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Aboard the M.V. Ocean Diamond to Antarctica

We rise and fall, over the steel grey waves southbound, our backs to Paris where all the promises and accords at last month’s climate conference seem utterly inconsequential compared to what lies ahead, Antarctica.

I am on the M.V. Ocean Diamond working on a team as a biologist and guide for adventure-minded passengers headed for the white continent. 

Expeditions leave the port of Ushuaia, on the south end of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, head east through the Beagle Channel (named after the HMS Beagle of Charles Darwin’s famed voyage) and then south. “Do you know what the weather will be like?” is the most common question. That’s because the famed Drake Passage, the relatively narrow 1,000-kilometre body of water lying between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula, is one of the roughest and most notorious on the planet. It is part of the greater Southern Ocean, where the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans converge. But it is as much responsible for the region’s climate and biota as the continent it surrounds. 

We are lucky today. The Drake is behaving itself. Waves smacking us broadside from the west are only three to four meters high. A variety of wind-loving sea birds accompany us the entire way, including the ethereal Wandering Albatross, whose 3.5 metre wingspan is the largest of all sea birds. 

We cross the Antarctic convergence encircling the continent, often marked by a fogbank, where cold and dense northbound Antarctic waters meet the relatively warm subantarctic waters and plunge below them. While politicians and their mapmakers define 60°S latitude as the northern limit of Antarctica, biologists consider the Antarctic convergence the true boundary, dipping below Cape Horne and the Falkland Islands before angling northeast, up and over South Georgia island and then well below South Africa. 

As we close in on the continent we come across a massive gathering of krill-gorging Humpback Whales arriving from the calving and mating areas of Brazil and the Caribbean. There are far too many to keep track of today, well over 100. In the Southern Ocean, the Antarctic Krill, the biggest of its kind, is a keystone species, feeding animals from all points in the food web and without which, Antarctica would cease to be Antarctica. 

But krill, and all that depend on it, either directly or indirectly, are startlingly vulnerable to climate change. Every year as sea ice forms around the continent, algae flourishes on the subsurface becoming the inverted pasture for these crustaceous grazers. Sea ice is essential to krill and vital to Antarctica’s entire marine ecosystem. 

It’s difficult to believe that this formidable and massive ecosystem could be so vulnerable at the hands of tiny and hairless primates. 

Among our expedition team is glaciologist and geologist Norm Lasca, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor emeritus, who has a long history in the Antarctic dating back to the 1970s. While 40 is a small window geologically speaking, Lasca has seen remarkable changes on the continent. He has his laptop open to one of the slides from his lecture. I lean against his desk following his finger across the outline of glaciers and ice shelves on his screen.

An ice shelf is essentially the floating end of a glacier. The largest, the Ross Ice Shelf, is the size of France. When portions break off, they form tabular icebergs, the front of which can be 40 metres above the waterline, an impressive chunk of ice when you consider that 85 per cent lies below the surface. 

Lasca tells me that the Larson B. Shelf, about the size of Rhode Island, suddenly and completely collapsed 2002. “It just disappeared,” he says. Ice shelves normally produce icebergs on their seaward side in events called “calving.” The Larson B. disintegrated after 12,000 years of stability, in an alarming 35 days.

He went on to show me the different shelves along the peninsula which are stable, and which are receding. The Larson A collapsed in 1995 and glaciologists are predicting the more southerly Larson C to crumble sometime soon, a consequence of the Antarctic Peninsula’s average temperature increase of 2˚C since the 1940s.

Lasca is a serious man, patient and dedicated to teaching. But in his eyes I can see his frustration with governments and the frighteningly large number of people that don’t believe in human-instigated climate change. 

“Seventy percent of the Earth’s freshwater is locked up in glaciers,” he says.  “The Antarctica ice sheet holds 90 per cent of the Earth’s freshwater the Greenland ice sheet nine per cent. If both were to melt instantaneously, sea levels would rise 60 metres.” 

The Antarctic Peninsula juts north from the rest of the continent, pointing to South America, its mountainous spine originally a continuation of the Andes. It’s sometimes referred to wryly as the “banana belt,” owing to its relatively warmer temperatures and the green from a variety of mosses, lichens, and two flowering plants found here. At 65°S latitude, it’s white and glaciated. While at 65° latitude in the northern hemisphere, there’s Scandinavia, green, forested, and livable. 

This peninsula’s iciness is partially due to the isolating effect of the ocean surrounding Antarctica and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world’s largest. Sometimes described as a river within a sea, it has the effect of insulating Antarctica’s climate from the rest of the world. 

While just a distant thought for most people, Antarctica and its forbidding frigidness is one key keeping Earth’s climate stable and its oceans nutrient and oxygen rich. 

Every year in late March as summer ends, sea ice begins to form and by its climax has doubled the area of the continent. Far from the ice putting Antarctica to sleep it actually triggers the production of cold and salty Antarctic Bottom Water, the densest seawater on Earth.

This brine blends with the Atlantic Bottom Water arriving from the north, forming an “ocean conveyor belt,” a ribbon of water circulating and connecting all oceans, and effecting global climate. Without the addition of this water in Antarctica, ocean circulation would rapidly change effecting world marine productivity and climate in unfathomable ways.

Like the imperceptible movement of glaciers, Antarctica itself is slowly changing and only thanks to scientists using specialized instruments have we been able to detect this. 

It was in 1985 that British scientists at Halley Bay Station far east of the peninsula first identified an ozone “hole” that was one and a half times the size of the U.S. A pristine and isolated wilderness on the other side of the planet was not immune to human industrialization. Even in Antarctic spring we lather on sunscreen to protect ourselves from undeterred UV rays from the sun. 

Antarctica is also a window into the past. 

Locked deep within its 2 to 4 kilometres-thick ice sheet, are pockets of air that were trapped when snow first fell on the continent. It’s from these tiny air pockets from which scientists have been able to reconstruct the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere – and detect the increase of greenhouse gases with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 

After eight days, the ship orients itself back north. Our eyes have been opened. Our backs are to Antarctica.

Nicholas Engelmann is a lecturer and biologist. He lives in Cordoba, Argentina.

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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