Antarctic researchers tackle hostile environments to explore uncharted scientific territory
Team awarded £3.7M to uncover critical processes in global climate systems
Professor Michael Meredith is Professorial Fellow in Oceanography, Murray Edwards College, and an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey
Professor Michael Meredith, Professorial Fellow in Oceanography, Murray Edwards College, is an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge, and Joint Director of the UK National Climate Science Partnership. He created the Polar Oceans team at BAS, which has research foci on determining the role of the polar oceans on global climate, the ice sheets, and the interdisciplinary ocean system.
Michael and his international research team have recently been awarded £3.7 million from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to advance a unique and unusually challenging study on how underwater tsunamis are triggered by glacier calving around Antarctica.
Scientists will analyse how these underwater tsunamis contribute to the mixing of ocean waters, a process that plays a critical role in shaping global climate systems, the Antarctic Ice Sheet, and marine ecosystems. The knowledge will be crucial for the global community and its ability to understand and predict the complex impacts of climate change. The team will use the latest technology to gather data from places that are very challenging for humans to access, and employ deep-learning algorithms and computer simulations to assess the impact of their findings.
As a precursor this project, dubbed Polar Ocean Mixing by Internal Tsunamis (POLOMINTS), planning is underway for a research expedition in the Antarctic winter this June. This will take place in 24 hour darkness and in the harsher conditions that typify this time of year, when some critical processes occur that would be missed by summer-only fieldwork.
But undeterred by the hostile environment, Michael says:
“This is an ambitious new science project, building on a discovery we made a few years ago that radically changed our understanding of how mixing happens in the ocean next to Antarctica. This mixing matters for our climate and future sea level rise, so the chance to go back and study it in detail is important for our society as well as scientifically exciting.
On the precursor fieldwork, we will be taking advantage of a rare opportunity to use the British Antarctic Survey’s icebreaking research ship, the RRS Sir David Attenborough, to collect wintertime data relating to ocean processes and ocean changes around Antarctica. We’ll be collecting measurements of the temperature of the ocean, how salty it is, its circulation, and its interactions with the glaciers and ice sheets of Antarctica. These measurements will span the midwinter solstice itself, and give unique new information on how the ocean around Antarctica functions and why it is so important.”
Read more about the project on the BAS website.
POLOMINTS is a collaboration led by British Antarctic Survey, and includes the Scottish Association for Marine Science, the University of Southampton, the University of Leeds, the National Oceanography Centre, the University of Exeter, and Bangor University. International partners are from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Delaware, and Rutgers University.
POLOMINTS is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (nerc.ac.uk)
Antarctica and the Earth System
The influence that Antarctica exerts on our global climate, and more broadly across ecosystems and societies, is the subject of a new book, for which Michael Meredith is the lead editor. “ Antarctica and the Earth System “ will be published on17 April, with co-editors Jess Melbourne-Thomas, Alberto Naveira Garabato and Marilyn Raphael, and contributions from across the international scientific community.