Anyone remember Behar’s rubber ducky experiment? You know, the one where an untethered Moulin Explorer was dropped into a moulin alongside the great Jakobshavn outlet glacier in West Greenland – together with 90 rubber ducks. The Moulin Explorer is a PVC cylinder – about the size of an American football – which contained an accelerometer, a pressure transducer, GPS with satellite modem link, and an antenna; all powered by high-capacity lithium thionyl chloride batteries. Did it ever emerge and report home? And what about those ducks?
BBC News had something about them back in ’08. Anyone heard anything further? Didn’t the meltwater actually emerge but refroze at the base of the glacier? Not exactly the rapid exit everyone expected, is it?
