Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Elephant Island, South Shetland Islands

by Jon Bowermaster on

Six a.m. and the sea is clouded by a morning mist, making the always mysterious-looking Elephant Island appear evermore … mysterious. Its sharp rocky peaks climb out of the Southern Ocean in inverted Vs; the tide is high, washing out the few shallow beaches that ring it. Just off Point Wild – named for Frank Wild, Ernest Shackleton’s right hand man – penguins feed near the surface of the gray sea and a solitary Weddell seal curls up in the rocks. Just around the point we watch a leopard seal rip a penguin to bits for breakfast, flopping it around on the surface like a rag doll.

I wonder how Elephant Island would have fared historically if this weren’t the very beach where Shackleton and the twenty two men from his crushed “Endurance” had pulled and sailed to back in 1916. It is impossible to land on the beach this morning, due to the high tide, but I have been here before. Even when the seas are calm and the tide low it is a narrow, rocky, inhospitable place. That they managed to sail their trio of tiny lifeboats here, to the far eastern end of the South Shetland Islands at all is a miracle. That they survived for many months on this thin sliver of rock is testament to … well … I’m not sure what exactly. Fortitude? Patience? Belief in myriad higher powers?

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Minus the Shackleton quotient, I doubt many around the world would have ever heard of this rocky lump. But today it holds a historical context far larger than its minute circumference. Bobbing in the rough seas just offshore, I can make out the monument built by the Chileans who sailed to the rescue aboard the “Yelcho” to rescue Shackleton’s men.

As we rock in the morning mist I try to imagine the scene as Shackleton and his crew prepared the small, twenty-three foot, six-inch lifeboat “James Caird” for its last-gasp, 800 mile sail to South Georgia. I envision them chasing down seals as they slid up onto the rocks, both for the sustenance they would give and the warmth their just-slit bellies held for the men’s long-frozen hands. I can imagine the men gathering in small groups to discuss among themselves the wisdom in the choices made by “the Boss” of who would go … and who would stay behind.

Today the pack ice is far from Elephant Island, but in April 1916 it was threatening to return any day, trapping the entire crew for another winter. They’d already been “lost” for fifteen months and were nearing the end of … everything … food, health, sanity. Which meant as they pounded nails straight, gathered provisions (matches, paraffin, extra socks) and filled the bow of the small boat with rocks for ballast there was an urgency that we cannot imagine from this vantage point. They all knew the risks of trying to sail a gerry-rigged lifeboat across the stormiest seas in the world with the scantest of navigational tools and a tiny, homemade sail. In the quiet of this morning I can almost hear their last conversations as they readied to push the “James Caird” off into the rising seas.

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Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Marguerite Bay

by Jon Bowermaster on

I spent the afternoon walking on a piece of fast ice the size of a small town – floating on the surface, about six feet thick, still attached to the continent – in a fjord known as Beaujoix. Many of the landmarks in the area bear French names, like the big island of Pourquoi Pas, for example, thanks to the early exploits this far south by Frenchman Jean Charcot.

Surrounded on three sides by breathtaking tall mountains and glaciers and on the other by the black Southern Ocean, this is as far south as I’ve ever been. Further south than all but a few ever get along the Peninsula. The reward was a long walk on new snow-covered ice. A dozen leopard seals play along the ice edge and small squadrons of Adelie penguins walk and scoot on their bellies alongside.

We tried to get here last year by sea kayak, but our attempt to sneak through the Gullet just north – a narrow sliver of sometimes-open water – was for naught, and we only got as far as the bottom of Crystal Sound. Our goal last year was to get exactly to this point, to Blailock Island where, on the northeast corner, an old friend, Giles Kershaw, is buried. I think we may have spotted the sight today, marked by a stone cairn, as we trekked.

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I met Giles in the mid-1980s, when he already had a reputation as the very best Arctic and Antarctic pilot in the business. He had flown for the British Antarctic Survey from 1974 to 1979 and had around the world, over both poles, and provided air support for many major expeditions. In 1983 alone he landed at the North Pole twenty-three times. In 1980 he was awarded a medal from the Queen of England, after he flew across a thousand miles of trackless Antarctic white to rescue three South African scientists who had been marooned on an iceberg for eight days. Even among his adventuring peers, Giles was considered the most adventuresome, the most curious, and the most visionary.

In 1985, after successfully helping a pair of wealthy American climbers scale the tallest peak on the continent, Mt. Vinson, he and two Canadian partners (Martyn Williams and Pat Morrow) started what is still the only private business operating in Antarctica. Then called Adventure Network International, they set up a seasonal base camp at Patriot Hills, near the Thiel Mountains in Antarctica’s interior, and flew in climbers, expeditioners and South Pole-bound tourists. Along the way they helped out a fair amount of international scientists, which is why the Antarctic Treaty and its membership – which bans private enterprise here – looked the other way and allowed them to operate.

In 1988 Giles helped lay supply caches between the tip of the Peninsula and the South Pole for my friend Will Steger’s Transantarctica Expedition and, on March 5, 1990, he was killed just near where I walked today. His Antarctica season had just ended and he was on a boat anchored just offshore from here, making experimental flights with a homemade gyrocopter. It crashed into a glacier at the edge of the Jones Ice Shelf. Several years later the mountain that anchors the northeast corner of the island across from where I stand is named for him.

That personal history notwithstanding, this spot on the map is one of the most remarkable places I’ve ever put my feet. Remote, stark, and unrelentingly beautiful. Even turning a full 360, twisting my boots in the soft snow, I can’t take it all in, too enormous to describe or articulate. You’ll have to come see it for yourself one day!

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Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Port Lockroy

by Jon Bowermaster on



I spent the afternoon at the small island of Pt. Lockroy, where I’ve been many times before. We stopped in a couple times last January, during our sea kayak exploration, and hung out on the beaches and its protected bay. When we left Antarctica late that month, we actually left our kayaks tied down to big rocks on the island; they were picked up in February by the “National Geographic Endeavour” and carried back to Spain; from there they were shipped in a container to the U.S. and now sit happily in my Hudson Valley backyard.

Rick Atkinson, a Scotsman who first came to Antarctica more than thirty years ago as a 21-year-old dog sled driver for the British Antarctic Survey, greeted us on the penguin-crowded stone beach. The black and red refuge hut on the hill behind is surrounded by Gentoos (and an oddly out of place pair of Adelie penguins). An overpowering whiff of guano fills my nostrils … Aaaaah, Antarctica! Like elsewhere along the Peninsula this season, the hut is surrounded by still-deep snow.

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He’s been coming here for thirteen years and has done and overseen the renovations during that period that have turned the hut into a British historical site. Part museum, part souvenir shop, Pt. Lockroy is today a must-stop along the Peninsula both for its recreation of life and work here fifty years ago, and also to stock up on Antarctica books, t-shirts, stickers and stuffed penguins. It’s an admittedly odd thing to stumble upon here in this remote place. But Rick and his three assistants wear their work with a smile, greeting on average one tourist ship a day, often hosting more than three hundred people in and out of their tiny work/living space.

The boom in tourism is evident everywhere along the Peninsula. Last season more than 46,000 visitors arrived by cruise boat. About 32,000 of them put their feet on land (or ice); the rest arrive aboard giant cruise liners too large to offload anyone. Rick’s experience is the frontline in how tourism is impacting the Peninsula and he’s the first to point out that you cannot come here, no matter how careful you are, and not make an impact. Though he cites a scientific study that shows that penguins, rigged with heart monitors, showed absolutely no change in rate as hundreds of red-coat clad tourists stomped by.

It was with Rick last January that we endured one thing we’d never expected in Antarctica: Horrific rains. We sat inside the hut then and watched the rain pour in buckets off the roof, soaking the penguin chicks still-covered in down. “That was the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he remembers. “But given that we’ve just experienced another very warm winter, I won’t be surprised if we see it again this year. Every year, it seems, there’s more and more rain at Lockroy.”

He and his team have been here a month and will stay until early March. Recording tools left on in the hut over-winter suggest the temperatures only dropped to -12, which for Antarctica, even inside the small, unheated cabin, suggests more warming.

We leave Rick some fresh water, baking soda and peppermint tea, assuming we’ll see him again soon.

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Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Neko Harbor

by Jon Bowermaster on

This small cove at the end of a long, glacier-packed bay off the Gerlache Strait is one my favorite corners along the Peninsula. It is surrounded by tall peaks – including, on a brilliant day like today, the tallest along the Peninsula, 9,200-foot-tall Mt. Francais – and long glacier tongues leading to the sea. Standing onshore of continental Antarctica, rather than one of the thousands of frozen islands that dot the sea along the Peninsula, I study the far wall as small but powerful avalanches launch from up high. Just a few slivers of hard, dark granite peek out, reminding me there is land – a continent! – beneath all of this white.

The bay is lined by a two-mile-long glacier which, if it broke off a big chunk, would send eight foot waves surging across the beach where I stand; if that happened, I’d have to run fast uphill to where the penguins, wisely, make their nests. Across a narrow bay is a wall of glaciers, behind me is soft hills covered by deep snow. In the far distance in three directions are long lines of tall mountains covered by snow and ice, some of it tens of thousands of years old. (At Vostok, a Russian base on the eastern side of Antarctica, scientists have measured the ice to be 14,000 feet thick, nearly three miles.)

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The snow is very deep this year, which often confuses people when I talk about how temperatures along the Antarctic Peninsula are warming. How can there be more snow if it’s getting hotter? Truth is, the fact there is more snow is a direct result of the warming temperatures: Less sea ice means more open water. More open water means more evaporation. More evaporation means more snow.

The deep snow is relevant when you’re camping, as I’ve done for many days in Antarctica (though this year I’m traveling by ship, the National Geographic Explorer, as a guide and lecturer). Tent life is not bad along the Peninsula, except when the temperatures hover in the mid-30s … which means that it is often wet and humid. It’s preferable when it’s cold and dry.

I’ve been to Antarctica many times over the past twenty years. Sometimes it is possible to get inured, occasionally blasé, about the incredible beauty that surrounds. I try to remind myself as often as possible to take a half hour each day and just sit and revel in the grandeur of the place. Words don’t suffice in detailing Antarctica’s physical beauty. The most powerful memories I collect here are not even visual, but aural.

You often hear Antarctica before you see it. For example, the splash of feeding penguins porpoising out of the sea, sometimes in pairs, sometimes by the hundreds. The blow of a humpback whale long before you catch sight of its arching back. The thunder crack of powerful movement from deep inside a glacier; there’s nothing to see on the surface, no visual change, just the loud report of the giant ice’s continual evolution. Today, most powerfully, I listened the ice moving fast through the channel in front of me: Brash ice, glacial chunks, sizable icebergs, groaning and cracking as they headed out of the channel towards faster-moving waters. I watched a playful crabeater seal play along the light-blue edge of a floating iceberg. They are one of the more curious and playful of Antarctica’s seals and, though we don’t see them everyday here, the most numerous big animal on the planet after man, some 30 million.

On a tall cliff across the bay I can make out streaks of blue-green malakite, a rich mineral vein, a reminder of just how much mineral wealth lies beneath all this ice. Like the deepening snows, this is something most people don’t think about when they ponder Antarctica: As its ice continues to lessen, one of the biggest changes in Antarctica will be nations fighting over who owns what. Copper, diamonds, oil … all will become new Antarctic commodities if warming trends continue.

It is hard to imagine this place without ice and snow, but of course it has been. Roughly 125 million years ago what we know as South America and Africa began to separate; then, the Antarctic Peninsula where I stand was still connected to South America. From 38 to 29 million years ago the Antarctic continent moved south. During that Cretaceous period, circa 144 to 65 million years ago, the continent was covered by forest, including tree ferns, cycads, palms, conifers and deciduous trees, and was home to freshwater fish, dinosaurs, reptiles and the predecessors of the penguins we see here now, though they were somewhat different. In that they were the size of an average man and weighed 300 pounds.

The continent has frozen and thawed since, but has been completely covered by ice and snow since the last Ice Age, about 11,000 years ago. Today, even at the height of summer, only two percent of Antarctica is ice-free; the continent contains 75 percent of the fresh water on earth.

It is clear the Peninsula is evolving, changing … warming. Analysis suggests the rapidity of warming in the northern Peninsula is unmatched over the last 2,000 years. Temperatures along the Peninsula during summer have climbed on average five degrees in the past 50 years; its average winter temperatures have risen by ten degrees, twice as fast as anywhere on Earth in the past century.

If even a small part of the ice Cap were to melt, world sea levels would rise from several feet to several yards, inundating most coasts. If the whole Ice cap were to melt, as it has in past ages, sea levels around the world would rise an estimated 260 feet, destroying a number of low-lying countries. Since sea levels have risen only 8.6 inches in the past century, the three-foot rise projected by the year 2080 is serious. Many millions will become refugees, depopulating the long U.s. coasts up to 50 miles inland, including all of southern Florida and the Mississippi Delta, also much of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the coasts of Africa and innumerable Pacific atolls.

Antarctica without snow and ice? Seems impossible, right?

Click HERE for more dispatches from Antarctica!

Click HERE for more dispatches from Antarctica!

Bowermaster’s Antarctica — The Weddell Sea

by Jon Bowermaster on

We’ve moved to the other side of the Peninsula, the eastern edge of the five-hundred-mile long finger jutting out of the continent, into the Weddell Sea. We tried to get in here last year, by sailboat and kayak, but were shut out. The winter of 2007 had been a particularly cold one, even by Antarctic standards, and the entry to the Antarctic Sound had been blocked long into summer by a pair of giant icebergs, each tens of miles long. That blockage, combined with a lack of wind, meant that where we had hoped to paddle – circumnavigating Vega and James Ross islands – was choked by frozen sea, passes between the islands still filled by one and two year old ice.

This year is very, very different. The winter of 2008 was warmer and windier and even though we’re a day away from the official start of summer, much of the Weddell is already clear of the same kind of thick pack we saw last year.

That said, it is never a picnic over here. Though sunny and bright, I take a long walk today and nearly lost the tip of my nose to frostbite. The biggest worry here, this time of year? Sunburn. The combination of the atmospheric ozone hole and all the bright snow, ice and sea that surrounds means sun block is as necessary as Gore-tex.The landscape on this side of the Peninsula is very different. The islands are short-hilled and rust-colored, stark. Other than a solitary Argentine base, there’s no one around for one hundred miles, and you sense that remoteness. Only a couple of the dozens of tourist boats that prowl the Peninsula each austral summer comes here. More than 100,000 sizable bergs calve off the Antarctic continent each year, about one-third of them come from the glaciers lining the Weddell Sea. Remember in 2002, when a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island dramatically broke off from the Larsen B ice shelf? The Larsen B is just south of where I am today and some of that ice and its brothers and sisters are still grounded here. As I write I’m standing alongside a flat-topped berg a few stories tall and at least two miles long.

The ice here is different too. The sky is bright blue, the wind howling at thirty to forty miles an hour and I spend the better part of an hour looking through a spotting scope towards Seymour Island, following “the pack” being pushed by wind and current. It is miles wide, floating on the surface, exactly what you would not want to get caught in. Imagine being surrounded by a fast-moving pack tens of miles wide, unable to escape. You could be stuck for days, or worse.

The Weddell’s icebergs are mean and tough too, none of that soft, slushy stuff you might see at this time of year on the western side of the Peninsula. Hit one of these, and you’ll suffer. They are extremely hard, toughened by years of extreme cold and wind, often studded just below the surface by giant, sharp continental rock. Even the name of the water here is ominous – the Terror and Erebus Gulf – named for a pair of historical wooden sailing ships that first risked exploring the region.

At the north end of the channel, I take a longer walk on Paulet Island, known for its 100,000 pairs of nesting Adelies. There are so many birds it is nearly impossible to clamber up the boulder-strewn beach. Beneath many of the adult birds peek the first chicks I’ve seen this year. As the day goes on, the sky grows evermore blue, the winds stronger.

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