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2017-04-10
Indian Scientists Completed 36th Expedition to the Icy Continent
Under the Indian Scientific Expedition to Antarctica, 36th expedition to Antarctica has been successfully completed. The summer team has returned back to India in the first week of April after completing a successful five month stint in Antarctica. As many as fifty summer scientific members from over twelve R&D institutes and universities were part of this short-term expedition. The scientific projects focused mainly on climate change with thrust areas in Atmosphere Sciences and Meteorology, Earth Sciences and Glaciology, Biological Sciences and Environmental Monitoring. The winter over team members of the 36th Indian Scientific Expedition to Antarctica are at Indian Research Bases, Maitri and Bharati.
A collaborative scientific work was initiated under the acronym MADICE (Mass-balance, dynamics, and climate of the Dronning Maud Land coast, East Antarctica) project. MADICE is an Indo-Norwegian research project focusing on investigating mass balance, ice dynamics and past-climate reconstruction in Antarctica lead by the nodal agency National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research, Goa and National Polar Institute (Norsk Polar Institutt), Tromso. The first sampling of MADICE team was successfully done during the 2016-17 austral summer. As part of the project which was spread over 35 days of camping, the team accomplished 2000 km Kinematic GPS measurements and 90 Static GPS measurement points was marked to measure ice flow fields. Over 800 km of track was surveyed for bed topography using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) in both high and low frequencies. A 50 m core was raised in the Leningrad ice rise to study the ice shelf.