67° South: The Journey So Far
British Antarctic Survey is the UK’s national polar research institute, with a mission to deliver world-leading scientific research, global polar leadership, and environmental stewardship of the polar regions. I joined BAS in July 2025 as a new Wintering Field Guide, deploying to Antarctica for fourteen months in November that year.
Our Scott Pyramid tent on the Pine Island Glacier, Ellsworth Land, West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Made from traditional Ventile fabric and incredibly stable in high winds, the design of these specialist polar tents has changed very little since the turn of the twentieth century. 29 December 2025.
For the fourth day in a row, the snow ramp we have spent days excavating has filled in overnight. Snow whips and dances around our feet, a blanket dragged across a white desert, charging over and gently scouring the surface. Drifting snow envelops our world like an ether. I feel a profound sense of comfort; I am at ease here, at home. Our tents on the Pine Island Glacier have become a sanctuary, or perhaps I have found sanctuary in the vast expanse of infinite white.
Returning to our vermilion cocoons, I welcome the familiar smell and soft amber glow of the kerosene lamp, the gentle roar of the Primus stove, and the quiet rustle of the orange tent fabric. I find preparing food and melting snow deeply calming and meditative. Sleep comes easily when the winds begin to howl and buffet against the tent walls.
Pine Island Glacier, Ellsworth Land, West Antarctic Ice Sheet. This small field camp was my home for four weeks during the 2025–26 season. Our team of four could live surprisingly comfortably in two Scott Pyramid tents and a small toilet tent, which provided a little privacy. A linear camp layout perpendicular to the wind makes snow wind tails more manageable. 23 December 2025.
Ben, Jono, and I wake to the partial wreckage of our tarpaulin construction, a desperate attempt to prevent snow from continually pouring into a pilot hole we have spent days digging out by hand. A void enclosed by sweeping snow drifts. Planks of wood plastered in rime ice; something grotesque, yet somehow serene. Our presence feels transient, like the shifting winds that shape the forms of our remote, ephemeral world. We must wade through thigh-deep drifts to move between our digging project and the tents. Snow pours into our pyramidal home every time someone gets in or out. We enjoy food, whisky, and music, with a touch of nostalgia. Ben and I discuss the kernel of a ski trip to Baffin Island, the seed of an idea for another expedition. When tent-bound, my mind drifts towards far-off lands and prospective journeys, before settling once more on how lucky we are to be here. We laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all.
Factory Cove
My journey to Antarctica was a two-week sail from the port of Montevideo, Uruguay, aboard the polar research ship RRS Sir David Attenborough. After our first week at sea, in the early hours of 17 November, we came alongside Signy Island in the subantarctic archipelago of the South Orkney Islands, some 1,300 kilometres south-east of the Falkland Islands and in the heart of the Southern Ocean. We had come to reopen Signy Research Station after the southern winter, ready for the summer science season, and to drop off the station’s new four-strong summer team.
The RRS Sir David Attenborough passing through the Neumayer Channel in the Palmer Archipelago on our way to Rothera Research Station. This narrow passage runs between Anvers Island to the north-west and Wiencke Island to the south-east. It connects the Gerlache Strait at its northern end with the Bismarck Strait to the south.
The channel was charted by the Belgian Antarctic Expedition under Adrien de Gerlache in 1898, and named for Georg von Neumayer, the German geophysicist and polar-research advocate. Port Lockroy sits just off its southern end on Goudier Island.
23 November 2025.
Established in 1947 as ‘Station H’, the three-man meteorological outpost was constructed above an old station in Factory Cove, a former whaling site used in the 1920s. An old concrete ramp is all that is left of the narrow-gauge railway installed in 1963 to unload stores and machinery from the small wharf. At the time, it was the world’s most southerly railway.
Little else remains of a once-flourishing twentieth-century whaling industry. Rust consumes the old ship’s anchors, half buried in the shoreline. Concrete blocks crumble. Mosses make the ship ruins their home.
Icebergs abound in the Southern Ocean as we round the western tip of Coronation Island after crossing the 60th parallel. The island is the largest in the South Orkney Islands archipelago. Less than three nautical miles to the south is Signy Island, where we spent several days in November opening Signy Research Station in preparation for the summer season.
Elephant Island, the desperate refuge of Shackleton in 1916 following the loss of his ship Endurance in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, is around 260 nautical miles to our west.
Antarctica has a rich human history. Tales of exploration and adventure weave together heroic feats of endurance and pioneering scientific research. People have been drawn to this place for over two centuries. Even now, I find a strange comfort in being here at the edge of the world. That unrelenting pull of the wild places, a fascination with the cold, an exhilarating sense of purpose. A new perspective shaped by living and working in such a vast expanse of space, a space filled by oceans, icebergs, snow-capped peaks, and gigantic escarpments of snow and shattered ice.
In two ribs, our team of two Field Guides and two scientists, along with two boat crew, made the short journey to Moe Island, off the southern tip of Signy Island. Whilst the sea was calm, bitterly cold winds, freezing sea spray, and driving snow stung our faces.
Our boats had to navigate between myriad small icebergs, known as growlers, before finding a suitable cove to land at Moe Island. Unable to wait for us at the island, the ribs returned to the RRS Sir David Attenborough whilst we carried out survey work. After counting several hundred penguins and keen to avoid the beckoning twilight, we radioed the ship to be collected a few hours later.
19 November 2025.
Our team of a dozen scientists, field staff, and engineers spent several days bringing supplies and scientific equipment ashore, clearing snow, and establishing communications with the outside world. Now dedicated to marine ecology and terrestrial biology research, work at Signy focuses on examining the effects of climate change on Southern Ocean ecosystems.
A few days later, I paired up with another Field Guide, Simon, to support two ornithologists with a visit to Moe Island. Just two kilometres long, the island is separated from the south-west end of Signy by Fyr Channel, a name taken from the Norwegian steam whaler Fyr, which operated in the South Orkney Islands in the early twentieth century. Dressed in one-piece waterproof boat suits, we stepped off the rope ladder from the access door on the side of the RRS Sir David Attenborough and into the rib dancing on the swell some three metres below. A twenty-minute boat ride through driving wind, snow, and biting cold brought us to the bleak, desolate island. We had set out to conduct a wildlife survey of the island, although counting several hundred penguins in buffeting winds and eddying snow proved quite a challenge.
It was late November when we finally stepped off the Sir David Attenborough and onto the wharf at Rothera Research Station. The station’s current inhabitants had climbed up to the rocky outcrop above the station to wave us in.
Antarctic Hauling
After several weeks of intense preparation on station, our home for the next six days was a field camp on the Wright Peninsula, a short ten-minute hop on a Twin Otter and within easy reach of the Stork Peaks by skidoo.
I tied in with Jon, a fellow Field Guide, as we practised snow assessment and crevasse rescue techniques during a hectic three weeks of field training. Rothera Research Station, Adelaide Island, Graham Land, Antarctic Peninsula. 12 December 2025.
We spent five brutal days hauling loads on skis and on foot from a skidoo park at the base of the Stork Peaks up to the ridgeline, some 500 metres above. On aluminium frames, akin to those used by porters in the Karakoram or Himalaya, we carried up to 30 kilograms at a time of batteries, cameras, and electronics equipment in the baking heat and arid air. Temperatures felt more like late spring in the European Alps. We established caches where the terrain’s steepness forced us to transition from hauling sledges on skis to fitting crampons and clipping into the static lines. We had anchored these lines further up the ridge, allowing us to bootpack the last 100 metres to a col and the final caching point.
Hauling scientific instruments in the baking midday heat with Field Guides, Simon (left) and Jon (right) on the Stork Peaks. The still water of Ryder Bay reflects Mount Gaudry (2,315m), the highest mountain on Adelaide Island. 6 December 2025.
Our efforts were in support of Polar Ocean Mixing by Internal Tsunamis, or POLOMINTS. This project brings together land-based, underwater, and satellite sensors to study how glacier calving generates sub-surface tsunamis in polar oceans. Researchers are investigating how these waves mix heat, nutrients, and carbon in the Southern Ocean and affect the productivity of marine ecosystems. Our goal was to build a series of compact instrument sites along Stork Ridge, a rocky, mountainous ridgeline a few kilometres north of Rothera. Along with other equipment, these sites would house cameras directed at the Sheldon Glacier, which flows south-east from Mount Mangin into Ryder Bay. These cameras would allow scientists to time-stamp such glacial calving events, responsible for tsunami genesis, and calculate the volume of ice calving off the glacier terminus before it crashes into the freezing waters below.
The hours were long but immensely satisfying. The instrument sites we had built would remain in place for at least two years, keeping a watchful eye on the glacier below. Glad to escape the heat of the midday sun, we returned to Rothera for a hot shower, a big meal, and, perhaps, a full day of rest.
Fieldcraft training on the Fuchs Ice Piedmont also covered linked skidoo travel and the pulling of sledges. A typical sledge system consists of a ‘full unit’ (left), which can support a field party for weeks at a time, and a ‘half unit’ (right), which contains emergency clothing, medical equipment, and spare parts.
7 December 2025.
As I write this in the weeks following the 2026 Antarctic Midwinter, temperatures are hovering around −2°C. Long-term historical records show that temperatures typically range between −15 and −20°C at this time of year. Rain lashing against the windowpanes is also not uncommon, and during the summer months, Rothera becomes a hot, dusty thoroughfare of scientists, construction workers, and field teams. We are observing a changing continent and trying to understand what that change means.
It was time to go deep field.
Going Deep Field
The Twin Otter quickly found buoyancy in the warm air over Rothera Point. It was 17 December. Plans were changing rapidly; I had packed for two months in the field, although my ultimate destination was still unknown. Our flight path to Fossil Bluff, a small aircraft refuelling and transit station on Alexander Island, took us over the George VI Sound, a 500-kilometre-long fault depression covered by a permanent ice shelf, separating Alexander Island from Palmer Land on the Antarctic Peninsula. Our pilot, Olly, talked of the early days of dog-sledge climbing expeditions and pioneering feats of polar aviation.
Hundreds of feet below us were the pressure ridges and rock formations of Ablation Point, and, dropping below cloud base at 600 feet, we flew over Jupiter Glacier and alongside Succession Cliffs, so named to reflect the geological succession of rock strata exposed in the towering buttresses of tuffaceous sandstone. At 400 feet, we witnessed the effects of Greenlandification – glacial melt pools indicative of climate and ice sheet processes in Antarctica, which increasingly reflect those observed earlier in Greenland. For our final approach, we swept alongside Planetary Heights, a range of rocky, ice-free summits extending down the eastern side of Alexander Island, and past Georgian Cliff, a striking rock bluff formed of dark mud-brown layered sedimentary rock. We touched down on the snow runway, refuelled with time for half a cup of tea, and took to the skies once more.
Olly, our Chief Pilot, checks the props on the Twin Otter after landing at Sky Blu on 20 December. Matt Scott, a Field Coordinator who has just overwintered at Rothera, prepares to refuel the aircraft.
BAS operates a fleet of four de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otters, along with one larger Dash 7, in support of polar operations across the continent. Equipped with skis and heavily modified for polar use, including long-range fuel tanks, the aircraft are a vital lifeline for teams operating in the deep field.
Several hours later, we arrived at Sky Blu. This deep-field logistics hub and blue-ice runway in South Palmer Land would be our gateway to field sites deeper in the continent. It was here that I learnt where I would be going next. The Pine Island Glacier, some 1,400 kilometres south of Rothera.
Our destination was a fuel depot – consisting of over 70 drums of aviation fuel – which had been used to support earlier science projects. Estimates placed the drums under at least five metres of snow. We had to dig down to the drums and haul each one out using a mechanical winch system and rebuild the depot on the surface, a backbreaking process known as depot raising. Any season for a Field Guide would usually consist of at least two good depot raises. The first depot raise for any new Field Guide was something of a rite of passage and a good opportunity to prove that we had what it took to operate in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth.
Raising a Dram
We take off from Sky Blu in the Twin Otter. Four hours and nearly 1,250 kilometres later, we touch down on Pine Island Glacier. I have flown out with Neil, a fellow Field Guide. Sam and Bex, vehicle operator and Field Guide, welcome us into a basic field camp. The pair arrived a week before us and are quick to tell us how difficult the next few weeks will be. A collection of orange tents, a single skidoo, a few equipment depots, and an HF antenna are all that exist over several thousand square kilometres. The view is a flat, white horizon in every direction.
Pine Island Glacier is one of the largest ice streams in Antarctica. Together with the Thwaites Ice Stream, it flows into the Amundsen Sea embayment in West Antarctica. These two ice streams drain around five per cent of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Like many of the world’s glaciers, Pine Island Glacier is changing rapidly: it is thinning and receding, and the rate of change is accelerating. A large, floating ice shelf buttresses the glacier, holding back the ice. Over 1,200 metres thick in places, the shelf is itself thinning and calving, and as it weakens, so does its stabilising effect on the billions of tonnes of glacial ice behind it.
It is 22 December, and the morning is spent digging. We aim to get down to the level of the fuel drum depot to confirm its depth and location. We use the battered marker flags as a starting point, and ground-penetrating radar to narrow down the potential depot area.
Neil warms up the snowblower, which we use to excavate snow to a depth of approximately two metres before it becomes necessary to dig by hand. Pine Island Glacier, Ellsworth Land, West Antarctic Ice Sheet. 23 December 2025.
Christmas Eve is our first day of lay-up. Winds batter the small orange pyramid tent, as I listen to snow being driven against the taut outer fabric. I wake before Neil and light the stove; I’ve finished my first brew before he has even stirred. We take pride in our little home. Neatly stacked by the stove are prefilled flasks and water bottles; coats, gloves, hats, and goggles are suspended from the upper echelons of our six-foot-by-six-foot life support module; toiletries, spare film, books, and writing materials all carefully stored away. Neil is a superbly experienced Field Guide, and I take every opportunity to learn my craft.
More than ten years and thousands of kilometres separate the seed of an idea planted as a student first discovering climbing from its realisation, and once again I am dreaming up what to do next. My mind races to future expeditions and van-based climbing adventures. I feel comfortable and at home, but also constrained, coiled, and agitated. I exist in a state of flux; both deeply present yet always pulled by the next adventure. I still don’t know whether that’s a good thing.
The long days of high winds and thick, swirling snow continue. I don’t much mind the prospect of being tent-bound for another week, save for the frustration of not being able to get on with raising this depot buried deep beneath the ice.
I enjoy the quirks of polar tent life. Kerosene for the stove and lamp seems to get everywhere. Neil mops up our latest fuel spill whilst I saw through a partially frozen banana bread with a multitool. A multitool I then use to carve shavings from a frozen block of Wensleydale to add to our lunch. Between reading books and brewing up more tea, we dig out the entrance to the tent for the second time today. The Primus has started burning poorly as we make hot chocolate after a late dinner, and for the remainder of the evening we are absorbed in stove maintenance. We finish tidying the tent and wish each other a Merry Christmas. Neil pokes his head out to confirm no change in conditions, and we turn in for the night.
Pine Island Glacier, Ellsworth Land, West Antarctic Ice Sheet. 23 December 2025.
On Christmas Day we return to the digging. Bex and Sam try once again with the snowblower to excavate a ramp down to the depot. Neil and I make another attempt at digging by hand, and we make good progress before stopping to cook pancakes for lunch. In the afternoon, we return to shovelling by hand, inching our way down as the hole fills in with drifting snow just as fast as we can dig it out. The deeper we go, the more compact the snow becomes. After several hours, we get the snowblower stuck and must pull it out with a skidoo. Neil and I join Bex and Sam in their tent for a superb Christmas dinner of Camembert baked over a kerosene lamp, korma, and banana bread with clotted cream. As we relight the stove to make tea, Rothera calls over the HF radio. The station has gathered in the operations tower to sing carols, crackling over the airwaves.
Shortly after Christmas, it is time for Bex, Sam, and Neil to return to Rothera, and I am joined by two more Field Guides, Ben and Jono. With renewed enthusiasm, we get straight to work. The snow has become as hard as ice, and we can only chisel our way down, inch by inch. Blocks are cut with a snow saw and heaved to the surface. The evenings are spent discussing the best way to safely make the required depth. Carefully, we must dig down using a series of wide platforms which enable snow to be efficiently removed from a pilot hole: a deep, shoulder-width pit whose only purpose is to hit the depot. The wind is unrelenting; drifting snow pours into the hole and leaves us tent-bound in lay-up for days at a time.
It becomes clear how arbitrary human ideas of status, success, and title really are. In which case, how do I define a meaningful notion of success or purpose? Perhaps it is to live a life where I give more to the Earth than I have taken from her. The question is as exciting as it is unnerving.
After four weeks in the deep field, the arrival of the first of three Twin Otters to extract our team is a welcome sight. To make this long flight, they carry drums of additional fuel, which we use to refuel the aircraft before the four-hour return journey to Sky Blu. Pine Island Glacier, Ellsworth Land, West Antarctic Ice Sheet. 14 January 2026.
Over the next weeks, we eventually make it down to the fuel depot. Depth and location confirmed. Over 70 drums of aviation fuel, to be raised from under the ice, to keep the science flying. Simply getting down to the cache is quite an achievement. We half joke that this must be one of the deepest hand-dug holes in Antarctica on record. Sitting on a makeshift bench made of shattered wood and blocks of snow, we raise a dram to the absurdity of our situation.
The drums will later be removed in a mammoth effort by the mechanised Tractor Train Traverse, using two PistenBullys. This pioneering system of mobile science and cargo platforms crosses the continent every season, providing logistical support and a refuelling capability to deep field sites. Raising the entire depot by hand would be almost impossible.
13 January 2026 is a day of waiting – aircraft movements, weather, and field logistics. I dip in and out of the few books I have brought with me, and scribble down the odd note in a journal. I am forced to slow down, to exist in a small orange pyramid. My bags are packed and gear sorted; there is only so much I can prepare before the plane arrives. I am poised yet lethargic from waiting. I go for a walk around the ski-way. I try a little meditation whilst making tea, pulling myself up straight and controlling my breathing. I feel so rusty, stuffy, and cooped up; my practice feels distant in time and space. I wake the next day tired from poor sleep. My muscles are stiff, hunched from days in the tents, and my legs feel heavy. Finally, the satellite phone buzzes into life; the Twin Otters are on their way!
Escape from the Field
I spend the last weeks of the summer field season on a few shorter projects. After returning to Sky Blu for a couple of days and a welcome rest, I fly to the Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf, which borders the Weddell Sea, with a small team to establish a five-day field camp and cache science cargo in preparation for a hot-water drilling project starting the following season. Known simply as Site 5, the project will use autonomous underwater vehicles beneath the ice shelf to measure melt rates and understand how this contributes to ocean warming.
Matt Scott calls Rothera on the satellite phone to discuss the developing logistics plan for our extraction from Site 5 on the Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf. We had flown in on two Twin Otters several days earlier, and had nearly completed our task of caching hot-water drilling equipment for next season’s project.
Our team of five slept in one three-person Scott Pyramid tent and the two aircraft. The tent made a superb communal space for cooking and preparing hot drinks, whilst a selection of equipment boxes served as makeshift chairs for al fresco dining.
30 January 2026.
From the Ronne, I bounce straight to another fuel depot to raise two dozen drums of aviation fuel before returning to Sky Blu one last time. As a team of four, we close the Sky Blu logistics hub for the winter. It is a week of long, physical days moving vehicles, tents, and field equipment into giant underground garages and up onto raised aluminium stillages. The last screws go into the wooden garage doors only minutes before our flying cut-off time.
Turning around for one last look at the winterised Sky Blu ‘comms melon’ before returning to Rothera at the end of the summer season. Sky Blu uses two of these fibreglass domes for accommodation, and this one also serves as a backup communications station for the field logistics hub. 11 February 2026.
We run to the Twin Otter as our pilot, Tom, completes his final checks. A massive weather system is nearly on top of us, and we must take off or risk being pinned down for another week before the storm passes.
The Half-Light
We land back at Rothera at midnight. We are the last field team to come back at the end of the season, and it is wonderful to be greeted by so many people who have stayed up to meet us and help unload our kit from the Twin Otter. Half an hour later, exhausted, I collapse into a dining room chair with a mixture of elation and deep fatigue. I turn my hands over. My skin is dry and cracked, my knuckles swollen, and my palms calloused from digging. My first Antarctic field season has come to an end.
The end of the season is traditionally celebrated with a night of live music in the boating shed. Everyone on station packs together as one community, in rapturous support of all those who step up to perform. We sing, dance, and stomp in the half-light; colours and shadows interplay across the faces of a family connected by a shared passion for adventure and the cold, infinite white. It is a brilliant way to end the summer. Already, my thoughts are slowly turning to the excitement of the winter ahead.
Crossing the plateau between N26 and the Stokes Peaks with marine biologist Matt Bell on an eight-day pulking trip around the Fuchs Ice Piedmont. These winter trips take place in March and April and allow the wintering team an opportunity to develop their polar skills and enjoy a little recreational time at the end of a busy summer season. 2 April 2026.
Rothera Research Station, Adelaide Island, Antarctic Peninsula, August 2026