The evolution and ecology of Antarctic sea floor communities
Antarctic seafloor ecosystems are both unique and fragile. Studying their past and present gives us valuable insights into how climate change may reshape them.
I am an interdisciplinary scientist, with a first class undergraduate masters degree in Geoscience, a postgraduate masters degree in Biological Science and a PhD in Palaeontology.
As a palaeobiologist at the British Antarctic Survey, my recent research has focussed on the evolution of polar ecosystems on several different levels, from tracing the history of individual taxa through time to looking at the interaction of taxa and the community structure as a whole. These studies have also examined the interaction and evolution of biota through changing climatic and tectonic regimes.
Trotter, C., Griffiths, H., Khan, T., Purser, A., & Whittle, R. (2025). The Weddell Sea Benthic Dataset: A computer vision-ready object detection dataset for in situ benthic biodiversity monitoring model development (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/1ba97e4b-efb7-460b-9f2d-90437e33ce09
Khan, T., Griffiths, H., Whittle, R., Stephenson, N., Delahooke, K., Purser, A., Manica, A., & Mitchell, E. (2025). Organisms identified from OFOBS images from PS118 Profiles 6_9 (Weddell Sea) and 69 (Powell Basin), April – May 2019 (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/7fb2f0c1-413c-4cd6-84ab-a504bf431290
Khan, T., Whittle, R., Witts, J., Griffiths, H., Manica, A., & Mitchell, E. (2025). Invertebrate fossil occurrences from the Cretaceous Lopez de Bertodano Formation (Maastrichtian), Seymour Island, housed in the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), Ithaca, NY (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/c1252fb5-8075-431c-a78b-1c1d8da37c5e
Trotter, C., Griffiths, H., Khan, T., & Whittle, R. (2025). Automated detection of Antarctic benthic organisms in high-resolution in situ imagery to aid biodiversity monitoring: optimal model weights (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/b2874f3f-285d-4ae6-9bb4-6bfe3eacbfff
Linse, K., Grant, S., Whittle, R., Reid, W., McKenzie, M., Federwisch, L., Polfrey, S., & Apeland, B. (2020). Benthic seafloor images from Prince Gustav Channel and Duse Bay, Eastern Antarctic Peninsula, March 2018 (Version 1.0) [Data set]. UK Polar Data Centre, Natural Environment Research Council, UK Research & Innovation. https://doi.org/10.5285/48dcef16-6719-45e5-a335-3a97f099e451
Antarctic seafloor ecosystems are both unique and fragile. Studying their past and present gives us valuable insights into how climate change may reshape them.
The Larsen-C Benthos project studied benthic biodiversity on the seabed exposed by the 2017 calving of the Larsen-C Ice Shelf.
SO-AntEco was a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) led expedition undertaken in conjunction with an international team of scientists from the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) AntEco research programme.
Why does global biodiversity show such a steep increase just as climates were deteriorating?
British Antarctic Survey (BAS) palaeobiologist Dr Rowan Whittle is a member of the Larsen C Benthos research cruise onboard the RRS James Clark Ross. Rowan’s primary role is to assist […]
The amazing survival strategies of polar marine creatures might help to explain how the first animals on Earth could have evolved earlier than the oldest fossils suggest according to new […]
A new study shows how marine life around Antarctica returned after the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. A team led by British Antarctic Survey studied just under 3000 […]
A new study of marine fossils from Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand and South America reveals that one of the greatest changes to the evolution of life in our oceans occurred […]
A study of more than 6,000 marine fossils from the Antarctic shows that the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs was sudden and just as deadly to life in the polar regions.