The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica

The Continent and Its History

The Continent and Its History A bucket of icy water down the neck checks the fiercest vomiter. —Frank Arthur Worsley, Endurance’s captain, on his cure for Antarctic seasickness. Sometimes we are given our opportunities, and we take them and make something fine, and the story will live forever; and so we have our bodhisattva moment. —Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica Antarctica is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace continent, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. The Antarctic continent is the fifth largest of the seven—the others being Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, and North America. If you want to fix its size, imagine the United States and Mexico combined. Antarctica is ranked eighth in geographic size of all the Earth’s features. Most of us have trouble calling to mind an overall image of Antarctica. This is because Antarctica gets edited off most world maps. The familiar mapped views of the world are Mercator projections, which maximize the area of midlatitude countries, thus making them appear larger than their geographic reality. Antarctica presents a pesky problem for mapmakers—as a circle it doesn’t lend itself to being cut into one long, wide strip. The solution has been to leave it off maps entirely. So it was that the fifth-largest continent became a lacey fringe. Lurking mysteriously off the map, Antarctic events invite 6 * the continent and its history geographic context by scientists and news agencies. When an enormous iceberg broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula in 2002, its official name became b-22, a code describing location and time frame. The U.S. National Ice Center assigns these coded names, then monitors the bergs’ journey northward . The agency is located outside of Washington dc, and most trackers have never seen an actual iceberg. The gargantuan b-22 made news across the world—and caused editors and scientists to fish around for the words to describeitsheft.Thebbcdescribedb-22asninetimesthesize of Singapore, which presumably draws a picture for UK residents ,allclearontheirformercolony’sactualsize.TheAssociatedPressintheUnitedStatesnotedthebergrivaledthearea ofthestateofDelaware.InCanadatheyofferedPrinceEdward Island as comparison. Reuters decided not to play that game, simply referring to the berg as “large.” The game of scale is infectiousformost,however.Wanttoimagineb-22atitsbirth? Think of two Hawaiis or the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. b-22 had a short reign as a headline grabber. Within days, the British Antarctic Survey announced that satellites had captured the break up of the Larsen b Ice Shelf. The images of its demise, recorded by a passing camera miles above the Earth, made the New York Times’s front page, albeit below the fold. The Larsen b Ice Shelf weighed in at 500 billion tons, and filled Antarctica’s Weddell Sea with miles of floes. What was the biggest floe, you ask? According to the New Scientist, it was about the size of Greater London. Blue and white, vast flat plains of ice, wind-polished, sculpted, chewed. A clear blue sky. I look at images of Antarctica every day and have done so for nearly twenty years. While it’s not precise to say humankind doesn’t know very much about Antarctica’s vast ice, it is accurate to say a lot of questions remain about how it works. the continent and its history * 7 Scientists, as well as concerned observers such as myself, are particularly interested in what appear to be high degrees of variation of ice speed. The ice moves, from the high point of the South Pole outward to the continent’s roundish perimeter. It used to be accepted fact that Antarctic glaciers were pretty stagnant. But this turned out to be false. They move all the time. They appear to be much more sensitive to other environmental factors than previously thought. I peered at a slide of a helicopter buzzing along the face of the Barne Glacier, which extends into the Ross Sea at Cape Evans.Ispentalmosttwomonthslookingattheglacier,which from the sea looks like a blue and white stone cliff. The helicopter appears to be a tiny bug against its face. What we now know is that most of the Ross Ice Shelf, an ice formation the size of France, varies its speed in relation to the tides. The ice moves faster when the tide is high. The ice seems to respond to the moon’s pull, like the ocean. The ice...