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The leader of a scientific expedition whose ship remains stranded in Antarctic ice says the team, which set out to prove climate change, is "stuck in our own experiment."
But Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at Australia's University of New South Wales, said it was "silly" to suggest he and 73 others aboard the
MV Akademic Shokalskiy were trapped in ice they'd sought to prove had melted. He remained adamant that sea ice is melting, even as the boat remained trapped in frozen seas.
"We're stuck in our own experiment," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition said in a statement. We came to Antarctica to study how one of the biggest icebergs in the world has altered the system by trapping ice. We ... are now ourselves trapped by ice surrounding our ship.
"Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition said in a statement.
Turney later told
FoxNews.com the ice surrounding his ship is old, rather than recently formed, and likely from a particular 75 mile-long iceberg that broke apart three years ago. Climate change may have prompted the iceberg to shatter and float into the previously open sea where the mostly Australian team finds itself stranded, Turney said.
"The ice was swept across to this area by the South-East wind, its pieces creating a knock-on domino effect," Turney told
FoxNews.com, speaking from a tent erected on the stranded ship's top deck. "We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."
But the situation has global warming skeptics poking fun at the scientists.
