Research projects

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

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 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 …

CONSEC is addressing the challenge to understand the links between the biodiversity, structure and function of Southern Ocean ecosystems and the impacts of rapid environmental changes to improve scientific knowledge …

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?

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 …

This is a Darwin Plus  project, funded by Defra, and its activities are focussed in the UK Overseas Territory (OT) of South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands. The project …

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 …

  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, …

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

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 …

The MMAK project is using state-of-the-art ocean-sea ice models to improve our understanding of processes that influence the distribution of krill in the South Orkney Islands region.

Polar Expertise – Supporting Development

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

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

The densest waters in the Atlantic overturning circulation, Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW), originate in the Weddell Sea, as Weddell Sea Deep Water. A large proportion is exported northward to the …

Earth System indicators in Antarctica

Sustained ocean observing programme

The polar regions are experiencing the most rapid climate change observed on Earth: temperatures are rising in some regions of the Arctic and Antarctic at more than double the global …

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 …

In this collaboration with the Natural History Museum (NHM) and the University of Liverpool, we have developed novel methods for using existing data to contribute to marine conservation and fisheries …

We are constructing observationally-constrained estimates of the state of the Weddell Gyre, including associated ice shelves and sea ice Introduction In the 25 years between 1992 and 2017, ocean melting …

The Southern Ocean Network of Acoustics (SONA) represents a group of scientific institutes and industrial partners who have united to measure an under-sampled component of the ecosystem – the mid-trophic …

SOC is a project of the NERC CloudSense Programme The biases observed in climate models over the Southern Ocean in surface radiation and sea surface temperature are larger than anywhere …

The evolution and ecology of Antarctic sea floor communities is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, led by Dr Rowan Whittle, looking at the past, present and future of life at …

The cause of the variability in atmospheric CO2 over glacial-interglacial timescales has been a puzzle since its discovery in the early 1980s. It is widely believed to be related to …

Reliable projections of the Earth’s climate are at the heart of scientific support for international efforts to address global change. There is increasing recognition that reliable projections require that physical …