On another amazingly warm blue-sky day I’m standing on a low hill looking out over Neko Harbor. Across a narrow bay is a wall of glaciers, behind me is soft hills covered by deep snow. In the far distance in three directions are long lines of tall mountains covered by snow and ice, some of it tens of thousands of years old. Just a few slivers of hard, dark granite peek out, reminding me there is land – a continent! – beneath all of this white. (At Vostok, a Russian base on the eastern side of Antarctica, scientists have measured the ice to be 14,000 feet thick, nearly three miles.)
It is hard to imagine this place without ice and snow, but of course it has been. Roughly 125 million years ago what we know as South America and Africa began to separate; then, the Antarctic Peninsula where I stand was still connected to South America. From 38 to 29 million years ago the Antarctic continent moved south. During that Cretaceous period, circa 144 to 65 million years ago, the continent was covered by forest, including tree ferns, cycads, palms, conifers and deciduous trees, and was home to freshwater fish, dinosaurs, reptiles and the predecessors of the penguins we see here now, though they were somewhat different. In that they were the size of an average man and weighed 300 pounds.
The continent has frozen and thawed since, but has been completely covered by ice and snow since the last Ice Age, about 11,000 years ago. Today, even at the height of summer, only two percent of Antarctica is ice-free; the continent contains 75 percent of the fresh water on earth.
It is clear the Peninsula is evolving, changing … warming. Analysis suggests the rapidity of warming in the northern Peninsula is unmatched over the last 2,000 years. Temperatures along the Peninsula during summer have climbed on average five degrees in the past 50 years; its average winter temperatures have risen by ten degrees, twice as fast as anywhere on Earth in the past century.
If even a small part of the Ice Cap were to melt, world sea levels would rise from several feet to several yards, inundating most coasts. If the whole Ice cap were to melt, as it has in past ages, sea levels around the world would rise an estimated 260 feet, destroying a number of low-lying countries. Since sea levels have risen only 8.6 inches in the past century, the three-foot rise projected by the year 2080 is serious. Many millions will become refugees, depopulating the long U.s. coasts up to 50 miles inland, including all of southern Florida and the Mississippi Delta, also much of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the coasts of Africa and innumerable Pacific atolls.
Antarctica without snow and ice? Seems impossible, right? Here’s what the continent would look like without ice. It has been weighed down by heavy ice for so long that part of it is submerged. They would gradually climb back above sea level if free of ice, though that would take tens – hundreds? – of thousands of years.
What Antarctica would look like without ice
The continent that lays beneath, much of it now submerged due to the weight of the ice
Photos, Fiona Stewart
The pack ice has moved away from the south side of Paulet Island and we were able to get ashore on a cold, gray morning, to mingle with the 200,000 Adelie penguins who nest here during the summer months. Last time we landed it was on the far side of the island, and our hope to climb up and over the island was thwarted by a literal boom in penguins. They’re everywhere this time of year, so thick they block every possible path. Their stone nests generally boast not one but two fat, all-gray chicks.
1903 hut, home to twenty men for a long winter
Just up from the rocky shoreline is the remnant of a stone hut built in 1903 by members of Norwegian Otto Nordenskjold’s expedition. They had sailed down in a ship named “Antarctica,” captained by a skipper named Larsen (for whom the giant ice shelf just to our south is named), but over the course of two years the team was accidentally split into three parts. Six on one island, three on another and twenty here on the tiny, rock-covered island of Paulet. Though separated by less than one hundred miles, no group knew the other was stranded and each kept waiting for the rest to sail or sledge to the rescue. Little did they know that while the “Antarctica” did attempt a couple times, it was fated to be squeezed by the pack ice near Joinville Island (ala Ernest Shackleton’s “Endurance,” more than a decade later) and sink.
It’s hard to imagine being stuck here for a year, living cheek-to-jowl with nineteen of your now-closest friends. They killed and stored 1,100 penguins and a handful of seals, built a stone hut – roofing it with sail cloth – out of the path of the heaviest snows but on the top of a windy hill, I imagine so they could constantly observe the sea in front of them, which varied from frozen to almost frozen. They heated with blubber, the fumes of which eventually blackened their skin. They had only a few books between them and little to do but stare at the walls. Against all odds, all but one of the twenty survived (the victim, who suffered a heart attack, is buried on the beach here) and ultimately met up with the other two stranded teams by chance. Theirs is another of Antarctica’s great stories of survival.
The scene, starker on a gray day than a bright and sunny one, reminds me how glad I am not to be stuck here, whether alone or with travel mates. This side of the Peninsula reminds me every day just how remote and foreboding Antarctica can be.
View a slideshow of the Paulet Island Peuguins.
Photos - Fiona Stewart
Icebergs are Antarctica’s sentinels, announcing the continent is near. And nowhere says iceberg like the Weddell Sea.
We spent the day among some of the biggest that have dropped off the continent’s glaciers in recent years – one hundred to two hundred feet tall, one to twenty miles long – centuries-old snow and ice compacted so hard and perfectly flat on top you could land cargo planes on them.
It makes for a stunning day, afloat among the giant bergs. But haunting at the same time.
These giant tabulars are remnants of the Larsen Ice Shelf; what remains of it lies just to our south. It has been disintegrating since 1996 and in March 2002 scientists watched a section of it – the 500-billion-ton Larsen-B – shatter into thousands of tiny icebergs before their eyes. Last March a 160-mile-square section the size of Manhattan broke off the Wilkins ice shelf, south of Marguerite Bay, and new, giant rifts can be seen in it from space, suggesting more break-off to come.
A Weddell Sea tabular
Statistics are worrying. Two of the 10 shelves along the peninsula have vanished completely within the past 30 years. Another five have lost between 60 percent and 92 percent of their original extent. Of the 10, Wilkins is the southernmost shelf in the area to start buckling under global warmings effect. What is happening so dramatically, so quickly to those shelves suggests it’s possible the rest of the Peninsula’s ice may deteriorate soon. And fast.
These big shelves are important for the protection they provide the glaciers. When that protection has disappeared, the glaciers will melt even faster. Spurred by warming coastal air and waters, many of Antarctica’s glaciers and ice shelves have accelerated their melting, suggesting that ocean levels might be irreversibly on the rise for centuries to come. The changes are detected each year by separate satellite and aircraft surveys of small glaciers along the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the rugged, sharply warming arm reaching toward South America and along the giant ice sheets feeding into the Amundsen Sea.
“Best guess” projections are that the melting on the Peninsula will raise the world’s sea levels by 20 inches to 3.5 feet in the next century, which spells trouble for places from Miami to the Maldives.
Magically rich in blue and white it is hard to imagine these giant bergs as Antarctica’s canaries-in-the-coal-mine, but that’s exactly what they are.
View a slideshow of Tabular Ice
Photos - Fiona Stewart
Photos, Fiona Stewart
Click on an image to see full-size
Penguins at Bongrain Point
Green lichen, Bongrain Point
Brown lichen, Bongrain Point
Red lichen, Bongrain Point
Beach ice, Bongrain Point
Crabeater seals sleeping, Jones Ice Shelf
Penguin tracks, Jones Ice Shelf
Crabeater seal prowling the ice edge, Jones Ice Shelf
March of the penguin, Jones Ice Shelf
Ice pans breaking away from the edge, Jones Ice Shelf
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Photos, Fiona Stewart
Words do not, cannot, do this place justice.
Again, for what seems the tenth time this season, I’ve stood in a place I’ve felt was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in Antarctica. And then it happens again, often the very next day.
A panoramic view of Dog Leg's Fjord
Just up from the end of Bourgeois Fjord, this little inlet – named by Australian John Rymill, when he explored it during the British Graham Land Expedition of 1934-37, because it looked like … a dog’s leg – is deep and steep. The green-black waters are thick with plankton, the sky indigo. As we climb to the top of a boulder-strewn moraine to have an up-close look down inside a glacier, we strip to t-shirts. My nose is brighter than my orange float-coat.
Air temperature, midday? Fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
Dog Leg's rocks
Dog Leg's centuries-old glacial ice
Dog Leg's glacier, up-close
Photos, Fiona Stewart
PORQUOI PAS?, MARGUERITE BAY
Far south again, more than one hundred miles south of the Antarctic Circle, on Christmas morning we successfully landed at Bongrain Point, on the western edge of Porquoi Pas Island. It was a success too, because we’d been here eleven days ago and could only look at the beach through binoculars. A six-foot-thick lip of hard ice and snow lined the beach; we tried hacking steps with a hand ax, but it would have been a half-day’s work.
Instead today we rolled straight onto the beach, unimpeded by anything but underwater rocks exposed by the withdrawing tide and some floating growlers. That six feet of hard snow and ice? Gone. Completely gone. In eleven days. Think it’s not warming here, and warming fast? This isn’t some Denver suburb after a spring snow dump but far south Antarctica. Even in December – the equivalent of June in the northern hemisphere’s summer – the ice is disappearing faster and faster each season.
I love the place names around Marguerite Bay, which was named for the wife of the region’s earliest explorer, Jean-Baptiste Etienne August Charcot, who spent most of 1909-11 in the neighborhood explorig. Porquois Pas? comes from the name of Charcot’s ship; the tallest mountain on the island is Mt. Verne, for Jules Verne, and Bongrain Point for the ship’s first officer. Charcot Island was originally Charcot Land; the Frenchies mistakenly thought they’d hit continent at that point, but it later turned out to be a very big island.
In the afternoon we move up to the end of Bourgeois Fjord (named after Joseph E., director of the Geographic Service of the French Army) … where I had a great, long Christmas Day walk on the fast ice, surrounded by some of the most magnificent scenery in Antarctica.
WATCH VIDEO FROM BOURGEOIS FJORD, ON CHRISTMAS DAY!
Photos, Fiona Stewart
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