Pint of View Lecture 7: Ice To Meet You: Antarctic Mixology

Pint of View London presents

Ice To Meet You: Antarctic Mixology

How a collapsing glacier unlocked one of climate science's biggest mysteries

Turns out the coldest room in the house is running the heating. For decades, the conventional wisdom in ocean mixing had a recipe: winds, tides, and the formation of sea ice in winter. Simple enough.

Then, in January 2020, aboard a UK research vessel in Antarctica, our speaker watched a massive glacier collapse into the ocean. The crash sent an invisible wave rippling through the deep — an "internal tsunami" nobody could see from the surface. And just like that, everything we thought we knew about how the Southern Ocean mixes got a lot more complicated.

It turns out falling ice, much like an ice cube in a drink, could be one of the most powerful mixers on the planet. And that mixing? It distributes heat, moves carbon, and feeds marine life across the entire Earth system. What happens in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica.

In this lecture, we'll explore what these invisible tsunamis are, why they matter, and what a fleet of underwater robots is doing about it — and what a warming world might mean for all of it.

This lecture is for everyone. Because climate affects us all and Antarctica is, quite literally, the coolest story on the planet.

Expect 45 minutes of lecture followed by a Q&A. Then we open it up for mixing, conversations, and meeting people who are just as curious as you.  

About The Speaker

Dr Amber Annett is an Associate Professor in Marine Biogeochemistry at the University of Southampton, UK. Her research focuses on the chemical and biological signatures of changing high-latitude oceans, specifically exploring trace metal geochemistry and polar ecobiogeochemistry.

A veteran of remote fieldwork, Dr Annett has spent over 30 months in the Antarctic — including a full 12-month polar winter at Rothera Research Station — across 11 major research expeditions, 6 in polar regions, on both UK and US vessels.

She holds a prestigious NERC Independent Research Fellowship and has published over 25 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals, including Nature Communications and Science Advances, with her work garnering over 1,000 citations.

Beyond the lab, Dr Annett is an advocate for diversity, gender equality and early-career scientists in marine science, and believes the geosciences are as vital to humanity as medicine or engineering.

Information on us and tickets can be found on our main page here.