Progress 113 days after Article 50 triggered, pretzels and modelling giant icebergs

Victorian tiling in Cambridge

This week's round of Brexit talks has concluded with some movement, but these are still the preliminary stages. Over 90 UK civil servants had been negotiating in Brussels.

Some uglier issues are arising. From the EU side there is concern for EU citizens in the UK and their continued rights to live there and be free to return if they visit another EU country. The counter negotiating proposal to the lack of promised security for EU citizens was that British people living in the EU might face losing their automatic right to move to another member state.

Whilst David Davis jokingly bounced back Barnier's earlier quote with "The clock is ticking", the spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, Tom Brake, pointed out, “It's now been 113 days since Article 50 was triggered and we have seen almost zero progress on even the most basic issues. With each day that passes, the likelihood of a catastrophic, disorderly Brexit increases.”

Fortunately, despite all these difficulties, at least the UK and Germany can still be friends, as demonstrated by the pretzel making and coxing Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. More seriously, hats off to them for visiting cancer science research labs - the importance of science collaboration has hardly been part of the Brexit news.

The work day was enlivened by tonight's CETC talks on the simulated world. We had two very different speakers. Mark Green talked about the research that went on behind the development of an immersive 3D game 'Rigs', to optimise enjoyment and thrills whilst avoiding 'sim sickness' and eye-strain.

Jan De Rydt of the British Antarctic Survey, showed us how simulating the ice sheets and flows around the BAS Halley Stations was being used to predict the cracks in ice sheets that could leave to calving of gigantic icebergs. The crack 'Chasm 1' which threatened ice stations Halley VI was likely to result in a sheet of 1500 square kilometers breaking off. The Halloween Crack would lead to a 2000 square kilometer island. However, these events were taking place at glacial speeds and could take years , if not decades to complete. The circum-antarctic gyres would then spin these slowly around the continent as they slowly disintegrated. These sheets, despite containing nearly a billion tons of water locked in ice, would not lead to sea level rises, as they were already floating on the ocean. However, the possible increase of ice sheets breaking off due to global warming could lead to a faster flow of ice off the actual continent of Antarctica, which locks up enough water to lead to a 60 m rise in sea-levels.