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
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
Just as every day is different down south, every landscape is wildly different too.
We’ve moved to the other side of the Peninsula, the eastern edge of the five-hundred-mile long finger jutting out of the continent, into the Weddell Sea. We tried to get in here last year, by sailboat and kayak, but were shut out. The winter of 2007 had been a particularly cold one, even by Antarctic standards, and the entry to the Antarctic Sound had been blocked long into summer by a pair of giant icebergs, each tens of miles long. That blockage, combined with a lack of wind, meant that where we had hoped to paddle – circumnavigating Vega and James Ross islands – was choked by frozen sea, passes between the islands still filled by one and two year old ice.
Weddell Sea tabular
This year is very, very different. The winter of 2008 was warmer and windier and even though we’re a day away from the official start of summer, much of the Weddell is already clear of the same kind of thick pack we saw last year.
That said it is never a picnic over here. The landscape is stark, the islands short-hilled and rust-colored. Other than a solitary Argentine base, there’s no one around for one hundred miles, and you sense that remoteness. If more than 100,000 sizable bergs calve off the Antarctic continent each year, about one-third of them come from the glaciers lining the Weddell Sea. Remember in 2002, when a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island dramatically broke off from the Larsen B ice shelf? The Larsen B is just south of where I am today and some of that ice and its brothers and sisters are still grounded here. As I write I’m standing alongside a flat-topped berg a few stories tall and at least two miles long.
The ice here is different too. The sky is bright blue, the wind howling at thirty to forty miles an hour and I spend the better part of an hour looking through a spotting scope towards Seymour Island, following “the pack” being pushed by wind and current. It is miles wide, floating on the surface, exactly what you would not want to get caught in. Imagine being surrounded by a fast-moving pack tens of miles wide, unable to escape. You could be stuck for days, or worse.
The Weddell’s icebergs are mean and tough too, none of that soft, slushy stuff you might see at this time of year on the western side of the Peninsula. Hit one of these, and you’ll suffer. They are extremely hard, toughened by years of extreme cold and wind, often studded just below the surface by giant, sharp continental rock. Even the name of the water here is ominous – the Terror and Erebus Gulf – named for a pair of historical wooden sailing ships that first risked exploring the region.
At the north end of the channel, I take a long walk on Paulet Island, known for its 100,000 pairs of nesting Adelies. There are so many birds it is nearly impossible to clamber up the boulder-strewn beach. Beneath many of the birds peek the first chicks I’ve seen this year. As the day goes on, the sky grows evermore blue, the winds stronger.
Some of the 200,000 Adelie pengins on Paulet Island
Wind swept and rocky, islands in the Weddell Sea are vastly different than the opposite side of the Peninsula
ANTARCTICA EXPEDITIONS UPDATES
For a summary of who’s doing what down south this year by ski, kite and foot, check in with my friend Kraig Becker’s The Adventure Blog. While I remain curious about the various attempts, admiring of the incredible physical stamina each requires, when you’re on the edge of the continent as I am, all of that seems very … foreign … very far away.
Photos, Fiona Stewart
What a difference a year makes.
I am standing at the foot of Sharp Peak, rising 4,000 feet from the sea, as I did eleven months ago. Then, the snow was wet and slushy, temperatures warm enough that it was raining rather than snowing on a grey day. Today is perhaps the most beautiful I have ever seen in Antarctica … well … though … there was that November day last year at Neko Harbor … or the one in late January at the base of Crystal Sound … or …
The LeMaire Channel
Suffice to say, this one was a beauty. Sitting off Prospect Point I am surrounded 360 by THE most spectacular wilderness on the planet. Running about in a Zodiac on a glass-calm black sea snowcapped mountain ranges circle me marked every few miles by substantial towering glacier tongues. Thick new snow is piled up on the hills and six-foot-thick fast ice (frozen sea) extends from the continent. Dozens of penguins and seals swim and fish, then slide up onto the ice for a rest. Flat-topped tabular icebergs bigger than small apartment buildings – crystal blue and surreal white – sit grounded in the bay or frozen into the fast ice. The sun is high; the sky indigo and air temperatures reach near to forty … (I’ve heard it was -10 F in Minneapolis today!). Aaaaah, Antarctica!
Last year we tried climbing Sharp Peak, but walked away due to too soft snow and crevasses masked by grey skies. Then the bay was scudded with ice of all sizes; this year most of the winter ice has already been blown out. Though we couldn’t have climbed the peak today either, due not to slushy snow, just way too much of it.
It is particularly hard on a day like this, surrounded by ice that is hundreds of years old and mountains covered by new-fallen snow, that one day much of this whiteness lining the Antarctic Peninsula could be gone. Though the air temperatures along the Peninsula have risen during the past fifty years by nine degrees Fahrenheit, the biggest increase on the planet, it is still easy for critics of climate change and its impacts to use this exact vista to suggest that no amount of warming, no matter who or what is responsible, will ever make a difference to this place.
But evidence is all around; despite on a glorious day like today, no matter appearances. All along the Peninsula the average temperatures of air and surface water are way up. Eighty-seven percent of all of the continent’s glaciers are flowing faster then ever and have receded. Each year the frozen continent is losing enough ice mass to cause the world’s oceans to rise about .05 inches, adding about 40 trillion gallons of fresh water to the world’s ocean, equivalent to the amount of water used by all U.S. residents every three months. Estimates for sea level rise are on the order of eighteen to twenty feet over the next couple millennium, but we’re not sure if it all may arrive in the same one hundred years. Ice shelves the sizes of small states along the Peninsula are fracturing at alarming rates.
The best analogy I can make for what is happening down south will be familiar to anyone who lives in a cold weather, ice-and-snow climate. Serious scientists in Antarctica talk about a “critical point,” when the combination of warm temperatures, precipitation and loss of ice cover will encourage Antarctica to melt very, very quickly. Think of your own backyard on a warm day at the end of a long winter; your yard, your stoop has been covered in snow and ice for several months and then on early spring day, after a momentous day of rain and warm temperatures, the last remnants of winter disappear … just like that.
The very same could happen here, which is the worry. Though I will admit to understanding, today surrounded on all sides by miles and miles of ice and snow, why there are still some out there who doubt. I am not one of them.
Sharp Peak, December 2008
Photos, Fiona Stewart
BLAILOCK ISLAND, MARGUERITE BAY
I spent the afternoon walking on a piece of fast ice the size of a small town – floating on the surface, about six feet thick, still attached to the continent – in a fjord known as Bourgeois, dead-ending in the Jones Ice Shelf. Many of the landmarks in the area bear French names, like the big island of Porquoi Pas, for example, thanks to the early exploits this far south by Frenchman Jean Charcot.
Surrounded on three sides by breathtaking tall mountains and glaciers and on the other by the black Southern Ocean, this is as far south as I’ve ever been. Further south than all but a few ever get along the Peninsula. The reward was a long walk on new snow-covered ice. A dozen leopard seals play along the ice edge and small squadrons of Adelie penguins walk and scoot on their bellies alongside.
Leopard seals along the edge of the Jones Ice Shelf
Adelie's strolling
We tried to get here last year, by sea kayak, but our attempt to sneak through the Gullet just north – a narrow sliver of sometimes-open water – was for naught, and we only got as far as the bottom of Crystal Sound. Our goal last year was to get exactly to this point, to Blailock Island where, on the northeast corner, an old friend, Giles Kershaw, is buried. I think we may have spotted the sight today, marked by a stone cairn, as we trekked.
I met Giles in the mid-1980s, when he already had a reputation as the very best Arctic and Antarctic pilot in the business. He had flown for the British Antarctic Survey from 1974 to 1979 and had around the world, over both poles, and provided air support for many major expeditions. In 1983 alone he landed at the North Pole twenty-three times. In 1980 he was awarded a medal from the Queen of England, after he flew across a thousand miles of trackless Antarctic white to rescue three South African scientists who had been marooned on an iceberg for eight days. Even among his adventuring peers Giles was considered the most adventuresome, the most curious, and the most visionary.
In 1985, after successfully helping a pair of wealthy American climbers scale the tallest peak on the continent, Mt. Vinson, he and two Canadian partners (Martyn Williams and Pat Morrow) started what is still the only private business operating in Antarctica. Then called Adventure Network International, they set up a seasonal base camp at Patriot Hills, near the Thiel Mountains in Antarctica’s interior, and flew in climbers, expeditioners and South Pole-bound tourists. Along the way they helped out a fair amount of international scientists, which is why the Antarctic Treaty and its membership – which bans private enterprise here – looked the other way and allowed them to operate.
In 1988 Giles helped lay supply caches between the tip of the Peninsula and the South Pole for my friend Will Steger’s Transantarctica Expedition and, on March 5, 1990, he was killed just near where I walked today. His Antarctica season had just ended and he was on a boat anchored just offshore from here, making experimental flights with a homemade gyrocopter. It crashed into a glacier at the edge of the Jones Ice Shelf. Several years later the mountain that anchors the northeast corner of the island across from where I stand is named for him.
That personal history notwithstanding, this spot on the map is one of the most remarkable places I’ve ever put my feet. Remote, stark, and unrelentingly beautiful. Even turning a full 360, twisting my boots in the soft snow, I can’t take it all in, too enormous to describe or articulate. You’ll have to come see it for yourself one day!
Jon strolling ...
Pack ice breaking off the Jones Ice Shelf
Post A Comment
