TWO leading geographers from Durham University have been awarded nearly £5 million to research past ice sheet collapse in West Antarctica and ethics in machine learning

The funding has been awarded by the European Research Council’s Advanced Grants programme and will last for five years.

Professor Mike Bentley, head of the department of geography, will lead a project using drilling below the ice to test past collapse in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The project received £3,877,828 in funding.

Prof Bentley said: ‘We will be using innovative technology to drill through the Antarctic Ice Sheet to retrieve samples of bedrock. With some advanced analytical techniques we can then determine when those rocks were last exposed from under retreating ice.

“By understanding past collapse events, we will better understand the conditions that lead to ice sheet retreat, and how much sea level rise we might expect in a warmer world.”

Separately, Professor Louise Amoore, deputy head of the department of geography, has received £1,961,249 in funding to investigate so-called Algorithmic Societies and ethical life in an age of machine learning.

Prof Amoore said: “My project will develop a new approach to responding to the consequences of machine learning for contemporary societies. We will conduct the research across diverse domains, from behavioural biometrics to biomedical object recognition.”

The European Research Council is the premiere European funding organisation for new research. The advanced grants are designed to support researchers with recognised track records of achievements, whose proposed projects demonstrate their ground-breaking nature, ambition and feasibility.

This year, 185 awards were made totalling £400m which will lead to the creation of some 1,800 new jobs for post-doctoral fellows, PhD students and other research staff.

Professor Harriet Bulkeley, department of geography director of research, added: “We are delighted that these projects have been awarded.

"This is an extremely significant personal achievement, and testament to the originality, creativity and excellence of each of these proposed research projects, as well as due recognition of their leading positions in each of their respective fields”.

The president of the European Research Council, Professor Mauro Ferrari, said: “The ERC grants will back cutting-edge, exploratory research, set to help Europe and the world to be better equipped for what the future may hold.

“These senior research stars will cut new ground in a broad range of fields and I wish them all the best in this endeavour.”

Durham's geography department is one of the leading centres of geographical research and education in the world, ranked in the top ten for eight consecutive years in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.