British Antarctic Survey

Our Director Professor Dame Jane Francis will be co-hosting this event tonight at the Royal Geographical Society to mark the 125th anniversary of Captain Scott’s British National Antarctic Expedition, which saw the discovery of the South Magnetic Pole and reached a new 'furthest south'. Tickets are still available! 👇

We want more moorings! 👏 And that’s what the GIANT science investigation is delivering, with this unique pair of ocean monitoring stations in one Greenland fjord.

As Dr Lewis Drysdale from explains, these moorings will tell us about the action near the glacier ice face, as well as how the fresher water is interacting with the ocean at the fjord mouth. We even think that the mooring by the glacier may be the closest one has ever been placed...

Moorings are an MVP of ocean science for a reason, gathering samples and data reliably from:
⬇️ a range of depths
📍 in one location
📅 over days/months/years

These moorings will be a consistent complement to the range of surveys the team are doing with our ship and a fleet of robots across 3-miippugut fjord.

This all adds up to one big, important portrait of a Greenland fjord: the glacier, the water, and the influence they might have on ocean currents and climate.

Nature roars! Scientists and crew on board RRS Sir David Attenborough captured footage of a huge glacier calving event in East Greenland.

The team were working near Sorgenfri Gletsjer, at the top of 3-miippugut Fjord, north of Kangerlussuaq Fjord. As evening set in, a big section of the glacier-front calved off all at once. The section that broke away covered 1km width across the ice face and was an average of 100m thick - totalling an estimated 18 million metric tonnes.

While Greenland’s ice sheet is losing mass at record rates, calving events are a normal part of the fluctuation and balance of ocean-terminating glaciers, particularly in summer.

At the time, the research ship was more than a kilometre away from the calving and emerging icebergs. As the event began, the crew responded by turning the ship into the safest position to handle waves. RRS Sir David Attenborough is a capable icebreaker-class vessel - usually seen near Antarctica, traversing sea ice and navigating around the vast tabular icebergs that are more typical to the frozen South.

The ship is in Greenland as part of the GIANT science expedition. The aim is to understand and model how Greenland’s glaciers interact with the warming ocean - including melting and calving - a set of processes that are not currently well represented in climate simulations.

This spectacular event is a reminder of why we are using a fleet of specialist autonomous vehicles to capture data near the ice face!

🎥 Loïs Blay & Alice Fremand

It might be Sewing Bee season, but we’re talking about a very different kind of darn…

Right now, 40 radars scattered across the polar regions are quietly watching the upper atmosphere, tracking invisible rivers of charged particles flowing 250 km above Earth’s surface. This is SuperDARN, and the data it collects helps keep our satellites safe.

SuperDARN monitors the ionosphere - a dynamic, electrified layer of the upper atmosphere, about 60 – 1,000km above Earth’s surface – where many satellites, including the International Space Station, orbit.

The Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is an array of radars that measure the movement of charged particles in the polar ionosphere. Think of it as tracking the ‘winds’ of the upper atmosphere. By combining data from radars across the globe, scientists can produce real-time weather maps of the ionosphere that reveal how energy travels from the Sun, through Earth’s magnetic environment, down into our atmosphere.

This matters for all of us. When solar activity heats the upper atmosphere, satellites experience increased drag, pushing them off course in ways that can be dangerous and costly. SuperDARN data helps predict when and where this happens, protecting the satellites we depend on every day. It also helps identify when GPS signals are likely to be disrupted, improving safety for aviation and shipping, for example.

The British Antarctic Survey has been part of SuperDARN since the very beginning. Our radar in the Falkland Islands is part of the network, and we host one of only three global data mirrors, making measurements freely available to researchers worldwide.

Last month, our team joined around 70 scientists from across the globe at the annual SuperDARN workshop to share new research, coordinate the network and plan the next year of international collaboration. We presented new software and data products, led coordination meetings and heard about exciting new work combining SuperDARN with satellite missions to push the science even further.

Space weather is a global challenge and tackling it takes global science collaboration.