Through an arrangement with Stellenbosch University (South Africa) and Aalto University (Finland), space on-board the expedition vessel, Agulhas II, was offered for four engineers to undertake a programme of monitoring of the vessel performance throughout the Expedition.
The team of engineers from Finland and South Africa want to improve their understanding of how ice interacts with the Agulhas II ice breaker ship. The ultimate goal is to construct even better ice breaking ships in the future but also to understand the ship’s performance to develop future routing systems. Engineers on-board constantly measured the pressure of the ice on the hull of Agulhas II and the thickness of the ice around the ship. After the Endurance22 expedition, the researchers will understand much better how the trafficability of an ice breaker ship is determined by different sea ice conditions. The engineers are also particularly interested to understand how waves interact with the sea ice and how this influences the trafficability of the ship.
The data gathering was restricted to on-board measurements and there were no releases to the environment or sampling from this research.
