Bristol scientists to solve the “mystery” of Antarctic mass loss

Image showing Antarctic Ice Sheet

Press release issued: 5 October 2011

An international team of scientists at the University of Bristol and Newcastle has been awarded £760,000 by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to investigate the changing mass of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

An international team of scientists at the University of Bristol and Newcastle has been awarded £760,000 by the Natural Environment Research Council ( NERC) to investigate the changing mass of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The project, led by Professor Jonathan Bamber in the University’s School of Geographical Sciences with Dr Jonty Rougier in the Departments of Maths, will be using a combination of satellite observations, GPS data and climate model output to determine the evolution of the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet over the last two decades.

The topic is not without controversy, and was the focus for a recent commentary in the top American journal Science, which raised questions about how well we know the numbers for the mass loss for just the most recent past.

The team, which includes academics from Newcastle University and partners from the Netherlands and USA, aim to tackle this controversy using novel and powerful statistical techniques for combining the data and assessing the errors.