Filchner Ice Shelf System, Antarctica
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 …
Understanding the role of the Polar Regions in climate change is a huge scientific challenge and an urgent priority for society. Our multidisciplinary climate research programmes investigate a wide range of science questions providing accurate information to politicians and policy makers.
The Antarctic is a pivotal part of the Earth’s climate system and a sensitive barometer of environmental change. Although remote and inhospitable, Antarctica is Earth’s most powerful natural laboratory. Understanding how the Antarctic is responding to current climate change – and what the continent was like in the past – is essential if scientists are to be able to more accurately predict future climate change and provide accurate information to politicians and policy makers.
British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has for the past 60 years been responsible for most of the UK’s scientific research in Antarctica and its current five-year research strategy is focussed on deepening our understanding of climate change.
Antarctic ice cores reveal the clearest link between levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the Earth’s temperature. They show that the temperature of the climate and the levels of greenhouse gases are intimately linked. In 2004, ice core scientists at BAS working together with colleagues from other European nations successfully extracted a three-kilometre ice core from the Antarctic. This core contains a record of the Earth’s climate stretching back 800,000 years – giving us by far the oldest continuous climate record yet obtained from ice cores.
BAS geologists can look back even further in time. By studying Antarctic rocks and sediments from the sea and lake beds, they are able to get a picture of what the Antarctic was like millions of years ago when the continent was warm and supported plants and animals such as dinosaurs. Understanding how the ice sheets that currently cover the continent developed and how they have receded in the past is essential if we are to be able to predict how those ice sheets will behave in a warmer world.
Much of BAS science is done on the Antarctic Peninsula – one of the fastest warming parts of the planet. BAS glaciologists are also studying the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, parts of which are thinning rapidly. Their work is crucial to understanding whether this thinning could signal the start of the ice sheet’s collapse, an event that would cause sea levels to rise much more than currently predicted.
On sea as well as on land, BAS scientists are investigating climate change. As the waters warm around Antarctica, ecologists at BAS are looking at how penguins, seals and the other species that make up one of the world’s largest marine ecosystems are responding.
Because the causes and effects of climate change are extraordinarily complex, assembling all the pieces of the climate change jigsaw is a huge challenge. By conducting world-class science in the Antarctic, BAS is making a significant contribution to meeting this challenge.
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 …
A strategic framework to connect science and society
iStar-D will identify the potential contribution to sea-level rise, from ice locked in the Amundsen Sea sector of Antarctica
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 …
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
1 January, 2019
1 January, 2019
1 December, 2018
1 December, 2018
1 December, 2018
24 May, 2021
British Antarctic Survey researchers will work on a new Horizon 2020 project to advance their understanding of polar processes in the global climate system. The CRiceS project, or Climate relevant …
21 May, 2021
An enormous iceberg has calved from the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf, in Antarctica. The iceberg, newly named A-76, measures around 4320 sq km in size and is …
19 May, 2021
For the first time, geological records have been used to reconstruct the history of Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The ice shelf is the largest remaining remnant of a …
19 April, 2021
For the first time, researchers have collected data from underneath the remote Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica using an underwater robot.
9 December, 2020
Polar climate scientists have created the most high resolution past record of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds. The results, published this week (9 December) in the journal Communications Earth and …
27 November, 2020
Large krill swarms in the Southern Ocean could help remove additional carbon from the atmosphere, in a way that is currently ‘hidden’ in global models. Scientists knew that the carbon-rich …
25 November, 2020
Applications for PhD projects with British Antarctic Survey (BAS) are now open for October 2021 admission. There are currently over 100 PhD students associated with BAS, working on a huge variety …
23 September, 2020
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has recognized a temperature of -69.6°C (-93.3°F) at an automatic weather station in Greenland on 22 December 1991 as the coldest ever recorded in the …
21 August, 2020
New research has revealed that climate changes associated with past episodes of abrupt warming in Greenland occurred synchronously across a region extending from the Arctic to the Southern Hemisphere subtropics. …
10 August, 2020
A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, supports predictions that the Arctic could be free of sea ice by 2035. High temperatures in the Arctic …