Research projects

Using a Very Low Frequency receiver at Halley Research Station we can pick up radio waves made by our planet. We use these waves to investigate the science of space …

For centuries people have used magnetic compasses to guide them on their way and explore new territories. This has led scientists to embark on their own journeys of discovery about …

Understanding Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) and its affect on global ocean circulation.

The source of sea-salt aerosols in the Polar Regions appears to be linked to sea ice surfaces, but exact details are unclear. Defining the sources is important given the critical …

Major changes are occurring across the North Atlantic climate system: in the ocean and atmosphere temperatures and circulation, in sea ice thickness and extent, and in key atmospheric constituents such …

West Antarctic ‘rivers’ of ice

Exploring Antarctica’s ‘ghost mountains’

Recent increases in the spatial coverage and temporal resolution of 40 m resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, is opening new opportunities to rapidly detect environmental observations e.g. ice sheet and iceberg position with greater positional accuracy. Our team are developing supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques to automatically detect sea ice and iceberg position from Sentinel-1 SAR imagery.

In the AI for smart conservation project, BAS are collaborating with local ecologists and conservation agencies to develop decision-making tools informed by sea ice forecasts. By combining satellite observations, GPS …

Great (Diomedea) albatrosses face multiple threats to their long-term survival. Declines in albatross populations have been linked to incidental mortality (bycatch) in fisheries, predatory invasive species (including rats, mice and …

AMOP is developing Artificial Intelligence methods that aim to optimise the efficiency of Antarctic field operations, while maximising science delivery

ANGWIN is now a SCAR action group.  See the proposal that was presented at the Polar 2018 conference here: SCAR_Proposal.pdf ANGWIN (in the Cornish English dialect ANGWIN means “the white”) …

This project will reconstruct millennial-scale ice sheet change in the western Amundsen Sea Embayment, Antarctica, using high-precision exposure dating.

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 …

Winds along the Antarctic coast are small scale but have global importance. Climate models must have a realistic representation of these winds as they influence ice shelves, sea ice and …

The aim of this study is to investigate whether a technique developed to measure the basal meltrate of ice shelves can be used to monitor groundwater in arid and semi-arid …

This research focuses on investigating the glacial histories of Arctic ice sheets and ice caps using the marine geological record preserved on continental margins. By reconstructing past ice sheets, their …

The Arctic Summer-time Cyclone Project is a joint project of scientists from the University of Reading, University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey with expertise in atmospheric dynamics, …

The ASCCC Project  has been funded by ACE (Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition) to investigate, quantify and understand the role of polar and subpolar seabeds in the carbon cycle, particularly in response …

The project Ascension Island Marine Sustainability (AIMS) – A Fisheries and Marine Biodiversity Project Ascension Island harbours globally important marine biodiversity, potentially representing a unique assemblage of western and eastern …

Antarctica is a unique and geographically remote environment. Field campaigns in the region encounter numerous challenges including the harsh polar climate, steep topography, and high infrastructure costs. Additionally, field campaigns …

The radiation belts are the region of space around the Earth where high energy charged particles are trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field. The energy of the particles and their …

The polar ice sheets play a major role in controlling Earth’s sea level and climate, but our understanding of their history and motion is poor. The biggest uncertainty in predicting …

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 …

Biodiversity@BAS is an initiative formed by BAS staff. Adopting current NERC Biodiversity policy​ and working closely with BAS Estates and Environment Office teams, its goal is to assist with the …

Overview Climate change is proceeding faster at the poles than any other region, with sea-ice retreating, glaciers melting and biotic communities being invaded by sub-polar species. These changes are affecting …

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

Wandering albatrosses are threatened by bycatch. Populations at South Georgia have declined catastrophically since the 1960s due to incidental mortality (bycatch) in fisheries (Pardo et al. 2017) [1]. This led …

Pushing forward our understanding of calcium production in the marine environment

CCfCS promotes interdisciplinary research in climate science across the wide range of departments and institutes in Cambridge.

Baseline study to monitor how marine biodiversity will respond to climate change

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 …

Does the cold affect how animals grow? Are skeletons different in Antarctic marine species, which survive almost permanently below 0°C? It is well known that animals grow at different rates …

Sea ice is an integral, changing part of the global Earth system. The polar climate system affects lives and livelihoods across the world by regulating climate and weather; providing ecosystem …

CUPIDO aims to address: what is the role of zooplankton in promoting the transport of plastic in the ocean?
and how this plastic transport interferes with zooplankton’s ability to store carbon in the deep ocean?

Overview While climate models suggest Antarctic sea ice extent should also reduce in response to rising atmospheric CO2 concentraions, satellite observations reveal that during 1979-2015 the opposite was in fact …

The biggest uncertainty in predictions of sea-level rise is what the contribution will be from the great ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland as climate warms. The West Antarctic Ice …

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of naturally occurring, chemically similar elements present in the Earth’s crust. Over the past decades these elements have become increasingly critical to many …

Environmental research relies on digital infrastructure (hardware, software and methods) to provide services that help researchers answer questions about the environment around us, and innovators to work out ways that …

Digital Twinning is next generation technology for data fusion and computer modelling enabling us to rapidly get answers to “what-if” questions. Digital Twins (DTs) are already in operation in industry …

DRAGON-WEX (the DRake pAssaGe and sOuthern oceaN – Wave EXperiment) is a NERC funded standard grant between the University of Bath and the British Antarctic Survey.   We will implement and …

DRIIVE will use the new EISCAT_3D radar to understand multi-scale coupling in the Ionopshere and how it is influenced both by space weather and the lower atmosphere.  The impact of …

Dynamics of the Orkney Passage Outflow (DynOPO) is a collaboration between BAS, the University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC). The project aims to investigate the flow of …

The UK EISCAT support group (UKESG) is a collaboration between the British Antarctic Survey and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, funded via the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) EISCAT, the …

Radiation belts of very high energy electrons and protons can form around some planets – at the Earth these large donut shaped regions in space are often called the Van …

European Marine Biological Resource Centre

A strategic framework to connect science and society

Determining the 1 in 100 year space weather event

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 …

GHC (“Geological History Constraints”) will gather information about past ice sheet behaviour and relative sea level change in the Thwaites Glacier system. Determining the timing and magniture of past episodes …

Geological maps remain the most effective method of communicating large amounts of geological information. An ongoing project to compile over 50 years of geological field data into new geological maps …

GOCE+Antarctica- Dynamic Antarctic Lithosphere -is an international project supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) that is using GOCE satellite gravity gradient data, GPS data and innovative 3D modelling to …

The British Antarctic Survey carries out Long Term Science that measures changes in Antarctic ecosystems and seeks to understand the underlying drivers and processes. Marine predators are sensitive to changes …

HOTRAY is a ray tracing computer code designed to trace the path of electromagnetic waves in a hot magnetised plasma.  HOTRAY has been used to understand the generation and propagation …

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 …

physicists, chemists, biologists, economists, and sociologists from 21 institutes in 11 countries across Europe assess the rapid retreat and collapse of Arctic sea-ice cover

The ICEGRAV project is a major international collaboration between Danish, US, UK, Norwegian and Argentinian scientists. The primary aim of the project is to carry our airborne gravity observations across …

PI: Ian Renfrew (University of East Anglia) CO-I’s: Tom Bracegirdle, Tom Lachlan-Cope, Alexandra Weiss PDRA’s: Andrew Elvidge (University of East Anglia), James Pope NERC Grant: NE/N009924/1 Project Partners: Robert Pickart …

IceNet is a probabilistic, deep learning sea ice forecasting system developed by an international team and led by British Antarctic Survey and The Alan Turing Institute [Andersson et al., 2021]. …

Over the past few millions of years, the Earth’s climate has switched between (cold) glacial and (warm) interglacial states many times. Although driven by long term changes in the Earth’s …

The objective of this project was to investigate whether magnetic reconnection in the space environment has a characteristic scale in space and time by characterising statistically the spatial and temporal …

IMCONet is an international Research Network that follows an interdisciplinary approach to understand the consequences of Climate Change in coastal Western Antarctica. A Network for Staff Exchange and Training, IMCONet …

Why does global biodiversity show such a steep increase just as climates were deteriorating?

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 …

An estimated 75% of all the litter in our oceans is plastic, and around 5 million tonnes of plastic waste enter the ocean annually. Scientific observations of a significant concentration …

The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed ~3°C over the last 50 years, approximately 6 times faster than the global average. Mechanisms for this accelerated rate of warming have been linked with …

  In order to assess the impact of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) on the oceans today we are investigating the effect of decreasing upper ocean pH on calcifying zooplankton. Pteropods, …

This research aims to improve estimates of Antarctica’s contribution to sea level. Sea level is currently rising at approximately 3mm/yr. If we are to understand why it is rising and …

PI: Markus M. Frey Co-I’s: X. Yang, R. Mulvaney NERC Grant: NE/N011813/1 The ozone layer shields all land-based life forms from harmful ultraviolet radiation; and indirectly influences the climate at …

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

iStar-B strives to better understand ocean and ice interaction, processes and variability

iStar-B studies ocean circulation and melting beneath the ice shelves of the south-eastern Amundsen Sea

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

JASPER brings together two of the best equipped Polar meteorology instrumented aircraft and teams to study boundary layer meteorology in the Antarctic Peninsula and Weddell Sea. A joint project between …

Society is highly dependent on the fleet of satellites that surround our planet. We rely on them for entertainment, communication, navigation, weather forecasting, and more.  Many day-to-day activities, such as …

KRILLBASE is a data rescue and compilation project which aims to improve the availability of information on two of the Southern Ocean’s most important zooplankton taxa: Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) …

On 12 July 2017, the Larsen-C Ice Shelf calved one of the largest iceberg originating from the Antarctic Peninsula ever recorded. As iceberg A68 moves north, it  leaves behind an …

In this NERC-funded project, we are generating Southern Hemisphere Westerlies (SHW) proxy records from each of the three major sectors of the Southern Ocean, focusing on subantarctic islands situated in …

This long-term study monitors the impact of marine plastics and other debris on breeding seabirds at Bird Island. Researchers have monitored the levels of marine plastics and other material from …

Access data from the Low Power Magnetometer (LPM) network

In order to accurately predict impacts of space weather and climate variability on the whole atmosphere we need an accurate representation of the whole atmosphere. The mesosphere (~50-95 km altitude) …

Long-term meteorological and ozone observations and data help determine the causes of climate change in the polar regions. Meteorology Meteorological observations are made regularly throughout the day at Halley and …

Introduction and Background The largest uncertainties in future climate predictions highlighted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC 2007) arise from our lack of knowledge of the interaction of …

Long term science We know that our world is changing due to human influence. But how is it changing? Some areas, such as the Antarctic Peninsula, are changing more rapidly …

Polar Expertise – Supporting Development

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 …

Development of regional models to examine the detailed oceanography of island shelves and surrounding regions.

Antarctic ice-loss research capability

Understanding the Ocean Regulation of Climate by Heat, Carbon Sequestration and Transports

OFCAP is an integrated programme of field observations, analysis and modelling aimed at understanding how the westerly winds in the Antarctic Peninsula interact with the mountains and influence the climate …

Recent research has demonstrated that electro-magnetic waves present in space can have a dramatic effect on the charged particles in the radiation belts. Under certain conditions the particles can resonate …

This project will tackle the the question of how strongly changes in ocean circulation affect global climate. The study is being carried out in collaboration with Dr Steve Bohaty and …

Krill are essential components of Antarctic ecosystems – they are important prey for fish, seals, penguins, and whales, and they influence carbon and nutrient cycling. This keystone role of krill …

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 …

STFC funded research grant

The main deliverable of the Western Core Box (WCB) is a consistent unique time series of mesoscale distribution and abundance of macro-zooplankton and micronekton, and an understanding of the physical …