Drought hit the Hunter Valley in early 2018. Photo Max Mason-Hubers
Short-term thinking may be blinding us to Australia’s real drought risk.
Eastern
Australia’s rainfall patterns are dominated by climate cycles across
the Pacific Ocean that last a rough average of 30 years.
Our
understanding of this cycle is evolving. But we know enough to prove
Australia’s 100 years of instrumental weather records does not paint the
full picture, said University of Newcastle Associate Professor Anthony
Kiem.
“The Millenium drought shouldn’t be a surprise in Australia,” he said.
“I’m
not interested in scaring people or sensationalising the issue. But you
have a false sense of security if you only look at the instrumental
records and say the Millenium drought is the worst on record - let’s
plan for that.”
Mr Kiem is working on
groundbreaking research that delves 1000 years back into the palaeo
record of our climate history to reveal a highly variable long-term
pattern.
“In
one century in the eleven-hundreds 70 per cent of the years are
classified as drought, including a straight run of 39 drought years in a
row,” said Mr Kiem, a senior lecturer and researcher on climate impacts
to Australia’s long term climate cycles.
“In the fifteen-hundreds there was a really wet period with no drought for the best part of 100 years.
“So
we see the Millennium drought is not unprecedented, it’s well within
range. We’ve had droughts like that before, in fact we’ve had a lot
worse and will again. And now there’s climate change on top of that.”
Along
with the usual suspect El Nino Southern Oscillation, drought cycles are
heavily influenced by the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation.
The
IPO is an ocean-atmospheric process similar to ENSO, but associated
with warming and cooling across the whole Pacific Ocean, not just the
tropics like ENSO.
And where ENSO runs on a
three to five year cycle, the IPO runs on a 30 to 40 year cycle (see
below for a run-down on how these climate cycles work).
While
the past 100 years of recorded weather in Australia was dominated by
relatively average IPO conditions, Australia has struggled through three
big dries in that time: the Federation, World War II and Millennium
droughts.
Cattle were being fed with forage to survive in the Hunter Valley's drought this year. Photo Belinda-Jane Davis.
Mr Kiem is working with Dr Tessa Vance from
the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre, and
Dr Jason Roberts from the Australian Antarctic Division, using ice core
records.
They are studying ice core
samples taken from the Law Dome in Antarctica, a frozen peak at Cape
Poinsett, to understand how ENSO and IPO have played over a significant
sample of thier cycles.
By drilling deep
into the ice they can travel back thousands of years to piece together a
fuller picture of the long term weather cycles driving eastern
Australia’s climate (we will come to how this works later).
So how do you go from an Antarctic ice core to a drought record of eastern Australia? It hinges on salt and snow.
The ice contains compacted snow, laid down in layers by clouds formed over the Pacific Ocean.
Oceanic storms whip up the sea which drive plumes of salt into the air, and into the snow.
The
compacted snow in forms layers in the ice core, leaving a signature of
the prevailing weather conditions which brought it there.
Those
weather conditions are the product of the same systems, namely ENSO and
IPO, that bring Australia its famous droughts and flooding rains.
Basically,
that means the salt signature, or lack of it, in Antarctic ice cores
can tell us a lot about rain, droughts and flooding in eastern
Australia.
Ice cores explained in video
The ice core evidence is bolstered by its correlation to tree rings. Strong growth occurs in wet/warm year, less in dry/cool.
Tree rings can show localised drought and flood histories, but their records only go back a few hundred years.
But the ice cores are needed to investigate far back in the climate records.
Mr Kiem said we are undergunned in drought management.
Our policy and preparations are based on a knowledge gained through 100 years of recorded history.
“We
are lulled into a false sense of security that drought can’t exceed the
extremes we;ve seen in the past 50 to 100 years, but it has and will
likely do so again.”
“When there is a big drought people talk about management and it becomes a political issue for five years or so.
“But
when it’s over that goes out the window, the extension programs are
removed and drought management programs aren’t a priority and we go back
to square one.”
ENSO / IPO explainer:
The Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation is an ocean-atmospheric process spanning the Pacific Ocean and running on average cycles of 30 to 40 years.
In
the warm, or positive IPO phase which is associated with drought, the
western Pacific becomes cooler. In a negative phase, which is associated
with floods, it becomes warmer.
The El Nino Southern Oscillation effect is centred on the tropical Pacific Ocean and cycles between warm and cool phases every three to five years.
Warmer
than average sea surface temperatures in the western Pacific Ocean near
Australia indicate the La Nina side of the cycle, which is associated
with wet years in eastern Australia.
El
Nino is associated with drought, and occurs when sea surface
temperatures in the western Pacific Ocean are cooler than average.
The
Southern Oscillation is another indicator of El Nino. The Southern
Oscillation Index measures the differential in air pressure between
Tahiti and Darwin. A positive differential indicates a La Nina, a
negative differential El Nino.
Super funds and fund managers keen to spruik their
responsible investment credentials will need to work harder to avoid
being delisted by the Principles for Responsible Investment, with the
London-based group saying it will push its 1900-plus members to be more
active on issues like climate change, human rights and corruption.
The
PRI says it is raising the bar on what is expected of its signatories,
which hold a collective US$70 trillion in assets under management.
Its
numbers include passive investment titans BlackRock and Vanguard,
Norway's giant sovereign wealth fund, Wall Street's Goldman Sachs and
Morgan Stanley, and more than 130 Australian institutions including AMP,
Macquarie Asset Management, BT Investment Management, Australian Super,
Cbus, Hesta, Perpetual and LendLease.
It has
put in place minimum requirements, a move it hopes will strip out
free-riders in its ranks while bolstering its relevance, more than 10
years after the PRI's launch by then-United Nations secretary general
Kofi Annan and a group of major institutions.
And
it wants its members to be more active in holding companies to account
on so-called ESG - environmental, social and governance - issues, with
climate change risks, fracking, corruption, water rights, modern slavery
and child labour among its current areas of focus.
Many
of its signatories proudly tout PRI membership on their websites,
sustainability reports and marketing materials, but about 10 per cent
would not currently meet its new hurdles, says PRI chief executive Fiona
Reynolds.
Fiona Reynolds says investors need to get "actively involved". Photo: Supplied
She
says some who have signed on - perhaps to help win investment mandates -
are "not really committed". Without improvement, they risk being
delisted within two years.
Among Australian members, "there's definitely some in the top and there's some in the bottom too," Reynolds says.
"You
own the company, you need to get actively involved. It's not that you
are trying to run the company, it is not to say that you can solve every
problem in the world, but you can have an impact."
Hurdles
Reynolds,
the former head of the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees,
wants to see more Australian investors wield their proxy votes against
company management when more gentle forms of engagement - like letters
to boards and meetings - fail to get results.
And
she has called on Australian institutions to get more involved in ESG
issues offshore, noting that "the vast majority do not do a lot about
their international holdings". When investors work together on issues,
she says, "it's much more difficult for companies to ignore them".
The PRI has strongly backed new climate risk disclosure guidelines for companies, championed by Michael Bloomberg. Photo: Michel Euler
In
recent years, PRI members have collectively pushed for more disclosure
on issues like water quality, air emissions and community consultation
and consent by fracking companies, and for improved labour practices in
agricultural supply chains.
Late last year, the PRI backed the Climate Action 100+ campaign,
launched by 200 institutional investors with US$26 trillion in assets
under management, which aims to push 100 high-emitting companies
including BHP, Rio Tinto and Wesfarmers to curb emissions and boost
climate risk disclosure.
PRI
signatories are required to report once a year on their activities, pay
their fees and declare their intention to invest responsibly via its
six "voluntary and aspirational" principles.
Under
the new hurdles, they will also need to have a responsible investment
policy that covers at least 50 per cent of their assets under
management, name a person within the organisation that is responsible
for carrying it out, and spell out who in their group's senior ranks is
accountable for it.
They
are "not particularly high hurdles", Reynolds says, adding that the PRI
would work with signatories who fell short over the next two years, to
help them avoid being delisted.
Even now, a handful of signatories are delisted each year for failing to file their reports.
The
move to lift membership requirements has been welcomed by some of the
PRI's more active signatories. Carola van Lamoen, the head of active
ownership at Dutch asset manager Robeco, said some investors had, in the
past, reaped the benefits of improved performance on ESG issues without
doing the work. The minimum requirements meant the PRI process was
"working better", van Lamoen says.
"In the PRI context the free-riders are facing some pushback," she says.
Investment climate
The
PRI was launched by the UN, and has its backing, but operates
seperately from that body and is funded mainly by signatory fees. While
equity investments attract the most focus, the PRIs apply across asset
classes including infrastructure and fixed income.
The
organisation has about 100 staff world-wide; in recent years it has
expanded its presence beyond its London head office, pushing into Asia
in 2015 and opening offices in Hong Kong, Beijing and Sydney.
Responsible
investing, it says, involves incorporating ESG issues into investment
decisions, as part of the process of managing risk and generating
sustainable returns. The PRI argues that responsible investment - as
opposed to impact or socially responsible investing - "can and should
be" pursued by investors whose sole purpose is generating financial
returns.
The group has strongly backed the
newly-minted guidelines issued by the G20 Financial Stability Board's
Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), chaired by
high-profile businessman and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg,
which calls on companies and investors to set out how climate change
could impact their operations, and how they are responding to its
potential risks and opportunities.
The
recommendations have been endorsed by companies around the world as
well as some financial regulators, including the Australian Prudential
Regulation Authority.
The PRI has urged the
Turnbull government to endorse the recommendations - a step already
taken by the UK, France and Sweden - pointing to the risks posed to
Australia's economy by climate change, including to its agricultural and
tourism sectors.
But while the federal
government has welcomed the release of the TCFD report, and last month
encouraged "all stakeholders to carefully consider" its recommendations,
it did not to respond to questions from Fairfax Media on whether it was
considering formally endorsing them.
Passengers onboard the First Fleet received a harsh introduction to their new home’s climate before they even landed. Their diaries and letters reveal just how hard it was
The H.M. Bark Endeavour, part of Captain Cook’s first voyage of
discovery to Australia and New Zealand from 1769 to 1771. Oswald Brett
The women screamed as the huge waves crashed loudly on the wooden
deck. Horrified, they watched the foaming torrent wash away their
blankets. Many dropped to their knees, praying for the violent rocking
to stop. The sea raged around them as the wind whipped up into a frenzy,
damaging all but one of the heavily loaded ships.
The severe
storm was yet another taste of the ferocious weather that slammed the
First Fleet as it made its way across the Southern Ocean in December
1787. Now, after an eight-month journey from England in a ship riddled
with death and disease, the passengers’ introduction to Australia was
also far from idyllic.
The First Fleet entering Port Jackson, NSW, on January 26
1788, drawn in 1888 by E. Le Bihan. Passengers had endured a gruelling
eight-months journey from Great Britain. Picture: State Library of New
South Wales/Wikimedia
The unforgiving weather that greeted the First Fleet was a sign of
things to come. More than once, intense storms would threaten the
arrival of the ships and bring the new colony close to collapse.
So
how did the early arrivals to Australia deal with such extreme weather?
Have we always had a volatile climate? To answer these questions, we
need to follow Australia’s colonial settlers back beyond their graves
and trace through centuries-old documents to uncover what the climate
was like from the very beginning of European settlement.
By
poking around in the settlers’ old diaries, letters and newspaper
clippings, we can begin to piece together an idea of what the country’s
climate was like long before official weather measurements began.
When
the British sailed into Australian waters, they had no idea of what
awaited them. Perhaps they expected that life would resemble their other
colonial outposts like India, or an undeveloped version of England.
With enough hard work, surely the land could be tamed to support their
needs.
But when the First Fleet sailed into Sydney Cove, they unknowingly entered an ancient landscape with an unforgiving climate.
Even
before Governor Arthur Phillip set foot in Botany Bay, violent storms
had battered the overcrowded ships of the First Fleet. During the final
eight-week leg of the journey from Cape Town to Botany Bay, the ships
had sailed into the westerly winds and tremendous swells of the Southern
Ocean. Ferocious weather hit the First Fleet as it made its way through
the roaring forties in November–December 1787.
British naval officer William Bradley was part of the First
Fleet. His journal was one of the primary sources Dr Gergis consulted as
part of her research. Picture: Supplied
Although the strong westerlies were ideal for sailing, conditions on
the ships were miserable. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King described the
difficult circumstances on board HMS Supply: ‘Very strong gales
… with a very heavy sea running which keeps this vessel almost
constantly under water and renders the situation of everyone on board
her, truly uncomfortable’. Unable to surface on deck in the rough seas,
the convicts remained cold and wet in the cramped holds.
Captain John Hunter described how the rough seas made life on the Sirius very difficult for the animals on board: The
rolling and labouring of our ship exceedingly distressed the cattle,
which were now in a very weak state, and the great quantities of water
which we shipped during the gale, very much aggravated their distress.
The poor animals were frequently thrown with much violence off their
legs and exceedingly bruised by their falls.
It
wasn’t until the first week of January 1788 that the majority of the
First Fleet sailed past the south-eastern corner of Van Diemen’s Land,
modern-day Tasmania. As his boat navigated the coast, surgeon John White
noted: ‘We were surprised to see, at this season of the year, some
small patches of snow’.
According to Bowes Smyth, faced with a
‘greater swell than at any other period during the voyage’, many of the
ships were damaged, as were seedlings needed to supply the new colony
with food. Bowes Smyth continued: The sky blackened, the wind
arose and in half an hour more it blew a perfect hurricane, accompanied
with thunder, lightening and rain … I never before saw a sea in such a
rage, it was all over as white as snow … every other ship in the fleet
except the Sirius sustained some damage … during the storm the convict
women in our ship were so terrified that most of them were down on their
knees at prayers.
Finally, on 19 January, the last ships of
the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay. But after just three days there,
Phillip realised that the site was unfit for settlement. It had poor
soil, insufficient freshwater supplies, and was exposed to strong
southerly and easterly winds.
By 1818 Sydney Cove (pictured here from Dawes Point in a
painting by Joseph Lycett) had become quite populous. Picture: State
Library of New South Wales/Wikimedia
With all the cargo and 1400 starving convicts still anchored in
Botany Bay, Phillip and a small party, including Hunter, quickly set off
in three boats to find an alternative place to settle. Twelve
kilometres to the north they found Port Jackson.
On 23 January
1788, Phillip and his party returned to Botany Bay and gave orders for
the entire fleet to immediately set sail for Port Jackson. But the next
morning, strong headwinds blew, preventing the ships from leaving the
harbour. A huge sea rolling into the bay caused ripped sails and a lost
boom as the ships drifted dangerously close to the rocky coastline.
According to Lieutenant Ralph Clark: If
it had not been by the greatest good luck, we should have been both on
the shore [and] on the rocks, and the ships must have been all lost, and
the greater part, if not the whole on board drowned, for we should have
gone to pieces in less than half of an hour.
By 3 p.m. on 26
January 1788, all eleven ships of the First Fleet had safely arrived in
Port Jackson. Meanwhile, while waiting for the others to arrive,
Phillip and a small party from the Supply had rowed ashore and planted a Union Jack, marking the beginning of European settlement in Australia.
After
such an epic journey, the whole ordeal was washed away with swigs of
rum. Unknowingly, it marked the start of our rocky relationship with one
of the most volatile climates on Earth.
This is an edited extract from Joelle Gergis’s Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia, out 2 April from Melbourne University Press. RRP $34.99, Ebook $16.99, from mup.com.au and all good bookstores. This article has been co-published with The Conversation.
Frithjof Kuepper is an amiable man. He giggles a lot. He likes to chat and he is generally polite at all times. But Kuepper, a marine biodiversity professor at the University of Aberdeen, is also one of a select breed of scientists who dive in the waters off Antarctica, the coldest, loneliest and most daunting continent on earth.
That is where he was in January when he took out his laptop to type a plaintive message to fellow researchers in an irreverent Facebook group called “F**k the leopard seal”. “The horror,” he wrote, “is back.”
Kuepper was in Rothera, a station run by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) research institute. Dozens of scientists flock there between October and March each year, when the continent’s violent weather eases. Kuepper had come to study things such as how seaweed survives in the dark for months on end under ice, a quest that could lead to better cold-water washing powder and other products with the potential to slash energy costs and carbon pollution.
His mere presence there was a small triumph. A scientist’s visit to Antarctica typically costs thousands of dollars and can take months of wrangling — with grant bodies for money, with university bosses for time off from teaching, and with spouses left back home at Christmas.
But more than two weeks after arriving at Rothera, Kuepper had failed to do a single dive. Bad weather delayed his flight from Chile to the station so much that he arrived on Christmas Day, a holiday. A diving officer injured an ankle jogging, stalling dive trips further. Then, just as Kuepper was finally about to hit the water, a strap on his face mask broke and he had to abandon the dive. Then came the leopard seals.
The sharp-toothed animal is a powerful Antarctic predator and although there is only one record of it ever killing a human, it happened at Rothera in 2003, when a 28-year-old British biologist was dragged to her death as she snorkelled near the base. Now, whenever one of the creatures is spotted, diving is aborted for four hours in the hope that the beast will depart the scene. A flurry of sightings put Kuepper’s dives on hold, yet again, but he was philosophical. “It’s kind of what you expect when you come to Antarctica,” he said. “A lot of things derail the schedule.”
That was a serious understatement, as the FT discovered after spending 13 days at Rothera in January to report on a central scientific dilemma: the struggle to understand a continent whose fate affects millions of people worldwide, yet is fearsomely hard to study.
Science has long played an outsized role in Antarctica. Nations wishing to help run the continent, which has no indigenous people or central government, have had to prove their commitment to scientific research since the Antarctic Treaty came into force in 1961, turning the remote white expanse into a gigantic natural laboratory.
Antarctic scientists discovered the hole in the ozone layer, along with ice cores that shed new light on the planet’s climate history. Yet for most of the 20th century, Antarctica was widely thought to be frozen in time.
Not any more. Parts of the continent are changing fast, including sections of the massive ice sheet that covers it. This holds so much water that if it ever melted completely, global sea levels would rise by nearly 60m. This will not happen any time soon, but even small losses would affect coastal cities and islands around the world, as well as some of the most iconic polar creatures. The race to understand Antarctica has become more urgent, even as conditions on the continent remain as forbidding as ever.
Rothera consists of a cluster of pale green buildings surrounded by glittering icebergs on the Antarctic Peninsula, the part of the frozen continent nearest the bottom of Chile. For an idea of its location, make a fist with your left hand and raise it so that your palm is facing your nose, leaving your thumb to stick out. The Peninsula looks like your thumb, your fist is roughly the shape of the rest of Antarctica and the left side of the top thumb knuckle is approximately where Rothera is.
The station was established in 1975 and is one of more than 100 research facilities dotted around Antarctica, some of which date back to the 1950s, when there was a surge in scientific exploration against a backdrop of cold war tensions. Rothera has a population of about 100 in the southern summer. This dwindles to just over 20 through the dark winter, when a skeleton crew keeps the base functioning.
The alien beauty of the Antarctic was evident from the moment we landed, as was its fragility. The first thing our feet hit as we stumbled down the plane steps was a tray of disinfectant, put there to kill any foreign organisms we might have brought with us.
As we walked up to the station, gaping at the glinting white views, the air suddenly filled with a putrid pong and the indignant bellowing of a herd of elephant seals. I was told to keep at least 5m away from the creatures, which lead a happier life than local seals did in the past. The animals were once shot to feed the sledge dogs that lived on the base until Antarctic Treaty rules saw the last of them shipped off to Canada in the early 1990s.
In the Antarctic, you really are working on the edge of knowledge. Peter Fretwell, geographer, British Antarctic Survey
Soon after arriving, I met Clem Collins, an air unit assistant who has been working on and off at Rothera since 1984. “We used to take about 150 seals a year,” he said, explaining how the animals were cut into blocks of dog food. “The more rotten the meat, the more the dogs loved it.” Food at the base is still sometimes called “man-food”, a legacy of the days when it had to be separated from dog feed.
We were quickly whisked off for an intensive bout of briefings on how to live — and survive — at the base: what to wear (more than you think), when to eat (up to five times a day in the canteen), where to sleep (with strangers in rooms with a double bunk) and how to check in and out of each building so everyone could be constantly accounted for.
Job definitions were loose. The engineer held yoga classes. Field guides turned into ski instructors on the slope behind the runway. A brisk tour of the station was led by the doctor, who also ran the post office. She later presented us with a fake foam bottom to teach us how to inject someone with morphine, should the need arise.
Basic medical know-how is a must in a place where weather can make rescues risky. An American doctor who discovered she had breast cancer at the South Pole in 1999 performed a biopsy on herself with the help of a welder who practised by poking a needle into an apple.
Each evening, radio operators in the station air tower check in with the scientists who camp out in the field, hundreds of miles from the base. Pinned to the wall is a map of Europe overlaid with dots showing how far away the scientists are working if one imagined Rothera as London. This year, one man was mapping the ice bed in the equivalent of Italy. Some were collecting equipment in what would have been Turkey, and another was drilling ice cores in a spot that would have been Saudi Arabia.
Many had flown out in planes with skis, landing in a way that would raise the hair on an ordinary passenger. With no runways to guide them, Antarctic pilots often have to make several low passes over a potential landing spot, hoping that the pressure of the trailing skis exposes any hidden crevasses before they eventually touch down. Even then, safety is not assured. A veteran pilot working for the Australian Antarctic Division landed safely in 2016 but died after stepping out and falling into a hidden crack in the ice nearby.
The highest point at Rothera is marked with a cross surrounded by plaques in memory of those who have perished over the years. The pilots killed in an air crash. The station worker who got lost in bad weather. And the scientists who set off over sea ice to see a penguin colony and never came back.
Inside Antarctica the continent whose fate will affect millions
Scientists have been eager to study Antarctica since the 1820s, when explorers caught their first glimpses of the last continent on earth to be discovered. The memoirs of early researchers remain a stark record of the difficulties of working in a place where average temperatures can plunge below -60C in winter; winds reach hurricane strength and about 98 per cent of the land is covered in ice up to 4.8km thick.
The zoologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who joined the fateful expedition of Britain’s Robert Falcon Scott, wrote of “the horror” of trekking more than 100km through blinding winter blizzards in the dark in 1911 to collect penguin eggs. His chattering teeth shattered in the bitter cold. One of his colleagues nearly lost an eye when he was hit by a blob of sizzling blubber from the camp stove. “Anyone would be a fool who went again,” wrote Cherry-Garrard. “It is not possible to describe it.”
Advances in everything from waterproof parkas to satellite phones mean today’s scientists work in more comfort, up to a point. Working at an Antarctic station is not for the faint of heart at any time, especially in winter, when the icy darkness can make evacuations impossible and tempers can fray. Historians say that in the 1960s, a Soviet scientist killed a colleague with an axe for cheating at chess, while a doctor at an Argentine base burnt the station down in 1983 to force an evacuation home.
Jess Walkup, an ebullient 31-year-old with a PhD in evolutionary ecology, will lead the Rothera base this winter. She is believed to be the first woman to have spent a winter at three BAS stations, and will be the first to lead a winter team at two bases (she previously ran the UK’s Halley station).
“They say it’s the easiest job in the world if nothing goes wrong,” she told me. Her responsibilities already range from mediating staff squabbles to organising boat cargo and setting the price of beer in the bar. When I asked what kept her awake at night, she said: “Any kind of major incident involving a fatality.”
Although female workers are far from a rarity on the station, they are still outnumbered. Women only joined the crews working through winter at Rothera in the late 1990s, which was, as one researcher wryly put it, “just a few years after the dogs left”. And sexism is not entirely dead. A few months earlier, Walkup had been told that because there would not be many women in her team over winter and most were in relationships, “that will be hard for the winterers”. “I’m like, ‘We’re not a commodity, we’re here to do a job,’” she said.
Still, she has faced far worse. She once spent more than a year as a field assistant at a remote BAS station on Bird Island, off the island of South Georgia. One day, she spotted a giant petrel with a leg tag that needed to be read. She crept up on the bird as it was feasting on the contents of a dead seal’s anal passage.
But as she got closer, it took off over her head. She cried out just as the startled creature vomited a load of rotting seal poop that dropped straight into her open mouth. “It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said. It was easy to believe her.
Antarctica’s brutal history is etched in the names of its landmarks: Cape Disappointment, Exasperation Inlet, Destruction Bay, Delusion Island.
Unsurprisingly, much of the continent has long been a mystery. The first broadly accurate map was not produced until 1983. The UK always thought the highest mountain in its part of the continent was Mt Jackson but in December BAS researchers said new satellite data had revealed it was actually Mt Hope, which was 55m taller.
People regularly confuse it with the Arctic, an ocean surrounded by land with a permanent population of about four million. The Antarctic is a continent surrounded by water and a shifting population that can rise to about 10,000 in summer and falls to some 1,000 in winter. It is visited by more than 35,000 tourists each year (many of whom never get off a boat).
Until this century, there was more known about the shape of ice on Mars than Antarctica. Satellites that could measure the Red Planet’s ice caps in detail were launched in 1996 — seven years before an equivalent mission for Earth. “It sounds crazy, but that’s just the way it was back then,” said Andrew Shepherd, a professor at the University of Leeds who had come to Rothera on his way to study how fast global sea levels could rise as Antarctica loses its ice.
Not that long ago, such a question would have seemed odd. The earliest reports from the UN’s 30-year-old Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the gold standard of climate research, suggested Antarctica was likely to gain ice as the atmosphere warmed, because higher temperatures would cause more snowfall at the poles.
That view began to change in the early 2000s as scientists learnt how to detect changes in the ice sheet far more precisely and satellite images revealed a series of spectacular collapses of some of the floating ice shelves that fringe the edge of the continent.
Ice shelves, unlike ice sheets, are big floating slabs that form as land ice spreads out on the ocean. As they grow, icebergs eventually snap off at their edges, though not always as dramatically as the Delaware-sized slab that split from the Larsen C ice shelf last July. Because they are floating, ice shelves do not raise sea levels themselves when they break up (think of how a glass of Coke doesn’t spill when its ice cubes melt). But scientists gradually realised that the shelves act like gigantic door-stoppers, stemming the rate at which ice from land — which does raise sea levels — flows down into the sea.
It soon became clear that some glaciers were indeed moving faster where shelves had broken away, and there was growing evidence that the continent as a whole was losing ice, especially in West Antarctica. The last report from the IPCC in 2013 suggested Antarctica’s ice sheet would only contribute a few centimetres to sea-level rise by 2100. But some researchers now think parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet could have tipped into a state of unstoppable collapse. One US study in 2016 suggested that if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, Antarctica’s ice loss could raise sea levels by more than a metre by 2100.
They say it’s the easiest job in the world if nothing goes wrong. Jess Walkup, Rothera 2018 winter base leader
That research remains controversial. But Shepherd said the bottom line is we do not know for sure: “There is a small chance that sea-level rise could be much bigger than everyone is expecting, because some models do predict extreme rises.” Some scientists have already begun to say that tens of billions of dollars should be spent on massive engineering projects to stall ice loss, such as artificial islands that could pin ice shelves into place in front of glaciers.
In a sign of growing concern, the US and UK agreed in 2016 that they would spend up to $25m, a fortune by Antarctic science standards, on a five-year study of the area around the huge Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Researchers describe the region as the continent’s “weak underbelly” because its collapse could eventually trigger more than 3m of sea-level rise. Ted Scambos, one of the US scientists behind the study, said: “This is the biggest glaciological study the two nations have ever attempted together, and it’s going to take our best effort to do it.”
Up in the Antarctic Peninsula, Rothera is already showing how quickly parts of the continent are changing. One morning, a bunch of people gingerly lowered themselves into an inflatable boat to go and see something remarkable near the Sheldon Glacier, a huge long lump of ice that oozes down to the sea not far away. Everyone wore puffy orange immersion suits because falling into the icy water would have spelled death in minutes. The boat had to steer clear of icebergs, which can topple over and crush anything near them, as well as the towering glacier cliffs, where falling chunks of ice can be equally deadly.
Some of us had never been to the Antarctic before and were openly agog as we motored past floating ice where pods of fat seals lazed in the sun. Cries of “My God!” and “Look!” filled the still air as we rushed to take selfies in front of the edge of the glacier that reared up from the shoreline like a jumbled white cathedral, pocked with electric-blue ice.
One Antarctic veteran pulled out a bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate that had been stored at Rothera for years, swearing it tasted better than anything sold today. Another explained how to chip off bits of glacial ice for gin and tonics back at the base, where it pops as it melts and releases bubbles of air trapped for thousands of years.
In the giddy atmosphere on the boat, one man was more subdued. He was Peter Fretwell, a geographer at BAS, where people say he works in magic. This stands for the Mapping and Geographic Information Centre, which draws up maps for scientists, pilots and anyone else visiting Antarctica. Fretwell kept frowning at a satellite map he had brought, which showed the large bay we had come to was not quite what it seemed. In fact, 25 years ago, it would not have been there at all.
Back then, it would have been covered in thick ice flowing down from the mountains. But the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming places on the planet. Temperatures on the west coast have risen by around 2.9C in the past 60 years, about three times the global average, while surface sea temperatures have gone up by more than 1C.
The Sheldon glacier began steadily shrinking back in the early 1990s, and what was once ice is now a large bay of open water. “It’s beautiful and fantastically impressive,” Fretwell said, staring out at the view. “It doesn’t look like a system that’s in turmoil and rapidly changing, but it is.”
The speed of change has had another impact on Fretwell. For the past five years, he has helped to manage a huge international database that is used to create the most up-to-date maps of the Antarctic. These rarely needed much redrawing in the past. But over the past decade, as the ice has changed and remote sensing technology has improved, the number of revisions has surged. “Now we’re updating every year,” said Fretwell. “It’s quite a task.”
Antarctica’s shifting ice may eventually pose a problem for humans, but there are already signs that it is affecting the continent’s wildlife. Back on dry land, Simon Morley, a marine biologist with BAS, was in an aquarium at the base’s laboratory, checking on the creatures collected from the icy waters.
Morley has lost count of how many times he has been to Rothera but as the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed, he has found himself in conditions he never expected to experience. A few years ago, he jumped into what he expected to be freezing water and discovered it was 4C, warmer than some waters he had been in during a UK winter. “Just imagine,” he said. “You come down here preparing to dive in the Antarctic and it’s four degrees. It’s crazy!”
That spelled problems for some of the creatures in his tank. His research has shown that limpets, a vital cog in the ecosystem, lose the ability to turn over and protect themselves from predators once water temperature rises above 2C. But Morley was also preoccupied by what he called the “monstrous changes” on the sea floor that have occurred as the duration of winter sea ice has steadily declined.
The state of Antarctica’s sea ice is not straightforward. Like the Arctic, the seas around Antarctica freeze every winter and melt in summer. But unlike the Arctic, where the extent of ice is shrinking at record rates, Antarctica’s sea ice has grown in some years and reached a record high in 2014. Comparing the two very different environments is fraught.
But Morley was focused on what was happening around Rothera and, in particular, icebergs. As they drift around, icebergs scour the seabed like gigantic white bulldozers, leaving a mass of crushed plants and creatures in their wake. There is less devastation when the sea ice is frozen solid and the bergs are trapped in place. BAS researchers have found that between 1997 and 2007, the sea ice froze solidly for up to 200 days a year. But after 2007, the number of days with solid sea ice plunged to 100, freeing bergs to float around the bay.
For more than a decade, Morley has been monitoring a patch of seabed in a cove near Rothera that has revealed an unsettling change. “There was a massive increase in marine-life mortality,” he said. “It is as if someone started cutting down a rainforest repeatedly every year so there was no hope of any seedling growing to become a mature tree. That’s what has happened in this cove in the last decade as the duration of sea ice has reduced. It’s one of the most startling natural changes in the seabed that we know of in the world.”
Sea ice duration is critical for other Antarctic creatures, including the famed Emperor penguin. This species breeds on the ice, which in turn shelters one of its sources of food: tiny shrimp-like krill that are also a staple for seals and whales. BAS scientists have already found evidence of four Emperor penguin colonies breeding on ice shelves instead of sea ice, even though it means they have to travel further for food. Other researchers’ estimates suggest the total population could halve by 2052. In 2012 the species was reclassified from one of “least concern” to “near threatened” but some scientists think it now deserves to be regarded as endangered.
It’s beautiful and fantastically impressive. It doesn’t look like a system in turmoil but it is. Peter Fretwell
At other times, however, the birds at Rothera can seem too robust. One day, the weather was calm enough for another boat trip to a small nearby island, where Open University plant scientist Kadmiel Maseyk was keen to look at moss. Only a handful of plant species can survive this brutal environment but no one knows exactly what will happen to them as the continent’s climate changes.
Maseyk had brought bags of cutting-edge instruments to measure the way moss behaves. But he had failed to include a more basic piece of equipment: a big stick with a black flag on top that scientists use to ward off the south polar skua, a brown bird that grows to half a metre long and is notoriously proficient at dive-bombing.
Maseyk arrived, breathless, where other scientists were gathered, urgently seeking one of their flagpoles. “There was a moss patch I wanted to see but couldn’t get there because of the constant skua bombardment,” he said. “The sky was black with them! I hightailed it out of their way while I still had everything intact.” He ended up getting about 20 minutes’ worth of data on a trip that had taken hours to prepare.
Back at the base, Richard Phillips, a seabird ecologist with BAS, would not hear a bad word about the belligerent skua. He has been studying seabirds in the Antarctic for nearly 20 years and speaks of them as some people describe their children. He is as fond of the “lovely little” snow petrel (despite its habit of projectile vomiting) as he is of the Emperor penguin, which grows so big you can “barely get your arms round a full-sized one”. He looked visibly pained as he described the decline of the albatross, which drown in droves each year as they dive on baited hooks trailed by fishing vessels.
Even the scrappy skua had its charms. “They’re beautiful creatures,” he beamed, as he prepared to show sceptical visitors one he claimed was so smart it had learnt to steal his hat. Sure enough, as he approached the bird, it dived at his head, snaffled his woollen hat and took off with it for about 100m before wheeling back to drop it at his feet.
But Phillips was also perplexed. He is one of the BAS scientists who have been studying about 25 pairs of skua at Rothera since the 1990s.
Until a decade ago, breeding failures were rare. But in five of the last 10 years, very few or no chicks lived, and last year only three pairs laid eggs. No chicks survived.
“We don’t know why the skuas are failing,” said Phillips. But once again, changes in the sea ice might be to blame. One possible explanation, Phillips said, was that more ice had hampered the birds’ ability to find fish. But it could also be that less ice had meant less krill for the fish, and therefore more hungry skua.
As our visit drew to an end it was evident that, for all the obstacles scientists faced in the Antarctic, many had made solid progress. Frithjof Kuepper finally started diving. Andrew Shepherd successfully tested satellite gear. Simon Morley found seaweeds never seen near the base before. Kadmiel Maseyk learnt a lot of new things about moss.
But there were also signs of the difficulties that lie ahead.
Peter Fretwell, the geographer who took us to the Sheldon glacier, had another mission. He was one of four scientists planning to check on something no human had ever seen before. In 2015, an anomaly had shown up in his satellite data suggesting that there could be a sizeable colony of birds on an island south of Rothera.
Satellites have led to enormous advances in understanding Antarctica, but scientists often need to check what they show by visiting sites in person, or at least getting close enough to fly a drone above them. Fretwell and the others planned to go to the island, document the colony and the surrounding plant life, and then declare the area a special protected zone.
The trouble was, the spot was in a part of the island known as the Finlandia Foothills where no one had ever been, and for good reason.
It was lashed by storms, pitted by crevasses and so remote that it would take two hours of flying to get even close to it. Fretwell went over first with a field guide but the weather was so bad he was confined to his tent for days and the rest of the party were stuck back in Rothera. Eventually, they all got there, only to discover a lot of snow and ice and rocks but no birds. The anomalous reading had been caused by an unusual type of rock.
A team of US scientists made better progress. In March they reported that, using satellites backed up by drones, they had found a “super colony” of about 1.5 million penguins on another island near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
There was a massive increase in marine-life mortality . . . it’s one of the most startling natural changes in the seabed that we know of in the world. Simon Morley, marine biologist, BAS
Fretwell was not discouraged. He now knew how to correct the satellites so they did not make the same mistake again. “That’s the thing about working in Antarctica, you really are working on the edge of knowledge,” he said. “It is probably the only place in the world where we are still making discoveries on an almost weekly basis. The reason why it has kept its secrets so long is the remoteness and the incredibly harsh and difficult conditions that scientists and support personnel have to endure.”
This was just another story of the challenge of studying Antarctica. The question is whether we will we be able to learn enough about the vast white continent before it changes beyond measure.
*Pilita Clark and Charlie Bibby travelled to Rothera with the British Antarctic Survey, an institute of the Natural Environment Research Council Links
