(Read Only)FEAT.ANTARTICA•1.nov.qxp 9/12/08 12:01 PM Page 6 POINTS SOUTH ANTARCTICA WhıteTHE CONTINENT HEATS UP A 600-MILE EXPEDITION DOWN THE ANTARCTIC COAST REVEALS A CONTINENT AT A TIPPING POINT. SOLDIERS ARE POSITIONING FOR A LAND GRAB.THE ICE IS CRUMBLING. THE PENGUINS ARE MOVING SOUTH. AND TRAVEL—BY FOOT, SHIP, OR KAYAK—IS JUST GETTING WARMED UP. BY JON BOWERMASTER PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER MCBRIDE CRACKING UP The Ocean’s Eight team, led by the author, skirts a crumbling iceberg in the Lemaire Channel. (Read Only)FEAT.ANTARTICA•1.nov.qxp 9/12/08 12:01 PM Page 8 BEST NEW TRIPS ’09: ANTARCTICA On a January morning, three days after leaving the southernmost yacht club in the world, Club Naval de Yates Micalvi, in Puerto Williams, Chile, we begin our hunt for the one thing Antarctica offers in greater numbers than anywhere else on the planet: ice- bergs. • About 200 miles from the continent’s mainland, surrounded by black, 12-foot seas, we spy our first and float by quietly, reverentially. It is easily a hundred feet tall, solid and old, its glacial ice so compacted that the air pockets has been squeezed out, making it ever more blue. • Ice is everywhere here. The 74-foot Pelagic Australis’s deck is sheathed in a thin layer of it. The boat glances off sizable pieces broken away from the 700,000-square-mile pack that surrounds Antarctica each spring. While I’ve been here several times before, a few of my teammates are seeing these big bergs for the first time. Armed with digital break a bone or rupture a video and still cameras, they’re like spleen, we would have to pro- kids on Christmas day. vide our own ride back to the We’ve been sailing hard for nearly tip of South America, which three full days across the notorious explains the Pelagic Australis, a Drake Passage, and now we’re nearing ship I chartered from Ameri- King George Island, 75 miles off the can captain Skip Novak for tip of the Antarctic continent in the $5,000 a day. South Shetland Islands. Home to a We also needed the permis- dozen international science bases, it’s sion of the U.S. State Depart- where I’d stashed our kayaks during a ment, the National Science recon trip aboard the National Geo- Foundation, and the Environ- graphic Endeavour. mental Protection Agency. The We are exhausted after sleeping in process took more than a year, two- and three-hour spurts, thanks to dozens of lawyer hours, and mandatory watches. But now, leaving permits as thick as telephone the Drake behind, that exhaustion is books, a painstaking pursuit replaced by trepidation: For the past but one that keeps out the year I’d started each day by punching daring and unprepared—those polarview.aq into the nearest com- who want to bicycle to the puter, trying to get a peek at just how the ice rimming the continent CAMP COOL Chilean South Pole, for example. Ironically, since we mountaineer Rodrigo was growing or shrinking. But we still have no idea exactly what Jordan hauls his cus- planned to camp, we had to fill out more paper- conditions we’ll find until we drop our kayaks into the Southern tom kayak to camp. work than the Princess, which carries 3,200 pas- Ocean. The only sure thing is that the water will be cold (30 Opposite: tktktktk. sengers. degrees, nearly the freezing point of salt water) and that the kata- But while our approach is unique, it’s clearly batic winds will be fierce, building as they race off the continent’s not the only way to visit. For the past decade, sloping plateau out to sea. each tourist season in Antarctica has set a record; Our plan had been straightforward enough: Get as far south as in 2007-08 more than 40,000 visited by big vessel, compared to a few we could—by kayak, sailboat, and foot—before the ice stopped us. thousand a decade ago. With prices down on the largest ships and It would amount to the second most ambitious Antarctic kayaking demand up (see it before it’s gone!), every tour operator in the world expedition in history (New Zealander and tripmate Graham Charles is trying to come here. Permits are required by the International Asso- paddled 528 miles down the coast in 2000). Along the way we’d ciation of Antarctic Tourist Operators (IAATO), but its online guide- meet a handful of scientists and soldiers to get a firsthand assess- lines for tour operators, including designated landing sites and rules ment of how the rapidly rising temperatures (it’s nearly four degrees to obey onshore, are unenforceable. Ice-ready boats are also not man- warmer on the peninsula on average than it was 50 years ago, among dated (a few of the ships operating in Antarctica last worked as ferries the most dramatic changes on the planet) and record-setting tourist in Denmark and Norway). Some predict that within two years the numbers are affecting life at the end of the Earth. number of visitors will double. But nothing in Antarctica is straightforward: Any private expe- For now, however, we are alone. And standing on the bow of the dition must provide its own search and rescue. There is no 911 Pelagic on a 20-degree morning, I tighten my grasp on a cold metal service. No navy. No coast guard. If someone on our team were to stay as we nudge past a three-foot-thick piece of›› ice, mindful of the 8 ADVENTURE NOVEMBER 2008 (Read Only)FEAT.ANTARTICA•1.nov.qxp 9/12/08 12:01 PM Page 10 BEST NEW TRIPS ’09: ANTARCTICA one steadfast rule of sailing in 30-degree water: Fall off the boat and kayaks made of carbon fiber, Kevlar, and fiberglass. The boats, which you’re dead. Tumble, trip, stumble, catch a toe, lose your balance, or are reinforced to withstand the ice, weigh 600 pounds when fully for any other reason find yourself in the Southern Ocean, just raise a loaded. Tipping one, and rolling upright again, would be a challenge. hand and wave goodbye because the boat will never return fast If we flipped, we’d have less than five minutes to surface before enough to save you before hypothermia sets in. hypothermia began to slow our hearts. For now the gray sea is calm as we pull around the first corner to Two of the ten shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula CHANGE IS IN THE AIR—AND IN THE SEA find the channel leading out to the Gerlache Strait, one of the Penin- sula’s so-called Kodak Alleys (for its typical lineup of picture-perfect have vanished completely. Another five We take our first paddle strokes on a gray day, about 150 miles down bergs). Near shore we thud the boats through thick brash ice. It’s like have lost between 60 and 92 percent of their size. the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, circumnavigating Enter- paddling through a field of bucket-size ice cubes. prise Island. I measure the temperature of the ocean; it’s 30 degrees Each austral winter, a halo of sea ice forms around the continent, exactly. Air temperatures are in the low 20s. Photographer Pete and each spring trillions of tons of fresh water are released into the McBride and videographer John Armstrong, each with thick drysuits, ocean as it thaws. This is the Earth’s thermodynamic engine, the beat- are the only ones thinking of swimming. The team—a group of seven ing heart that drives the circulation of ocean currents, redistributing adventurers, including Chilean mountaineer Rodrigo Jordan, Tas- the sun’s heat, regulating climate, forcing the upwelling of deep ocean manian naturalist Fiona Stewart, Orange County–based navigator nutrients, setting the tempo of the planet’s weather. The Antarctic Sean Farrell, Armstrong, McBride, Charles, and myself—will spend affects all our lives, but through forces so deep and elemental that the next few weeks nudging our way southward in custom-made we’re not even aware of them. TKTKTKT TKTKT: Tktktkt tktktk tktkt ktktkt tktktkt tktkt tktktktk tktktkt tktk- tktktkt ktktkt tktktkt (Read Only)FEAT.ANTARTICA•1.nov.qxp 9/12/08 12:01 PM Page 12 BEST NEW TRIPS ’09: ANTARCTICA Climate change models from the early 1970s seen them; likewise the plop-plopping of hun- predicted that the climatic effects of human dreds of porpoising penguins. We stop and study greenhouse gas emissions would be felt first and a half-ton leopard seal floating by on an ice floe. most strongly here. Antarctica is essentially unin- He looks up at us, belches, then goes back to habited and without industry, so any ecological sleep. and climate disturbances are caused by global We finish alongside the wreck of the Guver- forces. In the 1980s scientists prophesied that noren in Wilhelmina Bay. A turn-of-the-century, one of the first signs of human-influenced cli- 5,500-ton floating whale factory, only the rusted mate change would be the collapse of the Penin- bow of the ship now points out of the calm sea. sula’s ice sheets. This is exactly what is In 1913 the Norwegian craft was considered the happening now. most sophisticated whaling boat working in In March 2002 scientists watched the 500-billion-ton Larsen-B ice PLAYPEN Gentoo Antarctica, producing more than 22,600 barrels penguins cruise with shelf shatter into thousands of tiny icebergs.