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 in situ measurements of ice thickness, snow thickness, and freeboard along transects on the ice-station floes from the SIPEX2012. Ice cores were collected and snow pits were measured at the 0m, 50m and 100m mark along each transect, where possible. Ice temperature measurements are taken in the field as soon as the ice core sections have been recovered from the core hole. Additionally, ice cores were taken for density analysis at a few of the ice-core sites for independent verification of ice density. In addition, electromagnetic [EM] induction measurements of total ice and snow thickness were conducted along the transect where possible.
Ice core were transferred -20oC freezer for thin-section analysis for sea-ice stratigraphy and crystallography. The cores are then cut up into suitable short sections, generally about 5cm long, to be melted for analysis of salinity and stable oxygen isotopes. The latter will occur after the end of this cruise.
There is a data file for each ice station, containing a spreadsheet with the data. The spreadsheet contains information about how to interpret the data.
Also included are the scanned field notes containing the hand-written (raw) data collected in the field.
Among many, many volunteers, whose help is gratefully acknowledged here, the following persons were involved in data collection along the transect:
Mr Olivier Lecomte, Univ Catholique, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Member of observation team, olivier.lecomte@uclouvain.be
Dr T. Toyota, Inst Low Temp Science, Japan, Member of observation team, toyota@lowtem.hokudai.ac.jp
Dr A. Giles, ACE CRC, Member of observation team, barry.giles@utas.edu.au
Dr T. Tamura, NIPR, Japan, Member of EM observation team; tamura.takeshi@nipr.ac.jp
Mr K. Nakata, EES, Japan, Member of EM observation team; kazuki-nakata@ees.hokudai.ac.jp
Data were collected on the following dates:
Ice Station 2: 27 - 28 September 2012
Ice Station 3: 03 - 04 October 2012
Ice Station 4: 06 - 08 October 2012
Ice Station 6: 13 - 14 October 2012
Ice Station 7: 19 - 23 October 2012
Ice Station 8: 29 October - 04 November 2012
The snow and sea-ice conditions during SIPEX 2012 proved to be very difficult to conduct full measurement along the ice-physics transects as part of full ice stations. The extensive snow cover and the thick and generally heavily ridged ice were taxing on humans and mechanical equipment, making the 100m transects a time consuming undertaking.
No transect data were collected on stations #1 and #5.
At some occasions where there was unconsolidated ice or incorporated slush measurements could not be obtained.
A substantial component the sea-ice cores were near melting temperature making ice-core recovery and structural analysis difficult. Ice-core conditions made analysis in freezer lab taxing.
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_InSitu_Ice_Physics when using these data.
2013-01-10 - record created by Dave Connell. 2017-04-27 - record updated by Dave Connell to correct the download URL. 2018-02-23 - record updated by Dave Connell to publicly release the data. 2025-10-30 - record citation updated.