A noted environmentalist travels to the farthest reaches of the world.
By Bill McKibben
The trip to the Antarctic is the closest thing to space travel I’ll ever experience. You board a ship on the southern tip of Patagonia (in the charming city of Ushaia), and then for two days, it’s as if you’ve left the Earth.
The Drake Passage, sometimes the rowdiest water in the world, is as remote as it gets—beyond the reach of e-mail, where only albatrosses and whales loiter. Eventually, icebergs—huge, airport-sized hunks of ice—begin to loom on the horizon. Then behind them, islands, and finally, the glacier-wrapped Antarctic Peninsula.
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| - Photo by Sue Halpern |
I journeyed there in January—summertime in the southern hemisphere—with a group of Middlebury alumni, on a trip to see the last mysterious spot on the planet. And mysterious it was—otherworldly, really. To explore it, we’d leave our pleasant mothership in small Zodiac rafts, bundled in lifejackets and parkas (though the temperature stayed in the 40s most of the time). We’d clamber ashore in the midst of some penguin rookery or seal wallow where the animals seemed unafraid—they’d barely even bother to get out of the way. The sound, and the stench, of hundreds of thousands of breeding penguin couples was like nothing any of us had ever experienced. Some of it was comic—young penguins, as big as their parents, chasing Mom or Dad through the rookery at full tilt to demand more (regurgitated) dinner, or elephant seals, the size of library tables, belching and smacking chests with each other. But some of it was tragic too—and those were the parts that forced us to realize we weren’t on another planet at all.The Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than any place on the planet, its average temperature three or four degrees higher than just a few decades ago. You could say, oddly, that though the year-round human population there is only a few dozen, it’s been more profoundly affected by human civilization than any spot on Earth. As the temperature rises, the changes start to cascade: icebergs calve at a greater rate, and behind the advancing edge of the glaciers, whole ice sheets lurch toward the sea. The Larsen B ice shelf, an area
the size of Rhode Island, fell into the ocean here not long ago. Meanwhile, the pack ice forms later in the winter, or not at all, and hence the algae that line its bottom are reduced. The krill that feed on them are stressed, as are the penguins that eat the krill. And on and on.
Eventually, in turn, these changes will affect us. The ice above the West Antarctic, the latest computer modeling shows, may be more prone to rapid melt than we had thought, and if it goes, then sea level around the world will rise by dozens of feet, submerging vast swaths of civilization.
For the moment this place is more hauntingly beautiful than any place I’ve ever been—an infinite diversity of iceberg shapes, an infinite span of hues between blue and white. But the beauty grows steadily more haunting all the time. We’re very far away, but altogether too close at hand.
Bill McKibben is a writer, environmentalist, and a scholar in residence at Middlebury. He is the author of a number of books, including The Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, which was published in March.