Ambushed by a blizzard and trapped at their furthest point from camp, glaciologist Dr Richard Jones faced a dilemma: hunker down in the Antarctic wilderness or make a run for it?

Jones and his team had hitched a ride in a helicopter to a sampling site near the Denman Glacier, a vast repository of ice wedged into what could be the deepest terrestrial trough on earth. But bad weather had blasted in six hours earlier than forecast, nixing the ride back to camp.

“It was pretty extreme weather and something that did catch us off guard,” the Monash University researcher said on a call from Casey Station this week, awaiting his plane ride home. “We decided to hike back to camp through the blizzard.”

The Denman Glacier, 5000 km to the south of Australia, is 16 kilometres wide and 110km long - which is about the size of Hobart. But it stretches 3.5km below the sea surface – that’s about as deep as two Grand Canyons.

Jones and his team were some of the 27 scientists posted on the glacier and surrounding region for two months as part of Australia’s most ambitious field expeditions in 20 years. The Denman Terrestrial Campaign aims to understand how the glacier has changed over time, its stability, geology and biodiversity, and how that’s changing with the climate. It is one of the fastest retreating glaciers, meaning it’s very vulnerable to climate change, and holds a potential sea level rise of 1.5 metres.

If warm ocean water advances deep enough and seeps into Denman’s trough, it could rapidly melt the ice, endangering coastal communities and threatening to swamp an estimated $226 billion worth of Australian infrastructure exposed to just 1.1 metres of sea-level rise.

The campaign is a partnership between the Australian Antarctic Division, the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future and the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.

It’s vital work, but has some of the most challenging field conditions scientists could face. As Jones and his team battled back to camp, snow squalls erased the line between ice and sky, and gusts were so fierce they knocked them to the ground.

After four hours, the team stopped to rest, hunched against the extreme wind. Then the snow cleared for a minute and they spied something through the gale: tents. They were about 100 metres from camp, and they hadn’t even realised.

The adventure is just one that Jones and his colleagues had over the summer as they tried to piece together the history of Denman.

The glacier has retreated five kilometres in the past two decades – a rather rapid shift on a glacial timescale. “The problem is we don’t really know whether this retreat is normal, or whether it’s the start of a new worrying trend,” Jones said.

Jones and his team drilled into rocks with diamond drill bits and chiselled out Snickers bar-sized chunks – 600 kilograms of rock, all up. They took cores of lake mud and samples of beach sand.

Inside the rock and quartz of the sand lie geochemical signals that are sensitive to cosmic radiation. Once buried, a stopwatch begins within the minerals. Fire a laser at the sand grains and a time stamp reveals itself, allowing researchers to piece together the story of sea level, ice melt and glacial see-sawing of the region in a critical period of Antarctic history.

“Getting records of how the local sea level has changed is directly telling us how the ice mass has changed in this region over hundreds and thousands of years,” Jones said.

“Computer models need to know whether or not the glacier has been stable, whether it’s only started to change because of 20th century emissions, or whether it has been retreating or advancing prior to that.

“We hope that our kind of baseline that we get will really improve the ability of computer models to then predict how Denman Glacier, and the Antarctic ice sheet more broadly, will change over the next few decades and even centuries.”

Meanwhile, Laura Phillips, from SAEF’s biodiversity team, was focusing on collecting soil, water and moss samples to study what type of life is present, thriving and adapting in the region. The team will bring the samples back with them to study - and may need a big suitcase to carry the 852 bags of soil, 41 moss samples and 100 bottles of water from lakes.

Phillips said that when most people thought of the icy landmass, they tended to think of only penguins. But there was much more to it.

“There is so much we don’t know - it’s exciting to think what might be living here and how it’s surviving,” she said.

For example, Phillips and her team hope that by studying moss, they might learn what Antarctica’s climate has been like over the past 100 years, how water supplies have changed and how sea-level changes have affected it.

Phillips hopes her research will help provide greater insight into how to forecast and mitigate against environmental changes, and help make policy recommendations to better protect the continent.

Antarctica in a warming world

Sea ice extent in Antarctica last year was the lowest on record, driven by warming ocean temperatures. With less sea ice, oceans will absorb more heat, further warming oceans. This can have longer-term impacts on future sea ice cycles.

With less sea ice, the atmosphere is also likely to warm up. There has been a slight rebound in Antarctica’s sea ice extent this January, although it remains 18 per cent below average.

It comes as last year shattered global annual heat records and flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold of 1.5 degrees. The European Union-backed agency, Copernicus, said 2023 was 1.48 degrees above pre-industrial times, barely below the 1.5-degree limit set under the 2015 Paris Climate Accord aimed at avoiding the most severe effects of warming.

And January marked the eighth month of record heat globally, with an average air temperature of 13.1 degrees – that is 0.70 degrees above the 1991-2020 average for January. The previous record was set in January 2020.

For scientists, it’s a race against time to understand the giant icy land mass as the world warms. Antarctica is important to Australia given it has sovereignty over 42 per cent of the continent, including sovereign rights over adjacent offshore areas.

The federal government has also invested billions of dollars to protect Australia’s significant Antarctic interests. But funding research projects came under pressure last year when the AAD became the focus of a Senate inquiry following revelations the organisation needed to cut roughly 16 per cent of its operating budget – this included jobs and 56 existing projects that could be cut.

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The inquiry, which is expected to deliver its final report in March, will also look at how such cuts could impact Australia’s international commitments and obligations, as well as how it will impact the scientific outcomes.

AAD acting chief scientist Aleks Terauds said the projects that went ahead were decided based on “strategic prioritisation and operational assessment of deliverability”, in liaison with the scientific community.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said the government had locked in long-term funding for the Australian Antarctic Program. “Its budget is going up, every year over the forward estimates,” she said.

“This science is not just vital for Australia, it provides globally significant insights.”

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