Lost software, Polar Research Ships, Antarctica, and Doom: Rescuing 30+ years of raw scientific vessel underway data

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• Claudette Lopez - British Antarctic Survey
• Thursday 27 November 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Room E, West Hub.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jack Atkinson.

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) prepares all year to ensure successful Seasons of delivering polar science throughout Antarctic and Arctic regions. UK RRS (Royal Research Ship) Icebreakers are a key aspect of seasonal work. These vessels are fully equipped scientific research platforms solely devoted to support scientists throughout research periods known as ‘science cruises’, where science meets extreme environments via uncharted waters.

Icebreaker RRS James Clark Ross (JCR) (1991-2021) played an invaluable role in marine polar sciences, having served over 200 cruises! Although the JCR was a leader in UK polar scientific operations, a significant amount of her lifetime is positionally unaccounted for. In 2024, the UK Polar Data Centre (BAS) launched the Vessels Positions Project to identify and fill-in positional gaps in the JCR ’s voyage record. Originally this project was dedicated to filling in summer periods where JCR data systems were completely off. Very quickly this project turned into an emergency data rescue mission! Decades worth of underway data was missing, misplaced, lost. In this talk, I’ll share my work on restoring the JCR ’s historical underway data. I’ll discuss my journey from cryptic data discovery (and then some!) to data ingestion.

Underway data is the product of various scientific sensor messages transmitted into a data acquisitioning system, the data is captured while the vessel is underway.

This talk is part of the RSE Seminars series.

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