This March and April, BIOPOLE’s Alanna Grant (UKCEH) and Nadine Johnston (BAS) were deployed to King Edward Point (KEP), South Georgia onboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough’s SD058 cruise. During their 3 week stay on the island they delivered the final BIOPOLE-led fieldwork campaign, meticulously planned by Alanna and the WP1 team! The aim was to examine the key sources of nutrients from a range of sites (encompassing glacial and lake catchments) on the north side of the island within Cumberland East Bay and West Bay (Fig 1). The campaign is complementary to previous BIOPOLE campaigns in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (Jul-Aug, 2023), Tana River, Norway/Finland (Aug-Sep, 2024), and Rothera, Antarctica (Dec-Jan 2024/5) and was planned around the same framework. Access to the sample sites (Fig 1 and 2) was supported by the KEP boating team, Emily Cox and Joseph Laurence, and members of the KEP summer/winter field teams. A total of 15 out of 20 planned sites were sampled for a range of properties (Fig 3). Samples were part-processed within the KEP laboratories (Fig 4) and the final analyses will be conducted across various specialist BIOPOLE research centres once back in the UK. As part of Alanna’s masters project, the biogeochemical impact of the large animal colonies was also examined by sampling upstream and downstream of colonies. Alanna and Nadine also collected samples as a contribution to a project examining black carbon in the Antarctic (involving BIOPOLE’s Clara Manno BAS and her PhD student Laura Wilkie-Johnston BAS) and as part of a rapid science response to a mass stranding of kelp bivalves one of the islands beaches (BIOPOLE’s Katrin Linse BAS). Onboard the SDO58 cruise, University of Tasmania’s Inessa Corney also conducted copepod respiration experiments that will contribute to BIOPOLE’s legacy data sets. Many thanks to the Captain, Officers, and Crew of the RRS Sir David Attenborough and the summer and winter KEP Station Leaders and team for making all of this possible!

The Author of this Article Nadine Johnston (BAS) and Alanna Grant (NOC)