All these extremes mean that Antarctica is by far the emptiest continent, with no indigenous people, no permanent inhabitants and a temporary population varying from about 1,000 in winter to more than four times that in summer, excluding tourists. So far, fewer than a dozen people have been born on the continent, all at Chilean and Argentinian stations, which also maintain schools. The population of the Pole ranges from around 50 in the winter to well over 200 in the summer. It is by no means the smallest station and not necessarily the most isolated. Several inland stations might make the latter claim, depending on the criteria used. The uninhabited South Pole of Inaccessibility is one possible benchmark for the most isolated point on the continent. Isolated population bases include Kunlun Station on Dome A – but this runs only in the summer – and the Russian year-round station Vostok, which has a wintering population of not much more than a dozen. Of course, temporary field bases may be smaller and more isolated than these stations.
The Pole, then, is extreme, but not quite as extreme in any one measure as other places in the continent. It can, of course, claim the longest continuous period of darkness (and light) – half a year – although it shares this record with its northern counterpart. Ultimately, it seems that the Pole’s primary claim to fame, in terms of geographic and climatic extremes, is that it is, by definition, the most southerly point on the planet.
What is there to see at the Pole, human infrastructure aside? For most people, the name ‘South Pole’ probably conjures up a wide, icy plain – an image characterized more than anything else by absence. ‘It just looks flat, greyish, and, frankly, rather dull’, observes the science journalist Gabrielle Walker, speaking about the East Antarctic ice sheet. She is describing a view from an aircraft, however. While at surface level the plateau is not what you would call a varied environment, it would be doing it a disservice to think of it as entirely homogenous. Deep crevasses can form where the ice sheet meets an obstacle, such as a nunatak or an ice shelf, although they are less common in comparatively featureless interior regions such as the Pole. However, as the early explorers discovered the hard way, the snow surface is also subject to other topographic features: it can be eroded by the wind into a series of peaks, troughs and ridges. These are termed, in the plural, ‘sastrugi’ (a term originally deriving from Russian). In areas of high katabatic winds they can be a couple of metres tall, although at the Pole they are much smaller. Moreover, while the Pole looks flat from the air, it sits on a slope – what Paul Siple, the scientific leader of the first group to winter there in 1957, called a ‘very gentle hillside’, so that one horizon is much closer than its opposite.10 The changing response of this first group to their surrounds, as reported by Siple, is revealing:
Yukimarimo – naturally formed frost balls – at the South Pole Station during a sunrise in 2008.
when the men first came to the Pole what most impressed each in turn was the ‘nothingness’ of this southernmost spot. There was no other place in the world where there was less to look at. The eye could not feast on a distant mountain, the ocean, birds, foliage – or even a crevasse. The nearest mountain peak lay 300 miles away and the ocean was 800 miles off. But as they began looking closer, they saw new things each time. There was beauty in the snow surface that was not apparent at the outset. The snow had different shapes and forms, from massive drifts to sastrugi-carved fields and on down to exquisite tiny crystals. Optical phenomena were all about us and some of them were awesome. We may have been people in solitary confinement, but the beauty of what lay around us was awe-inspiring.11
The Dome at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is seen above a field of sastrugi – ridges of snow formed by wind erosion – in late October 2003.
The optical phenomena to which Siple refers include the ‘Southern Lights’ or ‘Aurora Australis’, visible during the long polar night, as well as a host of other effects when the sun is in the sky, such as solar halos, ‘parhelia’ or ‘sun dogs’, solar pillars, and blue and green ‘flashes’. All are visible elsewhere in the world but are more commonly seen and particularly spectacular in the polar regions. Best-known are the auroras, waving bands of coloured lights in the night sky, most often green, but also red and violet. Robert F. Scott’s journal entry, written at Cape Evans on midwinter’s day in 1911, evokes the phenomenon with characteristic eloquence:
The eastern sky was massed with swaying auroral light … fold on fold the arches and curtains of vibrating luminosity rose and spread across the sky, to slowly fade and yet again spring to glowing life … It is impossible to witness such a beautiful phenomenon without a sense of awe, and yet this sentiment is not inspired by its brilliancy but rather by its delicacy in light and colour, its transparency, and above all by its tremulous evanescence of form. There is no glittering splendour to dazzle the eye, as has been too often described; rather the appeal is to the imagination by the suggestion of something wholly spiritual, something instinct with a fluttering ethereal life, serenely confident yet restlessly mobile.12
Auroras are produced by the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles issuing from the sun. These interactions can accelerate electrons down magnetic field lines and towards the Earth. Here they excite oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, which emit light at particular wavelengths when they relax towards a normal state – hence the colours of the display. Auroral activity is normally concentrated in an oval-shaped band surrounding the Geomagnetic Pole, although during periods of increased solar activity the band can shift, distort and expand so that auroral effects are visible further north in the southern hemisphere. A number of Antarctic stations, including South Pole, sit near to the zone (Australia’s Mawson and Japan’s Syowa, both coastal stations, are particularly well placed in this regard). Thus the sky, during the Pole’s six-month night, is often lit up by waving curtains of light.
Another impressive phenomenon is the ‘halos’ – ‘arcs or spots of light in the sky’ – caused by the refraction and reflection of light through crystals suspended in the atmosphere.13 They can be produced by moonlight or artificial light – the ‘ring around the moon’ is a well-known example – but solar halos are the most spectacular. They can take a variety of forms – rings, arcs, ‘mock suns’, pillars – in different combinations, depending on factors such as the shape of the crystals, their orientation to the sun, and the sun’s elevation. In lower, warmer latitudes, they tend to occur when the sun is high in the sky, because ice crystals are here confined to the upper atmosphere. They can be seen every few days in highly populated parts of the world, but tend not be noticed: although it is not unusual to look up at the moon, few people regularly look up at the sun. In very cold climates, ice crystals are suspended close to the Earth’s surface, so these effects happen right before people’s eyes.14 The Pole, with its low, six-month sun and extremely cold temperatures, is an ideal place for viewing impressive and often quite rare halos.
Sun dogs with halo at the base of Mount Vinson.
Accounts of Antarctic exploration frequently contain descriptions of these effects. The meteorologist on Scott’s second expedition, George Simpson, lectured to his companions about various atmospheric phenomena, which they in turn marvelled at on their travels:
This morning it was calm and clear save for a light misty veil of ice crystals through which the moon shone with scarce clouded brilliancy, surrounded with bright cruciform halo and white paraselene. Mock moons with prismatic patches of colour appeared in the radiant ring, echoes of the main source of light. Wilson has a charming sketch of the phenomenon.15
NASA satellite-generated view of the Aurora Australis in September 2005.
The ‘mock moons’ (paraselenae) to which Scott refers are also known as ‘moon dogs’ – bright spots appearing on either side of the moon itself (or sometimes just on one side). The daytime equivalents – ‘parhelia’ or ‘sun dogs’ – are, along with the ring, the most commonly encountered halo. The
spectacular sky shows best known to most humans – sunrise and sunset – each occur only once a year at the South Pole. However, the sun’s disc takes more than a day to make its full transit below or above the horizon, and the whole process of sunrise and sunset is elongated, with twilight continuing for weeks. Particular optical effects, such as the ‘green flash’ – a burst of green light, normally a few seconds long, that occurs just as the top of the sun is disappearing below the horizon – can last intermittently for hours.16
For the aesthete and the atmospheric scientist, then, the South Pole has plenty of variation; but for the animal lover and the biologist, there is little on offer. Outside the station infrastructure, no life above the microbial level can exist at the South Pole. The only native creature to have ventured there is a south polar skua – a large Antarctic seabird. Scott reported seeing one on his fateful polar journey while camped at around 87 degrees south, 300 km (185 miles) from the Pole: ‘an extraordinary visitor considering our distance from the sea’.17 There are later reports of skuas occasionally visiting the interior of the plateau, including the Pole.18 A snow petrel might also, at a stretch, make the distance – they have been recorded as far south as 85.5 degrees.19
Edward Wilson’s watercolour of a halo display, painted in mid-January 1911 at Cape Evans.
Sun dog at 89 degrees south.
Things are very different on the warmer coastal parts of the continent – a reminder that Antarctica is a heterogeneous place, not all of one piece. Life at its edges is far more evident, although most of the animals that can be found on land rely primarily on the marine ecosystem – the cold, rich waters around the continent – rather than the terrestrial environment.20 Marine mammals that ply Antarctic waters and breed on its ice include Weddell, leopard, crabeater and Ross seals. They eat fish and krill (and penguins, in the case of the leopard seal), and in turn are menaced by orcas. Elephant seals breed on subantarctic islands but are summer visitors to the Antarctic continent, hauling out on beaches to moult. Several species of whale including humpbacks, fins, minkes and the largest of all living animals, blue whales, travel down to take advantage of the plentiful food supplies in the freezing water.
While penguins are automatically associated with the South Pole, this is an example of the term being used as shorthand for Antarctica. As aquatic birds, penguins inhabit the continent’s coastal areas and fast ice, as well as the subantarctic islands and, indeed, various locations up to the equator. There are four species that live and breed on or very near the continent – chinstraps, gentoos, emperors and Adélies – although it is the last two of these that are considered ‘true’ Antarctic penguins, since they breed further south and are better adapted to the continent’s environment. The closest that penguins come to the Pole itself is more than 1,370 km (850 miles) away, at the Adélie colony at Cape Royds on Ross Island. Many other bird species, such as skuas and petrels, can be found on and around the Antarctic coast. Ever since the publication of Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Antarctica has been irrevocably associated with the albatross, but these birds mostly haunt higher latitudes of the southern ocean, and no species breed on the continent.
In the main, Antarctic terrestrial life consists of invertebrates, but even this is limited. Midges can be found in the comparatively mild conditions of the Antarctic Peninsula, but no insects exist in the rest of the continent, although mites, springtails and nematodes manage to survive in ice-free areas. Vegetation is largely confined to the coast; two flowering plants can be found on the Peninsula, but mosses, lichens and algae make up most of the plant life further south.21 Lichen is the hardiest of Antarctic plants; it appears on and in exposed rock in the middle of the plateau, as close as 260 km (160 miles) to the Pole.22
A baby Weddell seal.
Inside the station, non-human life can survive but is forbidden: the 1991 ‘Madrid Protocol’, part of the Antarctic Treaty System, stipulates the exclusion of all non-native organisms from the continent bar humans. Permits can be obtained only for specific approved uses, such as domestic plants for food. Amundsen-Scott base includes a hydroponic greenhouse that doubles as a therapeutic space of escape for its human occupants. Inhabitants of the Pole clearly feel the lack of the non-human life that coastal stations enjoy: ‘Plastic flowers are planted in the snow outside some buildings. On a desk a magnetic fish lurches in its fishbowl, and in the Galley a plastic potted smiling flower dances to loud noises.’23 Dogs, of course, have been at the Pole as long as humans. One of the first human acts there was the slaughtering of one: the men of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition regularly killed their failing dogs as food for the remaining animals as well as themselves, and they made no exception at their South Pole camp. Helmar Hanssen reluctantly dispatched with a blow to the head his ‘best friend’ Helge, who was ‘portioned out on the spot’.24 Almost half a century later, dogs were back: the crew that built the first station at the Pole included huskies, who ‘led a neglected life’.25 This early inclusion of huskies notwithstanding, the U.S. does not have an extensive history of using working sledge dogs, unlike some other national programmes. Huskies as station pets, however, were not unusual at the Pole until the mid-1970s, when a no-pet policy was enforced at U.S. stations; after that, dogs occasionally arrived with adventurers making polar traverses.26 Laboratory animals were another distraction (and are still allowed under permit): hamsters were introduced at the Pole in 1960 for the purpose of metabolic studies, and twin baby hamsters were born there in 1961.
Emperor penguin.
Emperor penguins appear mildly interested in a Twin-Otter aircraft that has landed tourists on sea ice at the continent’s coast.
A surprising range of introduced animals have made the voyage to the edge of continent, brought accidentally in the holds of ships, or deliberately as food, working animals or pets. They include cats, rats, mice, horses, donkeys, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, hedgehogs and a bat. Dogs are the only introduced animals that have survived unaided for a substantial length of time in the Antarctic environment. The most famous example occurred when the Japanese coastal base Syowa had to be evacuated quickly in early 1958, and fifteen Karafuto dogs were reluctantly abandoned. When the next wintering team arrived a year later, two dogs had survived. They went on to become national celebrities. Despite the strictures of the Madrid Protocol, there are still occasional reports of dogs or cats loose on the continent.27
In the deep past, of course, native flora and fauna would have been spread across the whole Antarctic continent. Antarctica has not always stood in proud isolation at the Pole. Many hundreds of millions of years ago, East Antarctica may well have been joined to the western coast of North America, as part of the northern hemisphere supercontinent Rodinia. Around 500 million years ago it formed a central part of Gondwana, joined to Africa, India, South America and Australia. Northwest Africa lay over the Geographic Pole, while Antarctica was in low southern latitudes. Originally near the equator, Gondwana shifted and broke apart over the next few hundred million years. As the continent moved through different latitudes, it was ‘colonised by an evolving flora and fauna’: big rivers, lakes and seas where fish swam; swamps filled with vegetation; trees such as conifers, gingkos and ferns; large reptiles, dinosaurs and amphibians.28 Palaeontologists can piece together this history from fossils found in the nunataks jutting out of the ice: Scott’s doomed party famously spent hours ‘geologising’ on their return from the Pole, dragging back to their last camp 13.6 kg (30 lb) of rocks, including fossil specimens of Glossopteris – an ancient fern – confirming the continent’s early links to India and Australia. By 32 million years ago Antarctica had arrived at its polar location and had broken off from Australia, New Zealand and South America. The circumpolar current began to flow, the continent grew cooler and the plants changed. Beeches, mosses and conifers grew within a few hundred miles of the Pole and there is evidence of tundra and shrubs in the continent’s interior until around 14 million years ago.29 While the co
ntinents will keep shifting into the far future, Antarctica is likely to stay over the South Pole, rotating anticlockwise, for the next 50 million years.30
The South Pole Food Growth Chamber: this hydroponic, artificially lit greenhouse provides fresh food for the expeditioners.
Ancient life means coal, now visible as ‘thick … seams stretching along the length of the Transantarctic Mountains’ – as well as oil and gas.31 The continent’s potential mineral resources were certainly on the mind of early explorers such as the geologist Mawson. Science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century got excited about the possibilities, writing stories with titles such as ‘South Polar Beryllium, Limited’.32 Over the years, a number of different minerals have indeed been found in the region, including lead, zinc, copper, silver, gold, tin, nickel, cobalt, manganese, chromium, titanium and uranium.33 The discovery in the Prince Charles Mountains of the mineral kimberlite, in which diamond is sometimes present, generated media interest. However, the Antarctic presents numerous obstacles to miners: the lack of exposed areas, the thickness of the ice, the difficulties negotiating sea ice and icebergs, the isolation and environmental extremes. Places high on the ice sheet away from mountains, such as the South Pole, are particularly unlikely sites for mineral exploitation. Moreover, with the exception of iron and coal, there is no direct evidence that any minerals are present in the continent in large enough quantities even to warrant the term ‘deposits’.34 Some estimates of oil and gas quantities based on Antarctica’s geology, however, suggest commercial potential, and it remains possible that parts of the region, including the continental shelves, might be viable for future exploitation if resources elsewhere are scarce enough, prices high enough and technology sufficiently developed.
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