New York Times: In December 1942, John Pritchard and two other Coast Guard aviators were listed as missing after their plane lost radio contact—and presumably crashed—during a storm off the southeast coast of Greenland.
Now, 68 years later, the Coast Guard has commissioned a private recovery team to try to locate, excavate and repatriate the three men entombed in a J2F-4 Grumman Duck biplane (see left image) buried in a glacier there. The team set out last month with an arsenal of top-of-the-line technology: ground-penetrating radar, which can detect metallic objects close to the surface; advanced ice-melting equipment, which can pinpoint buried objects as it dissolves the ice around them; a camera that can take pictures from inside deep hollows of ice; and sensors to track the speed the glacier is moving before the plane, and bodies move out to sea.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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