Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  Though the births themselves had now dried up, both bases still allowed children and families, violating the no-children rule that applied almost everywhere else in the continent. Truly it seemed these were more colonies than scientific stations. I was eager to visit Esperanza, to see for myself what an Antarctic ‘colony’ looked like. And I got my chance in 2008 on a voyage with the Royal Navy’s HMS Endurance, which was supporting scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS)6. We were passing within a short distance of Esperanza. The captain had given permission for us to fly to the base while the ship steamed ahead, and then rejoin it afterwards.

  But first, our comms people had to raise the team at Esperanza and say we were on our way. So we waited, half dressed in the hot, bright orange rubber immersion suits, which were compulsory for passengers in the Endurance’s helicopters. (To be allowed to fly in a Royal Navy helicopter over water you also have to pass a ‘helidunk’ course back in the UK, which involves being packed into a model helicopter fuselage with a bunch of squaddies, dropped from a height into a swimming pool, and showing that you can swim safely out of the emergency exit. The first time, the lights are on and you stay upright; the second time, more realistically, the ‘helicopter’ spins upside down; the third time, the lights dim to twilight; and the fourth you are submerged and then inverted in pitch darkness. The last one was the worst. We all got out within the allotted time, but with less grace than in the previous attempts. I got some bruises in that dunking, but I gave some, too.)

  This was my first direct encounter with a military operation, and I blundered around at first, trying to assimilate the bewildering array of rules. Officers could go into the Ward Room, but not into the Junior Ratings’ mess. Senior Ratings could go into the Junior Ratings’ mess but only if invited. Scientists didn’t count—we could go more or less anywhere. But everyone had to ask before going on to the bridge, by stopping at the entrance and intoning a formula—‘Permission to enter the bridge’—to which the Officer of the Watch would reply not ‘Permission granted’ as you might expect but, bafflingly, ‘Yes please’.

  It was also odd to be on a military vessel in Antarctica, a continent formally dedicated to peace. Of course, the ship was supporting the UK’s scientific efforts, and there is a long tradition of support from the military for many, perhaps most, of the Antarctic nations. But it was also there to keep an eye on Britain’s ongoing interests in the region. The Endurance’s stated mission was not just ‘supporting the global community of Antarctica’, but also ‘to patrol and survey the Antarctic and South Atlantic, maintaining Sovereign Presence with Defence Diplomacy’.7

  Nevertheless, as time went on I became drawn to these men and women: the twenty-four-year-old navigator, who steered our icebreaker through the night while we slept, and briefed us over the PA each morning with her ‘sitreps’—which told us not just our current position, but what we would be eating for the daily breakfast special; the privates talking wistfully of when they could get away from this pretty but peaceful continent, and back into the war, where they belonged; the restless marines abseiling down the front of the ship to keep their hand in. (I was getting fairly restless myself by this point and the marines were very gracious about letting me join their abseiling.)

  I began to enjoy being woken at 7 a.m. by a uniquely military combination of traditional and modern: a bosun’s whistle, blown via a microphone and PA system into everybody’s cabins, ‘pee pee pee peep, pee pee pee peeeeouw’. I even learned to do this myself, bounding out of my bunk at 6:30 a.m. for the privilege of waking the rest of the ship. The trick lies in curling your fingers over the whistle’s hole at just the right moment to make the dying sound of the peeeeouw. At the beginning it seemed that our military hosts were as bemused by us as we were by them, but after a few weeks’ sailing down to Rothera and then back up north we had become friends.

  The go-ahead finally came, and we donned our helmets and were guided into the helicopter on the back deck, literally by the scruff of our necks. (When the rotors were going, nobody on board was prepared to take any chances with the civilians.) We flew over glaciers and bergs, rocks and dark grey water, till we came to a pleasant little cove, grey-skied and streaked with snow. The buildings of Esperanza were all, or almost all, the same bright cherry-red, made of steel containers but with dark triangular roofs that made it look like a toytown.

  We landed at the helipad, met the five-strong delegation that had come to greet us, and were guided down to the main building for coffee and cake. When it became obvious that neither the base commander’s English nor our Spanish would serve for much beyond name, rank and serial number, someone was dispatched to fetch a young meteorologist to translate for us.

  Everyone was pleasant, they were all smiling, but there was still something odd about the interpreter’s questions. He was quizzing us about our reasons for being there, with a sort of polite urgency. ‘Didn’t the ship tell you all this when they called?’ I said in the end. ‘There was no call,’ he replied. ‘We didn’t know you were coming.’

  What? But we had only got permission to fly on the assumption that our radio room had finally managed to speak to theirs! Something had obviously gone wrong with the communications. We had dropped unannounced out of the sky into an Argentinian colony, territory formally disputed by our two nations, in a Royal Navy helicopter!

  Britain and Argentina had a shaky record in this part of the world. Both countries, along with Chile, laid claim to this part of the continent, although all three claims were now on hold thanks to the Antarctica Treaty. Before the treaty was signed, though, we had definitely squabbled over the land. In 1943 a British expedition had hauled down the Argentinian flags that had been left on nearby Deception Island, and hoisted the Union flag instead. In 1952 a team from the British Antarctic Survey was unloading supplies here in Hope Bay from the ship John Biscoe when a shore party of Argentinians fired a machine gun over their heads. The respective governments later extended and graciously accepted a diplomatic apology but I’m sure that wasn’t much consolation for the scientists involved.

  Admittedly during the war of 1982 when Britain and Argentina fought for control of the Falkland Islands (a conflict that the writer Jorge Luis Borges memorably described as being like ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’), Antarctica was reportedly the only place in the world where Argentinians and British maintained cordial relations. But this is still not a place where you would want to send in a British naval helicopter unheralded and uninvited.

  And yet our hosts were nothing but charming. Maybe there is something magical about squashing human beings together in a place where humans have never been. The Arctic has long been a place of conflict. Deserts the world over are just as likely as lush grasslands to be battle zones. In the rest of our planet, bald men still fight over combs. But in Antarctica it seems that normal rules may not apply.

  When we finished our coffee and our questions, the base commander, Lt Colonel Miguel Monteleone, gave us a tour. The ground was rocky, the paths and boulders dusted with snow, and the buildings stood out cheerfully against an otherwise drab backdrop. Miguel (in spite of his formidable military bearing, he told me I could call him Miguel) took us to the tiny capilla, the chapel, and the laboratory and infirmary. Then we passed a signpost with arrows pointing every which way, announcing the whereabouts of the port, the helipad, the canteen. And there, too, was the one sign that I had not seen anywhere else in Antarctica. Escuela, it said. School.

  This was the building I’d been waiting for—the first sign of Esperanza’s children. It comprised several containers bolted together and Miguel walked me through, pointing out the different rooms. ‘This one is a playroom for all the children. Then here is the class for the children in seventh grade, the last year of primary school; in the next room there are two children for second grade, one in third and one in fourth grade. And here in the last class, kindergarten, two little kids of five or so, preschool really.’

  I stopped on
the threshold of this last room. There was an adult-sized chair and desk, presumably for the teacher, and, next to it, a small square table that barely came to my knees, and two small chairs. No: they weren’t just small, they were tiny. They were miniature. Though I knew that there had been small children and even babies here, seeing those chairs was somehow deeply shocking. And then I wondered why I was so shocked. Why did it seem so abnormal? How had I become so accustomed to the ‘no children’ rule that I accepted it as gospel? ‘How many children are there?’ I asked.

  ‘From 12 March, when the families come, we will be fifty-one, with eight women and fourteen children.’

  ‘What other facilities do you have on the base for the families?’

  ‘There is a satellite dish that allows us to get four digital TV channels and another satellite dish that allows us to connect to the internet, and in the social club there is ping-pong, table football and pool. And in winter, weather permitting, we offer open-air activities.’

  It sounded to me like a wonderful childhood. But this wasn’t just to give a few kids a great experience.

  ‘Esperanza is very unusual in Antarctica,’ I said cautiously, ‘because of the families and children. Why do you have families here?’ I wasn’t going to use the ‘c’ word, colonisation, but it seemed that Miguel had no qualms.

  ‘Bueno,’ he said airily. ‘It was our General Pujarto who initiated the Argentine Antarctic activity on behalf of the army. One part of his plan was to colonise Antarctica with families. The aim was to put a small town with Argentinian people in the Argentinian sector of Antarctica.’

  I think I must have blinked. I hadn’t expected such frankness. General Hernán Pujarto had been right-hand man to President Perón back in the fifties. He had set up Argentina’s Antarctic Institute as well as its southernmost base, and he was a strong advocate of colonising the Peninsula to claim it for his country.

  ‘Do you think there is a political aspect to having families here?’ I asked. ‘It’s more like having a colony instead of having a scientific base?’

  ‘Well, there is scientific activity in the base,’ Miguel replied. ‘The scientific work runs alongside family life and is also very important.’

  Yes, of course, the ‘science’. Although there was that small lab, and five scientists currently on the station, the overt aim of colonisation and occupation was more evident in Esperanza than anywhere else I’d seen in Antarctica, and the sticking plaster of doing science seemed the least convincing excuse.

  And yet, and yet . . . that wasn’t the whole story. Miguel was clearly serious about the science at Esperanza. And although doing research may not be his government’s prime motivation, Argentine science has undoubtedly made its mark on the continent. For it was here, or very near here, that two Argentinian scientists discovered something that changed our perception of this barren, ice-ridden world.

  It was January 1986, and geologists Eduardo Olivero and Roberto Scasso had landed just around the tip of the Peninsula from Esperanza, on the northern part of James Ross Island. They hiked about a mile or so south of Santa Marta Cove and started casting around for fossils. This was a good time to look. It was the height of the Antarctic summer and the top parts of the soil had briefly thawed enough to give them a chance of picking up some useful finds.

  The area had once been a shallow sea, and half buried in the soil were the typical ammonites and sharks’ teeth. But then the two researchers found something astonishing: a fragment of jawbone, a few teeth the shape of broad flat leaves, pieces of skull, vertebrae and limbs. They had discovered Antarctica’s first ever dinosaur.

  Antarctopelta oliveroi was a new species of ankylosaur, a stocky, plant-eating quadruped, stretching perhaps four metres from tip to tail. It had armoured skin and, like other ankylosaurs, its tail may have ended in a mighty club—though no trace of that has yet been found. It had a short spike protruding over its eye. It lived in the late Cretaceous Period, less than a hundred million years ago. And for some reason it died on the coast and was washed out and buried in a shallow sea.8

  Eduardo and Roberto’s finding confirmed what many scientists had already suspected: Antarctica has not always been a frozen wilderness. Although all but a tiny percentage of the land is now buried in ice, the few remaining outcrops of rocks bear many signs that its ancient past was much warmer than today.

  Since Antarctopelta, many more dinosaurs have shown up around Antarctica. The next was Crylophosaurus ellioti, a twenty-foot carnivore that died with its last meal—the leg of a hapless plant-loving prosauropod—stuck in its craw. Crylophosaurus had an armament on its head, shaped like a Spanish comb on a flamenco dancer, or perhaps an Elvis quiff. And then there were more. Some Antarctic dinosaurs were large, some trim; one appears to have had a duckbill. But all would have lived before the ice came.9

  There was also the vegetation to match. Near the Beardmore Glacier—which both Shackleton and Scott’s polar expeditions used as their staircase up on to the plateau—researchers discovered an eerie patch of petrified forest, which would once have nourished and shaded Antarctica’s dinosaurs, but was now reduced to stone stumps, their tree rings clearly visible where the trunks had been sheared off. On his journey back from the Pole, Scott himself picked up rocks on the Beardmore that had ancient fern leaves fossilised into them like a fingerprint.

  Scott didn’t know that the continents could drift, that Antarctica spent much of its geological history wandering around the warmer parts of the world, before the grinding of the Earth’s tectonic plates took it to its current resting position at the South Pole. But we know that now. So perhaps all these fossils came from a time when the continent was basking in the warmth of the tropics.

  Well, not exactly. Geologists have traced Antarctica’s path through the ages, and it landed at its present position some one hundred million years ago—within the days of the James Ross ankylosaur. Even when Antarctica was sitting squarely at the Pole, it was a green continent, covered with forests and ferns and dinosaurs.10

  The time of the dinosaurs was warm everywhere, including the poles, thanks largely to the very high levels of greenhouse gases in the air. Volcanoes had been belching out carbon dioxide for millions of years and Earth was a hothouse. But then, trees fell into those steamy swamps and were buried before they could rot, and the floors of shallow seas became carpeted with sea creatures, whose bodies, too, were buried in a rain of mud and sand. And time passed, and the carbon in the trees and the bodies of the sea creatures was buried further and cooked and squeezed and chemically transformed into coal, oil and natural gas. The Earth had found a natural mechanism to suck carbon out of the air and bury it where the sun didn’t shine.

  That is why the world started its cooling trajectory, and why Antarctica began to feel a chill that was helped along by the opening of Drake Passage and the forming of those swirling, isolating currents. The dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago, probably as a result of a colliding meteorite. But the forests and ferns eventually followed, driven away by the freezing air and the creeping ice. Antarctica has more or less been cooling ever since.11 Or it had.

  For in the past two centuries we humans have been mining down into the dark remnants of those ancient lands, extracting the fossilised fuels they contain, burning them and pouring their carbon back into the air. And inevitably the world is starting to warm back up again. In the past century the average temperature of our planet has risen by nearly 1.5°F and the effects are being felt here on the Peninsula more strongly than anywhere else. This part of the continent is warming at an extraordinary pace—three times the global average.12 It is one of the planet’s hot spots, melting visibly under the eyes of scientists and their instruments. Its shelves of ice are shattering. It is shedding icebergs like armadas. Even the animals are feeling the heat.

  The Peninsula is changing, and Rothera Station lies at the heart of this change. The main headquarters of the British Antarctic Survey’s operation,13 it is seated on a rocky
promontory on Adelaide Island about halfway down the west of the Peninsula. Icebergs out in the two adjoining bays gleam in the low-slanting sunlight, and chunks of ice wash up against the shore, jangling like wind chimes in the waves.

  Although the facilities at Rothera are now state-of-the-art, with en-suite bedrooms, high-grade laboratories and quick flights in and out from the Falklands to minimise both the time and cost of the science, this base also has the closest, most recent connection to the past. Many of the people are drawn here by tales of the heroic age, and the older ones can still remember a time when life at the British bases echoed that of those great explorers. Until the mid-1980s, work and life here would have been comfortably recognisable by the likes of Amundsen, Shackleton and Scott.

  For one thing, this was the last base on the continent to get rid of their huskies. Originally the dogs were there to work, but then as machines took over they became a recreation, a great way to go out on a Sunday and experience the Antarctica of the heroic age. But they were also a drain on resources. They had to be exercised, fed, stitched up when they got hurt in fights.

  Argentina, Australia and Britain were the last nations on the continent to keep dogs and all were initially mutinous when the edict went out in 1994 that they were now to be banned. First the Australians, then the Argentinians sent their remaining dogs home. Finally, in February 1994, the last fourteen huskies on the continent of Antarctica were loaded on to a Dash-7 plane at Rothera in specially designed kennels. From then onwards the only ‘alien’ species permitted on the continent would be humans. And the last direct connection to the heroic age passed out of sight and into history.

  But still there is that lingering regret for the old days. Though Rothera now has twenty-four-hour internet and unlimited phone calls, winterers continue to gather around the radio on 21 June to hear the traditional Midwinter Broadcast, bearing personal messages from home through the shortwave medium of the BBC World Service.