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WEEK 4: JANUARY 19, 2008 - JANUARY 26, 2008
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January 19, 2008
ANTARCTIC PENNISULA, BELOW SHARP'S PEAK We are going to try to go up Sharp's Peak...
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JANUARY 20, 2008 PROSPECT POINT, THE FISH ISLAND GROUP
We woke up in our tents this morning to a strong wind and a snow-rain mix pelting the outside of our tent walls. I peeked out of our big two-man tents and the kayaks were completely covered by ice and blown snow. From this vantage point it definitely looked like a tent day. Which is not an unwelcome way to spend an Antarctic day - once your tent is up, cook stove is working and sleeping bag dry.
 We'd come ashore hoping to climb the tall mountain of Sharp's Peak, which rises south of our camp. Our first landing was on a rock-and-snow point jutting straight out of the Peninsula beneath the peak; Skip remembered skiing to the base of the mountain from here in 1991. Today we find the point separated from the mainland by a jumble of fallen ice. Crossing to land would be treacherous from here, if possible at all, and would require skirting beneath giant seracs of ice, which none of us is willing to attempt unless it's the only option. Instead, the decision is made to paddle north two miles to Prospect Point, once home to a small British resupply hut, and make camp and hopefully an approach from there.
We scout the route in the morning's wet snow. On the climb up deep slush makes for tricky walking; the just-buried hints of nearby crevasses encourage us to go slowly, cautiously.  From the top of the 500-foot hill, Sharp Peak goes in and out of cloud cover. Rodrigo - our most experienced climber, having been up both Mt. Everest and K2 - could see a route up, though it would require an arduous slog through the deep, heavy snow and across several crevasses. "In a perfect world we would make a second camp just beneath that coll," says Rodrigo, pointing from the hill. "But this is not a perfect day." As we walk carefully back down the hill a giant glacier calves with a thundering roar, filling the already ice-crowded bay with even more big chunks of broken ice.
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VISITING VERNADSKY
 A couple days ago we spent the day at the Ukrainian scientific base called Vernadsky. Despite the palm tree painted on its diesel fuel storage tank, it is a cold and isolated place in the Argentine Islands. Along the coast of the Peninsula the station and its men are known for unfurling the finest red carpet in Antarctica.
During the afternoon we had an extensive tour of the base - once a British base called Faraday, given to the Ukrainians ten years ago - particularly the sophisticated ozone measuring device that scientists stick out through a hole in the roof every three hours. It is here that the Brits first discovered the thinning of the ozone in the atmosphere, and the work continues today. They also have meteorological records going back 50 years, the best on the Peninsula.
The Ukrainians also boast one of the southernmost bars on the planet (the furthest south claim must belong to the U.S. base at McMurdo, which is several degrees further south) and certainly the only vodka distillery on the continent ... though even as I write those words, I'm sure there are probably Russians at Mirnyy or Vostock whipping up their own home-brew.
After accepting an invitation for single malt scotch and processed cheese from an adjoining yacht also hiding out from wind and rain near Vernadsky, crewed by British Armed Forces members on a training mission, we returned to the base at 9 p.m. for a short night of vodka sampling, magic tricks, guitar playing and dancing. How did the night end? To borrow from an old clichè, what happens in Antarctica stays in Antarctica.
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JANUARY 21, 2008 SAILING NORTH TOWARD LOCKROY
Despite what they say about Antarctica being the driest desert on the planet, in the past few days we've experienced the continent at its most wet. While we fully expected to be dealing with cold and ice here and came prepared for both, dealing with a cold rainstorm in Antarctica is a different beast.
 On Petermann Island 10 days ago, researchers told us about a two-week-long rainstorm that greeted them at the start of one season. When we camped the other day at Prospect Point we hiked through calf-deep slush and put up tents in a wet, mostly-rain storm. This morning we woke to a mix of wet snow and hard rain and wind blowing icebergs into our anchorage. Later, sailing north through the Lemaire Channel we hit 50 mile per hour winds and a fierce rain reducing visibility to nearly zero.
Is rain in Antarctica a sign of global climate change? The average air temperatures along the Peninsula have risen over the past decade. At the Ukranian base at Vernadsky - formerly a British base called Faraday - we looked at records kept the past 50 years, which verified the warming. But the more things change the more they stay the same. The Ukrainians also recounted a story about their mandatory "polar bear" swim taken on the Antarctic winter solstice (June 22), when water temperatures are at their lowest - 29 degrees F, just above the temperature when sea water turns to ice. "On that day," said the base's youngest member, 22-year-old Gleb, "it's hard to imagine this place as being anything but the coldest place on earth!" |
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January 22, 2008
ANTARCTIC PENINSULA, NEAR PORT LOCKROY
-64. 49, 22s /
-63. 29, 08w
...when we're kayaking by these big icebergs resting in the sea, you can hear them melting...
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How much ice is on Antarctica?
Visualize a mountain range that is more than 800 miles (1300 km) long and 9,900 feet (3,000 meters) high. That's twice as long as California's Sierra Nevada and eight times higher than the Empire State Building. Now imagine it completely covered by an ice plateau Ñ you could walk right over the top of this mountain range without even knowing it was there! You would need a lot of ice to cover a mountain range that big. This isn't just an imaginary mountain range, however, it exists in Antarctica and is covered completely with ice. There are also several other massive mountain ranges in Antarctica with only isolated peaks and rock cliffs poking out from the ice dome that covers most of Antarctica. In some places in Antarctica the ice is more than 13,200 ft (4,000 meters) thick. That's two and a half miles deep, or more than ten and a half times taller than the Empire State Building.
How much ice is on Antarctica? The Antarctic Ice Cap contains about 85% of the world's ice, which is about 80% of all the fresh water on earth. That ice weights about 27 million billion tons (24,500 million billion kg). It's difficult to conceptualize a number that large. It might help to imagine 100,000 tons, the weight that could be carried by a container ship 335 meters long and 43 meters wide, one of the largest cargo ships on the ocean. If you loaded all the ice on Antarctica onto these cargo ships and then starting counting the ships, assuming you could count one ship per second, you would still be counting more than 860 years from now. The massive weight of the ice cap pushes the underlying continent about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) into the earth's crust. |
A desert with 80% of the world's fresh water?
If someone asked you to name the world's driest continent, what would you guess? Would you be surprised to know it is Antarctica? Even though most of Antarctica is covered with ice and snow holding eighty percent of the world's fresh water, the continent is, by definition, a desert. Antarctica accumulates on average fewer than 2 inches (5 cm) of water equivalent per yearÑthat is just slightly more than what the Sahara Desert receives. You might wonder how, if Antarctica receives such a small amount of precipitation each year, it could accumulate eighty percent of the world's fresh water. The snow and ice that forms the Antarctic Ice Cap accumulated over millions of years.
- Elizabeth K. Andre |
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January 23, 2008
ANTARCTIC PENINSULA, NEAR PORT LOCKROY
Pete McBride: I felt it was important in trying to document this remarkable frozen world to get underneath the surface of the water...
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What is life like under the surface of the Southern Ocean?
Which of the world's oceans would you guess is the most biologically productive? Would you guess a tropical ocean? Would you be surprised to find out it is the Antarctic Ocean? The water surrounding Antarctica accounts for only five percent of the world's sea water, but produces twenty percent of the world's sea life (measured by weight). Antarctic waters yield six times more life per square meter of surface area than the average yield of the other oceans.
What makes the Antarctic Ocean so rich with life? There are three reasons: long hours of daylight in the Antarctic summer to help algae grow, turbulent waters that keep nutrients floating in the water where phytoplankton can reach them, and the very cold water.
Why is cold water more productive? Cold water can hold more dissolved oxygen than warm water. The levels of dissolved oxygen in Antarctic waters are so high that many fish have few or no red blood cells (the blood cells other animals, including humans, use to carry oxygen). Without red blood, the fish appear white or nearly colorless.
The high levels of dissolved oxygen in Antarctic waters allow as many as 35,000 krill (small crustaceans that look a little like shrimp) to swarm in one cubic meter of sea water. These high numbers of krill support the rest of the Antarctic food web, providing food either directly or indirectly for virtually all the other animals in Antarctica.
- Elizabeth K. Andre |
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January 25, 2008 WHITE PENGUINS
We pull into the Chilean base at Gabriel Gonzalez Videla (named after the first president of any country to visit Antarctica, in 1951...) during a wet storm and are welcomed into its 16-man base with warm arms. "We are here for five months," the base commandante tells us, "so we are pleased to see everyone!" His welcome is tinted by two realities: In a continent supposedly ruled only by science, here there are only military men, not one scientist. In addition, the tiny base has also become something of a tourist attraction, luring 6,500 visitors in from trips along the Peninsula this year, many from regular visits by the 500-passenger Marco Polo, one of the biggest ships working Antarctica.
We've stopped here specifically for Fiona, who has heard through the grapevine (Argentine scientists on the Chilean base at King George Island) that as many as three albino penguins call the island home. They are not true albino's but leukistic, meaning they are born without pigment. White where their brothers and sisters are black, they have orange beaks.
The commandante points Fiona in the general direction of where they know one of the white penguins lives; she spots it within minutes and lets out a squeal. In among the thousands of penguins on the island she stands out. It's easy to see the tracing where her back should be black but is off-white instead. When she stands and stretches she reveals a pair of eggs, which most likely will not hatch given the lateness in the season. Fiona spends a few hours watching her. "This is my best day in Antarctica," she says as we walk back to the shore. |
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