British Antarctic Survey

Scientists are studying how much heat is entering the deep ocean around Antarctica and whether some of it could return to the atmosphere.

British Antarctic Survey Director Dame Jane Francis says researchers are trying to understand where the ocean stores that human-produced heat.

It's absorbing a lot of human-made heat and it's taking that heat down into the bottom of this deep ocean.

And what scientists really want to know is where that heat is going and if it's going to stay there for a long time.

Imagine walking through the quiet aisles of an archive, opening a wooden drawer and coming face to face with a piece of history that rewrites what we know about polar exploration and ancient life.

For nearly 40 years, an unassuming piece of petrified bones had tucked away in a cabinet within the geology collection of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge.

To anyone passing by, it looked like just another dusty rock among thousands of specimens gathered from icy expeditions over the decades.

Yet, as scientists recently revealed, this quiet specimen holds an extraordinary distinction.

Because they were uncertain of its exact identity, the fossil was packed away with other field samples, shipped thousands of miles back to the United Kingdom, and eventually placed inside a storage drawer.

Decades passed until Dr.

Mark Evans, the collections manager at the British Antarctic Survey, began sifting through the institution's vast archives.

As Dr. Evans looked through the drawers, his eyes fell upon the forgotten specimen.

Alison George is with us.

You're a former British Antarctic Survey Scientist.

Thwaites has already contributed to 4% of sea level rise around the world.

That's kind of crazy in itself that one thing is responsible for that much.

Yes,

yeah, I was told it could break off any minute.

And the British Antarctic Survey, in fact, had prepared an obituary just in case they switched on their satellites and realised that this ice shelf had gone.

But that didn't happen and it's winter now and the sea has frozen and that's holding the ice shelf in place.

And Bill Sladen was one of the last heroic researchers in Antarctica.

He was medical officer for the British Antarctic Survey back in the 1950s.

And actually, they set up a station and a supply ship went away and their station burned down.

So they had to live on penguins and seals for a couple months.

And rather worryingly, the paper's authors also found that the models that best match recent real world observations are also the models producing the highest future losses.

Another recently published paper from the European Geosciences Union was co-authored by Dr Ella Gilbert from the British Antarctic Survey, who you might know better as Dr Gilbs from her YouTube channel.

This paper tackled one of the biggest challenges scientists face when trying to understand Antarctica's future, which is the fact that the continent is huge, remote and incredibly difficult to measure.

Weather stations are sparse, satellite data has limitations, and many existing global climate models simply don't have the resolution to capture Antarctica's extremely complex coastal weather systems.

and we hold defense's only capability for air dispatch so anything that gets thrown out the back of an airplane on a parachute that's not a person so you're looking at like boats vehicles medical equipment blood whatever it is we throw that out the back of airplanes on parachutes and it tends to be during kind of humanitarian situations when something's needed Like the recent virus that we then dropped aid to a tiny island called Tristan da Cunha, which is the most remote island in the world.

Or it could be even dropping fuel to the British Antarctic Survey.

So we do all of that.

hugely kind of a broad remit it's really exciting we have people ready to go out the door at an hour's notice so they can deploy at any point to go all over the world to do this kind of stuff and it happens regularly we do a lot of search and rescue stuff with the coast guard and Yeah, it's a really exciting job, but it means you don't really switch off.

said Eric Renaud, a report author and professor of Earth System Science at UC Irvine.

Robert Larder, a marine geophysicist at British Antarctic Survey, said, The reality is that there is a lot we still need to find out about grounding zone processes to be able to make confident predictions about how fast ice will be lost.

Getting observational data from Thwaites' grounding line is the next step.

The scientists are planning to travel there in 2028 to deploy instruments able to document the flushing in and out of seawater.

I feel like there's a bit of an obligation for me to continue telling factual stories that are relevant, that there is a need for me to be getting back down there because there's all sorts of stuff that comes up.

I mean, this week, the British Antarctic Survey have just released a press release about the loss of 500,000 chinstrap penguins in the South Sandwich Islands.

I haven't been to the South Sandwich Islands, but I've seen chinstrap penguins before.

So I could use some of my previous photos in my social media posts to tell that story as well.