A few days ago China opened its third Antarctic science station, at 12,000 feet above sea level on the continent’s highest icecap. The station – named Kunlun – at Dome Argus is the country’s first inland base. (It has two others, Zhongshan and Great Wall, on King George Island.) While the rest of the world is choking economically and Antarctic science is far down the list of most government’s priorities, China is spending big down south, expanding its presence on the continent.
The base is small, accommodating just twenty people. The government says it will be used for a range of Antarctic research, especially deep glaciers and the mountains underneath them and the effect of extreme cold on human physiology and psychology and medical supplies and equipment.
“It is another great contribution by our country to the human being to unveil the Antarctic mystery,” said Chinese President Hu Jintao, in a telegram.
A telegram?
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Members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society accused Japanese whalers of attacking them this weekend with sound guns, water canons, concussion grenades and other weapons in frigid waters near Antarctica, according to Reuters.
Two Sea Shepherd activists in inflatable boats were slightly injured by water canon and metal balls thrown by the whaling crew as they tried to obstruct the launch of harpoons, said Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd anti-whaling vessel, the “Steve Irwin.” A Japanese government official denied the accusations.
“If our crew can hit them, then they would be better off quitting the research vessel and joining a professional baseball team,” Shigeki Takaya, assistant director of Japan’s Far Seas Fisheries Division, told the Reuters News Agency.
Takaya admitted the whalers used water canons and “beeping warning tones,” but protested that the activists hurl bottles of dye and foul-smelling butyric acid (rotten butter) at whaling vessels. Sea Shepherd has also deployed a helicopter to document the whaling activities.
Whale hunting was banned by a 1986 International Whaling Commission moratorium, which Japan has sought to overturn each year. Japan continues to kill about 900 minke and fin whales per year in what it calls a “scientific whaling program.” Most of the resulting whale meat is sold on the Japanese market.
“What is important is that despite the violence from the whalers, no whales are being killed,” Capt. Watson said. “They can’t get away from us, and if we keep on their tail they can’t kill whales.”
Rotten butter?
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During my recent seven weeks in Antarctica we saw just one Emperor penguin, afloat on a piece of pancake ice, alone, a beautiful if somewhat sad scene. It’s unusual to see Emperor’s along the Peninsula, since their home is far, far south. Yet I’m still stunned to see them twinned – like polar bears in the North – to endangered species lists:
Yet a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that the world’s largest penguins could suffer serious population declines through at least part of their range before the end of the century. The paper, co-authored by five researchers and led by WHOI biologists Stephanie Jenouvrier and Hal Caswell, used mathematical models to predict the effect on penguins from climate change and the resulting loss of sea ice.
“Penguins need sea ice to breed, feed and molt on. The ice also serves as a grazing ground for krill – tiny crustaceans which penguins, along with fish, whales and seals, feed on. The research indicates if climate change continues to melt sea ice at the rates published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the median population size of a large emperor penguin colony such as one in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, will likely shrink from its present size of 3,000 to only 400 breeding pairs by the end of the century. There are about 40 emperor penguin colonies that exist in the world.
“Emperor penguins weigh around 66 pounds and can stand about 3.8 feet tall. They can dive to a depth of 1,800 feet and hold their breath for up to 22 minutes – allowing them to get food other birds can’t get.
“The researchers say the probability of a population decline of 95 percent or more is at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as 80 percent. If that many penguins are lost, extinction could occur.
“Over the last 50 years, climate change in Antarctica has been most pronounced in the Antarctic Peninsula, where Terre Adelie is located. In the future, the Ross Sea—where sea ice actually has increased in recent years—may be the last sanctuary for penguins.” Last month, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decided not to list the emperor penguin under the endangered species act.
Holding their breath for 22 minutes?
***
I spent part of the afternoon with Google Earth, er, Google Ocean, the brand new add-on to the Internet phenom. My initial search took me directly south, to Antarctica, where Google underwater research is still limited. I scoured the Peninsula for underwater views, but I guess it’s too early. Go to the Ross Sea, though, and there are some very cool – if dark – glimpses of Antarctic life beneath the sea.
The best early review of the new software comes from my friend Andy Revkin at the New York Times. In his Dot Earth posting yesterday, he worries about the advancement of seeing the world as a high tech video game and quotes Dr. Steven Kellert, professor of social ecology at Yale, who is skeptical of the way many are now experiencing the world’s landscapes:
“Like most aspects of the modern telecommunications age, it is a complicated situation. My sense of the data is that there is a strong correlation between environmental awareness, even environmental activism in the most limited sense, and the advent of video/ television/ film depictions of nature and conservation. The down side is that it appears this exposure to nature and conservation via film bears very little correlation with a more complex and deep understanding of the natural world and its protection, or actions relation to personal lifestyle and responsibility. Moreover, a great deal of the increased awareness is abstract and remote – e.g., for tropical forests, charismatic wildlife in distant place, issues like climate change, but correspondingly little awareness, appreciation, or action related to the local and regional environment in one’s place or state of residence.
“The sad reality is that while more abstract, vicarious/representational awareness of nature and its conservation via the video and computer have grown enormously, concurrently, there has been a profound decline in more commonplace, everyday experience and contact with nature and the often deeper and more realistic and lasting appreciation and action that comes from this personal involvement.”
Agreed.
In the whaling museum here the most fascinating thing to me – after the touch-me-feel-me penguin skin – are the trophies and sports uniforms worn by the different South Georgia whaling station teams which competed against each other in rugby, track and field, ski jumping and more during the heyday of whale killing here.
Grytviken's abandoned whaling station
Grytviken was South Georgia’s first whaling station/factory, set up by Norwegian explorer C.A. Larsen in 1904. Initially only blubber was taken and the carcass discarded resulting in beaches of bones along the coastline which I can still see lying in the shallows off what remains of its main dock. By 1912, seven whaling stations had been established and South Georgia became known as the southern capital of whaling.
That heyday was during the early 1900s, when a variety of whales (blue, fin, sei, humpback and southern right whales) were abundant in South Georgia’s waters during the austral summers, feeding on the massive quantities of krill found on the edge of the island’s continental shelf.
By the late 1920s such shore-based whaling factories on the island declined due the scarcity of whales around the island, followed by a boom in whaling on the high seas. The stations on South Georgia then became home base for repair, maintenance and storage. It was the uncontrolled whaling on the high seas followed – up to two hundred miles off shore – and led to significant reductions in populations of exploited whale species.
The whale catcher "Petrel" would hunt whales as far as 200 miles off the coast of South Georgia
Whales were harpooned with an explosive grenade, inflated with air and marked with a flag, radar reflectors, and latterly radios. A catcher would then tow them to a factory ship or shore station. The whale was hauled to the flensing plan. The blubber was removed and boiled under pressure to extract the oil. Meat and bone were separated and boiled. The results were dried and ground down for stock food and fertilizer. Baleen whale oil was the basis of edible, pharmaceutical, cosmetic and chemical products. It was also an important source of glycerol to manufacture explosives.
Thirty-pound harpoon head
Between 1904 and 1965 some 175,250 whales were processed at South Georgia shore stations. In the whole of the Antarctica region a low estimate suggests one and a half million animals were taken between 1904 and 1978. Probably the largest whale ever recorded was processed here at Grytviken in 1912, more than one hundred feet long, weighing in at nearly two hundred tons. This intensive hunting reduced the Southern Ocean stock, once the largest in the world, to less than ten percent of their original numbers and some species to less than one percent.
It wasn’t until 1974 that the International Whaling Convention agreed to protect the few remaining species in the Southern Ocean, and whaling here was mostly stopped in 1978. Paul Watson and his Sea Shepard – now Animal Planet heroes apparently, though that has happened this season while I’ve been in Antarctica – are still attempting to dissuade the Japanese from their annual hunt. Today. On occasion, you can spy whales close to shore at South Georgia, as they make a slow recovery, in particular southern right whales and humpbacks.
THE BOSS IS BURIED HERE
On top of the sense of history left at this beach by its whaling history, Grytviken is famous in Southern Ocean lore too for being the burial site of Ernest Henry Shackleton.
In 1921 – six years after successfully rescuing his men off Elephant Island, thanks to the help of the Chilean naval vessel “Yelcho” – he sailed south for what was to be his third Antarctic expedition. Its vague intention was to survey the coastline and carry out somewhat ill-defined science. You get the sense he was just itching to get back down south.
This time out his sailing ship, “The Quest” barely made it to Grytviken and in the early hours of January 5, 1922, he suffered a fatal heart attack here. His body was on its way back to England when the ship carrying him home stopped off in Uruguay and learned that his widow wished her husband be buried on South Georgia. His grave is still the focus of the Whaler’s Cemetery at the end of the beach.
The last resting place of Ernest Henry Shackleton
It is tradition to toast “the Boss” – no, not the bard of New Jersey! – with a shot of rum poured onto his grave, which I happily did. Unlike the rest of those buried in the small, white picket-lined cemetery, Shackelton is interned with his head pointing south, towards Antarctica.
A rare South Georgia pintail duck swims just offshore from the Whaler's Cemetery
Photos, Fiona Stewart
Ernest Shackleton had an intimate relationship with South Georgia. He stopped here for a month in 1914 before sailing the “Endurance” to its crushing fate in Antarctica; a year and a half later with five others he sailed the gerry-rigged lifeboat “James Caird” 800 miles across the Scotia Sea to King Haarkon Bay, arriving on May 9, 1916; and in 1922 he returned, died and is buried here.
On a warm and sun-filled morning we land at Fortuna Bay, to repeat the last chunk of Shackleton’s legendary and unprecedented climb across South Georgia. A steep and muddy tussock hill leads to fields of broken slate, which climb gradually to 3,000 feet. The higher we get, the more stunning the landscape grows: tall, spiky, far off peaks covered in snow, clear mountain ponds, tufts of soft moss scattered among the shattered scree, waterfalls tumbling off nearby walls.
The climb up from Fortuna Bay
It was the whalers of South Georgia who first warned Shackleton that his route to the northern edge of the Antarctic continent was likely to be barred by unusually heavy concentrations of ice that had arrived the year he sailed for the Weddell Sea in December. He went anyway; we don’t know what he was thinking when he left South Georgia then nor what exactly when he thought when returned via the “James Caird.” In retrospect would he think it had been a mistake to take the “Endurance” down that season?
Exhausted by the 16 days it took from Elephant Island in the tiny boat, they narrowly negotiated a landing and crawled ashore on the southwestern side of the island, at Cape Rosa. But ultimate safety lay on the north side of the island, at the whaling station called Stromness. Leaving three of his crew under the upturned “James Caird,” Shackleton along with Tom Crean and Frank Worsley set off with minimal equipment (stove, binoculars, compass, an ice ax and ninety feet of rope).
Three thousand feet above sea level
A summer day midway through the Shackleton Route
Shackleton wrote of the beginning of the climb: “The snow-surface was disappointing. Two days before we had been able to move rapidly on hard packed snow; now we sank over our ankles at each step. High peaks, impassable cliffs, steep snow-slopes and sharply descending glaciers were prominent features in all directions, with stretches of snow-plain overlaying the ice-sheet of the interior …. The moon, which proved a good friend during this journey, threw a long shadow at one point and told us that the surface was broken in our path. Warned in time, we avoided a huge hole capable of swallowing a small army.”
At one point they had detoured badly and had to drop down to Fortuna Bay, which is where we picked up their trail.
Standing at the crest of the hill, the point at which Shackleton would have seen the sea on the eastern side of the island and possibly evidence of the whaling station at Stromness, it is hard to imagine what must have gone through his mind, after a year and a half being lost. One big difference is their journey in May was through deep snow; we see barely a snow patch on this mid-summer day. What told them they were in the right place after thirty-six hours of climbing, across twenty-two miles of previously unexplored and inhospitable terrain, was the very civilized whistle of the whaling factory’s wake-up call.
“Men lived in houses lit by electric light on the east coast. News of the outside world waited us there, and, above all, the east coast meant for us the means of rescuing the twenty-two men we had left on Elephant Island.”
Clambering downhill, past the tall waterfall Shackleton allegedly rappelled down, we cross a wide, wet plain of saw grass and glacial melt. Rusted remnants of the whaling station still stand, though today it’s tumbling down and off-limits due to being filled with asbestos and flying sheet metal. Thousands of fur seals wait on the beach to greet us; they have taken over the place, aggressively chasing us down the beach as soon as we step onto the sand.
Fur seals guard the rusting whaling station at Stromness
A parade of penguins outside Stromness
Photos, Fiona Stewart
Donut-shaped with a narrow passage leading from the sea into its six-mile-wide flooded caldera, Deception earned its name in the early 1800s from sailors who sailed right past, never seeing the entrance, thus missing out on the several protected bays inside. Originally discovered by sealers in the 1820s, it is the most famous of the South Shetland Islands; reports of the large number of fur seals quickly got back to England and the United States and for more than one hundred years it was one of the world’s sealing – then whaling – capitals.
The edge of the crater, Pendulum Cove
Today I wander past a few snoring Weddell seals passed out shoreside. Otherwise the wild life here has largely dissipated, thanks to voracious campaigns. Makes me wonder what the place must have looked like, crawling with fur seals, its calm sea chocked with humpbacks and orcas.
What I love about Deception is, though we are one hundred miles off the Antarctic Peninsula, how vastly different it looks from the continent. Tall and black, the island’s glaciers are covered by volcanic ash, its beaches constructed from cinder, like no other place in Antarctica. I spend the afternoon hiking up and over a short hill at Pendulum Cove, to an overlook down into what I remembered from previous visits as a wide, green crater lake. Today, just a trickle of melt water runs down the interior hill and across its pan-flat bottom. I’m not sure why the lake has drained. Maybe it’s related to the thermal activity and heat of the volcanic island, which may help it evaporate more quickly. Or if somehow the lake has sprung a leak and drained into the sea.
What’s left behind are remarkable patterns of nature, the result of years of geologic twisting and turning accompanied by the more than occasional volcanic blast. All coated with a thick dusting of ash and cinder, rather than snow and ice.
Geologic twisting and turning
A dozing Weddell Seal on the Beach, Pendulum Cove
Photos, Fiona Stewart
Photos, Fiona Stewart
Took a long walk on the black volcanic sand beach inside the caldera of Deception Island this afternoon. Past massive rusted fuel storage tanks, whale oil processors and the fallen down wooden huts crushed in relatively recent years by volcanic eruptions. Once home to whalers, piles of wooden barrels (built by imported cooper smiths to carry whale oil back to South America and Europe, until the 1940s), randomly dropped whalebones and the rusted hulk of a floating dry dock are all accompanied by the odiferous sulfur vents of the still-active volcano.
Abandoned whaling shack on the beach at Deception Island
Deception – like all the South Shetland Islands – was part of the British Antarctica Territory, back when countries honored each other’s claims to the seventh continent.
All that ended in 1959, when originally twelve countries signed the international treaty that still governs the place. Today there are 52 signators to the treaty, which was last amended in a big way in 1991, in part to address growing concerns over the continent’s environmental protection. The new protocol specifically banned all oil and mineral exploitation in Antarctica until 2041.
In the next few months a small hullabaloo will be heard in the hallways of the treaty member offices because the U.K., Chile and Argentina have submitted new claims to nearly one-quarter of the continent. Here’s why: In May 2009 the U.N. Commission on Limits of the Continental Shelf meets to consider new applications. Those limits grant territories and states ‘ownership’ up to 350 miles out to sea from shore.
Until recently, no one has worried about who owns the continental shelf down here. It’s cold and icy most of the year, the temperature of the sea hovers just below freezing year-round and the whole seascape is most often studded with icebergs a half-mile long and ten stories tall.
But that’s all changing. Air temps are warming and so is the surface of the sea, which means the Peninsula’s ice is slowly melting. Today many suggest Antarctica is simply too remote and too difficult to exploit for oil, etc.
But that’s based on life on planet earth today, as we know it. Look to the future, towards 2041 … when the amendment regarding mineral exploitation is to be renewed. The planet’s human population will have jumped from 6.7 billion today to 9 billion. Even if incredible leaps in alternative energy are made, by then the planet’s oil reserves may well be tapped. And the ice along Antarctica’s Peninsula may have dissipated.
That combination – less ice, more worldwide demand for oil – could make for a new calculation regarding the practicality of coming to Antarctica to drill. With that as backdrop, think about why the U.K., Chile and Argentina want to get on record NOW in regard to who owns what. The more specific their claims are now the more ammunition they’ll have in the future if deep sea drilling, and other kinds, are one day possible here.
Things have come a long way from the whaling economy, which until the 1940s was the major industry in Antarctica, going back about sixty years. Who knows what challenges the continent will face six decades from now.
Burial sites of Norwegian whalers, from the 1940s.
Adelies in the mist
Photos, Fiona Stewart
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