What lies beneath the surface of Antarctic Ocean – watch our latest fieldwork video
8th August 2025
In May 2025, CPOM Director for Knowledge Exchange, Sammie Buzzard (Northumbria University), joined a team from BIOPOLE, led by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), on the RSS Sir David Attenborough, conducting research in the Southern Antarctic Ocean.
BIOPOLE – is a collaborative long-term science programme examining Biogeochemical processes and ecosystem functions in changing polar ecosystems and their impacts.
It was the latest the ship had been to the Southern Ocean. The team’s mission was to look at the ocean water and the dissolved nutrients present at this time of year. This was an exciting prospect as no UK research team had looked at this so deep into winter before.
The team took water samples and tested it in their on-ship lab. They were surprised how much life was still thriving so far south in the winter, despite the lack of daylight and the cold. There were whales, seals, penguins and vast swarms of krill beneath the ocean’s surface which was picked up by acoustic sensors.
BIOPOLE is investigating how the nutrients found in polar oceans are driving the Earth’s global carbon cycle.
The Earth’s Carbon Cycle
The Earth’s carbon cycle is how nature moves carbon around the Earth’s system. BIOPOLE is investigating how ‘nutrients’, such as carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous, found in polar oceans are helping to drive this global carbon cycle. These nutrients feed tiny marine plants called phytoplankton and, similar to vegetation on land, these plants absorb C02 from the ocean to perform photosynthesis. This reduces carbon in the atmosphere helping to regulate the Earth’s climate.
As the Earth’s ice melts, more of these nutrients are being added to the oceans. Understanding the process of this is important when trying to predict what the future might look like for the Earth’s carbon cycle as the ice continues to melt.
National Capability
BIOPOLE is a long-term, multi-centre National Capability programme, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). National Capability allows us to bring together skills, expertise and knowledge over decadal timescales to answer some of environmental science’s most pressing questions and challenges that affect the security and wellbeing of people within the UK and beyond. This includes understanding sea level rise and global weather patterns associated with a changing climate and how we can properly adapt to protect the places people live and work.
These scientific questions require the maintenance and development of long-term datasets so we can monitor trends and inform the models we use to project future scenarios, as well as expertise from a range of different scientific disciplines. National Capability science spans decades, enables step-changes in technology and scientific techniques, and makes a wider portfolio of UK-based science possible.
CPOM’s role is to provide satellite information on how polar ice is melting into the oceans, using satellite missions such as the European Space Agency’s (ESA) CryoSat-2.
Watch our full-length case study film to find out more about the BIOPOLE programme or visit their website for more information.
