Uploaded March 2022 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
KYIV, UKRAINE — Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles fired into Ukraine from Russia have been found to contain decoys that trick air-defense radars and heat-seeking missiles, according to The Drive.
One 9M723 missile can be loaded with at least six of what the Collective Awareness to Unexploded Ordnance group has identified as Russian 9B899 submunition.
These decoys are released during the terminal phase of the missile’s flight, according to Michael Duitsman of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, likely in response to the primary, 9M723 missile being illuminated by air defense radars, according to The Drive.
The decoys themselves seem to contain a jammer that can disrupt radar-frequency emitters and a heat source to mislead infrared-guided missiles, and The New York Times explains that their use could partly explain Ukrainian air-defense weapons’ difficulty in intercepting Russia’s Iskander missiles.
KYIV, UKRAINE — Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles fired into Ukraine from Russia have been found to contain decoys that trick air-defense radars and heat-seeking missiles, according to The Drive.
One 9M723 missile can be loaded with at least six of what the Collective Awareness to Unexploded Ordnance group has identified as Russian 9B899 submunition.
These decoys are released during the terminal phase of the missile’s flight, according to Michael Duitsman of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, likely in response to the primary, 9M723 missile being illuminated by air defense radars, according to The Drive.
The decoys themselves seem to contain a jammer that can disrupt radar-frequency emitters and a heat source to mislead infrared-guided missiles, and The New York Times explains that their use could partly explain Ukrainian air-defense weapons’ difficulty in intercepting Russia’s Iskander missiles.



![Antarctic Shipwreck: Search for 100 Year-Old Lost Ship Set to Begin
FALKLAND ISLANDS — An expedition to find the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance will set sail to search the depths of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea next month, according to the BBC.
The iconic ship sank in November of 2015 after becoming trapped in Antarctic sea ice during an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic.
Now, funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, the South African-registered research ship, the Agulhas [f]II will for a second time attempt to find it.
The same team failed in a previous attempt in 2019 when its autonomous underwater vehicle lost contact with the surface and as such the new expedition will utilize two different robot submersibles, known as SAAB [g]Sabertooths, to travel the estimated 900 meters down to the seabed.
According to the Expedition’s website, the Sabertooths will not be equipped to take samples from the wreck. Instead they will use cameras and scanners to undertake a high-resolution digital survey of the wreck.
The expedition will also undertake a program of sea ice monitoring and measurements. Antarctic Shipwreck: Search for 100 Year-Old Lost Ship Set to Begin](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pn7fAp77tVc/mqdefault.jpg)





![Antarctica’s ‘Glue’ Is Coming Unstuck.
ANTARCTICA — The 2017 calving of the A68 iceberg from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf was likely caused by thinning ice melange[d], the mix of windblown snow, iceberg debris and frozen seawater that normally acts to glue rifts together with larger blocks.
That’s according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found the circulation of ocean water beneath ice shelves and radiative warming from above gradually deteriorates the ice melange.
Counterintuitively, if the ice shelves themselves thin, rifts tend to heal, with average annual widening rates dropping from 79 to 22 meters, or 259 to 72 feet. Additionally, if both the shelves and the melange thinned, this also slowed rift widening.
Only when the melange thinned separately to the ice shelf was rift widening found to increase, from an average annual rate of 76 to 112 meters, or 249 to 367 feet.
The reason for that is that the ice melange starts out much thinner than the ice shelf itself, so when it thins down to 10 or 15 meters thick, it becomes akin to water, allowing the ice shelf rifts to be released and start to crack.
The study’s lead author, Eric Larour, cited by SciTechDaily, says this idea explains why the A68 iceberg was able to break from the Larsen C ice shelf in the dead of the Antarctic winter, because even in winter, warmer ocean water can reach the melange from below.
Previously scientists had thought such large iceberg calving events in the Antarctic Peninsula were caused by hydrofracturing, according to Larour, whereby ‘melt pools on the surface allow water to seep down through cracks in the ice shelf, which expand when the water freezes again,’ but this would not be possible in the dead of winter, with no melt pools present.
The study, then, partially explains how ice shelves can start retreating and becoming unstable decades before hydrofracturing could act on them, and this, according to one of the study’s co-authors, means “we may need to rethink our estimates about the timing and extent of sea level rise from polar ice loss — i.e., it could come sooner and with a bigger bang than expected.” Antarctica’s ‘Glue’ Is Coming Unstuck.](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rbVDd_H12es/mqdefault.jpg)
