Famed British climate scientist Gordon Hamilton plunges to his death in Antarctica crevasse

Gordon Hamilton, a prominent climate scientist who studied Earth’s melting ice sheets, died when his snowmobile went into a crevasse in Antarctica, according to the US National Science Foundation. He was 50 years old.

Scottish-born Hamilton was a researcher with the NSF-managed US Antarctic Programme studying the stability of the ice shelves near McMurdo Station, a research centre on Ross Island, 4,000km south of New Zealand.

He and his team were camped in a heavily-crevassed area known as the McMurdo shear zone on Saturday, where the Ross and McMurdo ice shelves meet. Five kilometres wide and more than 200km long, this perilous zone bisects the compacted snow road to the station. The ice there is hundreds of metres thick and striated with fractures. Hamilton and his colleagues have worked for several years to map this region with robots and ground-penetrating radar, identifying crevasses to be repaired so that vehicles can haul supplies and equipment from the coast to McMurdo station.

Hamilton was driving a snowmobile when he plunged into a crevasse and fell 30 metres into the ice. The circumstances of the accident are still unclear, but NSF spokesperson Peter West said that some crevasses are covered in snow and difficult to spot from ground level. Some of Hamilton’s colleagues are working to develop robots capable of detecting buried crevasses for exactly that reason.

Hamilton’s body has been recovered and will be returned to his family in Orono, Maine, the NSF said.

Hamilton held degrees from the University of Aberdeen and University of Cambridge. Since 2005 he has been an associate professor at the University of Maine’s School of Earth and Climate Sciences. In a statement Monday, university president Susan Hunter said that his glaciology research was “second to none.”

“He leaves a legacy as an outstanding scientist, and a caring mentor and well-known teacher to undergraduate and graduate students,” she said.