Exploring Antarctic subglacial lakes with scientific probes: a formal probabilistic approach for operational risk management

摘要

Since their discovery, Antarctic subglacial lakes have become of great interest to the\udscience community. It is hypothesized that they may hold unique forms of biological life and that they\udhold detailed sedimentary records of past climate change. According to the latest inventory, a total of\ud387 subglacial lakes have been identified in Antarctica (Wright and Siegert, 2011). However,\udexploration using scientific probes has yet to be performed. We propose a generic, formal approach to\udmanage the operational risk of deploying probes during clean access to subglacial lake exploration. A\udrepresentation of the entire probe deployment process is captured in a Markov chain. The transition\udfrom one state to the next depends on several factors, including reliability of components and processes.\udWe use fault trees to quantify the probability of failure of the complex processes that must take place to\udfacilitate the transition from one state to another. Therefore, the formal framework consists of\udintegrating a Markov chain, fault trees, component and subsystem reliability data and expert judgment.\udTo illustrate its application we describe how the approach can be used to address a series of what-if\udscenarios, using the intended Ellsworth Subglacial Lake probe deployment as a case study.