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.

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.

Today is one of those days down here that you wish you could be sitting by some kind of warm fire, whether in the comfort of your living room or a preferably a bonfire. At eight this morning it is thirty-four degrees and raining, conditions which began yesterday and promise to be with us for at least two more. Thanks to satellite imagery we are able to track the weather up to five days in advance, more or less; at the very least we know when high and low pressure systems are on the way and from what direction to expect the winds.

Wet Penguins

Loading into a hypalon Zodiac — Graham Charles, an old friend of mine and great Kiwi explorer, Skip Novak, a longtime sail racer and owner of the “Pelagic Australis” that sailed us to Antarctica and myself — round the southwestern edge of Enterprise Island to have a look at the art show of grounded icebergs that gather in the relatively shallow waters each summer season.

We are not disappointed. Twenty and thirty foot tall icebergs litter the alley. One has a pair of small arches carved through it by wind and waves. Another has a sheer wall, like smooth granite, rising straight out of the cold sea. Another is ridged by undulations carved into its underside over many years before it rolled onto its side.

Graham, who has kayaked the length of the Peninsula and works every season as an expedition leader aboard one of the 30+ tourist ships that come south each season, is almost apologetic for the rain and gray. “It’s so unusual these days to see so many back to back days without sun. We’ve gotten spoiled by weeks recently where there’s been nothing but blue sky and glassy seas.”

Skip, who first sailed to Antarctica in the early 1980s and is one of a small handful of charter boat captains whose boats have returned each season since, agrees. “But even when you say that, I think back to conditions twenty years ago when we had far more wind. And back then, every morning you’d wake up to snow on the boat, which we almost never see now. It’s simply too warm to snow.”

Perhaps the most beautiful part of Antarctica, even on a gray, misty day, is just how much it changes from year to year. I’ve been to this corner of Enterprise more than a dozen times and the ice that surrounds it changes every 15 minutes. Sometimes by the light glancing off it or, like today, the mist that envelops it, or the wind and waves moving it up and down, from side to side, threatening to flip it onto its side.

Without question the biggest change to come to the Peninsula in my 20 years of experience down here is the weather. Today during the austral summer, November to February, each year is warmer and wetter. It’s not just my imagination: Data collected at the various science bases along this stretch of the continent detail that air and sea temperatures have risen dramatically in the past 40 years. During the summer, average temps have risen up 5 to 10 degrees F; year round, the average temps along the Peninsula, including during its long, cold, dark winters, have raised by up to 18 degrees.

The warmer conditions are relevant to us because they deliver more precipitation, i.e. rain. Our hope is that this will be a summer filled with many clear days, in large part because we’re trying to capture Antarctica in 3D … and we don’t want the audience to come away thinking the place is only gray, misty and wet.

Conditions have been making filming tricky during these early days of our exploration. A drop of snow or salty sea spray on the 18” mirror or one of two camera lenses on the Epic 3D rig means lots of stopping and starting, stopping and starting. The result is long days and lots of waiting.

But the delays are worth it. The beauty down here is that when the sun does shine it’s like watching a Disney film on hallucinogens, surrounded everywhere you look by ice in its thousands of forms.

From 1904 to 1931 this bay was home to one of the Southern Ocean’s boomtowns. As many as 15 big processing boats and another 35 “catcher” boats worked this beach at one time, most from Norway and the U.K.

With a sun rare for this island south of the South Shetlands lighting up the beach we moved up and down it not with giant tools for skinning whales but giant cameras for documenting the falling down boomtown. Rusting tanks that once held whale oil, collapsed dormitories that once housed men and wooden whaleboats buried up to their gunnels by blown sand are the subject. It is rare today that a whale ventures into the caldera, but just before entering through Neptune’s Bellows a trio of humpbacks had blown in the near-distance.

One thing we know for certain is that the sun won’t last. My hope is to make a landing the next day on the exterior of the island, at a beach known as Baily Head. Though it is just around the corner from the interior of the caldera, and we could hike to it in two hours, the preference would be to land by Zodiac on its steep beach.

How steep? It typically shuts out three of four attempts … and those are in big robust, hard-bottomed Zodiacs, not the more pliable nine-footer we will use.

Dump the Zodiac as we landed here, and there goes the film, on Day 2.

It’s the confidence of my Kiwi compatriot Graham Charles, who knows the coastline of the Peninsula as well as anyone, that is our ace in the hole. Sent to scout the beach just after 7 a.m. he returned with a thumbs up — or maybe it was a shrug of the shoulders, it’s hard to tell when we’re all dressed in six layers — but his message was that right now, it was calm enough to land. The worst case was that we could land by shore and have to hike ourselves and gear to the other side to get off the island.

One, then two and three runs were made with success and during the next two hours as we assembled the 3D camera in a growing wind on the cusp of the beach, observed by several thousand chinstrap penguins, the seas rose quickly and were soon crashing onto the shore. If we’d arrived an hour later, we’d have never been able to land.

The reason to make the effort to reach Baily Head are those thousands of chinstraps that trudge up and down in a continuous file ten to twenty abreast from high in the amphitheater behind to plunge into the cold Southern Ocean for a day of feeding. They line up on the beach, assess the surf, count the sets and then — often hesitantly, sometimes with a stutter step — dive or are swept in.

Landing for them can be even trickier; from a distance you can see them coming — 40 to 100 at a time, porpoising out of the sea, headed for the beach — and then surfing, or being slammed, onto the black sand.

Leaning into the sensitive camera to keep it upright, wrapping it in space blankets and plastic sheeting to protect it from the wet, we watch the scene for several hours in the admittedly freezing wet and cold — 32 degrees with a wet blowing wind and cold spray off the ocean.

The hike with gear to the top of the 500-foot ridge in the now-grassy and muddy bowl that is home to nearly 200,000 birds was easier than we expected and after shooting atop the beautiful ridge for several more hours, by five p.m. we were clambering down the backside towards a small black sand beach.

As we hiked down, a single file line of dutiful penguins, their bellies stuffed with fish and krill, headed back to their nests, most now featuring two fuzzy gray chicks.

Everyone from Sir Francis Drake, for whom the windy passage is named, to Captain Bligh, who fought into the winds for 100 days before giving in, turning around and sailing to Tahiti the long way, no one in their right mind has looked forward to these seas.

Pelagic / Chilean Base

I’ve crossed the Drake a couple dozen times now and include myself on the long list of those who live with a mild and constant dread of the place. Whether leaving from the southern Chilean ports of Punta Arenas or Puerto Williams, or Ushuaia in Argentina — from which most of the 30-odd tourist ships that carry visitors to the Antarctic Peninsula each austral summer leave from — in the days leading up to each of the crossings my fingers are tightly locked for many days in advance, praying for calm seas.

This time out was no different. We were set to leave aboard the 74-foot “Pelagic Australis” from a dock lined with expedition yachts on January 2 and the five-day outlook was for incredibly light winds and … calm seas. If that luck held, it looked like we’d make what we anticipated to be a three-day crossing in good time, with little turbulence.

Unfortunately our luck did not hold. Delayed waiting for an underwater housing for our 3D cameras, which never arrived and as far as I know is still stuck in customs in Buenos Aires, we finally sailed away from Ushuaia at midday on January 4 in 45 mile per hour gusts. Just minutes later they closed the port due to strong winds.

That luck — bad luck — managed to hang in for the next four days, as we were bucked by strong easterly winds pushing us far off our hoped-for course of due south to Deception Island. Instead we were forced to tack far to the east to avoid sailing directly into the wind, taking us slightly out of our way to the eastern edge of the South Shetland Islands. When we finally turned the corner around the Shetlands at King George Island, we had to lower the sails and motor face-on into a pounding wind and sea, making less than four miles an hour.

At 7 a.m. on the 8th we finally sailed into the caldera of Deception Island, wearied by a trip that had taken about 24 hours longer than it should have.

I had chartered the “Pelagic Australis” four years ago for a similar exploration; the crew this time around has some overlap: my friends and expedition partners Sean Farrell and Graham Charles were with me then, as was Skip Novak, who owns the “Pelagic.” But the camera crew has changed, to include 3D experts Ken Corben, Bob Cranston and Johnny Friday.

During the four days of bashing our way across the Drake it was easy to lose focus on why we were headed to the Antarctic Peninsula in the first place. But as a rare sun came out over Whaler’s Bay at Deception Island — lighting up the long, black volcanic sand beach that a century ago was home to one of the most efficient whaling operations the world has ever known — it was easy to put the seasick pills away, crawl out of our bunks and start pulling camera gear out of the holds below.

“Wild Antarctica 3D” is my first entry into the growing genre. The film industry, pushed by coalitions of heavyweight broadcasters and theater owners around the world, are gambling that 3D’s time has finally arrived and are demanding more and more high-level content. For me, being able to bring the Antarctic Peninsula, which I’ve been visiting the past two decades, initially into theaters in museums and science institutions all the better. I can already see penguins and icebergs jumping off the screen and into people’s laps.

Like much of my writing and filmmaking about Antarctica in recent years this film will ultimately be about Antarctica’s ice, specifically how it is changing.

Despite that the southern continent is covered in some places by nearly three miles of ice, along the Peninsula each summer for the past four decades its ice edges have been being degraded thanks to warming air and sea temperatures. Stepping onto the rare, sunshine-filled beach at Deception Island we were reminded that many things change here, and fast.

Photo: Flip Nicklin

Production of “Wild Antarctica 3D” begins when we sail away from Ushuaia, Argentina, on New Year’s Day aboard the 74-foot sailboat “Pelagic Australis.” This new film, slated for museum and theatrical release in spring 2013, will focus on the big changes being experienced along the length of the Peninsula by its wildlife, the ocean and land as warmer seas and air temperature continue to impact its ice.

And in Antarctica, as we’ve seen many times before, it is all about the ice.

The new film is the result of a filmmaking partnership of Giant Screen Films/D3D Cinema, DQBD Films and OCEANS 8 Films. Experienced cold weather videographers and divers Ken Corben and Bob Cranston will do much of the heavy lifting — shooting both above and below sea level (29 degrees F) — as we sail along the Peninsula.

Photo: Fiona Stewart

Our first stop will be Deception Island, then onto the Gerlache Strait and Argentine Islands. Highlights will be a two-day stop at the U.S. science base at Palmer Station and a rendezvous with the “National Geographic Explorer.”

Follow our expedition at jonbowermaster.com, Facebook and Twitter.

Photo: New Zealand Department of Conservation

I’m modeling that future, of course, after the wandering Emperor dubbed “Happy Feet,” who a few weeks ago showed up on a New Zealand beach, more than 2,000 miles from his Antarctic home. The 10-month-old penguin had clearly taken a wrong turn on a Southern Ocean foraging trip. Soon after he was discovered, standing alone and shaking his head in bewilderment, it looked like curtains for the poor bird. Since swimming ashore, he’d been living on a diet of sand and driftwood, confusing it for snow, not a healthy option to his usual diet of krill.

Typically I’d be among those advising to let nature take its course, to encourage those who found him wandering on Peka Peka Beach 60 miles northwest of Wellington, to simply let the penguin fend for himself. “Let the strong survive,” etc., etc. The end, admittedly, would not a pretty picture. But in my experience, when man steps in to “aid” Mother Nature, something usually goes badly awry.

But now that I see Happy’s getting prime attention from doctors, has a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a Webcam monitoring his every move that has attracted 120,000 followers, I’m thinking he may be savvier than I first thought, smart enough to have earned that all-expenses-paid, $30,000 return flight to the seventh continent. (His fans are of a particularly rabid variety. After observing the pengie in a sleep trance one Facebook fan gushed: “At 11:20 p.m., Happy Feet was sound asleep with his left flipper sticking out. Five minutes later, he pulled in his left foot and flipper and just got up!:).”

I initially tried to resist the sappy story of the errant penguin, as I do those other “fish out of water” stories that make the TV news a few times a year, ranging from lost dolphins and whales wandering far up the wrong rivers to those misguided raptors that build nests high atop skyscrapers. But when I read that Happy’s spending his days lounging on a bed of ice at the Wellington Zoo in his permanent tuxedo, his every snore, waddle and feasting-on-fish slurry observed by tens of thousands of new friends from around the globe…I’m impressed by his apparent magnetism and will to survive.

Apparently, his short-life story is inspiring some in powerful ways: A Chicago woman identifying herself as Janet compared Happy to the hero of an O. Henry short story, assigning his example as life-affirming.“I feel as long as the penguin does well, I’ll do well,” she wrote. Hundreds gathered to watch a leading gastroenterologist from Wellington Hospital perform an endoscopy on the bird to clear his stomach of some of that irritating sand and driftwood he’d wolfed down. (Worries continue, though. “He’s definitely not out of the woods yet,” cautioned a zoo spokesperson in a post-surgery news conference.)

Happy’s plight may prove a boon for other critters at the Wellington Zoo; the same spokesperson has suggested the experience has been so positive it may well consider live streaming of other animals and their medical operations.

When first discovered, by an early-morning beach wanderer, most of scientific officialdom was against intervening on his behalf, worried that if he was returned home it could be with a host of new bacteria, putting the rest of the colony at risk. Swimming back home would be impossible. “Birds get lost. It happens all the time,” Kevin McGowan at Cornell University told ABC News. “But it’s natural that when something as charismatic as a penguin shows up, people want to help.

“There’s a war between people’s good intentions and ignorance about what’s best for the animal,” said McGowan. “What we think may be a benign intervention might not be.”

Environmentalists have jumped on the bandwagon too, suggesting perhaps the Emperor’s confusion was a result of ocean acidification, climate change or the overfishing of krill.

Today Happy’s future hangs in the balance. So far, $8,000 of the $30,000 necessary to fly him back home has been raised. One potential upside, or downside dependent on how his future plays out, is that they’ve already fitted him with a microchip that will allow scientists (and fanatics?) to follow his every movement…for the rest of life. (Didn’t Jim Carrey eventually whig out during a similar fictionalized scenario?) In one critic’s words, it’s in Happy’s flippers now.

(For the rest of my dispatches go to takepart.com)

Photo by Fiona Stewart

But there are some surprises being reported from this deep-deep South during the continent’s long, cold winter (which lasts eight months, roughly March through October), and here they are:

Alien Species Are Invading

The aliens worrying Antarctic observers are not of the cellophane-skin and pumpkin-head kind, but rather more of the garden variety: insects, slugs, worms, plant seeds, and fungi that sneak in with the fruits and vegetables consumed by the 4,000 scientists who call Antarctica home during the summer season. Tourists are contributing too, carrying plant seeds in on their shoes and clothing. The invasion is encouraging calls for new levels of “biosecurity” to protect the otherwise pristine continent from being further infiltrated. For the moment, simple fungi and mold are the greatest concerns because they often carry plant diseases: Of the 11,250 fruit and vegetables sent to nine research stations, researchers found soil on 12 percent of the food as well as 56 alien invertebrates and 19 different species of mold. On Antarctica’s near islands, rats, mice, and cats are already devastating bird populations, a risk the mainland doesn’t have to worry about…for now, since warm-blooded creatures have a hard time surviving sub-sub freezing temps. For now.

The Ozone Hole Over the Continent Is Increasingly Influencing the Southern Hemisphere’s Weather

Everything from burning fossil fuels and rainforests to cow farts are blamed for the planet’s changing climate. Now a team from Columbia University suggests the ozone hole growing over Antarctica is linked to warmer, wetter weather reaching all the way north to the equator. Initially discovered in the 1980s and blamed on the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in refrigerators and aerosols, the hole is expected to mostly close up by the middle of the century because of the banning of those chlorofluorocarbonss. In 2000, NASA satellites measured it at 11.5 million square miles; a decade later it had been reduced to 8.5 million square miles. Despite the shrinkage, the study blames the high-altitude ozone hole for contributing to higher wind speeds, leading to more intense storms and heavy summer rains across eastern Australia, the southwestern Indian Ocean, and the South Pacific.

Declining Penguin Numbers May Have Less to Do With Warming Temps Than Previously Thought

It has been widely reported (including by me) that the Adelie penguin population in Antarctica has dropped by as much as 50 percent in recent years. The blame has been placed largely on the fast-disappearing ice along the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, which had long been home to thriving penguin populations. The reasoning has been that as the average winter temperatures along the Peninsula have risen by nine to 11 degrees since the mid-20th century, compared to two degrees everywhere else on the planet, the habitat change was chasing the ice-loving Adelie’s further south, or killing them off. But new studies by NOAA and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography suggest that might not be why their numbers are declining; instead, their main food source—krill—is diminishing thanks to warming seas, recovering whale populations, and overfishing. The two-inch long, shrimp-like crustaceans are the basis of Antarctica’s food chain, but along the Peninsula it’s estimated krill density has declined by 80 percent. Warming temps, of both air and sea, will continue to take a toll as will man’s growing demand for krill: In 2009 to 2010 more than 202,000 tons of krill were taken, a four-fold increase over 2002 to 2003.

The Ice Around the Continent’s Edges Is Melting Faster Than Predicted

It looks like penguins and krill alike will have to adapt to even warmer temps and less ice far sooner than expected. A new report out of the California Institute for Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggests that the big ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting faster than previously predicted. If nothing changes—i.e. dramatically less burning of fossil fuels and far fewer cow farts—melting ice will be the biggest contributor to sea level rise, outstripping the melting of mountain glaciers and polar ice caps. The report suggests a six-inch rise in sea levels around the world by 2050, sounding even more worrying alarm bells than the 2007 study by the International Panel on Climate Change, the last international body to fully assess the future of the ice sheets. The new numbers are based on a new technique that combines satellite radar readings of ice movement and soundings of ice thickness with new satellite information that measures differences in gravity planet-wide. Between Antarctica and Greenland, the two ice sheets dump 475 gigatonnes of ice (one gigatonne is one billion metric tons) into the ocean each year. The report estimates that the melting of polar ice caps and glaciers is about three times slower.

For the First Time in a Decade, Tourist Visits to Antarctica Are Expected to Dip Dramatically in the Coming Summer

According to the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO) the number of people visiting the seventh continent during the most recent summer season has dropped way off its high of 46,265 people in 2007 to 2008. Last season—2010-2011—the number was less than 34,000. This coming summer—thanks largely to a new ban on heavy fuels, which prohibits most big cruise ships from visiting the Peninsula—the industry monitoring group anticipates a 25 percent drop, to just over 25,000 visitors. The ban on heavy fuels, imposed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), goes into effect next month; it is purposely aimed at reducing the number of big ships visiting the Peninsula, the kind that carry thousands of passengers. One reason for the ban? Big ships + heavy fuel = big trouble in case of an accident, which could be disastrous on many fronts in this most-remote, most-pristine region. Visitor numbers are also down simply due to a still-sour global economy. Even the smaller ships that carry fewer than 500 passengers and make a dozen or more trips to the Peninsula each season are expecting fewer customers in the season, which begins in November.

(For the rest of my dispatches, go to takepart.com)

Photograph by and courtesy of Chris Sterritt

One result is that anyone who dives in the Southern Ocean is constantly attuned to who, or what, is swimming nearby. When my friend Kelvin Murray—who splits his underwater time between two cold-water destinations, the North Atlantic and Antarctica—sent this photo of himself being followed/observed/stalked by a big leopard seal I had to know what he was thinking:

“Let’s face it; diving in Antarctica is not for everyone. Many people ask me what it’s like to roll out of the boat into zero-degree water. First question is always, doesn’t your face freeze? Well, yes, but it goes numb so quickly I don’t feel anything. Is the equipment heavy? Yes, but I’m ‘weightless’ in the water. Is there anything to see? Yes, lots…

“It’s when I tell them about the leopard seals that they truly believe me to be mad. With a head three times the size of a man’s, equipped with large canine and tricuspid teeth, powered by 1000 pounds of muscle and flesh, in a twelve-foot long frame, this is a creature that demands respect.

“It was while I was guiding a group of underwater photographers on a recent trip along the Antarctic Peninsula that I had my closest encounter.

“We were reaching the end of the dive when the seal appeared. It immediately swam around and amongst us, using its long foreflippers to manuever with precise grace. Straight away it began to gape at the various camera dome ports, flashing its teeth in time with the flashing of the strobes.

“My dive partner took this particular shot as the leopard circled us. Seconds later I turned around and found myself eyeball to huge, black eyeball with the mighty seal literally, physically, and metaphorically in my face. It hung in the water, slowly twisting and gazing at me with what looked to be a huge crooked smile. I was careful not to blow bubbles—this is sometimes regarded as a sign of aggression or frustration in marine mammals—and slowly turned my face away, reminding myself that a stare-down might be seen as a challenge. The seal continued to stamp its authority on the area as we returned to our boat, giving us ample opportunity to express a mix of admiration, joy, and well…relief. Later in the day we returned to the site and watched with macabre enthusiasm as the seal chased down, drowned, and dismembered a penguin, with our snorkelers mere feet away.

“This was a very special encounter. There are few places in the world where you can get so close to an apex carnivore to observe while it stalks, hunts, kills, and eats. With iconic top predators under intense pressure the world over, mostly due to some kind of human impact—whether wolves and dogs, bears or big cats—the much-maligned great white shark is more endangered in the wild than the tiger. All of these majestic animals deserve respect and probably a small portion of appropriate fear, but despite our inherent misgivings, the reality is they have more to fear from us than we have of them.”

(For the rest of my dispatches, go to takepart.com)