Scaled Deployments of Seismic Penetrators to Measure Stability of Antarctic Ice Shelves

Abstract

Ice shelves play a critical role in regulating the flow of Antarctic ice sheets and thereby global sea level rise. Recent ice shelf collapses are poorly understood due to a lack of seismic measurements of an ice shelf’s response to extreme environmental forces, such as ocean tides and tsunamis. Instrumenting ice shelves is a challenge due to transportation limitations, unpredictable weather, and dangerous crevassing. Air-dropped seismic penetrators have been developed in the Seismogeodetic Ice Penetrator (SGIP) project to alleviate manual installation pain points and access remote locations. The design of two SGIPs dropped into the Ross Ice Shelf in 2025 is reconsidered to determine how the design must and could evolve to be able to deploy seismic sensors at a scale necessary to achieve science goals. The power budget for a remotely dropped penetrator that transmits all recorded data is determined. Power architectures with solar panels or a wind turbine are optimized to minimize the total height of a penetrator powered by primary batteries by 23% with Iridium and 29% with Starlink. A Barrowman aerodynamic model is evaluated against empirical results. The model is calibrated and used to consider penetrator drops from fixed-wing aircraft, with results suggesting that horizontal belly drops are optimal but that vertical aft or side drops are possible. A unit cost curve is found for scaled production volumes. Finally, scaled deployments with LC-130H and Basler aircraft are considered to optimize the aircraft cost of seismic data, finding both aircraft to be viable, but the LC-130H more cost effective.