King’s Alumnus takes up residence in Antarctica

As you get stuck into your turkey on Christmas Day, spare a thought for Jonathan Shanklin OKS who will be working in Antarctica for the British Antarctic Survey, where Christmas is just another working day.

For this, Jonathan’s twentieth trip to the Earth’s southernmost continent, his home will be the Halley VI Research Station. The station is situated on the treacherous Brunt Ice Shelf which borders the coast of Coats Land between Dawson-Lambton Glacier and Stancomb-Wills Glacier Tongue.

The Halley VI Research Station Halley is an internationally important platform for global earth, atmospheric and space weather observation in a climate sensitive zone. Built on a floating ice shelf in the Weddell Sea, Halley VI is the world’s first re-locatable research facility. This award-winning and innovative research station provides scientists with state-of-the-art laboratories and living accommodation, enabling them to study pressing global problems from climate change and sea-level rise to space weather and the ozone hole – first discovered at Halley in 1985 by Jonathan and his colleagues.

Jonathan will spend this Christmas as a meteorological observer, making surface weather observations for forecasting and climate studies, and launching weather balloons. He will be making ozone observations with a Dobson ozone spectrophotometer and calibrating an automated Dobson that he hopes will run over the Antarctic winter. 

Jonathan has started a blog “Notes from South 2017” for his trip and this can be found at: https://legacy.bas.ac.uk/met/jds/notes_from_south_2017.htm