the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
The Southern Ocean marine ice record of the early historical, circum-Antarctic voyages of Cook and Bellingshausen
Abstract. The circum-navigations of Cook’s Second Voyage (1772–1775) and Bellingshausen (1819–1821) were attempts to find any great southern land mass poleward of ~50° S and consequently involved sailing for three or two summers respectively in polar latitudes around Antarctica. Extensive sea ice eventually blocked each voyages’ southern probes, although Bellingshausen, unknowingly at the time, saw the Antarctic continent. However, these attempts meant sea-ice and iceberg records from the early historical period were collected near simultaneously from around much of Antarctica. Here, these records are extracted from journals, analysed, and compared to each other and the modern satellite record of both forms of marine ice. They generally show an early historical period with a more northerly record of both forms of marine ice than normal for today, but to a geographically varying degree. However, the early historical period in the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean saw marine ice generally within the range of modern observations for the same time of year, but the Weddell Sea and Indian Ocean marine ice, particularly on Cook’s voyage, then extended several degrees further north than in today’s extreme ice years.
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RC1: 'Review of cp-2024-5 letter', Seelye Martin, 15 Feb 2024
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AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Grant Bigg, 16 Feb 2024
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Reply to comments from Seelye Martin
First, I’d like thank Dr. Martin for his positive and helpful comments on this paper. The bold elements below note explicit statements about how I will address his suggestions in the revision.
I’d also like to thank Dr. Martin for pointing out the lack of my referencing in the text of Parkinson (1990). I had intended to make the points raised by Dr. Martin – hence the presence of the reference in the reference list – but the writing of the paper was spread out over several months so by the time I completed it I had forgotten that this had not been added. I will add suitable comments in the Introduction and the Discussion sections looking back to the Parkinson reference to extensive sea-ice in the Weddell Sea.
With respect to the embargoed supplementary data, my cover letter to the journal contained information on how the reviewers could register with the UK Polar Data Centre to access this data. I refer the reviewers to the journal editorial staff if they wish to access the data at this time. I will have the UKPDC remove the wider embargo once the paper is accepted. This approach is normal practice according to the UKPDC. Please note that Bigg (2024) is already in the reference list.
With respect to the iceberg part of the dataset I will amend the text at l. 139-140 as suggested by Dr. Martin. I split the record into three categories, as noted by Dr. Martin. The category 3 entries (iceberg fields) are used in the lower panel of Figure 6 (I will add this note to the Figure 6 legend). In Figure 5, I decided for clarity in an already busy figure to only note the presence of icebergs. This is the summary iceberg figure, and the detail of iceberg density is better left to Figure 6, for comparison with the modern observations. I stand by this division, which I think makes the paper clearer.
Specific Concerns
My purpose here was to compare the records of the two Antarctic circum-navigations of the early historical period, rather than to concentrate on one part of the Southern Ocean. The earlier paper by Love and Bigg (2023), referenced in this paper, covered the Weddell Sea in the 1820-1845 period, and included sea-ice data from Weddell’s expedition. Fig. 1 in Love and Bigg shows that Weddell didn’t reach as far east as the sea-ice peak region recorded by Cook and Bellingshausen. Dr. Martin is right that more could be said about the 1820s record in the Discussion and I will add an additional couple of sentences in the revision on what Love and Bigg found of relevance here.
I agree with Dr. Martin that Wales’ journal of Cook’s expedition needs to be checked for the iceberg data. It is worth noting however that while there are a few occasions where Forster recorded icebergs and Cook’s journal did not, on the whole the two records were very similar so I suspect that Wales’ journal is unlikely to add too much.
- 32: I think it is an interesting context that a British expedition was seeking the North Pole at the same time as Cook’s expedition south, but that they seem not to be linked. While of tangential importance to the paper overall I believe it is an important contextual observation regarding contemporary polar expeditions and do not wish to remove it.
- 86-88: My point here was that the other nineteenth century expeditions were more geographically focused and not circum-Antarctic in concept. Therefore they do not fit within the context of this paper. I stand by this statement. One has to define limits to any specific work or it could lose focus.
- 69: apologies. This should be section 2.1. I will correct this in the revision.
General question: I did try to consider color blindness in my colour choice. I think I have largely succeeded, but in some cases there were a lot of lines to consider.
- 115: thank you for the positive comment on the chronometer accuracy.
- 143: I agree this text should be changed as suggested in the revision.
- 208: The Comiso and Worby result doesn’t have a significant impact on the analysis (note the large error bar). I note this in the second phrase of the sentence.
Figure 1: The fish-hook south of Africa is an illusion. The outbound green line starts only a few days before ice was observed, and so is well south of Africa at the top if the fish-hook, while the inbound green line goes all the way to Cape Town. I will add a note to the Figure legend explaining this.
Figure 2: I agree this Figure could be confusing. I will put all the colour (Cook is red Xs, Bellingshausen is blue crosses) and shape information into the Figure legend in the revision.
Figure 3: The purpose of this figure is to demonstrate that there may be open water or polynyas south of the northern sea ice limit, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Weddell Sea. I tried to find an example where this was most obvious, and related to one of the observation days from both Cook and Bellingshausen’s journals. The text does imply this, but is not too clear, so I suggest I add some explanatory text to the Figure legend in the revision.
Figure 4: I welcome the helpful comments regarding this pivotal figure. In the revision I will extend the y-axis to 50S and consider a polar projection, although this might be difficult to do. I will certainly alter the size of the symbols so that the historical and modern observations are the same size. Currently, the historical ones are the larger ones. I will experiment with the colours (the current colours were an attempt to implement the color blindness guidelines of the journal template …). I think adding the Parkinson ice tongue would complicate an already problematic figure – I will note this in the Discussion, as noted above. I will also clarify the text at l. 216 to make the assertion clearer.
Figure 5: I will put all the information about the figure in the legend in the revision. This is a summary iceberg figure – I use the extreme iceberg field data in the lower panel of Figure 6 and suggest this is a clearer way of allowing the reader to see the difference.
Figure 6: I can change the panels to be Figure 6a and b, as suggested, both in the Figure and references in the text, in the revision. I will add a note to the legend to explain that the bottom panel is indeed showing the category ‘3’ iceberg data.
Figure 7: Again, I will put all the figure colour and symbol information in the legend, rather than mix between legends on and off figure, in the revision. The iceberg data is the same as in Figure 5, but it is true that some ship observations go further ast than the Tournadre data of Figure 6 suggests. I think this is because the ship data goes further back in time and will add such an explanatory note to the text discussion in the revision. I do currently note in the Conclusion that marine ice (ie sea-ice and icebergs) suggest a colder Weddell Sea in the past than today, but will make it more explicit in the revision that it is both icebergs and sea-ice that show this eastwards trend.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-5-AC1
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AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Grant Bigg, 16 Feb 2024
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