Bathymetric data of Long and Tryne Fjords at Vestfold Hills, Antarctica, collected in December 1999

At each site a 5cm diameter hole was drilled through the sea ice and a weighted measurement tape was lowered through the ice-hole to the bottom. Water depths were measured to the nearest centimetre; ice and snow thicknesses were measured to the nearest millimetre. A minimum depth of less than 3m was found in a narrow channel between small islands immediately west of Shirokaya Bay.

The maximum depth of the water column was 222m in the middle basin of Long Fjord. The tidal range for the measured days was less than 0.5m, with tidal corrections applied to the raw data. Water samples were taken in Breid Basin and the middle basin of Long Fjord.

These and water samples taken in Snezhnyy Bay [pers. comm. J. Laybourn-Parry, 1999] show aerobic and relatively fresh water for all upper basins. This indicates that even the far basins of both fjords are well mixed despite the drainage of large volumes meltwater from the Antarctic plateau into the fjords.

See related URL for data and a spatial summary of the data. See Entry: long_tryne_bathy for an interpolation of bathymetry made using the Topogrid command within the ArcInfo GIS software, version 8.0.2. Coastline and spot height (heights above sea level) data, extracted from the Australian Antarctic Data Centre's Vestfold Hills topographic GIS dataset (see Entry: vest_hills_gis), was also used as input data to optimise the interpolation close to the coastline.

The fields in this dataset are: day weighpoint lat(dd) long(dd) ice (cm) freeboard(cm) snow(cm) depth(m)