Polar Meltdown
Is the heat wave on the Antarctic Peninsula a harbinger of global climate change?
No one yet knows how or whether the ozone hole is a major threat to the region's biology. But there is little doubt about warming and penguins. After a few decades watching the same population of birds--he is now studying great grandchicks of some of his first ones--Fraser says he is beginning to feel, in his bones, what he calls ecological time: the decades to centuries over which populations ebb, flow, and sometimes vanish. At one of the station's evening science seminars, physicist Dan Lubin of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at Palmer to study how ice and open sea reflect sunlight, notes that climate change does not appear or disappear quickly. The atmosphere's carbon dioxide and other solar-energy-trapping gases won't return to preindustrial levels for 200 years or more, even if humans could somehow stop their emissions right now. "Two hundred years!" Fraser says. "Even in ecological time, that is enough to really screw things up."
As this account goes to press, Fraser reports by E-mail from Palmer that this year's chicks, so fuzzy and hapless in mid-January, have already changed into juvenile plumage and are going for their first swims. In a couple of weeks, if you can imagine this, the islands will be silent, as the penguins head out to sea for winter. And next year, he and Donna Patterson will be back to greet them when they return to raise another generation--and to count how many made it to another spring.
For more Antarctica photos, see U.S. News Online (http://www.usnews.com).
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