The SeaBED submersible has just finished a mission under the Antarctic ice and the scientists have concluded that the ice there is much thicker than previously expected. All of this was done with a sub powered by Ubuntu 8.04.

It's a well-known fact that Linux is the preferred tool for scientists and this operating system is used in numerous scientific endeavors, on land, under water, or in the air.

In fact, Ubuntu has been spotted over the Atlantic during a NASA mission, it's been seen in the JPL laboratories, and now it's also powering the small and powerful SeaBED submersible and it's at the center of a very interesting research.

The new 3D maps of the Antarctic sea ice made with SeaBED are the result of a joint effort between scientists from USA, UK, and Australia. The findings of their study, which revealed the fact that the ice has a much greater thickness than previous thought, has been published in Nature Geoscience.

SeaBED is changing our understanding of climate change

The study will be very helpful to better understand climate change and its effect on the largest concentration of ice on the planet, which is in Antarctica. The study itself is pretty interesting, but the fact that it uses Ubuntu 8.04, which is a rather old system, is the icing on the cake.

"It also has a WHOI MicroModem for acoustic communication and navigation, and a SeaBird CTD sensor for measuring salinity and water temperature. The main computer is a 1.2GHz Pentium processor, running Ubuntu Linux 8.04. The custom vehicle software is primarily written in the C programming language."

"The objective of the Seabed AUV is to serve as a readily available and operationally simple tool that allows rapid testing of docking methodologies and imaging algorithms. We expect to actively pursue repeat surveys for change detection and quantification in areas such as: sidescan sonar survey, photomosaicking, 3D image reconstruction from a single camera, image based navigation, and multi-sensor fusion of acoustic and optical data," reads the entry on the Autonomous Undersea Vehicle Applications Center.

The fact that it's powered by Ubuntu 8.04 is not exactly worrisome and it seems to suit them just fine. It's not like the sub is connecting to the internet or it's trying to download stuff from the repositories. In any case, if you happen to spot Ubuntu or any other Linux system in the wild, leave a comment below.