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  • An airborne radar survey was flown during the austral summer of 2015/16 over the Foundation Ice Stream, Bungenstock Ice Rise, and the Filchner ice shelf as part of the 5-year Filchner Ice Shelf System (FISS) project. This project was a NERC-funded (grant reference number: NE/L013770/1) collaborative initiative between the British Antarctic Survey, the National Oceanography Centre, the Met Office Hadley Centre, University College London, the University of Exeter, Oxford University, and the Alfred Wenger Institute to investigate how the Filchner Ice Shelf might respond to a warmer world, and what the impact of sea-level rise could be by the middle of this century. The 2015/16 aerogeophysics survey acquired ~7,000 line km of aerogeophysical data with a particular focus on the Foundation Ice Stream. Our Twin Otter aircraft was equipped with dual-frequency carrier-phase GPS for navigation, radar altimeter for surface mapping, wing-tip magnetometers, and a new ice-sounding radar system (PASIN-2). We present here the full radar dataset consisting of the deep-sounding chirp and shallow-sounding pulse-acquired data in their processed form, as well as the navigational information of each trace, the surface and bed elevation picks, ice thickness, and calculated absolute surface and bed elevations. This dataset comes primarily in the form of NetCDF and georeferenced SEGY files. To interactively engage with this newly-published dataset, we also created segmented quicklook PDF files of the radar data.

  • This dataset captures annual measurements of body mass for Adelie penguin chicks at Signy Island, from 1997 until 2020. Between 50 and 100 chicks are measured on beaches immediately prior to their departure, with 3-5 weighing sessions carried out annually per species in the period before fledging is complete. This monitoring contributes to the CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Program (CEMP) and is part of the annual seabird Long Term Monitoring Science carried out by the British Antarctic Survey at Signy Island. This work was funded by Natural Environment Research Council (UK) core funding to the British Antarctic Survey.

  • Persistent organic pollutant concentrations in artificial sea ice experiments at the Roland von Glasow Air-Sea-Ice Chamber (RvG-ASIC) at the University of East Anglia, UK. Experiments involved investigating chemical contaminant behaviours during sea ice formation and melt in order to assess possible exposure risk to sea ice biota. Funding was provided by: NERC ENVISION Doctoral Training Centre (NE/L002604/1). NERC and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funded Changing Arctic Ocean program EISPAC project (NE/R012857/1). British Antarctic Survey Collaboration Voucher. EUROCHAMP-2020 Infrastructure Activity under grant agreement (No 730997).

  • Subglacial Lake CECs was previously identified using radar profile data. Subglacial Lake CECs lies beneath 2650 m of ice, close to the Ellsworth Mountains at the divide between the Minnesota Glacier and Rutford and Institute Ice Streams in Antarctica. Four seismic reflection profiles were acquired across the lake to determine water column depth and investigate lake bed properties. Shot gathers with 48 channels and a maximum offset of 500 m were recorded. A seismic refraction experiment was undertaken to determine seismic velocities in the firn. Dual frequency and RTK GPS were used to determine shot locations. Seismic surveys indicate a maximum water depth of 301.3 +/- 1.5 m, at the widest part of the lake, with an estimated lake volume of 2.5 +/- 0.3 km3. Imaging of the ice-lake interface indicates topography with slopes of up to 1.9 degrees. This research was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council, British Antarctic Survey (Polar Science for Planet Earth Programme) and Centro de Estudios Cientificos, Valdivia, Chile.

  • This is the output from high-resolution model simulations of ocean conditions and melting beneath the floating part of Thwaites Glacier. The model is designed to study how these conditions change as the geometry of Thwaites Glacier evolved from 2011-2022. There is one simulation using the geometry from each year during this period, derived from satellite observations. The simulations are repeated for different ocean model forcing conditions, as described in the associated paper. PH was supported by the NERC/NSF Thwaites-MELT project (NE/S006656/1). ITGC contribution number 099. *******PLEASE BE ADVISED TO USE VERSION 2.0 DATA******* Version 2 is available at https://doi.org/10.5285/473eb97c-63a8-4002-8b72-e7f07b2ab228. (Version 1 has the seabed bathymetry and ice shelf topography files incorrectly oriented.)

  • This data set provides processed Ku- and Ka-band fully-polarimetric backscatter and derived polarimetric parameters from hourly scans, acquired using the KuKa radar, during Legs 1, 2, 4 and 5 of the 2019-2020 MOSAiC International Arctic Drift Expedition. Scans were acquired during winter (Legs 1 and 2), advanced melt (Leg 4) and freeze-up (Leg 5) seasons, from various Remote Sensing (RS) sites, located in the MOSAiC ice floe. The first deployment of the KuKa radar was on 18 October 2019 at RS1 site and the radar was retreated (due to ice break up) on 18th November. The radar was redeployed on 29th November at RS2 site until 13th December when cracks were observed at the site and the instrument was turned off and moved to a safe location. The radar was redeployed at RS3 site and started measuring again on 21st December 2019 until 31st January 2020, after which the radar was taken off the RS site to conduct maintenance. The radar was not operational during Leg 3. During Leg 4, the radar was operational between 25th June and 19th July 2020, and later retreated back to the ship, for deployment in Leg 5. The radar was deployed on 24th August 2020 and operational until the end of the MOSAiC expedition. The dataset was collected by MOSAiC Team ICE participants and processed by Vishnu Nandan at the University of Manitoba, Canada. This work was funded in part through NERC grant NE/S002510/1, the Canada 150 Chair Program and the European Space Agency PO 5001027396. The authors thank Marine Environmental Observation, Prediction and Response Network (MEOPAR) Postdoctoral Fellowship grant to Vishnu Nandan. The authors also thank the crew of R/V Polarstern and all scientific members of the MOSAiC expedition for their support in field logistics and field data collection.

  • We present here the Bedmap3 ice thickness, bed and surface elevation aggregated points and survey lines. The aggregated points consist of statistically-summarised shapefile points (centred on a continent-wide 500 m x 500 m grid) that reports the average values of Antarctic ice thickness, bed and surface elevation from the full-resolution survey data and information on their distribution. The points presented here correspond to the added points since the last release of Bedmap2. The data comes from 14 different data providers and 75 individual surveys. They are available as geopackages and shapefiles. The associated Bedmap datasets are listed here: https://www.bas.ac.uk/project/bedmap/#data This work is supported by the SCAR Bedmap project and the British Antarctic Survey''s core programme: National Capability - Polar Expertise Supporting UK Research

  • This dataset contains bed and surface elevation picks derived from airborne radar collected during the POLARGAP 2015/16 project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and with in-kind contribution from the British Antarctic Survey, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF). This collaborative project collected ~38,000 line-km of new aerogeophysical data using the 150MHz PASIN radar echo sounding system (Corr et al., 2007) deployed on a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Twin Otter. The primary objective of the POLARGAP campaign was to carry out an airborne gravity survey covering the southern polar gap beyond the coverage of the GOCE orbit. This dataset covers the South Pole as well as parts of the Support Force, Foundation and Recovery Glaciers. The bed pick data acquired during the POLARGAP survey over the Recovery Lakes is archived at NPI: https://doi.org/10.21334/npolar.2019.ae99f750.

  • A new version of this dataset exists. To see the last version of the Antarctic Digital Database, have a look here: https://data.bas.ac.uk/collections/e74543c0-4c4e-4b41-aa33-5bb2f67df389/ Coastline for Antarctica created from various mapping and remote sensing sources, provided as polygons with ''land'', ''ice shelf'', ''ice tongue'' or ''rumple'''' attribute. Covering all land and ice shelves south of 60S. Suitable for topographic mapping and analysis. High resolution versions of ADD data are suitable for scales larger than 1:1,000,000. The largest suitable scale is changeable and dependent on the region. Changes in v7.6 include updates to the Amery Ice Shelf front, ice shelves and glaciers east of Law Dome, and sections of coast and ice shelf around Abbot Ice Shelf and Pine Island Glacier. Data compiled, managed and distributed by the Mapping and Geographic Information Centre and the UK Polar Data Centre, British Antarctic Survey on behalf of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

  • We conduct a global survey of magnetosonic waves and compute the associated bounce and drift averaged diffusion coefficients, taking into account co-located measurements of fpe/fce, to assess the role of magnetosonic waves in radiation belt dynamics, where fpe is the plasma frequency and fce is the electron gyrofrequency.. The average magnetosonic wave intensities increase with increasing geomagnetic activity and decreasing relative frequency with the majority of the wave power in the range fcp < f < 0.3fLHR during active conditions, where fcp is the proton gyrofrequency and fLHR is the lower hybrid resonance frequency. In the region 4.0 <= L* <= 5.0, the bounce and drift averaged energy diffusion rates due to magnetosonic waves never exceed those due to whistler mode chorus, suggesting that whistler mode chorus is the dominant mode for electron energisation to relativistic energies in this region. Further in, in the region 2.0 <= L* <= 3.5, the bounce and drift averaged pitch angle diffusion rates due to magnetosonic waves can exceed those due to plasmaspheric hiss and very low frequency (VLF) transmitters over energy-dependent ranges of intermediate pitch angles. We compute electron lifetimes by solving the 1D pitch angle diffusion equation including the effects of plasmaspheric hiss, VLF transmitters and magnetosonic waves. We find that magnetosonic waves can have a significant effect on electron loss timescales in the slot region reducing the loss timescales during active times from 5.6 to 1.5 days for 500 keV electrons at L* = 2.5 and from 140.4 days to 35.7 days for 1 MeV electrons at L* = 2.0. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Highlight Topic grant NE/P01738X/1 (Rad-Sat) and the NERC grants NE/V00249X/1 (Sat-Risk) and NE/R016038/1.