After 30 years of service with British Antarctic Survey the RRS James Clark Ross has been sold to the Ukrainian National Antarctic Scientific Centre.

RRS James Clark Ross sold

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2021-08-20 11:00:06

After 30 years of service with British Antarctic Survey the RRS James Clark Ross has been sold to the Ukrainian National Antarctic Scientific Centre.

This is the second time that a UK research asset has transferred to Ukrainian research colleagues – the first being the transfer in 1996 of the former Faraday station that is now known as Vernadsky.

For the past three decades the JCR has fulfilled her role as a world-leading research platform for biological, oceanographic and geophysical research. She contains some of Britain’s most advanced facilities for oceanographic research in both Antarctica and the Arctic.

Built by Swan Hunter Shipbuilders in Wallsend, UK, and launched by HM the Queen in 1990 the RRS James Clark Ross was part of the first international, multi-vessel survey to estimate the biomass of krill in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean – a figure still used today in krill management models.  The ship is also a platform for deploying ambitious sediment coring technologies in previously unstudied locations, pushing coring technologies to its limits. Ground-breaking work in the Arctic provided insights into the scale and impacts of climate change in one of the most rapidly changing environments on the planet.

The ice-capable ship is a new asset for Ukraine and opens up new research opportunities for its National Antarctic Scientific Centre, in particular research into oceans and climate change in the polar regions. The purchase of the ship comes ahead of the COP26 Conference in November, where representatives from every signatory party for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) come together to discuss climate change action.

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