Hunting Arctic Asteroid Impact With Hovercraft

This is a nifty bit of self-funded science (those trust funds come in handy!) that involves mapping the arctic sea floor from atop a customized hovercraft. Yngve Kristofferson from the University of Bergen is one of the two principal scientists involved.

by Alexis Madrigal
Wired.com (12 October 2009) -- Two polar scientists hot on the trail of an arctic mystery have a new tool for exploration: a hovercraft, specially outfitted for week-long trips over the ice with scientific instruments and solar panels.

Their quarry is a nearly 22,000 square-mile patch of disturbed Arctic sea floor that could be evidence of a massive asteroid strike. John Hall, a now-retired geoscientist, discovered the anomaly during his late-’60s graduate work aboard Fletcher’s Ice Island, a huge berg U.S. scientists inhabited for several decades.

Since then, no scientific vessel has been back over the area to collect more data. The massive icebreakers that have crunched through the Arctic since the 1990s can’t reach the spot, said Yngve Kristofferson, a scientist and explorer at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Kristofferson became intrigued with Hall’s data and in 2004, the two of them met in Bergen to talk Arctic science from eight in the morning to 10 in the evening. At the end of their time together, they came to a decision: They needed a hovercraft.

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