The Climate Conversations: Singapore researchers come face to face with Antarctica’s melting glaciers

SINGAPORE: Standing on an ice sheet with only a t-shirt on his back was not how Professor Benjamin Horton thought his trip to Antarctica would go. 

“The first couple of days, the weather was amazing. The oceans were like a mirror. We had wildlife, humpback whales, popping out (of the ocean),” said the director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore.

“I was over dressed.”

It was around 15 degrees Celsius in the afternoon, not the type of temperature he was expecting to face in the South Pole.

“At the end of it, I was just wearing a t-shirt, no hat, no gloves,” the 52-year-old scientist told CNA’s Julie Yoo in The Climate Conversation podcast.

Antarctica is the coldest, driest and windiest continent on the planet. But summers here can be surprisingly mild and unpredictable. 

The next morning, weather conditions were so poor the team could not get off the boat.

“We went in the summer season and it was brutal. You can’t go in the winter season, so you only get these brief snapshots,” said Prof Horton.

The professor and 26-year-old PhD student Tan Fang Yi were part of a Singapore scientific expedition to Antarctica to study sea level rise.