British Antarctic Survey

The initial reaction to their paper was sceptical.

If the British Antarctic Survey had gotten unlucky with their panel of reviewers at Nature, their result might have been completely ignored.

Nobody had ever heard of these underfunded British people, and the ground-based instruments used had a reputation for being quite flaky.

And the results didn't make any sense given the Roland Molina theory.

The initial reaction to their paper was sceptical.

If the British Antarctic Survey had gotten unlucky with their panel of reviewers at Nature, their result might have been completely ignored.

Nobody had ever heard of these underfunded British people, and the ground-based instruments used had a reputation for being quite flaky.

And the results didn't make any sense given the Roland Molina theory.

And that is by far the most important element in terms of this story.

South Georgia has a research station maintained by British Antarctic Survey.

And really, up until the 1980s, there used to be a small contingent of Royal Marines based in South Georgia as part of the deterrence factor, because South Georgia continues to be counterclaimed by Argentina.

So If you take the longer view, what you find is the intersection of military presence with scientific presence has altered in the Falklands, in South Georgia and in what the United Kingdom calls British Antarctic Territory.

It's just expensive.

The UK does actually have the kit, right, to actually be there.

They've made that investment over many, many decades, right, through the British Antarctic Survey to a large extent.

Perhaps you can talk a bit about that organization, BAS, as an instrument of British geopolitics in the Southern Hemisphere.

More than a decade later, decisive observational evidence emerged.

In 1985, a team from the British Antarctic Survey discovered the existence of a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica.

Soon after, scientists at NASA were able to image the hole.

The findings shocked the world.

I'm a researcher studying seals from space.

So I'm just finishing my PhD at the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey.

And I'm within the wildlife from space team.

and really my research is all about how can we use satellites to study seals in Antarctica.

So I had funding from the foreign office to effectively run some citizen science campaigns.

And for these campaigns, I targeted students from disadvantaged and underrepresented backgrounds.

to come into the British Antarctic Survey and help me analyze my satellite imagery.

And the good thing about this is I could sell it to students as being, a thing where I just need help counting animals in a photo.

And there are places we went to where there was no data at all, no ground data at all, especially around the South Pole of inaccessibility.

And the And scientists we are working on at the British Antarctic Survey and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany were so curious and eager to get those data.

And obviously, we're not selling this data.

We give this data for free.