Playing to our audience

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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