Ice and Ocean in a Changing Climate

Antarctica and the surrounding Southern Ocean play disproportionately important roles in global climate. The climate can be considered an engine powered by radiation incoming from the sun. The vast ice caps and expanses of sea ice, as well as clouds and aerosols produced in the polar regions, reflect this radiation back into space helping to cool the planet. The global ocean circulation system depends on the cold dense waters that form around Antarctica, and transports huge amounts of heat and carbon around the Earth and supplies a significant proportion of key nutrients that support biological productivity globally. However, these regions are also some of the most climatically sensitive regions and are changing at unprecedented rates; we now have extremely high confidence that these observations are linked with human activity. In West Antarctica, glaciers are retreating, and there’s great concern about vulnerable floating ice shelves, with critical implications for global sea-level. The Southern Ocean is warming, sea ice dynamics are changing, and we're already observing shifts in marine ecosystems. And because the polar regions play such an important role in global systems, all these changes have the potential to feedback on climate making mitigation even harder.
 

Our overall goal at the British Antarctic Survey is to provide critical information needed about the polar regions including the Arctic and glaciated mountainous regions in addition to the Antarctic: we need to understand how and why they're changing and what we might have in store in the future. The new BAS science strategy has its grounding in the critical information and understanding we need to inform climate policy, as is linked strongly with society and the safeguarding of everyone's future.