Antarctica matters to the future of all of us

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Antarctica matters to the future of all of us

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The map of Antarctica
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It is a place of extremes

• Over 58 times the size of the United Kingdom,
  Antarctica is the highest, coldest and windiest
  continent.
• With a very low snowfall most of the continent is
  technically a desert, with the icecap containing
  almost 70 of the world's freshwater and 90 of
  the world's ice.
• Huge icebergs break off each year from the
  floating ice shelves and half of the surrounding
  ocean freezes over in winter, more than doubling
  the size of the continent.

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The Antarctic is a remarkable continent - remote,
hostile and uninhabited.

• For the early explorers Antarctica was the
  ultimate survival contest.
• For scientists it remains a place of
  intellectual challenge.
• For the modern tourist it is simply a wilderness
  of great beauty.

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Why people work in Antarctica

• A student who with a bachelor of arts degree in
  biology and a masters in teaching from the Curry
  School of Education, Yam was both humbled and
  dazzled by her 40 days at the bottom of the world
  last summer.
• The temperatures were numbing, to be sure. The
  coldest I felt was minus 60 degrees Celsius,
  which is about minus 76 Fahrenheit. That included
  the wind chill factor. I went right back inside,
  she said and chuckled.
• Only once did she suffer from the cold. Rubber
  gloves she wore one day while hauling in nets
  allowed moisture to get against her hands and
  freeze. The next day was so painful I couldnt
  touch anything.
• Emily Yam spent last summer in Antarctica doing
  NSF-funded research on board an ice-breaker ship.
  Here, she dons a "mustang suit" while on board
  the ship doing a 2 a.m. net towing to collect
  data specimens. Her eyelashes froze from the
  exposure to the frigid temperatures, which ranged
  from -60 degrees C to the more typical -20 to -40
  degrees C.
• Its just an amazing place. Extreme is such a
  small word for it. Everything is so extreme, and
  its so pristine, she said.
• Everything is white, but its not white. You
  see subtle colors within the white, different
  shades. Its so beautiful.

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Antarctica is not a scientific curiosity

• The processes taking place now in the Antarctic
  affect the world's climate and its oceans,
  linking the continent inextricably to what we
  experience thousands of kilometres away.

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Understanding climate change

• Locked up in its 4 km thick ice sheet is a
  record of past climate for the last 500,000
  years. Trapped bubbles in the ice hold an archive
  of atmospheric gases, and evidence for levels of
  global pollution by industry, agriculture and
  atomic bombs is frozen into the ice. Equally
  important is the evidence for ozone depletion in
  the upper atmosphere. Studies on the ice sheet
  and its contribution to world sea level rise are
  vital to our understanding of global change.

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Understanding climate change

• Less than 1 of the continent is free of ice
  and snow and the plants and other organisms
  living there need to be adapted to survive
  prolonged freezing and desiccation. Analysis of
  the sediments from a range of lakes is providing
  a detailed story on climate change over the last
  10,000 years, whilst in the future the sampling
  of a lake covered by 3.7 km of ice might reveal
  bacteria over half a million years old.

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UK and Antarctica

• UK interest in Antarctica and the surrounding
  oceans started with Captain Cook's expeditions
  (1768-80), and always had a scientific component.
  Exploration and observation became more
  systematic after 1923 when a series of
  expeditions under the Government-sponsored
  Discovery Committee were organised.

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Antarctica and Tourism
And they think we look daft!!!

• In 1969 Lars-Eric Linblad took his purpose built
  Antarctic tour ship - Linblad Explorer - to the
  Antarctic for the first time. Since then the
  industry has grown considerably both in numbers
  and diversity.
• Whilst most tourists still visit on ship-borne
  cruises, some now take overflights from Australia
  or South America, others fly in to a blue ice
  airfield and climb mountains or ski to the South
  Pole. More recently there have been sky diving
  attempts and SCUBA diving holidays will be
  available next year.
• Most tourists visit the Antarctic Peninsula and
  offshore islands to see the scenery, the wildlife
  and some of the historical sites of the early
  explorers. A small but increasing minority are
  now looking for other activities in Antarctica -
  sky diving, climbing, surfing, diving, ski
  walking - which may pose difficult safety issues
  in the future.

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Wildlife

• The Antarctic is an extreme environment for any
  organism to survive in, yet both marine and
  terrestrial habitats of the Antarctic, contain
  wildlife which has adapted (in some cases
  uniquely) to the extreme conditions and which
  effectively utilise available resources.
• Studying the wildlife of the Antarctic is
  important in order to understand the dynamics of
  the regions ecosystems, and the survival
  strategies and physiological adaptations of
  organisms in the extreme Antarctic environment.