Bowermaster’s Adventures: The winds of change in Antarctica

by Jon Bowermaster on

We spent the morning watching and following big groups of swimming/feeding penguins on the backside of Pleneau Island, about halfway down the Antarctic Peninsula.

It was one of the most prolific wildlife scenes I’ve ever witnessed here. The skies were dark, hinting snow, but the incredible beauty of the scene kept us out on deck all morning. Literally thousands of Gentoos swimming and porpoising surfaced in one big pack after another. In single file they would surface, jump one at a time onto a tiny piece of ice, which quickly disintegrated under their accumulated weight. Others seemed savvier, popping up onto bigger icebergs, which they scampered up and over, again in single file, before diving one at a time off the opposite side.

As well as gathering krill and small fish for their by-now two-month old chicks, I’m convinced whenever I see penguin action like this they’re also out horsing around, having some fun. It’s summertime, after all. In another month or two this scene will be dramatically different, frozen and iced-in, and all of Antarctica’s wildlife will be pushed to the ice edge.

It’s an interesting year to talk about ice along the Peninsula. Every year the sea around Antarctica freezes solid, essentially doubling the size of the continent. And every year with spring and summer most of that frozen sea either melts or breaks into smaller pieces and is blown away, offshore.

This year is different. Though summer is two-thirds over still-thick sea ice borders the coastline and encases many of its just offshore islands. It’s more ice than any of us who’ve been visiting the Peninsula for the past couple decades have seen in fifteen years or so.

After watching the penguins hunt for a couple hours we sailed south, to Petermann Island, a traditional summer stop, home to nesting Adelie, Gentoo and blue-eyed Cormorants. For several years the Washington, D.C.-based environmental group Oceanites had put up tents here, allowing its volunteers to come and live for an entire season, documenting wildlife. On an average day all season long one or two tourist ships would land passengers on Petermann for a walk around.

No one has visited the island this year. We attempted to chug through the two miles of thick, slushy ice separating the island from a clear channel. Several times our boat’s engine overheated due to the thick slush being sucked into the intake, requiring us to turn off the engine and plunge it out to prevent it from stopping for good.

%Gallery-147996%Through binoculars we could make out the fuel storage tank at the Ukrainian science base of Vernadsky in the Argentine Islands. We’ve stopped there many times in the past, to anchor in the calm creek that sits behind it and to share a meal and home-brewed vodka with the 14 scientists based there for 12 straight months. This year, thanks to all the ice, no one has been able to reach the base. The Ukrainians have been iced-in for nearly one year. We raise the base commander on the VHF and he assures us all is good; they had recently celebrated the Ukrainian New Year with a big dinner … but admitted they were anxiously hoping their 14 replacements would be able to reach the base in another month.

Sailing back to the north, heading towards a safe anchorage at Pt. Charcot, near where we’d watched the penguins — and leopard seals! — frolic earlier in the day the wind came up, the seas darkened and the ice that surrounded us began to move. It was pushing towards land, filling in any open gap in the sea.

As Skip Novak piloted the boat in, around and through the ice I sensed worry. If we were to anchor at Pt. Chacot and the wind kept blowing out of the west as it was predicted, it was very likely we’d be stuck, unable to move or get off the boat, for many days.

Standing outside in the blow we talked — actually shouted over the wind — about our options. It was actually a very short conversation. “Let’s get north, away from this ice,” said Skip. I agreed.

Now stories of too much ice along the Antarctic Peninsula may run contrary to those you’ve heard — many from me! — about how much the temperatures in this part of the continent are warming and ice melting.

That hasn’t changed: Both air and water temperatures along the Peninsula have gone up on average 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the past forty years, the biggest such change on the planet. The issue this season is not lack of warmth, but lack of wind.

During our adventure this year I’ve had two fascinating conversations with longtime Peninsula veterans about the changes they’ve seen. Each agreed the warming is creating big differences, though each focused on different impacts.

Bill Fraser, one of Antarctica’s premiere penguin scientists, has been visiting the American Palmer Station since the mid-1970s and is convinced the warming temps are changing wildlife patterns. He blames the changes specifically on the lack of sea ice due to warming air and sea temps.

Leif Skog is captain of the “National Geographic Explorer,” operated by Lindblad Expeditions, which has been bringing tourists to Antarctica since the mid-1960s. Skog has been coming here for nearly 40 years. We spoke on the bridge of his ship at Pt. Lockroy, the former British refuge hut known as ‘Camp A.’

For him, the biggest change has been the weather, specifically the wind. Or lack of it. “We used to get katabatic winds roaring down off the glaciers every three days or so. Gusts of over 100 miles per hour. We prepared for them, worried about them constantly. Now … we never see winds like that.” Changing weather patterns influenced by warming temperatures — and the lack of sea ice — makes perfect sense for what we’ve witnessed this season.

As we sailed the Pelagic Australisto safety, slowly pushing through the still-thick, slushy ice towards the backside of the beautiful Lemaire Channel, standing outside in blowing snow and cold Skip and I talked about just what an incredible part of the world Antarctica is. We sail past a sizable iceberg we had lingered near this morning, under far different conditions. Reminding us that every day — every hour — is different in Antarctica. Make that every 15 minutes.

Poachers kill 200 elephants in Cameroon already this year

by Kraig Becker on

Government officials in Cameroon have announced that poachers have already killed more than 200 elephants in 2012, which is a startling number considering we’re only about six weeks into the year. A growing demand for ivory in Asia is blamed for the massive rise in poaching, which is having devastating effects on the pachyderm population in central Africa.

On Friday, Gambo Haman, the governor of Cameroon’s North region, claimed that poachers from the Sudan and Chad are illegally crossing his country’s borders and hunting the elephants for their tusks. He said that the poachers are well-armed, regularly travel on horseback, and are receiving help from locals, who are often eager to see the elephants killed in order to protect their crops.

In January, the carcasses of 146 elephants were discovered in Cameroon, and so far this month, another 60 have been added to that total. It is feared that the number of animals that are actually being killed is much higher however, as not all of the bodies are discovered, particularly if they are being slain in remote regions of the country.

In response to this rise in these illegal activities, the Cameroon government has created a team of soldiers who are trained to rapidly respond to threats from poachers. That team is too small to effectively cover the entire country however, and they have often found themselves outgunned by the bandits they are pursuing. Haman said that a team of six soldiers from Chad were recently killed when they clashed with poachers in that country. The incident was a sober reminder of the dangers these soldiers face.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) have also commented on the recent rise in poaching in Cameroon. They described the situation as dire, saying that the current level of killings there is unprecedented in scale. In 2007, a census of the population of elephant herds in the country estimated that between 1000 and 5000 remained. If this level of poaching continues, there is a real possibility that there will soon be no elephants left in the entire region.

Indian government relocates villagers away from tiger reserve

by Sean McLachlan on


The village of Umri in Rajasthan, India, is no more.

The entire population of 82 families, some 350 people, has been relocated because the village stands inside the Sariska tiger reserve, the BBC reports. The move aims to protect the local tiger population, which is rebounding after being wiped out by poachers several years ago. This reflects a gain in tiger population nationwide after stronger efforts against poaching and mitigation efforts with local human populations.

Tigers are feared by the villagers, who not only worry for themselves but their livestock. Often villagers will hunt or try to poison tigers that come into their neighborhood. Humans also compete with tigers for land and wildlife.

Umri is the second village to be moved and all eleven villages in the reserve will eventually be relocated. The Indian government says the villagers are being compensated with free land, livestock, up to one million rupees ($20,241), and are being relocated as close as possible to their old homes.

The case highlights the problems facing conservationists worldwide. Human needs have to be balanced with those of the endangered animals, and doing that can be a tricky business. Relocating villages is a difficult and expensive task, and what will be done with the two national highways that pass through the park remains to be seen.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Bowermaster’s Adventures: Palmer Station, Antarctica

by Jon Bowermaster on

Palmer Station — When we sail into the narrow channel fronting the U.S. science base here at the tip of Anvers Island it is clear of ice, but for one sizable iceberg which we wait out, watching it drift slowly out to sea.

Once anchored and tied to the rocks at four corners — a necessity in Antarctica given the unpredictable winds and constantly moving ice, which are the twin constant threats of boats both big and small alike down here — we settle in for a good night’s sleep before going ashore the next day to interview and film scientists based here for the austral summer.

But when we awake the scene around our boat has changed: Big winds have pushed a field of brash ice — small chunks of floating ice that have a tendency to congeal into bigger masses when temps are cold — into the narrow channel, threatening to trap the sailboat and make getting back and forth to shore a nightmare.

Tying our nine-foot rubber Zodiac up next to the station’s row of a half-dozen bigger, sturdier versions it feels a bit like we’d ridden up to an Old West town and saddled our Shetland pony next to a string of quarter horses.
Though it is gray and misting heavily when we climb ashore the station’s manager, Bob Farrell, in sweatshirt and jeans, meets us outside. His charges this summer total just 41, a third of them scientists, the rest support staff.

Whether krill expert or IT guy, whether studying Antarctica’s longest-living insect (a midge) or looking after the station’s wastewater system, every one of the 42 based here for three to six months treats the place with equal parts reverence and occasional disdain. While each loves Antarctica in their own way, many returning year after year, the isolation — and grayness — of the place can sometimes make the assignment feel more jail sentence than golden opportunity. The two days we are at Palmer it rains and snows and rains and snows, with the sun coming out for just a tempting 30-minute peek, and then starts to sleet.

Luckily for us the place is busy with interesting science and super-committed-scientists. While the NSF-supported scientists are often in the field counting penguins or sampling underwater algae, a handful are here working the first-floor labs doing what scientists do: count, recount, analyze, compare, dissect, hypothesize, write and edit. Among the hi-tech support here is full-on Wi-Fi connections which allow phones with U.S. prefixes to ring and experiments launched with colleagues back home in New Jersey watching over scientists shoulders via Skype or Immarsat.For example, we find Rutgers’s University grad student Travis Miles in a lab preparing a four-foot long yellow “glider,” which he and assistants will slide into the ocean a couple miles from the station to collect data from deep channels nearby. The program has already sent one of its gliders 7,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
In a similar but different underwater endeavor, across the hall we meet Kim Bernard – native of South Africa and currently studying at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science — who shows off colorful screen grabs from her own undersea work, which is focused on krill fluctuations. The mainstay of Antarctica’s food web, recent krill numbers have been way down. Is it the warming waters? Overfishing? Extra-hungry predators? While the Rutgers’s team goes deep for answers, Kim studies the potential influence of tides on krill.

And both studies benefit Palmer’s most long-term study, of Adelie penguins, led by Bill Fraser who has been coming to Palmer since the mid-1970s. HQ for Fraser and his birding team — he currently has two teams of two scientists out on remote islands, counting — is a sturdy half-dome tent on the station’s front deck.

Sharing a glass of early evening whisky Fraser details some of the changes he’s seen since first arriving at Palmer in 1975-76, staying the first season for three months, the next for 13 months. During those decades he’s watched Adelie penguin populations decrease significantly, due to warming temperatures thus lack of sea ice; Gentoo penguin numbers increase, as they move into the warming neighborhoods abandoned by the Adelies; and krill numbers fluctuate wildly.

But the main thing he’s witnessed is less and less ice. Photographs assembled by various Palmer Station managers and visiting photographers show that at this tip of Anvers Island the retreat has been significant; they show a glacier behind the station that has retreated by 1,500 feet.

“That is the future of the Antarctic Peninsula,” says Fraser. “The ice is definitely disappearing. And fast.”

Impact of climate change on the Himalaya far less than estimated

by Kraig Becker on

A new climate change study, released this past Thursday, has surprised some experts and blown some major holes in the doom and gloom predictions that have been given out in recent years. In fact, the new study, which was published in the scientific journal Nature, found that there has been virtually no ice lost in the Himalaya over the past decade, which runs contrary to reports that many climatologists have given over that same time period.

In this new study, satellites were used for the first time to track the loss of ice in glaciers and the polar ice caps. Previously, teams of scientists would have to visit the glaciers themselves, and measure the changes manually. This was a time consuming and challenging process, and only allowed them to visit a few locations. The satellites gave researchers the opportunity to see the big picture more fully, and what they found was quite surprising.

Previous climate change studies estimated that the loss of ice in the Himalaya Mountains was quickly approaching 50 billion tons per year, but the satellites showed that the actual loss was closer to 4 billion tons annually, which one scientist in the study labeled as insignificant. That means that while the glaciers are indeed still melting, they are doing it at a far less alarming rate than we’ve been led to believe in the past. Researchers went on to say that the contribution to rising sea levels, from these melting glaciers and the ice caps, was less than half what had been predicted by other recent reports.

This research project began in 2003 and ran through 2010, giving the scientists involved an opportunity to observe changes over a substantial amount of time. Their findings fly in the face of predictions from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which once predicted that the Himalayan glaciers could be completely gone by 2035, a statement they were forced to retract later.

All of these different climate change reports just indicate to me that we really don’t know what the hell is going on with our planet.