From: Janet Dalziell - Expedition Leader
20th February 1997
THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
Janet Dalziell recently returned to New Zealand from leading a four-week expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula aboard the MV Arctic Sunrise. She was there to document the Antarctic's emerging signs of climate change. On her return, she wrote about her impressions.
It's a funny thing, organising a Greenpeace voyage to Antarctica. For months before our departure from Argentina in mid-January, I had been immersed in scientific papers documenting the many signs of climate change appearing in Antarctica. From the comfortable distance of Auckland, the concept of what we were going to see had become quite mundane, and I was much more occupied with all the details of pre-departure preparations. So it was an overwhelming experience to actually witness the enormity of the changes we have seen on this expedition.
ICE NO MORE
During the voyage, it was commonplace for the ship to steam into waters that have never been navigated before, because for thousands of years they have been covered by permanent ice shelves, hundreds of metres thick. We were the first ship in history to circumnavigate James Ross Island, for example. Previously, the island had been joined to the mainland by an ice shelf, over which early explorers roamed.
Just south of James Ross Island, we spent several days mapping the sea floor where the Larsen-A Ice Shelf used to be. In early 1995, this shelf -- thousands of square kilometres -- collapsed into the sea over a period of just fifty days: a blink of an eye compared to the hundreds to thousands of years it took to form. We flew over the next ice shelf to the south, Larsen B, and filmed the huge cracks that foreshadow the imminent collapse of this shelf too, as the warmer temperatures move inexorably southward.
PENGUINS ON THE DECLINE
Professor Bill Fraser, a US scientist who has been working on the Antarctic Peninsula for 20 years, told us of the major declines he has seen in Adelie penguin populations, one of Antarctica's icons. Over the last two decades, he has documented a 40% decline in the numbers of these penguins in the area, and he has seen 21 colonies become extinct. His theory is that the declines are due to increasing temperatures and a corresponding reduction in winter sea-ice cover, which supports the krill which the Adelie feed on.
At the British Antarctic Survey's Rothera station, Dr David Walton showed us colonies of the only two flowering plants that exist in Antarctica -- hundreds of kilometres further south than where they had previously been known.
These were the headline-catching findings of our expedition. But what the headlines couldn't capture was the consistency of the anecdotes we heard at all the stations we visited. Almost without exception, and along the entire length of the Peninsula, people who had spent several years in any one area gave a litany of retreating glaciers and milder winters. As we visited the southernmost station on our route, Argentina's "San Martin" station, it rained. The station people said they had never experienced rain there before.
Increases in the Earth's overall average temperature are likely to be due to greenhouse gas emissions. However, scientists are by profession cautious people, and they are still discussing the exact meaning of these changes in Antarctica. However, it is beyond doubt that major climatic changes ARE taking place on the Antarctic Peninsula and the changes are big enough to move thousands of square kilometres of ice-- features that can be seen from space.
It is clear to me, having witnessed such changes, that the experiment we humans are currently conducting with the earth's atmosphere is an extremely risky game. The governments of the world will be meeting in Japan this December to decide on further steps that should be taken to curb global climate change. The New Zealand government will be one of the decision-makers, but to date has played a spoiling role in the negotiations.
Greenpeace has gone to the ends of the Earth to expose the danger the world faces from global warming. The ice caps and wildlife of the region have taken thousands of years to evolve and develop, but within decades they are crumbling under the impact of humankind's greenhouse gas pollution. We must not close our eyes to these warning signs, for we may open them again to find there is little left of the world's last great wilderness.