Happy New Year, from the Danger Islands

January 3, 2009

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Posted in Antarctica
Tags: Danger Islands, Ice, New Year, Penguins, Seals

Antarctica Without Ice?

December 29, 2008

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On another amazingly warm blue-sky day I’m standing on a low hill looking out over Neko Harbor. Across a narrow bay is a wall of glaciers, behind me is soft hills covered by deep snow. In the far distance in three directions are long lines of tall mountains covered by snow and ice, some of it tens of thousands of years old. Just a few slivers of hard, dark granite peek out, reminding me there is land – a continent! – beneath all of this white. (At Vostok, a Russian base on the eastern side of Antarctica, scientists have measured the ice to be 14,000 feet thick, nearly three miles.)

It is hard to imagine this place without ice and snow, but of course it has been. Roughly 125 million years ago what we know as South America and Africa began to separate; then, the Antarctic Peninsula where I stand was still connected to South America. From 38 to 29 million years ago the Antarctic continent moved south. During that Cretaceous period, circa 144 to 65 million years ago, the continent was covered by forest, including tree ferns, cycads, palms, conifers and deciduous trees, and was home to freshwater fish, dinosaurs, reptiles and the predecessors of the penguins we see here now, though they were somewhat different. In that they were the size of an average man and weighed 300 pounds.

The continent has frozen and thawed since, but has been completely covered by ice and snow since the last Ice Age, about 11,000 years ago. Today, even at the height of summer, only two percent of Antarctica is ice-free; the continent contains 75 percent of the fresh water on earth.

It is clear the Peninsula is evolving, changing … warming. Analysis suggests the rapidity of warming in the northern Peninsula is unmatched over the last 2,000 years. Temperatures along the Peninsula during summer have climbed on average five degrees in the past 50 years; its average winter temperatures have risen by ten degrees, twice as fast as anywhere on Earth in the past century.

If even a small part of the Ice Cap were to melt, world sea levels would rise from several feet to several yards, inundating most coasts. If the whole Ice cap were to melt, as it has in past ages, sea levels around the world would rise an estimated 260 feet, destroying a number of low-lying countries. Since sea levels have risen only 8.6 inches in the past century, the three-foot rise projected by the year 2080 is serious. Many millions will become refugees, depopulating the long U.s. coasts up to 50 miles inland, including all of southern Florida and the Mississippi Delta, also much of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the coasts of Africa and innumerable Pacific atolls.

Antarctica without snow and ice? Seems impossible, right? Here’s what the continent would look like without ice. It has been weighed down by heavy ice for so long that part of it is submerged. They would gradually climb back above sea level if free of ice, though that would take tens – hundreds? – of thousands of years.

What Antarctica would look like without ice

The continent that lays beneath, much of it now submerged due to the weight of the ice

Photos, Fiona Stewart

Posted in Antarctica, History, News
Tags: Ice, MV Ushuaia, Neko Harbor, Ozone Hole, Penguins, Polar Ice Cap, Temperature

Paulet Island

December 29, 2008

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The pack ice has moved away from the south side of Paulet Island and we were able to get ashore on a cold, gray morning, to mingle with the 200,000 Adelie penguins who nest here during the summer months. Last time we landed it was on the far side of the island, and our hope to climb up and over the island was thwarted by a literal boom in penguins. They’re everywhere this time of year, so thick they block every possible path. Their stone nests generally boast not one but two fat, all-gray chicks.

1903 hut, home to twenty men for a long winter

Just up from the rocky shoreline is the remnant of a stone hut built in 1903 by members of Norwegian Otto Nordenskjold’s expedition. They had sailed down in a ship named “Antarctica,” captained by a skipper named Larsen (for whom the giant ice shelf just to our south is named), but over the course of two years the team was accidentally split into three parts. Six on one island, three on another and twenty here on the tiny, rock-covered island of Paulet. Though separated by less than one hundred miles, no group knew the other was stranded and each kept waiting for the rest to sail or sledge to the rescue. Little did they know that while the “Antarctica” did attempt a couple times, it was fated to be squeezed by the pack ice near Joinville Island (ala Ernest Shackleton’s “Endurance,” more than a decade later) and sink.

It’s hard to imagine being stuck here for a year, living cheek-to-jowl with nineteen of your now-closest friends. They killed and stored 1,100 penguins and a handful of seals, built a stone hut – roofing it with sail cloth – out of the path of the heaviest snows but on the top of a windy hill, I imagine so they could constantly observe the sea in front of them, which varied from frozen to almost frozen. They heated with blubber, the fumes of which eventually blackened their skin. They had only a few books between them and little to do but stare at the walls. Against all odds, all but one of the twenty survived (the victim, who suffered a heart attack, is buried on the beach here) and ultimately met up with the other two stranded teams by chance. Theirs is another of Antarctica’s great stories of survival.

The scene, starker on a gray day than a bright and sunny one, reminds me how glad I am not to be stuck here, whether alone or with travel mates. This side of the Peninsula reminds me every day just how remote and foreboding Antarctica can be.