Benjamin is a remote sensing glaciologist based at the University of Leeds whose work focuses on using satellite imagery to understand the dynamics of Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers. Ben came to glaciology from a background in physics, completing his masters’ degree at the University of Oxford in 2017. He began his PhD at the …
Ice sheet evolution is the key unknown in future sea level projection. Numerical models are the best way to assess ice sheet response to future changes in ocean and atmosphere. Observations of recent ice sheet change play a critical role in improving the accuracy of these models. The current revolution in our ability to observe …
More than 100 participants from over 20 nations gathered at ESA’s ESRIN centre for the Antarctica InSync Science Planning Workshop, marking a major milestone in shaping the future of international Antarctic research. The four-day event centred on discussions around the seven priority science themes and seven cross-cutting groups, each contributing to the ambitious coordination of …
Background The Antarctica InSync Science Planning Workshop will be hosted by ESA at ESRIN, Frascati (Italy), from 3rd to 6th November 2025. Antarctica InSync is a globally coordinated scientific initiative established to address the pan-Antarctic scale of environmental change currently unfolding across the Antarctic continent and the Southern Ocean. The initiative is grounded in an …
5D Antarctica aims to produce a suite of state-of-the-art Earth Observation datasets to characterise how the coastal ice sheet and ice shelves in Antarctica have changed over the last decades, and to make use of these datasets to investigate the physical processes driving this evolution. This will provide the first integrated assessment of ice dynamic …
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Antarctica InSync coordination team are inviting the global scientific community to participate in the upcoming International Antarctica InSync Science Webinar. This online event aims to provide an in-depth update on the progress and future plans of the Antarctica InSync programme, focusing on establishing working groups centered around key …
A paper, recently published in Nature Communications, reveals that a major subglacial lake drainage event beneath Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier in 2013 temporarily doubled the rate of ocean-driven melting beneath its ice shelf. The sudden release of over 7 km³ of freshwater formed a buoyant plume that intensified the melting effect of warm, deep ocean …
SO-SIMBA aims to: Develop and validate novel methods and innovative satellite remote sensing products to quantify Antarctic sea ice mass balance; Produce and maintain a Southern Ocean sea ice mass balance dataset from EO; Assess the changes in freshwater flux between sea ice and the ocean and the consequences for ocean circulation.
The instability of Antarctic ice shelves is one of the most critical open questions in polar science, due to its capacity to drive rapid sea level change at – and beyond – current high-end climate projections. Yet forecasting future instability is notoriously difficult because of the complex, non-linear forcing mechanisms controlling an ice shelf’s response, …
Understanding the processes driving ice-ocean interactions and their timescale is pivotal in getting a full picture of the Antarctic sensitivity to future climate variability. A recently published study measured 2018-2019 increased speed and discharge of ice and calving front retreat for the Cadman Glacier, and highlighted correlation to a positive temperature anomaly in the upper …
