Featured Image Credit: PA Wire
Last year, the internet was asked to choose a name for a polar research vessel for the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
And, as the internet often does, it chose some of the best names.
There were thousands of names submitted when the polls opened, but “RRS Boaty McBoatface” ranked at the top in the end, receiving more than 120,000 votes.
There was a little bit of outrage on the internet communities that chose the name, when Science Minister Jo Johnson deemed that there were more serious names to be chosen— naming after English broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough, which was the option that placed #4 in the online poll.
Now, the NERC has redeemed itself in (online) public opinion by bestowing the name Boaty McBoatface to another vessel, instead…
Boaty McBoatface is now a moniker assigned to a trio of super snazzy, yellow autonomous underwater vessel (AUV), that will be used for research in Antarctic waters very soon, to explore the Southern Ocean.
The vessel will travel with the DynOPO (Dynamics of the Orkney Passage Outflow) expedition, in which they’re setting their sights on Orkney Passage, a deep current that yields some of the coldest is about 3,500m deep and 500 miles from the Antarctic Peninsula, one that also yields the coldest, and most turbulent waters around.
It will be exploring on behalf of researchers and scientists like Alberto Naveira Garabato, a professor from the University of Southampton, who are focusing on improving predictions for climate change.
In the press release issued about this expedition, Professor Garabato added the importance of this. “Establishing the causes of [arctic] warming is important because the warming plays an important role in moderating the ongoing (and likely future) increases in atmospheric temperature and sea level around the globe.”