Antarctic Expedition with the Kolars
by Lorine Parks
Where in the world – do summertime temps spike at a high of 10 degrees below zero? And winter days average 40 degrees below? Antarctica, a desert landscape, because it receives an average annual precipitation of less than 10 inches.
Despite its thick ice, Antarctica is classified as a desert because so little moisture falls from the sky, and what does, never melts. It just accumulates. No country “owns” Antarctic: it is a condominium, governed by parties to the Antarctic Treaty System. Ongoing experiments are conducted in Antarctica by more than 4,000 scientists from many nations.
The treaty prohibits military activities and mineral mining. Coal, hydrocarbons, iron ore, platinum, copper, chromium, nickel, gold and other minerals have been found, but not been in large enough quantities to exploit. The treaty also prohibits nuclear explosions and nuclear waste disposal. It does support scientific research, and protects the continent's ecozone.
Into this fragile and beautiful wilderness, a few intrepid cruise lines and tour companies have been granted the right to bring a limited number of eco-tourists. Ron Kolar and his daughter Kouy participated in a father-daughter cum spouses trip in January of this year, and came to tell us about it.
Luckily they had fine weather, fair and not too windy, and they had pictures to prove it. Starting from Buenos Aires, the Kolars first took a brief side trip north to Iguassu Falls on the Brazilian border, monster waterfalls which are three times wider than Niagara and twice as tall.
Then they flew to Ushuaia the southernmost port in the world, below the Antarctic Circle, to take ship on the French vessel Le Lyrial, a mega-yact, with a length of 466 feet, and draft of 15.75’, this newest ship in Abercrombie and Kent’s armada offered expert lectures and gourmet meals for 198 passengers.
The ship left the Beagle Channel and headed into the Drake Passage, one of the roughest straits, but thankfully the weather was calm. Passengers enjoyed a ship’s lecture on “From Plankton to Penguins: the Impacts of Climate Change on the Antarctic Peninsula,” part of the ship’s enrichment program.
First chance to explore was in zodiacs, inflated rubber boats. From the zodiacs they could see icebergs calving, and whales breaching. Ron and Kouy became experts on seals (“Keep away from the leopard seals. They’ll attack. Elephant seals are safe. They only eat little fish”). Albatross patrolled above.
Next they were ready to learn about penguins. Of the 17 species, 7 live and nest in Antarctic, from the macaroni with their frivolous top-knot of curly feathers to the Emperors, the Kolars saw them all. Antarctic sea life includes penguins, blue whales, orcs, colossal squids and fur seals. The Emperor is the only penguin that breeds during the winter in Antarctica, while the Adélie penguin breeds farther south than any other penguin. The southern rockhopper penguin has distinctive feathers around the eyes, giving the appearance of elaborate eyelashes.
King penguins, chinstrap penguins, and gentoo penguins also breed in the Antarctic. The longtailed Gentoo penguins are a favored menu item of the leopard seals, sea lions, and orcas that patrol the waters around their colonies.
At last our hardy expedition set foot on the Seventh Continent, which is larger than two Australias, or big enough to hold the United States and all of Europe. They landed at Palmer Station, 1,700 miles from the South Pole. At Palmer, one of the three United States research stations located in Antarctica, scientists focus on the Antarctic pelagic marine ecosystem, including sea ice habitats, regional oceanography and terrestrial nesting sites of seabird predators.
Back on board the zodiacs before going back to the mother ship, they were treated to champagne to celebrate the occasion of landing on the mainland of Antarctica, “We were dressed too warmly,” Ron said. The ship supplies parkas and insulated boots, but the travelers were able to shed several layers because of the pleasant weather they encountered.
We saw Kouy waving to us from the sun deck, standing in her bathing suit by the ship’s heated pool, silhouetted against snowy mountains. That’s our California girl.
Ron and Kouy climbed glaciers, and there was a movie of Kouy coming down a snow chute like a human luge, on Cuverville Island. They had landed at Paradise Harbor and then made the arduous ascent up the steep snow slope. For the less adventurous, there were more penguns: the gentoo had week-old fluffy chicks. There were pictures of dilapidated whalers shacks. British and American sealers also used to spend a year or more on South Georgia, hunting the fur seal for its pelt.
As for the mystique of Antarctica, Antarctica has no indigenous population and there is no evidence that it was seen by humans until the 19th century. People made the mistake of deciding that a significant landmass would not be found farther south than Australia. But Captain James Cook's ships, HMS Resolution and Adventure, came within about 75 miles of the Antarctic coast before retreating in the face of field ice in January 1773.
The first confirmed sighting of Antarctica can be narrowed down to the crews of ships who sighted Antarctica or its ice shelf in 1820. The shops were commanded by von Bellingshausen (a captain in the Imperial Russian Navy), Edward Bransfield (a captain in the Royal Navy), and Nathaniel Palmer (a sealer out of Stonington, Connecticut). The expedition led by von Bellingshausen and Lazarev reached a point within 32 km (20 mi) from Queen Maud's Land and recorded the sight of an ice shelf at latitude 2 degrees south, which they named the Nimrod Ice Shelf. WikiMiniAtlas
Latitude 0 would be the South Pole.
Later, in the race to be the first to get to the South Pole, the Nimrod Expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1907 became the first to climb Mount Erebus and to reach the South Magnetic Pole. Shackleton himself and three other members of his expedition made several firsts in December 1908 – February 1909: they were the first humans to traverse the Ross Ice Shelf, and the first to set foot on the South Polar Plateau. An expedition led by Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen from the ship Fram became the first to reach the geographic South Pole on 14 December 1911, using a route from the Bay of Whales and up the Axel Heiberg Glacier. One month later, the doomed Scott Expedition reached the pole.
After that things were relatively quiet. The American Richard E. Byrd led several voyages to the Antarctic by plane in the 1930s and 1940s. He is credited with implementing mechanised land transport on the continent and conducting extensive geological and biological research.
Antarctica covers more than 5,400,000 square miles, making it the fifth-largest continent. The continent has about 90% of the world's ice (and thereby about 70% of the world's fresh water). If all of this ice were melted, sea levels would rise about (200 ft. In most of the interior of the continent, precipitation is very low, down to 20 mm (0.8 in) per year.
What have scientists learned from fern fossils found here? Paleontology tells us that more than 170 million years ago, Antarctica was part of the supercontinent Gondwana. Over time, Gondwana gradually broke apart and Antarctica as we know it today was formed around 25 million years ago. Antarctica was not always cold, dry, and covered in ice sheets. At a number of points in its long history, it was farther north, experienced a tropical or temperate climate, was covered in forests, and inhabited by various ancient life forms.
At one point, East Antarctica was at the equator, where sea floor invertebrates and trilobites flourished in the tropical seas. Three Antarctic dinosaur genera (Cryolophosaurus and Glacialisaurus, from the Hanson Formation, and Antarctopelta) have been described to date. It was during this era that Gondwana began to break up.
In the Meziozoic Era, Africa separated from Antarctica in the Jurassic, followed by the Indian subcontinent in the early Cretaceous). By the end of the Cretaceous, Antarctica (then connected to Australia) still had a subtropical climate and flora, complete with a marsupial fauna. In the Eocene epoch, Australia-New Guinea separated from Antarctica, so that latitudinal currents could isolate Antarctica from Australia, and the first ice began to appear.
During the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event about 34 million years ago, a catastrophy brought about a global icehouse effect. The Drake Passage opened between Antarctica and South America, resulting in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that completely isolated the continent. Today, new techniques such as remote sensing, ground-penetrating radar and satellite imagery have begun to reveal the structures beneath the ice.
Unique phenomona include the aurora australis, commonly known as the southern lights, a glow observed in the night sky near the South Pole created by the plasma-full solar winds that pass by the Earth. Another unique spectacle is diamond dust, a ground-level cloud composed of tiny ice crystals. It generally forms under otherwise clear or nearly clear skies, so people sometimes also refer to it as clear-sky precipitation. A sun dog, a frequent atmospheric optical phenomenon, is a bright "spot" beside the true sun.
There is a large area of low ozone concentration or "ozone hole" over Antarctica. This hole covers almost the whole continent and was at its largest in September 2008, when the longest lasting hole on record remained until the end of December. The hole was detected by scientists in 1985 and has tended to increase over the years of observation. The ozone hole is attributed to the emission of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs into the atmosphere, which decompose the ozone into other gases.
Small-scale "expedition tourism" has existed since 1957 and is currently subject to Antarctic Treaty and Environmental Protocol. Travel is largely by small or medium ships, focusing on specific scenic locations with accessible concentrations of iconic wildlife. A total of 37,506 tourists visited during the 2006–07 Austral summer with nearly all of them coming from commercial ships. Not quite 100 more, 38,478 were recorded in 2015–16, so the number is controlled and not escalating.