Over the past 40 years, ice cores have revealed more about climate change than any other scientific technique. Over the last few decades, satellites have detected changes to the amount of sea ice that covers the polar oceans. Since 1979 summer sea-ice extent in the Arctic has reduced at 10% per decade. Some major glaciers that drain the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated by as much as 50%.

RIFT-TIP

RIFT-TIP is a NERC-funded scientific project investigating iceberg calving and fracture growth in ice shelves.  The RIFT-TIP team will work primarily out of Halley Research Station, using seismic, radar, ApRES …

A boat floating on top of a snow covered mountain

KANG-GLAC

The Greenland Ice Sheet is decaying at an accelerating rate in response to climate change. Warm ocean waters moving through the fjords eventually meet the faces of marine-terminating glaciers, increasing …

A snow covered mountain

The Big Thaw

The Big Thaw is an ambitious new UKRI/NERC-funded Highlight Topic project assessing past, present and future changes in global mountain water resources by studying snow/ice accumulation and melt in the …

Bedmap

Bedmap is a collaborative community project with the aim to produce a new map and datasets of Antarctic ice thickness and bed topography for the international glaciology and geophysical community, …

Background pattern

Digital Twins of the Polar Regions

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

A man flying a kite in the snow

SIWHA

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 …

Ice Floor installation - close up of ice core

Ice Floor Sci-Art Installation

Ice Floor, is an immersive exhibition commissioned by engineering consultants Arup. UK born artist Wayne Binitie created the installation.

A close up of a refrigerator.

P-RAID

The ice sheets of Antarctica can be several kilometres thick, and contain precious information about the past climate. However, the bottoms of the ice sheets are melting, erasing this information. …

A close up of a piece of paper.

Ice sheets growing from the base

7 November, 2018

Fresh water freezing onto the bottom of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets leads to the formation of spectacular plume-shaped features, according to new research published today (7th November) in …

A group of people standing on top of a snow covered mountain.

Prestigious award for BAS early career scientist

6 November, 2018

Congratulations to Dr Emilie Capron who has been awarded the prestigious Early Career Scientist Award of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG). Dr Capron is a palaeoclimatologist at British …

A close up of a snow covered mountain.

Measuring glaciers in the Himalayan mountains

11 October, 2018

Technology pioneered in Antarctica could soon be providing much-needed data on the amount of ice in the glaciers of High Mountain Asia thanks to an ingenious helicopter-mounted, low-frequency radar developed …

A group of people on a boat.

Boaty returns from first mission under the ice

13 March, 2018

The yellow high-tech autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), affectionately known as Boaty McBoatface, has successfully returned from an ambitious science expedition deep below half a kilometre of ice. It is the …