All scientific data collected by the Australian Antarctic program (AAp) are eventually described in the Catalogue of Australian Antarctic and Subantarctic Metadata (CAASM). CAASM can be used to search through AAp data descriptions, and it also provides links to access publicly available datasets, which can either be immediately downloaded or obtained from the Australian Antarctic Data Centre (AADC).
This dataset contains routine measurements of snow and ice thickness, and snow-ice interface temperature, at 1m intervals along standard transects; snow property characterisation in snow pits measured at 0m, 50m and 100m along the transects; and sea ice cores acquired at various locations both along the transects and elsewhere on ice station floes during the 2012 SIPEX 2 marine science voyage.
Ice temperature information is acquired from the cores, which are taken on-board for further analysis. The latter includes thin-section analysis of sea-ice stratigraphy and crystallography at -20C within the freezer lab on-board the ship. The cores are then cut up into 5cm sections and melted for analysis of salinity and stable oxygen isotopes.
Observation items:
Snow:
- Thickness
- Temperature profile (every 3 cm)
- Snow-ice interface temperature at 1m intervals along the 100m transects
- Grain size
- Grain shape
- Density
- Hardness
- Salinity
- Stable oxygen isotope
Ice:
- Thickness
- Freeboard
- Draft
- Temperature
- Salinity
- Stable oxygen isotope
- Crystallography and texture
- Density
Instruments:
Snow:
Folding scales, Spatula, Thermometer, Snow sampler, Magnifying glass, Salinometer, Temperature and thickness probes, scales
Ice:
Drills, corers, ice-thickness tape measures, thermometer, salinometer, band-saw, cross-polarising filter, scales
The data are recorded in log books (scanned copies are included in this dataset) and have been transferred into the standard AAD sea-ice database templates (in excel format) for each station.
These data are publicly available for download from the provided URL.
This data set conforms to the CCBY Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Please follow instructions listed in the citation reference provided at http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/citation.cfm?entry_id=SIPEX_II_Ice_Snowpits when using these data.
2013-03-07 - record created by Dave Connell from a template completed by Takenobu Toyota. 2017-09-07 - record updated by Dave Connell to publicly release the data. 2025-10-30 - record citation updated.