tagged w/ Antarctica
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It took researches 30 years of drilling through a four-kilometer-thick ice to reach the renowned subglacial lake. Most importantly, million years-old secrets will be unveiled without causing harm to the lake's ecosystem. "2/5/2012 our scientists at the Vostok polar station in the Antarctic completed drilling at depths of 3,768 meters and reached surface of the subglacial lake," RIA Novosti quoted unnamed Russian scientist. Lake Vostok is a unique aquatic ecosystem hidden under some four kilometers of ice. Its water has been isolated from the atmosphere -- and therefore from the outer biosphere -- for millions of years. Scientists believe that surveys of the lake can provide invaluable details on past and future climate changes. http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/your-details/43060-20-million-years-old-antarctic-secret-scientists-find-ancient-vostok-lake-under-4-kilometers-of-iceIt took researches 30 years of drilling through a four-kilometer-thick ice to reach... more
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13,000 feet beneath the surface of Antarctica's vast ice sheet rests the otherworldly Lake Vostok. Home to some of the most extreme conditions on Earth, Vostok has remained isolated from the rest of the world for 20 million years, and completely inaccessible to mankind. Until now.
Yesterday, reports originating from Ria Novosti — a state-run, Russian news agency — began to circulate, indicating that the twenty-year mission to reach Vostok's ice-entombed waters had finally reached its goal. Other media outlets were quick to pick up the news as well, citing an unnamed scientific source, who claimed that, "Yesterday [February, 5], our scientists stopped drilling at the depth of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the sub-glacial lake."
Whether the team has finally drilled through to the Lake, however, remains to be seen. Is it likely? Yes. A spokesperson from the Russian Antarctic Expedition in St. Petersburg told New Scientist this morning that the drill did make contact with water last week, and that the water was automatically drawn up into the borehole, as planned.
But the team must now check the water levels in the borehole, and readings from their equipment's pressure sensors, to confirm that the water is, in fact, from Vostok — and not from a pocket of water in the layers of ice overlaying the lake. The fact that this confirmation process is ongoing probably explains why there is still no official announcement on the website of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (the government agency that heads up the country's polar science expeditions). Valery Lukin, director of the Russian Antarctic Program, told Nature this morning that the team's data could be processed by as early as tomorrow.
In any case, even if the lake has been breached, it will still be almost a year before Russia's scientists have an opportunity to address the question that everyone is so anxious to know the answer to: whether Vostok's pitch-black waters — which have been cut off from light for millions of years — harbor any weird new life forms. If they do, it would strengthen the prospect of discovering exoplanetary life in the subsurface waters of Jupiter's moon Europa, Saturn's moon Enceladus, and any other cosmic bodies that harbor water, subglacial or otherwise.
And if they don't? Well, that would be disappointing (after all, who wouldn't want to discover a new species of subglacial extremophile?), but it would also be incredibly interesting. After all, everywhere on this planet that we've found water, we've found life; to not find it in the waters of Vostok — the third largest lake by volume on Earth — would be totally unprecedented.
http://io9.com/5882868/scientists-have-probably-made-contact-with-earths-most-alien-lake13,000 feet beneath the surface of Antarctica's vast ice sheet rests the... more
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It has been five days since anyone has communicated with Russian scientists, who are in a remote Antarctic 'station,' where they are drilling through 13,000 feet of an ice sheet to reach the prehistoric Lake Vostok. Now the scientific community is anxiously waiting to hear what's become of them.
"Temps are dropping below -40 Celsius and they have only a week or so left before they have to winterize the station," said John Priscu, an Antarctic research expert at Montana State University, in an interview with Fox News. "I can only imagine what things must be like at Vostok Station this week."
The scientists are presumed to be on the surface of the ice sheet near the Vostok Station, where they were expected to conclude two decades of efforts to drill through to what has been deemed the most "alien lake on Earth," sealed off from the planet's atmosphere for 20 million years. Geothermal vents are theorized to sustain life beneath the lake, from primordial microbes to monstrous tube worms.
To prevent contamination of the lake, they have attempted to drill only deep enough to let frozen slush on its surface flow up through the borehole, but it is possible that pressurized gas could escape explosively, raising concerns about the scientists' safety.
"If it goes well, a breakthrough opens up a whole new chapter in our understanding of our planet and possibly moons in our solar system and planets far beyond," Priscu told the Washington Post. "If it doesn't go well, it casts a pall over the whole effort to explore this wet underside of Antarctica."
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/292793/20120203/lake-vostok-antarctica-russia-scientists-alien-geothermal.htmIt has been five days since anyone has communicated with Russian scientists, who are... more
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This is becoming an intriguing story, many other scientists from other country's have been warning not to finish drilling in fear of what might be released from the frozen lake for millions of years! I wonder if a drone attack got em?
A group of Russian scientists plumbing the frozen Antarctic in search of a lake buried in ice for tens of millions of years have failed to respond to increasingly anxious U.S. colleagues -- and as the days creep by, the fate of the team remains unknown.
"No word from the ice for 5 days," Dr. John Priscu professor of Ecology at Montana State University, told FoxNews.com via email.
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The team from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) have been drilling for weeks in an effort to reach isolated Lake Vostok, a vast, dark body of water hidden 13,000 ft. below the ice sheet's surface. The lake hasn't been exposed to air in more than 20 million years.
Priscu said there was no way to get in touch with the team -- and the already cold weather is set to plunge, as Antarctica's summer season ends and winter sets in.
"Temps are dropping below -40 Celsius [-40 degrees Fahrenheit] and they have only a week or so left before they have to winterize the station," he said. "I can only imagine what things must be like at Vostok Station this week."
The team's disappearance could not come at a worse time: They are about 40 feet from their goal of reaching the body of water, Priscu explained, a goal that the team was unable to meet as they raced the coming winter exactly one year ago.
When the winter arrives in the next few weeks, the temperature can get twice as freezing. Vostok Station boasts the lowest recorded temperature on Earth: -89.4 degrees Celsius (-129 degrees Fahrenheit).
If the team does reach the lake water, they will bring its water up through the hole and let it freeze there over the winter. The following year they will be able to start research on what they find, Priscu explained.
While there are only a few researchers actually working at the lake, scientists around the globe have been waiting with baited breath to see what the Russian's unearth this weekend.
"We are terribly interested in what they find," Alan Rodger, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, told FoxNews.com last year. "This is a lake that we don't think has been exposed for 15 million years. Therefore, if there is life there, we're going to have so many questions. How has it evolved over those years, how has it survived, what does it look like? Won't it be exciting to find something completely new on Planet Earth?"
Hey, where's the lake? Hidden beneath nearly 2 miles of ice in Western Antarctica.
The Lake Vostok project has been years in the making, with initial drilling at the massive lake -- 15,690 square kilometers (6,060 sq mi) -- starting in 1998. Initially, they were able to reach 3,600 meters, but had to stop due to concerns of possible contamination of the never-before-touched lake water.
"Ice isn't like rock, it's capable of movement," Dr. Priscu told FoxNews.com. "So in order to keep the hole from squeezing shut, they put a fluid in the drill called kerosene. Kerosene also grows bacteria, and there's about 65 tons of kerosene in that hole. It would be a disaster if that kerosene contaminated this pristine lake."
But the scientists came up with a clever way to make sure this debacle would not occur. They agreed to drill until a sensor warned them of free water. At that point they will take out the right amount of kerosene and adjust the pressure so that none of the liquids fall into the lake, but rather lake water would rise through the hole.
Priscu was concerned for his colleagues, but also admits the stunning scope of the story.
"It could be fodder for a great made-for-TV movie," he said.This is becoming an intriguing story, many other scientists from other country's... more
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Antarctica is so vast that the pictures give you no sense of scale. The pencil-thin line across the satellite image of Pine Island Glacier (above) is actually more than 18 miles long, 800 feet across in places, and 180 feet deep.
And it's growing. In the next few months, scientists expect the glacier to create an iceberg about 350 square miles in area. It will probably float northward, melting as it goes.
"Pine Island Glacier is losing ice very quickly, about six meters per year," said Michael Studinger of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which sent an expedition called Operation IceBridge to Antarctica in October in an old DC-8 jetliner, modified for scientific operations. It spotted the break in the ice. Earth-observing satellites have been watching it since.
"These things happen on a semi-regular basis in both the Arctic and Antarctic, but it's still a fairly large event," said John Sonntag, Instrument Team Lead for Operation IceBridge, in video recorded on the plane. "So we wanted to make sure we captured as much of that process as we could.
"A lot of times when you're in science, you don't get to capture the big stories as they happen, because you're not there at the right place at the right time," he said, "but this time we were."
To scientists, this is more than a vast spectacle. Both polar caps are losing ice, and researchers studying the world's climate say they want to understand the process.
More at the linkAntarctica is so vast that the pictures give you no sense of scale. The pencil-thin... more
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CNN...
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Strong earthquake hits off Antarctica's coast
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 6:58 PM EST, Sun January 15, 2012
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
The quake struck Sunday morning near Antarctica's Shetland Islands
The USGS reports it struck at a depth of 6.2 miles
A U.S. agency warns there's a "small possibility of a ... regional tsunami"
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(CNN) -- A strong 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck Sunday off the coast of Antarctica, prompting a warning that there was a "small possibility" it could trigger a tsunami.
The tremor was centered in waters south of South America's southern tip, about 334 miles (539 kilometers) west of Coronation Island and 388 miles northeast of Palmer Station in Antarctica, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
It hit at 9:40 a.m. local time (8:40 a.m. ET) on Sunday, according to the federal agency, and had an estimated depth of 6.2 miles.
Afterward, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center released a statement saying that there appears to be no threat of "destructive widespread tsunami" because of the quake.
But the agency did state "there is a small possibility of a local or regional tsunami that could affect coasts located usually no more than a few hundred kilometers from the earthquake epicenter.
"Authorities in the region near the epicenter should be made aware of this possibility," the warning center added.
.CNN...
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Strong earthquake hits off Antarctica's coast
By the CNN Wire... more
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or more than half a century, geologists have wrangled over the origins of an astonishing range of mountains found beneath ice up to three kilometers (two miles) thick in East Antarctica.
Named after the Soviet geophysicist who detected them in 1958 during the first International Polar Year exploration,or more than half a century, geologists have wrangled over the origins of an... more
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The rescued penguin known as Happy Feet, who was found near death on a New Zealand beach and nursed back to health, was fitted with a tracking transmitter prior to his release a week ago. Now, that radar signal has gone silent and most fear they will never know what happened to him.
http://veracitystew.com/2011/09/13/rescued-penguin-happy-feet-feared-dead-video/The rescued penguin known as Happy Feet, who was found near death on a New Zealand... more
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"This is like seeing a map of all the oceans' currents for the first time. It's a game changer for glaciology," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California (UC), Irvine. Rignot is lead author of a paper about the ice flow published online Thursday in Science Express. "We are seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before.""This is like seeing a map of all the oceans' currents for the first time.... more
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CNN...
August 11th, 2011
09:17 AM ET
DNA discovered in meteorites
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NASA researchers have found the building blocks of DNA, the genetic molecule that is essential to all life forms, in meteorites, pieces of space rock that have fallen to Earth. The discovery suggests that similar meteorites and comets may have impacted Earth and assisted in life formation here.
With minimal chance for contamination of the meteorite samples, scientists are confident that these meteorite specimens were formed in space. “People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960's, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life,” Michael Callahan, lead author of the study on the discovery, said in a statement.
The research team analyzed twelve carbon rich meteorites, nine of which were from Antarctica, to positively identify the basic elements of the chemical compounds they extracted from the samples. Testing revealed adenine and guanine, two fundamental components of DNA called nucleobases.
DNA is shaped like a double helix, or twisted ladder, and the rungs of that ladder are each comprised of two nucleobases, either a pairing of adenine and thymine or of guanine and cytosine. The ladder is essentially a long string of genetic code that tells cells in an organism which proteins to make. Those proteins then play critical roles in organism growth and function, making everything from hair to enzymes.
Scientists also found hypoxanthine and xanthine, two other chemicals used in biological processes and found in muscle tissue.
The meteorites also contained trace amounts of three molecules associated with nucleobases, called nucleobase analogs, but two of those are almost never seen in biology, providing the necessary proof that these DNA components were actually created in outer space.
In fact the only record of any of these nucleobases in biologic processes is within a virus. Callahan said in the NASA press release that “if asteroids are behaving like chemical 'factories' cranking out prebiotic material, you would expect them to produce many variants of nucleobases, not just the biological ones, due to the wide variety of ingredients and conditions in each asteroid,” and that is exactly what these researchers found. He says the nucleobases found, biological or not, can also be created in a lab setting, using the basic compounds hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water.
This finding contributes further to the growing collection of evidence that asteroids and comets are comprised of the proper chemicals to generate the building blocks of life. Some seem to have the ideal internal chemistry for the job.
“In fact, there seems to be a ‘goldilocks’ class of meteorites,” Callahan said in a statement, “the so called CM2 meteorites, where conditions are just right to make more of these molecules.”
.CNN...
August 11th, 2011
09:17 AM ET
DNA discovered in meteorites
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Scientists: March 11 tsunami produced Antarctic icebergs
CNN...
PHOTO IMAGES:
Top image shows the Sulzberger Ice Shelf on March 12 and the bottom on March 16 after the tsunami broke off icebergs.
August 9th, 2011
09:40 AM ET
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The tsunami spawned from the March 11 earthquake off eastern Japan broke up parts of an Antarctic ice shelf that hadn't moved in 46 years, scientists say.
Though the tsunami waves were only about a foot high when they reached Antarctica, their consistency was enough to crack the 260-foot-thick ice and split off icebergs with combined surface areas more than twice the size of Manhattan from the Sulzberger Ice Shelf, the scientists report in a NASA statement.
It was the first time scientists have been able to tie icebergs directly to a tsunami, according to NASA.
The tsunami waves traveled 8,000 miles and took 18 hours to reach the ice shelf, the scientists said, giving them time to validate theories on how an earthquake can affect geography a hemisphere away.
"In the past we've had calving events where we've looked for the source. It's a reverse scenario – we see a calving and we go looking for a source," Kelly Brunt, a cryosphere specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the NASA statement. "We knew right away this was one of the biggest events in recent history – we knew there would be enough swell. And this time we had a source."
Emile Okal at Northwestern University and Douglas MacAyeal at the University of Chicago collaborated in the study.
"This is an example not only of the way in which events are connected across great ranges of oceanic distance, but also how events in one kind of Earth system, i.e., the plate tectonic system, can connect with another kind of seemingly unrelated event: the calving of icebergs from Antarctica's ice sheet," MacAyeal said in the NASA statement.
.Scientists: March 11 tsunami produced Antarctic icebergs
CNN...
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An ancient living laboratory of our planet's past in Antarctica may have provided a preview of what we can expect to find deep below the barren surface of Mars and in the ice-shrouded seas of Jupiter's Europa. Two of the world's leading experts on life at the lower temperature extremes, Buford Price of the University of California, Berkeley and Todd Sowers of Penn State observed that microbes colonizing life appear to have two levels of metabolism: a survival metabolism in which they remain alive but become dormant until exposed to nutrients or higher temperatures, or, a maintenance metabolism for steady sustained growth.
LINK : http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/04/the-thing-140000-year-old-organism-discovered-under-ice-in-antaerctias-lake-vostok.htmlAn ancient living laboratory of our planet's past in Antarctica may have provided... more
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Japan has suspended its annual Antarctic whale hunt following protests from a campaign group.
Activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a US-based environmental group, have been chasing the Japanese fleet's mother ship.
An official at the country's fisheries agency said whaling had been halted "for now" because of safety concerns.
Japan says it suspended its hunt on 10 February. It is unclear whether the expedition, which would usually end mid-March, will be called off permanently.
"Putting safety as a priority, the fleet has halted scientific whaling for now. We are currently considering what to do hereafter," Tatsuya Nakaoku, an official at the fisheries agency, told Reuters news agency.
But he said nothing had been decided yet.
Activists' ships have been harrying the fleet for weeks in the icy seas of Antarctica.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society says one of its boats has been blocking the main ship's stern loading ramp, preventing any harpooned whales from being loaded on to the ship.
"If that's true then it demonstrates that our tactics, our strategies, have been successful," Sea Shepherd captain Paul Watson told the AFP news agency by satellite phone from the Steve Irwin ship.
"I don't think they've gotten more than 30 whales... certainly they haven't got many whales at all."
Japan's fleet involves 180 people on four ships, with the aim to kill up to 945 whales in Antarctic waters during the southern winter season.
Japan says it continues to hunt for scientific research, while not concealing the fact that much of the meat ends up on dinner plates, the BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo reports.
Few Japanese eat whale regularly, but many object to what they see as unjustified foreign interference in a cultural tradition, our correspondent adds.
Anti-whaling nations, led by Australia and New Zealand, and environmental groups say the hunts are cruel and unnecessary. Australia is taking legal action in the International Court of Justice against Tokyo over whaling.Japan has suspended its annual Antarctic whale hunt following protests from a campaign... more
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Imagine the ocean as a giant swimming pool - devoid of topographical features like seamounts and trenches and with smooth walls instead of jutting continental shelves or jagged coastlines.
If you're in the community of oceanographers who model the large-scale circulation of the oceans, that's pretty much how you have to imagine them.Their size and complexity have presented a stiff challenge to those who would dare to try to mimic on computers how water moves and understand ocean dynamics. The challenge is to write computer code sophisticated enough to capture the myriad variables that move a unit of water from one place to another. What ocean modelers have traditionally ended up with is something that looks like a rudimentary computer game like Pong when what they desire is the resolution of an Xbox.
But in a new age of supercomputing, ocean circulation modelers are making first steps in seeing their subject as it really is. Christopher Wolfe and Paola Cessi, physical oceanographers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, have come up with an explanation for the way water moves in layers between the poles. The researchers are taking advantage of a new ability to simulate ocean dynamics at a scale of a few kilometers.
Though that may still sound like a pixilated picture, its improved realism in portraying intermediate-sized phenomena such as large swirls known as eddies is allowing the researchers to revise long-standing theories of large-scale circulation, which in turn could help the world understand what keeps warm places warm and cold places cold. Some would say the epiphany is happening not a moment too soon. There is increasing evidence of rapid melt-off of ice sheets in the world’s two biggest repositories, Antarctica in the south and Greenland to the north, spurring climate modelers to devise a number of what-if scenarios. The evidence has triggered a variety of doomsday theories that a freshwater dump would disrupt the climate patterns we’ve grown accustomed to, plunging temperate areas of the world, especially Europe, into frigidity.
Now Wolfe and Cessi have made enough progress to be able to advance theories of what two big puddles of fresh water at either end of the ocean would do to ocean circulation. In most of the scenarios they come up with, the effects on global climate would be significant.
“At this point, based on global climate predictions, circulation could either speed up or slow down or do nothing,” said Wolfe, a postdoctoral researcher. “That’s something we’d really like to know and that’s the question we’re trying to answer.”
snip
If winds and differences in the buoyancy of water are what set oceans in motion to begin with, eddies are like the flywheels that keep the motion going. Without a realistic understanding of eddies, oceanographers can’t really simulate the oceans at the speeds at which water really moves. So Wolfe and Cessi elected to try to produce a computer simulation, using supercomputers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif, Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They obtained 20,000,000 CPU-hours and used a model that is highly faithful to the movement of eddies in real life. They also decided, however, to leave their computerized ocean in more or less the shape of a rectangular swimming pool and shrink its scale to about half its real size, creating what Cessi dubs a “hobbit ocean.” The computational power needed to simulate eddy activity and include a geographically-correct basin would require a devotion of resources still not available among the world’s supercomputers.
But Cessi and Wolfe say the high-resolution view of eddies produces a significantly more realistic view of how oceans move than anyone has been able to replicate so far. Already the two believe that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that large-scale circulation patterns adjust over decades or centuries rather than over thousands of years, which implies that changes in circulation are something that we could conceivably witness within a few generations rather than at some point in the distant future. Cessi notes with pride that the pair’s modeling approach has sped up the oceans from a molasses pace to something a little runnier, not real water yet but maybe more like maple syrup.
"Our contribution was to resolve scales as small as five kilometers," said Cessi. "I don't think anyone has done a calculation with such high resolution and for an extended period of time."
The Scripps scientists chose this course after noticing that many oceanographers have in recent decades explored what would happen if Northern Hemisphere ice sheets were to suddenly melt and dump loads of freshwater into surrounding oceans. Doing so, they have concluded that an infusion of fresh water slows circulation in the Atlantic.
But for unknown reasons, few have considered the equally plausible scenario that a warming world would create a similar melt-off in Antarctica as well. The two discovered that if Antarctic melt produced a larger amount of freshwater, the circulation would speed up.
Recent observations suggest that these are not hypothetical scenarios. The opposing ice masses are melting at an accelerating rate. A 2009 analysis showed that in Greenland, the rate of annual mass loss increased from 137 gigatons per year in 2002-03 to 286 gigatons per year between 2007 and 2009. In Antarctica, the mass loss increased from 104 gigatons per year between 2002 and 2006 to 246 gigatons per year between 2006 and 2009.
cont.Imagine the ocean as a giant swimming pool - devoid of topographical features like... more
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An oxygen-rich lake, unreachable for the past 14 million years and buried beneath a thick sheet of ice, is about to be penetrated by a drill bit from a faraway place.
It's possible that special life forms have adapted to live in this extreme environment, and scientists hope to learn more once they can analyze water samples.
No, sorry, it's not on Europa - it's in Antarctica. But the environment of Lake Vostok, which Russian scientists are about to drill open, is very similar to that Jovian moon and to Enceladus, a frozen satellite of Saturn. Astrobiologists are among those eager to uncover Lake Vostok's Miocene-era secrets.
The Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, a body set up to protect the frozen continent, approved a Russian team's process to extract water from the lake while preventing contamination, according to New Scientist. By the end of this month, a team from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg expects to hit water.
The lake's water pressure will push the drilling fluid up into the borehole, where it will freeze. Next year, researchers will return to extract that ancient water and analyze its contents.
Efforts to drill into Lake Vostok have been stalled since 1998, when the treaty organization stopped the Russian team's work until further environmental studies could prove the lake would not be polluted. Later studies showed this would be tricky - in 2003, NASA astrobiologists said the lake's high nitrogen and oxygen levels would cause the water to fizz like a shaken soda can, opening the lake to possible contamination and even posing a threat to the scientists.
Lake Vostok has oxygen levels 50 times that of other freshwater lakes, so scientists believe life would have had to evolve protective enzymes or other adaptations to survive. If so, these extremophiles could have implications for life on Enceladus or Europa.
No one is sure where the ice-water boundary lies, so scientists are not sure when they'll break through.
http://io9.com/5728459/russians-will-be-first-to-explore-untouched-antarctic-lake-vostok-in-hunt-for-weird-life-formsAn oxygen-rich lake, unreachable for the past 14 million years and buried beneath a... more
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Culminating a decade of planning, innovation and testing, construction of the world's largest neutrino observatory, installed in the ice of the Antarctic plateau at the geographic South Pole, was successfully completed December 18, 2010, New Zealand time.
LINK : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101219083814.htmCulminating a decade of planning, innovation and testing, construction of the... more
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December 10, 2010
Tragedy in Black and White
By ELIZABETH ROYTE
FRASER’S PENGUINS
A Journey to the Future in Antarctica
By Fen Montaigne
Illustrated. 288 pp. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $26
In the austral summer of 2005-6, the veteran magazine journalist Fen Montaigne traveled to Palmer Station in Antarctica to work with the highly regarded polar ecologist Bill Fraser. For nearly five months, Montaigne gamely weighed and banded Adélie penguins and their predators, attached radio tags to feathers, dodged shooting streams of gack (giant-petrel vomit), sifted through guano in search of silverfish otoliths and reveled in the sensory delights of “the most alien and beautiful place on the planet.”
But this is no straightforward work of natural history with Fraser as heroic guide. It’s a morality tale, in which Fraser plays an unsociable Cassandra who’s entrusted his tidings to a sympathetic messenger. Luckily for readers, Montaigne has wrapped his portrait of a place on the brink of oblivion inside a penguin love fest.
Bill Fraser has been closely observing and recording the habits of birds near Palmer Station for 35 years. Such depth of experience allowed him to notice some troubling changes. Adélie penguin colonies, and the brown skuas that depend on them for sustenance, were rapidly declining; chinstrap penguins were moving in; and the population of fur seals and leopard seals was on the rise. What was going on?
Laboriously pondering factors biological and meteorological, Fraser eventually linked local Adélie declines with the cascade effects of warmer winter air and sea temperatures along the peninsula. Higher temperatures bring more snow, which delays the start of mating and nesting season, which results in smaller penguin chicks and a higher mortality rate. Warmer seas reduce the extent of sea ice, which krill (penguin food) depend on and Adélies rest upon before launching foraging trips into the Southern Ocean.
It gets worse: with adult penguins traveling farther to fill their bellies, chicks are left vulnerable to those skuas. Predators from hell, skuas rule Adélie colonies with “Mafia-like domination,” Montaigne writes, ripping the heads off chicks and eating the krill from their stomachs while they’re still alive.
Climate change is warming the poles faster than many other places on the planet, which means that polar scientists are coming to grips with these changes sooner than most anyone else. “Fraser’s Penguins,” portions of which appeared in The New Yorker, warns that what’s happening on the Antarctic Peninsula now is a taste of unsettling changes, elsewhere, to come. Should the West Antarctic Ice Sheet continue to melt, global sea levels could rise dramatically, in one NASA scientist’s opinion inundating Washington — and other coastal cities — by the end of this century.
For Fraser, the warming has a moral dimension. The Antarctic has been virtually untouched by man, and it’s a place where humans are, as many visitors over roughly 200 years of exploration have noted, entirely inconsequential. But now, the long carbonic reach of industrialized society is quickly wiping out one of the toughest creatures on earth, a species that’s hard-wired to the polar desert and cannot adapt.
Montaigne is a controlled writer, offering careful and clear explanations of matters technical and lexicographic, biologically microscopic and meteorologically global. But it’s his descriptive prowess, his ability to evoke lavender — and cobalt, magenta and violet — without waxing purple, that most impresses. Sounds and smells are skillfully conveyed: the flippers of two fighting Adélies sound like “the thumping of a stick on a carpet being cleaned.” While some team members compare the smell of a newly hatched penguin to Doritos, Montaigne associates the aroma with “the scent of my dog’s paws.” After being stalked and nearly pounced upon by a killer whale, Montaigne writes, “I was so amazed by this performance that I cannot remember exactly what the orca looked like.” Sometimes telling less reveals more. At other times, Montaigne gives thrilling, blow-by-blow accounts of bird battles and breakups.
Drama-wise, the penguins put the resident biologists to shame. This reader was slightly disappointed that Montaigne only briefly discusses cocktails served over thousand-year-old ice, diving into 34-degree water and celebrating an engagement with a four-foot-long penis ice sculpture that ejaculates cheap Champagne. The birding team is “collegial and free of tension”; one Andy of Mayberry type habitually says “We’re done-dee” when a field task is completed.
Instead, Montaigne lets the Adélies chew up the scenery — their epic migration, territorial squabbling, nesting-stone thievery, philandering, stoicism (Fraser has seen penguins almost cut in half by leopard seals stagger back to the colony to deliver their load of krill), indifference to squalor and enslavement to their squawking chicks (at least until the little darlings reach fledgling weight, at which point their parents turn their backs on the creatures and dive into the sea).
Fraser himself remains more of an enigma, a man who’s happiest spending long stretches alone in inhospitable places. Montaigne tells us that Fraser is not on speaking terms with another penguin scientist, and that he’s “not a man you would want to cross,” but we never see this play out. Still, one admires both the subject’s reserve and the author’s respect for it.
Adélie penguins, like other polar species, have always faced daunting challenges. But today, Adélies are confronting conditions for which nothing in their evolutionary history has prepared them. According to Fraser, the colonies around Palmer Station have reached a tipping point: they’ll be gone within his lifetime.
Despite this sobering message, “Fraser’s Penguins” leaves one feeling exhilarated — by these remarkable creatures, the landscape they inhabit and the scientists who’ve devoted their lives to studying both.
Elizabeth Royte’s latest book is “Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water.”December 10, 2010
Tragedy in Black and White
By ELIZABETH ROYTE
FRASER’S... more
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The fringes of the coldest continent are starting to feel the heat, with the northern Antarctic Peninsula warming faster than virtually any place on Earth. These rapidly rising temperatures represent the first breach in the enormous frozen dome that holds 90 percent of the world’s ice.
by fen montaigne
In 1978, when few researchers were paying attention to global warming, a prominent geologist at Ohio State University was already focused on the prospect of fossil fuel emissions trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. His name was John H. Mercer, and when he contemplated what might be in store for the planet, his thoughts naturally gravitated to the biggest chunk of ice on Earth — Antarctica.
“If present trends in fossil fuel consumption continue...” he wrote in Nature, “a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress... One of the warning signs that a dangerous warming trend is under way in Antarctica will be the breakup of ice shelves on both coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula, starting with the northernmost and extending gradually southward.”
Mercer’s prediction has come true, and a couple of decades before he anticipated. Since he wrote those words, eight ice shelves have fully or partially collapsed along the Antarctic Peninsula, and the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than virtually any place on Earth.
The question as humanity pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, is not whether Antarctica will begin to warm in earnest, but how rapidly. The melting of Antarctica’s northernmost region — the Antarctic Peninsula — is already well underway, representing the first breach in an enormous citadel of cold that holds 90 percent of the world’s ice.
Much attention has rightly been paid to the precipitous warming of the Arctic, where Arctic Ocean ice is rapidly shrinking and thinning, Greenland’s large ice sheets are steadily melting, and permafrost is thawing from Alaska, to Scandinavia, to Siberia.
But none of the earth’s ice zones, or cryosphere, can compare with Antarctica, which is 1 ½ times the size of the United States — including Alaska — and is almost entirely covered in ice, in places to a depth of three miles. The Antarctic accumulated this unfathomable volume of ice because it is a continent surrounded by ocean — the Southern Ocean — which acts like a great, insulating moat around the South Pole. The Arctic, by contrast, is an ocean surrounded by continents, whose landmasses moderate the polar climate.
How cold is the Antarctic? How about -128.6 degrees F cold, which is the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, as measured at the Soviet Antarctic base, Vostok, on July 21, 1983. The polar plateau, where legendary explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott perished, routinely records temperatures of -70 or -80 degrees F in winter. So it will be quite some time before the heart of Antarctica’s vast ice dome begins to melt.
The periphery, however, is another matter, and steady warming there has the potential to raise global sea levels many feet and to affect global ocean circulation.
No place on the fringes of Antarctica has warmed with the swiftness of the Antarctic Peninsula, a crooked, 900-mile finger of land that juts toward the tip of South America. A 60-year temperature record on the
‘We are going to get to a point where sea ice won’t form anymore, and that could be catastrophic.’northwestern Antarctic Peninsula, taken at a research base originally built by the British and now run by the Ukrainians, paints a stark picture: Winter temperatures have increased by 11 degrees F and annual average temperatures by 5 degrees F. Ninety percent of 244 glaciers along the western Antarctic Peninsula have retreated since 1940. Sea ice now blankets the Southern Ocean off the western Antarctic Peninsula three fewer months a year than in 1979, according to satellite data.
In addition, ice shelves — large slabs of ice that flow off the land or out of submarine basins and float atop the ocean — have been disintegrating up and down the peninsula. The most notable breakup occurred in early 2002, when several summers of warm weather heated up the surface of the Larsen B Ice Shelf, creating countless melt ponds that enabled warmer water to seep down into the ice shelf. That led in March 2002 to what’s known as a “catastrophic” break-up; the ice shelf, once the size of Connecticut, shattered in a matter of days.
“We are already at the point where the changes we’re seeing in this part of Antarctica are unprecedented throughout the entire period of human civilization,” said Ted Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
The level of warming in Antarctica is far more severe than global warming of the past century, which has been about 1.4 degrees F. One major cause is that the warming of landmasses and oceans to the north has set up a sharper contrast with Antarctica’s intense cold. That has led to a strengthening of northerly winds, pulling far warmer air down from the south Pacific and south Atlantic onto the Antarctic Peninsula.
“One of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics is that heat always goes from warm to cold,” said Douglas Martinson, an oceanographer and Antarctic specialist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
cont.The fringes of the coldest continent are starting to feel the heat, with the northern... more
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If Sir David Attenborough and his camera crews weren't already intrusive enough, the seals and penguins of Antarctica now face having their privacy invaded by the billions of internet users, as Google brings its controversial Street View mapping service to the world's southernmost continent.
From today, users of the search engine will be able to access spectacular views of the coastline of Half Moon Island, which is relatively accessible and well-trodden by Antarctic standards, since it provides a popular stopping-off point for cruise ships carrying high-end tourists.
In addition to snow-capped mountains, rocky beaches, and the occasional iceberg, the photographs of the island's Duse Bay contain several images of anorak-wearing visitors who are apparently trying to creep up to the local population of chinstrap penguins to take their own snaps.
They were compiled from 10 shots taken by Brian McClendon, the vice-president of engineering at Google Earth and Maps, which now covers 25 countries on all of the world's continents, and is also this week launching in Ireland and Brazil.If Sir David Attenborough and his camera crews weren't already intrusive enough,... more
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