Antarctica: The Melting Continent

Antarctica: The Melting Continent — page 3
Introduction Suddenly a ray of sun broke through then another A patch of blue sky then I’d never sensed such deep stillness Only the thrumming of the ship’s engine and the hissing of icy waters could be heard Passing through fields of ice chunks and broken up icebergs we peered into the foggy veil Was anything there another Within minutes the ship chugged out of the low cloud into the most incredible panorama I’d ever seen foaming aquamarine sea floating icebergs layered with all the blues of heaven and earth walled in by monumental white mountains that seemed to exhale sprites of icy wind And there the spouts of humpback whales fellow migrants from the north They’d come all the way from equatorial waters to feed in Antarctica And there a flock of Adélie penguins flying through the water arcing like dolphins Everyone broke out in smiles I burst into tears here at last Pete leaned over my shoulder pointing out what looked like a thin stick at the foot of a mountain That’s a British weather station he said The stick was an antenna the size of a city skyscraper our only clue to the scale of the mountains that surrounded the Strait how hard to size up That and the slogan people are always saying It’s a harsh continent They mean be careful here They mean we are very far from help They mean this environment is not designed to be hospitable to humans On the contrary it often seems to be designed to destroy us And yet the future of Antarctica’s ice so vital to maintaining our planet’s balance depends more than anything on our actions It was my first lesson in understanding Antarctica how huge it is and 6