Britain’s flagship polar research vessel heads to Antarctica next week to help advance dozens of climate change-linked science projects, as Western nations spearhead studies there while the United States withdraws.

The RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the renowned UK naturalist, will aid research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations.

Operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the country’s polar research institute, the 15,000-tonne icebreaker, boasting a helipad and various laboratories and gadgetry, is pivotal to UK efforts to assess climate change’s impact there.

“The saying goes ‘what happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica’,” BAS oceanographer Peter Davis told AFP during a tour of

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