Understanding the contribution of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) to past and future sea level has emerged as a scientific priority over the last three decades. In recent years, observed thinning and ice-flow acceleration of the marine-based Pine Island Glacier has demonstrated that dynamic changes are central to the long-term stability of the WAIS. However, significantly less is known about the evolution of the catchment during the Holocene. Internal Reflecting Horizons (IRHs) provide a cumulative record of accumulation, basal melt and ice dynamics that, if dated, can be used to inform ice flow models to project spatial and temporal mass changes. Here, we use airborne radars to trace four consistent IRHs spanning the Holocene across the Pine Island Glacier catchment. We use the WAIS Divide ice-core chronology to assign discrete ages to three IRHs: 4.72 ± 0.08, 6.94 ± 0.11, and 16.50 ± 0.62 ka. We use a 1D model, constrained by observational and modelled accumulation rates, to produce an independent validation of our ice-core-derived ages and provide an age estimate for our shallowest IRH (2.31-2.92 ka). We find that significantly older ice is present below our deepest reflector, but the absence of continuous radar-observed reflectors at depth currently limits our understanding of pre-Holocene ice dynamical history. The clear correspondence between our IRH package and the one previously identified over Institute Ice Stream, altogether representing ~20% of the WAIS, suggests that a unique set of stratigraphic markers spanning the Holocene exist widely across West Antarctica.

The UK Polar Data Centre (PDC, https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/uk-pdc/) is the focal point for Antarctic environmental data management in the UK. Part of the Natural Environmental Research Council’s (NERC) network of environmental data centres and based at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the PDC coordinates the management of polar data from UK-funded research. In the last two years, the geophysics team at the PDC has made significant progress to improve the management of BAS aerogeophysics data, a challenging task considering that the British Antarctic Survey is one of the largest acquisitors of airborne geophysics data over Antarctica. In 2020, we published bedrock elevation data for fourteen airborne radar surveys over the continent, and more than thirty airborne gravity and magnetics datasets. This year, we will release large swaths of processed airborne radar data collected by BAS since the early 2000s, including extensive surveys over Pine Island (2004-05) and Thwaites (2018-20) glaciers, as well as the large surveys covering the Wilkes subglacial basin (2005-06) and the South Pole (2015-16), amongst others. Considerable effort has been made to curate these datasets to make them up-to-date and comply with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) principles. In doing so, we believe that these datasets will be a valuable asset to future geophysical and glaciological studies over the Antarctic. Our aim here is to show our progress in re-processing and publishing these datasets and, for the first time, showcase our new Polar Aerogeophysics Data Portal which will serve as a user-friendly interface to discover and download the newly-published aerogeophysics data deposited on BAS’s data catalogue.