Latest news with #BritishAntarcticaSurvey
Saudi Gazette
11-08-2025
- Science
- Saudi Gazette
British man who perished in Antarctic glacier found 65 years later
LONDON — The bones of a British man who died in a terrible accident in Antarctica in 1959 have been discovered in a melting glacier. The remains were found in January by a Polish Antarctic expedition, alongside a wristwatch, a radio, and a pipe. He has now been formally identified as Dennis "Tink" Bell, who fell into a crevasse aged 25 when working for the organisation that became the British Antarctic Survey. "I had long given up on finding my brother. It is just remarkable, astonishing. I can't get over it," David Bell, 86, tells BBC News. "Dennis was one of the many brave personnel who contributed to the early science and exploration of Antarctica under extraordinarily harsh conditions," says Professor Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey . "Even though he was lost in 1959, his memory lived on among colleagues and in the legacy of polar research," she adds. It was David who answered the door in his family home in Harrow, London, in July 1959. "The telegram boy said, 'I'm sorry to tell you, but this is bad news'," he says. He went upstairs to tell his parents. "It was a horrendous moment," he adds. Talking to me from his home in Australia and sitting next to his wife Yvonne, David smiles as stories from his childhood in 1940s England spill out. They are the memories of a younger sibling admiring a charming, adventurous big brother. "Dennis was fantastic company. He was very amusing. The life and soul of wherever he happened to be," David says. "I still can't get over this, but one evening when me, my mother and father came home from the cinema," he says. "And I have to say this in fairness to Dennis, he had put a newspaper down on the kitchen table, but on top of it, he'd taken a motorbike engine apart and it was all over the table," he says. "I can remember his style of dress, he always used to wear duffel coats. He was just an average sort of fellow who enjoyed life," he adds. Dennis Bell, nicked-named "Tink", was born in 1934. He worked with the RAF and trained as a meteorologist, before joining the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey to work in Antarctica. "He was obsessed with Scott's diaries," David says, referring to Captain Robert Scott who discovered the South Pole and died on an expedition in 1912. Dennis went to Antarctica in 1958. He was stationed for a two-year assignment at Admiralty Bay, a small UK base with about 12 men on King George Island, which is roughly 120 kilometres (75 miles) off the northern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. The British Antarctica Survey keeps meticulous records and its archivist Ieuan Hopkins has dug out detailed base camp reports about Dennis's work and antics on the harsh and "ridiculously isolated" island. Reading aloud, Hopkins says: "He's cheerful and industrious, with a mischievous sense of humour and fondness for practical jokes." Dennis's job was to send up meteorological weather balloons and radio the reports to the UK every three hours, which involved firing up a generator in sub-zero conditions. Described as the best cook in the hut, he was in charge of the food store over the winter when no supplies could reach them. Antarctica felt even more cut off than it is today, with extremely limited contact with home. David recalls recording a Christmas message at BBC studios with his parents and sister Valerie to be sent to his brother. He was best known for his love of the husky dogs used to pull sledges around the island, and he raised two litters of dogs. British Antarctic Survey A black and white photograph of three men holding large husky dogs. British Antarctic Survey Dennis Bell, on the left, with dogs at the Admiralty Bay Station in 1959 He was also involved in surveying King George Island to produce some of the first mapping of the largely unexplored place. It was on a surveying trip that the accident happened, a few weeks after his 25th birthday. On 26 July 1959, in the deep Antarctic winter, Dennis and a man called Jeff Stokes left the base to climb and survey a glacier. Accounts in the British Antarctic Survey records explain what happened next and the desperate attempts to rescue him. The snow was deep and the dogs had started to show signs of tiredness. Dennis went on ahead alone to encourage them, but he wasn't wearing his skis. Suddenly he disappeared into a crevasse, leaving a hole behind him. According to the accounts, Jeff Stokes called into the depths and Dennis was able to shout back. He grabbed onto a rope that was lowered down. The dogs pulled on the rope and Dennis was hitched up to the lip of the hole. But he had tied the rope onto his belt, perhaps because of the angle he lay in. As he reached the lip, the belt broke and he fell again. His friend called again, but this time Dennis didn't reply. "That's a story I shall never get over," says David. The base camp reports about the accident are business-like. "We heard from Jeff [...] that yesterday Tink fell down a crevasse and was killed. We hope to return tomorrow, sea ice permitting," it continues. Hopkins explains that another man, called Alan Sharman, had died weeks earlier, and the morale was very low. "The sledge has got back. We heard the sad details. Jeff has badly bitten frostbitten hands. We are not taking any more risks to recover," the report reads the day after the accident. Reading the reports again, Hopkins discovered that earlier in the season, it had been Dennis who'd made the coffin for Alan Sharman. "My mother never really got over it. She couldn't handle photographs of him and couldn't talk about him," David says. He recalls that two men on Dennis's base visited the family, bringing a sheepskin as a gesture. "But there was no conclusion. There was no service; there was no anything. Just Dennis gone," David says. About 15 years ago, David was contacted by Rod Rhys Jones, chair of the British Antarctic Monument Trust. Since 1944, 29 people have died working on British Antarctic Territory on scientific missions, according to the trust. Rod was organising a voyage for relatives of some of the 29 to see the spectacular and remote place where their loved ones had lived and died. David joined the expedition, called South 2015. "The captain stopped at the locations and give four or five hoots of the siren," he says. The sea-ice was too thick for David to reach his brother's hut on King George Island. "But it was very, very moving. It lifted the pressure, a weight off my head, as it were," he says. It gave him a sense of closure. "And I thought that would be it," he says. But on 29 January this year, a team of Polish researchers working from the Henryk Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station stumbled across something practically on their doorstep. Dennis had been found. Some bones were in the loose ice and rocks deposited at the foot of Ecology Glacier on King George Island. Others were found on the glacier surface. The scientists explain that fresh snowfall was imminent, and they put down a GPS marker so their "fellow polar colleague" would not be lost again. A team of scientists made up of Piotr Kittel, Paulina Borówka and Artur Ginter at University of Lodz, Dariusz Puczko at the Polish Academy of Sciences and fellow researcher Artur Adamek carefully rescued the remains in four trips. It is a dangerous and unstable place, "criss-crossed with crevasses", and with slopes of up to 45 degrees, according to the Polish team. Climate change is causing dramatic changes to many Antarctic glaciers, including Ecology Glacier, which is undergoing intense melting. "The place where Dennis was found is not the same as the place where he went missing," the team explains. "Glaciers, under the influence of gravity, move their mass of ice, and with it, Dennis made his journey," they say. Fragments of bamboo ski poles, remains of an oil lamp, glass containers for cosmetics, and fragments from military tents were also collected. "Every effort was made to ensure that Dennis could return home," the team say. "It's an opportunity to reassess the contribution these men made, and an opportunity to promote science and what we've done in the Antarctic over many decades," adds Rod Rhys Jones. David still seems overwhelmed by the news, and repeats how grateful he is to the Polish scientists. "I'm just sad my parents never got to see this day," he says. David will soon visit England where he and his sister, Valerie, plan to finally put Dennis to rest. "It's wonderful; I'm going to meet my brother. You might say we shouldn't be thrilled, but we are. He's been found - he's come home now." — BBC
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
An icy new map of Antarctica could help direct the search for alien life
Where does life lurk under the ice of Antarctica? The answers keep surprising us. In January, for example, researchers found corals, sponges and even giant sea spiders some 750 feet under the waves — all suddenly unearthed when a glacier broke free during a Schmidt Ocean Institute voyage. The find is hardly unusual; in 2021, another team uncovered sponges and other species underneath nearly 3,000 feet of ice in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf — the first time any living creatures had been found there. But with global heating and climate change wreaking havoc on the ice caps of Antarctica, researchers are looking to a new map of the south polar region to better map global warming changes and their effects on subglacial life. These efforts won't just inform how to protect these fragile ecosystems — they could act as a sort of road map for finding alien life on other worlds. Sharper satellite images helped form the backbone of Bedmap3, which updates maps of icy Antarctica — particularly among the high mountains and isolated interior of the eastern part of the continent. As the name Bedmap3 implies, this is the third map of Antarctica produced by a group led by the British Antarctica Survey (BAS); the first was done in the early 2000s. As we better map isolated and icy areas on Earth, these findings also help inform where life not only can form, but thrive. Glacial-crusted moons dot our solar system near the giant planets, most famously watery Europa near Jupiter and the fountain-spouting Enceladus near Saturn. In October, NASA launched Europa Clipper, a probe that will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) and survey the Jupiterian moon. In a release, NASA said Europa Clipper would fly-by just 16 miles from the surface, equipped with 'ice-penetrating radar, cameras, and a thermal instrument to look for areas of warmer ice and any recent eruptions of water.' But it won't arrive until 2031 and that's only one icy world that could be home to life — most recently, it was reported that Miranda, a moon of Uranus, might be another candidate for extremophile life that can flourish under intense cold. We'll need far more spacecraft to figure out if anything living lies under the crust of these worlds, but in the meantime, Antarctica serves as a handy analog to figure out the limits of life. "The more we know about Earth's icy environments, the better we will be able to understand the other environments," said Robin E. Bell, referring to icy moons. Bell is a research professor at Columbia University who has led 10 expeditions to Antarctica and Greenland in part to study deep subglacial lakes. While not involved in Bedmap3, Bell said the study holds potential: its higher resolution will show how "the water clearly pulses between the smaller lakes, and flows uphill in the Gamburtsev Mountains, until it is refrozen to the ice sheet base," she because Bedmap3 bumps up the resolution of imaging from space – after all, satellites have much improved over the decades – as well as better defining the edge of where the ice meets the sea, Peter T. Fretwell, a BAS geographic information officer, told Salon. Fretwell was second author on a scientific paper published last month in Scientific Data describing Bedmap3's results. Each grid square on the map has a resolution of a third of a mile in length, which is a substantial improvement from Bedmap2, he noted. On that map, some of the more isolated areas had a resolution of just three miles by three miles. The community is already working on lake databases and hydrological models based on the Bedmap3 results, and anticipates using this information for ice sheet modeling, geology and better simulations of how the environment used to behave in the ancient past, Fretwell said. "We hope that these new datasets will be out shortly," he added. While Fretwell cautioned he is not an expert in lacustrine habitats, meaning large bodies of water where life may be possible, he said Bedmap3 will help inform new studies of subglacial lakes. The community will be meeting soon to go over the results, he added: "One thing that is planned is a meeting in May to look at how we go forward with future glaciological survey following on from Bedmap3." Bell is already excited for the potential, after having led teams that found a volcano underneath the west Antarctic ice sheet and that spotted several lakes embedded in ice roughly two miles thick. She said the satellites and aerial surveys that created Bedmap3 will allow researchers to better estimate how thick the ice is, particularly in transient zones where the grounded ice changes to a floating ice shelf. "Our knowledge of subglacial lacustrine environments has hinged largely on satellite measurements and radar mapping," Bell said, noting that the under-ice Lake Vostok – first suggested by Soviet sounding studies in the 1950s and 1960s – was at last confirmed in 1993 using laser altimetry from the European Remote Sensing-1 satellite. Lake Vostok is roughly 34 million years old, but Bell is among the researchers who have suggested water circulated through the microbe-filled lake roughly every 50,000 years. When Bell's study was published in 2002, the researchers noted the ice sheet and the lake depend on one another; the circulation of the lake is controlled by the ice sheet thickness, and the cycle of freezing and melting at the base of the ice controls changes in water, sediment and life. Large and small lakes alike are therefore largely affected in the zone "where the base of the ice sheet melts and where that meltwater flows," Bell said. She expects Bedmap3 will help improve the existing ice sheet models and help researchers better understanding how water flows under the thick ice of Antarctica. And perhaps, even faraway moons.
Telegraph
24-02-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
‘I moved to Antarctica to save for my first home'
When George Harris announced he was moving to Antarctica for a year, his friends and family were surprised. But it was all part of an elaborate plan to save for his first home. Living in an extremely isolated place, with few opportunities to spend money, meant he could seriously save – and have the trip of a lifetime. Harris, a carpenter, first heard about the possibility of working in Antarctica on a podcast. He discovered that the Antarctic base is not just filled with scientists – it needs a lot of support from other specialists to keep it going. He found the British Antarctica Survey (BAS) online, and his adventure began. The 27-year-old arrived in November 2023 for his job that lasted over a year. The pay is similar to what you'd get in Britain for the same work but, crucially, there is no way to spend money in the isolated outpost. 'You don't have any costs,' says Harris. 'All your food is paid for, and it's not easy to spend money. You stay at the base, and you don't pay any accommodation fees. The only thing you might spend money on is when the ship comes in or at the shop where you can buy merchandise and clothing, but not much else.' His salary was £30,200 for the year, with a 10pc bonus because he was there over winter. After paying off some debts, in total he saved £10,000. He hopes to buy a home in the next two years. 'I'm not sure where yet, but possibly near Plymouth,' he says. 'My savings would make up half of what's needed for a deposit for the average house in Plymouth, but for the size I want to buy (a two- to three-bed house), I'll probably need more.' Life on the BAS base was routine, but the role's practical tasks kept him on his toes. Alongside general maintenance and regular safety checks, he helped modernise the station, and sometimes would help scientists, such as with an 'ice coring' project. For this, he made little wooden wedges to help researchers take samples out of the ground. He also assisted repairing parts for boat rigging and remade skis for the sled to go out in the field. BAS residents were also able to use the workshop for hobby projects in their personal time. Applicants need a lot of experience because, he explains: 'It's a lot of work. You have to think of solutions on the spot.' There are limited supplies and materials, not to mention accessibility and weather conditions in the southernmost continent's unique environment. Summer can range from 5C to -10C, and winter is normally around -10C to -15C, with the coldest being -26C. For free time in the evenings and on days off, there are two TV rooms, a gym and a crafts room – Harris attempted to learn the piano. 'If the weather wasn't very good outside, which was a fair amount of time, you could go to the movie rooms, play pool or get out a board game. I went to the gym a lot as well.' There is a two drink limit at the base, so there were no drunken nights in. He adds: 'Every Wednesday, a few of us would go to the kitchen and make fresh pasta after dinner. And there were lots of events as well. They celebrated Burn's Night, Christmas and New Year's.' There was even a folk night, 'where people would take it in turn to play songs. There was a music room with lots of instruments. People played together and made bands to play at social events'. Food is a major part of life on the base. 'The food was really good in the summer – we got quite a lot of fresh food coming in off the Sir David Attenborough ship or flights as they came in and out. The chefs worked hard to get nice dishes and change up what we ate. There was always plenty of food available. In the winter, there is less fresh fruit and veg, unfortunately.' For the last two to three months of the winter period, 'it was mainly just frozen fruit and veg or tinned food. They still did really well to make nice dishes, but you definitely start running out of options. I remember having my first orange off of the plane. Having some fresh fruit was amazing'. If flights were finished for the day, or cancelled due to poor weather conditions, residents are allowed to run on the runway – a loop of 'about two kilometers with lovely views'. You could also go for a walk in 'a flagged area of about 15 kilometers where it's been deemed safe. You can ski around, take a Ski-Doo whenever you like. You just have to sign in and out and take a radio with you'. Tedium was hard to avoid entirely in the winter. 'We had six weeks of the sun not coming over the horizon,' he says. 'When it was dark and the weather was bad, there were periods of boredom. Everything you experience is amplified in this small community.' Other than the people working at the station, based on Adelaide Island, there is no one else living nearby. The isolation is extreme – to get to the base, workers fly to Santiago in Chile, travel south to Punta Arenas, and then get on BAS's Dash 7 aircraft to Rothera Research Station. In the summer, he worked eight to six every day, and a half day on Saturdays – in the winter, there's no work on Saturdays, and it's nine to five. There is also a smaller team in the darker months. 'There were 38 of us in the winter, and in the summer it went up to about 160 people, with lots more people coming and going,' he says. There are lots of different occupations on the base, science teams and boating operators, as well as chefs and station support assistance. There are on-site doctors for if anyone gets ill during their stay. If required, 'they liaised with a medical unit based in Plymouth. You would be taken back to Chile and assessed there, and it would be decided whether you'd come back or carry on to the UK'. In the winter, he says, 'it's a bit more tricky. It would depend on the severity of illness, and it could take a few weeks to be able to get a plane down to get someone taken out', due to the weather. A memorable part of Harris's experience was the wildlife. 'I saw a lot of penguins and seals. I was lucky enough to see an emperor penguin that came through the station out of nowhere one day. I also saw whales, humpback, orca and minke on recreational boat trips. You can even join the marine team when they're diving.' He says: 'I loved the adventure of it, having the opportunity to go somewhere where not many people are able to go to work and being able to come back with some money saved was a bonus. Booking a holiday to Antarctica costs around £50,000, so to be able to live there and get paid for a year was an offer I couldn't refuse.' He adds: 'It's an amazing experience. You get to see a special part of the world few can. As with any year in your life, there's always going to be ups and downs, harder times and better times. But that's what you would have if you were living at home. And in this location, it's 100pc worth it.'
