Science journalist Jane Qiu is travelling to the Palmer ecological research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, joining researchers investigating how climate change has affected the region in recent decades. Please check back for her dispatches from the bottom of the world.
The R/V LM Gould sailed through a stormy blizzard for most of the night. Today, 30 November, the decks and anchor chains are covered in snow. We are well into the Gerlache Strait, the stretch of 160-kilometre long water that separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula. The entire landscape – the placid sea, occasional icebergs and ice-draped mountains – is coated in different shades of grey and shimmers under the unearthly Antarctic light.
In the distance, the Palmer ecological research station – consisting of a few buildings that perch on the rocky coast of the Anvers Island in the western Antarctic Peninsula, just north of the Antarctic Circle – begins to emerge from a curtain of thick fog. Parts of the island are covered by the gigantic Marr Ice Piedmont glacier, which is about 64 kilometres long and up to 32 kilometres wide, and reaches an elevation of over 2,800 metres.
Palmer has been operated by the United States as a research base since 1967. Twenty years ago, it became part of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, set up by the US National Science Foundation to research the effects of environmental changes. Most of the 26 LTER stations are located in and around the United States, with Palmer the only one studying marine ecosystems in polar regions.
In peak seasons during the southern hemisphere’s spring and summer, Palmer can host 46 scientists and supporting staff. A few times a week, researchers document environmental details from atmosphere and ocean properties to populations of the marine ecosystem – mostly within a three-mile radius. To expand the research area, annual research cruises sail 900 kilometres along the peninsula and take measurements at over 100 fixed locations.
After decades of field observations – combined with remote sensing and satellite data – scientists are starting to get a handle on how environmental and ecological changes are affecting the region, as well as the underlying causes. To their surprise, climate warming is causing temperatures in the western Antarctic Peninsula to rise particularly rapidly compared to the rest of the globe. In the past 50 years, annual mean temperatures have risen by two degrees centigrade, while the winter temperature has increased by six degrees centigrade – more than five times the global average.
The Marr Ice Piedmont glacier, which loomed over the Palmer station in late 1960s, has retreated for 500 metres – 87% of the glaciers on the peninsula are suffering a similar fate. The nearby Wilkins ice shelf, which was about half the size of Scotland, collapsed last year. The ice season in the region has also shortened by nearly three months and ice-free open water is now a common feature of the summer.
This is terrible news for an ecosystem that has, for millions of years, evolved around sea ice on the Southern Ocean. “The changes in the entire food web are just staggering,” says Hugh Ducklow, an ecologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and director of the Palmer station. For example, phytoplankton production – the starting point of the food chain – has decreased by 12% in past 30 years. Krill (shrimp-like creatures) and silverfish, key food sources for most predators in the Antarctic, are also hard to find.
The number of breeding pairs of Adelie penguins – the classic tuxedoed species that breeds exclusively in the Antarctic – around Palmer has dropped by 80% since 1970s, with the current population of less than 3,000 pairs. “Changes are occurring at a pace too rapid for the species to adapt,” says William Fraser, director of Polar Ocean Research Group in Sheridan, Montana, who has been studying seabirds around Palmer since 1975. “We may be approaching what could be an absolutely catastrophic change of the western Antarctic Peninsula.”
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Picture credits: Jane Qiu