Boaty McBoatface
| Type | Autosub Long Range AUV |
|---|---|
| Operator | National Oceanography Centre |
| Named by | 124,109 members of the public |
| Named for | A different ship |
| Published in | Nature Communications |
Boaty McBoatface is an autonomous underwater vehicle of the Autosub Long Range class, operated by the UK National Oceanography Centre. Its name was produced by a public naming poll for an entirely different vessel, and it has since appeared in peer-reviewed oceanography.[1]
The poll[edit]
In March 2016 the Natural Environment Research Council invited the public to suggest a name for its new £200 million polar research ship. James Hand, a former BBC radio presenter, suggested "Boaty McBoatface", which received 124,109 votes, roughly four times the runner-up.[2] Hand then publicly apologised to the Council, which is the most British sentence in this article.
The ship was named RRS Sir David Attenborough. The Science Minister explained that a name should be in keeping with the mission, a position that was unarguable and extremely unpopular.
The compromise[edit]
The Council gave the name to one of the ship's autonomous submarines. The internet treated this as a defeat. It was not: the submarine goes where the ship cannot.
In 2017, on its first Antarctic deployment, Boaty travelled 180 km through the Orkney Passage at depths to 4,000 m and returned the first direct measurements of turbulent mixing in one of the channels through which the coldest water on the planet leaves the Antarctic.[1] The finding, published in 2019, was that increased winds over the Southern Ocean drive mixing that warms the abyssal ocean, a mechanism that had been proposed but not measured.[1]
Legacy[edit]
A joke name is now a citable instrument in the literature on deep-ocean heat transport, and appears in the acknowledgements of papers written by people who did not vote for it. The Council has not run another open naming poll.
Subsequent suggestions in other countries' naming exercises include "Trainy McTrainface", a Swedish commuter train that entered service in 2017 under that name.[3]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Eleanor Frajka-Williams et al., "Localised mixing in the Orkney Passage from Boaty McBoatface", Nature Communications 10 (2019), article 4728.
- ^ "Boaty McBoatface polar ship named after Attenborough", BBC News, 6 May 2016.
- ^ "Trainy McTrainface: Swedish railway keeps Boaty's legacy alive", The Guardian, 3 July 2017.