Glacier flow

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 …

DATA AS ART #10

Ice layers Radio waves can be transmitted down through an ice sheet, ice stream or glacier and are reflected off the internal layers in the ice as well as off …

Weddell Sea ice sheet and climate

In the south of the Weddell Sea lies the Ronne and Filchner Ice Shelves. During the coldest part of the last glacial period about 25,000 years ago, the ice in …

Ocean-driven ice-shelf thinning in Antarctica

By exploiting advances in ice sheet modelling, and new Antarctic-wide datasets, this project aims to predict how far and how fast the observed ocean-driven thinning of floating ice shelves will …

Ice Sheet Modelling

The research of the ice sheet modelling group focuses on integrating observational data with dynamical models that describe how the ice flows in order to improve our representation of how …

Arctic marine geophysics

This research focuses on investigating the glacial histories of Arctic ice sheets and ice caps using the marine geological record preserved on continental margins. By reconstructing past ice sheets, their …

ANiSEED

This project will reconstruct millennial-scale ice sheet change in the western Amundsen Sea Embayment, Antarctica, using high-precision exposure dating.

A snow covered mountain.

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 …

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 …

A body of water.

Giant West Antarctic iceberg disintegrates

29 November, 2017

An animation of the giant iceberg that calved off the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica just over two months ago shows an unexpected break up. Satellite images revealed a …

A snowy landscape with the sea in the background

Large iceberg breaks off Pine Island Glacier

27 September, 2017

Latest satellite images reveal a new 100-square-mile iceberg emerging from Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. The calving event did not come as a complete surprise, but is a troubling sign with …

Rifting in Larsen B Ice Shelf before its breakup in 2001

New footage shows crack in Larsen C Ice Shelf

21 February, 2017

British Antarctic Survey (BAS) recently captured this video footage of a huge crack in the Larsen C Ice Shelf, on the Antarctic Peninsula. Currently a huge iceberg, roughly the size …

A cup of coffee sitting on top of a wooden table.

New study shows when Pine Island Glacier retreat began

23 November, 2016

New study reveals when West Antarctica’s largest glacier started retreating Reporting this week (Wednesday 23 November) in the journal Nature an international team led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explains …

A large body of water.

Ocean warming primary cause of glacier retreat

14 July, 2016

A new study has found for the first time that ocean warming is the primary cause of retreat of glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Peninsula is one of the largest current contributors to sea-level rise and this new finding will enable researchers to make better predictions of ice loss from this region.