Antarctica is one the most unhospitable places on the planet, 14 million square kilometres of icy expanse that is home to vast windswept valleys, some of the driest places on Earth, active volcanoes, one of the world’s biggest lakes (hidden beneath the ice) and of course the Antarctica Ice Sheet: the biggest mass of ice of in the world.
Antarctica’s wellbeing is vital for the wellbeing of the planet. It is home to 90 per cent of the world’s freshwater ice and 70 per cent of all the Earth’s fresh water. Antarctica (Antarctica is the continent, the Antarctic refers to the entire region) can be seen as the canary in the coalmine when it comes to climate change: summer temperatures have risen by more than (3°C) between 1970 and 2020, and earlier this year, scientists were stunned by temperatures up to 40°C above seasonal norms in Antarctica.
While Antarctica does not have a permanent population, there are roughly 80 research stations located there, home to about 4,000 people during the summer and 1,000 during the continent’s long, incredibly harsh winters.
For the scientists working there, Antarctica offers unique insights. “Antarctica is unique in that is a pristine environment (e.g. a lack of man-made aerosols – from the likes of car exhausts, incinerators and smelters) that allow us to show what the pre-industrial northern hemisphere may have been like,” says Dr Tracy Moffat-Griffin, Atmospheric Scientist and Deputy Science Leader of British Antarctic Survey’s Atmosphere, Ice and Climate team.
Antarctica is the continent most cut-off from direct human influence and so is the perfect place to study climate change on both a local and global level. Scientists can understand past climate change through Antarctica’s ice and sedimentary records and understand more about both natural and man-made changes to our planet.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is the United Kingdom's national polar research institute, and currently operates four research stations during the year and one in the summer. For the past 60 years, BAS has been responsible for most of the UK’s scientific research in Antarctica and its current five-year research strategy is aimed at deepening our understanding of climate change.
In 2004, ice core scientists at BAS working together with colleagues from other European nations successfully extracted a three-kilometre ice core from the Antarctic. This core contains a record of the Earth’s climate stretching back 800,000 years – revealing the oldest continuous climate record yet obtained from ice cores.
“We are able to use ice cores to understand the past climate and changes that have occurred in temperature and CO2 levels in the past,” Moffat-Griffin says. Much like the rings on a tree trunk, these ice cores allow scientists to track climate and temperature changes for hundreds of thousands of years, and calculate how modern amounts of carbon dioxide and methane compare to those of the past, and, essentially, compare past concentrations of greenhouse gasses to temperature.
Antarctica is not owned by any one country, but is governed internationally through the Antarctic Treaty system. The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959 by 12 countries who had scientists in and around Antarctica at the time.
The British Antarctica Survey is working in a number of areas on the continent, but for the Atmosphere, Ice and Climate team, the priorities include: Understanding the drivers for the amount of Antarctic sea ice; improving the understanding of the future occurrence/strength of atmospheric weather extremes and their impacts on things like glacier melt rates and sea level rise; and identifying aerosol sources in the polar regions, especially the sources of particles relevant to cloud formation in this region to help improve model representation of clouds in atmospheric climate models.
For Moffat-Griffin, the unique location the scientists work in presents a number of challenges. “Antarctica is a hostile environment even in summer, it means that you have to be aware of the risks of everything from sun burn to cold injuries,” she says. “It’s remote nature means that plans for logistics have to be made a long time in advance, to ensure that the right people are in the right place at the right time and also that the bases stay supplied with food and fuel.”
The time BAS scientists spend in Antarctica can vary from a few weeks to two summers and a winter, depending on the nature of their work.
One area they have focused on in recent years is the ozone layer. “As the ozone hole recovers (thanks to the success of the Montreal protocol) we are seeing changes in Antarctic atmospheric circulation which has caused a change in their trends,” Moffat-Griffin says.
“We are seeing this in observations and reanalysis datasets. This highlights [the fact] that the ozone hole recovery will cause changes in long term trends but also that we are likely to see more influence of climate change across the continent. We have also been working on a problem identified in the IPCC report, which showed low confidence in the representation of polar region clouds in models. Through a combined modelling and observational approach, we are starting to understand how improvements can be made.”
The Antarctic scientific community is unsurprisingly tight-knit, according to Moffat-Griffin. “It was a nice to see how well everyone there was working together and the really good sense of community. For me the most surprising thing was how much the quietness and feeling of relative isolation at the end of the world in that pristine environment put everything else into perspective.”
And while the work being done in Antarctica is of vital importance, so is the ability to translate that work into policy changes. BAS researchers “are involved in IPCC activities, feed into the Antarctic Treaty System, work with Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and also the Scientific Commission for Antarctic Research (SCAR),” Moffat-Griffin says.