Scubareefing
The Big Meltdown @ Antarctica Regions
Antarctica, the southernmost continent and site of the South Pole, is a virtually uninhabited, ice-covered landmass. Most cruises to the continent visit the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches toward South America. It’s known for the Lemaire Channel and Paradise Harbor, striking, iceberg-flanked passageways, and Port Lockroy, a former British research station turned museum.
The peninsula’s isolated terrain also shelters rich wildlife, including many penguins.
These glaciers will eventually disappear unless temperatures fall and frozen precipitation increases. The remaining glaciers are expected to stabilize, unless the climate continues to warm, but will be much reduced in size.
Here at the bottom of the world, a place all but free of human settlement, humanity is scrambling one of the ocean’s richest wildernesses.
Fossil-fuel burning thousands of miles away is heating up the western peninsula faster than almost anywhere else. (Only the Arctic compares.)
The warming is yanking apart the gears of a complex ecological machine, changing what animals eat, where they rest, how they raise their young, even how they interact. At the same time, the shrimplike krill upon which almost all animals here depend for food are being swept up by trawlers from distant nations. They’re being processed into dietary supplements and pharmaceuticals, and fed to salmon in Norwegian fjords and to tropical fish in aquariums.
So much here is changing so fast that scientists can’t predict where it’s all headed. “Something dramatic is under way,” says Heather Lynch, a penguin biologist at Stony Brook University. “It should bother us that we don’t really know what’s going on.”
What we can see is troubling enough. On the western peninsula, Adélie penguin populations have collapsed, some by 90 percent or more. Records of great hordes of the birds in one bay date back to 1904; today in that spot “there are only about six nests left,” Poncet says.
Traveling to Antarctica is not an easy or affordable feat. Most travel opportunities fall into the luxury category. The loophole to getting down to the world’s southernmost continent (for the creative set at least) is through the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (AAW).
The program was developed to get more eyes on the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) efforts there and to get the general public to better understand and appreciate those efforts. Photographers, sculptors, historians, painters, science writers and children’s novelists have been among the chosen program participants given the opportunity to travel to Antarctica on the National Science Foundation’s dime.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/…/antarctica-climate-ch…/
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