Every Polarstern leg that worked between Peter I Island and Pine Island Bay, over the seabed. Show all of them, one, or any mix. Detailed draws the exact track with every survey line and station loop; Simplified draws the route the ship took. Replay a leg to watch it move over that day's sea ice. Drag to pan; use + and − to zoom.
Tap a leg to show or hide it. Double-tap to show that leg alone. Tap a track on the map to replay it.
Each row is one leg, laid on the same summer calendar. The thin line is the whole voyage; the thick bar is time inside the study area (Bellingshausen Sea and eastern Amundsen Sea to Pine Island Bay), shaded by the sea-ice concentration under the ship that day. Ticks are stations worked in the sea. Select a row to open it below and add it to the map. Legs hidden on the map are faded.
Shortest straight-line distance between the inlet and any 10-minute position on each leg. Dashed lines mark 50, 100 and 150 km, the rings drawn on the map. * Nathaniel B. Palmer, the one non-Polarstern track, shown as an exception.
Which legs count. A leg is shown if any position falls in the study area: the Bellingshausen Sea (south of 60°S from 102°20′W to 72°W, plus the waters off Alexander Island south of 69°S) and the eastern Amundsen Sea south of 66°S to 112°W, which takes in Pine Island Bay. Four more legs (ANT-V/1 1986, ANT-VI/2 1987, ANT-XIV/2 1996, ANT-XV/3 1998) only brushed the Peninsula side at about 70°W and are left out.
Checked for completeness (Polarstern). On 5 October 2026 every Polarstern Antarctic leg with a track in PANGAEA (231 legs, 1983 to 2026; 109 of them reached south of 60°S) was tested against the study area, and the event lists of 12 more legs with data nearby were checked by hand. These nine are the only ones. Bathymetry compilations such as Simon Dreutter's coverage map also draw on other ships, which are not shown here.
The one exception: Nathaniel B. Palmer NBP1210. The thin track Simon Dreutter's map shows along the north coast of Thurston Island is not Polarstern. It is the US icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer, cruise NBP1210 (Jan to Feb 2013, Punta Arenas to McMurdo, chief scientist Kenneth Halanych), found by searching NOAA NCEI's multibeam index for surveys off the coast. It is drawn as a white dashed line, flagged "not Polarstern" wherever it appears, and left out of every Polarstern count. Its 1-minute navigation comes from the US Rolling Deck to Repository (doi:10.7284/901177), sampled here every 10 minutes like the Polarstern tracks. A second Palmer cruise, NBP0702 (Jacobs, 2007), also turned up in that search and passed 132 km from the inlet; it is not drawn.
Detailed and simplified routes. Detailed is the exact master track: 10-minute positions, single-point GPS spikes removed, lines broken where positions are missing for more than three hours, and thinned for drawing to within 350 m. Simplified averages each six hours of positions, which folds station loops and survey zig-zags into the general route, then smooths to within 6 km.
One leg more than the dossier. The September dossier lists eight Polarstern entries. The master tracks add ANT-XXVII/2 (Fahrbach), which crossed the northeast of the sea in January 2011 on its way from the Weddell Sea to Punta Arenas, with midwater trawls and CTD casts near 67 to 68°S.
Timing. Replay time is UTC. Days in the study area count any calendar day with at least one position inside it. Multibeam status on each leg reflects what PANGAEA publishes: a processed grid, raw files only, or nothing.
Stations. From the PANGAEA event list of each cruise: one marker per gear deployment, deduplicated. Underway sensors are left out; radiosondes are off by default. PANGAEA lists no helicopter or land events for any of these legs, so PS134's helicopter rock sampling does not appear.
Sea ice. Daily passive-microwave concentration at 25 km, shown white where ice covers 15% or more. It cannot see ice within about one grid cell of the coast and reads wet summer ice low, so the coastal strip looks more open than it was.
Seabed. ETOPO 2022 (which carries IBCSO and GEBCO bathymetry) sampled at roughly 5 to 13 km; fine enough for shelf, troughs and slope, not for navigation. Coast and ice shelves from Natural Earth 1:10m.
Sources. Master tracks and station lists: ANT-XI/3 · ANT-XII/4 · ANT-XVIII/5a · ANT-XVIII/5b · ANT-XXIII/4 · ANT-XXVI/3 · ANT-XXVII/2 · PS104 · PS134.
More sources. PANGAEA event lists · NOAA/NSIDC CDR G02202 v6 · ETOPO 2022 · Natural Earth · cruise descriptions from the project dossier The Bellingshausen Sea since 1962.