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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.

A successful field campaign

On New Year’s Day, the team of scientists from the BELSPO-financed ULTIMO project returned to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica from Mont Belgica via Basler transport plane. The team has spent nearly a month in the field collecting meteorites at two locations: Balchenfjella, and Mont Belgica. They’ve come back with 115 meteorites, 230 ice samples, 9 micrometeorite deposits, and numerous rocks.

Due to treacherous conditions between Balchenfjella and Mont Belgica, it became necessary to take the scientists across the glacier to Mont Belgica by plane and helicopter on December 18th. These aircrafts were kindly put at disposition by the SWIDA-RINGS project while waiting  for better weather condition for their field work.  Assisted by BELARE Team Leader Alain Hubert and Tim Grosrenaud, a Basler flight from Ultima Antarctic Logistics brought back the scientists and their equipment to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica on New Year’s Day.

The ULTIMO team is very happy with their field campaign this season and look forward to analysing their haul in labs at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and participating universities back in Belgium.

Making the most of their time

Meanwhile, scientists from the BELSPO-financed FROID project have also had a triumphant return from the field on January 6th. During their several weeks in the field, they took advantage of every day they’ve had in the field to drill shallow ice cores and take radar surveys of the bedrock beneath the ice around the Nils Larsen Blue Ice Fields southwest of the Sør Rondane Mountains, nearly 50 km from PEA.

While the scientists came back by skidoo, an IPF logistics team traveled out to their camp to haul back the scientists’ living containers, their equipment, and a reefer container that holds all of the shallow ice cores the scientists drilled this season at temperatures of -20°C.

With all of the ice core samples they’ve gathered (which will be analysed in a lab in Belgium later this year) and information they’ve gained from the topography of the bedrock (which will show where the bottom ice layers have been pushed up as they flow towards the mountains), the project team will be able to determine the best locations for drilling deep ice cores to find (hopefully) million year-old ice when they return next year with a drill that can core much deeper.

Keeping track of surface mass balance

In the meantime, Sergey Gonzales from the EPFL-CRYOS project has been taking photos of snow and ice around PEA - in particular sastrugi - the waves of frozen snow that are created by the strong winds in Antarctica. He’s been taking photos of standard square metres for photogrammetry study of the snow surface.  

The purpose of this exercise is to see to what extent the waviness of the sastrugi affects the albedo - the amount of solar radiation it reflects back into space from the snow surface. The more wavy the surface is, the more this affects the albedo. Monitoring albedo is important for studying surface mass balance of the ice sheet, as lower albedo leads to a higher absorption of solar energy, which in turn leads to a warming of the ice sheet.

The next step in the CRYOS project is to install a number of instruments on the tall mast at the station with the help of IPF’s field guide, Martin Leitl. However, they’ll need to wait until the weather improves, as a few days of inclement weather started just after the new year.

And for the 4th week in a row, the team of scientists and crew from AWI’s polar 6 aircraft has been trying to manage the logistical difficulties they’ve encountered with their plane, their equipment and the inclement weather. They’ve been trying to do radar surveys of ice shelves at the coast and their grounding lines as part of their contribution to the international SCAR-managed RINGS project.

Thankfully the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica is a very welcoming place that has been able to accommodate them for the duration of their trip, which has been longer than expected. We hope they will be able to complete their surveys in the coming days before finalizing their program from the South African Sanae station, and then finally the Norwegian Troll station.

During the last week of December 2024 and first week of January 2025, temperatures at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica have peaked above freezing, reaching as high as 0.9°C. This has led to some interesting phenomena.

Not far from the station, in the wind scoop of Utsteinen nunatak, streams of water have formed and are meandering their way through several sastrugi, which are “waves” in the ice that the wind has carved out. It seems surreal to hear the trickling of water in a place that is primarily frozen most of the year.

A lot of snow has accumulated on the roof of the station’s annexes. With temperatures trending above freezing, it was necessary for the whole team to chip in one afternoon and shovel snow off of the roof to avoid pools of water forming on top of the annexes.

In general, snow accumulation in Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica, has been above average since last season. Several automatic weather stations and other scientific equipment throughout the region have almost been buried by snow. Greater snow accumulation can be a product of a warming climate, as warmer air masses can hold more moisture, which leads to greater precipitation.

Speaking of moisture, during the last week of December, a low-level fog hung around the station for about a day or so. It was impossible to see more than 20 meters ahead. The humidity was a whopping 80%! No one who had been at the station had seen anything like this at PEA, at least not in the past several years.

Very warm temperatures at the coast

Temperatures have climbed even higher in other parts of Queen Maud Land. This past week, scientists from the GEOMAG project from the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium went out to the King Baudoiun Ice Shelf with Alain Hubert and Tim Grosrenaud to take geomagnetic measurements at the same location where Belgian scientists took them back in the 1960s when Belgium’s King Baudoin station was still operational.

The GEOMAG team was able to successfully measure Earth’s magnetic field at the same location to see how it may have shifted over time. While these geomagnetic measurements had been taken a few times since the closure of the King Baudoin station, this is only the second time that such geomagnetic measurements have been taken since the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica has been operational.  

However, what the scientists and IPF staff found at the coast were temperatures hovering around +8 to +10 C. Being close to the sea, temperatures in summer can climb relatively high on ice shelves, with pools of water sometimes forming on them for several weeks during the summer.

While at the coast, BELARE Team Leader Alain Hubert and Tim Grosrenaud also did a first reconnaissance to find the perfect spot for the cargo ship to unload its containers and other material when it arrives in mid-January. This reconnaissance is necessary to do every year as it is essential to assess the conditions of various ice shelves where a cargo ship can land. The edge of the ice shelf must be solid with no imminent cracks that could be deemed an unstable danger. It must also not be taller than 7-8 meters to ensure that the contents of the ship can be safely unloaded.

With these kinds of temperatures observed at the coast, it’s not uncommon to see streams of water pouring off some parts of the ice shelves. While impressive to see, this of course can be concerning, considering there must be some serious surface melt occurring for these freshwater rivers to form.

While this region of Antarctica has gained a sizeable amount of mass over the past two decades, because of increased precipitation at the coast, the question arises if the ice will continue to be replaced quicker than the rate of melt taking place in summer.  Some of our scientists are studying exactly that phenomenon, and we’ll tell you more in the next instalment…

Hydrogen production begins at PEA

This season, a new engineer on the team, Mathilde Renard, together with Nicolas Herinckx, has been working on a new system at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica to produce hydrogen to be used for several purposes using the station’s renewable wind and solar energy production systems.

Having arrived in mid-November, Mathilde has been working on getting the hydrogen production system up and running. The system uses electrolysis to split the hydrogen atoms off of water molecules - a process that takes quite some energy. The hydrogen produced is then stored in tank at the scientific north shelter.

When it needs to be used, the stored hydrogen can then be combusted to produce energy and water. The goal is to eventually use the hydrogen produced to power the backup generators at the station, which currently run on diesel (the generators are rarely used - only when necessary).

However at the moment, the first hydrogen produced at PEA is being used primarily for a different purpose: to fill radiosonde balloons that are sent up into the atmosphere every other day to collect weather data. Traditionally scientists have filled weather balloons with helium. However, due to its limited supply on Earth and the logistical cost and inconvenience of transporting it in bulky canisters, it was decided to start filling the weather balloons launched at PEA with hydrogen produced at the station instead of helium.

The inaugural weather balloon filled with hydrogen produced at PEA was launched on Christmas Eve, to much fanfare, and deservedly so! This milestone signifies the next step towards making the station even more self-sufficient and environmentally friendly.

Later that day, the entire team enjoyed a well-deserved Christmas Dinner prepared by the station’s chef, Thomas Duconseille.

A new hangar at the Winter Park

The IPF team also plans to work on a new hangar at the Winter Park, where many large vehicles, lots of spare parts, supplies, and scientific equipment will be stored on the blue ice field nearly 2 km from the PEA station.

The construction process involves digging several deep trenches in the ice for the foundation of the new hangar. Once the trenches have been dug, the supports for the new hangar will be put in place. As the temperature never rises above freezing in this part of Antarctica, water is then poured into the trenches to solidify the supports of the hangar. Situated between several nunataks, the ice around the Winter Park barely moves each year, making it a very stable place to build structures in the ice.

As all the parts for the hangar’s construction will be delivered by ship later in the season, the construction of the new hangar is planned to start during the 2025-26 season.

We’re looking forward to seeing everything the highly skilled IPF team will be able to accomplish before the end of the season!

Ongoing field campaigns

The BELSPO-funded FROID and ULTIMO projects continued their field work this past week.  At the Niels Larsen Blue Ice Field, members of the FROID team managed to drill several shallow ice cores, which are test runs for the deeper cores they plan to drill next season, when they hope to reach million-year old ice close to the elevated bedrock close to the Sør Rondane Mountains.

Meanwhile, the ULTIMO project has been able to collect several meteorites during their field trip, in spite of logistical difficulties. Initially the team had been stuck about 100 km from their ultimate destination, Mont Belgica, due to the large number of crevasses that the traverse team lead by Alain Hubert encountered along the way. However, thanks to logistical support from members of the Swida RINGS project led by Frederick Paulsen, which is examining the retreat of outlet glaciers in Antarctica. The Swida RINGS group initially had planned to stay at PEA for one night. But since they ended up staying for six days due to inclement weather where they wanted to go, they offered their support in lending one of their twin-otter planes to assist the ULTIMO project by flying the scientists and their equipment, including 6 snow mobiles up to Mont Belgica. For the next several weeks the team will continue to collect meteorites that can offer clues about the origins of the solar system; they are scheduled to be flown back to PEA on January 3rd..

Meanwhile, the IPF team continued to offer logistical support to AWI’s Polar 6 plane as it continues to take aerial surveys of the ice margin at the coast of the Queen Maud Land for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s international RINGS project. They only have a few more transects to do before they head back to Norway’s Troll station several hundred kilometres away. Some technical difficulties have hampered their progress, but the IPF team has been available to help in any way they can to make sure they can finish the job.

Skidooing to King Baudouin Ice Shelf

Before heading back to Belgium, systems engineer Nico Herinckx along with Simon Steffen travelled 200 kilometers (oneway) on skidoo to service an automatic weather station that had been set up last year for UC Irvine glaciologist Eric Rignot as part of the greater NISAR project. The main objective was to replace the data logger to ensure the SBD iridium modem could transmit the data to polar orbiting satellites which ensures that the data can be viewed remotely throughout the year.

Eric will arrive in mid-January to continue studying to what extent warming water and ocean circulation beneath an ice shelf contributes to its melt. The plan is to monitor weather conditions above the ice shelf, as well as drill a hole through the ice shelf and send an unmanned robotic vehicle underneath it to measure parameters such as temperature and salinity. Most of the melt an ice shelf experiences comes from below, not on the surface. But we’ll tell you more about this project once Eric arrives in a few weeks!

Later this week Simon will head back to the coast at the L0 Ice Rise to set up infrastructure for the PASPARTOUT project. Paula Lampreda from UGent is also returning to the station in January and hopes to install a volatile organic compound collector at L0 to study the origin of certain atmospheric particles that arrive in Antarctica and atmospheric circulation patterns in the Southern Hemisphere. It will be in the same area where her colleague from the ULB Sibylle Boxho dug a snow pit to collect atmospheric particle samples in ice layers going back several decades.

A surprise visit

On December 18th, the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica was treated to a surprise stop to refuel by members of the CHINARE expedition who were rotating out after their stay at Zhongshan station. While their plane was refueling, the CHINARE team members visited PEA and met with BELARE team leader Alain Hubert, who gave them a warm welcome. The CHINARE team then went on to take a flight to Ultima Air Base where they boarded their connecting flight back to Cape Town.

Fresh faces

The Princess Elisabeth Antarctica saw its first crew rotation on Friday, December 20th, as our all around superstar, systems engineer Nicolas Herinckx left and was replaced by Benoit Hellebuyck. Two other IPF team members that will stay until the end of the season also arrived, Laurens Gonzalez and Mathieu Chable .

Scientists from two additional projects also arrived. The first group of scientists are from the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium for the GEOMAG project, which has been studying Earth’s geomagnetic field at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica with instruments that have been installed in a special non-magnetic shelter a few hundred metres from the station and has been in operation since 2015.

During this season the GEOMAG teams also will head out to the site of the old King Baudoin station Belgium built in the late 1950s to take geomagnetic measurements in the same location the scientific teams from the BELARE expeditions from the 1960s took them to compare how Earth’s geomagnetic field on those locations have changed over the last 60 years. BELARE team leader Alain Hubert will accompany these scientists as they head out to the King Baudouin Ice shelf to provide logistical support.

The other batch of new scientists that arrived from the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, will work on the CRYOS project. This project has been running for almost a decade at PEA, tracking ice particles in the atmosphere to determine how much snow lands on the ground and contributes to growing the ice sheet, how many ice particles are blown away, how many sublime back into water vapour, and at what height above the surface different key processes happen.

Several instruments installed at PEA and serviced regularly by IPF staff (when scientists have not been able to travel to Antarctica) have been collecting long-term data. These data will contribute to a greater understanding of the surface mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Once they complete the requisite safety and field training all newcomers must undergo, they will get to work on their respective projects.