international
polar
foundation

As the Perseus International Airfield opens for incoming team mebers and scientists, operations at Princess Elisabeth Antarctica move full steam ahead for logistics, infrastructure, and science.

The International Polar Foundation is delighted to share an exciting update from 2018 Baillet Latour Antarctica Fellow Dr. Kate Winter of Northumbria University, whose fieldwork around the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica contributed to a major peer-reviewed publication on carbon capture in East Antarctica.

The last week the BELARE team has been busy preparing the three-kilometre long runway at Perseus International Airfield, going on field expeditions, and working on station upgrades.

This week at Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Station (PEA), the team continued making important adjustments to the station while pushing forward with several scientific support missions across the region.

After settling in at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA), the team has fully reactivated all the station’s systems. Now that everyone has settled in, the real work begins: maintaining the station and supporting this season’s scientific research projects.

BELARE 2025-26 gets underway as the first crew members arrive at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica and work to get the station up and running.

It is with great sadness that we must communicate with the BELARE community that one of our team members, Craig Masson, passed away on Friday the 16th of May, following an accident at work.

Prof. Eric Rignot from UC Irvine discusses his work following a successful field campaign on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf in East Antarctica during the 2024-25 BELgian Antarctic Research Expedition (BELARE).

Graduate student Ratnakar Gadi from UC Irvine’s Department of Earth System Science made history by successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation in an extraordinary setting—Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. It was only the second thesis defense ever conducted from Earth’s southernmost continent.

BELARE 2024-25 is drawing to a close. Preparations are being made to put the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica into winter mode and pack away scientific equipment.