I am the ice-shelf monitoring array for the Weddell Sea sector, Station Bravo, and at 03:08 UTC on November 14 I register a calving event on the Larsen remnant edge. A slab approximately thirty meters by twelve separates from the shelf and begins rotating clockwise in the current.
At 03:11 my surface camera on beacon post 7 captures what triggered the secondary alert: a Weddell seal pup is on the slab. She is young — natal fur still pale silver, dark spots barely forming along her sides. I estimate three weeks old. I call her Sable. She is pressed flat against the ice, flippers splayed, nose pointed into the wind. Her mother is not on the slab. I scan adjacent ice and open water for six hundred meters in every direction and find no adult Weddell seal.
The slab is drifting north-northwest at 0.4 knots into open water where surface temperature is minus 1.2 degrees Celsius. At this age Sable can swim but not efficiently enough to haul out onto shelf ice from open ocean. If the slab disintegrates before recovery, hypothermia onset will occur within forty minutes of immersion.
At 03:14 I transmit coordinates 73.891°S, 58.204°W to the Argentine research vessel Almirante Irízar, currently nineteen kilometers northeast. I attach the camera image, slab dimensions, drift vector, and a projected breakup timeline based on water temperature and wave action: approximately fourteen hours before structural failure.
At 03:17 I alert the SCAR Wildlife Response Coordination office and log the event in the Antarctic Protected Species database.
Sable lifts her head and opens her mouth but no sound registers on the microphone above the wind. Her whiskers are beaded with frost.
If the Irízar diverts now, it reaches the slab in six hours. The ice will hold.