Antarctica lives in our imagination
as the most remote,
the most forbidding,
the coldest place on planet earth.
Though it appears to be tough and invulnerable,
sheathed in ice and surrounded by frozen ocean,
the Southern continent can also be a fragile place.
Backlit by spectacular 24-hour sunlight,
surrounded by the kind of sculpture
only nature can produce.
Locked up and buried in the antarctic ice,
three miles at its thickest,
are clues to the planet's future health.
Join us as we travel to a storied land
veiled by ice and mystery.
Writer and filmmaker Jon bowermaster's
introduction to Antarctica in 1989
was also his first assignment for national geographic.
that 220 day,
3,741 mile expedition
was the longest in antarctic history.
It was organized by two modern day polar legends,
American will steger
and frenchman Jean-Louis etienne.
It focused attention on the frozen continent
at an important moment in history,
when the treaty that governs it was being renegotiated.
It was also the last expedition on the continent by dogsled.
I have been to Antarctica many times,
to both its high cold interior
and along its 900-mile peninsula,
traveling by sailboat and kayak.
My goal has been to bring back eyewitness reports
of how Antarctica is faring today.
My 10-person team and I sail from the tip of south America
to the antarctic peninsula on a 74-foot ice-worthy sailboat.
The crossing of the Drake passage takes five days.
It is renowned as one of the windiest places on earth,
and the seas can whip to 40 feet.
The water temperature here is 29 degrees.
Fall in and you'd have just a few minutes to live.
You know you're nearing Antarctica
when you spy your first iceberg,
the continent's most unique creations.
Carved off centuries-old glaciers
they can be as big as small islands,
20, 30 miles or longer.
The most impressive are ghostly blue.
But you're only seeing the tip,
since 90% of an iceberg exists below the ocean's surface.
No one goes to Antarctica without careful consideration.
If you get in trouble down here,
you must be able to rescue yourself.
There is no Navy or coast guard.
No 911 to call.
So I choose my travel companions carefully.
Skip novak, American born, based in South Africa,
has been sailing to the antarctic peninsula for 20 years.
Competitor in several around-the-world sailing races,
he knows the peninsula as well as anyone alive.
Graham Charles is one of new Zealand's best-known adventurers.
His reputation was earned by bold exploits by kayak
on some of the coldest seas on the planet.
The biggest adventures to be had along the peninsula
are by sea kayak.
It is perhaps the best way to see this part of the world,
because you're separated from the environment by less than an inch of plastic
and Antarctica really has a good shot at showing you what it's made of.
But Antarctica has not always been about cold and ice.
It makes me think that clues to the continent's future
may lie in its past.
More than 200 million years ago,
the land beneath all of today's ice
was part of a supercontinent known as gondwanaland.
The landmass that would eventually become Antarctica
broke off from south America and South Africa
and slowly drifted to its current home at the south pole.
Not so long ago in geological terms,
about one hundred million years ago,
Antarctica was covered by tropical rainforest.
It was home to dinosaurs that could see in the dark.
Necessary, since the continent is bathed in darkness more than half the year.
And the early relatives of penguins,
which grew to six feet tall and could fly.
As the earth continued to revolve and evolve,
about 45 million years ago,
the continent began to grow colder,
ultimately becoming home to most of the planet's ice.
Today, it is a huge kingdom of ice.
The United States could easily fit inside its borders.
Like a giant ice cube fixed at the bottom of the world,
the frozen continent
ultimately helps set the tempo of the planet's weather.
Earth's great annual climate cycle
is centered here.
With Antarctica serving as the engine
that drives the circulation of ocean currents,
redistributes the sun's heat,
and regulates global climate.
During its eight months of winter,
the continent doubles in size,
as seven million square miles of ocean
freeze around its edges.
Each Southern summer, much of that ice begins to thaw,
breaks off and drifts away.
This annual growing and shrinking
acts like a pump,
turning Antarctica into the planet's beating heart.
It's hard to imagine the vastness of all that ice.
The ice sheet frozen atop the continent
contains 61% of all the freshwater on the planet.
Much of its interior is off-limits to man or animal
because of the cold and remoteness.
How cold?
The coldest temperature on earth
was recently recorded on a high plateau in eastern Antarctica,
135.8 degrees below zero.
There's no wildlife in the interior of Antarctica
because there is no food.
But along the edges of the continent, it's a different story.
More than 14 million penguins call Antarctica home.
As do many millions of seals,
and 15 species of whales,
including humpbacks, minkes, orcas and blues,
and the tiny all-important krill
that are the basis of the food chain here.
Graham and I spent many days exploring the coastline by zodiac and kayak,
scouting for wildlife, hoping for an up-close look.
We spy plenty of penguins, which never cease to entertain,
whether on land or in the water.
Thousand-pound leopard seals pay us little attention.
Near the top of the food chain,
they rest unperturbed on floating chunks of ice,
rolling over only to yawn.
Jon and his team's curiosity about
and desire to explore Antarctica
put them in good company.
The icy continent and its mysteries
fascinated some of the greatest names in exploration history.
This corner of the planet
was among the last places to be discovered by man.
As sailors first roamed the globe,
they would occasionally spy icebergs in the deep Southern reaches,
suggesting there was a frozen land down there, somewhere.
In 1773, captain James cook
was the first to sail across the antarctic circle,
though he never actually saw land.
It wasn't until 1820,
when three expeditions,
Russian, American and British
claimed to be the first to lay eyes on the icy continent
within a few months of each other.
The very next year,
the first man stepped foot on antarctic ice,
an American seal hunter named John Davis.
What is now known as the heroic age of antarctic exploration
didn't get underway until decades later, in the 1890's.
The years that followed made household names of explorers like
Ernest shackleton,
whose endurance was crushed in the ice,
all of his men surviving an arduous eighteen-month odyssey.
Australian Douglas mawson,
who had almost been the first to reach the south pole,
barely struggling back to safety during a later expedition
after losing his two partners along the way.
And Norwegian roald amundsen,
who in 1912,
became the first to reach the south pole by dogsled.
In an ill-fated race that same year,
englishman Robert f. Scott
also attempted to reach the south pole,
first using horses, then by ski.
Tragically, the cold and ice conspired against Scott
and four of his teammates, who all died on the return from the pole.
Another kind of antarctic explorer
began arriving in the late eighteenth century.
These were hunters seeking seal furs and whale oil,
both then easy to find all along the antarctic peninsula.
Inside the caldera of a long dormant volcano on deception island,
whalers set up sophisticated processing plants
for reducing blubber to oil,
and packing it in barrels to be shipped back to Europe,
the United States and Russia.
At one time, hundreds of men worked on these beaches,
in wooden buildings,
and ships anchored in the shallow waters.
Today, the one-of-a-kind international treaty that governs Antarctica
forbids hunting of any species.
The agreement, signed by 48 nations,
was first adopted in 1961.
It commits all of Antarctica to science,
and states there can be no prospecting
for fossil fuels and precious minerals
or any military activity.
This commitment to science
brings several thousand researchers each summer.
There are 70 scientific bases,
administered by 30 different countries.
The U.S. base, called McMurdo,
is the largest science station.
During the summer months, it is home to more than 1500,
turning it into the planet's most remote small town.
It is a truly international scene.
The U.S. operates the base at the south pole
while the Argentineans oversee Antarctica's oldest base.
And the Chinese recently opened its newest.
In an isolated cove along the peninsula,
we sail into the U.S.'s Palmer station,
home to just 60 scientists and staff at the height of the summer season.
Each November, a handful of researchers and support crew are dropped off by boat.
And picked up again in march.
Kim Bernard studies krill,
the fingernail-sized crustaceans
that are the basis of the food chain in Antarctica.
Which requires venturing out onto the sea
in all kinds of conditions.
Travis miles and his team from rutgers university
deploy this self-propelled submarine into the deepest parts of the Southern ocean,
where it collects samples of seawater and krill.
Bill Fraser has been coming to Palmer for more than 30 years,
and is regarded one of the world's
most knowledgeable penguin scientists.
In recent years,
he's been focused on how the continent's penguin populations
have been impacted by warming temperatures.
Several species of penguins live along its edge,
including gentoos,
adelies,
emperors,
and chinstraps.
In one of the clearest examples of how
warming temperatures are impacting the continent,
the numbers of certain species are shifting.
Emperors are considered threatened.
Chinstrap populations have declined,
and gentoos are on the rise.
Along the peninsula,
where less ice is forming
and the summers are longer and longer,
millions of adelies are disappearing
at the rate of 12 to 20% each year.
The biggest threat is the loss of krill,
which have declined in the Southern ocean
by 80% since the 1970s
due to warming waters and overfishing.
Bill Fraser estimates that by 2021,
it's likely there will be no more adelies at all living along the peninsula.
Where are all the adelies going?
Further south, perhaps, where it's colder?
Or they're dying off.
In the past 50 years,
average air temperatures along the peninsula
have risen by four to nine degrees fahrenheit,
making it one of the fastest warming regions on earth.
The temperature of the ocean is warming, too,
which means less sea ice,
more evaporation and more rain.
The result is that ice along the edges of the peninsula
is disappearing.
In some places, very fast.
Nearly three decades ago,
scientists predicted that the effect of global warming
would be felt first in the polar regions.
They warned that one of the first signs of human-caused climate change
would be the collapse of the antarctic peninsula's bordering ice,
which is exactly what is happening today.
There are 10 massive ice shelves
scattered around the continent.
In the past 30 years,
two along the peninsula have vanished completely.
In march 2002,
scientists watched the 500 billion-ton Larsen ice shelf
shatter into thousands of tiny icebergs.
And in march 2008,
a sheet of ice the size of Manhattan,
broke off the Wilkins shelf.
Each summer season,
cliffs covered by ice for hundreds of centuries
are newly exposed.
As sea ice recedes, new islands emerge.
On some rocks along the coastline,
there is evidence of something very, very foreign here.
Plants.
What is happening so dramatically, so quickly,
to these shelves
suggests it is possible the rest of the peninsula's ice
may deteriorate more rapidly than anyone predicted.
Today, Antarctica's ice
and much of its marine life are at some risk
as the edges of the continent continue to adjust,
to evolve, to warm.
Since man first set eyes on the antarctic continent
nearly 200 years ago,
he's wondered about its future.
Whether it would defeat his efforts to conquer it
or succumb eventually to the power and numbers of humankind.
We are now learning the answers.
The remote continent with the reputation as rugged and foreboding
turns out to be a fragile ecosystem
that needs to be watched and protected.
Antarctica's ice and its treaty
have long prevented the exploitation of the fossil fuels and precious minerals
that lie beneath it.
Some believe there may be vast fields of coal,
iron ore, natural gas and oil,
even diamonds beneath its ice.
The treaty also says
that the national claims made by seven countries
early in the twentieth century
are not to be recognized.
Yet today, some countries are reasserting old claims
while others are making new ones.
One day soon, there will be lots of national competition
over exactly who owns what in Antarctica,
just as we're seeing now in the arctic as its ice disappears.
As we sail further south along the peninsula,
the landscape grows more dramatic.
This is frigid, unforgiving Antarctica.
Big, rolling icebergs are everywhere.
In the distance, we spy a beautiful, rare,
200-foot-tall arch carved by wind and wave
out of a giant iceberg.
Arches like this are extremely rare.
None of us on the boat, long experienced in Antarctica,
have ever seen one quite like this,
and have never witnessed one collapse.
To me, it is both mesmerizing and touching.
An evocative symbol of how Antarctica is changing forever.
Sea level is the best perspective from which to ponder the future
of Antarctica's ice.
There is so much of it around, it seems like the ice will last forever.
But along the coastline,
the glaciers the sea ice helps protect
are receding, shrinking.
Whenever I leave Antarctica, I am filled with both joy and regret.
The latter is made endurable
because I know i will keep coming back
to this very special and spectacular corner of our planet.
As a scene of adventure,
the white continent has no parallel.
It is truly a one-of-a-kind place.
My hope is that as its edges continue to change,
to warm,
we will keep a close eye on them.
So that the continent's evolution
will not result in its demise,
and that the number of Antarctica's ambassadors
and protectors will grow.