Satellites Help Skippers Avoid Icebergs In Vendee Globe

As if the sea and its many changing faces was not enough for the 29 skippers left in the Vendee Globe to contend with, there now comes another danger: icebergs

Brest, France, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Dec, 2020 ):As if the sea and its many changing faces was not enough for the 29 skippers left in the Vendee Globe to contend with, there now comes another danger: icebergs.

As the fleet in the solo round-the-world non-stop race makes its way around Cape Horn and heads east through the southern Indian Ocean, the boats are skirting the chillier waters of the Antarctic.

"I would love to see icebergs, but not in this race!" said French skipper Alexia Barrier who, like all other Vendee Globe competitors, remains fearful of a possible collision.

"This is my first Vendee Globe," said Barrier. "I've never seen an iceberg in real life." Fingers crossed she will not see one during this ninth edition of the race which started from Les Sables d'Olonne last month and takes the boats on a 24,296 nautical mile trip before they finish back in France in late January.

To avoid these monumental floating ice blocks, she and the other skippers will benefit not just from their own look-out but from a second pair of eyes keeping watch.

The icebergs are being closely tracked from space with orbiting satellites providing steady a bank of data.

"The satellites make around 25 trips all around the world each day," said Franck Mercier, Vendee Globe's project manager at Collecte Localisation Satellites (CLS, an offshoot of the French Space Agency).

- White pixels - The Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B satellites have specialised tools "which allow them to look through the clouds both day and night," adds the European Space Agency's Simonetta Cheli.

CLS, which specialises in oceanography, analyse the data in Brest where the centre an antenna called VIGISTAT which is five metres in diameter. It is the only such antenna in France capable of collecting such images that are detailed enough to locate icebergs.

This year, no fewer than 300 radar images will be used to spot any icebergs lurking in the route of Vendee Globe competitors.

"A small iceberg appears on the screen like a white pixel," says Mercier, adding that these blocks of ice can be around 50 metres long.

"Unfortunately, there may remain small icebergs which we will not have seen," he admits.

Known as 'growlers' these small blocks detach and drift from larger bodies of ice.

- 'Reassuring' - For boat safety, race organisers have banned skippers from crossing into the Antarctic Exclusion Zone (AEZ) where there is a greater chance of meeting an iceberg.

First introduced in 2016, the 'frontier' of the AEZ may change throughout the race. On Thursday it was raised to five degrees near the Crozet and Kerguelen islands, in the French Southern and Antarctic Territories, after the CLS team detected about 20 icebergs.

The AEZ "is extremely reassuring", Thomas Ruyant said on Thursday from his boat LinkedOut.

"We know that we have people who survey the ice and we as sailors can really focus on the rest."This year's ninth edition of the race has already seen damage to boats and the abandonment of early favourites Briton Alex Thomson and Frenchman Kevin Escoffier over the last week.