SKUA

For the past few weeks I have been sitting on some news, which turns out to be a surprisingly difficult thing to do when part of your job is literally talking to people about science. Today the embargo has finally lifted: the European Research Council has announced its 2026 Synergy Grants, and I am delighted (and, if I’m honest, more than a little daunted) to say that one of the 48 projects funded is ours: SKUA — studying the known unknown of Antarctic ice shelves, to the tune of €14 million over the next six years. Antarctic Skua – courtesy of pixabay (A skua, by the way, is the big, brawny, occasionally larcenous seabird you find hanging around sea bird colonies in the polar regions, nicking other birds’ lunch. Long-time readers of this blog will be unsurprised I am naming things after polar seabirds, though I swear this name had nothing to do with me!) What’s the known unknown? Ice shelves are the floating aprons of ice that fringe roughly a third of the Antarctic coastline. They…

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