On the hottest day of the year in the UK, I toured the chilled passageways of the country’s RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art icebreaking research vessel where science comes with scones, cream, and jam.
Last Friday in the midst of a scorching heat wave, I joined a group of British diplomats, scientists, and academics in the air-conditioned passageways of one of the world’s most advanced polar research vessels: the Royal Research Ship Sir David Attenborough. Known to the public as Sir Boaty McBoatface after the (disregarded) results of an online poll to name the icebreaker and to its crew and scientists as simply SDA, the crimson ship had docked back in Harwich on June 19 following its latest research expedition to Antarctica. Coincidentally, the sleepy seaside Essex town is where I had watched Istanbul Bridge head out to sea after sailing from China via the Northern Sea Route last October.
Despite the brutal heat that ground many British trains to a halt, most of our group managed to arrive on time for our tour of the icebreaker. At the edge of the empty parking lot at Harwich International, which is typically overflowing with cars waiting to board the ferry to the Netherlands, the impressive, 129-meter vessel operated by the British Antarctic Survey floated in the water. We flashed our IDs, donned safety vests, and climbed up the gangway to enter its decks. Launched in 2018, the ship is proof that Britain can still build things, even if the railways are forever melting down or freezing up.
Captain Will Whatley, the quietly confident 37-year-old who helms the Sir David Attenborough, greeted us. Having worked with the British Antarctic Survey since he was just 19 – nearly half his life – the captain told us that believes he has “the best job in the world” and that he intends to stay in the position until he retires. (Whatley once wrote in The Guardian, “I’m obsessed with icebreaking.”) As we sat listening to his stories of breaking through the frozen ocean bathed in the otherworldly hues of an Antarctic winter with “such bright moonlight and such long twilight,” I found myself nodding in agreement. I may be a polar geographer, but being an icebreaker captain is simply another level of cool.
The endless cups of tea and coffee and luxurious cakes served by the ships’ bakers added to the ship’s charm. Unlike some other countries’ polar agencies that contract out work such as the US, the British Antarctic Survey does everything in-house. This enables the research agency to keep tight oversight of all of its operations, from complex polar logistics to world-class baking. I’d probably give up my left arm to sail by icebergs while enjoying fluffy coconut macaroons and crispy chocolate cornflake squares every day – or night, as it were.
In 2025, the Sir David Attenborough became the first British ship to overwinter in Antarctica since the ill-fated Endurance in 1914-15, which still sits on the seafloor. That January, as Britain was suffering from its first-ever aerial bombings during the First World War, ice began crushing the wooden vessel. The slow-motion disaster prompted Sir Ernest Shackleton to abandon ship nine months later and lead his crew to safety on Elephant Island from where they were rescued the following year. They would have at least had fond memories of their last Midwinter’s Day meal onboard Endurance, comprised of turtle, whitebait, and mince pies, among other British culinary delights, to fuel them through their saga.
Nearly a century later, to commemorate the shortest day of the year, which is arguably even more important than Christmas in the Antarctic calendar, the complement of the Sir David Attenborough enjoyed a nine-course meal and received a special message from the King as part of the BBC’s 70th Antarctic Midwinter Broadcast. The icebreaker, too, paid a special visit to Elephant Island to remember Endurance’s tribulations. The ship may be forging the future of British polar science, but it is tasked with upholding the legacy of centuries of polar exploration, too.
Creature comforts on a knife edge
As we set off on our tour through the ship’s winding corridors, I felt like I’d crossed into a separate universe, where death and danger were made strangely cozy. We had to wear closed-toe shoes, but underfoot in the lounge stretched a carpet patterned with a white silhouette of Antarctica. A sign on a door teased, “Welcome to the Wonderful World of Winching Wizardry – Only Authorised Crew to Access this Area.” In the day room, a hard hat rested in front of a big basket of Hobnobs, Tunnock’s tea cakes, and other biscuits. Over these British pantry staples hung a framed photo of Chris Hindley, who served as the British Antarctic Survey Ships Programme and Operations Manager for twenty years, sitting on a couch carved out of snow somewhere on the frozen continent. He passed away in 2020.
On a video board in one of the science rooms, a series of jokes flashed next to visualizations broadcasting the air and water temperature, ship location, and other metrics. “Did you hear about the guy whose left side was cut off? He’s all right now,” one quipped.
The icebreaker’s 10-meter workboat, which ferries crew to and from shallow waters and island research stations, is named Erebus after the doomed ship commanded, alongside Terror, by Sir John Franklin. Both polar exploration ships were abandoned in 1848, and all of their crew perished. I suppose the powers that be are ignoring both public opinion and maritime tradition when naming the UK’s newest polar research vessels, for calling a ship after a sunken one is considered to be tempting fate.
An icebreaker’s goals: Science, logistics, and flying the flag
When a country spends £200 million and four years building a new icebreaker, it will no doubt encounter high expectations. Captain Whatley explained that the Sir David Attenborough has three purposes. The first is to serve as a multidisciplinary research platform. Up to 90 lucky souls can stay onboard the icebreaker at a time, with 55 scientists and 35 crew. They split their shifts into days and nights, which are indistinguishable during the polar day thanks to the 24/7 sunlight. One team is named the Admirals, while the other is called the Giants. (The platform also serves as a floating vessel for watching the World Cup, with the table and schedule posted prominently next to the television in the lounge.)
The ship’s second objective is to operate as a logistics platform that supplies the UK’s three research stations and two logistical facilities in Antarctica – and that takes back all the recycling, too. The crew carrying out this hard work seemed to be drawn largely from working-class British communities. While walking around, I noticed a tattooed woman washing dishes in the galley. She kindly and firmly prevented me from putting my napkin in the wrong garbage bin after lunch, proving that the icebreaker does in fact separate its trash.
In the day room, a few seafarers chatted animatedly, while another, who appeared to be Filipino, scrolled on their phone. Filipino seafarers contribute enormously to running the global polar fleet, as I’ve encountered from Svalbard to Newfoundland. (I even came across this recent Facebook post by an Alaska-based seafarer celebrating “conquering Antarctica” with his compatriots.)
Waiting in line for lunch with the captain and fellow visitors. Portraits of King Charles and the late Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip preside over the cafeteria.
The icebreaker’s third goal, according to Captain Whatley, is to “maintain the British presence in Antarctica and keep the flag flying, which we do.” Since the iconic icebreaker launched five years ago, nearly all of its voyages have been to Antarctica, which it can now visit year-round due to the ice’s rapid retreat. The icebreaker can easily sail at sea for two months and overwinter in Antarctica if needed. It can even journey from Britain to the Falklands, where it is flagged, and back without refueling.
The UK’s Antarctic Strategy to 2035, published last December, underscores that the country’s first and foremost aim on the continent is to “strengthen governance and UK sovereign interests.” The second is to “promote scientific understanding.”
In contrast, the UK’s Arctic Policy Framework released in 2023, which is currently being updated, sets out its main goal in the region as “partnering and collaborating,” with the second goal being “protecting climate, people and environment.” It describes the Sir David Attenborough as providing “a step-change in the UK’s ability to carry out complex and multi-task research in Polar Regions.” (As an aside, the document was allegedly called a “framework” because Canada deemed the word “strategy,” as found in the title of the UK’s 2018 Defence Arctic Strategy, offensive. Ironically, the Arctic’s second largest country borrowed from the UK when it released its own white paper for the region, called Canada’s Arctic and Northern Policy Framework.)
Sir David Attenborough heads for Greenland
In 2024, the UK’s icebreaker made its maiden voyage to the Arctic. This year, it will undertake its second. The Sir David Attenborough arrived yesterday to Frederikshavn, Denmark, where it will resupply before heading for eastern Greenland. (You can see where the vessel is in real time here.) There, the vessel will carry out a unique expedition to Kangerlussuaq Glacier, one of the country’s largest marine-terminating glaciers, to better understand their contribution to sea level rise, ocean systems, and climate change. Then, in summer 2027, the ship will head to Petermann Glacier in the far northwest of Greenland to study similar processes.
The two planned expeditions fall under the £20 million Greenland Ice sheet to Atlantic Tipping (GIANT) initiative. During our icebreaker tour, a representative from the British Antarctic Survey described GIANT as the “James Bond of science projects.” Through it, scientists are working to devise an early warning system for climate tipping points. These are critical thresholds that mark a point of no return, whether the irreversible decline of the Greenland ice sheet or a potential shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system, which contains the Gulf Stream.
GIANT is funded by ARIA (Advanced Research + Invention Agency), the UK Government’s research and development outfit founded in 2023. Its mission, as one member of our group put it, is to “fund it quick, do it quick, and fail quick,” applying Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mindset to science. Attesting to its appetite for potentially transformational science, ARIA has singlehandedly led the UK to become the world’s single largest funder of solar radiation modification, a geoengineering technique.
As a technology-forward expedition, GIANT will deploy myriad autonomous instruments above and below the sea surface. Long-distance drones with 10-meter wingspans will use radar to map the base of the floating ice shelf off northwest Greenland, while profilers will float up and down the water column to capture dozens of variables while drifting at sea.
Non-Arctic states are building more polar research vessels
The Sir David Attenborough’s expedition comes at a critical time for polar and international science – and for the UK more broadly. First, the US, the world’s leading science and technology power, is rapidly and drastically withdrawing from many of its commitments. US scientists have lost access to infrastructure, instruments, and ship time, threatening the continuity of long-running scientific programs and initiatives, from ocean monitoring networks to the US Antarctic Program itself.
In 2025, Trump budget cuts prompted the US National Science Foundation to terminate its lease of the country’s lone, aging icebreaking research vessel, the Nathaniel B. Palmer. The vessel has since returned to its owner, Edison Chouest Offshore, in Louisiana. The US Antarctic Program now lacks its own ship for the first time since 1968, and US scientists sailing to Antarctica now have to hitch rides on other icebreakers, such as Britain’s.
Some have even traveled to the bottom of the Earth onboard Ukraine’s Noosfera, operated by the country’s National Antarctic Scientific Center. Built in 1990 near Newcastle, England, the ship was formerly known as RRS James Clark Ross until 2021, when Ukraine bought it from the British Antarctic Survey, which replaced it with the newly built Sir David Attenborough. The fact that a war-torn country is more capable than the US of ferrying scientists to Antarctica says a lot about the state of polar research in Trump’s America.
Other countries are picking up the slack in and beyond the Arctic, sometimes on behalf of U.S. scientists. While we were standing in one of the ship’s science rooms in front of empty wooden “sacrificial boards,” into which scientists drill their equipment so that it doesn’t fall off when the icebreaker is at sea, one GIANT scientist told us that they have already been deploying drones and other sensors for their colleagues across the pond.
Second, the UK is slipping down the ranks of polar science while other countries rise to the top. China is a fast-emerging polar science power. Other countries like the United Arab Emirates are pouring funding into the field, too. In the next few years, several other non-Arctic states will launch new icebreakers to replace their aging ones including Japan, South Korea, and Germany. In winter 2024, China launched its newest icebreaking research vessel, Tan Suo San Hao. During its Arctic expedition the following summer, it carried out the first crewed deep-sea exploration of the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater volcanic range stretching from Greenland to Siberia.
Soft power, served cold
The Sir David Attenborough can break through one meter of ice while traveling at three knots, or about 5.6 kilometers per hour. But the ship’s real power may be softer. The icebreaker carries British science, culture, and values wherever it sails, from pole to pole. It even melts hearts: in 2022, two crew members became the first same-sex couple to marry in Antarctica in a ceremony officiated by Captain Whatley. This year, after its summer expedition to Greenland, the vessel will visit Reykjavik, Iceland, where one of my friends has already told me he is planning to go aboard.
The icebreaker serves up the soft power of British cuisine (you read that right) on its voyages, too. After lunch, which consisted of standard fare of jacket potatoes with toppings like chili and spinach curry, many of us helped ourselves to an ice cream cone from what was practically a self-serve ice cream parlor. The freezer contained half a dozen five-liter tubs of Yorvale ice cream with flavors ranging from warm and spicy stem ginger to sweet and flaky coconut, along with popsicles in every color of the artificial rainbow. We scooped our ice cream into thick sugar cones and topped them with chocolate sauce, toffee, sprinkles, and even crispy fan wafers. On such a sweltering day, the desserts were welcome treats. I could say I felt like a kid in a candy store, but it would be more fitting to say I felt like a kid eating ice cream on an icebreaker: pretty darn happy.
The UK’s icebreaker is sailing into seas increasingly plied by vessels that rival its capacity. But it may prove difficult for its competitors to match the vessel’s ability to win over the public both in and beyond national borders. The only one that commands similar fondness may be South Korea’s Araon. Launched in 2009, the ship has been a sleeper hit in the polar community on account of not only its karaoke and shrimp toast sandwiches, but a styrofoam model Araon kit. Handed out at nearly every polar conference, the DIY toy allows people to take a miniature version of the icebreaker home and put it together. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw one prominently displayed in a glass case onboard the Sir David Attenborough. Araon is truly the Trojan horse of icebreakers if there ever was one.
Towards the end of our visit, the British vessel’s crew opened up the tiny shop, which allows five customers in at a time. I’d never seen so many excited diplomats. Nearly every person bought some sort of merchandise, whether a woolly hat, t-shirt, magnet, postcard, or Gore-Tex raincoat – all branded with Sir David Attenborough. I’m writing this post, in fact, while sipping coffee out of my new and already cherished mug.
As the tour wound down, we gathered in the lounge to pack up our souvenirs and enjoy a final cup of tea. As if the cakes weren’t enough, a crew member popped out of the kitchen, cheerfully bearing a silver tray laden with scones slathered in clotted cream and strawberry jam.
More and more countries have icebreakers. But can they pull off Antarctic afternoon tea? I think not.
