Science at sea in Antarctica

In Antarctica, there is a type of cloud known as a ‘mixed phase cloud’ – these are clouds that are typically found where the air is below zero (like Antarctica or the UK in winter). These clouds contain a mixture of water droplets and ice crystals, and the numbers of droplets and crystals is controlled by particles of dust (known as aerosols). These dust particles act as little ‘seeds’ that the water droplets and ice crystals form on (a bit like growing a cloud).

These clouds play a critical role in our climate system by affecting the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface and the heat that escapes back into space.  

Scientists are trying to learn more about these clouds to help us predict our future climate. This research is part of a much bigger project (called CloudSense) that is investigating how clouds affect our climate all over the world.

My name is Nina and I’m a Cloud Scientist at the British Antarctic Survey. I am spending 6 weeks on the RRS Sir David Attenborough along with nine other scientists to better understand how the clouds in Antarctica and the surrounding Southern Ocean are formed.

Life onboard as a scientist is very busy so the time has flown by! Each day there are new measurements to do, experiments to run, data to analyse and always something interesting to look out of the porthole windows at. Even from inside the ship’s labs we can see the huge slabs of sea ice, with the occasional penguin or seal hanging out, while we run our experiments. 

After spending the last week doing science at sea, today I left the ship on one of the smaller boats for a visit to Bird Island, to collect samples from the mosses and lichens that grow there. This involved clambering over giant mounds of tussock grass and dodging the fur seals that hide among them, some sun, some snow and lots of mud.

Bird Island is a wildlife hub; we saw gentoo penguins with their chicks on the beach close to the Research Station and huge wandering albatrosses in nests high up on Wanderer’s Ridge. It’s surprising to see, when you look closely, just how many different living things thrive in such cold places – and this biology can impact clouds too. 

Our whole science team is interested in clouds; some of us are investigating the chemistry of tiny cloud-forming particles in the air and others more interested in their sources (things like volcanos, penguins, and plants) and understanding how these important particles move in the atmosphere.

Flying high

What better way to investigate clouds than from the skies? So, of course, taking measurements from the clouds is the third ingredient to the Southern Ocean Clouds project!

The scientists will combine measurements from all these locations – sea, land and sky – to reduce the scientific uncertainty about how clouds form over Antarctica.

The planes we use to take these measurements are the Twin Otter aircraft, departing from Rothera Research Station. Join project leader Tom Lachlan-Cope and the team in the skies as they fly to take these measurements!

Explore the ship’s labs 

RRS Sir David Attenborough is a floating laboratory. The ship has more than 750m² of built-in lab space, which includes ‘wet’ labs (where samples of water, silt and creatures are first sorted when they’re brought up from the ocean), ‘dry’ labs and ‘cold’ labs for different kinds of analysis. There are also specialist laboratories for analysing air and seawater, and a super-cold freezer for storing samples.  

We even have a dark room which can be used for bioluminescence experiments, and is home to our Scanning Electron Microscope. This special bit of kit takes super close-up images by jiggling the sample’s atoms.  

It also has space for scientific containers – these are standard 20ft shipping containers that have been kitted out as extra labs. This means the ship can have extra labs to suit the needs of the researchers on board, making the ship ultra-flexible.