“Aliens in Antarctica” is a hard-to-beat, eye-catching headline. And it’s true; they (outsiders!!!) are slowly taking root in a place long considered the most isolated, and pristine, corner of the planet.
Photo: Ryan T. Pierse/Getty Images
But it’s not what you think.
We’re not talking cellophane-skinned, one-eyed creatures from another universe, but rather much more pedestrian invaders, including bluegrass, springtails, and weeds.
By happenstance, I participated in the research that discovered this growing threat to Antarctica. During a 2008 sailing expedition along the Peninsula, my team and I agreed to be sucked by hoses (vacuumed!) on a regular basis. The detritus collected from our clothing, pockets, cuffs, boots, hair and duffle bags was carefully put into sealed bags and sent off to be dissected by scientists at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University and its Center for Invasion Biology.
That year, 2008, also witnessed the height of visitors to Antarctica by both tourists and scientists—more than 40,000. The goal of the “Aliens in Antarctica” project, initiated by the Antarctic Treaty members, was to gauge just how many different invasive species all these visitors were carrying with them.
“We’re not talking cellophane-skinned, one-eyed creatures from another universe, but rather much more pedestrian invaders, including bluegrass, springtails, and weeds.”
The result of all that hosing and bagging from 1,000 volunteers has recently been reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal, which gives the alien invasion a hard number: Based on calculations, that season more than 71,000 seeds were carried ashore (31,732 on tourists, 38,897 on scientists), suggesting that on average every person who visits the remote continent unknowingly carries 9.5 seeds with them.
Formally, the aliens are known as plant propagules—detachable structures, such as seeds. At least four alien grasses have been identified and taken root, a reality one Australian scientist labeled a “substantial threat.”
Visiting humans changing an environment by transporting non-native plants is an old story. In Chile, algae arriving on the boots of fly fishermen have recently killed off entire lakes. The Hudson River, where I live, is choked with water chestnuts, which first showed up clinging to tanker ships arriving from afar. Today in the Galapagos, invasive species of plants outnumber native ones.
Until recently, Antarctica had staved off invasives thanks to its isolation and cold. But as more and more people come to visit, and as temperatures warm around its edges, particularly along the Peninsula where most of the tourists visit, all these hitchhiking invasives have a far better chance of surviving.
The tourists are not the worst culprits; the study puts most of the blame on visiting scientists who pack up their cold-weather gear at season’s end, take it home, use it in a variety of natural settings and then return with it to Antarctica accompanied by undetected stowaways.
Stemming the problem is a challenge. Asking Antarctic visitors to be more dutiful is a start. Visitors should wash boots and vacuum clothes and bags before arriving. In the words of Steven Chown, the invasive biology expert who co-authored the “Aliens in Antarctica” report, “Good biosecurity begins with personal responsibility.”
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It was a rather uneventful summer in Antarctica, relatively warm and wet along the coast, though much of the Peninsula remained blocked by thick pack ice due to lack of winds. The scientific highlight may have been the Russians’ successful drilling to Lake Vostok, 2.2 miles below the ice. Thankfully, there were no reports of ships run aground.
I spent January there, filming a big, new 3D movie about “change” in Antarctica, sailing down on the 74-foot Pelagic Australis. But all of that seeming uneventfulness has gone out the window with an apparent suicide-by-sailboat misadventure that is being closely monitored by Navies around the Southern Ocean.
Norwegian Jarle Andhoey, 34, self-proclaimed Viking and scofflaw of international treaties and sailing safety, and his 52-foot yacht, Nilaya, are thought to have gone missing while sailing from Antarctica toward Cape Horn. Last public contact with the Nilaya—which is not carrying an EPIRB, so it cannot be tracked by satellite even when in trouble—was a phone call from one of the crew members to his wife about five days ago. He reportedly told her the sail was broken, the boat was adrift, and that they were out of diesel and food. He had no idea of the boat’s position. Last Wednesday, March 14, Andhoey’s Oslo-based lawyer confirmed the boat was in trouble — broken mast? — and was headed back to Antarctica, hoping to land at one of the Argentina bases along the Peninsula.
If Andhoey’s name rings a bell, it’s because he was in the news exactly one year ago when his yacht the Berserk sank with three crew members aboard off the coast of Antarctica…while he and an 18-year-old boy were attempting an illegal run toward the South Pole aboard ATVs. On top of the loss of life, that misadventure got him arrested back in Norway and fined $5,000 by the Norwegian Polar Institute for traveling without permits or insurance.
This past January Andhoey headed back to the Ross Sea aboard a new yacht, claiming he was searching for signs of his lost boat. He insisted last year’s efforts by New Zealand, the U.S., and even the Sea Shepherd—which sent its helicopter out to scour the wild seas and ultimately spied its empty life raft—had failed to mount “a proper search.”
In and out of trouble for a decade, Andhoey has been a branded a madman in his home country by many people. He has even most likely renamed his new boat Berserk IV. On his website he compares himself to Roald Amundsen and has been known to wear a helmet with Viking horns.
“”It’s pathetic, really, and one has to have genuine sympathy for the families of the three lost souls that his quest for fame condemned to death.”"
Others have been far more critical than simply calling Andhoey a nutjob. New Zealand multimillionaire economist and Antarctic sailor Gareth Morgan has told the press he hopes whatever the boat is called, it sinks, describing Andhoey as a “bottom feeder, a taker of the worst kind.” “He appears to not give a toss about the amount of hurt he imparts on those who get in the way of his quest for his ‘Wild Vikings’ brand to attract sponsors and book sales,” Morgan told the New Zealand Herald. “It’s pathetic, really, and one has to have genuine sympathy for the families of the three lost souls that his quest for fame condemned to death.” Charlene Banks, sister of one of Andhoey’s crewmen who went down with the Berserk a year ago, calls him “diabolical.” “It’s all about publicity,” she told Radio New Zealand. “He’s definitely not well-prepared at all; he leaves everything to the last minute. He hasn’t got any of authorities’ approval. He believes he’s above the law.”
New Zealand authorities had been on the lookout for the Nilaya since January, when Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs alerted them that Andhoey was apparently going to attempt a return to Antarctica, again without permits or insurance. The boat was spotted by the custom’s plane in international waters off New Zealand. It apparently managed to stop in New Zealand long enough to pick up crew, though it’s not known exactly how many people are sailing aboard the Nilaya. It’s thought that now-19-year-old Samuel Massie, who was with Andhoey when they tried to reach the South Pole by ATV last year, is onboard, as is a Kiwi Maori political activist Busby Noble, who has variably reported that he was below decks repairing the anchor when the boat sailed away with him on it…or that he joined the misadventure to help give a proper blessing to the men who’d been lost at sea, one of whom was a friend.
As more private yachts sail to Antarctica each year, the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO) has been rigorous about trying to keep operators informed on the dos and don’ts of sailing to the only place on the planet governed by international treaty. The first warning given in its manual for yachties is: All Antarctica-bound yacht expeditions must be authorized by the operator’s own country or the vessel’s flag state. In Antarctica, the Nilaya apparently sailed within two miles of the big U.S. base at McMurdo and was spotted by a base employee; New Zealand’s Scott Base was instructed not to receive the boat or crew if it showed up. They touched the ice at some point because Noble reported via sat phone to have planted the Maori flag.
When it had no luck finding any sign of the Berserk, the Nilaya apparently headed from the Ross Sea toward Cape Horn, which this time of year means navigating a 200-mile-wide band of ice. The skipper’s thinking was that if he was able to reach Argentinaian-soil—rather than going back to New Zealand, where authorities at the very least want to present him with a $9,000 bill for searching for him—he wouldn’t face arrest or prosecution. Today he bigger question remains, where is Andhoey? And what was he thinking?
Pleneau Island—We spend the morning watching and following big groups of swimming/feeding penguins on the backside of the island, about halfway down the Antarctic Peninsula.
Photo by Graham Charles
It is one of the most prolific wildlife scenes I’ve ever witnessed here. The skies are dark, hinting snow, but the incredible beauty has kept us out on deck all morning. Literally thousands of Gentoos emerge in one big pack after another, swimming and porpoising. In single file they surface and jump onto a tiny piece of ice, which quickly disintegrates under their accumulated weight. Other penguins savvier, popping up onto bigger icebergs, which they scamper up and over, again in single file, before diving one at a time off the opposite side.
As well as gathering krill and small fish for their by-now two-month-old chicks, these penguins, I’m convinced, are also out horsing around, having some fun. It’s summertime, after all. In another month or two this scene will be dramatically different, frozen and iced-in, and all of Antarctica’s wildlife will be pushed to the ice edge.
It’s an interesting year to talk about ice along the Peninsula. Every year the sea around Antarctica freezes solid, essentially doubling the size of the continent. And every year with spring and summer, most of that frozen sea either melts or breaks into smaller pieces and is blown away, offshore.
This year is different. Though summer is two-thirds over, still-thick sea ice borders the coastline and encases many of its just-offshore islands. It’s more ice than any of us who’ve been visiting the Peninsula for the past couple of decades has seen in 15 years or so.
After watching the penguins hunt for a couple hours we sail south, to Petermann Island, a traditional summer stop and home to nesting Adelie, Gentoo, and blue-eyed Cormorants. For several years the Washington, D.C.-based environmental group Oceanites had put up tents here, allowing its volunteers to come and live for an entire season, documenting wildlife. On an average day during the season, one or two tourist ships usually land passengers on Petermann for a walk around.
But no one has visited the island this year. We attempt to chug through the two miles of thick, slushy ice separating the island from a clear channel. Several times our boat’s engine overheats due to the thick slush being sucked into the intake, requiring us to turn off the engine and plunge it out to prevent it from stopping for good.
Meanwhile, through binoculars, we can make out the fuel storage tank at the Ukrainian science base of Vernadsky in the Argentine Islands. We’ve stopped there many times in the past, to anchor in the calm creek that sits behind it and to share a meal and home-brewed vodka with the 14 scientists based there for 12 straight months. This year, thanks to all the ice staying put and not drifting away, no one has been able to reach the base. The Ukrainians have been iced-in for nearly one year. We raise the base commander on the VHF, and he assures us all is good—they recently celebrated the Ukrainian New Year with a big dinner—but he admits they are anxiously hoping their 14 replacements will be able to reach the base in another month.
Sailing back to the north, heading toward a safe anchorage at Pt. Charcot—near where we’d watched the penguins and leopard seals frolic earlier in the day—the wind comes up, the seas darken, and the ice that surrounds us begins to move. It pushes toward land, filling in any open gap in the sea.
As Skip Novak pilots the boat in, around and through the ice, I sense worry. If we are to anchor at Pt. Chacot and the wind keeps blowing out of the west, as it is predicted, it is very likely we’ll be stuck, unable to move or get off the boat, for many days.
Standing outside in the blow we talk—actually shout over the wind—about our options. It is actually a very short conversation. “Let’s get north, away from this ice,” says Skip. I agree.
Now stories of too much ice along the Antarctic Peninsula may run contrary to those you’ve heard—many from me!—about how much the temperatures in this part of the continent are warming and ice melting.
That hasn’t changed: Both air and water temperatures along the Peninsula have gone up on average 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 40 years, the biggest such change on the planet. The issue this season is not lack of warmth, but lack of wind.
During our adventure this year I’ve had two fascinating conversations with longtime Peninsula veterans about the changes they’ve seen. Each agreed the warming is creating big differences, though each focused on different impacts.
Bill Fraser, one of Antarctica’s premiere penguin scientists, has been visiting the American Palmer Station since the mid-1970s and is convinced the warming temps are changing wildlife patterns. He blames the changes specifically on the lack of sea ice due to warming air and sea temps.
Leif Skog is captain of the National Geographic Explorer, operated by Lindblad Expeditions, which has been bringing tourists to Antarctica since the mid-1960s. Skog has been coming here for nearly 40 years. We spoke on the bridge of his ship at Pt. Lockroy, the former British refuge hut known as “Camp A.”
For him, the biggest change has been the weather, specifically the wind. Or lack of it. “We used to get katabatic winds roaring down off the glaciers every three days or so. Gusts of over 100 miles per hour. We prepared for them, worried about them constantly. Now…we never see winds like that.” Changing weather patterns influenced by warming temperatures—and the lack of sea ice—makes perfect sense for what we’ve witnessed this season.
As we sail the Pelagic Australis to safety, slowly pushing through the still-thick, slushy ice toward the backside of the beautiful Lemaire Channel, standing outside in blowing snow and cold, Skip and I talk about just what an incredible part of the world Antarctica is. We drift past a sizable iceberg we had lingered near earlier in the morning, under far different conditions.
Reminding us that every day—every hour—is different in Antarctica. Make that every 15 minutes.
Palmer Station—When we sail into the narrow channel fronting the U.S. science base here at the tip of Anvers Island, it is clear of ice except for one sizable iceberg, which we wait out, watching it drift slowly out to sea.
Once anchored and tied to the rocks at four corners—a necessity in Antarctica given the unpredictable winds and constantly moving ice, which are the twin constant threats of boats both big and small down here—we settle in for a good night’s sleep before going ashore the next day to interview and film scientists based here for the austral summer.
But when we awake the scene around our boat has changed: Big winds have pushed a field of brash ice—small chunks of floating ice that have a tendency to congeal into bigger masses when temps are cold—into the narrow channel, threatening to trap the sailboat and make getting back and forth to shore a nightmare.
Tying our nine-foot rubber Zodiac up next to the station’s row of a half-dozen bigger, sturdier versions, it feels a bit like we’ve ridden up to an Old West town and saddled our Shetland pony next to a string of quarter horses.
Though it is gray and misting heavily when we climb ashore, the station’s manager, Bob Farrell, wearing sweatshirt and jeans, meets us outside. His charges this summer total just 41, a third of them scientists, the rest support staff.
Whether krill expert or IT guy, whether studying Antarctica’s longest-living insect (a midge) or looking after the station’s wastewater system, every one of the 42 people based here for three to six months treats the place with equal parts reverence and occasional disdain. While each scientist loves Antarctica in his/her own way, many returning year after year, the isolation—and grayness—of the place can sometimes make the assignment feel more jail sentence than golden opportunity. The two days we are at Palmer it rains and snows and rains and snows, with the sun coming out for just a tempting 30-minute peek, and then it starts to sleet.
Luckily for us, the place is busy with interesting science and super-committed-scientists. While the NSF-supported scientists are often in the field counting penguins or sampling underwater algae, a handful are here working the first-floor labs doing what scientists do: count, recount, analyze, compare, dissect, hypothesize, write and edit. Among the hi-tech support here is a full-on Wi-Fi connection, which allows phones with U.S. prefixes to ring and Skype or Immarsat conferences on experiments to take place between scientists and colleagues back home in New Jersey.
For example, we find Rutgers’s University grad student Travis Miles in a lab preparing a four-foot long yellow “glider,” which he and assistants will slide into the ocean a couple miles from the station to collect data from deep channels nearby. The program has already sent one of its gliders 7,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
In a similar but different underwater endeavor, across the hall we meet Kim Bernard—native of South Africa and currently studying at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science—who shows off colorful screen grabs from her own undersea work, which is focused on krill fluctuations. The mainstay of Antarctica’s food web, krill have recently seen its population decline. Is it the warming waters? Overfishing? Extra-hungry predators? While the Rutgers’s team goes deep for answers, Kim studies the potential influence of tides on krill.
And both studies benefit Palmer’s most long-term study, of Adelie penguins, led by Bill Fraser, who has been coming to Palmer since the mid-1970s. HQ for Fraser and his birding team—he currently has two teams of two scientists out on remote islands, counting—is a sturdy half-dome tent on the station’s front deck.
Sharing a glass of early evening whisky, Fraser details some of the changes he’s seen since first arriving at Palmer in 1975-76, staying the first season for three months, the next for 13 months. During those decades he’s watched Adelie penguin populations decrease significantly, due to warming temperatures; Gentoo penguin numbers increase, as they move into the warming neighborhoods abandoned by the Adelies; and krill numbers fluctuate wildly.
But the main thing he’s witnessed is less and less ice. Photographs assembled by various Palmer Station managers and visiting photographers show that at this tip of Anvers Island the retreat has been significant; they show a glacier behind the station that has retreated by 1,500 feet.
“That is the future of the Antarctic Peninsula,” says Fraser. “The ice is definitely disappearing. And fast.”
Port Lockroy — If there is a human population center along the Antarctic Peninsula, this is it. While there may be hundreds of thousands of penguins, tens of thousands of seals, whales and sea birds that call this remote stretch home, few people do.
But at the height of the austral summer season — December-February — more people congregate in the protected harbor here at the former ‘Camp A’ of the British Antarctic Survey than anywhere else for many thousands of miles, if temporarily. (The next most populated place in Antarctica would be the American base at McMurdo, home to 1,200 scientists and support crew during the summer months, but located on the opposite side of the continent.)
Whale Tail
The former refuge hut has been turned into a mini-museum and gift shop, demanding a mostly volunteer staff to run it and keep the small island relatively tidy (it is surrounded by breeding Gentoo penguins, everywhere …) for the tourist boats that arrive, often twice a day.
When we go ashore at Goudier Island we find an all-women staff of four plus a visiting guide from one of the tourist ships who’s spending ten days here helping out. The two men are here temporarily, installing video cameras around the hut so the penguin colonies can be monitored remotely during the eight months no humans live here.
I had a slightly selfish interest for pulling into Lockroy; a pair of kayaks I’d asked to be dropped off by the National Geographic Explorer had been stashed alongside the residents’ Quonset hut a few weeks ago. We find them, bright red and yellow polyeurethane wrapped in plastic badly deteriorated by the ozone-free sun that shines brightly here during the summer thanks to the still-present hole in the atmosphere that grows over the deep, deep south this time of year.
The even-more-temporary residents of Lockroy are those that arrive by private sailboat, a growing phenomenon, seeking well-known shelter from Antarctica’s fiercest winds. Twenty years ago, it would be rare to see a sailboat here, maybe one or two during a complete summer season. Today there are almost always five or six boats at anchor in this bay alone.
Skip Novak, the owner of the Pelagic Australis that I’ve chartered, has been coming to the Peninsula by small boat since 1988 and is one of a the charter members in a very small (3 or 4?) club of pioneers. He is on board with us and regales us nightly with stories of those early days when they used to tap into the fuel deposits left behind at abandoned science bases, debauched nights in Ushuaia’s lone strip club (the Tropicana, still there) at trip’s end and the always odd and colorful characters who initially came here in small boats against the advice of virtually everyone.
We anchor at Lockroy for three nights, filming in the iceberg-studded bays nearby, diving under icebergs and photographing the whalebones left on the sea floor by rapacious oil barons of a century ago. During those days a half-dozen sailboats anchor nearby:
An Italian couple on their private boat pull in, crewed by a staff of six sailors. The report from its skipper, who used to work for Skip, is that they are already bored by the penguins and ice and will most likely cut an anticipated 30 day trip short by two weeks. A Brit in a plastic sailboat carrying four friends comes and goes from the anchorage on day trips. Daily they return with a slightly fearful look in their eye and worried tone in their details; their boat is certainly not cut out for bashing through ice and this season there is a lot of still-frozen sea ice out there in the passes.
Another small plastic boat, the Paradise, operates out of Ushuaia and specializes in bringing (mostly French) climbers to the Peninsula. In my 20 years coming to this part of the world, on top of the general tourist boom the biggest change has been that the adventuring crowd has finally found ways of getting here. The result is lots of skiers and climbers are chartering small boats and spending their days exploring new peaks and routes. While most of the biggest mountains along the Peninsula have been previously climbed (the tallest is Mt. Francais, at nearly 9,256 feet) there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of smaller ones no one has ever stood atop or ski traversed.
But the number of sailboats we see is down from a few years ago; then we pulled into Lockroy and there were ten boats. Similarly general tourist visits are down; four years ago Lockroy had a record 18,000 visitors by cruise boats, this year they anticipate 13,000. The record high for visitors to the Peninsula was more than 35,000 in 2008; this year it will be just over 20,000. Global economic woes are an explanation for the drop, as is the elimination of most of the giant cruise boat visits thanks to a change in law ruling out the heavy fuels they use from operating along the Peninsula.
One boat we’re keeping our eyes out for left Ushuaia a couple days before we did, stacked with nine British special forces soldiers down here for “drills.” We’d run into a similar group a few years ago — similarly 8 men and 1 woman — and they’d welcomed us into various anchorages along the Peninsula with bagpipes, proper British tea and good Scotch.
More traditionally for Antarctica we meet up with a handful of boats being run by second-generation sailors, who have inherited a passion for the place by essentially growing up here … both a job and lineage no one could have imagined just fifty years ago when the international treaty that governs the continent was written. The word “tourism” is never mentioned in that original agreement.
Paradise Harbor — Its common knowledge among Antarctic veterans that no two days here look or feel alike. Ever.
The reality is that no quarter hour looks alike. Or can be predicted, no matter how many months or years you’ve spent here.
We spent the night in a small, protected bay about 400 miles down the coastline of the Antarctic Peninsula. The tricky thing about sailing a small yacht here (the aluminum-hulled Pelagic Australis is 74 feet) is that there are very few truly protected anchorages; it reminds me often of the coast of Maine, with its thousands of small islands, where finding safe haven is often similarly dodgy. Here the combination of rapidly changing winds and weather mean that even when you’ve securely tied off bow and stern to rocks with a pair of heavy metal lines at each end, there is no certainty that you’ll really be safe through the night.
The biggest threat, of course, is ice. A big wind comes up, a seemingly protected bay can fill with icebergs big and small, and any sailboat can be locked in within an hour, unable to move until the ice blows out again. Which might be an hour, or days.
(While most of the private boats that sail to Antarctica are aluminum or steel-hulled, as it becomes an increasingly popular destination for adventurous yachties, the greater number of plastic, even the occasional fiberglass boat, show up here, more greatly threatened by sharp-edged ice.)
This morning we are lucky; there’s no ice in the bay when we awake. We are even luckier to spend the entire day just half a mile from where we slept, hiking, sailing and filming the rare beauty of Antarctica as it changes, seemingly by the minute.
Steel gray skies turn bright blue. High white clouds skid across the horizon, then disappear. Brash ice — small bits of broken-up sea ice — turn the ocean surface into what resembles a giant frozen margarita. One by one a handful of icebergs the size of small houses float into the bay, pause, circle, then continue on, pushed slowly to the north by winds and current.
From up high looking down, whether perched on the spreader 30 feet above the Pelagic’s deck, or standing atop one of the 100 foot tall glaciers rimming the shallow U-shaped Skontorp Cove — named for Edvard Skontorp, described as an “outstanding” Norwegian whale gunner — the scene is otherworldly: Ice moving in and out, winds picking up then calming, high clouds casting shadows on the sunlit, black Southern Ocean.
Since the rain that haunted us the first few days of this exploration have stopped, on a day like this it’s easy to be reminded of how privileged we are to see this remote corner of the planet. Its also a good reminder of just how relevant the them of change — the subject of the film we’re shooting here, Wild Antarctica 3D — is to this place. Ice comes and goes, sea and air temperatures change, species are threatened, and every day the changing weather is the primary topic of conversation.
Mid-afternoon I jump in a Zodiac with Graham Charles, my Kiwi friend who knows this coastline as well as anyone, and we take a long, slow ride along the glacier’s edge.
We purposely stay a safe distance away from the towering ice. Those who know Antarctic best are the ones who respect its threats most, including its 29-degree waters but particularly its ice. Only the foolhardy pull cowboy acts here — like lingering too close to glacier walls or attempting to thread through tempting arches carved in icebergs — given the harsh penalty to be paid if you misjudge.
It is a warmish day, just above freezing, and the sun has been heating up the exterior of the glacier all day, making it more vulnerable to calving. When big chunks fall off it into the sea it’s like bags of cement being tossed in, sending waves and spray rolling. When a section of wall collapses it’s like a mini-tsunami.
Just as we pass a particularly sculptured wall, sure enough, a 30-foot wide section atop the glacier wall gives out a few warning groans and then drops into the ocean. It slides at first, then seems to explode. Watching over our shoulders, the engine on full throttle, six-foot waves chase us but do not catch up. Skidding the boat onto smooth waters we put it in neutral and watch as Antarctica continues to change all around us.
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