Oshen, a British startup, intends to deploy small, self-sailing robots with solar-powered sensors in the subpolar gyre, where they will measure such things as sea and air temperature and wind speed. Marble, another British company, is developing drones that can monitor the position and size of icebergs, the location of the glacier front and the height of the Greenland ice sheet, three variables that are essential to accurately forecast melting.

Both Oshen and Marble say their work is only possible because smartphone technology has made sensors and processing power cheap. Control systems that once required proprietary software can now be run using free, open-source code.

That’s really fucking cool