Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  That whiff of nostalgia also remains in the food sent out from Rothera into the field. A box of ‘man food’ (so-called to distinguish it from ‘dog food’) to take out to a camp still contains the sort of rations that Scott’s men would have been happy to share: powdered milk, porridge oats, tea and cocoa, ‘biscuits brown’ (which were called by this military-style language to distinguish them from ‘biscuits fruit’).

  At least the boxes don’t contain pemmican, that classic heroic age mix of fat and dried meat that sustained all our heroes during their epic voyages. But you sense that some people at Rothera regret its absence. Instead, in a nod to modernity there are sachets of dried, reconstituted meals of curries, stews and ragouts that are more or less indistinguishable in spite of the different ingredients listed on the packets. No other major Antarctic nation still sticks to this dreary camp food—although you are now allowed an extra ‘goodies box’ and some of the bigger camps have stretched to pizzas and bread-making.

  Of all the changes that took place in the early nineties, the arrival of women seems to have caused the least stir. The first woman to spend a summer field season there was a scientist named Liz Morris. She had been newly appointed Head of the Ice and Climate Division at BAS, but the authorities had assumed that she would have no desire to go south. They were wrong. She was undeterred by the letters explaining that there were no hairdressers, shops or, more darkly, ‘facilities’ in place to receive her, and she went to Rothera in 1987–8.14

  To the shame of the British, this was very late when compared, say, to the Americans, but by the early 1990s more women were spending summers there, and in 1994 the first women wintered at Signy base, to the north. And then . . . to the credit of the British, mixed teams suddenly began to seem normal. When they returned to the bases in the late 1990s some of the first women were astonished by the change. Nobody was watching or judging you in any special way. You could just be yourself.

  People who were at Rothera during these times of great change bring up the loss of the dogs immediately, and often then mention the arrival of the plane. But if you ask them what it was like to have women at the base and then in the field, they look perplexed for a moment, as if they’ve forgotten it was ever any different. Although Rothera is still far from achieving the sort of ratio found at McMurdo, and although the British programme waited longer than most to bring women south, the integration now seems complete.

  With equality of opportunities comes equality of risk. On the hill at the apex of Rothera Point, amid an assortment of crosses and memorials dedicated to Britons who have lost their lives in this part of Antarctica, the newest and shiniest is dedicated to a woman named Kirsty Brown.

  Though plenty of scientists go out from here to study ice and rocks, Rothera itself specialises in understanding the animals of the continent, especially those in the seas around the base. Kirsty was a marine biologist studying these sea creatures. She had short brown hair and an engaging smile, and was so full of smarts and energy that people called her ‘Bang’. She was just finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide. She was also an accomplished rider and diver. And on 22 July 2003, the day the sun finally returned to Rothera after six weeks of winter darkness, she was out snorkelling. Kirsty was excited about diving among the ice—and had already stated that she would go out every day if she could. This particular day, she was swimming along with her buddy (the rules strictly forbade going alone), with two more watching from the shore.

  Nobody had noticed the leopard seal in the water. Swimming was forbidden if they were around, but only so as to avoid disturbing the seals. Leopard seals are big and brutish. They can be thirteen feet long. They have thick thuggish necks and squared-off muzzles that jut aggressively. They are top predators, swaggering rulers of the Antarctic seas. Leopards are the reason that penguins hesitate nervously at the ice edge, silently egging each other on, till one jumps and the others spontaneously follow in a cascade of black and white. There’s safety in numbers. Or, at least, there’s less of a chance that you will be the one to be caught. Penguins and fish fear leopard seals with good reason, but they had never been known to attack humans. And yet, this one did.

  Kirsty probably didn’t see it coming. She barely had time to scream. Its head was the size of her entire upper torso. It must have weighed six or seven times as much as she did. Her diving knife would have been of little use even if she’d had time to wield it. The seal took her down, held her head in its mouth; it seemed to be playing. She resurfaced once then vanished again while her companions were still launching the rescue boat. By the time they got to her, it was too late. Her dive computer showed that the seal had taken her to 230 feet below the surface and held her there for six minutes before abruptly releasing her. Nobody knows why it attacked. Perhaps it thought she was a fur seal. Perhaps she accidentally disturbed it. The doctor spent an hour trying to resuscitate her. And then the shocked winter crew spent another few weeks with her body, waiting for the emergency plane that would fly in and take her back home.

  Kirsty’s monument on the hill at Rothera Point sits on a cairn of artlessly arranged rocks; it is a toposcope, a circle of metal explaining the view through 360°, naming the surrounding glaciers, mountains and seas. And running round the centre is an engraved tribute: ‘Kirsty “Bang” Brown. In such a short time she achieved so much and lived life to the full.’ She was only twenty-eight.

  Rothera divers still brave the waters around here, but there is always someone watching, ready to sound the alarm. They bring their catches to Rothera’s aquarium, a cold bright room filled with round tanks that are heaving with weird Antarctic sea life.

  Lloyd Peck specialises in the effects of warming on the coldblooded creatures that have made Antarctica their home. The Endurance had delivered me to Rothera for a brief visit, and Lloyd had offered to show me his beloved animals. He bounced enthusiastically between tanks, pulling out the ten-legged starfish that I had seen in McMurdo, and the antifreeze fish and the giant sea spiders and all those other alien adaptations by which the animals here make the most of the frigid waters.

  ‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘If you mention life in Antarctica, people don’t think of any of these. It’s always penguins, seals and whales.’

  ‘That’s because films about Antarctica always focus on the charismatic animals,’ he replied. ‘But warm-blooded animals only account for less than 0.00001 per cent of species on Earth. So for a scientist, if you take a statistical approach they don’t exist. They’re such a small proportion of life on Earth that they don’t really exist.’

  Whoa. Statistically speaking warm-blooded animals, including humans, don’t really exist?

  Lloyd laughed. ‘The real animals that we have to understand and know about are the ones that are the vast majority of species on Earth, the cold-blooded animals. Like the clams in this tank.’ He reached in, grabbed one and pointed it towards me. This was far bigger than any clam I had ever seen. Lloyd could barely hold it in one hand. It had a luminous pearly clamshell, hinged and cylindrical, and, at the top, a wrinkled concertina of splodgy grey muscle. ‘We do a lot of work on this species,’ he was saying when the animal unexpectedly launched a freezing jet of seawater at me as if it were a schoolboy in a peeing contest. I yelped and jumped backwards. ‘Yes, I forgot to say that they squirt. Sorry.’ He was laughing again.

  ‘That’s why I like them. They do things you don’t expect. They’re the only clams that can swim by jet propulsion. They’re normally buried in the sea floor and the wrinkled part is all you can see. But if they’re dug up by an iceberg they have to get back down to a low point to bury themselves. So they squirt out a jet of water and take off. Of all the bivalves—molluscs, oysters, mussels—they’re the only ones that can do this!’

  Lloyd clearly enjoys his animals. But his research on these clams and many of the other creatures in the aquarium is yielding troubling news about the wildlife of the Peninsula. Although there is little now to be feared from the men with
their harpoons and clubs, warming is subjecting the animals here to a new threat and it could turn out to be the worst danger yet.

  ‘We’re looking at how they cope with rising temperatures. If you pull these clams out of the sediment they have to rebury themselves to do the normal things they do in life. If you warm them up, you quickly get to a temperature where they can’t do it any more. For these guys that’s only about a two-degree warming.’

  He knew this because he and his colleagues had done the experiment. They put some of these clams into a tank, changed the temperature of the water, and watched what happened. Antarctic sea creatures are never in a hurry. If you watched in real time, you would quickly get bored. But Lloyd showed me the speeded-up video, with twelve hours compressed into about a minute. At 32°F the clams were enthusiastic, jigging up and down like jackhammers as they forced their shells back underground. But when he heated them up by just a few degrees they simply lay there, limp, flaccid and supine. It was too darn hot.

  ‘Why does a warmer temperature make it harder for them to bury themselves?’ I asked.

  ‘Warm-blooded animals like us set our own internal temperatures regardless of what it’s like outside,’ Lloyd said. ‘But cold-blooded animals keep themselves at the same temperature as the environment and their metabolic rate depends on that temperature. As you warm these animals up, their metabolic rate goes up, and so does their cost of living.

  ‘If I get you to walk upstairs you can probably hold a conversation. If I ask you to run upstairs and raise your metabolic rate it will be harder. If you eat a big meal first and try to run up the stairs you’ll probably be sick because you can’t get enough oxygen quickly enough to power both your muscles and your digestion. With these animals, warming them up is the equivalent of giving them a big meal and making them run upstairs. They don’t have the spare capacity to do anything else.’

  ‘What happens if they can’t bury themselves?’

  ‘They’re vulnerable to predators. Also they have to be in the right position to pump water to feed and to reproduce. For them, not being able to get back in the sediment is really bad news.’

  And then he showed me more of the creatures he had tested in his warming tanks. The strangest were bright yellow snails the size and shape of lemons, which had their shells on the inside, covered with soft tissue that shone with a ghostly glow. Each was glued to the side of the Perspex tank with one large yellow foot, and you could see their tentacles twitching as they ‘breathed’ the oxygen in the seawater.

  ‘Aren’t they amazing?’ Lloyd said. ‘They eat sea squirts. They exist in huge profusion in some parts of Antarctica, and apart from a handful of biologists, most people have never seen them before.’

  ‘How vulnerable are they?’ I asked.

  ‘We know that these animals can’t cope with rising temperatures. Evolutionarily speaking, the temperatures here have been very low and very constant for a long time. The animals back home in European seas are used to a seasonal change of ten, maybe twelve degrees. These guys have a temperature change of two degrees or less during the year. They’ve lost the ability to cope with big temperature changes. That means that as the seas warm they’ll be the first ones to suffer.’15

  Lloyd is very worried about the effect the warming already happening on the Peninsula will have on the sea creatures that, until now, have been flourishing here. His experiments have already shown that it won’t take much more warming to tip them over the edge.

  ‘We’ve looked at eight different species and so far they have all been sensitive to small changes. Some of these amazing creatures could disappear before most people even know they’re there. And that’s a crying shame.’

  For the first time since I’d met him, Lloyd’s face fell. He wasn’t laughing now.

  These animals are Lloyd’s life, but why should the rest of us care? Well, you don’t need to lose many species for it to make a big difference to the ecosystem as a whole. One in particular, a small, shrimp-like creature called krill, is a cornerstone for the entire food web. And it seems to be suffering, too.

  Krill depend on the presence of sea ice for their livelihood. They eat the algae that grow under sea ice, and their own young also hang out under the protection of the ice in great krill nurseries. But with the recent warming has come melting. And in a study of nearly 12,000 net hauls from the krill catches of nine different countries, going all the way back to 1926, researchers have found what they describe as a ‘significant’ decline in numbers.16

  That in turn appears to be having a knock-on effect on the charismatic creatures—many seals, whales and penguins—that rely on krill for their food. Already, numbers of chinstrap and Adélie penguins are falling on the Peninsula. Their staple foodstuff is disappearing, and so are they.17

  Of course there are winners as well as losers. But in this case, the winners moving in to take over the ecosystem are dismal creatures called salps, which are formless gelatinous blobs that are palatable to almost nobody in the higher echelons of the food web.18 Taking out chinstrap penguins and Adélie penguins and perhaps seals and whales, too, and replacing them with salps is probably a good thing for the salps. For the rest of us? You decide.

  And there’s another alarming change afoot. Until recently the waters of Antarctica have been the most isolated in the world. When the ice first came to the continent tens of millions of years ago many crushing creatures—such as lobsters and crabs—became extinct, and the prohibitively long swim from warmer climes farther north means they have never been replaced. That left a host of evolutionary niches for the rest of the animals to radiate into.

  But now the crabs are coming back. In 2010 researchers sent a remotely operated submarine deep down into a stretch of water just off the west coast of the Peninsula, to scout out any interesting forms of life on the seabed. To their astonishment they found a massive, teeming colony of king crabs, perhaps 1.5 million of them. The first pioneers probably washed in with a surge of warmer water from the south, and now these notorious bone-crushers are poised, ready to descend on an unsuspecting ecosystem that has lost the evolutionary ability to protect itself.19

  It’s no longer necessary to look at thermometers to know that the Peninsula is warming. Change is not just in the air here; it is in the animals, and it’s also in the ice. Over the past few decades, floating shelves of ice that surround the Peninsula have been falling one by one, like dominoes. They break apart, shatter into icebergs that drift away leaving open water where before there was none. For scientists it has become imperative to discover whether this warming really is because of human activity, and, if so, to try to predict what will be next.

  Antarctic ice shelves are highly impressive. You have to sail up close to them to appreciate their size and apparent solidity. The early explorers called the first one they encountered ‘the Barrier’ because it dwarfed their tiny ship. There was no sailing past it, no going round.

  That was the Ross Ice Shelf, near McMurdo on the other side of the continent, the great expanse of floating ice the size of France where Amundsen set up base and Scott and his men perished. Another giant shelf lies almost diametrically opposite this, stretching out from the eastern side of the Peninsula, like the webbing at the base of the Peninsula’s thumb. This is the Ronne Ice Shelf, which covers about the same area as the Ross Shelf, is thicker, and is similarly fed in part by the fast-moving glaciers of West Antarctica.

  Every so often, a massive slab on the seaward edge of one of these monsters will flex just a little too much; perhaps the surface crevasses will start to make their way deeper; tides work the ice up and down, making more crevasses, more cracks until, finally, the slab breaks off and sails away, forming one of those tabular icebergs, flat-topped and square-shouldered, the size of a floating city, or even a county.

  There are also plenty of smaller ice shelves around the Peninsula proper. They float at the inner end of many of the region’s fjords, filling them with icebergs, bergy bits, growlers and all
the various debris of the world of ice. By the standards of the Ross and Ronne ice shelves, these are minor players. Anywhere else in the world they would be considered large.

  And it is these shelves, on the Peninsula, that have started to alarm scientists by falling apart. The first to go was the Larsen Inlet Ice Shelf, which disappeared in 1989. Then, in 1995, the Prince Gustav Ice Shelf, which draped the narrow channel between the northern tip of the Peninsula and James Ross Island and had been retreating for decades, finally gave up the ghost.

  Larsen A, the Prince Gustav’s nearest remaining neighbour, was next. It was about 700 square miles and broke apart in January 1995, sending a plume of icebergs into the Weddell Sea. Researchers now looked uneasily at the next domino in the chain: Larsen B, twice as large and presumably more robust. Was it likely to shatter soon?

  Larsen B lay fairly far down the eastern side of the Peninsula, and to get there meant traversing the notoriously ice-jammed Weddell Sea. The best way to watch it was by satellite. But researchers itched to get there, on the ground, and see for themselves what was happening.

  One of these was Eugene Domack, a sedimentologist from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He knew that the Peninsula was undergoing serious change right now, but he was also ready to take the long view. It was possible that this was just some perfectly natural local warming. Perhaps the Peninsula regularly experienced hot flushes that could disappear as quickly as they came. After all, we had only been acquainted with the region for a couple of centuries. Ice shelves might have been breaking and reforming repeatedly for thousands of years, with nobody there to notice.

  If he could only get up close to one of the disintegrating ice shelves, Gene thought he had a way to figure out whether the ice had a habit of breaking up like this, or if the recent events were truly as alarming as they seemed. First, he needed to test his model on one of the more accessible ice shelves, on the western coast—which is rarely choked up with pack ice. If it worked, he could then try taking it into the rather more challenging waters of the Weddell Sea.