OK, I was hoping the last post on Arctic ice would wrap things up for the season. There’s one more though that is too good to pass up. Like a latter-day Jules Verne hero, French explorer Jean-Louis Etienne is setting off to measure ice thickness in an airship, newly delivered from Russia. The vessel is 55 m long, 17 m high, contains 5,000 square metres [as William points out in the comments below this should clearly have been m³, apologies] of helium and can carry a payload of 1.5 tons. Etienne says he is working on a larger airship for Earth observation, with a 30 ton payload and an 8,000 km range.

Using a device called the EM bird the airship will fly over the Arctic recording the ice thickness. The EM bird emits a laser beam to map the surface of the ice and a low-frequency electromagnetic beam to probe the bottom surface, both together yield the thickness (View image). A photo gallery of the airship’s assembly is also online. She’s a lot prettier than your average ice breaker.

This is far from the first time airships have been used in this region. Here’s Nature from 1907: Mr. Walter Wellman, who proposes to make another attempt to reach the North Pole by means of his airship America, has left for Norway, on the way to Spitsbergen, where the balloon will be inflated.

Image: artist’s impression of airship