by Chris Turney
If Chris and I were going to attempt anything like Shackleton, we’d have to recreate some of the excitement he generated a century ago. A return to some of his best-known stomping grounds was out of the question though. The Ross Sea and geographic South Pole are home to large research bases today, but they don’t have the combination of past and modern environmental changes we were after. We’d looked at other possibilities: Coats Land, Enderby Land, Wilkes Land—remote parts of the Antarctic that were the target of Shackleton and his contemporaries and are largely forgotten or ignored by government operators today. Unfortunately, none seemed to fit the bill. If we were to raise the estimated $1.5 million needed to bankroll a six-week expedition to such a remote part of the world, our destination also had to capture the public’s imagination. We had to have the right blend of science, adventure, and history.
With Chris away in the field, Annette and I had been bouncing ideas, and a magical name had come up.
“How about Cape Denison?”
There was a moment’s delay as the satellite hook-up relayed my message.
Cape Denison holds a special place in the history of Antarctic exploration. A small outcrop of rocks on the East Antarctic coastline, it is forever associated with one of the most spectacular and often forgotten tales of survival. A century ago, it was the main base of operations for one of the great explorers of the south, trained and mentored by Shackleton himself: the Australian scientist Douglas Mawson. His privately funded science team, with three bases and one research ship, explored a region the size of the United States between 1911 and 1914. Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition team had intended to spend just one year south, but it was not to be. A sudden turn of events led to tragedy on the ice, the deaths of two men, allegations of cannibalism, and, with the return of winter sea ice, an extended stay in Antarctica.
Since Mawson’s time, scientists had only infrequently visited Cape Denison. After 2010, these visits all but ceased with the arrival of giant iceberg B09B, which lodged itself on the seabed of the adjacent Commonwealth Bay. The appearance of this monster has dramatically altered the coastline by preventing the summer breakout of sea ice formed in the bay, isolating Cape Denison from the rest of the world. How long B09B will remain in place is uncertain, with suggestions ranging from just a few years to centuries. But more important, no one is sure what impact the massive expansion of sea ice is having on the area. Some scientists have argued that the local penguin population may have collapsed because of the greater distance they have to travel for food. Other studies suggest the extra sea ice could have stopped the formation of salty, dense waters that are a fundamental part of the global ocean circulation system. Paradoxically, the shutdown of what’s known as Antarctic Bottom Water may also be allowing warm ocean water to reach the edge of the Antarctic continent deep below, melting the fringing ice sheet under the surface with worrying consequences for sea level. Cape Denison is a place where there’s a dizzying number of questions any scientist worth their salt would be itching to tackle.
“Oh, my God, that’s genius. It completely fits the bill.”
Over the next twenty minutes, we excitedly sketched out a science program. As the procession continued past to the beach in the January heat, Chris and I had the making of our enterprise: The Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013–2014.
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Shackleton described the magnetism of Antarctica as being “drawn away from the trodden paths by the ‘lure of the little voices,’ the mysterious fascination of the unknown.” It gets under your skin like nowhere else on Earth. For a scientist, the unknown is a particularly powerful draw. There are so many questions to be answered, so much to learn. At the turn of the twentieth century, Shackleton and Mawson asked what lay south and how this fitted into what was known of more equable climes. After a century of expeditions, the science questions today are no less profound.
With only 2 percent of the continent exposed as rock, the Antarctic holds around 90 percent of our planet’s ice and 70 percent of its freshwater. There’s so much water that if all the ice melted we would be left with a large landmass in the East Antarctic, an archipelago of mountains where the West and Peninsula were, and global sea levels nearly 200 feet higher, flooding the likes of Dhaka, New York, Sydney, and London. Where, when, and how much of the Antarctic ice sheets will melt in a warmer world is a major focus of research. Offshore, the surrounding Southern Ocean supports hugely productive ecosystems, many of them economically important, including the krill and Patagonian toothfish fisheries. These ecosystems also play a crucial role in soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and regulating climate. Just how the ocean, atmosphere, and ice interact to influence the world’s climate is hugely uncertain. The Antarctic makes up 7 percent of our planet’s surface, yet there have never been enough scientists to tackle it.
As a Laureate Fellow, I was determined to make a contribution to the effort. I wanted to learn just how quickly the Antarctic ice sheets could melt. I had recently published a research paper that suggested stronger winds in the mid-latitudes may have changed how the ocean currents circulate around the continent during periods of high global temperatures. One possibility is that past wind shifts may have brought warmer waters up alongside the edge of the ice sheet, raising sea levels more than twenty feet higher than they are today. But did the Antarctic ice sheets collapse in the past? Chris and I had ideas about where we might look to find out.
In the southern summer of 2010, we had flown out from Chile with a private company known as Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions for a four-week season in West Antarctica. We left the small frontier city of Punta Arenas in a balmy 60F. The sky was overcast, damp, almost oppressive. I was excited but nervous. I had spent several months training for this. As a university student, I’d been in the Territorial Army, including a full month of military exercises alongside U.S. troops under the blistering North Carolina sun at Fort Bragg, but I had never been as fit as I was now. Uncertain of what I might face, I had diligently run six miles a day, climbed once a week, trained for crevasse falls and even learned a multitude of knots. Now it was real. We were going to Antarctica and there wasn’t much else I could do apart from keep my wits about me. The aircraft—a converted Soviet transporter that shared more similarities with a rocket than a plane—did not allay my nervousness. We hurtled through the sky at 30,000 feet, the deafening roar from the engines making conversation with Chris or anyone else nigh on impossible. Keen to get my bearings, I made my way up to the front of the cabin. I poured myself a cup of coffee from an urn and, sipping the hot fluid, peered out through the Plexiglas window on the port side of the plane. All I could see through the banks of cloud below were large slabs of sea ice that stretched beyond the horizon. There was no land in sight. It was the farthest I had ever been from civilization.
Four and a half hours after we left Chile we landed in the Ellsworth Mountains. The contrast to damp Punta Arenas couldn’t have been greater: blinding sunshine, a frigid 14F wind, and a vista that took my breath away. The rugged, snow-draped mountains pierced the sky, the deeply gorged valleys proclaiming the sculpting power of ice over millions of years. As we gingerly stepped onto the blue-ice runway, we were greeted by welcoming smiles that were the warmest thing around for a thousand miles.
The Antarctic challenges everything you’ve learned in the north; every idea you thought you had about the world has to be chucked out and reconsidered. This is an environment where life exists in extraordinarily low temperatures, where snow falls under clear blue skies, and where hurricane-force winds can strike at any moment. The intellectual thrill of discovering and interpreting an entirely new landscape among like-minded expeditioners and adventurers was an exhilarating experience. I immediately became besotted with the place. I never felt so alive; my senses went into overdrive. Everything was new: working, eating, cleaning (sometimes), and sleeping; all in twenty-four hours of brilliant, mesmerising daylight. My appetite became insatiable as I adapted to
an environment completely different to anywhere else I had ever been.
Set in a region that drains 22 percent of all ice from the Antarctic continent, the Ellsworth Mountains offered an ideal location to find out what happened to the ice sheets in the past. During our month-long stay, Chris and I climbed mountains, sampled rocks, navigated glaciers and crevasses, dug snow and ice trenches, all to get precious snapshots of how the Antarctic had changed through time. On our return home, we compared our fieldwork results with computer-model simulations of Antarctica’s climate and ice sheets over millennia. There had indeed been massive changes in the height of the ice sheet around the Ellsworth Mountains, but we could see that this was only part of the story. The models suggested that some of the greatest changes had been over on the other side of the continent, far out to the east.
But nowhere is more isolated, extreme, and wild than the East Antarctic. With a world-record low temperature of -128.6F at the Russian base Vostok and precipitation averaging two inches a year, the region has the oxymoronic distinction of being the coldest place on Earth while also being the world’s largest desert. The ice sheet here is a behemoth. It doesn’t just cover a larger area than the West Antarctic, it’s far, far bigger. With an average thickness of 7,300 feet, it’s nine times the size of the west in terms of ice volume. Of the 200 feet of global sea level rise locked up in the Antarctic, some 180 feet lies in the east. But because most of the ice sits above sea level, many scientists consider it to have been relatively stable in the past. The thinking is that the ice sheet is so large that without warm ocean waters lapping along the edge of the continent, the East Antarctic should sit there largely unscathed by higher air temperatures; it might actually get larger, a consequence of the increased evaporation from warm surface waters creating more snowfall at high latitudes.
The problem is, as the East Antarctic is so isolated, extreme, and wild, not nearly enough fieldwork has been done there to test these ideas. The most humans have ever managed is to be visitors, and unwelcome ones at that; even today many areas have never been seen by human eyes. As a result, we don’t fully understand how the ice sheet has behaved in the past. But we do know now that there are places in the east where ice sits on the seabed, making it vulnerable to a warming ocean. One of the most important is the Wilkes Basin, extending 500 miles inland from Mawson’s Cape Denison base. Over an area comparable in size to New Zealand, the Wilkes Basin is covered by 8,000 feet of ice, enough to raise the world’s sea level by more than ten feet. If anywhere can drive up the world’s sea level, it’s the East Antarctic.
* * *
Planning for any research expedition has one large and very real elephant in the room: funding. Early on, Chris and I had worked up a detailed budget and estimated we could do a forty-day voyage for around $1.5 million, including the likely charter costs of a ship and fuel. We had a small amount of funding from research grants, but this would hardly be enough to cast off. We had to get a major injection of cash if we were going to take the expedition beyond the planning stage. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good time to raise money in Australia. Many companies were making very public statements about cutting their donations to groups and charities. Hundreds of letters trying to pique interest went unanswered. Only a handful of organizations suggested meeting. Nothing came of them.
A century before, the likes of Shackleton and Mawson sought the stamp of approval from a learned institution. With this support, an expedition could publicly show that the planned venture had merit and use this to raise funds. In Edwardian times, the Royal Geographical Society was as big as it came. A world-leading center of geographic and scientific understanding, the Society’s assent carried serious weight. As a Fellow of what’s affectionately known as the RGS, I traveled to London to seek its advice.
Today, the RGS is housed in a beautiful, rambling, redbrick mansion just along from the Royal Albert Hall, opposite the Albert Memorial and Kensington Gardens. Walking past the gridlocked traffic and roadworks that seem to be a permanent feature of this part of the city, I signed in and entered a maze of high-ceilinged corridors filled with pictures and memorials commemorating the tragic death in 1912 of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his teammates in the Antarctic. It was eerily silent, almost mausoleum-like, but in spite of the décor, the Grants Programme staff of the RGS were welcoming. “We’re not looking for funding,” I assured them, “but your support for what we’re trying to do would be a tremendous help.” They were enthusiastic, making suggestions about the work, who we might go into partnership with, and what scheme we could best apply for. Four months later the RGS turned us down on a technicality. We didn’t have enough U.K.-based students taking part, and they had no other scheme for which we might get approval. I was gobsmacked. If Mawson or Shackleton applied today, they would be rejected. My point of contact at the RGS apologized, embarrassed they no longer had a way to recognize large scientific expeditions, and offered to raise the issue at the next Council meeting. That didn’t help us. We needed support, not sympathy.
Fortunately, all was not lost. Just a year earlier, I had published a book called 1912: The Year the World Discovered Antarctica. Speaking at the Brisbane Writers Festival, I met representatives of Google Australia. They were keen to look at ways I could communicate science on their social media platforms Google+ and YouTube. I was electrified by the idea. Rather than giving talks to small groups, this was a way to reach out to the world: to show how science works and what my team and I were discovering in the field. Soon after, I started posting blogs and short films under the banner “Intrepid Science,” and my number of followers soared to tens of thousands.
Two months after the festival, I received an unexpected call from Google’s Sydney office.
“Chris, you know your expedition south? Well, we don’t want to be pushy but we think we might be able to help. Are you interested?”
Am I? Oh, yes!
The Google representative explained that they ran a school competition every other year called “Doodle4Google,” in which schoolchildren are invited to redraw the Google logo inspired by a question or phrase. The successful image is put up online, and the winning school is granted a room full of technology. For 2013, Google wanted to use “If I were an explorer I would . . . ,” with an extra twist: the winning Australian and New Zealand teachers would join us on the expedition. It would be a world first for Google. I was to be one of three judges on the entries from both sides of the Tasman.
The competition was to run in the middle of 2013, perfect for marking the centenary of Mawson’s expedition. Google immediately started making contact with major companies in Australia about funding the prize. Suddenly we had firms fighting over exclusive rights to the competition. In just a few weeks we had the Commonwealth Bank of Australia offering $500,000. Google had given us the cornerstone investor we so desperately needed to make the expedition a reality.
* * *
Leading an expedition to the Antarctic had been my dream ever since I can remember. From an early age, I loved tales of discovery. As a kid, I would bury myself in ripping yarns from history involving explorers, scientists, archaeologists, and inventors; I couldn’t get enough of stories where the heroes disappeared from civilization and returned with new discoveries in hand. My favorite was in an old moth-eaten boy’s annual: an illustrated account of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s failed attempt to cross the Antarctic in 1915. The story of his ship, the Endurance, being crushed and the men forced to camp out on the ice for months on end, followed by Shackleton successfully crossing the wild south Atlantic Ocean and raising the alarm, seemed almost too incredible, too fantastic, to be real. One particular image always captured my imagination: a photo of the Endurance, lit up against the pitch-darkness of the Antarctic winter, defiant against the pack ice. The danger, the sense of isolation, and the determination to survive struck a deep and profound chord with me. I needed to learn more.
A merchant navy officer by training, Shackleton cut his teeth in the Antarc
tic during Scott’s British National Antarctic Discovery Expedition of 1901–1904. Controversially sent home on health grounds, Shackleton went on to lead three of his own expeditions south. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 and the safe return of all his men after encountering the perils of the ice was his crowning achievement in the polar regions. But alongside his brilliant leadership was his remarkable ability to tell a story. Shackleton was famous for capturing the imagination; he electrified the public with tales of adventure and discoveries in a new land. Photographs, film, audio recordings, books, newspaper reports, magazine articles, and public lectures were all used to whisk the audience away to the Antarctic. When Shackleton was in a violent storm, you were clinging on to the ship’s tiller with him, when Shackleton was on the edge of starvation, your own stomach gnawed, and when Shackleton laughed at the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the penguins, you were laughing too; all from the safe confines of home. He was so good that other explorers were advised to try to emulate him—though few ever succeeded. After Shackleton, Antarctica was no longer an unknown region to the public: it was suddenly real. This was science communication at its best and it set the standard for future efforts.
