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Prof. Eric Rignot is a Distinguished Donald Bren Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine as well as an Academic Partner and Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research focuses on the interaction of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets with global climate, using satellite remote sensing, airborne remote sensing, in-situ measurements, and climate modelling.

During his career, Prof. Rignot has made significant contributions to understanding the dynamics of glacial ice and the effects of climate change on polar ice sheets. He is featured in the recently released film, 2050, produced by Bargoens and financed by Syensqo.

We caught up with him after his return from a successful field campaign on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf in East Antarctica during the 2024-25 BELgian Antarctic Research Expedition (BELARE), based at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, the world’s first zero-emission polar research station.

What was the purpose of your trip to Antarctica this year?

The goal of our expedition is to see to what extent the warming southern ocean is melting the King Baudouin Ice Shelf in East Antarctica. When the ice coming off of a glacier on the continent flows out onto the ocean and starts floating we call this extension of the glacier over the water an "ice shelf”.

Melt that occurs on ice shelves is one of the main drivers of ice loss in Antarctica, so understanding how the ocean is eroding the King Baudouin Ice Shelf from below is key to understanding the mass balance of the ice sheet covering the continent and its impact on sea level rise.

Why did you focus your research on King Baudouin Ice Shelf in particular?

Because this is an area where we have a large ice flux from the continent flowing towards the coast.

Ice comes onto the ice shelf via the King Baudouin Ice Stream. It’s not an officially recognized name, but it’s the biggest glacier in the area and it is 800 metres thick. We want to follow where the ice is going. If you want to know the history of ice and how fast it melts with time, you have to track pieces of ice along their flow lines.

Another reason is the exceptional location of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Station. It’s in a convenient location to study the King Baudouin Ice Shelf. And the King Baudouin Ice Stream is accessible - not too full of crevasses. You can move around on foot and on skidoos. There aren’t too many places in Antarctica where you can study an ice stream and an ice shelf so easily. In other places you need more expensive logistics - planes, helicopters, ships, etc., to be able to do thorough enough research. You’re lucky if you can get to study one ice shelf in situ at least once in your career.

Near the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Station, it’s possible for us to set up long-term observation stations. Scientists need to observe the environment for a long time and in detail in order to understand the physical processes at work and the evolution of the ice. It is essential to have a continuous data set over a long period of time to fully understand what’s going on. Most of this observational record currently does not exist, which limits our progress in understanding the evolution of ice and in turn to project sea level rise.

What did you do during your fieldwork this past season?

We set up five base camps starting from the front of the ice shelf, where it breaks into icebergs, going back 80 km to the grounding line, where glacial ice flowing off of the continent starts to float over the water as the ice shelf.

At each basecamp we had several objectives.

We did radar sounding surveys to understand the complex internal structure of the ice shelf and determine its thickness at various locations. We also conducted seismic surveys to measure the seafloor depth beneath the ice shelf, which has never been measured before in detail. We need to know both the thickness of ice and the depth of the ocean to understand how the ocean water interacts with the ice and melts the ice shelf from below.

At each basecamp we wanted to drill through the ice shelf to the ocean below to deploy a conductivity, depth and temperature (CDT) device. We wanted to document the kind of water that enters the cavity below the ice shelf and interacts with the bottom of the ice shelf - specifically to determine the temperature and salinity of the water.

However things didn’t go exactly as planned. We drilled two holes successfully and then lost the drill head in the second hole. But the drill was still experimental at this stage. It was challenging to drill through the ice shelf because there were thick, refrozen melt layers and ice refreezing more rapidly than we anticipated during drilling.

We did manage to do a number of CDT measurements at the front of the ice shelf, where it meets the ocean. We found that at the seafloor, 750 metres below sea level, the water is warm, at about 0.7°C. That might not seem warm to you, but by Antarctic standards it is warm.

The average temperature for Antarctic ocean water is -2°C. The salt in the ocean water lowers its freezing point. And the freezing point drops even more as you go deeper into the ocean; it drops by 0.75°C for every additional kilometre below the sea surface because of the increase in water pressure.

So, 0.7°C is well above the melting point of sea ice. And water stores a lot of heat because of its high heat capacity, so there is plenty of energy to melt basal ice in this sector.

The grounding line of the King Baudouin Ice Shelf has a depth of 700-800 metres. We wanted to verify that the warm water detected at the ice front at 750 m is able to reach the grounding line, but we were not able to do so. We’ll have to try again during another season.

As we couldn’t do all the drilling we had hoped for, we conducted more radar and seismic surveys, which revealed a lot of interesting features about the ice shelf.

What did these radar surveys reveal?

One of the key areas of interest is the zone around the grounding line, where the glacial ice from the ice stream on the continent becomes the floating ice shelf. We think this zone around the grounding line is where the interaction of ice with the ocean is the strongest. Given the extra time, we collected about six times more data in the grounding zone than we had originally planned for, and we made interesting discoveries.

For instance, we knew there are channels of concentrated melt near the grounding line that are aligned with the ice flow direction. But we also found channels that extend perpendicular to those, which was surprising as we do not know how they formed, as well as areas on the flanks of the channels that we call “terraces” because they have a perfectly flat bottom; these are other surprising features to find near the grounding line.

We also found an unusual melt channel on the west side of the ice shelf, which is deep and forms a bump at the surface. In general, a melt channel forms a trough, because the ice is thinner, so it floats at a lower elevation. Here, we found the opposite situation: the ice is thin at the centre but protrudes above the surrounding area at the surface. Our interpretation is that the channel is formed by compression forces by the glacier combined with high melt in the channel, which makes it thinner. We will investigate this relationship in more detail in the coming months.

Scientific curiosity drove us to investigate further. As a scientist, when you’re in the field, if you stumble on something surprising or unexpected, you want to measure more. You measure as much as you can and adapt your work plan accordingly. It’s most exciting and productive to do this while still in the field, which is why we analyzed our data almost daily when we returned to our base camp to refine our plans for the next day.

We also used to think that meltwater channels start at the grounding line, which is where the ice starts to flex and bend with the oceanic tides. This season, we found that this isn’t a necessary condition. We discovered a meltwater channel extending further upstream into the continental ice, at least 3 km. This means that seawater can follow more permanent conduits beneath the ice than those that open and close with the tidal cycles, sort of unknown permanent caves extended beneath grounded ice.

During a previous expedition in 2011, Belgian colleagues found a subglacial lake inside the ice shelf. No one expected to find meltwater inside the ice. We need to understand how these water pockets form, how their formation changes with time, and their influence on ice shelf stability. Similarly, the melt channel we found that extends far upstream creates a line of weakness to climate warming for the system.

Lakes forming inside an ice shelf is bad news because it makes the ice shelf more prone to break up. When this happens, the broken ice shelf lets a lot of continental ice flow faster towards the ocean, much like removing the cork of a bottle, and this rises sea level, or messes up the floor of your kitchen.

Do you have any hypotheses about where this meltwater channel could come from?

The channel could form on the lee side of a bump in the bedrock upstream that the glacier flows over. Perhaps this initiates its formation. Once that channel starts to melt, it might become a self-sustaining process.

Conversely, on other parts of the ice shelf we found terraces, i.e. areas where the bottom of the ice shelf is completely flat. On terraces, there is no buoyancy force driving ice melt; the ice shelf protects itself for further influence by the ocean. We were surprised to find them so close to the grounding line on an ice shelf, where meltwater flow is assumed to be turbulent, because we think terraces can only occur in places with low flow speed of the water - relatively calm conditions - yet we found them to form within a couple of kilometres of the grounding line.

We also found that melt becomes active over some section of ice, then ceases, then initiates again further downstream. It’s a phenomenon that we haven’t yet been able to document; ice melt varies tremendously on small spatial scales.

So do these cavities actually form behind the grounding line?

They normally form in the proximity of the grounding line. I saw one near the grounding line last season with only three radar transects.  This year, using about 20 radar transects, we got a much better idea of the shape and extent of several cavities.

To understand their formation, we’ll need more observations of the seafloor depth and ice thickness, because we think these cavities form in regions favourable for more turbulent mixing, and these regions occur in places with favourable bathymetry. We will come back with more advanced technology to do this.  We also hope to explore the cavity with automatic underwater vehicles (AUVs) during another season to get much finer details about the cavities. Our work this season was a first step in that direction.

You used a sledgehammer to get seismic images of the ice sheet and sea floor below it. How does this work?

At different locations along the ice shelf, we placed 24 geophones connected by a 230-m long cable. We used a sledgehammer to strike the surface of the ice shelf and generate a sound wave that travels through the ice, into the ocean waters and back. The geophones recorded the echo of that noise from the bottom of the ice shelf and also from the seafloor. The echoes come back within one second. From these data, we estimate water depth and ice thickness.

It was amazing how well this works. This type of seismic imaging was traditionally done with small explosives. But following the advice of a colleague at the Norwegian Polar Institute, the technology has evolved enough so that even the sound of a sledgehammer hitting the ice surface is sufficient to hear echoes from the seafloor about one second later.

You also deployed a second automatic weather station this season. How do they contribute to your study?

The purpose of putting an automated weather station on the ice shelf is to understand the energy budget at the surface of the ice shelf and how melt is occurring. What are the driving processes? Short wave radiation? Long wave radiation? Wind? When does this occur during the year? It’s important to document this to understand how melt water forms and collects on the ice shelf.

During the 2023-24 season, we installed an automatic weather station on the grounding line of the ice shelf. We installed a new one in the middle of the ice shelf this season. We found extraordinary results about the timing and magnitude of melt events that we will report soon.  

This part of East Antarctica is interesting to study. The Queen Maud Land in East Antarctica has seen an increase in snowfall since 2009, a feature that is somewhat unique in Antarctica and not yet well explained. And we also detect a lot of surface melt in this region, which is not expected by Antarctic standards. So it is a region where the rate of turnover of mass is high and changing with time, which is very interesting in terms of the impact of global climate on Antarctica.

You also installed a GNSS antenna. What does this do?

A GNSS is a fancy GPS station that listens to multiple satellite systems to get a precise position on the ice. We deployed it on the ice shelf next to the automatic weather station to detect horizontal or vertical motion of the ice shelf to calibrate and validate measurements to be made by a new satellite mission called NISAR (NASA-ISRO SAR), a joint synthetic-aperture radar mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The satellite will be launched in July 2025. It will be the first synthetic aperture radar mission that covers all of Antarctica coast to coast for many years, continuously.

With NISAR, we will be able to look at the movement of the ice in great detail.

What did you do with your radar equipment at the end of the field campaign?

We left it on the ice near the grounding line. We buried it in the snow in a sealed box that looks like a coffin at the boundary between the ocean and the continent. It takes measurements every hour. It’s a precise radar instrument that detects changes in ice thickness down to a few millimetres. The radar is an autonomous phase-sensitive radio-echo sounder (ApRES) built by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). My BAS colleague Keith Nicholls is a collaborator on this project. It will be left there for a year to see how the thickness of the ice changes with time.

We had one there at the end of the 2023-24 field campaign and we recovered it this year to get the data it had collected over a year. It had a solar panel on the top to recharge the battery, which allowed it to continue functioning for an entire year.

You can see the coffin where we deployed that radar in the 2050 film.

This year we found the coffin 2 metres below the surface under multiple ice layers, meaning there had been periods of melt since it had been deployed. We were also surprised by the amount of snow accumulation on top of the box, about 50-80 cm.

We plan to bring more automated radars to the ice shelf in the future to document ice melt.

Are you happy with what you were able to accomplish?

Absolutely. We had a small team of four people, but everyone did a great job and conducted the work safely.

For most of my career I’ve analysed satellite data. I’ve done research pole to pole from planes and boats, but I have less experience in the field. This was the first time I camped on Antarctic ice for 24 days. I was not sure how to handle it, but the weather was good. We were not in the coldest part of Antarctica, or there during the coldest season. After a week we were already in a good rhythm.

The staff at PEA has from the beginning been very supportive of our expedition. They helped prepare the logistics, transport, meals, and camps for us. Our field guide didn’t just take care of our safety, he also helped collect measurements. It’s a team effort where everyone brings his/her own expertise. We could fully trust our equipment and logistics, which is important so we can focus on good data collection.

We had a nice living container with a kitchen and internet. We could cook and have a good amount of comfort for 24 days and work efficiently. For instance, we could back up our data online on Google Drive daily via the Internet. Access to the Internet in the field changes things profoundly not just in terms of safety, but also efficiency and makes it possible to conduct most of our analysis while still in the field. At one point, we wanted to do some thermodynamic calculations for our drill. We logged on, used ChatGPT, and got an answer within one minute with equations, numerical examples, and trends. And ChatGPT was correct.

Before we close, I want to take this opportunity to thank all the people in Cape Town and at PEA who contributed to this expedition, made this work possible, and allowed us to work safely and in accordance with the Madrid Environmental Protocol of the Antarctic Treaty System.

Are you planning to go back next year or in the coming years?

We haven’t discussed the exact details yet, but most likely yes. We see this as the beginning of a more ambitious observatory of ice shelf melt in Antarctica and we see this region as a unique laboratory to study fundamental physical processes controlling the evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and its impact on current and future sea level change.

The highly anticipated documentary, which takes place primarily in Antarctica as well as Greenland, seamlessly weaves several narratives together focusing on the consequences of climate change and the first overwintering expedition in Antarctica led by Belgian explorer Adrien de Gerlache. The documentary features IPF founder Alain Hubert, Hélène de Gerlache de Gomery (granddaughter of Adrien de Gerlache), UC Irvine glaciologist Prof. Eric Rignot, the late Swiss glaciologist Dr. Konrad Steffen and his son IPF technician Simon Steffen, IPF mechanic Tim Grosrenaud, IPF systech engineers Nicolas Herinckx and Aymar de Lichtervelde, and several scientists who have spent time in Antarctica at the Princess Elisabeth station.

The filmmakers travel with Hélène de Gerlache de Gomery to the Antarctic Peninsula where she sails in the same waters first traversed in 1898 by her grandfather, Adrien de Gerlache, and which are today aptly called the Gerlache Strait. The audience is also taken along for a ride with IPF Founder Alain Hubert on a field expedition to support scientists, Prof Eric Rignot studying the consequences of a warming climate and ocean on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf, and with engineers as they do their daily job to run the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, the world’s first and only zero-emission polar research station.

2050 was first shown to a large public audience on February 8th, the closing day of the Oostende Film Festival. 1,500 people came to see the film. It was chosen as one of the audience’s favourite films of the festival.

Next, MOS Vlaanderen, an educational organisation that integrates environmental stewardship into local school curricula, presented the film to teachers at two locations in Belgium:  in Leuven on February 18th and in Ghent on February 19th. Each event was followed by a panel discussion with Eric Goens and scientists who had been to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica to do research.  At the event in Ghent, IPF Education and Outreach manager Mieke Sterken also joined the panel discussion.

And finally, the film’s official avant-premiere at Kinepolis in Antwerp on the evening of Thursday February 27th welcomed hundreds of people to the red-carpet event attended by ministers from the Belgian government and the Flemish Parliament, along with several Belgian scientists who have been to Antarctica, including Jean-Jacques Derwael, who took part in Belgian expeditions to Antarctica in the 1960s.

IPF Founder and BELARE expedition leader Alain Hubert, freshly arrived from Cape Town after finishing the 2024-25 research season in Antarctica, joined Hélène de Gerlache de Gomery, Simon Steffen and filmmakers Eric Goens and Kristoff Van Den Bergh on the red carpet before viewing the film. 2050 was screened in two different rooms in the cinema complex. After each screening the filmmakers and members of the cast answered questions about the film and their experiences working in Antarctica.

Filled with breathtakingly beautiful landscapes, 2050 shines a light on past and present science taking place in Antarctica and Greenland, and how changes in the polar regions have widespread implications for the rest of the planet. It’s certainly not a film to miss!

Watch the trailer here

Where to see the film in Belgium

And yet, in an endless stream of fake news, most people seem to have lost track of reality. How sick – or healthy – is our climate? What is fact, and what is fiction?

In 2050, we travel to the most remote place on Earth: Antarctica. A world of ice, wind, and absolute silence. But also a world that is now crying out louder than ever. Because to truly understand the state of our planet, we must go to the place where the impact of climate change is most acute.

"The pace at which Antarctica is melting is unprecedented. Some people worry about their garage being flooded for a day. We must realize that these symptoms are not temporary but permanent. The melted ice water is moving fast, at an alarming rate."
— Eric Rignot, International Glaciologist & Founder of NISAR (NASA)

With award-winning documentary filmmaker Eric Goens as our guide and legendary polar explorer Alain Hubert — founder of the International Polar Foundation (IPF) and leader of the research expeditions that take place at the Belgian Princess Elisabeth Station — as our compass, 2050 offers a raw and confronting look at the heart of scientific climate research. We follow dozens of scientists to Antarctica and join them in the search for sustainable solutions.

"We are the first generation to both understand the problem and know the solution," says Eric Goens. "It is our duty to protect this planet from even greater disasters. We owe it to all the generations that will come after us."
— Eric Goens

“Science is our compass in navigating the future of our planet. If we truly want to preserve Earth, we need to invest in polar research — especially in Antarctica, where the delicate equilibrium of our planet's climate hangs in the balance. History has shown us the power of international collaboration, from Belgium’s pioneering Antarctic expedition of Adrien de Gerlache in 1897, to the world’s first zero-emission research station, the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. Today, as we embark on designing the next generation of zero-emission research station, the Andromeda Earth Observatory, we must embrace the knowledge science provides and take responsibility for the choices that will define our future.”
— Alain Hubert, President and Founder of the International Polar Foundation

The project is proudly supported by Syensqo, a pioneer in science and sustainability. "125 years ago, our founder Ernest Solvay backed the groundbreaking Antarctic expedition of Adrien de Gerlache. Today, we continue that same commitment," says Dr. Ilham Kadri, CEO of Syensqo.

After a warm reception at the Ostend Film Festival, where it was named one of the audience favorites, 2050 is now preparing for its official cinema release on March 5th.
But the mission goes beyond the big screen. This documentary aims for an international audience—because the future starts here. And the clock is ticking.

2050 – In Belgian cinemas from March 5th!

Watch the trailer here

Switching to winter mode

This season’s last group of scientists from the PASPARTOUT, EXPOSOILS, NISAR and CRYOS projects left last Friday, February 14th to head back home, leaving only 12 station crew left behind for the final days of the season. Everyone was very happy with the research they were able to accomplish this season and were very happy with the logistical support they received.

Those left at the station have started putting the station into winter mode, which is a lot of work for the whole team.

Firstly, all scientific equipment that cannot be left outside during the harsh winter is either safely packed away at the station or prepared for being sent to the university or research institution that deployed it. Instruments are kept functioning for as long as possible before being packed away so they can continue collecting data. The launch of weather balloons every other day for the ACME project to get a radiosonde profile of the atmosphere will continue until two days before departure.

Now that supplies that arrived a few weeks ago on the cargo ship have been put away and added to current inventory, the team has been doing inventories of all the spare parts for vehicles and construction at the station and the food stocks to see if anything new needs to be ordered for next season.

Another important task to complete before departure is to raise the station’s annexes, which sit on a moving glacier.  While the main building of the station is firmly fixed to granite ridge, its annexes sit on a very slowly moving glacier, which can move 10-15 cm a year. Thankfully a new system the IPF team devised a few years ago makes this task a matter of adding some metal plates to pylons beneath each annex at the start and end of each season.

And of course the water treatment system must be shut down for the winter. One by one systems that use water are closed for use. About five days before departure, the toilets are shut down, which means only dry toilets can be used. The following day the showers and the laundry are shut down.  Once everything has been shut down, plumbers Simeon Polet and Laurens Gonzalez then need to drain the tanks of the bioreactors and empty all pipes of any excess water that cannot freeze during the winter months.

A season to be proud of

The season passed by very quickly and the team at PEA worked together like a well-oiled machine to solve any problem scientists may face - which is inevitable in Antarctica - on the spot.

Scientists were very happy with their stay at PEA and they are pleased with the data they were able to collect. Overall, 17 scientific projects were supported by the International Polar Foundation staff during the course of this season. Three expeditions took place with heavy logistic at remote locations from PEA for several weeks at the time. Left alone, the scientists working remotely (with the help of the staff on site), PEA was able to welcome a total of 24 scientists this season. This is close to the number of staff members present to support them, which is an impressive ratio.

Bad weather has forced the staff to prepare the station and surroundings for overwintering a few days in advance, but according to forecasters, the weather will clear over the weekend and the remaining 12 members of the 2024-25 BELARE team will leave on Monday, February 24th, with the goal of reaching Cape Town the following day. It will be the end of a very successful season, full of great accomplishments and memories.

The Princess Elisabeth will be well prepared to survive the next eight months unoccupied - until the 2025-26 team starts her up again in November!

While the other three teams had already finished their work for the season several days ago and had started to pack up their samples and equipment for the trip home, Prof. Eric Rignot and his team from UC Irvine only returned on Tuesday after spending 24 days doing fieldwork at the coast.

After unloading cargo and supplies from the traverse convoys that had arrived last Thursday with the help of the entire team and scientists who were at PEA, Eric Rignot and his team from UC Irvine finish up their work collecting data on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf and started heading back to PEA with their mountain field guide Daniel Mercier  

Eric and his team (Ratnakar Gadi from UC Irvine, Nolwenn Chauché from Aberystwyth University) had gone along an 80-km transect of the entire ice shelf from its edge on the Southern Ocean to the grounding line (where the ice flowing off of the continent leaves the bedrock and starts flowing out over open ocean), doing ApRES radar transects, CDT samples, and seismic surveys to get a clearer picture of the ice shelf thickness and the sea floor depth beneath it, and to determine to what extent warming ocean water is melting the ice shelf from below.

As he and his team weren’t able to continue with hot water drilling past a certain point on the ice shelf after technical issue in the second borehole (they had planned to drill in five across the 80 km transect), the team decided to make the best use of their time in the field and do even more radar transects and seismic soundings on the ice shelf and above the grounding line. This allowed them to get a lot more data about the extent of the grounding zone of the ice shelf and make an interesting discovery: a meltwater channel near the grounding line. However, instead of digging a valley in the ice, the ice on both sides of the meltwater channel is compressed and raised - something very unusual. Eric and his team will dig through the data they’ve collected to determine exactly what caused this formation.

Summer days are gone

Now that the final weeks of the 2024-25 season are approaching, the warmer days of December and January are slowly transitioning to cooler days. It’s becoming obvious that the austral autumn is rapidly approaching.

In February, the sun starts to set for longer and longer periods each day. On the first day night returns, the sun dips below the horizon for less than an hour. However in the days that follow, daylight hours noticeably shrink from one day to the next as the sun stays down for longer and longer each night.

When the sun starts to disappear in this season, covered by clouds, behind mountains or at “night”, the winds that blow tend to be much colder as the windshield factor is applied. Temperatures at PEA can sometimes drop down to -25°C this time of year. Even during his last week at the coast (coastal areas tend to be a bit warmer), Eric Rignot said that at night temperatures could drop down to -17°C. And it’s still technically summer for another five weeks!

Antarctic weather conditions: always a wild card

BELARE expedition leader Alain Hubert and the IPF team that accompanied him to the coast spent several days unloading the cargo ship, which dropped off a large amount of supplies and equipment for the station. 

On Sunday, they finished unloading the cargo from the ship with ideal weather conditions. Only a few hours later a storm arrived and whiteout conditions hit the Queen Maud Land region of East Antarctica forcing the Prinoth convoy hauling the cargo back to the station to take a two-day about 128 km north of Princess Elisabeth Antarctica.

Unfortunately, bad weather in Antarctica can foil even the best laid plans. The force of nature is so strong there that it’s always safer to err on the side of caution. If you get caught in a whiteout, sometimes the best thing to do is just stay put until the storm blows over. Whiteout conditions can be extremely dangerous as it’s often impossible to see only a few metres ahead. It’s easy to get confused when navigating through a whiteout, especially if you get tired so it was the right decision to stop and wait it out.

When the weather cleared, the convoy continued on Wednesday to Perseus Airfield, and then made it to PEA on Thursday where the unloading of all the goods and material could take place.

Progress on the ice shelf

Meanwhile, Professor Eric Rignot and his team from UC Irvine are still at the coast with IPF Guide Daniel Mercier. They’ve made progress on their work studying how the King Baudoin Ice Shelf from its to the grounding line (where the ice shelf starts to float on the water, past the continent’s bedrock) might be being affected by a warming ocean and changing climatic conditions. They’ve managed to set up a second AWS near the edge of the ice shelf, take numerous radar transects, and drill boreholes through the ice sheet to measure ice thickness, temperature and salinity of the water beneath the ice sheet.

Along with the radar transects and the hot water drilling activities, the team is also studying the properties of the ice with a seismic device and performing measurements of conductivity, temperature and depth (with a CTD instrument) at several locations along the ice edge of the King Baudouin Ice Shelf.

With another week to go, they still have quite a lot of work left to do. But despite the setback, they’ll continue their mission until completion.

Meanwhile back at the station

The storm has piled several metres of snow against the doors and walls of the station, which will need to be cleared away once the weather improves. The entrances to the garages where the vehicles are kept have been snowed in. The team has only been able to get out of the red front door of the building for the past few days, and only after regularly shovelling away snow that has accumulated in front of it.  

Now that the storm has passed and the traverse team is back from the coast with the Prinoth tractors, the entire team is now busy, unloading the cargo from the sledges and containers. Door by door the snow is being cleared away from the station so operations can get back to normal.

Ghent University researcher Paula Lampreapineda, who’s working on the BELSPO-sponsored PASPARTOUT project, has been installing a new and improved version of the volatile organic compound autosampler that can resist freezing temperatures better on the south shelter of PEA to collect samples of atmospheric particles over the coming year. The snow samples she took from trenches she dug at the coast last week are currently on the cargo ship that has left along with samples from the FROID and ULTIMO projects.

Björn Tytgat and Quentin Vanhellemont from Ghent University and the RBINS respectively, who are working on the BELSPO-funded EXPOSOILS project, have completed their first round of day trips from PEA to ten locations where they’ve been collecting data loggers and invertebrates samples from rock beds and open-top chambers that have been set up in the vicinity of PEA for several years now. With the weather set to be good again starting last Wednesday they may return to a few more sites to try to collect more of the microfauna for molecular analysis.

And Sergi Sergi Gonzalez from the EPFL in Lausanne, who is working on the CRYOS project, has continued to install a series of instruments on the antenna in front of PEA at three different heights. These instruments will measure blowing snow and heat fluxes at different levels above ground.

By this time next week, all of the scientists will be packing their gear to start heading home. The next flight out is scheduled for February 14th!

Financed by the Belgian Federal Science Policy (BELSPO) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles’ QUOI project, with strong logistical support from the International Polar Foundation (IPF), which is mandated to manage the zero-emission Princess Elisabeth Antarctica research station by the Belgian Polar Secretariat, the team of scientists from the FROID project (“Finding the world’s oldest ice record around the Princess Elisabeth Station”) spent several weeks on a field campaign in the Nils Larsen Blue Ice Field near the Sør Rondane Mountains in December and early January.

The field team consisted of four scientists - Maaike Izeboud (VUB), Etienne Legrain (ULB/VUB), Veronica Tollenaar (VUB), and Harry Zekollari (VUB)  - who were supported by IPF field guide François Pallandre and IPF technician Nicolas Grosrenaud. They drilled shallow ice cores to date the surface age of the ice, took surface ice samples, planted stakes in the ice to see how much ice is being lost at the surface, and collected radar data to evaluate ice thickness. The data they obtain from all of this work will help the scientists figure out where the ice is the oldest, and therefore where to drill an ice core with the goal of retrieving million-year-old ice.

“Antarctica is covered by an ice sheet in most places, and the further down into the ice sheet you go, the older the ice is,” explained Prof. Harry Zekollari. “Air bubbles trapped in the ice, which formed as snow fell on the surface and turned into ice over time, can tell us how the composition of the atmosphere varied in the past and therefore what the climate was like going back hundreds of thousands, or even a million years.”

Some of the oldest ice in Antarctica lies at the bottom of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, where the ice meets the bedrock of the Antarctic continent. Previous international scientific expeditions to drill deep ice cores to find the oldest ice have been able to go back hundreds of thousands of years in climate history. The most well-known of these was the EPICA project (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica), which was able to retrieve an ice core going back 800,000 years at Dome C, one of the highest points on the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Recently, in a follow-up deep drilling project (Beyond EPICA), ice older than 1,200,000 years was recovered. However, many of these ice coring projects drilled straight down several kilometres into the ice sheet to retrieve the oldest ice. This method is technically difficult, expensive, and time-consuming.

“The FROID project takes a different approach to finding very old ice without having to drill kilometres-deep ice cores,” explained Dr. Veronica Tollenaar. "It takes advantage of the location of blue ice areas on the continent. The Antarctic Ice Sheet slowly flows from the centre of the continent to its coasts due to gravity. As the ice approaches mountains, in blue ice areas, the ice at the bottom of the ice sheet is pushed up closer to the surface, making the oldest ice easier to access.”

Altogether this season the research team collected 15 shallow ice cores, more than 1000 surface ice samples, and did 200 km of radar transects. The ice samples are currently being shipped back to Belgium, where they will be analysed in the labs of the participating universities.

The field camp for the FROID project was located in the Nils Larsen Blue Ice Field 2300 metres above sea level, not far from the Sør Rondane Mountains, about 50-60 km from the Princess Elisabeth station.

The team encountered an interesting phenomenon during their field work.

“One thing we came across during our time up at the field was a liquid surface lake, which is very rare to find in Antarctica, especially at the high altitude where we were,” Dr. Maaike Izeboud stated. “However, there were several warm days in December with high temperatures, so this lake may have formed due to surface melt. We need to investigate this further by modelling the surface mass balance to see how exceptional the formation of a surface lake at that altitude might be.”

They also had some unexpected visitors right before the new year.

“On New Year’s Eve, several south polar skuas, which are large sea birds that typically live near the coast, paid us a visit,” Dr. Etienne Legrain recounted.  “While Henri Robert, the IPF Science Liaison Officer who is also a biologist, said it’s normal that skuas occasionally fly several hundreds of kilometres to breed in small numbers in the Sør Rondane Mountains, we were nonetheless amazed to see a form of life after so many days in the field!”

The FROID project plans to return to Antarctica for a second field campaign during the 2026-27 research season.

To the coast!

Last Saturday Eric Rignot From UC Irvine and his team from the NISAR project left for the coast 200 km from PEA with Alain Hubert, Tim Grosrenaud and mountain field guide Daniel Mercier in Prinoth tractors towing several sledges (scientific equipment and caboose) and a caterpillar-equipped Toyota Hilux.  One container equipped with a kitchen, wifi and communications infrastructure will be the living quarters for Eric and his scientific team for the next several weeks as they camp out on the coast.

Eric and his team will spend the next several weeks studying the thickness of ice at different distances from the grounding line to the edge of the King Baudouin Ice Shelf to see how much of it is melting underneath. In addition, they will install a GNS antenna to measure movement of the ice with the tides and ice shelf melting, conduct seismic transects and use a sledge hammer to get insights on the ice structure and thickness. Finally, they will be using a hot water drill to bore through the ice and deploy CTD sensors in the water beneath the ice shelf. Alain and Tim will remain in the vicinity to install a 3-metre tall automatic weather station (AWS) that Simon Steffen prepared before leaving for the PEACE project.

Cargo ship arrival

Alain and Tim will soon meet with Yann Perillot, Jacques Belley and Siméon Polet left PEA have left with a train of sledges and a container in prevision of the cargo ship arrival foreseen in a few days depending on the ice conditions in the area at the time of berth along the King Baudouin Ice Shelf.

One reefer container (set at -25°C) that has all of the surface ice and ice core samples taken by the scientists from the FROID project along with meteorite sediments collected by the scientists from the ULTIMO project will be loaded onto the cargo ship to be transported back to Belgium, where scientists will do their respective analyses in the labs of their universities.

Being unloaded from the ship and going back to the station will be many containers containing frozen food necessary for the coming seasons as well as all the pieces of a new hangar that will be build at the Winter Park next season. The ship will also bring fuel for the vehicles the BELARE team and scientists use as well as the planes that transport people to and from the station, or for the teams that spend some time at PEA using it as a base of operations, as is the case with AWI’s Polar 6 aircraft. Other aircraft also sometimes use PEA as a refuelling station to reach their destination on their trans-Antarctic journey from one base to another.

The loading and unloading of the cargo ship is a task that takes several days and a crew of at least five people. The ship is only staying in the area for a short time before moving on to resupply other stations, so the team has to work non-stop for the entire time the ship is there to make sure the job is completed as quickly as possible.

Serious snow studies

Separately on Friday Paula Lampreapineda from Ghent University, who is working for the BELSPO-funded PASPARTOUT project, and Sergi Gonzalez from the EPFL in Lausanne, who is working on the CRYOS project, left for the Princess Ragnhild Coast in a caterpillar equipped Toyota Hilux with their field guide Manu Poudelet.

During their five-day trip, Paula will dig trenches to take snow samples to study atmospheric particles and deposits at different depth of the trench. Alain and Tim, who are nearby, will stop by while waiting for the ship to collect the snow samples the automatic snow sampler has been gathering since Paula's colleague Sibille Boxho installed it last season. Sergi will take snow samples and photogrammetric measurements along the transect they take to the coast to recreate the relief of the snow surface digitally as a way to determine potential albedo of the studied area.

The microscopic world

Meanwhile, Björn Tytgat and Quentin Vanhellemont from Ghent University and the RBINS respectively, who are working on the BELSPO-funded EXPOSOILS project, have been taking day trips to the several locations around PEA they and their colleagues before them have studied for many years.

As the project is tracking how climate change is affecting microbial communities in the vicinity of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, they will take samples of microorganisms such as collembola and mites around and inside  open-top chambers (OTC) installed in the field to locally mimic climate change. OTC’s and control plots are also equipped with data loggers that measures temperature and humidity. Study areas are equipped with time lapse cameras to assess how much of it is snow-covered from one season to the other and how precipitation affects the local conditions throughout the year.

On Saturday, January 11th, teams from the Belspo-funded ULTIMO and FROID projects headed home after each undertaking a very successful field campaign along with several crew, including  Simon Steffen and Doctor Martin Leittl who had been at the station for several weeks.

They were replaced by Eric Rignot and two colleagues from the University of California Irvine, who will work on the NISAR project; Paula Lampredapineda from the University of Ghent, who will spend five weeks in Antarctica for the BELSPO-financed PASPARTOUT project; and finally Bjorn and Quentin Vanhellemont, also  from the University of Ghent, who will work on the BELSPO-financed EXPOSOILS project.

New crew members include field guides Daniel Mercier and Manu Poudelet. They will be responsible for the safety of the scientists while in the field.

After they finish the requisite field training, and after the IPF team finishes putting the touches on the logistical support, the scientists want to head into the field as soon as this coming weekend.

Examining ice shelf dynamics

Professor Rignot and his team hope to spend three weeks on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf studying how it’s being affected by warming atmospheric and ocean temperatures. They will use various methods to look at the thickness of the ice shelf from the grounding line to the tip of the ice shelf at the coast.

Firstly, they will set up a second automatic weather station on the edge of the ice shelf that Simon Steffen had prepared before leaving (for the PEACE project). This will complement the AWS already installed at the grounding line. They will also install a GNSS antenna in order to measure any rise or fall of the ice shelf over time.

At various locations along the ice shelf, Eric and his colleagues will drill holes in the ice with a hot water drill and lower a CTD sensor to measure conductivity, temperature and depth into the ocean beneath the hole. This will give them an idea of how quickly the ocean beneath the ice shelf is warming.

Finally, they will take ground radar transects by hauling a radar sounder behind a skidoo in a grid pattern. This will give them an image of how thick the ice shelf is over its entire length.

During their stay at the coast, they will have the luxury of having one of the modified living containers with them. The container put together by IPF engineers has internet, a snow melter, a kitchen, and a living area. This helps make extended stays away from the station a lot more comfortable.

As Alain and Tim will be nearby preparing for the arrival of the cargo ship towards the end of this month, they will provide assistance to Eric whenever necessary.

Studying atmospheric particles

This year, Paula Lampredapineda from the University of Ghent will continue work that she and her colleague Sibylle Boxho from the ULB started last year studying atmospheric particles, their origin, and how they are transported to Antarctica through the atmosphere for the BELSPO-funded PASPARTOUT project.

Paula will head out to the coast for 10 days with IPF field guide Manu Poudelet to revisit a location that Sibylle had visited last year. This location is not far from where Eric will be stationed and where Alain and Tim will prepare for the offloading of the cargo ship.

Paula will bring to the coast a volatile organic compound (VOC) automatic sampler she had installed at PEA last season so it can start taking samples at the coast. Alain had installed a support battery pack, wind turbine, and solar panel so the VOC sampler can run autonomously for the entire winter.

At this location Sibylle Boxho installed a precipitation/snow sampler last season. The sampler rotated automatically every three months to collect precipitation from each of the year’s quarters. Paula will collect the precipitation samples and bring them back to Belgium for analysis.

Paula will also repeat what Sibylle did last year: dig a two-metre deep trench in the snow and sample snow layers going back several years to determine what kind of atmospheric particles have been transported to Antarctica over this period of time.

As Paula only plans to be at the coast for 10 days or so, she and Manu will camp out in tents. Conditions at the coast tend to be warmer and milder in general, so they should have an easy stay.

Sergi Gonzalez from the EPFL will also join them to continue taking photogrammetry of the snow surface over square metres for the CRYOS project along with snow samples at different depths.

Sampling microbial life

The BELSO-funded EXPOSOILS project is back at the station, with Björn Tytgat and Quentin Vanhellemont from the University of Ghent representing the project this year.

During their month-long stay, they plan to revisit nunataks the project has visited several times to take samples of microbial life in their regular locations, during day trips not far from the station.  

They will also collect temperature and humidity loggers, check open top chambers installed on most nunataks near the station. They will also get data from their time lapse cameras installed last season that can monitor how much snow accumulates and how much is ablated when the sun hits it.

Preparing for the ship to arrive

The big logistical task BELARE Team Leader Alain Hubert, Tim Grosrenaud, and the rest of the IPF team need to prepare for is the arrival of the cargo ship, scheduled to arrive on January 24th. Alain and Tim have been doing reconnaissance over the past several weeks along the Princess Ragnhild coast to find the best place for the ship to offload each time they’ve been in the area.

On the ship will be fresh food for the rest of the season and the following one, supplies for the station, materials for a hangar the team plans to construct during next season, and fuel for the vehicles. The ship will take back with it ice core samples the FROID project took during the season along with samples from the ULTIMO project (mostly sediments to be sorted to find micro-meteorites) and logistical equipment for the next season (transportation boxes, reefer etc).

It takes years of expertise to make sure the offloading process goes safely and smoothly. Alain and the IPF team have what it takes to make sure it gets done properly!

While previous successful meteorite recovery missions in 2009-2010, 2010-2011, 2012-2013, 2018-2019, and 2022-2023 focused on blue ice areas closer to Belgium’s zero-emission Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station, the 2024-2025 campaign took place in the remote Belgica Mountains of Antarctica, more than 300 km southeast of the research station. In addition, the team also recovered several thousand micrometeorites, cosmic dust particles less than 2 mm in diameter, and abundant ice and rock samples. This research has been made possible through funding by the Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO) and required heavy logistical support from the International Polar Foundation (IPF), mandated to manage the Princess Elisabeth research station by the Belgian Polar Secretariat.

The meteorite search team, consisting of three scientists from Belgian universities - Prof. Dr. Steven Goderis of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel as well as Prof. Dr. Vinciane Debaille and Dr. Gabriel Pinto of the Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium), and Dr. Hamed Pourkhorsandi, a research scientist at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in France - together with two IPF field guides Martin Leitl and Paul-Philippe Dudas, made a first stop in the Balchenfjella area in search of meteorites, before making their way to the Belgica Mountains on December 15th. The Belgica Mountains, located in the Queen Maud Land region in East Antarctica, were discovered by a Belgian expedition team during the International Geophysical Year Polar Expedition in 1958 during a reconnaissance mission by airplane. The reconnaissance had to be stopped after the airplane crashed on the blue ice there. The mountains were visited again by Belgian scientists in the 1960s, but have not been visited by a Belgian scientific team since then.

Meteorites can be found on blue ice fields near mountain chain where the ice is pushed up and eroded by strong katabatic winds. Systematic recovery programs have been running since the 1970s, as each meteorite holds relevant information about the formation and evolution of the solar system and the celestial bodies, including Earth, the Moon and Mars, as well as the arrival of water, volatile compounds, and organic matter to Earth, etc. 
Prior plans for travel by container convoy had to be abandoned for air transport due to difficult terrain. Conditions at the basecamp (essentially tents) were harsh, even for Antarctic summer, with temperature going down to -31˚C with the wind chill due to strong winds. The team of researchers would head out each day looking for meteorites on snow mobiles in a V-shaped formation, so they could cover large areas more systematically.

More impressive than the number were the types of meteorites found. The meteorites included at least two achondrites (stony meteorite representing planetary mantles), and several carbonaceous chondrites, the most primitive meteorites similar in composition to the original material of the Solar nebula, the giant, spinning cloud of gas and dust that formed our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.

“Each new (micro)meteorite provides an essential piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve,” said Prof. Goderis about the importance of the samples he and his colleagues found.

“Based on some meteorite fragments, we can learn about planetary differentiation and collisions taking place in the early solar system, and in other fragments we find prebiotic molecules required for the evolution of life.” added Prof. Debaille.

The meteorites will be sent to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels for defrosting, curation, and detailed classification, after which they will become available for research to the involved research teams as well as the international scientific community. The most beautiful pieces will be put on display for the public to enjoy.