Rob Larter

Polar marine scientist. Made in Wolverhampton. Enhanced at universities of Durham, Aberdeen and Birmingham. UK science lead in Science Coordination Office of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Views are my own.

Profile page: https://bas.ac.uk/profile/rdla

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Last Notes

2025-12-27 10:32:16 GMT

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Meanwhile cricket fans in Europe catch up on some sleep

2025-12-27 08:50:52 GMT

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I agree, it doesn't seem right. I've read that this is the first series between any teams to contain two two-day Tests since 1896. In the case of the match that just finished it sounds like the pitch wasn't prepared properly for test cricket, which is shocking.

2025-12-27 07:56:20 GMT

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I've been to a couple of ice hockey matches at the Gattiker ice rink in Cambridge. Agree it's very impressive.
That comment about the England cricket team being rubbish didn't age well though, did it?

2025-12-19 11:29:03 GMT

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Even as someone soon to become a beneficiary, I think the state pension triple lock is unsustainable. The difficulty any government faces on this though is that old folk are a large fraction of the electorate and most likely to vote, and self interest influences a lot of voting decisions. It's a tricky conundrum.

2025-12-19 07:31:15 GMT

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I agree that it's how a good social democracy should work, but a difficulty with it in the UK at present is our highly skewed demographic distribution, with relatively few in work supporting a large aging population.

2025-12-02 20:21:55 GMT

Sea-ice extent in the Bellingshausen Sea (lower left on these maps) is not presently as minimal as it was at the start of December three years ago, but with 2½ months to go until the sea ice minimun, we're probably heading towards another blue ocean event in this sector.
Sea-ice extent in this sector has declined progressively through the 46 years of the satellite record. Looking back further, the first ship to visit the sector, the Belgica, was trapped in sea ice in this sector for a whole year in 1898-99.
Maps from the Institute of Environmental Physics, University of Bremen
https://seaice.uni-bremen.de/sea-ice-concentration/amsre-amsr2/
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2025-12-01 12:13:50 GMT

For #AntarcticaDay here are a few photos from my last visit, on RV Polarstern three years ago. At the end of that trip I didn't know when or if I would return. Now I have a plan to return this season - watch this space.
This is also a timely opportunity to remind everyone that over previous years we have set up a range of outreach and educational resources on the International #ThwaitesGlacier Collaboration website at
https://thwaitesglacier.org/news/antarctica-festival-2024
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2025-10-21 21:50:28 GMT

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Indeed, but the global mean rise over the past century was only 20 to 25 cm (8 to 10 inches). Over the past 30 years the rate of rise has doubled. The rate is likely to continue to rise, and may accelerate considerably if ice sheet instabilities are triggered. Much of the future rise is already committed, irrespective of what emissions scenario is now followed because even after reaching net zero the world will remain abnormally warm and it will take a long time for glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets to reach an equilibrium in this warmed world.

2025-10-20 22:49:07 GMT

How Soon Will the Seas Rise?
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-soon-will-the-seas-rise-20251020/

2025-10-15 06:22:44 GMT

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The problem is that sea-level rise threatens to rewind the whole region, and as a society we have to decide how much we're willing to invest to stop that from happening.

2025-10-14 21:18:28 GMT

A fascinating visit to the Denver Sluice Complex today with a group from #U3AC (University of the Third Age in Cambridge). The complex is a critical centre of #flood control and water management infrastructure for a large part of East Anglia.
The first sluice at this location was constructed in the 17th century as a key step in drainage of the #Fens. The present complex of sluices has successfully enabled prevention of serious flooding and management of drainage in the large catchment for decades, but how long it will continue to be able to function so effectively as sea-level rises in future is uncertain.
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2025-10-10 23:01:11 GMT

A pleasure to have been able to visit the #RRSSirDavidAttenborough in Harwich yesterday and today to meet up with others who helped specify and commission the ship's scientific facilities. The vessel is looking great after its recent refit, and loading of cargo for departure to the #Antarctic is nearly complete.
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2025-10-07 21:59:05 GMT

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Glad it was useful. Sadly, I still have read beyond the abstract ( meetings, co-author manuscripts, reviews etc. dominating my days).

2025-10-06 09:26:06 GMT

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I have downloaded the pdf of the Coonin et al. paper using our library subscription. Let me know if you would like me to send it as an email attachment.

2025-10-06 07:27:39 GMT

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I had missed that paper. Thanks for shatter the link. Just read the abstract so far and from my knowledge of paleo data I don't think there is any way the WAIS could have contributed 5 m during this interval. In fact, 5 m is probably more than the WAIS contributed during the entire deglaciation.

2025-10-05 15:38:01 GMT

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You need to get your analysis published. I appreciate that this will be a challenge if nobody is paying you to work on it at present.

2025-10-05 09:09:18 GMT

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Interesting. Most people working on palaeo sea levels regard the existence of MWP1A as being well established. I attended one presentation about 10 years ago in which the speaker questioned whether the data really constrain the extent of the rise and timing as tightly as widely reported. I understand that there has been some revision of estimates of the magnitude and time limits since then but I haven't heard of anyone calling existence of the event into question. I'll be interested to see your final conclusions.

2025-10-04 21:21:16 GMT

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I agree that there is the potential for the WAIS to lose ice more quickly than the Laurentide did if instabilities are triggered. Current whole ice sheet models don't show this, but there are a few processes that are not fully accounted for yet. There are still questions about the threshold for initiation of MICI and under what conditions it could be sustained, and recent studies have revealed that melting at the base of ice shelves is more complex and spatially variable than current parameterisations account for. Another important unknown is how the complex interactions between ice, glacial sediments, tidal instrusions of seawater and episodic discharge of subglacial melt affect basal drag in grounding zones.

2025-10-04 21:10:13 GMT

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A group of of us in the UK have actually recently had a proposal approved to try to answer exactly this question. We're in "recommended for funding" limbo at present and had to tie up some details concerning how and when a research cruise and fieldwork can be done in order to get to the stage of getting an award letter.

2025-10-03 23:00:29 GMT

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The speed at which ice can be lost from ice sheets, particularly the WAIS, remains an important unknown that is critical for adaptation planning.

2025-10-03 22:57:20 GMT

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You estimate perhaps 12-13 m within a thousand years, but if the rate wasn't steady during that interval there could have been rates of 2 m per century or more for a few hundred years, which is getting into the zone touted for the MWP. That's huge compared the modern rate, and whatever the actual maximum rate was it was delivered from ice sheets that didn't have the same degree of instability the WAIS is thought to be vulnerable to. However, perhaps the maximum rate was achieved through synchronous losses from multiple ice sheets and ice caps?

2025-10-03 12:51:31 GMT

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That does seem like a place ice could be lost from relatively quickly, but I'm not really familiar with what constraints there are on the deglacial history.

2025-10-03 11:11:28 GMT

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I've long wondered how it would be possible to achieve the rates of ice loss needed to deliver the sea-level rise if you took the Deschamps et al. results at face value. That was around 4 m per century, or to put if more starkly, approximately one WAIS collapse per century for 4 centuries in succession. However, if you look at the high-end projections for Antarctic ice loss to 2300 in the high emission scenario ISMIP6 models presented by Seroussi et al. last year, they get close to that rate.

2025-10-02 21:53:09 GMT

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Surely the drilling results from around Tahiti, initially reported by Deschamps et al. in 2012 and more recently reanalysed by Blanchon and Chutcharavan are more difficult to dismiss though?

2025-10-02 11:30:07 GMT

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Roger Creel's re-interpretation of Holocene records is the most significant change I'm aware of. The interpretation that mean sea level peaked in the mid-Holocene seems consistent with what is known about the history of Greenland Ice Sheet mass change, and there are now several studies suggesting a similar ice mass evolution in parts of Antarctica.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-54535-0

2025-09-25 14:19:29 GMT

The deepest part of the three gravity cores collected nearest to Thwaites Glacier. These glacial tills and proximal glacimarine sediments hold the potential to inform us about the timing of the last stage of grounding zone retreat before the start of contemporary ice loss, and the characteristics of the bed the downstream part of the glacier is flowing over.
https://fediscience.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/265/352/874/709/862/original/00e93d979e95d732.jpg

2025-09-14 09:29:46 GMT

One of the biggest challenges in the UK today is to get many ordinary people to understand that immigrants are not the reason that their lives have become harder, billionaires are.

2025-09-09 22:24:26 GMT

After the past couple of years Antarctic sea ice extent approaching ONLY 2 standard deviations less than the long-term average seems like good news.
This is what we've come to.
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2025-08-25 16:44:13 GMT

"experts believe a global rise in sea level of at least three metres may now be inevitable as a result of the break-up of Antarctica’s giant western glaciers"
I'd prefer this to have been phrased "latest scientific results point to loss of marine-based areas of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet now being inevitable, implying a commitment to more than 3 metres of global mean sea-level rise", but you get the picture.
"Believe" should never feature in a sentence about science.
https://observer.co.uk/news/international/article/global-3-metre-rise-in-sea-levels-inevitable-experts-warn-as-sci-fi-becomes-reality

2025-08-09 06:42:43 GMT

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When Netanyahu has travelled to Washington I've wondered what route he has taken to avoid the airspace of countries that do recognise the ICC and would take him into custody.

2025-08-08 07:17:10 GMT

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The higher education funding system is also flawed in the way it is loading huge debts onto UK students that most of them will never pay off. Even for graduates who earn quite good salaries, their repayments don't reduce the balance of the debt because of the high interest rates. I wonder how the situation will be managed when these vast amounts of debt have to be written off?

2025-07-19 08:33:36 GMT

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My understanding is that the change in dominant period of cyclicity during this interval is generally attributed to the way the increasing extent of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets affected system response.

2025-07-18 12:32:58 GMT

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It's not work I'm involved in, but from my perspective the main advance will be knowing with much greater certainty what atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were over the period the core covers before 800 ka

2025-07-18 06:13:46 GMT

Drilling Antarctica: What ice can tell us about our past and the future | ITV News https://www.itv.com/news/2025-07-17/drilling-antarctica-what-ice-can-tell-us-about-our-past-and-the-future

2025-07-18 06:09:40 GMT

Unique 1.5m year-old ice to be melted to unlock mystery.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ygwd6yj28o

2025-06-27 21:55:10 GMT

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At least most people will be saved from all but the opening paragraphs of this nonsense by the paywall. Seriously though, debunking these crazy technofantasies that are supposed to temporarily suppress some aspect or other of climate change is becoming like playing whac-a-mole. As you point out, real science has already identified the solution. We just need to get serious about implementing it.

2025-06-19 19:54:32 GMT

Moved to the next stage of my rehabilitation today following an Achilles tendon rupture in January, by participating in the office midsummer 10k. Alternated fast walking with gentle jogging and am very pleased to have beaten my target time of 1 hour 20 minutes.
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2025-06-03 05:36:00 GMT

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👏

2025-05-28 20:30:10 GMT

First time cycling to the office today since my Achilles tendon rupture in January. A little slower than I'm used to, but I'll take this for now.
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2025-04-27 14:50:18 GMT

On my way to #EGU2025, where I'll present some of the multibeam swath bathymetry and sub-bottom acoustic profiler data we collected in the Bellingshausen Sea two years ago as part of the CoReBell project on RV Polarstern expedition PS134.
https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU25/EGU25-13677.html
1/n

2025-03-08 18:52:02 GMT

40 years ago today on my first #Antarctic and Southern Ocean research cruise I arrived at South Georgia for the first time. RRS Discovery III tied up at the jetty at King Edward Point, a short distance from the abandoned Grytviken whaling station. I had previously visited the Alps and spent summers working as a field assistant in Iceland and Alaska, but the mountain scenery of South Georgia was the most impressive I had seen - ice-capped mountains of alpine scale rising directly from the sea.
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2025-02-22 17:47:18 GMT

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I can see the potential of that. Some significance engineering challenges in making new routes across the Pennines though.
I'd much rather see genuine "levelling up" investment in northern infrastructure like this than successive governments' obsession with forcing further development along the "Oxcam arc", parts of which are still trying to adapt to the crazy pace of development that has happened over the past few decades.

2025-02-22 11:31:02 GMT

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It's good to read about how successful this project is proving to be. However, the choice of which infrastructure investments elsewhere are funded still needs to be made carefully. For one thing, there needs to be a customer base, or at least a potential one. This is one of several criteria on which the much hyped East West Rail project fails. The assertion is that Oxford and Cambridge are two major centres of innovation, so there must be substantial demand for journeys between the two. There is actually little evidence to support this, and in fact surveys commissioned by the East West Rail Company revealed little demand for end-to-end journeys. For those who do want to make this journey it's a fairly simple one by rail via London, taking about two and a half hours (which isn't much longer than it would typically take to drive between the two).
If we are going to invest in new rail routes, I would prefer to see the investment go into ones that link centres of economic activity, for example east coast ports via Cambridge to the West Midlands. At present this is a very slow and tortuous rail journey, unless you go via London. Because there is no suitable rail route, most freight from Felixstowe and Harwich is forced to go by road via the A14.

2025-01-25 15:46:37 GMT

40 years ago the first leg of research work on my first #Antarctic cruise on RRS Discovery III was approaching its end. Here are a few selected photos from that leg.
1. SW part of Deception I and New Rock
2. Graham Coast from Bismark Strait
3. SW part of Anvers I.
4. Head of Flanders Bay
https://fediscience.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/889/715/125/734/105/original/d288218ce0f3278b.jpeg
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2024-11-07 09:13:35 GMT

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I applaud people who have the confidence and energy to do those kinds of things. Personally, I don't think talking to camera is one of my strengths. I prefer to support others in doing that.

2024-11-07 06:50:23 GMT

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For these reasons I'm also increasingly in favour of efforts to communicate science through unconventional approaches. There are people who will go to music events, plays, art galleries etc. who would never read anything on science or environmental themes put out through a media outlet.

2024-11-07 06:45:19 GMT

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Yes, that's absolutely true. I didn't mean to downplay the great efforts to communicate being made by many scientists, but there is clearly a large section of the population in the US (and elsewhere) that we're not succeeding in getting the message through to. Yes, the media is an imperfect filter, but we have to persevere in working with them because, with few exceptions, the general public, policy makers and politicians don't read scientific papers.

2024-11-06 23:19:34 GMT

Many factors influence the way people vote, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that we, as a science community, have failed to communicate the urgency of taking action on climate change to a large proportion of the US population.

2024-11-06 23:14:25 GMT

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It's not so surprising if you're familiar with 20th century history.

2024-08-26 08:10:10 GMT

As we're now on transit home at the end of the #KangGlac cruise, and I don't have to keep watch on sonar systems anymore, I've chosen to station myself at a desk with a view today.
This is the view looking aft from the Winch Control Room on #RRSSirDavidAttenborough
https://fediscience.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/027/289/613/440/247/original/964901e2dd9ea186.jpg

2024-08-22 02:16:59 GMT

** Ice Sheet Modelling research post opportunity **
Apply now to join the Ice Dynamics and Palaeoclimate team at the British Antarctic Survey.
https://bas.ciphr-irecruit.com/applicants/vacancy/655/Ice-Sheet-Modeller
Unfortunately, due to funding limitations this is a fixed-term post, but there a lot of people at the institute who started on fixed-term contracts and have found ways to extend their employment.