Postcard: Voyage around the margins of the last British-Irish ice sheet

Professor Richard Chiverrell, from the University of Liverpool's School of Environmental Sciences talks about his experience on board Royal Research Ship (RRS) James Cook. I have spent 32 days researching on board the RRS James Cook, as part of the Natural Environment Research Council's (NERC) funded consortium focusing on ice sheet decay. We sailed from Southampton through the Celtic, Irish, Malin Seas before skirting the edge of the continental shelf south, up to 150km west of Ireland before the return sailing to Southampton. Despite being a novice to marine-based research, I have taken to it like a duck to water; my original plan was to complete the first half of the cruise and depart, but approaching the halfway port call with changes in the science crew, it became clear we needed more senior members of the team on board. So I stayed for the duration. Vanishing glaciers My role in the five-year Britice-Chrono programme is running the land-based research, and so you could argue I had substantially misread my remit or got lost by going to sea! But the research aims were to work out how quickly glaciers draining an ice sheet that nearly covered these islands vanished. Many of the margins were located far out to sea on the edge of the continental shelf and that required research off-shore.