The British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the UK’s national operator in Antarctica, began its 2026/27 research season in late October, including the largest penguin census ever carried out on the continent, with flights from the British Rothera station and from Chile’s Marsh station on King George Island.
The season began with the departure from the UK of the polar icebreaker RRS Sir David Attenborough, which is running on hydrotreated vegetable oil, a biofuel, as part of the organisation’s efforts to reduce emissions, and with the arrival of its aircraft at Rothera. Dozens of scientists and support staff will be spread across the five British stations.
The census will use an aerial camera system aboard a Twin Otter aircraft, successfully trialled last season, to count around 200 colonies of Adélie, chinstrap and gentoo penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland, Elephant Island and South Orkney groups. The data will help scientists understand population changes and the potential impact of krill fishing, and will feed into the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).
New projects also include the first drone-based monitoring system for the body condition and demography of humpback whales, whose populations are recovering after the end of commercial whaling. A multinational study will investigate why the flow of warm water to the Amundsen Sea, a major driver of ice loss in West Antarctica, varies, with the help of the autonomous submarine Autosub Long Range. Other teams will study the compacted snow layer that protects ice shelves from melting and, with NASA and the California Institute of Technology, deploy an instrument beneath the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf.
At King Edward Point station in South Georgia, the groundfish survey will mark 40 years since it began in 1987, one of the longest records in the Southern Ocean and key to studying the effects of ocean warming on fish and the wider ecosystem.
“Collaboration is at the heart of Antarctic science,” said BAS Director Professor Dame Jane Francis, highlighting the participation of researchers from Chile, the Netherlands, the United States and Australia, as well as the value of long-term monitoring programmes.