<div>Geoscience Australia's collaborative Antarctic Geoscience program provides scientific and strategic leadership on key national priorities in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>From February to April 2024 one of our scientists participated in an international marine expedition to the East Antarctic Ice Shelf along Australia's Antarctic Territory coast. The expedition aboard the Research Vessel <em>Polarstern</em> entitled "East Antarctic Ice Sheet Instability and its interaction with changes in Southern Ocean circulation - Part 3" (EASI-3), was the third of the EASI expeditions to investigate ocean–ice sheet interactions along the East Antarctic margin.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>This talk presents the voyage highlights, including scientific exploration, seabed mapping, sonars, sediment sampling, ship life and wildlife, by inviting the audience into the world of an Antarctic expeditioner.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div>

<div>Compared to its inherently unstable West Antarctic companion, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) as the largest ice mass on Earth, was long considered to react relatively robustly to external oceanic and/or atmospheric forcing. Many studies from recent years, however, revealed that ice masses in its marine-based portions such as the Wilkes and Aurora Subglacial Basins, which hold a potential sea-level equivalent of about 20 metres, may react just as sensitively. Currently, many outlet glaciers that connect into these deep hinterland basins are subject to significant ice flow acceleration and grounding-line retreat, hence may hint at potentially substantial ice losses in coming decades and centuries. Since those observations only cover a relatively short time period of several decades, it remains largely uncertain how the modern rapid changes in those sectors compare to ice sheet dynamics since the ice sheet’s last maximum extent some 20,000 years ago. Here, we report first results from newly acquired multibeam bathymetry, sediment echography and <em>in-situ</em> sediment core data from the Davis and Mawson Sea continental shelves, revealing major palaeo-ice stream troughs, grounding-line stabilization features, and extensive meltwater drainage systems. These new combined data will allow for establishing crucial spatiotemporal benchmarks for characterizing past ice sheet dynamics for these vulnerable EAIS portions, and with that deliver a needed framework for testing and validating palaeo-ice sheet models that ultimately aim at predicting their future response more reliably. Presented at the 29th International Polar Conference 'Dynamic Poles and High Mountain Environments'