AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
It is a harsh and beautiful land that men and women imagined for centuries before explorers ever set foot upon it. Recently, I got to visit Antarctica, land of penguins, frozen vistas and global controversy, writes Daphne Bramham.
A continent at the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere was first imagined in the second century as a counterbalance to the Arctic. Europeans first added it to their maps in the 1500s. But for nearly three centuries, Terra Australis Incognita remained purely speculative.
The last continent to be imagined, Antarctica was also the last to be discovered.
In 1773, Captain James Cook circumnavigated the Antarctic Circle, going farther south than any Europeans before him. He never saw Antarctica, but it didn’t stop him from believing.
“That there may be a continent or a large tract of land near the (south) pole, I will not deny,” he wrote in his diary. “On the contrary, I am of the opinion that there is.”
Half a century later, Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen confirmed Antarctica’s existence in 1820. He saw it, but couldn’t reach it because of sea ice. It wasn’t until 1822 that American sealer and explorer John Davis and his crew became the first known to have landed there.
The Antarctic has long loomed large my imagination as well. Long before Happy Feet or Blue Planet, I dreamed of walking among penguins. I longed to see the albatross that so bedevilled the Ancient Mariner.
And after reading Ernest Shackleton’s incredible account of putting the lives of his men and himself above the vainglorious attainment of the South Pole, I wanted to see where they had been.
As the last continent to be discovered, Antarctica remains a mysterious, mystical and spectacularly beautiful place that often turns adventurers and rational scientists into poets when they are asked to describe it.
Antarctica remains largely unknown. It is the emptiest and coldest place on Earth, with a recorded low of -89.2 C, and the only continent with no permanent human settlements other than the research stations that are mainly clustered along its coast.
Uniquely, it remains the only land mass that humans have yet to exploit for its resources.
Because it’s tucked at the bottom of the globe, sliced into bits to fit on flat maps, most of us don’t fully appreciate that Antarctica is roughly equivalent in size to the United States and Mexico combined.
A vast, frozen desert punctuated by volcanoes and mountain ranges, its highest peak — Mount Vinson — was only discovered in 1957. At 4,897 metres, it is nearly 1,000 metres higher than Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies.
The South Pole itself is 2,700 metres above sea level. That is 1,000 metres higher than Banff and Denver. Surrounded by the roughest and most dangerous seas, few places on Earth are farther from Canada. Even a more or less straight-line flight from Calgary to the Antarctic Peninsula is more than 18,000 kilometres. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that our Antarctic involvement is limited.
Canada signed on to the Antarctic Treaty in 1988. The international accord came into effect in 1961 and guarantees that Antarctica will be open to scientific research, but closed to mineral extraction, nuclear testing and the disposal of radioactive waste.
Because Canada has no permanent research station and no formal Antarctic research plan, it is only a non-consultative member to the treaty and not at the table when governance, sovereignty, resource exploration, wildlife protection, tourism or the effects of climate change are discussed.
Yet as a polar nation, a growing number of Canadian researchers, political scientists and environmentalists are pushing for greater involvement because of the parallel and complementary issues faced by both the Arctic and the Antarctic — everything from sovereignty to sea-level rise.
Animals have always drawn people to the far south, whether they are whalers, researchers or, today, an increasing number of tourists. The convergence of the southern seas with Atlantic and Pacific oceans makes the Antarctic a rich feeding ground for marine mammals, from the biggest (blue whales) to the smallest and everything in between, including the mythic albatross and adorable penguins.
But human incursions over the past century have severely impacted both the wildlife and the oceans.
Over two million baleen whales have been killed in the Southern Ocean — along with more than 725,000 fin whales, over 360,000 blue whales and another 250,000 or so humpbacks.
Evidence suggests that the stocks are rebounding since the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling there in 1982 — a moratorium that Canada opposed and, as a result, resigned its membership in the commission.
But now there are growing concerns about the commercial fishing of other species, which is damaging the rich stock of krill — a small shrimp-like crustacean that is the primary food source for baleen whales, penguins and other wildlife.
The wealth of marine wildlife in South Georgia has led to it being described as the Serengeti of the Southern Ocean.
But it doesn’t mean that many of those animals aren’t at risk. Of the 18 species of penguins, 11 are endangered. Albatrosses are the world’s most threatened birds. All 22 species are listed as endangered, vulnerable or “near threatened.” Blue, sei and fin whales are all endangered.
There is a move to set aside a conservation area about twice the size of British Columbia in the Weddell Sea off the Antarctic Peninsula to protect marine mammals, fish, penguins and seabirds.
In January, Greenpeace launched a global campaign in support of the European Union’s sanctuary proposal to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. In October, the proposal to protect 1.8 million square kilometres was blocked by China and Russia even though China had brokered a deal the previous year to designate a 1.5 million-square-kilometre area in the Ross Sea, on the opposite side of the continent, as off-limits to fishing for 35 years.
In addition to direct human interventions, climate change is affecting this region more than anywhere else. According to Polar Knowledge Canada, the Southern Ocean is warming at twice the rate of the global ocean, having absorbed more than 65 per cent of the heat associated with global warming and taken up to half of the ocean uptake of anthropogenic carbon.
The Antarctic Peninsula is showing the worst effects. One spectacular example came in July when one of the 10 largest icebergs in history calved off the Larsen ice shelf and into the sea.
At an estimated trillion tons of ice, it is half the size of Haida Gwaii and accounted for about 12 per cent of the ice shelf ’s total area, leaving it at the lowest extent ever recorded.
It’s too early to say what it might mean for wildlife. But when an ice shelf collapsed in the Ross Sea on the other side of the Antarctic, it had devastating effects on an Adelie penguin colony. Only two chicks were born in the colony and an estimated 18,000 died because the parents weren’t able to access their feeding grounds.
The reasons for the collapsing ice shelves are twofold. Warming sea water melts them from below, while warmer air temperatures melt them from above.
Because the ice chunks come from shelves that are already floating, this isn’t directly contributing to sea rise — any more than a melting ice cube in a drink doesn’t overflow the glass.
But scientists believe the collapse of the ice shelves may contribute to sea-level rise because they act as barriers to underground river water and advancing glaciers reaching the ocean.
Along with all the research being done on specific animals, on climate change and ice, there is growing interest in the quality of the water in the Southern Ocean.
Although humans have a brief history in Antarctica, there are thrilling stories of past and present explorers, adventurers and scientists. Some are well-known — Shackleton, Robert F. Scott, Roald Amundsen, Edmund Hillary and Robert Swan.
Over 18 days, I visited a small sliver of the Antarctic and of the continent.
I hope to take you along on this adventure with stories about what I saw, learned and experienced.