knows how to use it. In August, they will practise taking different sediment cores from the deep seafloor between Shetland and the Faroe Islands.
“Once we start to go into full-capacity science on board, which we’re doing this year, we’re going to learn so much more about what it can do,” says laboratory manager Aisling Smith.
Some of that science will be for the BIOPOLE programme, a ÂŁ9 million project to study how the cycling of nutrients from the poles to the oceans is changing. Researchers are testing a rig of 12 electronically operated nets that will help them take samples of a type of zooplankton called a copepod in Antarctica this November.
While the popularly named Boaty McBoatface submersible won’t be along for the expedition, the team will deploy underwater gliders to paint a picture of underwater conditions, along with a conductivity, temperature and depth (CTD) instrument.
Copepods are typically no bigger than a lentil, but they are so numerous that they collectively weigh 10 times more than all humans put together. They also have a big impact on the climate. When sea ice melts in spring, it sparks a phytoplankton bloom that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Copepods eat these phytoplankton, then sink to the seafloor, where the carbon can remain for centuries.
In this way, the tiny creatures sequester at least 1 billion tonnes of carbon per year. The fear is that, as Antarctic sea ice retreats, fewer nutrients will be available for phytoplankton and, in turn, copepods to grow.
“Turning off those nutrient taps, that has implications for productivity in the rest of the world’s oceans,” says ecologist of the BAS. “It’s really important that we can understand just how much carbon [copepods] are capable of drawing down to depth.”
The moon pool will play a major role in that. Now that they have tested its wooden and steel doors and deployed the ROV, the engineers will try putting the net rig and the CTD instrument through it.
“Normally, when we get to the sea ice, that’s where our science kind of stops,” says Johnston. “But because this ship has a moon pool, once we get down into the sea ice, we can access the water column and gather data in places where we’ve never been able to get it before.”
