Polar Meltdown
Is the heat wave on the Antarctic Peninsula a harbinger of global climate change?
To see what such rapid heating does to a landscape and its wildlife, a U.S. News team visited Palmer in January, the height of austral summer. The peninsula has no airstrip, so it takes four days from Punta Arenas, Chile, across the Drake Passage aboard the Laurence M. Gould, an oceanographic research and resupply vessel under charter to the National Science Foundation. NSF manages the $200 million-per-year U.S. Antarctic program, and Palmer is one of the agency's premier sites for studying long-term ecological change.
At a glance the region looks much as it did to American seal hunter Nathaniel Palmer and other explorers who saw this part of the world in the 1820s. Palmer Station's small cluster of blue, corrugated steel buildings perch upon a rocky shore. Behind them the glacier extends as far as the eye can see. Inside the friendly base are laboratories, warm bunks, a good kitchen, and the "Penguin Pub" bar. Over the pool table is an old whale's rib, and above the fridge is an orange life preserver from the Argentine ship Bahia Paraiso, which sank after hitting nearby rocks in 1989. Its hulk is still visible from the station at low tide, and it still smells of the oil that wiped out a cormorant colony in the weeks after the wreck. Outside, gale-force winds can pour down the glacier without warning, sucking the warmth from anybody caught outside and not bundled up.
No passports. Palmer, with a maximum population of around 40 and an annual cost of $12 million, is one of three U.S. Antarctic stations and the only one on the peninsula. The main U.S. headquarters is McMurdo Station, nearly 2,500 miles away on the Ross Sea, where the population can exceed 1,000 people, and the other station is at the South Pole. Like all of Antarctica, the peninsula is a utopia of international cooperation. No one needs a passport to be here. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty suspended all territorial claims and reserved the great white continent for scientific research.
Fraser, 49, came here as a grad student and soon after did a 14-month sojourn. He makes no secret of the fact that he loves Adelie penguins. Changes here are not limited to new species moving in. Indeed, the Adelies are dying off, and fast.
Imagine a flock of turkeys trying to bleat like sheep, amplify it a few times, and that is the sound of a colony of Adelies. They are packed into nests of small pebbles stained pink with guano, and one often smells their raucous colonies before hearing them. Analysis of debris under nesting sites indicates that Adelies have dominated bird life around here for at least 600 years. And, to a first-time visitor during nesting season, Adelies seem to be waddling comically everywhere on the small offshore islands or slicing swiftly through the waves and dodging fierce leopard seals that prey upon them.
But 25 years ago more than 15,000 pairs of the penguins nested yearly within about 2 miles of the base. This year, there are about 7,700 of the handsome, formal-clad couples raising young. The population is down 10 percent in just the past two years. One soon learns to recognize the silent expanses of pebbles that mark extinct colonies.
advertisement
