Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  4. Huntford, Shackleton, p. 408.

  5. http://www.polarconservation.org/information/evacuations/2GG2-russian

  6. Johnson, Big Dead Place, p. 78.

  7. Martin Pomerantz was an American scientist who realised the potential of the South Pole for astronomy, back in the 1960s.

  8. A. A. Stark, C. L. Martin, W. M. Walsh, K. Xiao, A. P. Lane and C. K. Walker, ‘Gas Density, Stability, and Starbursts near the Inner Lindblad Resonance of the Milky Way’, Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol. 614, 2004, pp. L41–4.

  9. There is a superb video construction of this, based on Tony Stark’s work, at http://easylink.playstream.com/nsf/video/milky_way.rm

  10. At first they made only hydrogen and helium, but then these elements were processed through generations of stars to create the suite of complex elements that make up humans.

  11. Jeff Peterson, ‘Universe in the Balance’, New Scientist, 16 December 2000, pp. 26–9.

  12. http://www.amanda.uci.edu/collaboration.html

  13. http://icecube.wisc.edu/

  14. Luckily for us, and everything else made of atoms, neutrons stay intact when they are bound inside atoms.

  15. Both men have nonetheless documented their many seasons in websites. Robert’s in particular shows some truly breathtaking images. For Robert’s page see http://www.antarctic-adventures.de/ and for Steffen’s, http://www.adventure-antarctica.de/

  16. Being a telescope nanny means dressing and undressing many times a day. For making your commute, you start with a basic layer of thermal T-shirt and long johns. Perhaps add long trousers before pulling on your thermally insulated Carhartt overalls, usually in a sickly mustard shade. A thick fleece jacket comes next, followed by the trusty green polar parka. You’ll need a hat and balaclava to go under your parka hood. And everyone adds their own little touches. Robert Schwarz improvised a rubber mask and tube, bowdlerised from the fire-breathing apparatus, which sat under his balaclava. It made him look like an android, but it stopped his breath from fogging up his goggles.

  17. Following the inconclusive inquest, there were many articles about Rodney Marks’s death. Two of the best are Jeff Mervis, ‘A Death in Antarctica’, Science, 2 January 2009, pp. 32–5, and Will Cockrell, ‘A Mysterious Death at the South Pole’, Men’s Journal, available at http://www.mensjournal.com/death-at-the-south-pole

  18. Johnson, Big Dead Place, p. 92.

  19. Though at the time this was the most winters anyone had spent there, that particular record has now been exceeded. At the time of writing, Robert Schwarz has spent seven winters there, and Steffen Richter shares the current record of eight winters with a man named Johan Booth. However, Jake’s record still stands for the most consecutive winters. For the latest on this and other South Pole wintering statistics, see http://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/wo.html

  20. Here is a blog from someone who actually did this: http://nathantift.com/southpole/journal/journal28.htm

  21. See, for example, Lawrence Palinkas, ‘Psychological effects of polar expeditions’, The Lancet, vol. 371, 12 January 2008, pp. 153–63. DOI:10.1016/ S0140-6736(07)61056-3.

  22. http://www.bigdeadplace.com/welcome.html

  23. http://www.pnra.it/

  24. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/spo/observatory.html

  25. http://www.iris.edu/hq/programs/gsn

  26. Spufford, I May Be Some Time, p. 173.

  27. Solomon, The Coldest March.

  28. Gabrielle Walker, ‘In From the Cold’, New Scientist, 13 October 2001.

  5. Concordia

  1. EPICA was funded to the tune of more than €7 million by the European Commission, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The project involved a second core at Dronning Maud Land near the coast, which was drilled after the one at Dome C was finished. See the European Science Foundation EPICA website at http://www.esf.org/index.php?id=855

  2. http://www.institut-polaire.fr/

  3. The lowest reliably measured temperature on Earth, -89.2°C, was recorded at Vostok on 21 July 1983.

  4. One of the meteorologists, Guillaume Dargaud, recorded the experience in an excellent blog: http://www.gdargaud.net/Antarctica/ WinterDC.html. In fact the record low was -78.6°C. The rest of Guillaume’s site is full of fascinating information about Concordia and Dumont d’Urville, as well as Antarctica in general.

  5. The same experiment was deployed at the South Pole in 2002 within earshot of the station. It ‘mysteriously’ failed at the beginning of winter.

  6. The answer turned out to be complex, but fascinating. See Gabrielle Walker, ‘Antarctic astronomy: Seeing in the dark’, Nature, vol. 438, 24 November 2005, pp. 414–15.

  7. Although Vostok was deeper than the EPICA core, the thicker ice there insulated the base more, making it harder for the slight heat radiating from the inside of the Earth to escape. Thus, the oldest layers have melted away and turned into a giant under-ice lake.

  8. J. R. Petit et al., ‘Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica’, Nature, vol. 399, 1999, pp. 429–36.

  9. EPICA Community Members, ‘Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core’, Nature, vol. 429, 2004, pp. 623–8.

  10. James White, ‘Do I Hear A Million?’, Science, vol. 304, 11 June 2004, no. 5677, pp. 1609–10, but see also Edward Brook, ‘Tiny Bubbles Tell All’, Science, vol. 310, November 2005, no. 5752, pp. 1285–7.

  11. D. Luthi, et al., ‘High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000–800,000 years before present’, Nature, vol. 453, 2008, pp. 379–82.

  12. The Chinese have already begun testing for suitable ice core sites. See Xiao Cunde et al., ‘Surface characteristics at Dome A, Antarctica: first measurements and a guide to future ice-coring sites’, Annals of Glaciology, vol. 48, 2008, pp. 82–7. They are also planning to do astronomy there. See Richard Stone, ‘In Ground-Based Astronomy’s Final Frontier, China Aims for New Heights’, Science, vol. 329, no. 5996, 3 September 2010, p. 1136.

  13. U. Siegenthaler et al., ‘Stable carbon cycle-climate relationship during the Late Pleistocene’, Science, vol. 310, 2005, pp. 1313–17.

  14. Though she initially refused all food there, she was tricked by Hades into eating some pomegranate seeds, which was enough to connect her to the underworld for all time.

  15. http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~brandt/

  16. Stephen G. Warren, Richard E. Brandt and Thomas C. Grenfell, ‘Visible and near-ultraviolet absorption spectrum of ice from transmission of solar radiation into snow’, Applied Optics, vol. 45, issue 21, 2006, pp. 5320–34.

  17. D. Six, M. Fily, S. Alvain, P. Henry and J. P. Benoist, ‘Surface characterisation of the Dome Concordia area (Antarctica) as a potential satellite calibration site, using Spot4/Vegetation instrument’, Remote Sensing of Environment, 89(1), 2004, pp. 83–94.

  6. A Human Touch

  1. http://iaato.org/tourism_stats.html

  2. Translated by Peter Oxford.

  3. I have made three return trips to the Peninsula by ship, once on the US National Science Foundation’s Nathaniel B. Palmer, once on the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, a Russian research ship chartered for tourist trips by Peregrine Adventures, and once aboard the Royal Navy icebreaker HMS Endurance, which was supporting the scientific activities of the British Antarctic Survey. That makes six crossings in total. And every time, Drake Passage has been as flat as a mirror. It can’t be a coincidence. I am clearly some kind of charm—lucky or unlucky depending on what you wish for. If you decide to make this trip and you’re worried about seasickness I suggest you take me with you. But if you want the full experience—the romance of some heavy winds to write home about—make sure I’m not on board.

  4. Jeff Rubin, Lonely Planet: Antarctica, pp. 29–30.

  5. www.peregrineadventures.com/antarctica

  6. http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/

  7. Sadly, the HMS Endurance is now out of commissi
on. Owing to a problem with her valves she came close to sinking in the waters of South America in 2009; though she was returned to the UK, the repair bill would have been too great and she has now been scrapped, to be replaced with a Norwegian icebreaker.

  8. The first report of this dinosaur was: E. Olivero, R. Scasso and C. Rinaldi, ‘Revision del Grupo Marambio en la Isla James Ross—Antartida’, Contribución del Instituto Antartico Argentino, 331, 1986, pp. 1–30; however, it took more than a decade to assemble all the available pieces, and the new species was not named until 2006, in Leonardo Salgado and Zulma Gasparini, ‘Reappraisal of an ankylosaurian dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of James Ross Island (Antarctica), Geodiversitas, vol. 28, 2006, p. 119.

  9. For an overview of Antarctic dinosaurs and references for the finds, see http://antarcticvp.com/education.html

  10. Dominic Hodgson et al., ‘Antarctic climate and environment history in the pre-instrumental period’, in Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment, Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, pp. 119–23, Victoire Press, Cambridge, 2009.

  11. The cooling happened in fits and starts, and ice ages were, of course, generally colder than intervening warm periods such as the one we have today. But the overall trajectory has been securely downwards. See, for example, Hodgson et al., ‘Antarctic climate and environment history in the pre-instrumental period’, p. 123.

  12. John Turner, Steve Colwell, Gareth Marshall, Tom Lachlan-Cope, Andrew Carleton, Phil Jones, Victor Lagun, Phil Reid and Svetlana Iagovkina, ‘Antarctic climate change during the last 50 years’ International Journal of Climatology, vol. 25, 2005, pp. 279–294.

  13. The British Antarctic Survey has a very good website, with information about its own scientific activities as well as a host of material about Antarctica more generally: http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/

  14. Felicity Ashton, ‘Women of the white continent’, Geographical (Campion Interactive Publishing), vol. 77 Issue 9, September 2005, p. 26.

  15. L. S. Peck, K. E. Webb and D. M. Bailey, ‘Extreme sensitivity of biological function to temperature in Antarctic marine species’, Functional Ecology, vol. 18, 2004, pp. 625–30.

  16. Mark A. Moline, Hervé Claustre, Thomas K. Frazer, Oscar Schofield and Maria Vernet, ‘Alteration of the Food Web Along the Antarctic Peninsula in Response to a Regional Warming Trend’, Global Change Biology, vol. 10.12, 2004, pp. 1973–80.

  17. W Z. Trivelpiece et al., ‘Variability in krill biomass links harvesting and climate warming to penguin population changes in Antarctica’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2011, vol. 108, 3 May 2011, pp. 7625–8.

  18. Angus Atkinson, Volker Siegel, Evgeny Pakhomov and Peter Rothery ‘Long-term decline in krill stock and increase in salps within the Southern Ocean’, Nature, vol. 432, 2004, pp. 100–103.

  19. Craig R. Smith, Laura J. Grange, David L. Honig, Lieven Naudts, Bruce Huber, Lionel Guidi and Eugene Domack, “A large population of king crabs in Palmer Deep on the west Antarctic Peninsula shelf and potential invasive impacts”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Published online before print 7 September, 2011, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1496

  20. Gabrielle Walker,‘Southern Exposure”, New Scientist, 14 August 1999, p. 42.

  21. Huntford, Shackleton, p. 432.

  22. Ibid., p. 455.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Ibid., p. 473.

  25. Shackleton, South, p. 83.

  26. Ibid., p. 81.

  27. Ibid., p. 168.

  28. Ibid., p. 167.

  29. Huntford, Shackleton, p. 555.

  30. Alexander, The Endurance, p. 148.

  31. Ibid., p. 183.

  32. Ibid., p. 185.

  33. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, Constable and Company, 1922, vol. 1, p. viii.

  34. http://www.shackletoncentenary.org/the-team/-henry-worsley-writes.php. Note that this is a deliberate misquotation of a sixteenth-century poem called Ship of Fools. The original wording read ‘. . . burned with passion for the West’.

  35. C. J. Pudsey and J. Evans, ‘First survey of Antarctic sub-ice shelf sediments reveals mid-Holocene ice shelf retreat’, Geology, vol. 29, 2001, pp. 787–90.

  36. T. Scambos, C. Hulbe and M. A. Fahnestock, ‘Climate-induced ice shelf disintegration in the Antarctic Peninsula’, Antarctic Research Series, vol. 79, 2003, pp. 79–92.

  37. Eugene Domack et al., ‘Stability of the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula during the Holocene epoch’, Nature, vol. 436, 2005, pp. 681–5.

  38. Scientists think the warming on the Peninsula comes from a combination of the rise in greenhouse gases (from our human burning of coal, oil, gas and trees) and a nasty side effect of the loss of the ozone layer (from our human creation and use of ozone-destroying chemicals). See, for example, J. Perlwitz, S. Pawson, R. L. Fogt, J. E. Nielsen and W D. Neff,‘Impact of stratospheric ozone hole recovery on Antarctic climate’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 35, 2008, p. L08714.

  39. H. DeAngelis and P. Skvarca, ‘Glacier surge after ice shelf collapse’, Science, vol. 299, 2003, pp. 1560–2.

  7. Into the West

  1. Jonathan L. Bamber, Riccardo E. M. Riva, Bert L. A. Vermeersen and Anne M. LeBroq, ‘Reassessment of the Potential Sea-Level Rise from a Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet’, Science, vol. 324, 2009, pp. 901–3.

  2. See, for example, Robin Bell et al., ‘Large subglacial lakes in East Antarctica at the onset of fast-flowing ice streams’, Nature, vol. 445, 22 February 2007, pp. 904–7, and R. P. Scherer, ‘Did the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse during late Pleistocene interglacials: A reassessment’, Geophysical Research Abstracts, vol. II, 2009, EGU2009–5895.

  3. Eric Rignot et al., ‘Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modeling’, Nature Geoscience, vol. I, 2008, pp. 106–10.

  4. Ian Joughin and Richard B. Alley, ‘Stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet in a warming world’, Nature Geoscience, vol. 4, 2011, p. 506.

  5. This was first labelled ‘Ice Stream C’ and has now been renamed Kamb Ice Stream in honour of Barclay.

  6. Ian Joughin and Richard B. Alley, ‘Stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet in a warming world’, Nature Geoscience, vol. 4, 2011, p. 506.

  7. I. Joughin and S. Tulaczyk, ‘Positive Mass Balance of the Ross Ice Streams, West Antarctic’, Science, vol. 295, 2002, pp. 476–80.

  8. David G. Vaughan, ‘West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse—the fall and rise of a paradigm’, Climate Change, vol. 91, 2008, p. 65.

  9. E. Rignot, ‘Fast recession of a West Antarctic glacier’, Science, vol. 281, 1998, pp. 549–51.

  10. A. Shepherd, D. J. Wingham, J. A. D. Mansley and H. F. J. Corr, ‘Inland thinning of Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctica’, Science, vol. 291, 2001, pp. 862–4; A. Shepherd, D. J. Wingham and J. A. D. Mansley, ‘Inland thinning of the Amundsen Sea sector, West Antarctica’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 29, 2002, p. 1364; E. Rignot, D. G. Vaughan, M. Schmeltz, T. Dupont and D. MacAyeal, ‘Acceleration of Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers, West Antarctica’, Annals of Glaciology, vol. 34, 2002, pp. 189–94.

  11. A. Shepherd, D. Wingham and E. Rignot, ‘Warm ocean is eroding West Antarctic Ice Sheet’, Geophysical Research Letters, 31, 2004, p. L23402.

  12. Since the shelves are floating, lower doesn’t necessarily mean thinner. The sea level could have dropped locally for some reason, taking the ice down with it, or less snow could have fallen on the surface. But the researchers checked and rechecked and none of these explanations fitted. Any variations in sea level or snowfall were far too small to explain the drop they were seeing. The shelves had to be melting away from their undersides.

  13. Stephen D. McPhail et al., ‘Exploring beneath the PIG Ice Shelf with the Autosub3 AUV’, in Oceans 09 IEEE Bremen—Balancing Technology with Future Needs, IEEE, Piscataway, New Jersey, 2009.

  14. Stanley S. Jacobs, Adrian Jenkins, Claudia F. Giulivi and Pierre Dutrieux, ‘Stronger ocean circulation an
d increased melting under Pine Island Glacier ice shelf’, Nature Geoscience, vol. 4, 2011, pp. 519–23; Adrian Jenkins et al.,‘Observations beneath Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and implications for its retreat’, Nature Geoscience, vol. 3, 2010, pp. 468–71.

  15. Nathan P Gillett, Vivek K. Arora, Kirsten Zickfeld, Shawn J. Marshall and William J. Merryfield, ‘Ongoing climate change following a complete cessation of carbon dioxide emissions’, Nature Geoscience, vol. 4, 9 January 2011, pp. 83–7.

  16. D. G. Vaughan et al., ‘New boundary conditions for the West Antarctic ice sheet: Subglacial topography beneath Pine Island Glacier’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 33, 2006, p. L09501.

  17. J. W Holt et al., ‘New boundary conditions for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Subglacial topography of the Thwaites and Smith glacier catchments’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 33, 2006, p. L09502.

  18. Because of ocean currents and the way the Earth spins, dumping ice into the ocean in Antarctica doesn’t raise sea levels everywhere by the same amount. Researchers calculate that water from melting ice in West Antarctica would be particularly focused in the Indian Ocean, and on both east and west coasts of the United States.

  19. Byrd, Alone, p. 7.

  20. Ibid., p. 214.

  21. Ibid., p. 262.

  22. Ibid., p. 293.

  23. Gabrielle Walker, ‘Hidden Antarctica: Terra Incognita’, New Scientist, 29 November 2006, pp. 30–35.

  24. L. Gray et al., ‘Evidence for subglacial water transport in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet through three-dimensional satellite radar interferometry’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 32, 2005, p. L03501.

  25. At the latest count there were 397. See A.Wright and M. J. Siegert, ‘The identification and physiographical setting of Antarctic subglacial lakes: An update based on recent discoveries’, in Antarctic Subglacial Aquatic Environments, Geophysics Monograph Series, vol. 192, 2011, edited by M. J. Siegert, M. C. Kennicutt II and R. A. Bindschadler, pp. 9–26, AGU, Washington, DC.