Research projects

The Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica have warmed dramatically in recent decades, with some climate records indicating that these are among the most rapidly warming regions on Earth. The Antarctic …

Bedmap Himalayas is an ongoing BAS core-funded and grant-funded programme. It aims to measure how much water much is stored as glacier ice in High Mountain Asia. In warm weather, …

understanding whats beneath the ice, opens new opportunities for detailed modelling of the past and future evolution of the Antarctic ice sheets

A decade ago, the European EPICA project completed drilling a deep ice core at Dome C, revealing the close link between climate and atmospheric greenhouse gases over the past 800,000 …

British Antarctic Survey is monitoring cracks on the Brunt Ice Shelf. Find out how here

During the Last Interglacial (129-116 thousand years ago, ka) CO2 and global temperature were both higher than they were before human industrialisation. By examining Last Interglacial climate, we thus gain …

Understanding the contribution that polar ice sheets make to global sea-level rise is recognised internationally as urgent.  The mission of this five-year project is to capture new observations and data …

The research of the ice sheet modelling group focuses on integrating observational data with dynamical models that describe how the ice flows in order to improve our representation of how …

Project MIDAS (Impact of Melt on Ice Shelf Dynamics And Stability) is a UK-based Antarctic research project, investigating the effects of a warming climate on the Larsen C ice shelf …

Science on the move – the mission to understand the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

iStar-C – strives to understand the dynamical control and response to change of Pine Island Glacier

iStar-D will identify the potential contribution to sea-level rise, from ice locked in the Amundsen Sea sector of Antarctica

By exploiting advances in ice sheet modelling, and new Antarctic-wide datasets, this project aims to predict how far and how fast the observed ocean-driven thinning of floating ice shelves will …

The behaviour of the westerly wind belt (see Figure 1a) over the Southern Ocean during cold glacial periods has been debated for many years. These winds matter because explanations of …

Ice cores take a long time to collect. The 3.4 km- ice core drilled at Dome Concordia (Antarctica) took 5 years to collect and encloses the oldest ice drilled so …

Abrupt warming episodes punctuate Greenland ice core records throughout the last glacial period. These events were first identified in two Greenland stable water isotope records (Dansgaard et al., 1993), and …

Field Team includes: Alex Brisbourne (BAS), Andrés Rivera (CECs), Rodrigo Zamora (CECs), Field Guide (BAS). Antarctic subglacial lakes contain unique records of ice sheet history and microbial life; they may …

The NERC funded SIWHA_CO2 project “Sea Ice and Westerly winds during the Holocene in coastal Antarctica, to better constrain oceanic CO2 uptake” will be a breakthrough in our understanding of how …

The Sub-Antarctic – ice coring expedition (SubICE), part of the international Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE), successfully drilled several shallow ice cores, from five of the remote and globally significant sub-Antarctic …

Surface Fluxes in Antarctica (SURFEIT) is a BAS National Capability International research programme. Its primary aims are to bring together relevant members of the international scientific community and increase our …

The Big Thaw is an ambitious new UKRI/NERC-funded Highlight Topic project assessing past, present and future changes in global mountain water resources by studying snow/ice accumulation and melt in the …

We will add water tracers (including stable water isotopes) to the UK Earth System Model (UKESM2) which will track through the model’s hydrological cycle. This work started under the EU …

In the south of the Weddell Sea lies the Ronne and Filchner Ice Shelves. During the coldest part of the last glacial period about 25,000 years ago, the ice in …

Changes in wind strength and circulation patterns above the Antarctic Peninsula are linked to its warming and increased upwelling of warm circumpolar deep water, resulting in accelerated melting and thinning …