We're off to the Antarctic Patriot Hills!

Never has a continent been more misunderstood. Antarctica is on a scale hard to grasp: at over fourteen million square kilometres, it is second only to Russia in coverage of the Earth’s surface and bigger than all the countries of Europe combined. It is the world’s highest continent, with an average altitude of 2300 metres. It contains more than seventy per cent of the world’s freshwater, locked up as thirty million cubic kilometres of snow and ice—which, if it melted, would raise the planet’s seas by an estimated sixty-five metres, easily flooding the likes of Sydney, London and New York. The bitterly cold air on its upper surface contains virtually no moisture, making the Antarctic interior the world’s largest desert, while the rocks that make up the rest of the continent span almost the entire age of the Earth. The wildlife along its fringes is some of the most diverse on the planet.

And yet the Antarctic remains one of the last great unexplored regions on our planet. In spite of over a century of discovery – including aerial and satellite surveys – remarkably little of this great continent has been explored on the ground. The need is urgent. The pristine southern polar region is uniquely placed to monitor the health of our planet. 

This year Chris Fogwill and I are extremely fortunate to be returning to the Antarctic and following up on an idea that that has excited us for some time. Today, a high-pressure system sits over the Antarctic continent, fed by air flowing south from warmer climes in the upper atmosphere. We know that by the time this air reaches the southern continent it has been intensely chilled, falling to temperatures below -80°C, and sinks. This cold air—katabatic, or downhill, wind—periodically pours off the central plateau towards the coast, like air spilling out of an open refrigerator door. These high winds typically average tens of kilometres per hour and scour the surface of snow. These high winds work in our favour. The winds are so fast and dry, the ice at the surface is removed by a process known as sublimation, drawing ancient, compressed snowfall up from down below to form blue ice areas. The practical upshot is this process exposes a wonderfully accessible, detailed record of past climate change preserved in millennia-old ice that allows you to literally walk back through time.
Parked up in Patriot Hills
Normally you’ll find Chris and I in balmy Sydney at the University of New South Wales, but thanks to the success of our last two seasons in Antarctica and support from Google, the Australian Research Council and Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions, we will be returning to the Patriot Hills, an area where temperatures should be around -20˚C. Instead of coring for past climate, we'll be working across the blue ice surface (and against the elements!) to collect precious surface samples. The idea is this will produce the first detailed climate reconstruction for the region over the last twenty thousand years. By extending ‘historical’ records of the last few decades, we hope we’ll gain a better understanding of how Antarctic ice sheets respond to past and future change. At least that’s the plan...

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Google you’ll be able to join us in the field. We will be hosting two Hangouts on Air on Google+ as +Intrepid Science; one before and one after our sojourn on the ice. While in the Antarctic, we will also be sending back daily movies and slideshows on the Chris Turney - Intrepid Science Channel (hosted by YouTube) and Twitter feeds on @ProfChrisTurney. If you’re interested in learning more of our earlier work in Antarctica, check out my new book 1912: The Year The World Discovered Antarctica and the blog entries for the January 2011 and January 2012 expeditions.  


Hope to see you later. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Tropics and the Furious Fifties

Image
There’s an old sailor’s expression: “Below 40 degrees south there is no law, below 50 degrees south there is no God.” Since the sixteenth century, sailors have spoken in awe of the violent westerly winds and seas they experienced fighting their way across the Southern Ocean. With few landmasses to slow them down, the winds found across 40 degrees latitude often reach speeds of twenty-five knots—about 40 percent stronger than their northern hemisphere counterparts—earning them the title the “roaring forties.” As shipping pushed farther south, explorers realized that these winds form part of a vast storm belt that includes the “furious fifties” and “screaming sixties,” names more reminiscent of terrible rock bands than a major part of our planet’s circulation system. The early hunters and traders didn’t understand it at the time, but these winds are created by a procession of low-pressure systems carried east by the jet stream, a river of cold air hurtling and twisting round the Antarct
Read more

Sydney declares a climate emergency – what does that mean in practice?

Sydney declares a climate emergency – what does that mean in practice? Chris Turney , UNSW Late on Monday night, the City of Sydney became the second state capital in Australia (after Hobart a week earlier ) to officially declare a climate emergency . With climate change considered a threat to human life, Sydney councillors unanimously supported a motion put forward by Lord Mayor Clover Moore to mobilise city resources to reduce carbon emissions and minimise the impact of future change. The decision sees Sydney join a variety of local and national governments around the world, in a movement that is increasingly gaining momentum . In total, some 658 local governments around the world have made the same declaration, with the UK and Canada committing their national governments to the global movement in just the past two months . An official declaration of climate emergency puts a government on a “wartime mobilisation” that places climate change at the centre of policy and plannin
Read more

Death of a colony

Image
Cape Denison holds a special place in the history of Antarctic exploration. A small outcrop of rocks on the remote East Antarctic coastline, Cape Denison is forever associated with one of the most spectacular and often forgotten tales of survival. A century ago it was the main base of operations for one of the great explorers of the south: the Australian scientist Sir Douglas Mawson . Privately funded, three bases and one research ship supported a science team that explored a region the size of the United States between 1911 and 1914. Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, however, suffered terribly during their time at Cape Denison: a sudden turn of events led to tragedy on the ice, the death of two men, allegations of cannibalism and with the return of winter sea ice, an extended stay in Antarctica. But when they first came upon Cape Denison, Mawson was ecstatic. Greeted by squawking penguins: ‘ We were soon inside a beautiful, miniature harbour completely land-locked. The su
Read more