Tiny Robot Lost Under Antarctic Ice for 8 Months Comes Back With Rare Data

A tiny robot explorer traversed the vast, frigid waters of Antarctica—even diving under the ice at one point. After miraculously surviving all that, the robot brought back souvenirs for scientists.

In 2020, researchers with CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, deployed an Argo float—a free-floating, robotic instrument collecting ocean data—near Totten Glacier in East Antarctica. To their surprise and disappointment, fickle Antarctic tides sent the float farther south, where it reappeared and soon sank under the Denman ice shelf.

“We feared the worst,” admitted the researchers in an essay for The Conversation . “But nine months later it surfaced again… And it had collected data from places never measured before.”

Indeed, from its unlikely dive, the float gathered never-before-sa