The Riiser-Larsen ice shelf, East Antarctica, 2026-01-16

We would like to believe that science has mapped every corner of this planet and studied every detail. But almost four weeks into our trip to Antarctica – together with researchers from Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Norway, as well as technicians and logistics staff from the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat – we realise that this continent is still largely unknown. We know that glaciers in West Antarctica are melting at a pace almost as fast as in Greenland. We know that 2025 was the warmest year ever recorded in Antarctica, and the third warmest globally.

But after a five-hour journey by snowmobile from the Swedish Wasa Station in East Antarctica, watching scientists drill through snow layer after snow layer – and measure the size and weight of each piece – we still arrive at the same conclusion: it is still too early to draw conclusions. About the state of the Riiser-Larsen Ice Shelf. About the history and future of this vast white desert.

Here we have realised that there is a big difference between the professions of journalists and researchers. News journalists tend to treat a changing climate as “breaking news” – one event in a chain of other events – competing with the war in Ukraine, an invasion of Venezuela, and protests in Iran.

In that competition, the most pressing challenge for those reporting on the climate is how to visualise what is not yet visible – and how to reach a wider audience.

For the scientists we have come to know, climate research is a lifelong investment: drilling, collecting measurements, writing them down with frozen fingers that can barely hold a pen. One by one until the page is full. And then doing it again. And again.

“It’s like collecting evidence for a trial,” said Ninis Rosqvist of Stockholm University one afternoon, after an icy night out on the great white expanse. “My whole career, I thought they would believe us if we just showed them the data. Now I realise I was naive.”

We barely talked about politics, climate deniers, or social media. “Let science be for the scientists, activism for the activists, and politics for the politicians,” was something we often heard during these four weeks.

Cathedral building in a white desert

A scientist is really like a detective at a crime scene, looking for seemingly irrelevant details before drawing conclusions about what happened – and what might happen next. What happens next is not decided here in the cold, with a notebook full of numbers. That is up to others. But without the hard work these scientists do here, there can be no conversation based on facts. The value of the work may not become clear until years – or decades – later. Science in Antarctica is like building cathedrals: hard work now, for the benefit of generations to come.

Text: Bram Vermeulen, journalist/reporter