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
Stephen Hawking spoke to the BBC about climate change and Donald Trump
Earlier this month, Stephen Hawking died at
his home in Cambridge at the age of 76. As one of science’s brightest
stars, he made his name from hypothesising about the past to solve the
great mysteries of the universe.
But Hawking also had much to say about
the future, recently turning his attention to climate change. In his
last years, he used his platform to warn us that human activity was
irreversibly damaging the planet and urged us to take action.
“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes
irreversible,” Hawking said during an interview last year with the BBC.
He didn’t stop there. He then proceeded to denounce US President Donald
Trump’s decision to withdraw from Paris climate agreement. “Trump’s
action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus with a
temperature of 250 degrees and raining sulphuric acid,” Hawking said.
Sounds ominous, right?
But Hawking’s words might not be mere premonition of a distant future.
They are looking more and more likely to become a reality sooner than
expected.
The past four years has been the hottest period on record, with Nasa
reporting that 2017 was the second-hottest year in recorded history,
while scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) saying that it was the third-warmest.
And the risk of such hot weather has already increased fivefold from the
past, when it occurred once in a thousand days, according to a 2015
study by climatologist Erich Fischer at the Institute for Atmospheric
and Climate Science in Zurich.
And things could get much worse if we go beyond the tipping point of a
temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Fischer’s study shows that the
risk of hot weather will double again at a 1.5-degree increase in
temperature, and double once more when we reach a 2-degree rise.
Failure to maintain the global temperature rise could usher in a new climate regime.
According to a 2016 study published in Earth System Dynamics, a 2-degree
rise in temperature would lead to a 10-centimetre-rise in global sea
levels by 2100 and longer heat waves, which would threaten virtually all
tropical coral reefs in the world.
Such an extreme rise in sea level could permanently inundate many coastal regions and islands.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Other estimates predict an
ice-free Arctic in the summer, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest,
and the melting of the Siberian tundra to release planet-warming
methane from its frozen depths.
And there’s not much time left, either. Delaying the efforts to reduce
fossil fuel emissions could lead to 153 million premature deaths across
the globe from air pollution this century, according to a recently
released study led by Duke University in North Carolina.
So the next big question is, can we keep global warming within 1.5 degrees?
The answer, unfortunately, is that this would be extremely unlikely,
according to a draft UN report from the International Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), the world’s leading authority on climate change.
“There is a very high risk that under current emissions trajectories and
current national pledges, global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees
Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” the report reads.
It also states that the 66 per cent likelihood of holding warming below
1.5 degrees without overshooting is already out of reach.
Not all hope is lost, though. The report points out that limiting global
warming to 1.5 degrees is still possible, but it will require a rapid
phase-out of net global carbon dioxide emissions and deep reductions in
non-CO2 drivers of climate change, such as methane.
With the deadline for our planet’s fate drawing near, chief executive
Andrew Higham of Mission 2020 – a collaborative initiative that aims to
drive down global emissions for full decarbonisation by 2050 – said that
policymakers had to act now, and fast. “What we need is to move fast.
We have the technology, so there’s nothing stopping us in our pathway to
1.5,” said Higham, who was in charge within the United National
Framework Convention on Climate Change for drafting and delivering the
Paris Agreement. “It seems like a small number, but it makes a really
huge difference to vulnerable communities.”
Hawking may have left the Earth and all of its problems, but the rest of
humanity is still here. It’s high time we took Hawking’s words
seriously.
*Born in Indonesia, Hans Nicholas Jong is a Jakarta-based environmental journalist. Links
Once-productive lands have become deserts, are polluted, or deforested, putting 3.2 billion people at risk.
In Thailand, global warming and lack of rainfall causes cultivated land to dry up and crack. Image: Petr Baumann/Shutterstock
Like a broken cell phone that can only text or take pictures, but
not make a single call, more than 75 percent of the Earth’s land areas
have lost some or most of their functions, undermining the well-being of
the 3.2 billion people that rely on them to produce food crops, provide
clean water, control flooding and more.
These once-productive
lands have either become deserts, are polluted, or have been deforested
and converted for unsustainable agricultural production. This is a major
contributor to increased conflict and mass human migration, and left
unchecked, could force as many as 700 million to migrate by 2050,
according to the world’s first comprehensive evidence-based assessment
of land degradation, released today in Medellín, Colombia.
Deforestation in Madagascar. Image: Dudarev Mikhail/Shutterstock
Land degradation—including deforestation, soil erosion, and salinity
and pollution of fresh water systems—is also driving species to
extinction and aggravating the effects of climate change, the report
concludes. It was written by more than 100 leading experts from 45
countries for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
(IPBES). IPBES is the ‘IPCC for biodiversity,’ a scientific assessment
of the status of non-human life that makes up the Earth’s life support
system. A major companion report was released Friday documenting the rapid and dangerous decline in biodiversity. It called for fundamental changes in how we live, run our societies, and the economy.
“This is an extremely urgent issue that we need to address yesterday,”
said Robert Scholes, a South African ecologist and co-chair of the
assessment. “Land degradation is having the single biggest impact on the
well-being of humanity,” Scholes said in an interview in Medellín.
Human activities, mainly those involving agriculture and urbanization,
have destroyed or degraded topsoil, forests, and other natural
vegetation and water resources nearly everywhere, the report found.
Wetlands have been hit hardest, with 87 percent lost globally in the
last 300 years. Wetlands continue to be destroyed in southeast Asia and
the Congo region, mainly to plant oil palm trees.
Less than 25
percent of the Earth’s land surface has escaped the substantial impacts
of human activity—and by 2050, this will have fallen to less than 10
percent. Most of these future land losses will be in Central and South
America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The only places left relatively
unaffected will be polar regions and tundra, high mountains, and
deserts, the report projects.
Ending land degradation is “an urgent priority to protect the
biodiversity and ecosystem services vital to all life on Earth and to
ensure human well-being,” said Luca Montanarella, a soil scientist from
Italy and co-chair of the assessment.
“We’ve know about this for
over 20 years, but it is only getting worse,” Montanarella said in an
interview in Medellín. There is little public awareness and it is not
considered an urgent issue by most governments. The only way to stop the
decline is at the local level, and through the choices each of us make,
he said.
River bank erosion in Bangladesh. Image: Sangib Kumar Barman/Shutterstock
Those choices include choosing to eat less meat and buying food from
local growers who use the most sustainable farming practices. Up to 40
percent of food is wasted globally at various points, from farms to
overstuffed refrigerators, said Robert Watson, IPBES Chair. Countries
also need to end their production subsidies in agriculture, fisheries,
energy, and other sectors, Watson told Motherboard.
Rich
countries need to take responsibility for the impacts that their
consumption of imported products may have. The country landscape of the
United Kingdom is a tourist attraction because the country imports 35 to
40 percent of its food from other countries, said Watson. “People don’t
see the impacts of their consumption.”
Ending land degradation and restoring damaged lands would provide more
than one third of the most cost-effective greenhouse gas mitigation
activities required by 2030 to keep global warming to below 2°C. And
doing this would cost at least three times less than doing nothing and
create much better livelihoods and jobs for local people, said Watson.
“Implementing the right actions to combat land degradation can
transform the lives of millions of people across the planet, but this
will become more difficult and more costly the longer we take to act,”
he said.
50% of Coalition voters and 67% of Labor voters want to phase out coal, and majority also support striving to cut greenhouse gas emissions
Anti-coal mining protesters join thousands at a march in Sydney on 24 March. Photograph: Rushton/EPA
A majority of Australians would support phasing out coal power by 2030, including half the people in a sample identifying as Coalition voters, according to a survey by a progressive thinktank.
The research funded by the Australia Institute says 60% of a sample
of 1,417 Australians surveyed by online market research firm Research
Now supported Australia joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance to phase out coal power by 2030.
The Powering Past Coal Alliance – spearheaded by the UK and Canada – was unveiled at the COP23 climate talks in Bonn. The agreement is not legally binding, and the membership does not include Australia or other major coal exporters and users.
The survey suggests there is a core level of support across
Australia’s partisan divide for signing on, with 50% of Coalition voters
supportive as well as 67% of ALP voters. The significant dissenters
were One Nation voters, with only 36% supportive.
A majority of Australians also supported increasing ambition on
cutting greenhouse gas emissions, with 58% support, including 47% of
Coalition voters in the sample.
“The strong majority support for phasing out coal power shows how far
the community is ahead of the government on climate change,” said the
Australia Institute’s deputy director, Ebony Bennett.
She said the Turnbull government’s approach on climate and energy
policy meant Australia was at risk of missing out on jobs and investment
associated with a global boom in renewable energy, and was out of step
with public sentiment.
The research follows a declaration on Wednesday at the National Press Club
by the resources minister Matt Canavan that he was not interested in
contemplating a discussion about a just transition for workers displaced
by any phase out of coal consistent with Australia’s international
climate obligations.
Canavan said workers suffered when industries shut down or were
phased out so euphemisms like “just transitions” were best avoided. “I
don’t like the term transition, let’s be frank, if you want to shutdown
the coal industry, say it – that’s what will happen.”
The resources minister said expanding the coal industry was “not
inconsistent with the obligations we’ve got to reduce carbon emissions”.
He said countries were increasing investment in high-efficiency coal
plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the Paris
accord. Canavan did not mention that some countries, such as Japan, are increasing investment in high-efficiency coal because of a phase-out of nuclear power.
Canavan also declared in response to a question about balancing his
portfolio responsibilities to boost the resources sector with his
responsibilities to the Queenslanders who elected him that he had been
elected to parliament “on a platform that is unashamedly pro-coal”.
While Canavan was elected because he was given a winnable position on the LNP’s Queensland Senate ticket, the resources minister said: “I got elected on the basis I will support the resources sector.”
Camels walk on the sand during the “Gallops of Morocco” equestrian race
in March in the southern Moroccan Sahara desert. (Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty
Images)
Earth’s largest hot desert, the Sahara, is getting
bigger, a new study finds. It is advancing south into more tropical
terrain in Sudan and Chad, turning green vegetation dry and soil once
used for farming into barren ground in areas that can least afford to
lose it.
Yet it is not just the spread of the
Sahara that is frightening, the researchers say. It’s the timing: It is
happening during the African summer, when there is usually more rain.
But the precipitation has dried up, allowing the boundaries of the
desert to expand.
“If
you have a hurricane come suddenly, it gets all the attention from the
government and communities galvanize,” said Sumant Nigam, a professor of
atmospheric and oceanic science at the University of Maryland and the
senior author of the study. “The desert advance over a long period might
capture many countries unawares. It’s not announced like a hurricane.
It’s sort of creeping up on you.”
The
study was published Thursday in the Journal of Climate. The authors
said that although their research focused only on the Sahara, it
suggests that climate changes also could be causing other hot deserts to
expand — with potentially harsh economic and human consequences.
Deserts
form in subtropical regions because of a global weather circulation
called the Hadley cell. Warm air rises in the tropics near the equator,
producing rain and thunderstorms. When the air hits the top of the
atmosphere, it spreads north and south toward the poles. It does not
sink back down until it is over the subtropics, but as it does, the air
warms and dries out, creating deserts and other areas that are nearly
devoid of rain.
“Climate change is
likely to widen the Hadley circulation, causing northward advance of the
subtropical deserts,” Nigam said in a statement that announced the
study.
At the same time, he said, the Sahara’s
southward creep suggests that additional mechanisms are at work. One is
probably the natural climate cycle called the Atlantic Multidecadal
Oscillation, or AMO, in which temperatures over a large swath of the
northern Atlantic Ocean fluctuate between warm and cold phases for 50
years to 70 years. The warm cycles deliver precipitation to subtropical
areas, and the cold cycles keep it away. Human-caused climate change can
increase the intensity and length of the drier cycle.
Nigam
and the study’s lead researcher, Natalie Thomas, a doctoral candidate
at the University of Maryland, used data from the Global Precipitation
Climatology Center to arrive at their finding. They studied grids and
patterns from 1920 to 2013, mixing in satellite data compiled “over the
last three decades,” Nigam said.
They determined
that the AMO was in a positive phase that delivered more rain to areas
near the Sahara from the 1930s to the early 1960s. It then switched to a
negative cycle that lasted 40 years. A 1980s drought — “the most
intense … of the 20th century” — was attributed to the latter phase and
linked to “higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Railway tracks are covered by sand as a result of desert encroachment in
2013 at Ogrein Railway Station in Sudan. (Mohamed Nureldin
Abdallah/Reuters)
Over the second phase, the Sahara crawled south
mostly, encroaching on a more tropical area known as the Sahel. Its
effect could be seen on a water basin that drains into Lake Chad. “The
water level has been falling precipitously,” Nigam said. “It’s very
depleted. We can’t attribute it all to rainfall. There may be human
draws from the lake. But it’s telling, a visible element, and it clearly
lies in the area where the Sahara is encroaching southward.”
Africa is the continent least responsible for human-caused climate change, but it’s the most vulnerable
to its effect because of unique features. It is, for example, a land
mass almost evenly divided between the Southern and Northern
hemispheres, creating a wide variety of climate zones.
Thomas
said she started the research as a way to characterize century-long
trends but focused on Africa’s Northern Hemisphere when she noticed
“really strong trends over the proximity of the Sahara.”
As
the researchers went about their work, downloading satellite data and
information from the global climatology center, the evidence became more
concerning. “The finding was impressive because it was happening in the
summer season, the growing season where Africa receives most of its
rainfall, a really important season for agriculture,” Nigam said.
Yet
that is when the greatest southward advance of the Sahara occurred, he
said. A season of rain was being replaced by the expansion of a desert,
without the affected governments, Chad and Sudan mostly, noticing.
The
future implications for countries already affected by lack of rain and
drought could be dire, Nigam said. “Water resource planning, water use
and long-term planning is important.”
The rapidly falling cost of renewable energy and
batteries is "chilling" for the future of the fossil fuels sector,
raising doubts about the viability of new coal power stations.
A
Bloomberg New Energy Finance report has found the price of renewables
has fallen by almost a fifth over the last year, with wind and solar
generators becoming cheaper than both coal and gas-fired power stations.
Elena
Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF, said the rapidly
falling cost of renewable generation and battery power is changing the
game for the electricity sector.
"The conclusions are chilling for the fossil fuel sector," she said.
The combination of batteries and wind farms is providing more power flexibility. Photo: David Mariuz
The cost of electricity supplied by lithium-ion batteries, like the
Tesla installation in South Australia, has fallen nearly 80 per cent,
from $US1000 ($1308) a kilowatt hour in 2010 to only $US209 a kilowatt
hour in 2017.
Wind and solar are proving cheaper because their
cost of electricity has fallen significantly, while that for coal, gas,
nuclear and large hydro projects has only slightly decreased.
"We
are seeing record-low prices being set for wind and solar, and then
those records being broken again and again on a regular basis. This is
having a powerful effect – it is changing perceptions," BNEF head of
Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Seb Henbest, said
BNEF said Australia had one of the world's lowest levelised cost of electricity for onshore wind and solar.
Solar power will likely be cheaper than coal by 2020.
The
Australian National University forecast future prices of new renewable
energy generators would fall to $50 a megawatt hour in the 2020s.
The
ASX forward prices for NSW between the 2020 March quarter and 2021
December quarter run to an average of $75.73 a megawatt hour for
coal-fired power.
Globally, the levelised cost
of electricity for wind farms was $US55 per megawatt hour for the first
half of 2018, down 18 per cent from the same time last year, while solar
power has also fallen 18 per cent to $US70 per megawatt hour. Only
offshore wind generation failed to fall significantly, dipping 5 per
cent in costs year on year
EY believes Australian renewable energy will cost the same or be cheaper than fossil fuels as soon as 2020.
This
parity is forecast to happen as the Renewable Energy Target - a
government scheme designed to support building renewable generation like
wind and solar - comes to an end.
However, Ms Giannakopoulou said despite the rapidly falling costs of renewables it does not spell the end for fossil fuels.
"Some
existing coal and gas power stations, with sunk capital costs, will
continue to have a role for many years, doing a combination of bulk
generation and balancing, as wind and solar penetration increase," she
said.
"But the economic case for building new
coal and gas capacity is crumbling, as batteries start to encroach on
the flexibility and peaking revenues enjoyed by fossil fuel plants."
Australia
has been putting wind and solar through its paces to see if it can
provide both more stable, instantly available energy to the grid,
overcoming the issues of how to generate electricity when the wind isn't
blowing and the sun doesn't shine.
The
government recently announced new trials to improve the accuracy of the
renewable systems’ self-forecasting ability, which allows them to
predict the weather in their immediate area and know how much
electricity they can provide into the grid, ensuring there is no sudden
shortfall when the weather changes.
There
are also trials to use wind farm-generated electricity to provide power
that smooths out demand and supply to make sure it is balanced.
Neoen
Australia’s South Australian Hornsdale 2 wind farm also carried out
trials providing intermittent energy into electricity markets under a
wide range of operating conditions, saving the market about $3.1 million
due to the lower cost of energy.
