Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  The penguins wouldn’t especially care. They would be used to it. Now they would be off somewhere in the sea, huddled together on the floating ice floes beloved of cartoonists. But even though I’d been out last night in the wind’s full fury, I still couldn’t believe that it could pick up an entire stretch of solid sea ice and whisk it all away.

  When Australian geologist Douglas Mawson hatched his plan to explore the newly discovered Adélie Land, west of Cape Adare, he had no idea that he was choosing one of the windiest spots on the windiest continent on Earth. Perhaps he would have come here anyway. He was, above all, a scientist. He had no interest in stunts such as a dash to the geographic South Pole, a random point in a featureless landscape that is the notional axis around which the Earth spins but has otherwise little to recommend it. Instead, as part of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, Mawson had travelled to the south magnetic pole, a much more scientifically satisfying spot that marked the place where all the Earth’s magnetic field lines gather together—and could help explain the behaviour of compasses the world over.

  Now Mawson wanted more. Adélie Land offered the dual prospect of exploring further the strange magnetic fields around the south geomagnetic pole, as well as performing geological studies that could connect this unknown terrain with previous explorations to the east.

  Mawson would have been a valuable member of anyone’s team. He was six feet three, physically strong, relentlessly determined and an intellectual powerhouse. And he had Antarctic form. Scott had already tried to persuade Mawson on to his latest expedition, even offering him a guaranteed place in the sledging team that would make the latest attempt on the Pole. Not a chance. Mawson had his own scientific agenda and he was sticking to it.

  So on 8 January 1912, just a week before Scott’s team would be trudging wearily to the geographic pole, Mawson’s own Australasian Antarctic Expedition steamed into a bay just to the east of what is now Dumont d’Urville. Even while they were unloading their equipment and building their huts, Mawson and his men began to realise what they might be up against. The winds were extraordinary. The invisible air picked up materials and equipment weighing hundreds of pounds and flung them around like matchsticks, before shattering them on the rocks. Mawson and his expeditionary team learned the art of ‘hurricane walking’, leaning so far into the wind that it seemed they were perpetually on the point of crashing face first into the ground (and when, on occasion, the mischievous wind dropped for a moment, so did the hurricane walkers).

  Describing the experience drove the pragmatic Mawson to poetic heights: ‘The climate proved to be little more than one continuous blizzard the year round; a hurricane of wind roaring for weeks together, pausing for breath only at odd hours,’ he wrote.23 ‘A plunge into the writhing storm-whirl stamps upon the senses an indelible and awful impression, seldom equalled in the whole gamut of natural experience. The world a void, grisly, fierce and appalling. We stumble and struggle through the Stygian gloom; the merciless blast—an incubus of vengeance—stabs, buffets and freezes; the stinging drift blinds and chokes.’24

  One of Mawson’s colleagues, a young lieutenant named Belgrave Ninnis, who had been passed on to Mawson from Shackleton, took a more whimsical approach to his description. ‘It really looks as if there must have been a large surplus of bad weather left over after all the land had been formed at the Creation, a surplus that appears to have been dumped down in this small area of Antarctica.’25

  Come the end of the winter, having been largely trapped in their hut by the force of the endless storms, the men were restless and ready for work. Three parties set out with dog teams in different directions, all still battling the ongoing gale. Ninnis joined Mawson and another man—Xavier Mertz—on what was likely to be the toughest leg, a long sledging journey to the far east.

  The men had been sledging east for more than a month and all seemed well, when the first disaster came not from the wind, but the ice. Ninnis was travelling behind the other two men, jogging along beside his sledge. Mawson heard a faint whine and assumed one of the dogs had received an encouraging flick of Ninnis’s whip. But when he turned, there was no sign of Ninnis, dogs or sledge, just a gaping hole in the snow. Mertz and Mawson raced to the edge of the hole. Peering into the darkness they could see one wounded dog and a few items of equipment on a shelf 150 feet down, far beyond their longest rope. Of Ninnis and the rest of the dogs there was no sign. They shouted for hours but they were powerless to help.

  Beyond the horror at the sudden loss of their companion came the realisation that they themselves were now in terrible trouble. Assuming that the first sledge would be the more vulnerable to crevasses, they had packed almost everything of value on the second one; most of the food, the tent, the spare clothes, the six best dogs, and all of the dog food had now vanished, with Ninnis, into the ice sheet. The only way home would be with makeshift gear, feeding the dogs to each other and to themselves. ‘Mawson and I have to hold together, and with the few remaining things, to do our best to find the way back to the Winter Quarters,’ Mertz wrote in his diary. In his, Mawson wrote: ‘May God help us.’26

  Within days they were boiling dog paws to make them palatable, hungrily devouring every bit of the scrawny animals left behind. The livers were especially tasty, but also deadly. Neither man knew that dog livers contain poisonous amounts of vitamin A. Indeed, nobody at the time knew that vitamin A, or any of the other vitamins, even existed. But they did notice that they were unaccountably weakening. The skin began sloughing off their feet and hands. Pale blood trickled from their nostrils and fingernails. Mertz eventually died in Mawson’s arms, and, after two days sitting helplessly beside the body, Mawson buried him and struck out again, alone.

  Shortly afterwards, the snow gave way beneath him. ‘So this is the end,’ he thought with weary resignation as he fell. But the sledge above him jammed in the hole that he had broken through and he came up short, dangling in his harness at the end of 14 ft of rope. Without stopping to think he began the climb back out. A tremendous struggle brought him to a knot in the rope, then to another. He reached the overhanging snow lid, was on the point of heaving himself out, when the snow gave way and he crashed back down.

  Now he was dangling again in the faint blue light of the crevasse, turning slowly as the rope twisted this way and that. He had nothing left. His only two regrets were that he had not eaten all the remaining food when he could, to have felt satiated for one last time in his life; and that he had no pill in his pocket with which to achieve a painless death. Instead the end was to be slow and miserable. Or, he could just slip out of his harness and fall into the darkness below. His hand moved to the straps.

  What would you have done? What would I?

  It was at this point that Mawson remembered the lines from Robert Service’s poem ‘The Quitter’:

  Just have one more try—it’s dead easy to die

  It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.

  And he chose pain, and life. He took his hand from the harness buckle and put it instead on the rope. Heave. Then another hand. Heave. Somehow he managed to haul himself out a second time. He lay on the snow for several hours, unable to move. Then, endowed by nature with the belligerent drive for survival that marks out all true Antarcticans, both human and animal, he roused himself, prepared some food, and constructed a rope ladder for all the subsequent times that he would crash into crevasses between here and home.

  When Mawson finally reached the edge of the plateau he was already nine days late for his rendezvous with companions, and ship, back at Winter Quarters. The danger from crevasses was all but over, but now he had to contend again with the Adélie Land winds that came roaring down on him from the ice sheet. Twice he was stuck in his makeshift tent for two days, while the clock ticked and the prospect of rescue receded. ‘The tent is closing in by weight of snow and is about coffin size now,’ he wrote. ‘It makes me shudder.’27

  At last he reached Aladdin’s Cave, a magical place of scintil
lating ice crystals that the men had used for storage, less than six miles from the hut. There, Mawson gorged on oranges and pineapples while the blizzard roared about him day and night, trapping him for a week of agonised impatience before there was just enough of a lull for him to slip and slide down the ice to Winter Quarters. But the hurricanes of Adélie Land had played their final cruel trick of timing on this great survivor. Staring out to sea he could just make out a black speck on the horizon. He was too late. The ship had gone.

  Five people had volunteered to stay behind, not to rescue him—he was presumed dead—but to seek out his corpse in the spring. Desperately they sent a radio message begging the ship to return. But the brief lull in the weather was over and the winds returned in furious form. It was no longer safe to attempt a landing. The ship steamed back to Hobart, and Mawson was left trapped on the continent for another winter, with the darkness and the blizzards, and a handful of reluctant colleagues, one of whom went quietly mad.

  Thierry Raclot was a tall, imposing figure with a shock of tight black curls that fell frequently across his face—from where he brushed them back impatiently. I had seen him around the base, climbing up among the Adélie nests or watching and taking notes, and once with a little Adélie squirming in his arms. He took a no-nonsense view of his birds, which suited me fine, although I also noticed that the generally fearless Adélies skipped smartly out of the way if you crossed them anywhere near Thierry’s lab.

  Thierry and I were braving the wind to check on his Adélies. There were nests everywhere, with parents stolidly incubating their eggs. The lucky ones were those where the females had already come back and given the males a break to go off and hunt for food after their long fast. ‘It’s that first nest relief that’s the critical one,’ said Thierry. ‘After that, when the chicks are hatched and the short foraging trips start this part of the work is done.’

  He and his research group were trying to probe what happened if the female was late. There could be many reasons for this. She might be exhausted from laying those two large eggs; it might be taking her a long time to find enough good food to replenish her reserves; there could also be accidents out there, or killer whales, or leopard seals.

  But for whatever reason, the males left behind needed to decide when to give up the ghost. If they stayed on the eggs too long, they would starve to death. If they left too early, they would lose their unborn chicks. Thierry wanted to know what triggered that critical point when the urge to feed overwhelmed the urge to breed. He suspected it might be a stress hormone called corticosterone. But the only way to find out was to catch the abandoned males in the act of leaving. And that was harder than it sounds.

  This year, they had marked fifty pairs with the same black waterproof stuff that Caroline painted on to her emperors. They noted the laying date, the number of eggs, they checked on the males each day, saw who left, caught them in the act, measured their weight, the size of their flippers, beak, chest and the amount of corticosterone in their blood.

  ‘It can be quite difficult. You try to catch them on the rocks because on snow they can move very fast—even faster than you. Some try to escape and you have to run after them. It’s much better if they stand and face you and try to fight. If the weather’s good you can use a crook around the neck but in this wind you can forget it.’

  The male leaves when his weight has dropped in half, about eight pounds. Of the marked group, Thierry had managed to catch five males in the act of abandoning. Nineteen had been successfully relieved by their females and most of the rest had sneaked off. ‘It’s a long hard process. We would like to have a few more birds for our data but—luckily for the penguins and unluckily for our study—it’s hard to get data at this late stage of fasting. You have to monitor a lot of birds to get the data from just a few of them.’

  High up on the bank, in the middle of a crowded set of nests, a penguin was lying flat on his eggs. I could just make out the top part of a smudgy black number on his chest. ‘That’s number eighteen,’ said Thierry. ‘He’s the last of the males. He’s fasted for forty-five days and it looks as though the female isn’t coming back. But the main problem is to be there to catch him when he leaves. He doesn’t tell you ‘I’ll be leaving in an hour’. I check him throughout the day. Today the weather’s too bad to be out there for long, but on a good day I can be watching for three or four hours at a stretch.’

  We had both had enough of the wind now, and Thierry took me to see the other half of his experiment. Next to his lab there was a holding pen, where a handful of Adélies stood or lay. Their breasts were marked with numbers that were now turning brown. They had coloured bands on their flippers and two small instruments, half the size of a cigarette packet, glued to either side of their backs.

  Thierry told me that much of what they already knew about the signal to abandon nest came from these experiments on captive birds. In early December, they chose a few males that hadn’t managed to breed, captured them and brought them here. Every day they weighed them and took blood samples, which revealed what was happening internally. First the birds used up their carbohydrates, very quickly, within a few days. Then they started on the body lipids—the fat store. Finally, when the lipids reached a dangerously low level, about 20 per cent of the starting amount, the birds started to burn their proteins. Now they were like marathon runners, hitting the wall, literally digesting their own muscles. And that was when the warning bells started to go off inside.

  You could tell because that was also the point when the birds started to move. The instruments on their backs functioned as a sort of pedometer. At first the birds stayed more or less motionless, just as they would on the nest. But when they were ready to go they started hopping restlessly from foot to foot, moving around the pen. That was when Thierry released them. Usually there were four to six captive birds in here at a time, and every time he released one he caught another. This season he already had gone through about fifteen birds.28

  Amazingly, the birds seemed to know exactly when the lipid levels got low, when they had started digesting their muscles. How could they be so in tune with the internal subtleties of their metabolisms? And was there anything we could learn about sensing—and manipulating—our fat-burning phases?

  Thierry and his group hit on corticosterone as a possible signal since it seemed to encourage other seabirds to start foraging. To test this, they had been giving some of these captive birds different levels of the hormone. So far it looked promising. The birds that received the highest hormonal dose started in on their proteins sooner than they needed to, and also started moving around. And the level of another hormone, prolactin—which encourages parental care—abruptly fell. Now he wanted to know if corticosterone levels rose naturally when the birds hit the wall. All he needed was to catch a few more birds in the act.

  On my way back to the dorm I passed number eighteen’s nest. He was still there, the brown smudgy number clear on his grubby chest. He was still starving, still hoping that his mate would come. His hormones hadn’t kicked in yet. He knew his life was not yet in danger. But the turning point was closer than I realised. Later that evening in the communal bathroom I bumped into Thierry brushing his teeth. ‘We missed him,’ he said sadly. ‘Number eighteen has gone.’29

  It was still only midsummer, but I could sense that evolution had already chosen this year’s winners and losers in the Antarctic breeding game. The emperor chicks were somewhere else, sinking, or swimming, on their own merits. The last of the unrelieved Adélie males had given up and gone, while the successful parents were beginning to hatch their young and stuff them full of food to prime their overactive mitochondrial hothouses.

  But there was one more species of true Antarctican that still had breeding sites and nesting strategies left to play for: snow petrels. Like the Adélies, snow petrels never stray far from the ice. They come here in summer to breed and raise their young, and then join the Adélies in their winter quarters, hanging around at the edge of the pa
ck ice, feeding on fish and krill and waiting for the summer to return.

  Olivier Chastel is a specialist in Antarctic seabirds. A biologist from the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Villiers-en-Bois, he has studied many different species in the south: albatrosses, skuas, petrels and penguins. I had arranged to meet him in his office, and he told me that of all the birds he had studied, snow petrels were his favourites. ‘You know, they’re pure white, they have this romantic name.’

  Yes, they were romantic, these angels of the Antarctic world. I’d seen them wheeling overhead against a brooding purple sky. Early travellers thought they were the souls of dead sailors. They were heart-stoppingly beautiful. I said this to Olivier and he smiled. ‘I’ll show you now if you like. But you’d better not look at them too closely. Because when you’ve seen them fighting you’ll have a different image.’

  First, we stopped at a skua nest to check on the eggs. ‘I like skuas, too,’ Olivier said. ‘They’re tough. They’re not afraid of you. As soon as you put a ring on one of these birds, it has a personality. Some birds are shy, some are nasty, some are clever, some stupid. One skua specialises in taking off people’s hats and dropping them in the sea. A friend lost a lens cap from his camera. They test everything to see if it’s edible.’

  On the bare rock there was one unhatched egg and one bemused-looking ball of fluff. The egg was lying in a pool of meltwater, which put it in imminent danger of freezing. Oliver climbed over and did his best to drain the water while the two parents screamed madly and dive-bombed him, their wicked beaks shining with menace. Automatically, he put one hand up in the air above his head as he crouched.

  ‘This pair is one of the easier ones,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘With the others I have to carry a stick and hold it high in the air. Then they don’t attack.’