Zaroc Stone
2008-08-07 21:21:56 UTC
The Death March of the Penguins
By Julia Whitty, Mother Jones. Posted August 4, 2008
Polar Earth is thawing, wreaking havoc for penguins -- and humans. It's time
we grasp how this unpeopled world sustains us.
If not for the wind, it would be another hot day in Antarctica. But the 20
knots blasting around the shoulders of Penguin Island are stripping us of
sweat and what feels like our clothes. I'm shivering hard, and working hard
to keep up with Heather Lynch, 5 feet 4 inches of science dynamo,
robin's-egg-blue rubber boots pistoning through knee-deep snow with manic
determination. She turns 30 this July and is training for a 19-mile
wilderness run in Vermont billed as the hardest for its distance anywhere.
We're in the Antarctic Peninsula, that Sistine Chapel of the geologic world,
with its godlike finger of mountains reaching across the Drake Passage
toward South America's mountains of men. Training helps. We have only a
couple of hours ashore to count an expected two or three thousand penguins,
with a few cross-country miles to hike to and from the rookery across
unknown terrain, orienteering via a hand-drawn map that might as well say
here be dragons for all it's worth. Ordinarily, penguin rookeries aren't
cryptic places. They advertise through a landscape of jittery, methlike
overactivity, a soundscape of braying, buzzing, and honking, and a
scentscape reeking of guano and treacly dead things.
Except we can't find this one, and resort to sniffing over sea cliffs 150
feet high. Below, icebergs rear like Mormon temples from the battleship-gray
waters of the Bransfield Strait. A few weeks back, a smaller version of one
of these white behemoths sank the venerable Antarctic tour ship the Explorer
in view from here, stranding 154 passengers and crew in lifeboats for four
hours. The first ship to the rescue was the National Geographic Endeavour --
Lynch's and my ride, anchored offshore now.
We power hike until the snowfields give way to desolate, burnt slopes of
ejected volcanic boulders. The island has the feel of a tensed muscle
overdue for another tectonic release. The last eruption here was estimated
by the dating of lichens as 1905 -- the same year French polar explorer
Jean-Baptiste Charcot began to amass 32-plus volumes of observations on the
Antarctic Peninsula, a treasure chest of data that Lynch and her colleagues
still mine today.
In the lee of the island's summit we finally spy a scattering of a few
hundred Adélie and chinstrap penguins where we were expecting thousands.
They're subdued, with nary an ecstatic display to be seen, that
head-craning, chest-pumping, flipper-flapping performance complete with
hee-hawing calls. The Adélies are clustered on empty nests, with only 11
chicks among them. A pitiful tally for an entire year's breeding effort.
Hiking back into radio range, we hear from Ron Naveen, counting southern
giant petrel nests on the other side of the island. It's terrible here, he
reports, just awful. At first I picture him befouled by stomach-oil spit
from the bellies of the huge albatrosslike birds the whalers called
stinkers. But his concern is that he's found only 75 nests in a colony that
once housed more than 600. Worse, it appears all the petrels are sitting on
eggs, far too late in the season for the chicks to survive. The whole island
is a bust.
Breeding success in Antarctica is highly variable. Local events -- rain,
heat, snowfall -- can crash an entire season. In East Antarctica, southern
giant petrels have been found dead on their nests, a single egg nestled in
the brood patch, the birds having succumbed to enormous, burying snows. Yet
what's happening now is indicative of a larger meteorological reality. The
western Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than any place on Earth.
Wintertime temperatures have risen a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit in 50
years. What was once a cold, dry place has become a warm, wet place. The
wildlife is reeling from the chaos, some finding opportunity, others
catastrophe. On Penguin Island, Adélie populations have plummeted 75 percent
since 1980.
Returning across the high flanks of the island, Lynch and I pass a pair of
chinstraps -- chinnies, as they're affectionately known -- waddling toward
the distant colony, wings cranked open for balance, lurching from one webbed
foot to the other, climbing hard. It's an impressive feat of penguin
mountaineering. The pair rests, facing each other, as if conferring on their
own adventurous conundrum. We chuckle, though we're puzzled as to why they
don't just swim to their front doorstep on the far side of the island.
Of course, there's no telling why penguins make one decision versus another,
why they elect a long and difficult path when an easier way is obvious. Any
more than we can figure the bizarrely perilous choices of our own kind.
In 1774, after enduring tempests, gales, and fogs, Captain James Cook came
up hard against the Antarctic ice sheet and turned back. He never saw the
land beyond, land he thought "doomed by nature to everlasting frigidness ...
whose horrible and savage aspect I have no words to describe." He predicted
another explorer would, though "I shall not envy him the honour of the
discovery but I will be bold to say that the world will not be benefited by
it."
It's still a hard sell, the notion that this frozen continent and its
frozen-ocean partner to the north have much relevance to our temperate
world. Naveen and Lynch are here to count dwindling numbers of penguins --
because, Naveen says, doing so is like looking into a crystal ball and
seeing our own future beset by climate change. They're censusing three
species (Adélies, chinstraps, gentoos), plus two seabirds (blue-eyed shags,
southern giant petrels), at 123 sites in a long-term research project known
as the Antarctic Site Inventory. It's a daunting undertaking, facilitated in
part by Lindblad Expeditions, which donates one cabin, two bunks, and all
meals for two researchers aboard the Endeavour for the entirety of the
Antarctic season -- a contribution worth a minimum of $200,000 a year.
Naveen and Lynch have no control of the ship's itinerary, but are grateful
to piggyback on the travels of the tourists.
Ron Naveen's history as a Lindblad lecturer dates back a quarter century.
He's also the founder and president of Oceanites (OH-shun-AYE-tees), the
nonprofit funding organ for the Antarctic Site Inventory. Heather Lynch, who
looks, in her own words, to be 17 years old, is a newcomer to the project,
with two Antarctic seasons under her belt. She brings 21st-century science
to the table, introducing überstatistics to often-incomplete datasets as a
way to fast-forward to results.
I'm hitchhiking on their ride, sharing their tiny, two-bunk cabin, sleeping
on a ledge below the porthole. My goal is to report on the International
Polar Year, a 63-nation enterprise launched because the poles "are presently
changing faster than any other regions of the Earth, with regional and
global implications for societies, economies and ecosystems." Written
between the lines of the mission statement is the understanding that the
frozen poles are Earth's own doomsday vault, our last nest egg of vitals:
freshwater, minerals, oil, oceanic currents, climate control, and who knows
what else. Vaults we don't want to open.
Naveen, Lynch, and I join 110 passengers aboard the 294-foot Endeavour on
their vacation of a lifetime. Fifty years ago there was no infrastructure
for tourists in Antarctica. This year, 40,000 will visit aboard more than 58
vessels, with the number predicted to rise to more than 80,000 tourists by
2010. The only obstacles to visitation these days are financial --
Lindblad's cheapest berths aboard the Endeavour cost $10,250, plus hefty
airfares -- though clearly it's worth it. After all, we're all here,
tourists, explorers, researchers, writers, sharing similar concerns about a
frozen world necessary for our well-being.
We all know how the febrile Arctic is melting toward an ice-free state --
while the Antarctic, that mother lode of ice that as recently as 2001 was
thought invulnerable in the 21st century, is leaking at the seams. We know
that since 2000 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased 35 percent
faster than expected, despite the pledges of 180 nations to rein them in.
We're aware that polar seas are defying the laws of expectation, warming, in
places, a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1995, opening the door for
nonnative plants and animals to cross the polar thresholds and claim new
waters for themselves. We get that all this bodes poorly for penguins and
humans alike.
Don't we?
After two days of warm, sunny weather, when I suggest we might expect a
change to sleet or snow, one of the guests aboard the Endeavour snorts:
Snow? Nobody told us to expect that. More than a few express surprise at
snow on the frozen continent. Others, with the stunned look of people booked
on the wrong tour, self-medicate at the bar, and don't seem to notice the
weather at all. We share meals in the ship's glass-walled dining room, with
its gliding panoramas of snow, ice, icebergs, sea, sky, whales, and
seabirds, and I hear more than a few guests describe how they came to be
here -- struck by spontaneous wanderlust after viewing that paean to snow
and fatherhood, March of the Penguins.
It's blizzarding the day we arrive at Petermann Island -- Oceanites'
Antarctic field station and home to three researchers collecting data on
penguin breeding efforts. After a brief Zodiac ride, Naveen, Lynch, and I
land ahead of the guests and are welcomed ashore by the resident scientists
based there for the winter. The greetings are heartfelt and effusive and
involve the bestowing of gifts of chocolate and booze and fashion magazines
laden with perfume swatches. (There's no shower here.)
We trudge through oversized snowflakes butterflying through the air, past
nesting gentoo penguins and their pink guano latrines, to the Arctic Oven, a
20-by-10-foot blimp of a yellow tent built for the cold extremes of the
world. It's part kitchen, part science lab, anchored to the ground with a
dozen 60-pound "deadmen" bags filled with rocks, now disappearing into the
blizzard.
We undress in the sulfur light inside the vestibule, removing every square
inch of our sodden, guano-splattered outer clothing before climbing through
the tent's zippered hatch. Or, rather, Lynch and I do. Naveen doffs only
jacket and boots and steps through with dripping hat and rain pants. Both he
and Lynch are giddily happy to be back in their field home -- Naveen too
much so to be mindful, shuffling in his socks on the cold floor, reaching
out to touch everything: the laptop, the satellite phone, the raunchy cards,
inflatable flamingo, and weather-beaten maps hanging on the interior
clothesline. He's running a monologue about penguins and punctuating his
thoughts by tossing back peanut M&Ms pilfered from a bowl on the kitchen
table.
Hey, Lynch reminds him, we're on a ship full of goodies. The Petermann gang
hardly has any.
The Death March of the Penguins
But this is The House That Ron Built, so he squirms good-naturedly and eats
another handful anyway. It's the first season Naveen hasn't been resident
for at least one of two annual five-week stints here, because, he says
sadly, things get done faster when he stays home.
He's referring to fundraising, and home is Washington, DC, where he manages
the business of collecting charitable contributions and writing science
grants that sustain the efforts on Petermann Island, while facilitating 784
visits to 123 bird rookeries across Antarctica since 1994.
The research is daunting. Compounding the difficulties of getting boots on
the ground in remote seabird rookeries is the fact that some sites are too
big to count. Or too steep. Or too locked in by ice. Or too dangerous due to
70-knot winds on the day of the visit. Furthermore, counts are most useful
during only two short windows each season: one at the peak of egg laying,
the other at the peak of crèching (the time after hatching when penguin
chicks congregate in downy flocks, leaving both parents free to hunt for
food). The difference between the number of eggs laid and the number of
chicks surviving to crèche is a reliable indicator of how well the species
is doing from one year to the next.
The resident team on Petermann Island faces different challenges, including
as many as three visiting ships a day, all requiring some aspect of a guided
tour. Many days it's hard to get anything done, including the basics.
There's no outhouse here, only a rock and the flushing sea, and, if you
don't time it right, 100-plus witnesses.
One by one the Endeavour's passengers file up to the Arctic Oven, where the
camp manager holds open the hatch to the vestibule so the passengers can
peer into the inner workings of a field station. Some seem embarrassed by
the zoolike presentation of scientists in their native habitat, and duck
away. Others linger with queries, mostly about the living conditions. One
woman asks an oft-repeated question, Who does the cooking? We take turns,
says Lynch: One person cooks and cleans for a day, followed by two days off.
The guest digests this, snow dumping behind her, penguins hee-hawing, wind
rattling the guy wires, the fishy stench of guano permeating the air. Huh,
she responds: Kind of like a summerhouse on Long Island.
Visitors aren't what they used to be, reports Naveen. The Antarctic
aficionados still pilgrimage here, but they're outnumbered these days by
doom tourists chasing down the disappearing world and the nouveau riche
absentmindedly checking off the premier stop on their grand tour of Planet
Earth.
You can't protect what you don't know, said Lars-Eric Lindblad upon first
bringing tourists to Antarctica in 1969 (aboard the same Explorer that went
to the bottom a few weeks ago). From his pioneering efforts, the notion of
ecotourists as ambassadors was born. Nearly 40 years into the training
program, the plebes aboard the Endeavour have a ways to go. One guest, when
asked after a two-hour onboard lecture on seabird identification whether the
bird overhead is a southern giant petrel or black-browed albatross, looks
up, shrugs, and admits, I really don't care.
On a day so warm the southern giant petrels are riding thermals rising off
icebergs, we sail into the Weddell Sea. The sun is sharp as knives. The air,
antiseptically invisible. Islands 50 miles distant seem yards away. Up
close, killer whales hunt the floes for sleeping crabeater seals, while cape
petrels, those checkerboard flyers of the cold waters, surf the air curls
streaming off the ship. I'm wearing flip-flops on deck.
We sail through canyons of ice, enormous tabular bergs colored in sea-glass
shades of milk, crystal, turquoise, and cobalt green, shot through with
bolts of electric blue. The bergs tower 80 or more feet above us, some the
remnants of the 1,264-square-mile Larsen B ice shelf, which in 2002
catastrophically disintegrated at a speed then truly startling to science,
but now almost commonplace as both poles and many high elevations summarily
liquefy.
As recently as 2000, scientists predicted Arctic summer ice until 2100,
whereas some research now suggests its demise by 2013. But even as the bad
news from the Arctic mounted, the southernmost continent was considered too
big, too remote, too frozen to react with every nuance of changing currents
and warming winds. At 5.4 million square miles, it's bigger than Europe, the
coldest, windiest, driest place and largest and highest desert on Earth.
Much of Antarctica lies more than two miles above sea level; 90 percent of
the world's ice and as much as 70 percent of its freshwater are locked in
its frozen vault. The prospect of this global Sub-Zero melting anytime soon
lies beyond the ken of human imagination, and climate models have long
forecast a reassuring stability.
But the certainty of an unshakably frozen South Pole is cracking. The
Antarctic Peninsula's thermal sprint is hammering 87 percent of its glaciers
into retreat. This past February the Wilkins ice shelf -- an area bigger
than Connecticut -- began to disintegrate, following the familiar script of
the Larsen B. In a heartbeat, the northernmost fringe of Antarctica has
become more temperate than polar: endowed with snow, but less of it sticking
around long enough to become entombed in glaciers, existing glaciers dumping
faster into a warming sea. God's finger is growing thin.
The Antarctic landmass is showing the strain too. In 2005, researchers found
the first real evidence of massive melting over a multitude of regions
previously considered immune, including far inland, at high latitudes, and
at high elevations. Put together, these disparate melt zones add up to an
area the size of California. Furthermore, whereas scientists were expecting
a growth in Antarctica's coastal ice sheets from heavier snowfall, a 10-year
study found much of them in mysterious, rapid decline. Losing the coastal
ice opens the floodgates for glaciers to surge into the sea, not only
raising sea levels but also adding freshwater to oceanic currents fueled by
salinity levels, increasing the risks of resetting the currents -- Earth's
natural thermostat.
But it's a beautiful day aboard the Endeavour. Hatless guests stroll the
decks, complementary red parkas flapping open, heads craned back to see the
massive icebergs, oohing and aahing in their own ecstatic displays. The ship
weaves between a fantastic assortment of bergs melted below the waterline
and flipped, revealing the crazed hand of a submarine sculptor, complete
with domes, pinnacles, wedges, and weird standing glassy blocks resembling
Icehenges. Some icebergs are favored haul-outs for penguins, whose
formidable ice-climbing skills allow them to porpoise out of the waves, stab
the ice-axes of their bills into sheer walls, then peg with toenail
crampons, hammering move after move until they've climbed 50 or more feet to
ledges tattooed with sleeping penguins.
There's talk aboard the Endeavour of climate change, including from a vocal
contingent of naysayers quoting mythical studies. One woman repeatedly cites
a fictional cluster of 19,000 denialistas hunkered down in German institutes
of higher learning, until someone asks her to prove it. There are also a
surprising number of middle grounders leaking equal parts confusion and
skepticism about "this global warming business." The two groups manage to
exhibit all five stages of climate-change denial: There's nothing happening;
we don't know why it's happening; climate change is natural; climate change
is not bad; climate change can't be stopped. The true believers discover
each other mostly through shared incredulous silence.
Yet all come together when we happen upon an ancient ice floe topped with a
single sleeping emperor penguin. It's a juvenile that has just completed its
inconceivable genesis in the dark of the Antarctic winter, perched atop its
father's webbed feet, tucked into the brood pouch, enduring 100-knot winds
and subzero temperatures. The young bird utters three soft braying calls as
we approach, then stands. The motor drives on a hundred cameras whine.
Everyone whispers to no one in particular, as all are joined by an invisible
thread of respect woven into the collective consciousness by March of the
Penguins. You can almost hear the Morgan Freeman narration hang in the air.
Directly ahead lies heavy pack ice, the dividing line between ships and
penguins. We turn back, leaving the young bird to its solitude.
The pack ice in the Weddell Sea is the same obstacle that sank Ernest
Shackleton's Endurance in 1915, and, like him, we set our sights on Paulet
Island, where he hoped and failed to land his men. We can't quite get there
either, though Captain Philipp Dieckmann noses the ship in a narrow channel
cluttered with big bergs, bergy bits, growlers, and weather-pummeled sea
ice, all idiosyncratically on the move with tide and wind, like dancers
without a choreographer. Here and there we kiss ice, the ship shuddering at
the impact and wailing in a Björklike voice, seductive and violent. Everyone
who can be is clustered topside, watching the contest, when a German who
speaks excellent English confesses how he and his compatriots have been
confused by the constant references to "Adélie" this and "Adélie" that,
wondering where in the world is this French woman everyone is talking about.
Naveen and Lynch badly want to get ashore on Paulet and count Adélie
penguins and the Antarctic cormorants known as blue-eyed shags. But Matt
Drennan, expedition leader and 20-year veteran of the Antarctic, with 80
expeditions under his belt, doesn't like the look of things. Too much ice.
Too much tide. Wind coming up. He squints into the glare of memory -- things
can change too quickly here -- and apologizes profusely. No one
second-guesses his tough decision because no one wishes to repeat the
travails of the 20 men of the Nordenskjöld Expedition who inadvertently
overwintered here in 1903 after their ship sank in the Weddell ice. Their
tiny stone hut, visible from the Endeavour, looks to be built from stacked
headstones.
Paulet is only a mile across, yet its slopes, rising more than 1,100 feet,
are so steep and its birds so densely packed that they've never been fully
counted, only estimated. The last year conditions enabled an estimate was
1999, when Naveen managed a flyover in a British navy helicopter and
calculated between 95,000 and 105,000 Adélie nests, for a total of perhaps
350,000 adults and chicks on the island.
The question of interest today is how many are present this year. Adélies,
the most polar of the three penguin species nesting in the peninsula, seem
to be suffering the most from climate whiplash, their numbers plummeting 80
percent in places. Exactly why remains a matter of conjecture, though many
theories begin and end with krill. Adélies survive almost exclusively on
krill, making forays more than 400 miles to and from their nests and dives
up to 574 feet deep in pursuit of the shrimplike invertebrates.
But krill stocks aren't what they used to be. Despite the fact that wildlife
has been protected on Antarctic lands since 1959, the Southern Ocean, which
feeds most Antarctic life, is still considered fair game. Industrial-scale
krill-fishing fleets arrived here in the 1970s, bent on transforming the
keystone species of Antarctica into fish food and omega-3 supplements. In
2007, the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living
Resources expanded the catch limit from 450,000 to 2.6 million metric tons
in East Antarctica alone. This despite concerns that the stock is already in
decline from climate change. Krill need pack ice for feeding, yet the pack
in the peninsula has shrunk 80 percent in 30 years, forming later each
winter and retreating earlier each summer.
The problems for penguins don't end with krill. Adélies need sea ice as a
place to rest while foraging, a kind of polar recovery room, now shrinking.
Moreover, the warming climate is producing deep snows and flooding rains
that smother or drown their eggs and chicks -- changes that may also be
fueling outbreaks of ticks severe enough to force some penguins to abandon
their eggs and chicks and seek relief in the sea. Now melting glaciers are
releasing time bombs of ddt and likely other pollutants once safely frozen
in the ice.
In November 2007 researchers at Palmer Station in the Antarctic Peninsula
recorded the first extinction of an Adélie colony, which may historically
have housed as many as 30,000 birds. "The evidence could no longer be
denied," the team wrote, "and it was formally transcribed into our field
notebooks and databases ... no [Adélie] pairs had arrived to breed on
Litchfield Island ... the first recorded extinction of an entire colony in
the 34-year history of this study."
At first glance, the massive penguin rookery at Brown Bluff looks to be
strewn with the carcasses of penguin chicks. But they're not dead, only
prostrate with heat -- fat, absurdly fuzzy, lying prone on rotund
krill-filled bellies, wings outstretched, webbed feet raised in the air
behind them, shedding heat through the only unfeathered parts of their
bodies. The Adélie chicks hatched earlier than the gentoos on the island,
and some are near fledging now, molting their down feathers like penguins
emerging from gorilla suits. Most are joining crèches and partaking in the
comical affairs known as feeding chases: a parade of chicks besieging any
parent returning from the sea, the youngsters chattering loudly of their
hunger. The returning parents, bloated with krill, lurch as fast and far
away as they can, hoping to winnow their own chicks from the mob. Some
feeding chases persist a thousand feet down the beach, a long way for birds
with no ankles, says Naveen.
We arrive prepared to count, but are waylaid by the impossibly calm day, the
mirrorlike bay with ripples of sinuous leopard seals, the grounded icebergs
on shore, and the literally hundreds of adult penguins crowding the
waterline. They're restless and hot and hungry. They're also afraid of the
leopard seals. Entering the water requires a flock to reach consensus.
Before that, they reach many false consensuses, a few birds toppling
headfirst into the sea only to U-turn and torpedo out again. This day, as
every day, a few will not return with food but instead become food for
leopard seals.
We climb a precipitous hill worn to dirt and rock from countless generations
of penguin feet. Birds come and go, effortlessly hopping past us on the
uphill. Near the pinnacle, scrambling atop a boulder, Heather Lynch snaps
photos of the colony in all directions and notes the gps coordinates. There
are too many birds to count, except on a digitized image on a computer
screen. Next year, conditions permitting, an Oceanites team will return to
this same boulder and count again. Such is the way databases in the
Antarctic grow, as slowly as lichens.
To compensate for the difficulties inherent in polar work, Naveen hooked up
with Bill Fagan at the University of Maryland. Fagan's lab, where Lynch is a
postdoc, is a scientific front line combining advanced mathematical theory
and off-the-map fieldwork to explore questions critical to life on Earth --
including those shaping life naturally (community ecology), and those that
save life from ourselves (conservation biology).
Orchestrating the Illusion of Solitude
Lynch, with a master's in physics and a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, is
representative of what may well turn out to be the distinguishing feature of
21st-century science -- the reintegration of the last century's separate
disciplines into something beginning to resemble one. What she offers the
Antarctic Site Inventory is the bandwidth to crunch relatively sparse
population numbers alongside data on sea ice, climate, and ocean
productivity -- plugging it all into hierarchical Bayesian models --
statistical analyses so complex that only recently has the computational
power emerged to manage them. (An early Bayesian application in 1968
stretched computers of the day, yet succeeded in locating the sunken nuclear
submarine the Scorpion, lost somewhere in the Atlantic.) The work derives
from the 18th-century British mathematician and Presbyterian minister
Reverend Thomas Bayes and his theorem on the probabilities of the behavior
of billiard balls.
Lynch hopes to use Bayesian models to address what Fagan calls the weak-data
problem in conservation biology: the persistent dearth of field records over
consequential timescales. The statistical tools aren't quite the equivalent
of sinking all your pool balls on the break. But they set them up cleanly
for your next shot.
At Booth Island, in a heavy snowfall, the naturalists aboard the Endeavour
land ahead of the guests and set up orange traffic cones to mark footpaths
as close to the action as front-row seats, yet far enough away from penguin
trails and colonies to be respectful of their privacy. Along with ice and
weather, Naveen and Lynch are also examining the impact of tourism on
breeding penguins, though initial results seem to agree with other studies
that well-managed tourism enhances penguin survival, possibly by keeping
skuas -- predatory gulls nearly the size of eagles -- away. Good for
penguins, bad for skuas, says Lynch.
The first 1,000-passenger liner traveled to Antarctica in 2000, and last
year a 3,000-passenger cruise ship visited. Not all make landings, yet the
dangers are real, whether people come ashore or not. When the Explorer sank
in 2007 it was small enough, and the weather calm enough, that nearby ships
could rescue its passengers. And the ship sank cleanly enough that a major
oil spill, far from any emergency infrastructure, was averted. In other
words, conditions were excellent for a sinking, a reality unlikely to be
repeated.
More tourists also change the aesthetic. Matt Drennan spends several hours a
day calculating how to keep the Endeavour out of the line of sight of all
the other ships competing for space at the 20 or 25 most popular landing
sites on the peninsula. Maintaining the illusion of solitude is hectically
orchestrated every July during the International Association of Antarctic
Tour Operators' online electronic derby. Ignorant of what December or
January will hold, ships submit itineraries for which landing sites they'd
like to visit on which days. Six months later, the reality of ice and
weather hits and the schedules are reshuffled in an undertaking worthy of a
Bayesian model. It's a process that's still workable, says Drennan, but only
just. He doubts it can absorb twice as many visitors and still maintain the
character of a wilderness experience.
Do visitors care? No matter the weather outside, the Endeavour's bow is
stippled with a flock of hardcore guests wearing red Lindblad parkas -- the
$10,000 parkas, they joke -- cameras at the ready, eyes tearing from the
wind. Those less hardy rest in easy chairs in the library, watching the
scenery glide by. Others nap in their bunks. A few anchor the bar. One soul
holes up in the windowless computer lab with an everlasting game of
solitaire. The old hands aboard, the 12 naturalists, who tally more than 150
years combined Antarctic experience, keep watch for whales from behind the
windshield on the bridge. Sometimes a frozen guest joins them. But the
inside lacks the raw power of the outdoors, the sensual jolt craved by those
who know this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The whales spout. The crabeater seals glance up from their daybeds on the
ice floes. The penguins porpoise from the surface like flying minnows.
Somewhere between the naturalists' lectures and the uncensored cut of the
wind, the stunning landscapes of Antarctica transform into a living,
breathing, ongoing story that will follow these visitors back to the other
world and whisper in their ears for a long time to come.
Fifty years ago, a bunch of visiting scientists heard the call of
Antarctica. The result was the Antarctic Treaty, written in language as
stripped-down and clear as the Declaration of Independence, presenting a
revolutionary argument for the rights of the uninhabited continent:
"Recognizing that it is in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall
continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not
become the scene or object of international discord."
Because of the treaty and related agreements, known as the Antarctic Treaty
System or ats, the continent enjoys freedoms unparalleled elsewhere on
Earth, including freedom from any military presence (though some nations use
their military to run their research), freedom of scientific investigation
and cooperation, freedom from territorial ownership, and freedom from
nuclear weapons. The frozen continent offers a thought experiment as to how
an intelligent, informed, curious, energetic, disciplined, and mostly
rational human society might operate at some future date.
The Arctic, in contrast, presents a dark glimpse into the past, as
disappearing ice awakens piratical instincts in nations seeking heretofore
inaccessible minerals, oil, fish, and seafaring riches. New data in the
Arctic are already being used to boost increased American territorial claims
by 100 nautical miles. Canada is embroiled in sovereignty disputes with the
US, Russia, Denmark, and Norway over sites rich with oil and natural gas,
and over ownership of the fabled Northwest Passage.
Yet Antarctica may be only temporarily immune from polar fever, since the
ats suspends mineral exploration merely until 2048. Seven nations --
Argentina, Australia, Britain, Chile, France, Norway, and New Zealand --
maintain territorial claims in abeyance, for the time being. Along with 39
other countries, they wait, should the treaty change, poised inside 64
permanent and seasonal scientific bases, some facilitating no science, some
facilitating exploitation thinly disguised as science. For better or worse,
the research footprint grows far bigger than even the tourist footprint in
Antarctica.
It's questionable whether 40 years from now, when the mineral rights
prohibition comes up for renewal, the equivalent spirit of enlightenment
will prevail. By then, the frozen goodies known to abound under Antarctica's
snowfields may well be more accessible. The United States has already
completed a controversial 1,000-mile snow road connecting its bases at
McMurdo Sound and the South Pole -- the road to plunder, should conditions
allow. By 2048, the global population will have soared to 9 billion, an
increase almost equivalent to the total number of people living on earth in
1959, when the first Antarctic Treaty was signed. Pressures on Earth's
resources may well have outgrown our generosity.
In all likelihood we're only an oil shortage away from applauding the
19th-century sentiments of poet Bret Harte on America's original polar
aspirations:
Know you not what fate awaits you
Or to whom the future mates you?
All ye icebergs, make salaam
You belong to Uncle Sam!
We make final landfall at Port Lockroy, a weatherproof harbor in the Palmer
Archipelago, and historic site of an old British whaling station turned
military base turned meteorological station. Whale skeletons line the
shores. A pair of tiny black huts marks the line Churchill held against the
Nazis in Antarctica. Enormous glaciers ring the bay, punctuated by rocky
mountaintops knuckling through the snow. At metronomic intervals, ice calves
into the sea, sonic booms marking puffs of snow and ice. Outside the
protected harbor, hurricane-force winds blow, while five yachts that braved
the Drake Passage moor in faultless calm.
Port Lockroy is crowded with tourists in kayaks, tourists beachcombing,
tourists on Zodiac tours of the harbor. The hut's latest persona is as a
museum, gift shop, and post office, its rooms crowded with visitors spending
all manner of currencies on tea towels, T-shirts, and postcards. It's a
snapshot of one Antarctic future.
A passenger aboard one of the moored yachts visits the Endeavour and gives a
talk in the lounge. He's a well-known explorer, examining climate change and
the impacts of tourism while making a documentary about himself kayaking in
the Antarctic Peninsula. He refers to his kayaks as floating ambassadors,
and the guests are eager to hear his take on this global warming business.
But despite his audience of newly fledged envoys, despite the incomparable
backdrop, and the pressing issues, the explorer is reticent, paddling around
the touchy subject while waving a drink through the air. Perhaps this is
what ambassadors do.
With a few working hours still left in Antarctica, Ron Naveen and Heather
Lynch launch into the bird colony at Jougla Point, most of it off-limits to
nonscientists, wading shin-deep in muck and slipping and sliding in melt
pools on the edges of rocky escarpments. Naveen's no novice and skates
nonchalantly along drop-offs; Lynch powers behind, field notebook in hand,
hood cinched low. They count and recount, the simplest science imaginable.
Much depends on their numbers, including decisions likely to be made about
future human visitation here, the outlook for penguins, and, perhaps, a
critical data point in the emerging picture of how this unpeopled world
sustains us.
Snow sashays onto the nesting gentoo penguins and blue-eyed shags,
disguising the pink mire of the colony that has turned their chicks into
unrecognizable lumps of filthy down. The birds nest shoulder to shoulder,
alongside old winch anchors, mooring blocks, whale skulls, wooden crates,
discarded cable. They nest under the old World War II huts and on the cement
block holding the British flag. Through every human endeavor that has
blossomed here then faded, they've endured, cooing their courtship calls,
hissing at intruders, spreading their feathered parasols to keep snow,
sleet, rain, and sun from their perfectly hopeful chicks.
See more stories tagged with: south pole, antarctica, the artic, climate
change, penguins
Julia Whitty is a contributing writer at Mother Jones and the author of "The
Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific."
By Julia Whitty, Mother Jones. Posted August 4, 2008
Polar Earth is thawing, wreaking havoc for penguins -- and humans. It's time
we grasp how this unpeopled world sustains us.
If not for the wind, it would be another hot day in Antarctica. But the 20
knots blasting around the shoulders of Penguin Island are stripping us of
sweat and what feels like our clothes. I'm shivering hard, and working hard
to keep up with Heather Lynch, 5 feet 4 inches of science dynamo,
robin's-egg-blue rubber boots pistoning through knee-deep snow with manic
determination. She turns 30 this July and is training for a 19-mile
wilderness run in Vermont billed as the hardest for its distance anywhere.
We're in the Antarctic Peninsula, that Sistine Chapel of the geologic world,
with its godlike finger of mountains reaching across the Drake Passage
toward South America's mountains of men. Training helps. We have only a
couple of hours ashore to count an expected two or three thousand penguins,
with a few cross-country miles to hike to and from the rookery across
unknown terrain, orienteering via a hand-drawn map that might as well say
here be dragons for all it's worth. Ordinarily, penguin rookeries aren't
cryptic places. They advertise through a landscape of jittery, methlike
overactivity, a soundscape of braying, buzzing, and honking, and a
scentscape reeking of guano and treacly dead things.
Except we can't find this one, and resort to sniffing over sea cliffs 150
feet high. Below, icebergs rear like Mormon temples from the battleship-gray
waters of the Bransfield Strait. A few weeks back, a smaller version of one
of these white behemoths sank the venerable Antarctic tour ship the Explorer
in view from here, stranding 154 passengers and crew in lifeboats for four
hours. The first ship to the rescue was the National Geographic Endeavour --
Lynch's and my ride, anchored offshore now.
We power hike until the snowfields give way to desolate, burnt slopes of
ejected volcanic boulders. The island has the feel of a tensed muscle
overdue for another tectonic release. The last eruption here was estimated
by the dating of lichens as 1905 -- the same year French polar explorer
Jean-Baptiste Charcot began to amass 32-plus volumes of observations on the
Antarctic Peninsula, a treasure chest of data that Lynch and her colleagues
still mine today.
In the lee of the island's summit we finally spy a scattering of a few
hundred Adélie and chinstrap penguins where we were expecting thousands.
They're subdued, with nary an ecstatic display to be seen, that
head-craning, chest-pumping, flipper-flapping performance complete with
hee-hawing calls. The Adélies are clustered on empty nests, with only 11
chicks among them. A pitiful tally for an entire year's breeding effort.
Hiking back into radio range, we hear from Ron Naveen, counting southern
giant petrel nests on the other side of the island. It's terrible here, he
reports, just awful. At first I picture him befouled by stomach-oil spit
from the bellies of the huge albatrosslike birds the whalers called
stinkers. But his concern is that he's found only 75 nests in a colony that
once housed more than 600. Worse, it appears all the petrels are sitting on
eggs, far too late in the season for the chicks to survive. The whole island
is a bust.
Breeding success in Antarctica is highly variable. Local events -- rain,
heat, snowfall -- can crash an entire season. In East Antarctica, southern
giant petrels have been found dead on their nests, a single egg nestled in
the brood patch, the birds having succumbed to enormous, burying snows. Yet
what's happening now is indicative of a larger meteorological reality. The
western Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than any place on Earth.
Wintertime temperatures have risen a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit in 50
years. What was once a cold, dry place has become a warm, wet place. The
wildlife is reeling from the chaos, some finding opportunity, others
catastrophe. On Penguin Island, Adélie populations have plummeted 75 percent
since 1980.
Returning across the high flanks of the island, Lynch and I pass a pair of
chinstraps -- chinnies, as they're affectionately known -- waddling toward
the distant colony, wings cranked open for balance, lurching from one webbed
foot to the other, climbing hard. It's an impressive feat of penguin
mountaineering. The pair rests, facing each other, as if conferring on their
own adventurous conundrum. We chuckle, though we're puzzled as to why they
don't just swim to their front doorstep on the far side of the island.
Of course, there's no telling why penguins make one decision versus another,
why they elect a long and difficult path when an easier way is obvious. Any
more than we can figure the bizarrely perilous choices of our own kind.
In 1774, after enduring tempests, gales, and fogs, Captain James Cook came
up hard against the Antarctic ice sheet and turned back. He never saw the
land beyond, land he thought "doomed by nature to everlasting frigidness ...
whose horrible and savage aspect I have no words to describe." He predicted
another explorer would, though "I shall not envy him the honour of the
discovery but I will be bold to say that the world will not be benefited by
it."
It's still a hard sell, the notion that this frozen continent and its
frozen-ocean partner to the north have much relevance to our temperate
world. Naveen and Lynch are here to count dwindling numbers of penguins --
because, Naveen says, doing so is like looking into a crystal ball and
seeing our own future beset by climate change. They're censusing three
species (Adélies, chinstraps, gentoos), plus two seabirds (blue-eyed shags,
southern giant petrels), at 123 sites in a long-term research project known
as the Antarctic Site Inventory. It's a daunting undertaking, facilitated in
part by Lindblad Expeditions, which donates one cabin, two bunks, and all
meals for two researchers aboard the Endeavour for the entirety of the
Antarctic season -- a contribution worth a minimum of $200,000 a year.
Naveen and Lynch have no control of the ship's itinerary, but are grateful
to piggyback on the travels of the tourists.
Ron Naveen's history as a Lindblad lecturer dates back a quarter century.
He's also the founder and president of Oceanites (OH-shun-AYE-tees), the
nonprofit funding organ for the Antarctic Site Inventory. Heather Lynch, who
looks, in her own words, to be 17 years old, is a newcomer to the project,
with two Antarctic seasons under her belt. She brings 21st-century science
to the table, introducing überstatistics to often-incomplete datasets as a
way to fast-forward to results.
I'm hitchhiking on their ride, sharing their tiny, two-bunk cabin, sleeping
on a ledge below the porthole. My goal is to report on the International
Polar Year, a 63-nation enterprise launched because the poles "are presently
changing faster than any other regions of the Earth, with regional and
global implications for societies, economies and ecosystems." Written
between the lines of the mission statement is the understanding that the
frozen poles are Earth's own doomsday vault, our last nest egg of vitals:
freshwater, minerals, oil, oceanic currents, climate control, and who knows
what else. Vaults we don't want to open.
Naveen, Lynch, and I join 110 passengers aboard the 294-foot Endeavour on
their vacation of a lifetime. Fifty years ago there was no infrastructure
for tourists in Antarctica. This year, 40,000 will visit aboard more than 58
vessels, with the number predicted to rise to more than 80,000 tourists by
2010. The only obstacles to visitation these days are financial --
Lindblad's cheapest berths aboard the Endeavour cost $10,250, plus hefty
airfares -- though clearly it's worth it. After all, we're all here,
tourists, explorers, researchers, writers, sharing similar concerns about a
frozen world necessary for our well-being.
We all know how the febrile Arctic is melting toward an ice-free state --
while the Antarctic, that mother lode of ice that as recently as 2001 was
thought invulnerable in the 21st century, is leaking at the seams. We know
that since 2000 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased 35 percent
faster than expected, despite the pledges of 180 nations to rein them in.
We're aware that polar seas are defying the laws of expectation, warming, in
places, a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1995, opening the door for
nonnative plants and animals to cross the polar thresholds and claim new
waters for themselves. We get that all this bodes poorly for penguins and
humans alike.
Don't we?
After two days of warm, sunny weather, when I suggest we might expect a
change to sleet or snow, one of the guests aboard the Endeavour snorts:
Snow? Nobody told us to expect that. More than a few express surprise at
snow on the frozen continent. Others, with the stunned look of people booked
on the wrong tour, self-medicate at the bar, and don't seem to notice the
weather at all. We share meals in the ship's glass-walled dining room, with
its gliding panoramas of snow, ice, icebergs, sea, sky, whales, and
seabirds, and I hear more than a few guests describe how they came to be
here -- struck by spontaneous wanderlust after viewing that paean to snow
and fatherhood, March of the Penguins.
It's blizzarding the day we arrive at Petermann Island -- Oceanites'
Antarctic field station and home to three researchers collecting data on
penguin breeding efforts. After a brief Zodiac ride, Naveen, Lynch, and I
land ahead of the guests and are welcomed ashore by the resident scientists
based there for the winter. The greetings are heartfelt and effusive and
involve the bestowing of gifts of chocolate and booze and fashion magazines
laden with perfume swatches. (There's no shower here.)
We trudge through oversized snowflakes butterflying through the air, past
nesting gentoo penguins and their pink guano latrines, to the Arctic Oven, a
20-by-10-foot blimp of a yellow tent built for the cold extremes of the
world. It's part kitchen, part science lab, anchored to the ground with a
dozen 60-pound "deadmen" bags filled with rocks, now disappearing into the
blizzard.
We undress in the sulfur light inside the vestibule, removing every square
inch of our sodden, guano-splattered outer clothing before climbing through
the tent's zippered hatch. Or, rather, Lynch and I do. Naveen doffs only
jacket and boots and steps through with dripping hat and rain pants. Both he
and Lynch are giddily happy to be back in their field home -- Naveen too
much so to be mindful, shuffling in his socks on the cold floor, reaching
out to touch everything: the laptop, the satellite phone, the raunchy cards,
inflatable flamingo, and weather-beaten maps hanging on the interior
clothesline. He's running a monologue about penguins and punctuating his
thoughts by tossing back peanut M&Ms pilfered from a bowl on the kitchen
table.
Hey, Lynch reminds him, we're on a ship full of goodies. The Petermann gang
hardly has any.
The Death March of the Penguins
But this is The House That Ron Built, so he squirms good-naturedly and eats
another handful anyway. It's the first season Naveen hasn't been resident
for at least one of two annual five-week stints here, because, he says
sadly, things get done faster when he stays home.
He's referring to fundraising, and home is Washington, DC, where he manages
the business of collecting charitable contributions and writing science
grants that sustain the efforts on Petermann Island, while facilitating 784
visits to 123 bird rookeries across Antarctica since 1994.
The research is daunting. Compounding the difficulties of getting boots on
the ground in remote seabird rookeries is the fact that some sites are too
big to count. Or too steep. Or too locked in by ice. Or too dangerous due to
70-knot winds on the day of the visit. Furthermore, counts are most useful
during only two short windows each season: one at the peak of egg laying,
the other at the peak of crèching (the time after hatching when penguin
chicks congregate in downy flocks, leaving both parents free to hunt for
food). The difference between the number of eggs laid and the number of
chicks surviving to crèche is a reliable indicator of how well the species
is doing from one year to the next.
The resident team on Petermann Island faces different challenges, including
as many as three visiting ships a day, all requiring some aspect of a guided
tour. Many days it's hard to get anything done, including the basics.
There's no outhouse here, only a rock and the flushing sea, and, if you
don't time it right, 100-plus witnesses.
One by one the Endeavour's passengers file up to the Arctic Oven, where the
camp manager holds open the hatch to the vestibule so the passengers can
peer into the inner workings of a field station. Some seem embarrassed by
the zoolike presentation of scientists in their native habitat, and duck
away. Others linger with queries, mostly about the living conditions. One
woman asks an oft-repeated question, Who does the cooking? We take turns,
says Lynch: One person cooks and cleans for a day, followed by two days off.
The guest digests this, snow dumping behind her, penguins hee-hawing, wind
rattling the guy wires, the fishy stench of guano permeating the air. Huh,
she responds: Kind of like a summerhouse on Long Island.
Visitors aren't what they used to be, reports Naveen. The Antarctic
aficionados still pilgrimage here, but they're outnumbered these days by
doom tourists chasing down the disappearing world and the nouveau riche
absentmindedly checking off the premier stop on their grand tour of Planet
Earth.
You can't protect what you don't know, said Lars-Eric Lindblad upon first
bringing tourists to Antarctica in 1969 (aboard the same Explorer that went
to the bottom a few weeks ago). From his pioneering efforts, the notion of
ecotourists as ambassadors was born. Nearly 40 years into the training
program, the plebes aboard the Endeavour have a ways to go. One guest, when
asked after a two-hour onboard lecture on seabird identification whether the
bird overhead is a southern giant petrel or black-browed albatross, looks
up, shrugs, and admits, I really don't care.
On a day so warm the southern giant petrels are riding thermals rising off
icebergs, we sail into the Weddell Sea. The sun is sharp as knives. The air,
antiseptically invisible. Islands 50 miles distant seem yards away. Up
close, killer whales hunt the floes for sleeping crabeater seals, while cape
petrels, those checkerboard flyers of the cold waters, surf the air curls
streaming off the ship. I'm wearing flip-flops on deck.
We sail through canyons of ice, enormous tabular bergs colored in sea-glass
shades of milk, crystal, turquoise, and cobalt green, shot through with
bolts of electric blue. The bergs tower 80 or more feet above us, some the
remnants of the 1,264-square-mile Larsen B ice shelf, which in 2002
catastrophically disintegrated at a speed then truly startling to science,
but now almost commonplace as both poles and many high elevations summarily
liquefy.
As recently as 2000, scientists predicted Arctic summer ice until 2100,
whereas some research now suggests its demise by 2013. But even as the bad
news from the Arctic mounted, the southernmost continent was considered too
big, too remote, too frozen to react with every nuance of changing currents
and warming winds. At 5.4 million square miles, it's bigger than Europe, the
coldest, windiest, driest place and largest and highest desert on Earth.
Much of Antarctica lies more than two miles above sea level; 90 percent of
the world's ice and as much as 70 percent of its freshwater are locked in
its frozen vault. The prospect of this global Sub-Zero melting anytime soon
lies beyond the ken of human imagination, and climate models have long
forecast a reassuring stability.
But the certainty of an unshakably frozen South Pole is cracking. The
Antarctic Peninsula's thermal sprint is hammering 87 percent of its glaciers
into retreat. This past February the Wilkins ice shelf -- an area bigger
than Connecticut -- began to disintegrate, following the familiar script of
the Larsen B. In a heartbeat, the northernmost fringe of Antarctica has
become more temperate than polar: endowed with snow, but less of it sticking
around long enough to become entombed in glaciers, existing glaciers dumping
faster into a warming sea. God's finger is growing thin.
The Antarctic landmass is showing the strain too. In 2005, researchers found
the first real evidence of massive melting over a multitude of regions
previously considered immune, including far inland, at high latitudes, and
at high elevations. Put together, these disparate melt zones add up to an
area the size of California. Furthermore, whereas scientists were expecting
a growth in Antarctica's coastal ice sheets from heavier snowfall, a 10-year
study found much of them in mysterious, rapid decline. Losing the coastal
ice opens the floodgates for glaciers to surge into the sea, not only
raising sea levels but also adding freshwater to oceanic currents fueled by
salinity levels, increasing the risks of resetting the currents -- Earth's
natural thermostat.
But it's a beautiful day aboard the Endeavour. Hatless guests stroll the
decks, complementary red parkas flapping open, heads craned back to see the
massive icebergs, oohing and aahing in their own ecstatic displays. The ship
weaves between a fantastic assortment of bergs melted below the waterline
and flipped, revealing the crazed hand of a submarine sculptor, complete
with domes, pinnacles, wedges, and weird standing glassy blocks resembling
Icehenges. Some icebergs are favored haul-outs for penguins, whose
formidable ice-climbing skills allow them to porpoise out of the waves, stab
the ice-axes of their bills into sheer walls, then peg with toenail
crampons, hammering move after move until they've climbed 50 or more feet to
ledges tattooed with sleeping penguins.
There's talk aboard the Endeavour of climate change, including from a vocal
contingent of naysayers quoting mythical studies. One woman repeatedly cites
a fictional cluster of 19,000 denialistas hunkered down in German institutes
of higher learning, until someone asks her to prove it. There are also a
surprising number of middle grounders leaking equal parts confusion and
skepticism about "this global warming business." The two groups manage to
exhibit all five stages of climate-change denial: There's nothing happening;
we don't know why it's happening; climate change is natural; climate change
is not bad; climate change can't be stopped. The true believers discover
each other mostly through shared incredulous silence.
Yet all come together when we happen upon an ancient ice floe topped with a
single sleeping emperor penguin. It's a juvenile that has just completed its
inconceivable genesis in the dark of the Antarctic winter, perched atop its
father's webbed feet, tucked into the brood pouch, enduring 100-knot winds
and subzero temperatures. The young bird utters three soft braying calls as
we approach, then stands. The motor drives on a hundred cameras whine.
Everyone whispers to no one in particular, as all are joined by an invisible
thread of respect woven into the collective consciousness by March of the
Penguins. You can almost hear the Morgan Freeman narration hang in the air.
Directly ahead lies heavy pack ice, the dividing line between ships and
penguins. We turn back, leaving the young bird to its solitude.
The pack ice in the Weddell Sea is the same obstacle that sank Ernest
Shackleton's Endurance in 1915, and, like him, we set our sights on Paulet
Island, where he hoped and failed to land his men. We can't quite get there
either, though Captain Philipp Dieckmann noses the ship in a narrow channel
cluttered with big bergs, bergy bits, growlers, and weather-pummeled sea
ice, all idiosyncratically on the move with tide and wind, like dancers
without a choreographer. Here and there we kiss ice, the ship shuddering at
the impact and wailing in a Björklike voice, seductive and violent. Everyone
who can be is clustered topside, watching the contest, when a German who
speaks excellent English confesses how he and his compatriots have been
confused by the constant references to "Adélie" this and "Adélie" that,
wondering where in the world is this French woman everyone is talking about.
Naveen and Lynch badly want to get ashore on Paulet and count Adélie
penguins and the Antarctic cormorants known as blue-eyed shags. But Matt
Drennan, expedition leader and 20-year veteran of the Antarctic, with 80
expeditions under his belt, doesn't like the look of things. Too much ice.
Too much tide. Wind coming up. He squints into the glare of memory -- things
can change too quickly here -- and apologizes profusely. No one
second-guesses his tough decision because no one wishes to repeat the
travails of the 20 men of the Nordenskjöld Expedition who inadvertently
overwintered here in 1903 after their ship sank in the Weddell ice. Their
tiny stone hut, visible from the Endeavour, looks to be built from stacked
headstones.
Paulet is only a mile across, yet its slopes, rising more than 1,100 feet,
are so steep and its birds so densely packed that they've never been fully
counted, only estimated. The last year conditions enabled an estimate was
1999, when Naveen managed a flyover in a British navy helicopter and
calculated between 95,000 and 105,000 Adélie nests, for a total of perhaps
350,000 adults and chicks on the island.
The question of interest today is how many are present this year. Adélies,
the most polar of the three penguin species nesting in the peninsula, seem
to be suffering the most from climate whiplash, their numbers plummeting 80
percent in places. Exactly why remains a matter of conjecture, though many
theories begin and end with krill. Adélies survive almost exclusively on
krill, making forays more than 400 miles to and from their nests and dives
up to 574 feet deep in pursuit of the shrimplike invertebrates.
But krill stocks aren't what they used to be. Despite the fact that wildlife
has been protected on Antarctic lands since 1959, the Southern Ocean, which
feeds most Antarctic life, is still considered fair game. Industrial-scale
krill-fishing fleets arrived here in the 1970s, bent on transforming the
keystone species of Antarctica into fish food and omega-3 supplements. In
2007, the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living
Resources expanded the catch limit from 450,000 to 2.6 million metric tons
in East Antarctica alone. This despite concerns that the stock is already in
decline from climate change. Krill need pack ice for feeding, yet the pack
in the peninsula has shrunk 80 percent in 30 years, forming later each
winter and retreating earlier each summer.
The problems for penguins don't end with krill. Adélies need sea ice as a
place to rest while foraging, a kind of polar recovery room, now shrinking.
Moreover, the warming climate is producing deep snows and flooding rains
that smother or drown their eggs and chicks -- changes that may also be
fueling outbreaks of ticks severe enough to force some penguins to abandon
their eggs and chicks and seek relief in the sea. Now melting glaciers are
releasing time bombs of ddt and likely other pollutants once safely frozen
in the ice.
In November 2007 researchers at Palmer Station in the Antarctic Peninsula
recorded the first extinction of an Adélie colony, which may historically
have housed as many as 30,000 birds. "The evidence could no longer be
denied," the team wrote, "and it was formally transcribed into our field
notebooks and databases ... no [Adélie] pairs had arrived to breed on
Litchfield Island ... the first recorded extinction of an entire colony in
the 34-year history of this study."
At first glance, the massive penguin rookery at Brown Bluff looks to be
strewn with the carcasses of penguin chicks. But they're not dead, only
prostrate with heat -- fat, absurdly fuzzy, lying prone on rotund
krill-filled bellies, wings outstretched, webbed feet raised in the air
behind them, shedding heat through the only unfeathered parts of their
bodies. The Adélie chicks hatched earlier than the gentoos on the island,
and some are near fledging now, molting their down feathers like penguins
emerging from gorilla suits. Most are joining crèches and partaking in the
comical affairs known as feeding chases: a parade of chicks besieging any
parent returning from the sea, the youngsters chattering loudly of their
hunger. The returning parents, bloated with krill, lurch as fast and far
away as they can, hoping to winnow their own chicks from the mob. Some
feeding chases persist a thousand feet down the beach, a long way for birds
with no ankles, says Naveen.
We arrive prepared to count, but are waylaid by the impossibly calm day, the
mirrorlike bay with ripples of sinuous leopard seals, the grounded icebergs
on shore, and the literally hundreds of adult penguins crowding the
waterline. They're restless and hot and hungry. They're also afraid of the
leopard seals. Entering the water requires a flock to reach consensus.
Before that, they reach many false consensuses, a few birds toppling
headfirst into the sea only to U-turn and torpedo out again. This day, as
every day, a few will not return with food but instead become food for
leopard seals.
We climb a precipitous hill worn to dirt and rock from countless generations
of penguin feet. Birds come and go, effortlessly hopping past us on the
uphill. Near the pinnacle, scrambling atop a boulder, Heather Lynch snaps
photos of the colony in all directions and notes the gps coordinates. There
are too many birds to count, except on a digitized image on a computer
screen. Next year, conditions permitting, an Oceanites team will return to
this same boulder and count again. Such is the way databases in the
Antarctic grow, as slowly as lichens.
To compensate for the difficulties inherent in polar work, Naveen hooked up
with Bill Fagan at the University of Maryland. Fagan's lab, where Lynch is a
postdoc, is a scientific front line combining advanced mathematical theory
and off-the-map fieldwork to explore questions critical to life on Earth --
including those shaping life naturally (community ecology), and those that
save life from ourselves (conservation biology).
Orchestrating the Illusion of Solitude
Lynch, with a master's in physics and a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, is
representative of what may well turn out to be the distinguishing feature of
21st-century science -- the reintegration of the last century's separate
disciplines into something beginning to resemble one. What she offers the
Antarctic Site Inventory is the bandwidth to crunch relatively sparse
population numbers alongside data on sea ice, climate, and ocean
productivity -- plugging it all into hierarchical Bayesian models --
statistical analyses so complex that only recently has the computational
power emerged to manage them. (An early Bayesian application in 1968
stretched computers of the day, yet succeeded in locating the sunken nuclear
submarine the Scorpion, lost somewhere in the Atlantic.) The work derives
from the 18th-century British mathematician and Presbyterian minister
Reverend Thomas Bayes and his theorem on the probabilities of the behavior
of billiard balls.
Lynch hopes to use Bayesian models to address what Fagan calls the weak-data
problem in conservation biology: the persistent dearth of field records over
consequential timescales. The statistical tools aren't quite the equivalent
of sinking all your pool balls on the break. But they set them up cleanly
for your next shot.
At Booth Island, in a heavy snowfall, the naturalists aboard the Endeavour
land ahead of the guests and set up orange traffic cones to mark footpaths
as close to the action as front-row seats, yet far enough away from penguin
trails and colonies to be respectful of their privacy. Along with ice and
weather, Naveen and Lynch are also examining the impact of tourism on
breeding penguins, though initial results seem to agree with other studies
that well-managed tourism enhances penguin survival, possibly by keeping
skuas -- predatory gulls nearly the size of eagles -- away. Good for
penguins, bad for skuas, says Lynch.
The first 1,000-passenger liner traveled to Antarctica in 2000, and last
year a 3,000-passenger cruise ship visited. Not all make landings, yet the
dangers are real, whether people come ashore or not. When the Explorer sank
in 2007 it was small enough, and the weather calm enough, that nearby ships
could rescue its passengers. And the ship sank cleanly enough that a major
oil spill, far from any emergency infrastructure, was averted. In other
words, conditions were excellent for a sinking, a reality unlikely to be
repeated.
More tourists also change the aesthetic. Matt Drennan spends several hours a
day calculating how to keep the Endeavour out of the line of sight of all
the other ships competing for space at the 20 or 25 most popular landing
sites on the peninsula. Maintaining the illusion of solitude is hectically
orchestrated every July during the International Association of Antarctic
Tour Operators' online electronic derby. Ignorant of what December or
January will hold, ships submit itineraries for which landing sites they'd
like to visit on which days. Six months later, the reality of ice and
weather hits and the schedules are reshuffled in an undertaking worthy of a
Bayesian model. It's a process that's still workable, says Drennan, but only
just. He doubts it can absorb twice as many visitors and still maintain the
character of a wilderness experience.
Do visitors care? No matter the weather outside, the Endeavour's bow is
stippled with a flock of hardcore guests wearing red Lindblad parkas -- the
$10,000 parkas, they joke -- cameras at the ready, eyes tearing from the
wind. Those less hardy rest in easy chairs in the library, watching the
scenery glide by. Others nap in their bunks. A few anchor the bar. One soul
holes up in the windowless computer lab with an everlasting game of
solitaire. The old hands aboard, the 12 naturalists, who tally more than 150
years combined Antarctic experience, keep watch for whales from behind the
windshield on the bridge. Sometimes a frozen guest joins them. But the
inside lacks the raw power of the outdoors, the sensual jolt craved by those
who know this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The whales spout. The crabeater seals glance up from their daybeds on the
ice floes. The penguins porpoise from the surface like flying minnows.
Somewhere between the naturalists' lectures and the uncensored cut of the
wind, the stunning landscapes of Antarctica transform into a living,
breathing, ongoing story that will follow these visitors back to the other
world and whisper in their ears for a long time to come.
Fifty years ago, a bunch of visiting scientists heard the call of
Antarctica. The result was the Antarctic Treaty, written in language as
stripped-down and clear as the Declaration of Independence, presenting a
revolutionary argument for the rights of the uninhabited continent:
"Recognizing that it is in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall
continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not
become the scene or object of international discord."
Because of the treaty and related agreements, known as the Antarctic Treaty
System or ats, the continent enjoys freedoms unparalleled elsewhere on
Earth, including freedom from any military presence (though some nations use
their military to run their research), freedom of scientific investigation
and cooperation, freedom from territorial ownership, and freedom from
nuclear weapons. The frozen continent offers a thought experiment as to how
an intelligent, informed, curious, energetic, disciplined, and mostly
rational human society might operate at some future date.
The Arctic, in contrast, presents a dark glimpse into the past, as
disappearing ice awakens piratical instincts in nations seeking heretofore
inaccessible minerals, oil, fish, and seafaring riches. New data in the
Arctic are already being used to boost increased American territorial claims
by 100 nautical miles. Canada is embroiled in sovereignty disputes with the
US, Russia, Denmark, and Norway over sites rich with oil and natural gas,
and over ownership of the fabled Northwest Passage.
Yet Antarctica may be only temporarily immune from polar fever, since the
ats suspends mineral exploration merely until 2048. Seven nations --
Argentina, Australia, Britain, Chile, France, Norway, and New Zealand --
maintain territorial claims in abeyance, for the time being. Along with 39
other countries, they wait, should the treaty change, poised inside 64
permanent and seasonal scientific bases, some facilitating no science, some
facilitating exploitation thinly disguised as science. For better or worse,
the research footprint grows far bigger than even the tourist footprint in
Antarctica.
It's questionable whether 40 years from now, when the mineral rights
prohibition comes up for renewal, the equivalent spirit of enlightenment
will prevail. By then, the frozen goodies known to abound under Antarctica's
snowfields may well be more accessible. The United States has already
completed a controversial 1,000-mile snow road connecting its bases at
McMurdo Sound and the South Pole -- the road to plunder, should conditions
allow. By 2048, the global population will have soared to 9 billion, an
increase almost equivalent to the total number of people living on earth in
1959, when the first Antarctic Treaty was signed. Pressures on Earth's
resources may well have outgrown our generosity.
In all likelihood we're only an oil shortage away from applauding the
19th-century sentiments of poet Bret Harte on America's original polar
aspirations:
Know you not what fate awaits you
Or to whom the future mates you?
All ye icebergs, make salaam
You belong to Uncle Sam!
We make final landfall at Port Lockroy, a weatherproof harbor in the Palmer
Archipelago, and historic site of an old British whaling station turned
military base turned meteorological station. Whale skeletons line the
shores. A pair of tiny black huts marks the line Churchill held against the
Nazis in Antarctica. Enormous glaciers ring the bay, punctuated by rocky
mountaintops knuckling through the snow. At metronomic intervals, ice calves
into the sea, sonic booms marking puffs of snow and ice. Outside the
protected harbor, hurricane-force winds blow, while five yachts that braved
the Drake Passage moor in faultless calm.
Port Lockroy is crowded with tourists in kayaks, tourists beachcombing,
tourists on Zodiac tours of the harbor. The hut's latest persona is as a
museum, gift shop, and post office, its rooms crowded with visitors spending
all manner of currencies on tea towels, T-shirts, and postcards. It's a
snapshot of one Antarctic future.
A passenger aboard one of the moored yachts visits the Endeavour and gives a
talk in the lounge. He's a well-known explorer, examining climate change and
the impacts of tourism while making a documentary about himself kayaking in
the Antarctic Peninsula. He refers to his kayaks as floating ambassadors,
and the guests are eager to hear his take on this global warming business.
But despite his audience of newly fledged envoys, despite the incomparable
backdrop, and the pressing issues, the explorer is reticent, paddling around
the touchy subject while waving a drink through the air. Perhaps this is
what ambassadors do.
With a few working hours still left in Antarctica, Ron Naveen and Heather
Lynch launch into the bird colony at Jougla Point, most of it off-limits to
nonscientists, wading shin-deep in muck and slipping and sliding in melt
pools on the edges of rocky escarpments. Naveen's no novice and skates
nonchalantly along drop-offs; Lynch powers behind, field notebook in hand,
hood cinched low. They count and recount, the simplest science imaginable.
Much depends on their numbers, including decisions likely to be made about
future human visitation here, the outlook for penguins, and, perhaps, a
critical data point in the emerging picture of how this unpeopled world
sustains us.
Snow sashays onto the nesting gentoo penguins and blue-eyed shags,
disguising the pink mire of the colony that has turned their chicks into
unrecognizable lumps of filthy down. The birds nest shoulder to shoulder,
alongside old winch anchors, mooring blocks, whale skulls, wooden crates,
discarded cable. They nest under the old World War II huts and on the cement
block holding the British flag. Through every human endeavor that has
blossomed here then faded, they've endured, cooing their courtship calls,
hissing at intruders, spreading their feathered parasols to keep snow,
sleet, rain, and sun from their perfectly hopeful chicks.
See more stories tagged with: south pole, antarctica, the artic, climate
change, penguins
Julia Whitty is a contributing writer at Mother Jones and the author of "The
Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific."