LITMUS TEST
Why penguins may help us predict the impact of climate change
ANTARCTICA Steve Forrest is trying to count penguins, but progress is slow. Snow is falling in thick, sticky flakes and his target colony is disappearing. Cold waves splash across our boat as the wind picks up, driving white caps across the Gerlache Strait, at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The chinstrap penguin colony is perched on top of a cliff, and our dinghy, containing several graduate students and two large drones, has no place to land on the rocky shore. One of the students holds up an anemometer to measure the wind speed. The other has the stony face of someone who is about to be sick.
“This is emblematic of what chinstraps do, they are very extreme,” says Forrest, a conservation biologist and 25-year veteran of the Antarctic. We watch as they leap out of the ocean, grip the rock with their claws and trudge up a steep snowbank to get home. “Not a lot is known about chinstraps, compared with some other penguin species — partly because they live in these godforsaken places.”
What seems like bad weather for the penguin-counting team is just a mild day on the coldest, windiest, highest continent on the planet. Antarctica contains 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water and 90 per cent of its ice. If the whole continent melted completely, global sea level would rise by 60 metres. A glance at its ice-encrusted shores makes it obvious why this is the only continent that has never had an Indigenous human population.
On remote islands around the peninsula, Forrest and his team from New York’s Stony Brook
University are surveying chinstrap penguin colonies, some of which have not been counted in three decades. They’ve found population declines in several locations: one large colony has shrunk by more than half.
“This is part of a much larger regional decline that we are concerned about,” says Heather Lynch, associate professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook. “The alarming part for me is not just that they are declining but that we don’t understand what is going on — and who knows what else is going on, what else is declining, under our noses, that we are unaware of.”
Climate change is the most likely factor behind the declines. The Antarctic Peninsula, where we are, is the fastest-warming part of the continent. It has heated up by about 3 C since 1950, and, in February, a record high of 18.3 C was recorded at Esperanza Base. The pace of change on the peninsula, which is warming more than three times faster than the rest of the planet, means the animal populations there are in the middle of a rapid transformation. Some species are thriving, while others are at risk of extinction.
“The chinstraps are the canary in the coal mine for a whole host of changes that are happening on the Antarctic Peninsula,” Lynch says after the expedition. “Time might be running out to figure this out before these changes are irreversible.”
Although Antarctica can appear to be a barren wasteland, the oceans around it are teeming with life. The giant glaciers and the annual sea-ice formation drive an overturning in the ocean waters, pouring oxygen and nutrients into the sea. Each winter, the continent’s surface area doubles as the ocean freezes around it.
The sea ice nourishes krill, the most abundant species on the planet and the foundation of the ocean food chain. Flocks of birds such as the black-browed albatross and the southern giant petrel, with wingspans of up to two metres, follow our boat wherever we go.
Studying Antarctica is notoriously difficult but, in many ways, it holds the keys for understanding the future of our planet. The rate at which its ice melts will determine whether we see 50 centimetres or 100 cm of sea level rise by the end of the century — the difference between whether or not low-lying cities such as Miami and Bangkok survive in their current form.
Clues to the history of the world, and what the earth’s atmosphere looked like millions of years ago, are also buried deep in the Antarctic ice cap. At a time when humans are trying, and so far failing, to curb emissions, Antarctica reminds us what is at stake.
Even though Antarctica appears to be at the end of the earth on traditional maps, it is at the centre of the world’s oceans. The strongest current in the world, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, runs clockwise around the continent. It drives the global “conveyor belt” that circulates water through the oceans, a beating heart that pumps life through the seas.
This conveyor belt — known as the global thermohaline circulation — governs the oceans. But global warming is shifting its behaviour. “It absolutely is changing,” says Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey. “There is longterm warming and freshening of the deep waters of Antarctica.”
One of the clearest changes is in Antarctic Bottom Water — the coldest, densest water that fills the deepest basins of the planet and is formed by the freezing of the ocean in winter. Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, believes Antarctica may be producing less bottom water than before.
In a recent survey, “one of the patterns that really leapt out was the coldest, densest waters around Antarctica were substantially warmer than they had been,” he explains.
The ocean circulation means Antarctica is far more linked to the rest of the world than it first appears.
Not only does Antarctica have great influence over the planet, it is also deeply affected by pollution elsewhere. Says Marcelo Leppe, the director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute: “All the problems that we have around the world, we have it in Antarctica too.”
I speak with Leppe in Punta Arenas, the centre of the country’s Antarctic program. The city is also home to the Research Centre for Dynamics of High Latitude Marine Ecosystems, which tracks how marine species in Antarctica are responding to climate change.
One of the centre’s marine biologists, Luis Vargas-chacoff, has just returned from Antarctica, where he says the weather was unusually warm. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects temperature increases of 4 C to 6 C on the Antarctic Peninsula. We have an idea that species will move as that warming happens, because they are site-specific,” he explains.
Monitoring and counting the animals of the Antarctic doesn’t just matter for Antarctica but for the entire world. “Our ability to see what happens to ecosystems when they are perturbed, and see how they might change in the future, that is really important for the next 100 years,” explains Phil Trathan, senior ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey.
One example of global warming is already clear as we trudge through the guano of the chinstraps. There’s a sprinkling of rain, and the penguin chicks are looking wet and miserable. Their downy coats are highly adapted to snow but less effective in rain.
Why is it worth coming so far, just to know whether there are 300 or 800 creatures on this poop-covered island? “It seems really basic — counting penguins,” Noah Strycker, one of the graduate students, admits. “The bigger issue is that penguins can teach us about their environment. If you can quantify how many penguins there are, then that helps you quantify how much krill there is . ... You can call penguins a ‘bioindicator’ of the Southern Ocean ecosystem.”
The outlook for another species is not so good. The emperor penguin, which lives closest to the pole, is the most threatened. “By the end of the century, there won’t be many emperor penguins left,” says Stephanie Jenouvrier, head of the Jenouvrier Seabirds Lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
She explains global warming is destroying their habitat. “Their fate is tied to the sea ice because they use it as their home base for breeding, moulting and feeding,” says Jenouvrier. “Because they are breeding on the southernmost place on earth, there is very little option for them to move elsewhere.”
Human action can still make a difference, she adds. If warming is limited to 2 C by the end of the century, as outlined in the Paris climate agreement, the emperor penguin population will fall by only 44 per cent, according to a paper Jenouvrier published last year. But if emissions continue on their current trajectory, more than 80 per cent will disappear by 2100.
Other species face a more mixed future. The Adelie penguins — the most plentiful species with four million pairs — appear to be increasing in the relatively cool east Antarctica but declining in the warming parts of the Antarctic Peninsula. “There will be climate change winners and climate change losers,” says Lynch. “Climate change can have all these different manifestations.”
Tracking species and populations may be about to get a lot easier. Satellite and drone imagery, combined with improvements in computer vision, are about to revolutionize the counting of animals. This is already underway on board Greenpeace’s Esperanza, where the penguin team has set up an office inside a shipping container to process drone images, which will be used to train computers to do the counting. The days of researchers personally visiting colonies for surveys may be coming to an end.
Lynch, who uses satellite data to identify new penguin colonies, points out that until now, ecologists have spent a lot of their time just trying to find the species they are studying. “The mere surveying of animals is going to get easier,” she says. “Ecologists like myself can spend more time understanding the underlying dynamics, rather than just figuring out where all the animals are.” There are still limitations — drones can only fly so far and the computer algorithms haven’t yet been fully trained — but accuracy is improving quickly.
Satellite surveys may even be helpful for tracking whale populations, one of the great unsolved mysteries of the ocean. Whales are hard to count because they migrate over long distances and spend a lot of time underwater. Jennifer Jackson, a whale specialist at the British Antarctic Survey, explains that they are trying to use satellites to count them from space.
After being hunted for centuries, whale populations are now coming back, following the end of whaling in the 1980s. The humpback whale population seems to be on its way to a full recovery in some areas. “It is clear that protection from whaling has worked,” says Jackson. She led a recent survey near South Georgia, a sub-antarctic Island, which saw 55 blue whales, an unprecedented number.
However, the return of the whales also means they are eating a lot more krill. Whales are the biggest consumers in the ecosystem, and the shift in krill consumption, combined with warmer oceans and shifting currents, makes it very difficult for scientists to know exactly how krill populations are changing, and why. Some evidence suggests krill have moved south due to climate change. Others think the increase in whales has reduced the krill available for penguins.
“There are a lot of compounding issues,” says Trathan of the British Antarctic Survey. “Understanding the science of climate change, recovering marine mammals and fishing trends is a perfect storm of ‘science needed.’ ”
The politics of fishing in these icy waters plays a part as well. There are growing calls for more limits on fishing in several new marine protected areas, but progress is stalled at the 25-member body that regulates fishing, the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). A proposal by Chile and Argentina to protect the Antarctic Peninsula from fishing has been deadlocked for eight years, mainly due to opposition from China and Russia, which both have fishing fleets in the Southern Ocean. A similar effort to create a protected area in east Antarctica, supported by Australia and the EU, has also been blocked.
“It is about trying to future-proof the Southern Ocean,” says Jackson, the whale specialist. “Whale populations are recovering, and we don’t really know how that will impact things.”
For environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the recovery of the whales represents a major victory after decades of campaigns. Greenpeace is now turning its focus to the ocean as a whole. It has been advocating for a Global Ocean Treaty, fighting oil drilling in the Arctic and pushing for rules on deepsea mining. “At the moment, there is no one who holds CCAMLR accountable for their failures,” says Frida Bengtsson of Greenpeace. “To see the Southern Ocean protected would be amazing.”
Humans first laid eyes on Antarctica 200 years ago, and since then one wave of exploitation has followed another. First there were the sealers, then the whalers, who hunted several species to the brink of extinction. In the 20th century, the polar explorers and scientific bases left their mark as empires jockeyed for influence. Seven countries have laid claim to Antarctica, although, under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, they all agreed to dedicate the continent to peace and science.
The arrival of tourists has brought new pressures. This season Antarctica will have 40 per cent more visitors than it did last year, according to the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators. The association expects 78,000 people to visit between November 2019 and March 2020. Dozens of ice-capable cruise ships are currently under construction and tourism is expected to keep growing.
For many tourists, Antarctica is the last unexplored frontier. Partly because it is so inhospitable, it has always appealed to the human instinct to conquer, to assert, to explore. But as the changes on the planet accelerate, it is also poised to become one of the most vulnerable places in a warmer world.
It won’t be the first time the continent has heated up — in past geologic epochs, it was warm enough to have trees and plants. But the planet was vastly different then, with much higher sea levels and hotter average temperatures. “Antarctica evolved from a very warm world to this white Antarctica today,” says Leppe, the head of the Chilean Antarctic Institute.
While Antarctica has seen warm temperatures before, humans have not. Leppe pulls up a chart showing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which rose above 400 parts per million in 2015. The last time that happened was three million years ago. “This is the first time that as a species, as Homo sapiens, we are passing through 400 ppm. So nobody, no cultures, no humans can explain how we can face this big challenge.”
The best we may be able to hope for is to better understand what is happening, and try to act before it is too late. Just as the little chinstrap penguin can show us the bigger changes taking place across the food chain, so Antarctica as a whole may help provide the answers to our own future.
The Financial Times Limited (2017). All rights reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Limited. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
One of the patterns that really leapt out was the coldest, densest waters around Antarctica were substantially warmer than they had been.