Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Prince Gustav Channel and connected James Ross Island to the Antarctic Peninsula has crumbled
away, and not long before that the Wordie Ice Shelf on the west coast broke up. The regional cli-
mate on the peninsula, always the warmest part of Antarctica, has heated up by 2.5 degrees Celsius
since the 1940s, and this has weakened the ice shelves. In fifty years, more than 3,000 square miles
of them have disappeared without being renewed.
Even the gradual disintegration of the ice shelves won't necessarily raise sea levels. According
to the Archimedes Principle, floating ice displaces its own mass of water. If, however, the crum-
bling of the ice shelves causes the ice sheet lying over Antarctica to discharge more ice, then sea
levels will rise. Even in that situation, the extra discharge would have to take place off large areas
of the coast, not just the peninsula, before the rest of the planet were to be significanthy affected.
Although the new berg was enormous, it was an infant compared with a 3,000-square-mile pre-
decessor named Trolltunga which snapped off Antarctica in 1967 at about twelve o'clock on the
map. The record holder measured over 12,000 square miles, inevitably leading to comparisons
with Belgium, a country which seems to function almost exclusively as a measuring device for
natural disasters.
Neil rushed into the weatherhaven one evening and flung himself on to a crate, hair flopping
into his eyes. He had been reading
Anna Karenina
.
'I just can't stand the way Tolstoy is always absolutely completely right about everything! He's
so incredible! He knows everything! Every nuance is the right one! Every insight makes me think
Yes! It
is
like that!'
We all thought about this for a while.
'Ah yes, Neil, but was he happy?' asked somebody, stirring the ice in a pan on the primus.
'No,' said Neil, 'he was all fucked up.'
'But he had a great beard,' said somebody else, 'and that's what counts.'
∗
Back at Rothera, the field assistants were hunched gloomily over formica tables in the labs or the
sledge store, writing the reviled end-of-season reports before the ship arrived in three weeks. At
least once an hour someone would come to find me on the spurious grounds of a spelling enquiry
- either that or they would engage themselves in any other displacement activity which came to
hand. I occupied myself agreeably enough, and it was thrilling to be warm again. On Shrove Tues-
day, a week after I returned from Ski Hi, I tossed seventy-five pancakes. I had also been assigned
the taxing job of skua monitoring. In Cambridge they were collecting data on skua distribution in
order to tackle the aeronautical problem of birdstrikes, and I had to stroll around the point inter-
mittently, counting the birds.
March was an odd time. Summer had ended, yet winter hadn't begun. One day the base com-
mander announced the name of his winter replacement, drawn from the ranks of the fifteen winter-
ers. Bits of paper were posted to the doors of the emptying labs staking out room claims. Twenty
or so people were going out on the Dash, and eighteen of us were waiting three weeks for the ship.
Men who had been on the ice for two-and-a-half years began discussing what they were going to
