Background
Andrew Clarke is a polar ecologist who worked at the British Antarctic Survey from 1970 to 2010. His fieldwork was based mostly at South Georgia (1970 – 1982), Signy Island (1984 – 1994) and Rothera (1997 – 2009), though he also worked at McMurdo, Palmer and in Svalbard, and undertook numerous oceanographic cruises. At Signy he established an internationally recognised research group working on the nearshore marine ecology, which moved further south to Rothera in 1997. Here he established the Rothera Oceanographic and Biological Times-Series monitoring programme, which continues to this day as the only year-round oceanographic programme in Antarctica. From 1994 to 2004 he chaired the Scientific Steering Committee of the SCAR international programme on the Ecology of the Antarctic Sea-Ice Zone (EASIZ). His scientific work was divided roughly equally between the ecology and physiology of marine invertebrates, biological oceanography, and the evolutionary history and biological diversity of the Antarctic marine fauna. The link between these seemingly disparate topics is the relationship between organisms and temperature. He continues to work on this, though at a more relaxed pace in retirement.