Here is an activity report for AntarcticGlaciers.org in the 12 months from May 2024-May 2025. The information here may be useful for others thinking about online science communication websites.
See also the Activity report for 2023.
Highlights
In total, since inception in 2012, I estimate that the website has had over 5.65 million page views.
In the 12 months of May 2024-May 2025:
- Published 42 new webpages and 13 blog posts
- Content contributed by 10 ECR writers, supporting training the next generation of science communicators
- 648,349 page views, averaging 60k per month
- 328,586 active users, averaging 30-40k per month
- 23.5% of weekly active users visit the site every single day during that week
- Out of all the people who visit the site each month, about one fifth come back at least once a week.
Website content
The website now has 143 published blog posts, 374 web pages, 1464 approved comments, and 74 published “Answers to your Questions”.
In the year May 2024-May 2025, the website grew by 13 blog posts, and 42 new webpages.
Significant new innovations include the Hidden Landscapes of Greenland and the Comic Corner.
Guest contributors
The website worked with several new guest authors, including Domino Jones, Caroline Taylor, Jenny Snell, Gunjan Silwal, Isabelle Wicks, Emily Potter, Ethan Lee, Rike Becker, Guy Paxman and Edmund Lea. All contributors received mentoring, support and encouragement for content development, considering intended audience, writing style and illustrations. They also benefit from exposure of their work on the website. Some ECR students were paid for their time using the IAS funding (see below).
Additional guest authors earlier in 2024 included Alex Hyde, Becky Sanderson, Lizz Ultee and Owen King.
Guest author career stage tended towards Early Career, with the majority being PhD students, others post-doctoral research fellows or more senior academics in fellowships or open ended posts.
This is an important and ongoing contribution to training the next generation of science writers.
Thank you to all of these contributors. Please get in touch if you are a PhD student or ECR and are interested in contributing to AntarcticGlaciers.org.
Ask a scientist and Answers to your Questions
“Ask a Scientist” queries continue to be regularly received, and I try to answer the most interesting questions under “Answers to your Questions”. Unfortunately I am no longer able to answer all queries. If there are any volunteers to help with this, get in touch!
Comments, spam and hacking
Comments are regularly received and all require manual approval before they are posted on the website. Sometimes this may take a few days if I am busy.
In the best incidences comments form a lively debate on the website, resulting in interesting discourse and communication. This is welcomed enthusiastically and helps the website be as useful as possible.
Unfortunately, some comments are rude or abusive, and are not approved since they do not follow the comments policy. The pages on ice cores most commonly attract rude, abusive and denialist comments. I have no patience for these and now treat them as spam.
Spam continues to be a problem with people putting spam links in comments, which require manual sifting and publishing. They often comprise of irrelevant or generic content, or false praise. Some may be malicious content. Although spam filters are installed, many still get through the filter but are not published on the website after manual checking. These spam posters are often trying to get ‘dofollow’ links to website onto this website, even though all backlinks in the comments are ‘nofollow’.
Note: nofollow link: the html code includes the “rel=”nofollow”” attribute, and means that search engines do not pass authority (like pagerank) from the linked-to page to the page the link is on. All links in all comments on AntarcticGlaciers are ‘nofollow’ links. Links that authors have added to pages are ‘dofollow’ links as standard on AntarcticGlaciers.
Website security remains important and the website does get periodically attacked.
Website analytics
The website continues to attract consistent attention. In the 12 months May 2024-May 2025, according to Google Analytics, it received:
- 648,349 page views
- 1,302 file downloads
- 482,349 session starts
- 331,621 first visits
- 328,586 active users
- 2.6 million events
Monthly traffic is holding steady at ca. 60k page views per month. Monthly total users range from 30-40k.
Traffic follows a distinctive seasonal and weekly pattern, with traffic dropping on weekends, bank holidays and over Christmas, Easter and the July-August summer holiday. Traffic spikes occur infrequently, likely prompted by news stories driving more search traffic to the website.
User stickiness
The average engagement per user is 1 min 12 seconds, with 1.97 page views per active user. This means that users explore beyond the first page. The average across most content-heavy sites is 1.5-3.0 pageviews per user. This also shows good ‘stickiness’ of users.
This is also shown in the ratios of daily, weekly and monthly users.
The DAU/WAU average of 23.5% shows frequent daily visits from weekly users. This means that about 23.5% of weekly active users visit the site every single day during that week. That is a strong sign of user interest.
The WAU/MAU average ratio of 21.3% means that 21.3% of monthly active users are also active weekly. Out of all the people who visit the site each month, about one fifth come back at least once a week.
Lifetime traffic
The change in Google Analytics now makes it challenging to calculate total page views since website creation. There is a data gap between Oct 2023-end of April 2024, due to a delay in updating the website properly to function with Google Analytics 4.
Between inception in July 2012 and August 2023, when Google Analytics data is continuously available, the website received 4.9 million page views and 2.6 million new users. From September 2023 to May 2025, the website received a further 754,000 page views.
In total, since inception in 2012, I estimate that the website has had over 5.65 million page views, not including visitors during the data gap from October 2023-April 2024.
Popular pages
The most popular pages include ice core basics, living and working in Antarctica, Wildlife of Antarctica, Mapping the World’s Glaciers, and the homepage.
According to Google Analytics, the most popular pages over the calendar year May 24 – May 25 were:
- Ice core basics (35,577 pageviews)
- Living in Antarctica (27,987)
- Wildlife of Antarctica (13,210)
- Moraine types (12,225)
- Mapping the world’s glaciers (12,207)
- Precision and accuracy (12,188)
- What is the global volume of land ice (10,424)
- Introduction to glacier mass balance (9,778)
- Deformation and sliding (9,722)
- Introduction to the Greenland Ice Sheet (9,251)
- Seasons of Antarctica (9,198)
- Calculating glacier ice volumes (7,909)
EDI focused articles have a smaller reach, but still strong traffic over the last 12 months:
- Menstruation in the field (1092 page views; 1548 lifetime views)
- For whom is glaciology (277)
If you want the pageviews for a particular page (e.g. one you authored), then please get in touch.
Website traffic sources
Over the last year, out of the 328,586 total users, 75.9% (249,541 users) of website traffic was through organic search, 20.03% was direct traffic, and 3.27% was Referral traffic (i.e. following a link from another website).
The most searched queries included:
- marine ice sheet instability
- antarctic glaciers
- glacial hazards
- glacial hydrology
- ice shelf buttressing
Users primarily originated in the USA, Great Britain, the EU, Australia, and Russia.
The most common browsers were, in order, Google Chrome (59.5%), unknown (27.2%), Safari (5.5%) and Firefox (5.5%).
Google Search Console gives AntarcticGlaciers.org pages, over the last 12 months, an average position of 9.6 in search results, and 33.7 million impressions.
Website backlinks
Significant external links recently noted include:
- https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov (ice berg)
- https://en.wikipedia.org. Numerous, but, e.g. sea level rise
- BBC
- Greenpeace
- CarbonBrief, CarbonBrief, CarbonBrief,
- NASA, NASA
- The Conversation, The Conversation
- The Guardian, The Guardian
- USA Today
- climate.gov
- abc news
- NY Times
- Washington Post
- cbs news
- National Geographic
- The Independent
- Brietbart
- Forbes
- Reuters
Interestingly, ChatGPT is now referring notable traffic to AntarcticGlaciers. I have not noticed a strong decline in website traffic following the widespread launch of ChatGPT and other similar LLMs.
Estimates of the number of backlinks vary, and are difficult to constrain. Google Search Console tracks 58,040 external links from outside the antarcticglaciers.org domain linking to AntarcticGlaciers.org webpages.
More incoming links mean that webpages are ranked more highly by search engines, seen as more credible, and lists them higher in search results.
Used in School and University teaching
The multilevel content is used widely worldwide in school and university teaching. The following are just a few examples of universities linking to the website: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; New York University, University of Northern Colorado, Virginia Tech; Buffalo.edu, Durham University, Exeter University, Portsmouth University, Malborough College, Manchester University, Monash University, University of Vienna, University of Brighton, UC San Diego, University of Innsbruck, NCC Central University, Maynooth University.
The website is also linked to by multiple schools, and I have received several generous emails of thanks from school and university teachers and students. These are always welcome, not least because I can use them as evidence of excellence for funding bodies. Please feel free to email me!
Resources from the website have been widely used in academic and school-level text books (e.g. Geography Association Teachers of NSW and ACT in Australia), BBC Bitesize via Hamlett Films, Trackuback in Sweden, and Royal Geographical Society, The Guardian Visual and Data Journalism Team, EPOCH Magazine.
The website is also referred to by other educational websites, e.g. OGGM-EDU.
Supporting external research bids
I regularly provide letters of support for colleagues applying for external UKRI and international funding bids (e.g., NSF, NERC), to provide them with a well-respected outlet for science communication and public engagement activities. This includes several in the last calendar year.
Cited in academic journals
Figures and information from the website have been used in academic journal papers, in many journals including Nature Geoscience, most recently from authors at the University of Trieste, University of Bern, University College Dublin. E.g., Forte et al., 2025; Fischer et al., 2025; Cloetingh et al., 2023; Gao et al., 2020; Haran et al., 2017; Singh et al., 2023
Recognised as an example of best practice in the scholarly literature, e.g. McDougall 2019; Clarke et al., 2025.
Cited in formal policy documents
Examples:
- Cited in formal testimony to the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology (Pfeffer, 2019).
- Cited in the South Pole Station Master Plan Draft, NSF, 2024.
These collective links and citations show that the website is influential in the field.
External prizes
AntarcticGlaciers.org has been awarded multiple external prizes (2024 IGS Richardson Medal, 2020 SCAR Medal for Antarctic Communication and Education, Geographical Association Silver Publisher’s Award (2 separate prizes for teaching resources on this website), Geologists’ Association “Certificate of Excellence for Geological Education”, and mentioned in the citation for the 2021 BSG Gordon Warwick Medal.
The Antarctic StoryMap Collection received a GA Silver Publishers’ Award in 2022.
The Hidden Landscapes of Greenland received a GA Silver Publishers’ Award in 2025.
The IGS citation states that AntarcticGlaciers.org is, “an unparalleled achievement in glaciological communication, and an invaluable resource for educators and the public” and “one of the most widely used and effective resources in glaciological communication”.
The Gordon Warwick citation states; “Of particularly note is her impressive popular website, www.AntarcticGlaciers.org. This website engages with school, universities and the wider public, not just in terms of the subject matter, but also through encouraging women and minorities to pursue careers in science.”
Website comparisons
AntarcticGlaciers.org uniquely combines scientific accuracy with accessible educational content, making it particularly beneficial for educators and learners seeking to understand Antarctic glaciology and its global implications.
The website continues to perform well, with SimilarWeb giving it an industry rank of #207, and worldwide rank of #486,480.
Website funding
AntarcticGlaciers.org is firmly non-profit. The funding for the website is all listed on the funding page. I am grateful to the IAS for continued support and sponsorship. IAS funding is held and administered by Newcastle University.
I have used this funding to commission specific articles from ECR colleagues, paying on a per-article basis. This is important as it means that the content of AntarcticGlaciers.org continues to be updated and relevant, the ECRs get an opportunity to write for different audiences, and are fairly recompensed for their time.
This essential funding is greatly appreciated and has meant that I have been able to keep AntarcticGlaciers free of ads and paid or affiliate content, and free at point of use for everyone. As I result I can maintain editorial control and integrity, and make no personal profit from the website.
If you are interested in sponsorship, please get in touch. More sponsorship would enable me to commission more articles.
Offers to contribute to the website are always welcome.
Website platform
The website continues to be built on WordPress, which is proving to be an adequate platform, easily updateable without too much software development expertise.
Website development and hosting continues to be supported by Stefan Senk.