In a report out yesterday the U.S. Geological Survey presents stats from a 62-year-long study that show that “every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990.” While the hows and whys of global climate change can be argued ad infinitum, in my experience nowhere is the change more evident than along the Peninsula. The USGS report adds statistics to my empirical assessment.
I’m writing today from home in a very, very wet Hudson Valley; we’ve endured three straight days of falling snow and rain (temperature hovering at 31 degrees F), which means the outside world now resembles a slush swimming pool. I just came in from an investigative slosh and can report calf-deep mush. The relevance of this warm snowfall in New York State in a conversation about Antarctica? With both air and sea surface temperatures warming all along the 1,000-mile long Peninsula, on many austral summer days the ice along its edges resembles what’s just outside my door tonight: Wet. Slushy. Soft. And disappearing fast. Here in the Catskills the temperatures will get into the 40s in the next few days; flooding is already a major concern. Which is exactly what is happening along the Peninsula during these past two decades too: Warmer air and sea temperatures means less ice cover, thus more evaporation and more precipitation in the form of sleet and rain. And we all know what rain does to ice, makes it disappear very, very fast.
I’m fully expecting my basement to flood in the next few days, which will be a drag. I’m also fully expecting the ice along Antarctic’s Peninsula to disappear faster than most scientists believe, contributing to a minimum global sea level rise of twenty feet by the end of the century or before, which will be a major drag. Especially for the 200 million-plus people around the globe who currently live less than three feet above sea level.
In its press release the USGS explained that the area covered by its six-decade-long study contains five major ice shelves, the Wilkins, George VI, Bach, Stange and the southern portion of the Larsen Ice Shelf. “The ice lost since 1998 from the Wilkins Ice Shelf alone totals more than 4,000 square kilometers, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island,” reports the USGS.
But for me the most worrying part of its report is this: “Retreat along the southern part of the Peninsula is of particular interest because that area has the Peninsula’s coolest temperatures, demonstrating that global warming is affecting the entire length of the Peninsula.” Which means what in regard to the planet’s big picture? Everyone should do what I’m going to do later tonight in preparation for tomorrow, which is find the tallest pair of rubber boots I can.
Every place along the Antarctic Peninsula tends to be my favorite. Bailey Head. Neko Harbor. Paradise Bay. Cuverville. The Lemaire Channel. The Grand Didier Channel. Crystal Sound. The Fish Island Group. Marguerite Bay. And on and on and on.
Tabular Ice, Weddell Sea, Antarctica 2009
But in Antarctica places can tend to run together thanks to one commonality: Here it is truly all about just one thing, The Ice. Sure, we all know there’s rock and snow below (even petrified forests and most likely dinosaur bones). But for the moment still, I still come to the far south each austral summer for the ice.
I admit to having a favorite: The big, tabular icebergs that litter the Weddell Sea like giant white dominoes. Set free from their role as guardian of the coastline gives them an independence apparent in their grandness. Frozen sea built up over centuries of falling snow, these particular tabulars are broken off from, remnants of the Larsen Ice Shelf. They are drifting (very slowly) north through the Antarctic Sound, where they will eventually float (very slowly)from the Southern Ocean into the Atlantic where they will, in a decade or so?, melt.
Today they are significant for more than just their size. These were once the grand guardians of the glaciers lining the eastern side of the Peninsula. That they have broken off and drifted away means those glaciers are at risk of disappearing ever faster.
They are long (on average a mile, sometimes up to ten and twelve miles) and high (one hundred and fifty, two hundred feet) and barely on the move. At the moment most are grounded and lodged on the ocean floor, shearing it clean of all living things. Their role in Antarctica’s future is powerful. Free to roam, and to disappear with the assistance of wind, rain, and warming temperatures, they’ve given up their role as protectorate and taken on the role of floating idols, reflecting sky and sea in new patterns every single minute.
I saw South Georgia Island for the first time from about ten miles out, on a gusty, windy, blue-sky morning. Though we’d just sailed eight hundred miles east and north from the tip of Antarctica, giant tabular icebergs greeted us, nearly blocking the entryway to Cooper Bay. These big icebergs had broken off the Larsen Ice Shelf since 2002 and slowly made their way here, where they now sit grounded, sentinels placed as welcome mats or warning.
Antarctic icebergs rimming the southern tip of South Georgia have floated more than a thousand miles
I love seeing a place for the first time, convinced – like falling in love at first sight – that it is that very first glimpse that makes its biggest impression. My expectations were vast. While I’d heard about South Georgia for years – that its steep mountain peaks were covered by year-round snow, that more than one hundred and fifty glaciers filled its valleys, that tussock-covered fields spread up the hills from the sea, that it’s wildlife was out of this world – I had no mental images.
Now I have them. Big ones.
There are only a couple hundred volcanic islands in the South and Mid-Atlantic. Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, the Falklands and South Georgia are the best known.
South Georgia definitely has the most exotic reputation, in part thanks to Shackleton, in part due to its whaling history, but largely for its otherworldly menagerie.
Strong morning winds kept us trolling off the rocky coast for several hours searching for the appropriate approach. When we rounded the southeastern corner into Cooper Bay the gusts diminished as if with the snap of a finger. While the tall mountains and hanging glaciers were astonishing, the best part for me – after more than five weeks among the whiteness of Antarctica – was the green grass running down the hills to the sea. But it was when I raised binoculars to my eyes that I got the biggest jolt.
Something we haven't seen for awhile: Green grass
The beaches were, well, how do I put this. I’ve never seen such a mass of giant living, breathing sausage and blubber amassed in one place outside of a crowded East Coast beach on the 4th of July. Thousands of fur seals, hundreds of Weddell seals and hundreds more of the giant, two-ton female elephant seals, spread over the rock and sand beach … everywhere. And this is nothing. As I stare, mind-boggled, my friend Pete Pulesten tells me he first came here twenty-five years ago, and a couple months earlier in the breeding season, when thousands of horny, multi-ton male elephant seals line the beach like bratwurst. “That is when this place is truly wild,” says Pete.
South Georgia was first seen in 1675 by a Brit named Antoine de la Roche, who’d been blown far off course while rounding Cape Horn; the next time it was sighted was nearly one hundred years later, by the Spanish ship “Leon” who named it Ile de St. Pierre after the saint’s day (July 1) on which it was seen. It wasn’t until British explorer Captain James Cook, on his second voyage around the world in 1775, that South Georgia was mapped. Unfortunately for Cook, he thought he’d discovered the southern continent, Antarctica. When he rounded the southern tip of South Georgia, in the opposite direction than how we’d arrived this morning, and discovered he was looking due west, he named the point Cape Disappointment. He claimed the island for his homeland, sent home a report on the island’s “rich seas” and continued on his way.
Rich seas? That’s an understatement even today. In just a couple of hours, here’s what I saw: Penguins (Kings, chinstraps, Gentoo and Macaroni). Wandering and black-browed albatross. Southern and northern Giant petrels, as well as snow, white-chinned, the common diving and Wilson’s storm petrels. The South Georgia (Imperial) Shag. Hundreds of sheathbills and kelp gulls. Special terns and a pipit found nowhere else on earth. The south polar skua. Thousands and thousands of seals (fur and southern elephant). And, bizarrely, roaming in the background, sizable herds of reindeer (it’s a long story, but they were introduced by whalers more than one hundred years ago and they’ve not yet been exterminated).
Lounging female elephant seals
That’s all in just a couple hours. The sky was filled with flying critters, the shallows swimming with seals and the beaches chockablock with giant meat. (Lunching? Giant petrels literally disappear inside a dead fur seal, ripping its guts out with its sharp beak, such that the cadaver seemed to be flopping up and down on the beach on its own accord.)
My first impression? Walt Disney must have visited this place during his most productive years and created all of his magic kingdom’s based on South Georgia’s reality. Rugged mountains, covered by glacier and lush green tussock, rimmed by tens of thousands of flying, swimming, snorting, feeding, wrestling, playing critters. Everywhere.
A giant petrel, afloat
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
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