Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica

If the earth were flat, this is the place where you are most likely to fall off the edge. For those of us who like First World comforts, the euphemism “end of the world” is a kind reference to Antarctica. This continent at the bottom of our globe truly is a place of extremes: it is the driest, coldest, highest (average elevation), windiest, and most remote place on earth. It also is the most beautiful (my opinion) and dismal (depending on the timing of your visit) place you can ever visit. Come on a clear summer day when the sun never sets, and you’ll find solitude among ice-covered mountains, dry valleys, and spectacular icebergs. Come on a cold winter day when darkness envelopes you and blizzards blur your vision, you can’t see the hand in front of your eyes and exposed skin will freeze in a matter of seconds, and you will not be able to think of a more miserable place on earth. It is at this place of beauty and danger that our global weather patterns are born, the world’s ocean currents originate, and 70% of the earth’s fresh water is stored.

The Antarctic continent, which is roughly the size of Australia, was avoided and ignored until just 200 years ago when the Antarctic Peninsula was first sighted. The discovery of land just south of South America unleashed a mad rush to commercially exploit the enormous whale and seal populations to the point when several marine life species were hunted close to extinction. Simultaneously, a global rush started to become the first country to reach the south pole. In terms of public interest, the race to conquer and claim 90 degr south can only be compared to the space race of the 1960s. Many expeditions by brave explorers were launched in the 19th century, but it wasn’t until 1911, barely 100 years ago, that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen became the first human to set foot on the southern-most location on earth.

Male killer whale (Orcinus orca) at maximum speed. As a penguin or seal, you don’t want to see this racing towards you. Killer whales hunt in pods. They are known to bump ice flows from below to dislodge their prey. Males are easily identified by their 2 m (6.5 ft) tall dorsal fins.

This is all to say that Antarctica is a remarkable place, poorly understood and explored, with much to offer to humankind. It still is a place where you can get terribly lost and die quickly without even trying. Antarctica is also a place that, after millennia of quiet, unnoticed existence, is crumbling before our eyes. It’s disintegration, which all reputable climate scientists agree upon has now started, has the potential to cause great suffering for all life on earth and result in millions of environmental refugees. Still, despite the available evidence and the known dire consequences of a climate catastrophe, there still are too many people all around the world who are either unaware of the facts or deny the undeniable. They look at news about the latest drought, heatwave, flooding, or polar vortex and blame “Mother Nature”.

A massive tabular iceberg in the evening light. Once part of a giant ice shelf resting on ocean water, this berg separated and will float in the open ocean and melt for years while contributing to the ongoing global rise in sea levels. The portion of these icebergs we can see, can be 100 m (300 ft) tall. Ninety percent of the iceberg mass is below sea level and cannot be seen.

At the heart of the threat our world is facing are the enormous ice shelves at the edges of the Antarctic continent. They are the proverbial canary in the goldmine. Due to warming sea temperatures in the Southern Ocean (mostly in the western Antarctic), the ice shelves, which extend and float on top of the ocean surface, have started to disintegrate. They cannot withstand the warm ocean water melting the ice from below. Eventually, huge tabular icebergs carve off the ice shelves and float out to sea where they survive for years before melting and contributing to a rise in sea levels. As an indication of size, the tabular iceberg known as B15 contained enough fresh water to replace the Nile River’s water volume for 75 years. The ice shelves along the continent’s fringes, some of which are the size of entire countries (e.g., the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France or the size of Canada’s Yukon Territory), act as barriers which hold back the massive interior polar glaciers that rest on bedrock. With the ice shelves gone, gravity will allow the glaciers to slide down the elevated bedrock towards the ocean at a rate 10 times faster than the current speed.

Waterfalls created by melting glacier ice in Admiralty Bay on King George Island, Antarctica. So far, 1/3 of the global sea level rise can be attributed to melting glaciers.

What is warming the Southern Ocean? There is no doubt that high CO2 levels in the atmosphere are, at least indirectly, contributing to the temperature increases in the world’s oceans. The last time the world experienced CO2 concentrations as high as current levels (410 ppm) was 3 million years ago. At that time the global air temperature was 5 degrees warmer than is is now. Luckily, the oceans are acting as enormous heat sinks. Scientists believe that 93% of the heat generated by greenhouse gases is absorbed by the world’s largest bodies of water but by now, this has resulted in elevated ocean surface temperatures, globally.

Gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) on an ice flow in the Gerlache Strait, Antarctic Peninsula.

With the amount of CO2 humans have already pumped into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, a global sea level rise (SLR) of 50 cm during the next 10 to 20 years will be unavoidable. Given that CO2 will linger in the atmosphere for 1,000 to 2,000 years, even a concerted global effort resulting in a sudden lowering of greenhouse emissions will not prevent the scourge of coastal flooding. It is believed that 100-year floods will become annual events already at 30 cm SLR. Believing the science, the Singaporean government will be investing US $120 billion to protect the city state from expected flooding by building a barrier along the shoreline in the years to come.

A large chinstrap peguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus) colony at the entrance to the caldera of Deception Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica. The island is an active volcano. The red colour is oxidized iron from the latest eruption (1969) while the green colour shows the presence of lichen.

Is it too late to halt rising seas levels? I guess the answer is a matter of degree. Since 1900, sea levels have already risen by 32 cm and we are, as mentioned earlier, moving towards 50 cm SLR at a rapid rate. What is already “in the pipeline” can no longer be undone. However, we still have a chance to avoid a potentially catastrophic SLR of 15 m by 2300, for example. Humans currently pump 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and there is no indication that the trend is slowing. The only time CO2 emissions declined recently was in 2020 during COVID, but this abnormality in an otherwise rising trend was very short-lived.

An iceberg from a fragmented ice shelf is lit up by the evening sun near Anvers Island, Antarctic Peninsula.

As our ship glides past massive penguin colonies and icebergs that were shaped into pieces of art by waves and wind, I wonder how many future generations of tourists will be able to marvel at sights like these. Then I see tabular icebergs in the distance, massive in size and gleaming in the setting sun. Suddenly the answer seems to be clear: not many.

This year, 100,000 tourists will visit Antarctica - a record. It used to sadden me when thousands of tourists stream into the last remote places on earth. Not in Antarctica. In my opinion, the more people see the effects of climate change first hand, the better for the world.

Waves splash against the base of a large floating ice shelf in the Drake Passage between Cape Horn and Antarctica.

You may not fall off the earth’s edge in Antarctica, but intrinsically you know, the process you are witnessing here may soon lead to more severe coastal flooding around the globe.

The canary is not doing well.

More pictures can be seen on this website on the page “Gallery Archive - Antarctica I”.

 ~ RT