Polarized

Life at the South Pole batters body and mind

2010-09-21T10:58:00.001-05:00

(As published in The Kansas City Star:)

PALMER STATION, Antarctica | Jon Brack loved the South Pole.

The rest of the world might consider life there a banishment, might think the place is some frozen gulag to be endured.

But Brack relished his sunless winter at the bottom of the world. He tended a greenhouse, learned to play guitar, picked up conversational Italian. Venturing out of the Amundsen-Scott station meant dressing like an astronaut, but it promised the mind-blowing colors of the aurora australis.

“I didn’t want the sun to come back,” he said, “because I didn’t want the auroras to go away.”

Brack is part of a breed that has been drawn to Antarctica for better than a century — men and women intrigued more by the exotic than the easy, who think life is too short to be squandered in someplace ordinary.

Working all three U.S. research stations on the continent, Brack never went hungry or lacked a warm bed and an Internet connection.

At 22, he set aside a business degree and went to work as an Antarctic chef. Raytheon — the giant defense contractor that also runs the American polar research stations — started him at a field camp about eight miles from McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice Shelf on the continent’s New Zealand side.

MacTown, as regulars call it, is a summertime home for about 1,000 people — in winter, a fifth of that. Typically, about half the people are researchers. The rest are people such as Brack, who keep the scientists warm, fed, healthy and free to pursue research.

During that first season he tried yoga. He joined a bowling league. In an adaptation of “Much Ado About Nothing” he transformed the role of the village idiot into that of McMurdo’s safety officer.

“McMurdo is a mining town crossed with a fraternity,” Brack said. “You see lots of people who had divorced or left their families and their careers, people just looking to get away. The South Pole” — where he would work in subsequent years — “had some of that, but more people who were eager to be there.”

He regularly banked his Raytheon pay and traveled the world between seasons. His passport has been stamped in more than 50 countries.

Brack spent two stints at the pole, one for a full year.

It’s brutal enough in the summer — “the cold sucks your breath away the instant you step off that plane” — but winter is another story entirely. Temperatures regularly drop to minus-90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun disappears from March through September.

“Approximately 5 percent of winter-over personnel experience symptoms that fulfill criteria for a psychiatric disorder,” concluded one social scientist. “Even among those who fail to meet (those) diagnostic criteria, (Antarctica) tends to magnify seemingly trivial events and symptoms.”

That’s why everyone who wants to winter on the ice must first see a shrink.

“ ‘Do you love your mother?’ ‘Do you want to kill your mother?’ You know the kind of stuff they’re looking for,” Brack recalls of his exam. “The psychiatrist went over the results and said something like ‘This would be a problem if you were anywhere else in the world, but it’s good for the South Pole.’ Something,” Brack laughs, “about commitment.”

Some South Pole realities set in quickly. Consider the dating scene. Of the 58 people at the pole that winter, just 11 were women. Of those, six had come with husbands or boyfriends. Of the remainder, one was lesbian and three paired up with somebody in a matter of days.

“There were of a couple of us guys sitting around doing the math and saying, ‘Well, that settles our chances for the season,’ ” Brack said.

He made a point to go to the bar only about once a week. He played cards, tended his greenhouse herbs and lettuce, and mixed with scientists whenever he could.

“Some people really enjoy it,” he said. “Others just drink.”

One guy downed a bottle of Crown Royal every night. He’d take the purple velvet bags the whiskey came in and hang them on the fluorescent light over the bar. By winter’s end, the light was blotted out entirely.

“Generally, he was a happy person,” Brack said. “There definitely were others who were more destructively depressed.”

Yet the cold and the company get old for everyone by the end.

“It’s at the point where all the stories have been told five times,” Brack said. “You know all the buttons to push on everybody, and you’ve even pushed a few yourself.”

He’s spent the last two years at the Palmer Station, which sits on Anvers Island just off the Antarctic Peninsula, almost halfway between the South Pole and the tip of South America. It’s the smallest of the U.S. Antarctic outposts — its population runs from about 30 to 45.

“It’s a commune here,” he said, “not just a labor camp.”

It also offers the most inviting environment. The temperature barely dips below freezing and often lingers in the 40s. The place has a bar, a small movie lounge, a fully outfitted gym, a sauna, an open-air hot tub, wireless Internet and some of the best eating on any continent.

Here the 31-year-old Brack is a jack of all trades, handling cargo, acting as fire marshal, working on the ocean rescue team, doing occasional kitchen cleanup, raising the flag and playing bass in the house band.

Brack revels in it: the scenery, the people, the ability to hop into a boat for a photo safari. But in this second season at Palmer and his fifth in Antarctica, he says the end is near. Every romance he’s had in civilization has been cut short by a trip to the ice. And someday he might like a family.

“I’m enjoying this while I can,” he said. “How many places can you work and while you’re having breakfast you look outside the window and see penguins or whales? It’s great here.”

Antarctica: A frozen hotbed of climate research for hardy scientists (belated post of story)

2010-09-21T10:55:00.001-05:00

(As published in The Kansas City Star:)

ANVERS ISLAND, Antarctica | Roald Amundsen attacked this frozen nowhere-land as a racing explorer, determined to be fastest, to be first, to be remembered.

His determination and savvy got him to the South Pole before any other, and made him a hero in an age when Antarctica existed in the human imagination as a final conquest.

Mostly for show, he brought along a scientist.

Just shy of a century later, the conquerors have given way to the curious.

Now scientists such as geologist David Barbeau and ornithologist Kristen Gorman, rugged individuals of another age, shuttle in rubber Zodiac boats from remote research stations and ice-breaking research ships. They bump aside small floes, bend against brutal polar winds and scramble up cliffs in search of their own discoveries.

They search not for fame, but for answers about the same climate that once tortured and killed their polar adventuring forebears. Around this continent, the weather has mellowed alarmingly. Giant glaciers and tiny creatures are threatened as this tip of our global iceberg warms faster than anywhere else on earth.

These modern-day researchers come not to conquer, but to understand.

Almost by accident, Barbeau’s career as a geologist has been swept up, and upward, on the wave of interest about what makes parts of the planet freeze and thaw, and what that says about climate change.

He leads Antarctic expeditions hatched and financed entirely on the strength of theories about how the continent broke off from South America and iced over.

Gorman, meanwhile, tracks how dwindling Adelie penguin colonies connect to the retreat of sea ice. She navigates guano-slick boulders.

She teams with researchers steering remote-control submersibles into undersea canyon feeding grounds to measure how the birds fare as Antarctica’s glacial edges crumble into the sea.

“We’re asking simple questions about food ecology in this larger framework,” she said of fish and shrimplike krill and their feathered hunters. “How do you better predict how climate will affect predators?”

It wasn’t so much that science drew her to the wilds of Antarctica. It was an overwhelming need to work in wild places that sucked her into ornithology.

Though Barbeau ends up climbing mountains and skiing across glaciers, he recognizes that the strain and danger don’t compare to what the men of Amundsen’s age knew. But they were just looking for fame and national bragging rights.

“The first to do this, the first to do that,” he said dismissively. “We’re just trying to understand things. With climate science, you’re talking about something that’s critical.”

He and Gorman are just two among scores building careers in modern-day Antarctica, where climate studies promise academic status and grant money.

At the South Pole, researchers take core samples of ice, measuring the gases trapped in them to see what Earth’s atmosphere was like thousands of years ago. In the Drake Passage, measurements taken by ship and satellite reveal how much carbon dioxide is absorbed by sea life.

Observations made over decades on the Ross Ice Shelf and along the Antarctic Peninsula look at changes in temperature and ice levels, and what that’s meant to whales, seals, penguins and the krill at the nexus of the food chain.

For six weeks, late last year, electrical engineers from the University of Kansas flicked switches and toggled computer controls in a DC-8 jet sweeping back and forth over the frozen wastes. Their purpose: to peer through the continent’s miles-deep blanket of ice.

Ross MacPhee, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, sees a particular personality in the researchers drawn south of the Polar Front. He is both a paleontologist and a scholar of polar exploration, and traveled on his own Antarctic expedition in 2009.

While the great breakthroughs of the Digital Age typically appear in laboratories using fast-developing technology, he said, a breed of scientist survives that still prefers to work in the wild. It may be as much that their science delivers them outdoors, as that they need to go the wilderness to advance their science.

“We’re talking about someone who doesn’t mind being too cold or too wet or too sweaty,” MacPhee said, “someone who actually enjoys tough conditions.”

•••

Antarctica is a hotbed of new climate patterns that serve as a nifty laboratory for understanding what’s happening to the Earth as a whole.

Its long, dark winters make it the best place on Earth for observing the heavens. Its air is the cleanest on the planet, giving researchers a baseline to compare with other regions. Some 70 percent of the world’s fresh water is locked into 30 million cubic kilometers of Antarctic ice.

The United States alone spends more than $300 million a year on research here — supply flights to the globe’s most forbidding landscapes, icebreakers plowing the seas for oceanographic research, delivering people like Gorman and Barbeau to remote coasts.

Barbeau is the point man on a $700,000 grant that has brought him here for three years running and paid for nearly 20 other researchers either to accompany him or to perform lab analysis back in the United States.

All the modern work feeds, and is driven by, findings like those of the Nobel-decorated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that carbon dioxide levels are at a 650,000-year high and climbing. Such buildup of gas in the atmosphere — the IPCC attributes the steep rise chiefly to industrialization — could explain why nine out of every 10 glaciers in the world are shrinking.

Global warming remains a controversial concept, made more so when the hacking of e-mails from researchers at East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit last year revealed that they toyed with data to make for more dramatic results. Skeptics also like to point out how most of Antarctica has not warmed appreciably.

Scientists in Antarctica, though, say the climate here has changed quickly and profoundly. Shifting atmospherics mean more ice is piling up in the Ross Sea and around the South Pole — evidence of an extraordinarily dry place seeing slightly more snow.

The Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost spit of land jutting up toward South America, is rapidly thawing. Since 1950, average midwinter temperatures there have climbed almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit and now range around 14 degrees.

Such data, goes the mainstream consensus, suggest the planet’s climate is changing faster than ever before.

The first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record, a fact that was not missed at December’s international talks at Copenhagen. Although little came from that climate summit, political pressure to slash carbon emissions is only mounting.

Meanwhile, sea ice — formed on the ocean surface in the coldest temperatures — floats off the northern peninsula for 80 fewer days a year than it did a quarter-century ago. In 2002, a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island broke from the peninsula’s eastern shore. In 2008, more than 150 square miles more fell off its west side.

The warming here is the fastest on the planet, five times that of the rest of the globe.

•••

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who barely survived a trek to collect penguin eggs in 1911 on Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed British run to the pole, described Antarctic exploration as “at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

Times have changed.

“Hi, guys!” Gorman cheerily greets her subjects on Cormorant Island.

She talks to the birds: big-footed, Technicolor cormorants; hovering, scavenging skuas; squawking, knee-high, feces-mottled penguins.

While she labors to keep her scientist’s detached powers of observation, Gorman can’t avoid an affinity for the grandeur of giant petrels or the chubby adorability of a downy penguin chick.

After five years on the Antarctic peninsula, she said, “I still think the penguins are cute.”

Sitting indoors in flip-flops and a down jacket patched with duct tape, Gorman looks younger than her 35 years.

In a schoolgirl voice, the doctoral candidate at Simon Fraser University punctuates conversations with “cool” and “super cool” — typically in appreciation of the look of a bird or the power of isotopes to reveal an animal’s diet.

Day after Antarctic day, she hikes through penguin breeding grounds, weighing the eggs, examining the young, documenting the declining numbers.

She sees the penguins arrive in the spring. Watches them tend eggs, many of which are devoured by predators. She studies their hatchlings, sees them snatched away under the rough law of this frozen jungle.

Increasingly and problematically less frozen.

That’s bad news for the Adelie penguin.

In 1975, 15,000 pairs nested along the peninsula and its scores of small islands. Now there are fewer than 4,000.

Gorman has tracked the phenomenon for the last five years while working out of the U.S.-run Palmer Station. The pace and stamina of her and her research companion, Jennifer Blum, awe even the hardy folks drawn down here.

Nearly every day of the sun-saturated Antarctic summer, the two lace hiking boots, yank on layers of fleece and Gore-Tex and climb into a tiny Zodiac outboard. They motor from one small island to the next well into the evenings.

The sea at times pounds their bow, or surrounds them in ice. Each landing requires one researcher to climb boulders with wet rope in hand while the other fights wind and current to anchor the boat out of harm’s way. Then they trek among two-ton elephant seals and irritated penguins.

Penguins look sweet enough, but they are tight bundles of muscle. With beaks. Pick one up, it will resist. Gorman’s forearms bear a constellation of penguin scars.

“They’re less cool,” she said, “when you have to handle them.”

Rain still makes her uneasy — not because she can get soaked in the cold, but because it makes for a dangerously slick slime when it mixes with bird guano on the rocky islands.

The Adelies feed in spots where the churning of warmer and cooler water stirs up nutrients and promotes the growth of fish and krill.

The birds need winter sea ice to launch their daytime hunts. As that ice has receded, the Adelies are forced farther south in the winter. Scientists call that climate migration. For the penguins, it means shorter days and less feeding time.

While Gorman’s job is to collect the sober data of science, she concedes some feeling for her subjects.

One evening in December as she plucked a guitar with friends and someone sang “Orphan Girl” (I have no mother no father/No sister no brother), Gorman put on a half-acted frown.

“This makes me think,” she said sadly, “of the penguin chicks.”

•••

Antarctica holds 91 percent of the Earth’s ice.

So KU scientists have a whole lot of measuring to do.

For six weeks, the electrical engineers peered through ice sheets so thick that only in recent years have scientists found entire mountain ranges hidden below the surface.

For much of the last two decades, the chief way to monitor ice in Antarctica was with satellite readings. But the man-moon operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration over the pole soon will fall out of service.

In stepped CReSIS, the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, a collection of climate and technological experts. As a result, NASA’s “Ice Bridge” observation project will run until a replacement satellite goes into orbit in 2014.

The DC-8 is packed with gear made by engineers from KU and elsewhere especially for the job of teasing out new detail about how much ice is stored in the Earth’s natural freezers and how it’s changing.

The flights, which also go over Greenland in the summer of the Northern Hemisphere, tend to be low-altitude, ground-hugging affairs often fighting some of the strongest winds on the planet.

“You really have to hold on,” said Chris Allen, a professor in KU’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an associate director for CReSIS.

“It got kind of scary a couple of times. But sometimes that’s what it takes to get the job done.”

In its 11 hours aloft, the plane passed from Punta Arenas, Chile, soaring over the Antarctic sea where Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance crew was stuck for more than a year, the trail Amundsen blazed, the ice where Scott perished.

Radar signals bounce back from the gleaming white below; terabytes of data feed into the flying lab’s humming computers, enough data each day to fill more than 1,000 pickup trucks with books. This season, the plane logged enough miles to circle the planet four times.

“There was always something to deal with” — software glitches, fidgety hard drives, turbulent skies — “but that’s what makes the challenge interesting,” Allen said.

•••

Even at 35, the geologist Barbeau possesses the persona of a brainy hippie backpacking between hostels rather than that of a professor leading polar expeditions.

His work in the slow-moving field of geology plays into the rush to understand climate change by looking at a critical question: Did glaciers take over Antarctica after it split free from South America, or before?

We know the glaciers arrived 35 million years ago. But the land mass had been sitting at the pole for 100 million years before the chill set in.

The continent is cut off today by the Polar Front, an ocean current and prevailing winds circling the continent from west to east, the water moving with a force 100 times greater than that of all the world’s rivers combined.

If the breakup of the Andes mountain chain — which opened the Drake Passage between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula — occurred before the cold arrived, that suggests it was the seclusion enforced by the Polar Front that later froze it over.

But if the opening of the Drake Passage took place after the glaciers came, then it was probably a gas thing.

It would have been a reversal of what is happening today. The planet would have been experiencing a sudden flourish of plant and animal life, with great quantities of carbon absorbed. Less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere meant less greenhouse effect trapping the sun’s warming energy.

Barbeau’s polar field work could be as vital to his career as Amundsen’s conquest of the South Pole was to his. Both set off with the blessings of their patrons — the Norwegian government and sundry benefactors for Amundsen, principally the National Science Foundation for Barbeau — who had placed bets on their success.

Amundsen beat the British and got a sea named after him.

There will never be a Barbeau Bay, but Barbeau’s discovery landed the geologist a prestigious NSF grant — a huge boon to his research and important to his standing on campus. It meant hundreds of thousands of dollars for his university’s overhead. That success, Barbeau is certain, is the reason he learned while in Antarctica in December that he had achieved tenure at the University of South Carolina.

“It’s a matter of stumbling on the right problem,” Barbeau said, recognizing that by feeding the chic niche of climate science, his work stands much more likely to draw grants and prestige.

At work, he is a wiry prospector wielding a small pickax and an undersized sledge hammer and toting as much as 80 pounds of rocks over miles of snow. Where Amundsen used a compass and a sextant, Barbeau marks his finds with a Garmin satellite navigator.

And where Amundsen learned the value of dogs and fur garments, Barbeau has come to appreciate that less is more. Just enough clothing to keep an active man from shivering, just enough gear to pry rocks loose from a mountainside.

“Every minute on the ground is precious,” he said. “Fewer trips back and forth from the boat mean more time at work, more energy and more focus.”

While he feels pressure to push his science forward, to scope out possibilities for the next grant, Barbeau is constantly aware that he makes a living going to spectacular places.

The Antarctic coast is surely that. Mountaintops jut from the ocean. Glaciers show their alabaster cliffs to the shore. Whales lumber by the research ship that hauls him along the coast, penguins torpedo past its bow, albatrosses glide above it — all in a landscape painted in arresting whites, grays and blues.

“A simple glance around or a thought of how few people have been able to do geology in such a place,” he said, “can lighten a pack by 20 pounds or more.”

Editor’s note

Kansas City Star reporter Scott Canon spent five weeks at Palmer Station on the Antarctica Peninsula and on the Southern Ocean late last year. His travels there and in 2008 to Toolik Lake, Alaska, inside the Arctic Circle, were made possible by a science journalism fellowship awarded by the Marine Biological Laboratory and funded by the National Science Foundation. Photographs for this series are by Canon. Darryl Levings edited the story. The graphics are by Dave Eames. A blog of Canon’s trips to the Antarctic and Arctic is at scottcanon.blogspot.com .

To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com .

Shackleton, after waiting for established air route and better food, gets to South Pole

2010-03-16T08:18:00.000-05:00

OK, not that Shackleton. But a distance relative of the old man became not the first, but about the gazillionth person to make it to the South Pole.

From the Military Times:

SHACKLETON DESCENDANT REACHES SOUTH POLE

After five attempts, a Shackleton has finally made it to the South Pole.

Navy Reserve Cmdr. Scott Shackleton reached the pole the night of Feb. 9 while serving on a three-week resupply mission helping prepare the scientific communities stationed there for the Antarctic winter from mid-February until October.

Scott Shackleton's distant cousin, famed British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, made four unsuccessful attempts to plant a flag at the geographic bottom of the earth before he died of a heart attack on his last expedition in 1922.

"It's a beautiful and mystical place," said Scott Shackleton in a phone interview from McMurdo Station just hours before he was scheduled to leave the continent and begin his journey home. "It's unlike anywhere else in the world. I understand now why he kept coming back to explore, and I hope I get another chance to come here, too."

Scott Shackleton's job was to oversee the offload of a tanker and a container ship. He made it to the South Pole in an Air Force C-130 aircraft, which was making ferry runs with supplies to sustain those living at the South Pole for another year.

During Ernest Shackleton's second expedition, he got within 97 miles of the geographic pole - the farthest south anyone had made it until that time.

His hopes to be the first to the pole were dashed when Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his party got there Dec. 14, 1911.

Carpe vomit, seas the day

2009-12-20T20:19:00.000-06:00

   Heading south, the ocean gods showed mercy. The notorious Drake Passage knew relative calm. Most all aboard our stubby, ice-breaking research ship fared well.
   Payback is a, well, it rhymes with itch.
   In the small hours of Sunday morning, as the ship moved deeper north into the Drake, the wind blew 50 knots and the swells pitched above 15 feet.
   My bed is tucked in the hold of the ship. It's a place of many noises. The throbbing diesel engines. The alarms that go off regularly in the engine room to alert the crew to tweak this or turn that. The ventilation in our makeshift cabin that drones on like the outside winds.
   But my crib is also protected from the most extreme sways of the ship. Even so, I have to prop up the side of my mattress with a lifejacket so I won't roll out from the top bunk. Even with that jury-rig, I have to hold on to the walls to keep from spilling to the floor.
   Others have it much worse. In their upper deck bunks they feel the sways of the ship in exaggeration and, like me, feel the boat's bass vibration when a wave strikes the bow just wrong.
   One woman has twisted her ankle on the swaying floors and now must navigate the ship's steep stairways on one good leg. Worse yet, the talented chef from Palmer Station has hitched a ride for emergency dental work. An exposed nerve must wait for five days of rocky passage before someone in Chile can drill into her mouth. Plus she's been seasick.
   And the boat is shrinking, figuratively. The rough seas mean the outside decks are closed. Plus most of the people riding along have been living in these close quarters for a month now. The best jokes have been told. The romance of the ice has faded far to our stern. Thoughts are now shifting to connecting flights and the sundry details of holiday travel.

A yeti at the helm

2009-12-17T17:10:00.001-06:00

Some of you may want to reconsider your votes in our poll of Antarctic explorers.
With a one-day overpopulation, the people doing real work at this polar outpost were busy. But the day's visitors, stuck for the last month aboard a research ship were eager to see the sights. In particular, they wanted to visit the nearby islands where Penguins poop and elephant seals lounge in the guano.
Who'd they come looking for to pilot this Antarctic maritime expedition? None other than one very corn-fed Midwesterner raised on the prairie who just three weeks ago wasn't terribly sure about the whole bow/stern thing.
I can be quite impressed with myself (reporter, duh), but maybe never so much as when the locals sought me out to take 10 folks in a Zodiac to Torgersen Island. OK, it wasn't Worsley taking the James Caird from Elephant Island to South Georgia, but there were small swells and a gusty wind and a little snow.
It was also my bittersweet final Zodiac outing, and I was rewarded by principally, not messing up the boat, and additionally by seeing the newest born of Penguin chicks.

Now honestly, which is cuter? The chick, or the Zodiac driver?

Your ride is here

2009-12-17T17:08:00.000-06:00

Ever been at a party, having a great time, and your ride home starts honking the horn out front?
The ship that will haul us back to Chile arrived this morning, with plans for steaming north on Friday morning.
Crew and passengers have been cruising around the Antarctic peninsula for the last month, kept from their explorations too much of that time by ice. For them, today is a great respite, a chance to come ashore on Palmer Station, hike around, maybe soak in the hot tub and almost certainly have a drink or six in the bar. Everyone will feast together on pizza tonight and the longer-term residents of Palmer will get a welcome infusion of company.
For those of us who have settled into Anvers Island so comfortably, the boat is not a pretty sight. It means our stomachs are soon to be tested by the Drake Passage, and after that several airports and tiny airline seats.
Much more, it means leaving -- without much prospect of ever returning -- one of the most spectacular natural settings on the planet. We'll leave behind, too, a tight ad hoc family of warm and adventurous souls who have made the remote anything but lonely.
I'm already dreading that moment after an exotic, some days after the return, when it feels like a dream -- cut short by the alarm clock of ordinary life. Where's the damn snooze button.

Young chicks (gratuitous headline intended to inflate web traffic)

2009-12-15T16:38:00.000-06:00

Our astute ornithologists alerted us to some of the first Adelie penguin chicks of the year, no more than three days old when we saw them on Tuesday.
This is not your antiseptic maternity ward. It feels, instead, like a great blending of primordial goop.
On a rocky little island aptly named Humble, amid the random snoring and bellowing of lethargic elephant seals, the chicks sit in rock nests springing veritable streams of guano and slush that dribble through mounds of seal dung. Think of downtown Kansas City after the St. Patrick's Day parade.
In these early days, both parents stay near -- likely to protect the young from the greedy jaws of skua shorebirds. Soon they will take more turns venturing out into the water for meals.

At first approach, they seem invisible. Advised to stand quietly as winds grew stronger, their tiny chirps caught our ears and led our eyes.
Mostly, the adults keep the downy chicks warm by sitting on them as if they were still just eggs. Then the parents stand and out pop the hungry maws -- like editors, always begging for more, more, more.
So Mom, or just as often Dad, barfs. Tiny, slimy, half-digested bits of seafood wretch up and into the hatchling's beaks. Antarctic sushi.
Nearby, other nests still harbor eggs. But the job of the newborns is to eat and make guano. They do both as prodigiously as the Royals give up runs. Like our boys in blue, they've been doing worse each year. The Royals don't have a great excuse. For these feathery swimmers, the problem is that in the winter they forage from the ice during the daylight. Since there's increasingly less ice, they move farther and farther south, where the winter days only get shorter. And so on. But there's always next year.

Chillin' in style

2009-12-15T11:35:00.000-06:00

Woke this morning to see this ship, the Bahamian-flagged Minerva, a couple hundred yards from my bedroom window.
It's one of two cruise ships expected to stop at Palmer Station this week, and part of a trend of Antarctica tourism going through fits and starts.

Just as Antarctica has become the chic place for the well-heeled and environmentally conscience to see, the business of bringing tourists to high latitudes in the lower hemisphere is getting trickier.

First, the cruisin' companies have had to deal with their own heavier traffic. Operators go to great lengths to time their journeys in the all-too-brief Austral summer so that they remain largely out of view from one another. It's a bit of a buzz kill to pay a bucket-load of money to have your view of penguins and icebergs cluttered by a another cruise ship.

Then there's the nagging issue of sinking. The Explorer (not to be confused by National Geographic's cruise ship of the same name) shared paint with an iceberg in 2007 about 60 miles from the Antarctic peninsula. The passengers and crew, about 150 in all, were rescued from lifeboats. But the sinking of the Explorer brought about attention to the perils of taking so many people to areas so remote in waters that can be tricky.
Now the countries involved in the uneasy of the no-man's-land of Antarctica want strong new controls.

In 2007, the cruise ship Explorer ran into an iceberg less than 100 kilometres from the Antarctic Peninsula. Its passengers were rescued in lifeboats, but the ship sank. It carried 185,000 litres of marine diesel, a lighter fuel, which prevented it from becoming an even worse environmental disaster, according to experts.

Already, rules are set to take effect barring the use of heavy oil on the cruise ships south of 60 degrees latitude, meaning a few companies will bow out rather than retool their ships. Saga, Swan Hellenic and Voyages of Discovery have already steamed away from the continent..

Meantime, the disintegration of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has dumped more icebergs in the water, making navigation harder and meaning and accessibility to some areas less predictable.
The cruises can routinely run tens of thousands of dollars per head. So people talk about the orange parkas their issued for the trip as being $20,000 jackets. Passage on the Minerva, which featured lectures from a scientist who's done much research in the region, included a surcharge that helped pay for scientific gear donated to Palmer on Tuesday.
I climbed on to the Minerva this morning to see the ship and the grip-and-grin ceremony. It was populated by the sort of folks who could afford the money and time for a 10-day Antarctic cruise. Lots of gray hair. And when the folks from Palmer gave a presentation on board, passengers were told they could also watch it on TV in their berths. Later, some 200 rounded through the station for tours and T-shirts.

H2o -- chilled

2009-12-14T08:42:00.000-06:00

This link should lead to a random collection of the Antarctic's defining feature: ice.

That water's cold. And deep, too.

2009-12-13T18:25:00.000-06:00

Ahab wannabes were grabbing their harpoons. The great white (really white) one bobbed in the Southern Ocean on Sunday.
There's cold, and then there's dangly parts take a vacation cold. The water here is actually slightly below 32 degrees farenheit (salinity at work). So why not go swimming?
Local tradition holds that residents of Palmer Station plunge in the polar waters when friendly vessels head north. The ritual aims to bring good luck for those about to head across the notoriously nasty Drake Passage. It's decidedly bad luck for those taking the plunge.
During my time here, no ship would be making the trip without me aboard, so I jumped in just to confirm my stupidity.
Off the pier in one blindingly pale flash of gumption, and I was in the water.

I've read where studies test people's tolerance to pain by having them stick their hands in ice water. It hurts.
Indeed, you do know when you hit the water.

But it must have been numbing as well, because I figured a somersault in the water was in order. Not a great idea.
I got a head rush combined with a brain freeze. It was like gulping down a giant grape Slurpee while buried naked in the snow. I felt as if my eyeballs were collapsing on themselves. Even my prodigious insulation was no match for the ice water.
Time to head for the ladder. People on land seemed alien. They were laughing. Smiling. Where's Bill Clinton when you need him? I wanted somebody to feel my pain.

I waddled 30 yards to the hot tub, where it took me a good two minutes to inch my frozen flesh into the steamy water.

Soon, though, I warmed with my fellow ice jumpers, all of us well impressed with our own daring. Friendly crowd. Not terribly bright.

Man in the mountain

2009-12-12T16:30:00.000-06:00

Can you see him?
Anybody can find the face of Jesus in a pancake or a crying Madonna in a coffee stain.
But you've got to travel to the Antarctic peninsula to see this music great in a mountainside.
His face is above the center, diagonal snowfield. He's looking to your left.
A bird researcher based out of Palmer Station a while back noticed that the face in this mountainside and the mug has become a fixture in the psyche here ever since.
See him yet?
His identity can be found, if not with your own eyes, in the comments section.

This leopard is a bad cat (but no feline)

2009-12-12T14:13:00.001-06:00

OK, this is my nominee for the weirdest creature south of an editorial board meeting. The Hydrurga leptonyx, or leopard seal is the Antarctic regional bad boy. She (honestly, it's hard to tell the sex) feasts on penguins and the young of other seals and just about any other warm-blooded prey he can get those menacing chompers around. Leopard seals also gorge on squid and krill.
We saw this one lounging on an ice floe floating about 100 yards from a penguin colony and rolling around in a pool of her own urine. Reminds me of that week I spent at Sturgis.
Although it's an ear-less seal, it looks more like what might happen if you mated a snake with a whale, a Doberman with an otter, or Michael Phelps with a tax collector. They are absolutely otherworldly, like something out of the "Alien" movie series banished to the coldest water in the world.
They lumber on land, but they dart like torpedoes of muscle once in water. The sterns of our Zodiac boats have been reinforced because leopard seals have been known to bite through the thick, hard rubber.
The one we encountered today was at least 10 feet long. They can grow to more than 12 feet and weigh well over 800 pounds and don't have particularly cuddly personalities. Can you say mother-in-law?

Seal sleeps, science stop

2009-12-11T09:44:00.001-06:00

OK, so it's not this crabeater seal's fault that a trailer home-sized ice berg has blocked in all the boats today. But the way it's lounging about on the same ice that is keeping researchers and the rest of us from heading out in the water seems to rub things in a bit.

Playing to our audience

2009-12-10T12:39:00.001-06:00

Mrs. Powell's kindergarten class has asked for pictures of penguins swimming and sliding on their bellies. We know our audience, and we aim to please.
Yet these are two areas where we're pretty weak. I've not seen many penguins sliding with real speed on their bellies. Rather, they tend to flop on to their tummies and scoot a little bit when they seem to feel it's easier than walking.

As for swimming, those pictures are a challenge, too. It's a blast to watch them swim through the water, breaking the surface like dolphins. But since you never know just where they'll come up, it's hard to capture.

But sometimes they lounge around the surface of the water and look a little like ducks.

Polar pole

2009-12-10T06:31:00.000-06:00

Everybody says they never get asked their opinion. Here at "Polarized" we care deeply. Look at the column on the right side of this page.
Rock the vote, and all that stuff the kids talk about.

In a hash of brash.

2009-12-09T18:40:00.001-06:00

Left Palmer Station mid-afternoon for two quick stops in the ocean today and learned that, like in Kansas City, a quick onset of ice can make driving tricky.
The bay outside the station looked pretty much like this when we left.

So we cruised along for a while. The ocean swells were a little higher than usual, but not enough to do more than make the bow of our Zodiac bounce a little bit.
Saw a few penguins perched on a berg.

Then as we headed back, less than an hour after we left, we motored toward Palmer expecting an easy route. But when we got within about three-fourths of a mile from the station we saw that brash, or junk, ice had moved in.
Soon ice was lifting us higher off the water, clogging our propeller, killing our engine. We slowed from a few knots to to desperate lurches back and forth. We were fast falling to the mercy of the ice, and it was coaxing us close to a rocky shore. It wasn't looking dangerous, but if we fouled up the boat or the propeller, there'd be hell to pay with the boating boss back at Palmer.
At a minimum, itIt was looking like an hour or more to finish a trip that might usually take five minutes. Six minutes, tops.
It helps to have friends in the right places. Like the Southern Ocean.
A pair of world-class scientists happened to be a few hundred yards from us in the same jigsaw of fast-closing brash ice. Alex Kahl and Brian Gaas were driving a Zodiac affectionately known in these parts as "Bruiser" for being weighted down with gear and powered by an outboard packing 75 horsepower. Alex, in particular, has been very proud of that engine (size matters, and all that). Our little craft (code named for the purposes of this afternoon's outing "Newspapers are Dinosaurs" by the effete National Public Radio guy traveling with me) sported just 40 horsepower and, even with my lard butt in the bow, couldn't plow very well.
So we went hillbilly on these Antarctic seas. We tossed our bow line to Bruiser, and with me pulling on the line like a deer hunter trying to haul a buck from the brush, did our best to follow in the wake they bulled through the ice.

With feet too many times stomping too near idled propellers, some rather pointless work by your correspondent with an oar to shove aside some of the bigger chunks of ice (often the size an heft of an ATM), we made it back to bay that had transformed to this.
Just goes to show that the boating conditions around here can change almost as fast as an editor's opinion.

Penguins, more and less

2009-12-09T07:43:00.000-06:00

Let's talk penguins.
Even among our flightless, tuxedoed adorables, the Antarctic breeds are a rarity. The world knows 17 varieties wandering the Southern Hemisphere.
But in Antarctica we have, principally, three kinds.
You can spot the gentoo by its orange beak and the white stripe atop its head.

Then there's the chinstrap, so named because, well, it has a chinstrap.

And finally the dominant species of the Antarctica peninsula, the Adelie, sports classically black feathers on its head. The Adelies, named for the wife of French explorer Dumon d'Durville, tend to waddle around in massive colonies like so many Whos down in Whoville.
In recent years, the number of gentoos and chinstraps that are more native to warmer climes in the north has skyrocketed. In 1975, there might have been fewer than 100 nesting pairs of chinstrap penguins around the western Antarctic peninsula. Today, there may be 300. Gentoos were practically nonexistent here as recently as 1990. Today estimates put the number of nesting pairs above 1,000 and climbing.
Adelies, meanwhile, are in steep decline. There may have been more than 15,000 nesting pairs along the peninsula and its scores of small islands in 1975. Now there may be fewer than 4,000 pairs.
The Adelies feed in spots where the churning of warmer and cooler water stirs up nutrients and promotes the growth of fish and shrimp-like krill. But to get to those feeding grounds, the Adelies need winter sea ice to launch their hunts.
As that ice has receded, so have the penguin numbers.

So how do we know how many penguins there are here? In part because very tough people like Jennifer Blum, left, and Kristen Gorman coat themselves in Gore-Tex, fleece and sunblock on a daily basis, hop in a tiny rubber boat and scoot from one island to to the next. They count birds. They monitor the number of eggs laid, how many of those eggs end up in the bellies of predators, how many chicks hatch. And so on. For month after Antarctic month.

New meaning to glacial pace

2009-12-08T20:04:00.000-06:00

I keep packing on the pounds, and the world's glaciers keep shedding weight. Not good.
(Maybe if I ate less, there'd be less need to cut down rain forests or raise beef and ship all those goodies to the local Hen House, reducing my carbon footprint. Consequently, that might preserve a little bit of ice. Let me think about that while I feast on another cheeseburger.)
More evidence is spilling out like tumblers off an ice shelf that the world's glaciers are losing their heft.
Greenland is losing 250 billion tons of ice a year. Nearly as much is shedding from glaciers and ice shelves in Antarctica. (Our picture here is really just a routine summer calving of ice off a glacier deployed for dramatic effect.)
We've known for some time that 90 percent of the world's glaciers are in retreat. Now comes word that they're melting even faster than we thought.

There's fear that Greenland's ice could reach the point of no return -- that as the top of the ice continues to drop in elevation, the remainder will melt even if global temperatures don't increase.

Along the Antarctic peninsula, islands have been revealed with regularity in recent years as shrinking glaciers shrivel away to reveal that ice had covered over connections between separate pieces of land previously thought to be single stretches of terra firma.
And around Antarctica the increased loss of ice could foul the current balance of water south of the Polar Front. That, then, could have profound influences on the the way water of different temperatures and different saline levels moves about in the ocean and stirs up the bottom of the food chain. Which, extrapolated out way down the road, could make it harder for me to chow down on that burger.

Admit it. It's fun just to say Copenhagen

2009-12-08T06:51:00.001-06:00

It's probably going to cost you money in the long run, but the European Commission likes the decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to start looking at putting controls on carbon dioxide emissions.
That will mean just about anything you consume -- from eating a hamburger, to driving a car, to time on your computer reading blogs like this -- could become more problematic and more expensive.
This comes as folks from 105 countries meet in Copenhagen this week to, most likely, not come to terms on a strong agreement to cap CO2 emissions.

10 cool things about a Zodiac

2009-12-07T05:50:00.000-06:00

1. It's like your inflatable dingy -- but with horsepower.

2. Easy to drive: twist throttle for speed, push to turn left or right.

3. You get to channel your inner Cousteau.

4. Whales.

5. If you do high-speed Miami Vice-style turns you can pretend you're a Navy SEAL without getting shot at.

6. No one ever paints flames on the side.

7. If you're not Greenpeace, you don't have to drive it between a ginormous ship and a big-ass whale.

8.When you sit on the side you feel like you're riding in the back of a pickup truck, but the cops won't stop you.

9. Makes tough guy "vroom, vroom" motorboat sound.

10. It's French, without being snooty.

Southern rock

2009-12-05T18:18:00.000-06:00

As roadhouses go, this one's a little out of the way. And, it doesn't have a road.
Yet you'll be hard-pressed on this continent, or any other, to find a place that combines raucous with cozy quite so well.
No slight intended to the Kansas City music scene, but I'll take open mic night at Palmer Station any time. Friday's first-of-the-summer jam went from folk to rock to poetry to rap.

I considered going Henny Youngman on the crowd (you know, "I saw this elephant seal the other day. Boy when he lies around the island, he lies around the island.") Thought better of it.

Instead, I just enjoyed the show.
Pictured here is the ad hoc and unnamed band of musicians who pulled off more than a few impressive licks and, for me, revived the power of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean."
The fact is that it's hard to be among the 35 souls isolated here at one of the most remote communities in the world and not have a good time.
It's easy to think living in Antarctic would be a hardship. Sure enough, the people who man this station are tough folks who kind find themselves in dangerous spots.
But Palmer Station is no gulag.
This time of year it's almost always light outside. The temperature seems to hover just above and below freezing. (My face has gotten cold a few times while tooling around in Zodiac boats -- so much for the insulating properties of lame excuse for a beard.) Seals and penguins and the occasional whale come by the shore of the compound.
We eat like kings. The daily fare is a sort of whole grain buffet. Hearty food cooked with imagination and sophistication -- breakfast, lunch and dinner. You scrub your own dishes and pitch in to clean up the kitchen once a week. That only adds to the camaraderie. Between meals you have access to a pantry that would make Aunt Bea drool. Fresh baked cookies seem to materialize on the hour.
The place has a bar. With a deck. And a disco ball. Serve yourself on an honor system out of stocks purchased at the station store twice a week. Irish car bombs were the drink of choice after open mic Friday in celebration of the entertainment and a recent sci-tech success with remote-controlled submarines.
There's s a gym (couple of treadmills, exercise bikes, elliptical machine, a full range of weights). A sauna. A hot tub.

Depending on how many people are here, half to all with bunk with another person in rooms on a par with a college dorm.

With a view like this.
But the defining quality is how a group of people living in close quarters for months at a time seem to enjoy each other so much. There's a sense of shared glee at being the special few who get to enjoy a spectacular place.

Blubber is the new black

2009-12-04T08:44:00.001-06:00

Research by an Australian biologist suggests that when elephant seals like this one (a juvenile on Humble Island, Antarctica) forage at sea they sometimes remain motionless deep under water for as long as 20 minutes. What's unclear is whether that chillaxing break is simply a way for them to rest in the ocean or an aid in digestion.
Either way, the blubber that insulates them from cold also delivers buoyancy. Sufficiently fattened elephant seals will float gently back to the surface. If they're too skinny (it's a relative thing), they sink to the bottom.
New tags developed and deployed off eastern Antarctica and put on the elephant seals' heads not only will track the chubby mammals habits, but record water temperature and salinity -- valuable information for piecing together the world's shifting climate puzzle.

Cute -- it's what's for dinner, Part II

2009-12-03T20:41:00.001-06:00

When Disney does it, that whole circle of life thing just feels so warm and fuzzy.
In the wild, not so much.
Consider the penguin and the skua (playing the role of an Antarctic Simba).
(Full disclosure: the pictures here were drawn from two different days, but the scenario they represent is a common one.)
Our penguin couple goes to great lengths to build a nest out of rocks and protect, fighting off other penguins for the territory and the stones. Mama lays her egg. Dad stays with the egg to warm and protect it.

Along comes the skua, a scavenger and egg hunter of the first order. It, too, needs to hatch its young, and to store the energy to lay the egg and tend to its coming chicks. You know where this is going.

The skua, with cunning and aggressiveness, snags the penguin egg from its nest and flies off.

Then comes dinner.

Also, leopard seals like this one ...

... transform adult penguins into this.

Climategate

2009-12-03T07:32:00.000-06:00

I've not had the time to web surf to explore so-called Climategate.Climate change skeptics have siezed on the hacking of the e-mails of British climate scientists as a smoking gun they feel reveals the idea of man-made global warming as a fraud. That's the opinion found here. Alternatively, Slate.com says here that there's another way to look at the Climategate.
Certainly the news could alter the dynamics of the upcoming Copenhagen climate summit, although the tough sacrifices needed to cut carbon emissions would seem to be a greater factor. Climategate notwithstanding, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said definitively that the world is warming and that man's role is significant. And the IPCC view remains, albeit controversial, the scientific consensus.

This land is your land, this land is my land, this land is Chile's and Argentina's and Russia's and ...

2009-12-02T12:16:00.000-06:00

The Soviets thought it would be a nifty spot for rocket launches. Hitler had claimed the land for the Fatherland by flying over the White Continent and dropping little metal swastikas. The whaling and seal hunting had folks from all over the world rubbing their palms in anxious anticipation of the booty that could be scored in Antarctica. Ditto the discovery of coal and gems under the ice. In 1952 the Argentinians chased off a British meteorological expedition (in some ways foreshadowing the Falklands War that would come three decades later).

But in the end, the world mostly agreed to place nice. And 50 years ago this week, the Antarctica Treaty established that the bottom of the world belonged to nobody and everybody.
Sort of.
Rather than divvy up Antarctica and its surrounding waters, the treaty put those claims aside. Instead, the pact protected the continent for wilderness and scientific study.
That's not stopped the British, French, Norwegians, Australians, New Zealanders, Argentinians and Chileans each from making pie wedge shaped claims -- sometimes problematically overlapping -- on ground that extends from the South Pole out to and beyond the Antarctic Circle. Chile has a monument at the very southern edge of South America that is supposed to mark its geographic center -- the implication that Santiago's territory stretches to the pole. In 1978, Argentina air-lifted a pregnant woman to an Antarctic science station to give birth. Her son, Emilio Marcos de Palma was the first known Antarctic-born citizen. Since he was also Argentinian, the boast was that the Antarctic place of his birth must also be Argentinian.

Still, ever since 12 countries including the United States signed the Antarctic Treaty in Washington in late 1959, the last-found continent has been left mostly to scientists. The standing claims of seven nations to various parts of Antarctica were not recognized in the treaty and have been dismissed everywhere but in the capitals from which they were issued. No military bases have taken hold (although countries often hold suspicions about how robust the science of its rivals appears, and whether those competitors are principally interested in a geographic toehold). (The American flag is hoisted here at Palmer Station only on those rare days when a ship comes in. It waves above the U.S. Antarctic Program flag and that of the country or the state from which the arriving ship hails.)
Some people are critical of the treaty, saying it's created a legal no-man's-land that makes it more difficult to put environmental protections in place, to secure plant and animal sanctuaries and assign responsibility for maritime rescue. That's partly because a unanimous vote is required by the signatories of the treaty to put any restrictions into action. Even then, enforcement invites an an international legal limbo.
Still, the treaty is generally lauded as a conditional success and environmentalists, for instance, typically fret over its demise.
The stakes could change. There remains belief that the continent could have great stores of natural resources. Even oil. And if the climate does become more temperate -- and more practical for mining and drilling -- the stakes could change. And with that, the dynamics of international cooperation might be tested as well.

A day at the beach

2009-12-01T16:34:00.000-06:00

I spent half an hour this afternoon on the edge of a cove listening to five young elephant seals napping, snorting and soaring. (Sounds something like this.) Anyone who wandered into my living room on a day the Chiefs are playing would be familiar with the scene.

Caption contest

2009-12-01T16:23:00.000-06:00

More ice? Less ice? Both, and both matter.

2009-12-01T09:02:00.000-06:00

So, is there more or less ice on and around Antarctica these days? The answer: yes.

Most significant to weigh in recently on the issue of climate change in the deep, deep south is the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

The group's just published study, "Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment," found a strong warming trend over the Antarctic peninsula while the rest of the continent has cooled. And by the reckoning of the international team that produced the report, both are the results of civilization's presence on the planet.

The cooling comes from the hole in the ozone layer -- which appears to be working essentially as a vent that stovepipes out warmer air. The ozone layer also soaks up the sun's heat. So less ozone means less warmth. That factor, though, is an aberration. Worldwide efforts to curb ozone depletion have actually worked. And with the aberration of a damaged ozone layer disappearing, that cooling effect will fade.

Meantime, the researchers said the global build-up of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have warmed the peninsula especially and the entire Southern Ocean generally.

That's led to a growth of plant species in the oceans and on the rocky coast -- some of them grasses introduced accidentally by people traveling to Antarctica.

Ice is retreating rapidly -- except where it's not.

Some 90 percent of glaciers on Antarctica have shrunken in recent decades. At the same time, there is more sea ice in areas like the Ross Sea because of the ozone effect while the warming peninsula is seeing less ice. The researchers -- a group of more than 100 from eight countries -- expect the loss of sea ice will become more universal in the southern region as the ozone layer is re-established.

Cute -- it's what's for dinner

2009-11-30T16:16:00.000-06:00

You guessed. When times got tough, the pups got sauteed.
Diaries of the Shackleton expedition talk about the sorrow that our pictured Second Officer Tom Crean suffered when the time came to make dinner out of the little guys. (For those of you who joined us late, Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition was the tragic and heroic last-gasp effort by the Brits to capture a polar first by crossing the continent on foot. The Norwegians beat them.)
Although the crew, Crean especially, took a fondness to the dogs, the huskies could be a nasty pack prone to chomping on the hands of their handlers. But they were critical to early 20th century polar expeditions. Attempts to use gas- or diesel-powered tractors proved disastrous. And ponies, it turns out, even when fitted with pony snow shoes (no kidding) are much better for birthday parties than crossing the ice.
And dogs, when the going gets really tough, are as good for breakfast as they are for lunch.

Frozen water, frozen, water, frozen ...

2009-11-29T19:07:00.002-06:00

People who come to Antarctica talk about living on the continent as living "on the ice."
What that doesn't convey is the feeling you get within hours of arrival of how much the ice seems to be living itself. Of course, it isn't alive. But it changes constantly.
When we arrived on Anvers Island, the bay looked like this:

By this morning, after the tide had gone out, it was full of brash, or junk ice and looked more like this:

Likewise, late last night this mini-iceberg that's been hanging around Palmer Station like a lost kitten spontaneously started bobbing and twisting in the water. In the end, it didn't flip over. But it's likely to go bottoms-up, or "turtle," before long.

(Notice its resemblance to a Henry Moore sculpture -- with the added bonus of being noticeably in flux by the day and by the hour.)
(This one, on the other hand, looks like something Tim Burton might put together if he worked in whites and blues instead of blacks and, um, blacks:

The shame here is that the almost black light quality of the blues is hard to transfer from ice, to camera lens to computer to blog -- particularly when your correspondent is pretty sure that ISO stands for "I swear, officer.)

If only they had statues to abuse

2009-11-28T10:58:00.000-06:00

Culturally, if not taxonomically, the sheathbill is the pigeon of the Antarctic. So lowly is its status that some folks call them shit chickens.
Like chickens, and unique among Antarctic birds, their feet are not webbed. They are also chicken (free-range, anyway)-like in size. They are common and they are scavengers.
Given a chance they'll feast on the eggs of penguins, terns or petrels. In a pinch, they'll gorge on feces (no cracks about reporters being the sheathbills of the human world).

Ice, Ice, baby

2009-11-28T10:25:00.000-06:00

A hundred, or maybe multiples of that, icebergs are drifting toward New Zealand. There are so many, in fact, that a shipping warning could kick in soon if the ice doesn't let up, shipping in the region could be in doubt.

The small iceberg shown here is on the opposite side of the continent, and well away from busy shipping routes.
But on the other side of Antarctica the traffic in ice spotted by satellites is more problematic.
Scientists think the icebergs are the remains of a giant ice flow that split from the continent, possible due to climatic changes.
New Zealand has sent out coastal navigation warnings, but there are no imminent plans to shut down shipping.
New Zealand was barraged by icebergs in 2006, and a sheep was flown by one on a helicopter so it could be shorn in a publicity stunt to promote the country's wool industry.

The Drake is a fake

2009-11-28T08:44:00.001-06:00

We dodged a bullet in crossing the Drake Passage. It can be the roughest seas on the planet, but Neptune smiled upon us. Sea legs were shaky, but that was it. We got through quickly and puke-less.
This is a link to photos from the short voyage.

Polar paparazzi

2009-11-27T19:54:00.000-06:00

When the crew of the Endurance was trapped in the winter ice, the frozen sea working like a vise to crush their ride home, photographer Frank Hurley made pictures. It wasn't easy, what with the flesh-freezing winds and that whole winter-long night going on. But he strung some lights for this classic.
Here's what he wrote in his diary:
“During night take flashlight of ship beset by pressure, This necessitated some 20 flashes, one behind each salient pressure hummock, no less than 10 of the flashes being required to satisfactory illuminate the ship herself. Half blinded after the successive flashes, I lost my bearings amidst the hummocks ,bumping shins against projecting ice points and stumbling into deep snow drifts.”
For all his work, just a fraction of his images survive. When Ernest Shackleton ordered the abandoning of the ship, the "boss" helped him cull through the bulky glass plates that did then what our tiny memory cards do in today's digital cameras. To make sure Hurley wasn't tempted to go back and retrieve more pictures, Shackleton insisted on shattering the discards.
Why'd they take any at all when weight was so critical? Their sale was one of the few things the crew had to make money off of the journey.

Isn't he cute?

2009-11-27T15:38:00.000-06:00

We saw this guy alone on a small ice berg a few hours before our ship landed at Palmer Station. Having arrived, I'll post more pictures and maybe something interesting when I have things a little more in order.

Have canned air, will travel

2009-11-25T17:37:00.000-06:00

     Here’s a business idea: Fix microscopes. And make house calls. To the poles.
     Too late, Jim Janoso has beaten you to it. Toting a suitcase crammed with mirrors, lenses, flashlights, tiny screwdrivers, small allen wrenches, oils and canned air, he travels to the world’s most remote research outposts so scientists can better look at little things. “I never thought I’d get down here,” he says while swaying side to side on a laboratory stool as our ship makes its way south. But he’s bound, for the third time, for Antarctica. It’s been more serendipity than calculation that made him microscope mechanic to the poles. He is trained as a mechanical engineer and has worked in the aerospace industry, for the forest service and a concrete manufacturer. Happenstance introduced him to the former proprietor of Northern Focus Optical, which traveled mostly to middle schools and high schools tending to microscopes in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
     Janoso took over the firm in 2003 and branched out to higher-end microscopes and expanded his circuit into Alaska and some its most isolated camps.
     Word of mouth soon enough landed him a gig in the Antarctic. Now, he says, “I sometimes forget where home is” (actually Roundup, Mont.) while going to polar regions for their spring and summer season and roaming the lower 48 states much of the rest of his time. As we bob across the ocean on the way to Palmer Station, he dissects the ship’s high-end microscopes.
     There will be more microscopes awaiting his trained eye and steady hand when we arrive. Janoso sometimes gives long-distance direction on the art of microscope maintenance to their handlers around the world. Careful about moving from -40 to a heated room lest condensation creep in between the lenses. Mind how you move from the warm to the very cold or risk cracking glass.
     Other problems require his rare skills and the spare parts he’s toted with him. Inevitably, he’ll need something that’s not stowed in his bag. Sometimes, he’ll borrow tools in the ship’s machine shop and fashion a fix. Just as often, the repair will have to wait until next year – if ice and weather and research funding gaps don’t conspire to delay him longer. “I’ll go anywhere,” he said. “I love it.”

When waters collide

2009-11-25T11:22:00.000-06:00

     This is where the water wrestles with itself.
     Nature has drawn a loopy circle through the Southern Ocean well away from, but around, Antarctica. The line wanders anywhere from north of 47 degrees latitude to south of 60 degrees, and meanders from season to season, year to year. It’s where the deep-chilled brine of polar surface water slips beneath the warmer waters of the north. The result of the battling waters is the Antarctic Convergence.
     Although it is a virtually invisible – and somewhat shifting – line, the Convergence forms perhaps the most imposing quarantining of species in the world. Consider that in an area larger than North America there are just 39 of the more than 9,000 species of birds on the planet. This time of year the Convergence – alternatively, the Polar Front – sees surface waters around Antarctica become diluted with fresh water from ice melt.
     The mix and churn of the warm and saltier water from the north with colder Antarctic water conjures up great blooms of algae. Tiny shrimp-like krill feed on the algae, and then become the main staple of dinners for everything from penguins to whales. On board a ship, there’s no noticeable difference from the convergence itself beyond a dip in temperature. While the Convergence is often associated with violent seas, the roller coaster conditions are often just a coincidence.

And we are taking a shortcut through the most notorious coincidence. The Drake Passage overlaps with the Convergence and marks the spot where winds and currents circling from the west out of wide-open seas come barreling between the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. Shortly before sundown last night we passed by the bottom of Tierra del Fuego (pictured) and into the Drake. The swells here are decidedly larger than what we saw before entering the Drake. Waves wash over the back deck and fewer people wander out to the bow. It has become a seesaw. But by Drake standards, the weather and seas are rather calm. And those who stand watch are rewarded with the sight of an albatross.

Southward ho!

2009-11-24T19:12:00.003-06:00

   The Laurence M. Gould shoved off into a bright Chilean afternoon, carrying a crew of 17 and a few dozen geologists, paleontologists and biologists bound for the Southern Ocean.
   We'll spend about a day navigating the fjordish (sorry, the word works for me) straits that will wind us calmly by Argentina and then out through the much more rollicking Drake Passage.
   We compared notes on seasickness medicine, some folks already drowsy and dry-mouthed from the drug patches they'd pasted behind the ears the day before.
   Got about an hour's lecture on safety. Short version: Try not to bang your noodle in a doorway or fall off the side.
   Quickly saw dolphins and penguins swimming by the bow.
   Sharing sleeping quarters with three others in what basically amounts to a shipping container below the water line. Shower, I'm told, is too flights up. But I'm in no hurry.

One comes, one goes

2009-11-23T08:32:00.000-06:00

This ship came in across the dock this morning (Monday). We're set to sail at 2 p.m.

What the chic crowd is wearing this (Austral) summer

2009-11-23T08:29:00.000-06:00

My threads:

Adios a Punta Arenas

2009-11-23T05:29:00.000-06:00

One last run through our South American staging ground.

Unlike so much of the world, the homogenizing taint of U.S. franchises – McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut in particular seem so common everywhere else – has yet to invade the southern tip of Chile.

More than a few shops catering to tourists and locals trade in the hiker chic brands like North Face and Columbia. (Oddly, though, I don’t think I ran across signs for Patagonia clothes, which is named for the region.)

But still, there are places that would fit in nicely en Los Estados Unidos. Consider Lomit’s (alternately described on its menus as the more Latin Lomitos). It could substitute nicely for Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern, a watering hole and grill long popular with that city’s newsfolk dating back to the age of Royko. Middle aged readers will remember it as the place that inspired early “Saturday Night Live” skits with Dan Akroyd and John Belushi bullying their customers in thick Balkan accents about “cheeseburger, cheeseburger, no fries – chips!”

The staff at Lomit’s doesn’t come on as strong, but they dish up a deliciously greasy burger smothered in a muenster-like cheese. The sandwich is the size of your face – unless you’re John Kerry. The meal is best washed down with Austral Calafate Ale – named for the native calafate berry that turns it slightly sweet and crimson – straight from the southernmost brewery in the world.

It doubles as a sports bar, and the folks were watching a game Sunday afternoon that had something to do with a ball. But I was left clueless because there was no hoop or bat or Chiefs massacre.

Along the cold windy beaches, as much rock and seawall as sand in many places, young couples like to huddle tightly together in twosomes. I guess it’s one way to keep warm.

At the town square, it was as if John Phillip Souza had imposed his will on a Latin jazz band. A mix of army and naval troops marched through the main drag and assembled for a mini-concert at the town square. They improved tremendously when they stopped marching and swapped in more salsa for the Souza.

Later I would do my own marching, spending a few hours cruising for a pharmacy that was open, carried seasickness pills and could understand my use the word vomito. Not easy on a Chilean Sunday.

I stumbled across what seems a ritual on Sundays for families to make to trek to tightly packed two-story mausoleums. Maybe long cold winters led people this way rather than waiting until spring to bury the dead.

Good as Gould

2009-11-22T08:05:00.000-06:00

This is my ride for at least the next few days, and my lifeline to civilization for the next month.
The Laurence M. Gould is a scientific research ship. I will be a stowaway.
The original plan had been to take a take 10-day journey from Punta Arenas, Chile, to Palmer Station on Anvers Island, dropping off research teams on even more remote field stations farther north on the Antarctic peninsula.
The rumor in port this morning was that we would instead head straight to Palmer because sea ice was making the other destinations trickier to get to. Unsure how that will shake out, or what it means to my chances of being able to visit places other than Palmer. In any event, I'll shiver happily.
Obssessives (that's you, Mom) can track the progress of the ship by clicking on this link or the link listed on the right hand side of the blog. (Also, remember to vote in our poll, also listed to the right. Antarctic Convergence, bring it on.)
We board the vessel at 2 p.m. local time today and, we hope, cast off at 8 a.m. Monday.
The boat looks pretty cool, but it seems like it could use a racing stripe, and a pair of fuzzy dice.

Boy, are my arms not tired.

2009-11-21T07:41:00.000-06:00

See this plane. See how it's wheels are on the ground? That's not a good thing. For me, at least.
That's KU's Chris Allen at the door. For the last month-plus the electrical engineering professor has headed a team flying on the NASA DC-8 that's been mapping ice on and around Antarctica. They've packed the plane with leading-edge radars capable of a dizzying array of measurements that can penetrate kilometers deep into the surface. That lets them figure out how high the ice is, and how deep it is -- sorting out where the ice stops and the ground begins.
Because the bevy of sensors needs clear skies to make its measurements, clear weather has been key. And they've been lucky, even adding flights to their mission because the gods were kind.
But final extra flights when I arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile, this week got postponed once, twice and finally, this morning scrubbed for good. So my hopes for flying over the continent were dashed.
The various logisitic and scientific crews weren't terribly bummed. They're worn out and now they can get a head start on packing up for the ride home.

Everything is so different here

2009-11-20T15:31:00.000-06:00

I've been accused of not being amenable to local cuisine, or fresh cuisine of any sort. But I offer this as Exhibit A in evidence of my daring palate. You see here a container not of quotidian, stateside sour-cream-and-onion Pringles, but a quite Latin American package of Kryspos -- that's Kryzpo with a "K." If you investigate I think you'll find not a single k in the entire word "Pringles."
And what's up with the Dreams Casino in Punta Arenas. Sure, it's on the (quite frigid) beach, but there appears to be no moat of water around the thing. The people here must be loco.

It's always a campaign year -- or is that happy hour? -- somewhere

2009-11-20T15:13:00.000-06:00

While the U.S. waits impatiently for, or works desperately against, hope and change, Chile is approaching the eve of its presidential election.
The incumbent, Michelle Bachelet, had a rough start but is leaving office next year as a rare president with rising popularity ratings.

So now we have opposition candidate Sebastian Pinera pitted against former president Eduardo Frei in the December 13 voting. Pinera is ahead in polling with37 percent support, followed by Frei with 28 percent. Independent candidate Marco Enriquez-Ominami is playing the Ross Perot role and is polling at 17 percent.
Banners and posters are ubiquitous in Punta Arenas and campaign appearances dominate local TV.
Strikes are pretty regular here, and have ramped up in anticipation of the election. A few-hours strike of meteorologists played a small role in determining whether a flight over Antarctica I'd like to tag along with might be delayed. The weather guys came back to work, but the flight was scrubbed because of a cloud bank moving toward the Antarctic peninsula.

The deep south

2009-11-19T17:34:00.000-06:00

We are in MuttonWorld.

Punta Arenas sits by Strait of Magellan, marking where Pacific waters become Atlantic. It's the southernmost city of any size (about 116,000) in the world. Think cold and windy, without a whole lot of winter sunshine.
The Spainiard José de los Santos Mardones established the place in southern Patagonia in 1849 and it became a signficant port of call and coal depot until the Panama Canal created the shortcut that meant shipping routes didn't have to snake below South America. But while it was big, it was also a popular gathering spot for spies keeping eyes out for what was going where.
Now it's about sheep and oil, drawn from the Tierra del Fuego oil fields.
Chile claims a sliver of Anarctica that runs clear to the South Pole. In fact, there's a monumnet south of Punta Arenas -- which lies at the south end of what the rest of the world recognizes as Chile -- that marks the supposed center of Chile.

South for the (Austral) summer

2009-11-19T17:25:00.001-06:00

I'd forgotten how much Spanish I'd forgotten.
Still, there's a special kick to navigating a foreign city on your own. (Last night I escaped from the torture that is modern air travel. About 36 hours of cramped seats and crowded airports. Almost makes you yearn for the days of scurvy and storms that would have brought you to the Strait of Magellan by steam and sail a few generations ago.)
Anyway, like almost any place I've been, locals are surprisingly accommodating of unilingual Americans. Punta Arenas is a friendly port city that makes a go off of shipping, sheep and scientists. Lots of wool and fleece and glacier glasses. I arrived to weather I had left behind: soggy and about 15 degrees above freezing. I couldn't see the sun, but it appeared to set very late.
I come courtesy of the Marine Biological Laboratory which has put National Science Foundation bucks to use in a science writing fellowship that will take me and two other journalists to Palmer Station on the Antarctic peninsula. My main patron, of course, is The Kansas City Star, which has sprung me free for a little over a month and agreed to pick up the cost of sending me south a few days early in hopes of tagging along on a NASA DC-8 flight over the last continent. (That's still iffy. Maybe on Saturday if the skies clear.)
And most significantly, I'm here with the blessing of a family that's let me miss Thanksgiving and a very special birthday in pursuit of a frigid wanderlust.
Picked out a bag of loaner polar clothing at Raytheon's port-side warehouse this morning. (Apparently summers in Antarctica are cooler than in the Midwest.) I'd show you a picture of all the gear, includes something called a red yazoo cap that looks like it sounds, but it's already been set aside for storage on the ship that will tow me farther south. They actually had comfy boots that fit my oversized feet. But, alas, no gloves large enough for a Sasquatch. (Luckily, I brought my own army surplus gloves and overmitts.)
If weather clears over Antarctica, I'll fly on a NASA ice-measuring plane over the continent tomorrow night. Weather and a strike at the airport have that trip in jeopardy for the moment. If that flight scrubs, maybe Saturday -- or not at all.

Give the "Boss" a go-cup

2009-11-19T17:14:00.000-06:00

For Hemingway fanatics, it's a special bar in Paris or Key West. For me, the mecca of bars is here in Punta Arenas. The Shackleton Bar is tucked in the back of the Hotel Jose Nogueira and is said to serve a nifty version of the local specialty. (The pisco sour is sort of a Chilean margarita, sans salt.)
Ernest Shackleton, known by those in his famously failed expeditions as the Boss, stayed at the hotel, in those days owned by the epynomous Nogueira, while making repeated attempts to rescue the bulk of his crew when they were stranded on Elephant Island. One legend has him firing a gunshot into the roof of the bar when it was time to round up sailors for a rescue mission.
Today the walls are adorned with a series of paintings depicting the trevail and ultimate rescue of the Endurance crew.
Now, excuse me while I go down a cold one at the Boss' bar.

Is it getting stuffy on this planet?

2009-11-19T12:04:00.000-06:00

Not had any gloomy news on temperature and carbon build-up lately? Well, it's always coming.
The Global Carbon Project tells us earlier this week that a six degree Celsius
temperature rise by the end of the century is virtually inevitable.

In the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of 31 researchers say a spike this decade of carbon emissions suggests a runaway train effect in the buildup of greenhouse gases. We posted earlier here news that the planet might be better at soaking up carbon, the new results suggests the Earth isn't as absorbent as we might like.

On the rocks

2009-11-16T14:23:00.000-06:00

A number of witty friends suggest this is what's drawing me south, but I'm more about this.

Earth, like a dorky sweatband, soaks it up

2009-11-11T16:33:00.000-06:00

A Brit's recent study of ice samples finds that the Earth has a surprising ability to absorb the increases in carbon dioxide in the air.
Although the rate at which we belch CO2 into the atmosphere has increased almost 18-fold since 1850, ice samples taken from Antarctica suggest the planet has soaked up almost half the carbon added to the mix by the activity of man. (Probably no small amount of it created in the manufacture of monstrous things like the one strapped to this guy's noggin.)
It could be a rosy finding, if it holds up, because conventional wisdom was that the Earth's ability to absorb CO2 would decrease as it became saturated.

Warming = less ice = more plankton = CO2 storage = less warming?

2009-11-10T08:43:00.000-06:00

Just preliminary evidence here, but the British Antarctic Survey has found that the way melting ice allows more sunlight to shine in the ocean spurs significant blooms of tiny marine creatures. Those phytoplankton, in turn, eventually die and sink to the ocean bottom, taking carbon with them.
That means a symptom brought on by greenhouse gases, the melting of the ice, could spur a phenomenon that reduces the levels of those same greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Bad news: it doesn't look like the effect is anywhere nearly dramatic enough to offset the overall buildup of greenhouse gases.

New meaning to life list

2009-11-09T14:33:00.001-06:00

`God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus! -
Why look'st thou so?' -"With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross." -- Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Turns out fish hooks work better (or is it worse?) than crossbows.

The top six species of sea birds at risk of extinction in the Atlantic hail from the albatross family. The British Antarctic Survey on South Georgia has found the number of those big birds flying today is just half the population of the early 1960s.

Your fish sticks might be the problem. In diving for their own seafood, an albatross is vulnerable to getting snagging by commercial fishing equipment -- either on hooks or in nets.

Now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Birdlife International are calling for a treaty monitoring panel to impose new rules on fishing to protect the albatross.

But will using albatross-safe fishing methods be more costly, less fuel efficient, more damaging to other species?

In any event, it's long been considered bad luck to kill one of the birds. Just ask the ancient mariner.

'Is it he?' quoth one, 'Is this the man?

By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low
The harmless Albatross.

Let's hope CO2 ain't all that

2009-11-04T13:25:00.000-06:00

The last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today was, well, quite a long time ago.

Something like 15 million years ago. That's right, even before disco.

And the world was a much different place. Global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees higher and sea levels were 75 to 20 feet higher.

How do we know? you ask.

It used to be we only knew about atmospheric levels going back about 800,000 years -- a blink of an eye in geographic time -- by studying bubbles of air trapped in long-frozen Antarctic ice.

Now comes the very clever Aradna Tripati, who has peered back further in time by looking at sea shells.

Specifically, she's charted the ratio of boron to calcium in the shells to figure out what the atmosphere was like when they were formed. That time travels a good 20 million years.

Melting, just not as fast as we thought

2009-11-04T13:06:00.000-06:00

Good, but not great, news on the rate at which the West Antarctic (think western hemisphere -- it's confusing when you get down there) Ice Shelf is melting.

It is melting. And the debate about whether your Buick is responsible will go on. But tracking ice movements against bedrock suggests that previous estimates about the trimming of the ice shelf were overstated.

That said, the researchers say that ice is still melting.

"West Antarctica is still losing significant amounts of ice, the loss appears to be slightly slower than some recent estimates," said Ian Dalziel, a researcher with the West Antarctic GPS Network, said in a press release. "So the take home message is that Antarctica is contributing to rising sea levels. It is the rate that is unclear."

Calmest place on the planet, needs a Starbucks

2009-10-20T10:57:00.000-05:00

You thought it was any room where that your mother-in-law wasn't in.

Sciences begs to disagree.

Turns out the calmest place on earth is a few hundred miles from the South Pole, so-called Ridge A. Things are so calm there, even the stars don't dare twinkle.

Based on studies of weather patterns, satellite data viewed from an astronomers point of view, a team of U.S. and Australian scientists have settled on the spot as the most mellow spot on Earth.

It's 13,300 feet above sea level and sits at the head of three humongous glaciers -- each muscling out over land the size of western Europe.

Calm is not paradise. At 100 times drier than the Sahara and with an average winter temperature of -94 degrees farenheit, it's the coldest and driest place on the planet.

Because the calm extends into space, scientists are noodling out the best way to plant a telescope there. If they succeed, the images could rival those of the Hubble space telescope.

CO2 giveth, and CO2 taketh away

2009-09-25T10:02:00.000-05:00

Much as increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere create a greenhouse effect that warms the Earth, new research that explores CO2 levels from 30 million-plus years ago found that lower levels of the gas helped the formation of the polar ice caps.
CO2 was on the low side during the Eocene-Oligocene (say that five times fast) climatic transition period and allowed the planet to chill enough for ice to form at the polar extremes.
It turns out the clues rested in the East African village of Stakishari in Tanzania. There scientists were able to precisely date the time where rocks of the period were formed. Those rocks, in turn, give a look at levels of various gases in the atmosphere so long ago.
The period marked the biggest change in the planets climate since the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

OK to get out that hair spray?

2009-09-24T10:49:00.000-05:00

The ozone hole above Antarctica may be closing.

In another 90 years or so, it may close entirely.

Australian scientists say their work suggests the hole, discovered in the 1980s and feared for the way it lets in unfiltered ultra violet rays, may be shrinking.

Some two decades ago the Montreal Protocol banned chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, that were believe responsible for poking a hole in the ozone layer and keeping '80s hairstyles lookin' fine. The ban may have actually helped.

Measurements made with weather balloons and lasers provide new evidence that the hole is getting smaller. It's still three times the size of Australia. It just used to be bigger.

Keep in mind, however, that there's some suggestion that it acts as an accidental vent of greenhouse gases and may be the reason the planet hasn't heated up more quickly.

The great thaw

2009-09-24T10:36:00.000-05:00

A fresh and comprehensive study of satellite images of Antarctica and Greenland suggest the ice there is melting more quickly than previously thought.

(At the same time, there is evidence that more ice is building up in the interior of Antarctica -- the result of shifting weather patterns.)

Lasers from NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite bounce off glaciers to give scientiests the new data and suggest that those giant bodies of ice are thinning at increasing rates.

Coastal areas are melting the quickest, and may be as thawed today as any time in recorded history. The most likely cause: warmer ocean currents.

Like hair on an old man, ice on the planet disappearing on top, increasing on bottom

2009-09-16T10:12:00.000-05:00

Even as the Arctic has become less icy, the Antarctic has seen more sea ice.

Why?

Scientists are still noodling it out. But a couple theories are gaining traction.

First, the southern hole in the ozone serves as a bit of a heat vent, allowing for cooler temperatures at that end of the globe even as the build-up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases appears to be warming the Earth.

Next, ocean circulation may be changing. The waters of the ocean could be more stratified, meaning the warmer water below is mixing less with colder water on the surface. That means more ice.

Finally, it might have to do with how water logged the sea ice is. I'm a little shaky on this point, but it has to do with snow becoming wet and turning to ice.

Try reading this piece for a longer explanation.

Glaciers kick it up another gear, then get winded

2009-09-16T09:55:00.000-05:00

Fresh research on glaciers that appeared to be moving especially fast in southeastern Greenland may raise as many questions as it answers.

In any event, it seems the frosty buggers have slowed a bit.

From the AP:

　Helheim Glacier nearly doubled its speed in just a few years, flowing through a rift in the barren coastal mountains at a stunning 100 feet (30 meters) per day.
　　　Alarm bells rang as the pattern was repeated by glaciers across Greenland: Was the island's vast ice sheet, a frozen water reservoir that could raise the sea level 20 feet if disgorged, in danger of collapse?
　　　Half a decade later, there's a little bit of good news and a lot of uncertainty.
　　　"It does seem that the very rapid speeds were only sustained for a short period of time although none of these glaciers have returned to the 'normal' flow speeds yet," says Gordon Hamilton, a glaciologist from the University of Maine, who's clocked Helheim's rapid advance using GPS receivers on site since 2005.
　　　Understanding why Greenland's glaciers accelerated so abruptly in the first half of the decade and whether they are now slowing down is crucial to the larger question of how fast sea levels will rise as the planet warms.

World warming to a shortcut

2009-09-11T08:53:00.000-05:00

This story in The New York Times talks about how the very disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice could be a boon to shipping. It's also a reason countries have become more covetous in their claims to the sea floor below the North Pole.

I'll be writing in the coming months about ambitious territorial claims being made at the other end of the world, and how some scientific expeditions down there double as an excuse to call dibs on Antarctica.

The opposite of polar, but related

2009-07-22T11:53:00.000-05:00

Tuvalu, a string of atolls in the Pacific, knows a thing or two about climate change. Its highest ground sits just 4.5 meters above sea level. And as sea level climbs, the islands are shrinking.
Crops are getting hit more and more by ocean salt water. Real estate is disappearing.
So the folks there are hoping to shame more industrialized countries into cutting back on CO2 emissions -- in hope of slowing down climate change -- by cutting their own carbon dioxide output down to zero by 2020.
Other random Tuvalu facts: Tuvalu has a bad problem with exotic rats. It's been largely mined out and its inhabitants get most of their income from people who work abroad and send back remittances. One of its greatest financial assets is the power to sell .tv domain names to television web sites (don't discount the value of an alphabetical coincidence).

Coming back soon

2008-07-23T13:19:00.000-05:00

This blog is on hiatus until November 2009, when the handsome and gifted author heads to Antarctica.

If you've seen one ...

2008-07-14T09:11:00.000-05:00

True story: While waiting to board my plane leaving Fairbanks I overheard a middle-aged couple telling an airline employee about their trip.
The wife had loved Alaska, hated to leave. The husband had had enough. After you've seen one tree and one mountain, he said, it gets a little redundant.
I suppose. And when you've seen one chubby tourist, you've seen 'em all. Which is way too many.
Two days earlier, I'd made my final hike in the Alaskan wilderness near Galbraith Lake.
It drizzled much of the time. We ended up circling through, at most, three miles of back country and fought off mosquitoes a good part of the way. It seemed too hot when we were moving and too cold when we stopped. After two weeks of camp life, I'd begun to develop a blister on one toe.
And yet I savored the day and, although I was eager to get back to regular showers and the bosom of my family, I dreaded that my time in the foothills of the Brooks Range was coming to an end.
Unlike like the guy boarding my plane, I'd gone about two weeks without seeing a tree because I was living on the tundra. When I headed south over the mountain range from the North Slope toward Fairbanks, I was thrilled to see the dwarf forests of black and blue spruce that looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. And not only did the mountain ranges look diverse -- geologists point out what they consider old and new mountains -- but the sun's lazy circles in the sky could make the same rock formation turn different hues throughout the day.
When would I drink fearlessly from a stream again? When would I again walk the length of a stream, a valley, a lake that remained truly wild?
Northern Alaska is not a place for everybody. I'm sure I couldn't cope with the impossibly cold and interminably dark winters. Prudhoe Bay is decidedly unpleasant industrial outpost.
But while the seen-one-seen-'em-all tourist had had his fill, I felt envy for the young researchers spending the entire summer at Toolik Lake -- far from cell phone range and television, up tight with a mostly virgin landscape.
I'll catalog the Alaskan wilderness among the many places I've been to and am unlikely to get back to. After all, it took me 48 years to get there the first time. Still, I'll not remember as a place I got enough of, but as a part of the planet that seems to operate on a different scale, that can't be truly be captured in photographs, and that gives this country a sanctuary for wild things.

Arctic blow-up

2008-07-10T22:42:00.000-05:00

Think of a tractor pull, except for the outdoorsy crowd.

Apparently some trash talking about who could inflate a rubber raft most quickly -- a bit of field research drudgery turned into a challenge -- started the whole thing.

One group of researchers declared their superiority on their ability to blow and the contest was on.

Some dressed in faux pimp gear (as best can be done in rubber boots) and others entered the arena to music from a "Rocky" sequel.

In the end it was the guys using the push pumps -- as opposed to foot pumps and the simple blow, blow, blow 'til you turn purple method -- who triumphed.

Next came the deflation and roll up contest, a challenge of splayed bodies trying to squeeze air through valves.

Save your tractor fuel, I'll take this for entertainment.

Science to scientists

2008-07-09T11:55:00.000-05:00

That dream about showing up for finals after having skipped class the whole semester? Well, it's baaaaack!

This is a great gig, a scam, actually. The National Science Foundation gives money to the Marine Biological Laboratory. The MBL skims its share and then pays my way to come to the Arctic Circle to stroll among the wilderness.

The catch: I have to do science. And math. While others watch.

In the end, I worked with colleagues mimicking the research and experiments being carried out on the tundra. In my case, it was a look rates of photosynthesis and carbon dioxide flux on tundra -- some that had been fertilized and some that had been left to its own devices.

The work plays off the effects of climate change. With warmer temperatures, more nutrients likely are released into the soil, perhaps spurring more plant growth. It quickly gets into biology courses that I barely passed in high school and avoided altogether in college, and into math that sends a tiny reporter brain into seizures.

After days of pouring over Excel spreadsheets, converting them into graphics, plotting logarithmic lines and transferring all the jumble into a PowerPoint presentation, there I stood presenting my "findings" to scientists.

It's good I was filthy from camp life. That way the pit stains weren't so obvious. For 10 minutes I clicked on the PowerPoint slides. On the bright side, there were only two times -- the truth -- when I looked at what I'd prepared and had no idea what it meant.

The scientists were gentle, but it was ugly nonetheless.

Musk but no dusk

2008-07-07T11:21:00.000-05:00

Ovibos moschatus, the muskox, looks like the mastadon’s little brother. Hairier than Haight-Ashbury back in the day, it tromps along the tundra like a defensive tackle in the fourth quarter. Lumbering but majestic. Alert, but largely unperturbed by what goes on around him.
The 600-plus pound animals look like an unkempt cross between a buffalo and a goat, although he is more closely related to the latter. The beasts (think of the creatures from Where the Wild Things Are) disappeared from Alaska in the late 1800s from over-hunting, surviving only in Arctic Canada and Greenland.

A herd was nurtured in the isolation of Nunivak Island and about 40 years ago were set loose again on the coastal plain. They now number about 2,200 across the state.We saw these some 80 miles south of coast, a herd that looked to be anywhere from 18-30 strong. They make a low, guttural grunt. From what I hear, they smell a little like editor.

iPods? We don't need no stinkin' iPods

2008-07-07T03:20:00.000-05:00

Psycho Killer
Qu'est-ce que c'est
fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far better
Run run run run run run run away
That classic by the Talking Heads somehow melds rather delightfully with the "Circle Be Unbroken," "Banks of the Ohio," and "House of the Rising Sun" when a tent full of Ph.D.s and their research assistants tap their feet on a plywood floor for the evening.
"Mr. Tambourine Man" is next? Don't know the chords. Look at the floor. There they are, written with the ubiquitous field scientist's Sharpie: GADGDGDAD.
It's a little obnoxious really. So many of the gypsies circulating through the Toolik Lake Field Station can tromp over mountain ridges without getting short of breath. They can fit zooplankton into the ecosystem, calculate the cubic meters of water flowing through a stream with their eyes closed and figure out the gender of a long-tailed jaeger from 50 paces. And play music? Come on.

But how to keep them out of your bird feeder?

2008-07-07T01:52:00.000-05:00

The Arctic ground squirrel is an amazing little creature. Its body temperature drops below freezing in hibernation and it stumbles out of its slumber, and their burrows periodically to prevent their brains from going to pieces.

Come spring, the guys get out first and gorge themselves for mating. The ladies come up and mate usually on the first day. Twenty-eight days later pups are scurrying about.

Now, like most Alaskans, the rush is for juveniles to set out on their own and the entire brood to prepare for the cold, long, long winter that awaits.

Graduate student and researcher Trixie Lee (shown releasing a squirrel she captured the day before, and trying to coax another catch into a jar for anesthitization) sets traps daily (they love carrots) so she can tag and test a population nestled near the banks of the Atigun River. She'll look at hormones and a number other things to make us all a little hipper to the ways of the squirrel.

Nearby, undergraduate Ashley Fenn charts their behavior, Jane Goodall style.

After a day on the tundra they come back to a trailer to draw squirrel blood samples, take squirrel body mass measurements and tend to furry ones for a night.

The (not so) Great North

2008-07-06T02:49:00.000-05:00

So starting in Fairbanks and the Dalton Highway -- the only way to travel north to south -- and bumping along to its conclusion leads you to Deadhorse, Alaska.

Legends abound about how the oil field hamlet got its name. (A horse died there when it could find nothing to eat. A patriarch bankrolled a son's dead horse of a business there. Something to do with the cold.) The truth looks to be lost to time. Yet the name fits. It's a place fit for neither man nor beast of burden. Imagine the rustiest, flatest most industrial part of the most industrial outpost you've ever seen. Something almost apocalyptic.

Befitting the hard work of oil folk, the town is lacking in all things aesthetic. It's the last frontier without the charm.

It's also created a modern legend: Folks drive up the highway from the Midwest thinking they can take their Airstreams to the Arctic Ocean (why us hicks always get blamed for cluelessnes is beyond me). The truth is, however, that the haul road stops a few miles short of the ocean at the foot of oil company operations.

Want to dip a toe in the Arctic? Pluck down $38, sit through a video of petro-propaganda, pile into a van, listen to a cursory description of Deadhorse ("to the right you see the tire repair shop" "to the left is where they make the drilling mud" -- no kidding) and walk a quarter mile out on a rock beach. Great stuff. That's where tourists either dip toes (for the weak of heart) or splash full body into the Arctic Ocean. It's cold, but not as cold as you'd expect, and muddy.

Back into Deadhorse and a meal (not included in tour price) and a stop at the General Store for souvenirs.

For the tough folk that populate the outpost, living there mostly means coming in for a few weeks of 12 hours on, 12 hours off working the oil fields and the sundry operations that support drilling. In the winter, the sun disappears entirely for 54 days (!redruM !redruM! redruM). All of which prompted a colleague to suggest a T-shirt. "Deadhorse: It sucks even more in winter."

These boots are made for dancin'

2008-07-03T01:05:00.001-05:00

It's like this: One, one, one. Then one, two, three. One, two, three. One, two three. ...

In what may be the northernmost salsa dancing on the planet, experts in squirrel hibernation, glacial geology and all things fish shake a little fanny.

So (scientists always beging their explanations with "So"), you're opening yourself up on beat two and setting yourself up to turn on beat three.

It seems it only starts to get truly sunny in the Arctic remote of northern Alaska about 10 p.m., when Wednesday night salsa lessons are in full swing. Joel Mercado (the guy with a hat, glasses and beard) schools fellow researchers at the Toolik Lake Station research camp in the basics -- one, two, three -- of salsa.

Scientists work long hours here because the endless sun makes it so easy and because there's so much work to be done before the cold sets in and teaching duties re-emerge. Mercado is on the verge of a master's degree from the University of Puerto Rico. He's earning it studying tundra plants and how they might respond to rapid climate change. He spends his days surveying plants in one 10-centimeter square after the next. One sunny night a week, he likes to pop a beer and let loose to Latin rhythms.

You're holding me away from you. I won't hurt you. I might stink a little, but maybe everybody up here smells a little. It's OK.

He's been surprised by his colleagues' ability to pick up salsa.

"At first, I didn't think they'd be very good," he said. "But they learn quickly."

Perhaps it's those math skills. One, two three. One, two, three. ...

If it looks like a glacier, feels like a glacier, melts like a glacier ...

2008-07-02T02:41:00.000-05:00

Actually, it's aufeis, German for "ice on top."

And, no, it's not a glacier. The ice sits atop a mountain spring. Although the water gushes from the earth virtually year round, winter temperatures in the Arctic run so cold that it freezes the moment it hits the air. Kansas Citians might think of it as the Northland Fountain on steroids.

The aufeis builds to almost glacier like proportions, covering acres of rocky stream bed. Bust open a piece, and it splinters into crystal shards. (A cultured colleague compared the look to the insides of Superman's castle in the Christopher Reeves version of the movie.) The massive blocks of ice that steadily melt away during the summer -- but never disappear entirely -- sport stripes of calcium that has oozed from rocks in the mountain. That stuff has the color and consistency of drywall mud.

Because the ice is melting, on the Arctic tundra that means that hot sunny days can raise creek levels as quickly as a good rain.

Water dripping from aufeis tastes wonderfully clean and would, no doubt, be great for brewing beer. Now if I can only find some hops and barely growing along the Yukon.

SkeeterWorld

2008-06-30T15:42:00.000-05:00

So let's get a couple things clear.
The only thing that works -- and the science types are unequivocal about this -- is DEET. (Yeah, yeah, Udder Cream, Avon's Skin So Soft, the sweat of a Mongolian ox. I've heard about 'em. Go ahead. You'll swat like the rest of us.)
Just as important to remember: DEET doesn't work either. At least not for long.
These little buggers come in clouds on northern slope of the Brooks Range. Nothing other than a stiff breeze seems to shoo them away.
Legend at Toolik Lake holds that the record for most bugs killed in a single slap to a buddy's back is 242 (or 247 or 272 depending on who's telling the story). It's at least plausible.
The best way to tell how long someone has worked here is to watch their reaction to the attacks. New arrivals douse themselves in bug dope, don super dorky head nets or prance about in the impossibly dorky bug shirt (imagine an entire garment made of the stuff of your tent screen). (Full disclosure, I fall in the middle category but would cash in my 401k for a shirt.)
More experienced hands can carry on conversations without pause while mosquitoes simultaneously suck from a half dozen spots on their face.
Walking in valleys and along streams is the worst. Standing atop a windy peak or hiking into a stiff breeze is best. But they're still worse there than at your worst summer picnic.
They are never gone. Not at lunch, not in the outhouse, not in bed.
Me, I'm striving for a bit of zen with the hordes. Want some O-negative, you little bastards? Come and get it. But beware, I've made a bloody pulp of plenty of your kin. As our president might say, bring it on.

Shangri-La for the smart set

2008-06-29T20:04:00.000-05:00

The Toolik Lake Field Station is an idyllic place for scientists looking to study everything from fish, to shrubs, to squirrels to microbes. Tucked well into the Arctic Circle, it goes months in dark and extreme cold and then in the summer basks in 24-hour sunlight, an explosion in plant growth across its undulating tundra and an invasion of curious researchers.

And clouds of mosquitoes, but more on that in another post.

The camp is a base for investigative teams -- mostly senior university faculty and their young assistants -- intrigued with all that happens to the ecology of a region that encompasses tundra and boreal forest. The long-term nature of many of the studies puts Toolik in a key position to probe the mysteries of climate change.

It's a scavenged place, converted from a highway construction camp in the mid-'70s (much of the settlement of northern Alaska relates back to the bounty of oil and the building of the pipeline), it can be home to as many as 125 people in the summer. But it's usually about half that.

The population is all about science, a hardy group of researchers who tromp over mountains and into streams in the name of biology. Fashion statements are limited to the works of Goretex, fleece and Carhart.

From 10-14 people tend to the chores so scientists are free for research. It's got two large generators running around the clock on diesel. The chow is hearty and plentiful, made mostly from scratch. Groceries come in 18-wheelers twice weekly from Fairbanks.

The buildings are utilitarian. Largely trailers and semi-permanent tents. To walk through is to imagine a battlefield Army encampment that's fallen into the hands of science guerrillas.

Water is plentiful, drawn from the lake and treated for drinking. Sewage is another matter. The grey water is trucked at great expense to Deadhorse three hours to the north. So campfolk are limited to two very short showers a week. Trash is either incinerated or trucked south to Fairbanks. Again, pricey stuff.

For the last two years, the camp has been open year-round, meaning about 16 sturdy folks hang through the winter. Winds howl at 40 mph. Last year the thermometers maxed out at 60 below.

Summer time is far nicer than you'd expect in the Arctic. T-shirts and a light jacket will do most of the time.

But the physically taxing work and lack of showers can foster a bit of an aroma. The population turns to, well, let's look what Mike Mansur wrote when he first planted the Star flag in the Arctic in 2000:

"Four nights a week, on the shore of this glistening lake, some of the world's leading scientists gather in a small, wooden building and take off all their clothes." It's the sauna. A place to warm up, wash off with biodegradable soap. The bravest jump in the lake. (Your intrepid reporter promises to take the plunge. As a favor to you, he will post no photos.)

It could be said there's no nightlife here, but only in the sense that there's no night. But bring in their own alcohol can drink it here, though rowdiness is discouraged. There are occasionally dances. There's a full drum set, an electric guitar and base, three mandolins and (surely there has to be some sort ecological law forbidding this next one) a banjo.

Mostly, folks get along. Camp manager Chad Diesinger (fresh from the scaling of Denali) says people sometimes don't get along. A few aren't suited for the close quarters and lack of privacy. But generally, it's a granite-tough crowd infatuated with wilderness.

"I tell people to get out and hike a little bit," Diesinger says. "Get where you can't see camp anymore. Enjoy it."

A road paved by oil

2008-06-29T00:30:00.000-05:00

The Dalton Highway is a 400-plus mile mix of swerving pavement and spine-rattling gravel that stretches from Fairbanks to Deadhorse near the Arctic Ocean.
It was built in the mid-70s to make the Alaskan Pipeline possible, snaking alongside the engineering marvel still pumping crude, that's eventually ending up as $4 gas at a pump near you.
Sardined into a van, I traveled the highway for 10 hours and 360 miles on Friday with some fellow reporters and a couple of scientists.
We passed into the Arctic Circle, through the Atigun Pass and onto the tundra in the foothills north of the Brooks Range mountains.
I've been to some big sky country before, and apologies to those slogan-bogarting folks in Montana, the view at Toolik lake somehow conveys a stretch of horizon not much found in the lower 48.

Heading north

2008-06-23T20:10:00.000-05:00

This beauty in blue is where I'm heading this summer. I'll spend two weeks at Toolik Lake, Alaska, hanging with scientists study long-term changes in the local environment and global climate. Hopefully the trip will generate more interesting posts than this one.