Surprise find The team's actual mission was to survey ocean currents
near the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of ice extending more than 600 miles (970 kilometers) northward from the grounding zone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ross Sea, to model the behavior of a drill string, a length of pipe extending to the
seafloor which delivers drilling fluids and retrieves
sediment samples.
The researchers studied cores of
seafloor sediment representing 500,000 years of deposition, spanning about 6,000 miles of the Pacific equator, from
near Papua New Guinea to
near Ecuador's Galapagos Islands — nearly a quarter of the globe's girth.