Boaty McBoatface Makes Major Climate-Change Discovery on Maiden Mission
‘COMPLETELY NEW’
The name Boaty McBoatface is set to be immortalized in academic journals for years to come after the crew of the vessel made a major climate-change discovery on its first ever mission. The little yellow submarine was given the name originally chosen for a polar research ship in a public vote. Officials named that boat the RRS Sir David Attenborough, but passed on the ridiculous name to a smaller robotic submersible. Its first mission saw it explore 110 miles at depths as low as 13,000 feet in the waters near Antartica. Its data linked Antarctic winds, which are growing stronger due to increasing greenhouse gases, to rising sea temperatures and turbulence deep in the ocean. “The data from Boaty McBoatface gave us a completely new way of looking at the deep ocean. The path taken by Boaty created a spatial view of the turbulence near the seafloor,” said Eleanor Frajka-Williams, of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England.