Polar Meltdown
Is the heat wave on the Antarctic Peninsula a harbinger of global climate change?
PALMER STATION, ANTARCTICA--One doesn't need a Ph.D. to see that things are changing fast around here. "That's Dead Seal Point up there," says Ross Hein, 27, director of boating operations at this remote American research base. On a sunny January day--midsummer in Antarctica--he points the Zodiac inflated motorboat toward a low, rocky islet a mile or so east of the base. The tough, flexible bow bumps slowly through a shoal of ice chunks--some the size of golf balls, others as big as a refrigerator--shoved near shore by the wind and current. The hard ice gives the boat a ride like an old truck on a bad road. It leads into a startlingly beautiful passage several hundred yards long and 50 yards wide. "Two years ago," Hein marvels, "this wasn't even here."
The point is that Dead Seal Point has no point, for we clearly are passing behind an island. To the right is a long wall of extravagantly fractured ice high as a 10-story building. It is the leading edge of Marr Ice Piedmont, a glacial cap that reaches a depth of 2,000 feet on 38-mile-long Anvers Island, Palmer's home 120 miles outside the Antarctic Circle. Hein, to minimize hazards from falling ice, keeps well to the left, along a miniature, melting ice cap atop Dead Seal Point.
The spot's name stems, first, from the now vanished elephant seal that died on its seaward side a few years ago. But what
is more significant, the rock was once believed to be a peninsular point peeking from under the glacier's foot. Since the 1960s, Anvers Island's glacial mantle has pulled its skirts in by about 30 feet annually. The point turned out to be an island, one of many emerging along the shore. Thirty years ago, the then new Palmer Station was about 50 yards from the same retreating glacial front. Now it is a quarter-mile walk. An eerily beautiful ice cave nearby, today about 40 yards long and formed by a drainage channel along the glacier's base, was twice as long a decade ago.
If you think a few degrees of global warming would not mean much in your neighborhood, the word from Palmer Station is: Think again. While hardly warm here, what with icebergs like ivory cathedrals turning majestically in adjacent Arthur Harbor, it may be the most warmed-up place on the planet. It provides lessons for us all if, as many scientists believe, Earth is unstoppably entering a heat wave that could last centuries.
The Antarctic Peninsula is an S-shaped projection of mountains, geologically related to the Andes, that reaches 800 miles north from the main continent toward South America. The computerized climate models used to forecast global warming reveal no reason for this place to be warming more rapidly than the rest of the planet. But since the mid-1940s, the average year-round temperature on the peninsula has gone up 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit, and in the early winter (June in the Southern Hemisphere) it is up a startling 7 to 9 degrees. While it still snows year-round, with summer temperatures averaging a few degrees above freezing and the middle of winter running in the teens, the rate of warming is 10 times the global average.
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