Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Sharp Peak

by Jon Bowermaster on

Standing at the foot of Sharp Peak, a 4,000-foot-tall snow-covered granite peak rising straight up from the sea, beneath a 360-degree indigo sky, today just might be the most beautiful I have ever seen in Antarctica. Though even as I write that, I knowingly admit it’s impossible to compare days, especially here, since I’ve witnessed so many beautiful ones here over the past twenty years.

But this one was a beauty with a Capital B. Sitting off Prospect Point I am surrounded by THE most spectacular wilderness on the planet. Running about in a Zodiac on a glass-calm black sea, snowcapped mountain ranges circle me marked every few miles by substantial towering glacier tongues. Thick new snow is piled up on the hills and six-foot-thick fast ice (frozen sea) extends from the continent. Dozens of penguins and seals swim and fish, then slide up onto the ice for a rest. Flat-topped tabular icebergs bigger than small apartment buildings – crystal blue and surreal white – sit grounded in the bay or frozen into the fast ice. The sun is high and air temperatures reach to nearly forty … (earlier in the day I heard it was -10 F in Minneapolis!). Aaaaah, Antarctica!

Last year we tried climbing Sharp Peak, but were forced to quit before we started due to too-soft snow and crevasses masked by flat, grey skies. On that day the bay was chock full of floating ice of all sizes; this year most of the winter ice has already been blown out. Though we wouldn’t have had much luck climbing it peak today either, due not to slushy snow, just way too much of it.
It is particularly hard on a day like this, surrounded by ice that is hundreds of years old and mountains covered by new-fallen snow, that one day much of this whiteness lining the Antarctic Peninsula could be gone. Though the air temperatures along the Peninsula have risen during the past fifty years by nine degrees Fahrenheit, the biggest increase on the planet, it is still easy for critics of climate change and its impacts to use this exact vista to suggest that no amount of warming, no matter who or what is responsible, will ever make a difference to this place.

But despite appearances, evidence is all around: All along the Peninsula average temperatures of air and surface water are way up. Eighty-seven percent of all of the continent’s glaciers are flowing faster then ever and have receded. Each year the frozen continent is losing enough ice mass to cause the world’s oceans to rise about .05 inches, adding about 40 trillion gallons of fresh water to the world’s ocean, equivalent to the amount of water used by all U.S. residents every three months. Estimates for sea level rise are on the order of eighteen to twenty feet over the next couple millennium, but we’re not sure if it all may arrive in the same one hundred years. Ice shelves the sizes of small states along the Peninsula are fracturing at alarming rates.

The best analogy I can make for what is happening down south will be familiar to anyone who lives in a cold weather, ice-and-snow climate. Serious scientists in Antarctica talk about a “critical point,” when the combination of warm temperatures, precipitation and loss of ice cover will encourage Antarctica to melt very, very quickly. Think of your own backyard on a warm day at the end of a long winter; your yard, your stoop has been covered in snow and ice for several months and then on early spring day, after a momentous day of rain and warm temperatures, the last remnants of winter disappear … just like that.

The very same could happen here, which is the worry. Though I will admit to understanding why, on a day like today surrounded on all sides by miles and miles of ice and snow, there are still some out there who doubt the globe is warming precipitously. I am not one of them.

Click HERE for more dispatches from Antarctica!

Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Science in Antarctica

by Jon Bowermaster on

Thanks to the 1959 treaty that governs Antarctica, the entire continent is supposed to be devoted to science (rather than military exercise, national claims or mineral exploitation). And no one does science with more conviviality than the Ukrainians at their base in the Argentine Islands called Vernadsky.

I stopped in yesterday for a visit with the thirteen scientists and support crew who have been here non-stop since last February; only the cook remained from my visit of the year before, when we stopped a couple times during our kayak expedition … one night closing down the southernmost bar on the Peninsula and having to carry a couple team members back to our boat. (I’m still searching for that photograph of my pal Pete McBride dancing in a size 60 DDD bra that I know is hidden somewhere on my computer.)

While the base’s reputation among Antarctic cognoscenti is for concocting the best home-brewed vodka in Antarctica, its 63-year meteorological record keeping is without compare along the Peninsula, perhaps the best on the continent. As I walked the halls of the base yesterday, one chart kept in the weatherman’s office jumped out at me: A slowly rising line from left to right, beginning in 1945 – when the Brits built the base, then known as Faraday – and ending in 2008, charting the rise in average temperatures here on this island. In 1945, the average annual temp was -5.5 C (-10 F); this year, -2.3 C (-4.25 F).

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Six degrees Fahrenheit warmer over the past fifty years makes it one of the greatest average temperature increases on the planet. And it’s not just the thermometer that tells the story. During the last winter – roughly March to October – for the first time anyone can remember the sea around the Argentine Islands never froze solid. This past year they also had heavier than usual snowfalls, thanks to a combination of the decrease of frozen sea (more open ocean means more evaporation and more precipitation) and warmer temperatures.

In the narrow main hall I clamber up a wooden ladder, to revisit the machine the Brits initially used to discover the ozone hole, which opens up above Antarctica each year. The Ukrainians have kept up the monitoring of the atmospheric hole; the current Mr. Ozone at the base showed me another graph, illustrating how the ozone hole grows to its largest in August (25 million square kilometers) and shrinks to its smallest in December (12 million square kilometers). While the hole has been shrinking in recent years (thanks to an international ban on hole-causing CFCs) everyone at Vernadsky takes it very seriously. Everyday before they go outside they check its size and the sun’s strength … and on some days decide not to go out if the hole is big and sun penetrating, for fear of burning eyes and skin.

Click HERE for more dispatches from Antarctica!

Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Grand Dider Channel, Antarctic Peninsula

by Jon Bowermaster on

I first came to Antarctica twenty years ago, as part of an international team intent on dog sledding across the continent. Since then, I’ve been back more than a dozen times; last season for nearly three months, much of that time traveling the length of the six hundred mile long Peninsula by sailboat and kayak, the rocky finger jutting into the Southern Ocean from the continent. Unlike many of the most veteran of Antarctic aficionados, I’ve had the good fortune to get to know both the stark, forbidding interior of the continent, as well as parts of its glacier-lined coastline.

What I’ve learned is that every summer season – roughly December through February – is vastly different here. And every day is vastly different too. What is not changing is that during the past fifty years, most noticeably during the past decade, air temperatures along the Peninsula have warmed more than anywhere on the planet. The impacts of warmer temperatures are evidenced everywhere, from loss of ice cover to changing wildlife habits. The ability to take a close-up look at that evolution is a great chance for me.

This morning I spent the morning among the Yalour Islands, near the northern end of the Grand Didier Channel, zipping by Zodiac around icebergs of a variety of shapes and sizes. Initially the skies were bright and blue, the first such we’ve seen in a few days. Actually, the last blue skies were accompanied by hurricane winds, which blew every cloud in the sky out of the way. But as is typical for Antarctica, things changed rapidly today as a fast-moving snow squall blotted the sun and turned the idyllic scene quickly more ominous, a whiteout, impossible to see the shoreline.

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We passed through these islands eleven months ago by kayak and the difference today is dramatic. Because we were going to travel along the Peninsula by kayak last January, for many months I had started each morning checking out www.polarview.aq and its satellite images of Antarctica’s ice.

Each year more than seven millions square miles of sea ice freezes around the continent, growing the continent to twice the size of the U.S. And each year that pack ice breaks up and melts in different patterns and stages dependent on how warm the temperatures are, how big are the winds. Thanks to a colder-than-usual winter last year the continent was ringed by frozen sea ice until late in January, even the Peninsula, which is generally the first Antarctic region to lose its ice.

By comparison, this season the Peninsula is amazingly clear of pack ice, less than anyone can remember seeing.

Perhaps most telling: Yesterday at Cuverville Island, on a rocky, north-facing slope we spied something very new to Antarctica: Grass. About twenty feet off the sea, two small patches of just-greening herb sprouted, fed by summer sun and warming air temperatures, clear evidence the Peninsula is warming.

Click HERE for more dispatches from Antarctica!

Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Greetings from Antarctica!

by Jon Bowermaster on

Hello … from … Antarctica! More specifically, it’s Peninsula, which juts like a 600-mile-long finger from the seventh continent, stretching towards the southern tip of the Americas. Surrounded on either side by frozen sea ice and open ocean, this is the most dynamic, the most changing region of Antarctica and a place I have been coming to for nearly twenty years. My first experience? With dog sleds, in 1989, the last of the great sledding expeditions to explore the continent. More recently, last year I brought a small team and sea kayaks and we traveled from the tip of the Peninsula to 120 miles south of the Antarctic Circle.

What keeps me coming back are a variety of things, but particularly that the place is changing so fast. While Antarctica seems remote, an icy, impenetrable fortress – and admittedly, much of the continent, especially its high, dry, cold interior lives up to that reputation – the Peninsula is where many of the impacts of global climate change are most evidenced. Average temperatures here have climbed more than anywhere else on the planet during the past fifty years.

Ironically, the Peninsula is simultaneously witnessing another boom: Tourism! It’s hard to fathom until you’re down here and see, on occasion, several big tourists boats in one day, but Antarctica has become one of the hottest tourist destinations on the planet. Each year sets new records for visitors; last season, more than 46,000. The upside is that such visits create new ambassadors for one of the few places on the planet successfully governed by international treaty.
The downside is something we witnessed just last month, when a tourist boat, the “M/V Ushuaia,” ran aground about fifty miles from where I write. While all the passengers and crew were safely transported by Chilean Naval ship to nearby King George Island, then flown back to South America, the ship was still on the rocks for days. With a hole in it, which has leaked fuel oil into what are otherwise pristine waters. The concern was that even if the ship is pulled off the rocks, given the damage, it may not have been able to navigate or even be towed back to Argentina. Luckily, the ship made it back safely.

I also come for the sheer beauty of the place. Nowhere on the planet can match Antarctica for grandeur. It’s like Alaska piled on top of another Alaska piled on top of another Alaska and then dropped at the edge of the Himalaya. This morning I hiked 1,500 feet up a hill on Cuverville Island. Out of the wind, it was warm, just about the freezing mark. Gusting winds dropped the temps to 17, 18 degrees. The higher I got, the more the expanse grew. In the bay below a dozen icebergs bigger than small apartment buildings – blue and white, shining under a bright blue sky – were stuck in the shallows. Across a narrow channel, tongues of ancient glaciers fall to the sea. Along the way I passed a half-dozen colonies of Gentoo penguins nesting; they will have chicks to take care of within a matter of days. It was a brilliantly clear day and as far as I could see – a dozen miles — everything was deep blue and bright white, marred by the occasional exposed rocky cliff.

I like to think of Antarctica as the beating heart of Planet Earth and this morning, despite any and all concerns, it seemed to be very, very healthy.

I’m here for two months and will be reporting in every week or so, so please stay tuned.

Click HERE for more dispatches from Antarctica!

Good Reads: Jon Bowermaster’s new dispatches from Northwest Africa

by Jeffrey White on


“All news out of Africa is bad,” says Paul Theroux in the opening of his 2003 book Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, and while it’s just the first sentence in a sweeping narrative that encounters misery and hope in equal measure, he has a point.

It is still difficult for Africa to elbow its way into the world’s headlines without dragging some kind of disaster story along with it: Famine, AIDS, political violence, civil war.

It is always nice to encounter writing — book length or journalism — that finds other things to say about the Greenest Continent, writing that at the very least attempts to go beyond a fatalistic approach to Africa so often driven by major media outfits and pack journalism. Writing, in other words, that searches for, and ultimately finds, some context.

Theroux’s book is one example, and the travel books of Jeffrey Tayler are another. The subtle novels of Alexander McCall Smith come to mind.

African narratives in daily journalism are harder to find, put they are out there (one that immediately springs to mind is Boston Globe travel writer Tom Haines’ brilliant dispatch from Sudan a few years back).

The work of author and adventurer Jon Bowermaster, a frequent contributor to National Geographic and National Geographic Adventure, is a part of this second group.

Bowermaster is currently writing a series of dispatches as he makes his way along the coast of Northwest Africa.

I like them because they read like vignettes, each one a picture with a few characters at their center: Shopkeepers in Casablanca, fisherman in Dakar. And he’s touching on issues that do not usually make it to newspaper front pages: Overfishing in Senegal, the region’s desertification, the questionable legacy of Thor Heyerdahl in the Canary Islands.

In many of these dispatches you will hear the voices of Africans, a nice reminder that this troubled continent still has a lot to say.

Give them a read.