Exploring the climate history and the geological structure and evolution of the rocks and mountains of Antarctica’s continental interior provides clues to past, present and future environmental change. Under-ice lakes, mountain chains buried by up to 4km ice, and sea bed sediments surrounding the frozen continent provide an unparalleled record of how the Earth’s climate has changed over millions of years.
Antarctica — our fifth largest continent — is 58-times the size of the UK. Buried beneath the snow and ice that cover more than 99% of its surface are chains of mountains the size of the Alps, while around the edge of the continent, and running across its centre, are other large mountain ranges that rise above the ice.
Geologists have studied the rocks in these mountains for more than a century. These rocks reveal that Antarctica has moved vast distances over millions of years. More than 500 million years ago, Antarctica straddled the equator, and the warm, shallow seas that covered the continent supported trilobites and other organisms long since extinct.
For hundreds of millions of years, Antarctica was locked in the centre of a giant continent called Gondwana. Around 150 million years ago, this supercontinent began to split apart, forming the modern continents of Australia, India, South America and Africa. At that time, instead of ice and snow, Antarctica was covered in dense forest and dinosaurs roamed its coastal plains.
Rocks and fossils tell us that the continent began to cool about 80 million years ago and around 35 million years ago, a vast ice sheet blanketed East Antarctica.
Locked in Antarctica’s rocks and in the sea bed around the continent is an unparalleled record of how the Earth’s climate has changed over millions of years. During the past 50 years, geologists at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have built up the world’s largest archive of Antarctic rocks and fossils and made major contributions to our understanding of Antarctica’s ancient history.
Today, using BAS’s Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross to carry out surveys at sea and BAS aircraft to study remote corners of the continent, BAS geologists are using these ancient records to help predict how future climate change will affect not only Antarctica, but also the rest of the world.
Scientists at BAS are using advanced computer models to show what the Antarctic may have looked like 3 million years ago. The models suggest that during the mid-Pliocene warm period, the ice retreated significantly from the edges of the continent and was replaced by a sparse tundra vegetation. That a rise in temperature of only a few degrees centigrade had such a profound effect on Antarctica is a stark reminder of what might happen in the near future.
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 …
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 …
Exploring Antarctica’s ‘ghost mountains’
West Antarctic ‘rivers’ of ice
This project will reconstruct millennial-scale ice sheet change in the western Amundsen Sea Embayment, Antarctica, using high-precision exposure dating.
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 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 …
1 June, 2023
Concern is rising about tipping points in the Antarctic region (Armstrong et al., 2022). Recent heatwaves, changes in the Southern Ocean, and a reduction in the extent of Antarctic sea …
27 October, 2021
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 …
6 May, 2021
We are delighted to announce that today (6 May 2021) Professor Dame Jane Francis, Director of British Antarctic Survey, and Professor Richard Horne, Head of Space Weather and Atmosphere team, …
10 March, 2021
For the first time, an international team of scientists has used satellite magnetic data from ESA’s Swarm mission, together with aeromagnetic data, to help reveal the mysteries of the geology …
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 …
1 April, 2020
An international team of researchers has provided a new and unprecedented perspective on the climate history of Antarctica. From a sediment core collected from the seafloor in West Antarctica, they …
3 July, 2019
A team of scientists has discovered a rare lava lake on a remote and inaccessible sub-Antarctic island. This volcano in the South Sandwich Islands is only the 8th to be identified worldwide to have a persistent lava lake.
19 June, 2019
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 …
28 January, 2019
An international team of scientists is travelling to the Amundsen Sea – one of the most vulnerable sectors of the Antarctic Ice Sheet – to answer vital scientific questions about …
1 August, 2018
A new ‘heat map’ shows, in unprecedented detail, how geothermal heat is escaping through the Earth’s surface beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. This is critical information for enabling scientists to …
17 July, 2018
The most comprehensive magnetic map of Antarctica ever produced is published this week (15 July 2018). The new map – which includes 3.5 million line-kilometres of magnetic anomaly data collected …