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During the first leg of the Winter Weddell Sea Project (Antarktis V/2) cruise of F.S. Polarstern the entire width of the Antarctic sea ice zone was traversed in the vicinity of 0° longitude in the period July 18 to September 10, 1986. Ice thicknesses were measured by direct drilling and by helicopter profiling using an Exstar 100‐MHz impulse radar system. In addition, aerial photography of the ice cover was done from 100‐ to 2000‐m altitude using a 70‐mm aerial camera mounted in the helicopter. The results of the point measurements (drilling) are reported in this paper together with an indication of how the radar and photography data will be used to extend them so as to yield area‐averaged ice thickness distributions. It was found that the main ice type across the entire width of the ice cover was consolidated pancake ice occurring in vast floes; this formed out of a 250‐km‐wide band at the advancing ice edge which comprised a concentrated field of individual pancakes in a matrix of frazil ice. Preferred thicknesses of undeformed floes were 40–60 cm of ice covered with 5–15 cm of snow. The individual pancakes attained almost all of this thickness before consolidation; subsequent congelation growth was slow, estimated at 0.4 cm d −1 . The floes contained much small‐scale roughness on the upper and lower surfaces due to rafting of pancakes at the time of consolidation, but pressure ridging was modest except in the far south. A few very thick (8–11 m) multiyear floes were observed embedded in the pack at latitudes beyond 66° S.
Wadhams et al. (Tue,) studied this question.