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

Antarctica: The Melting Continent — page 4

Antarctica: The Melting Continent — page 5 — Chapter 1 THE UNKNOWN LAND Today Antarctica is Earth’s most inhospitable continent the coldest and driest place on the planet Only a handful of plant and animal species survive here But Antarctica used to be different Not cold Not isolated Not a deathtrap The remains of dinosaurs have been unearthed in Antarctica since the At one time Antarctica was ice free and covered instead in wait for it dinosaurs 1960s and are still being discovered today The oldest among them lived during the early Triassic period 250 to 245 million years ago these were the same species of dinosaur as those found on other continents because in early dinosaur times pieces of Antarctica were joined to other pieces of land to form much larger continents than those we have today Later species were particular to Antarctica showing that Antarctica had separated from the other continents by this time causing those later dinosaurs to adapt to the now unique environment These included relatives of Brachiosaurus and Titanosaurus but unlike the giant examples found in other parts of the world the Antarctic species were as small as retriever dogs In early dinosaur times and before Antarctica wasn’t even here at the very bottom of the world All of Earth’s continents ride atop plates that make up the planet’s outer layer called its crust and are constantly moving These plates glide over molten rock heated by energy from the center of Earth This motion is incredibly slow at its quickest it’s about as fast as your fingernails grow As the plates move 8 THE UNKNOWN LAND

Antarctica: The Melting Continent — page 6 — continents crash into each other new lands are created and other land sinks under the water Today Antarctica is made up of West Antarctica and East Antarctica And how each of them ended up at the bottom of the world is a different story East Antarctica was once part of a large continent called Gondwana as were Africa India Australia and South America But Gondwana began to break up around 200 million years ago and the part that became East Antarctica eventually became more solid stable and frozen than the land that makes up West Antarctica today Among its secrets is a buried mountain range the Gamburtsev Mountains hidden under the East Antarctic ice sheet During the Jurassic period 180 million years ago the middle of dinosaur times the movement of the continents pushed East Antarctica south Eventually over the next 100 million years it shifted to its current position over the South Pole As East Antarctica moved south it slid over another plate and where the crust sank lava bubbled up in volcanoes This formed both the Andes Mountain range that runs the length of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula the long arm extending northward West Antarctica developed later in the Cretaceous period the end of the dinosaur times around 100 5 million years ago when shards of an uplifting plate split into pieces You can see those same forces are still at work today in active volcanoes including Mount Erebus which towers smoldering over Antarctic research stations that edge the Ross Sea West Antarctica crunched together at the bottom of the world a channel of ocean broke through the thinning strip of land that still connected the Antarctic Peninsula to the southern tip of South America and formed the Drake Passage Now Antarctica was separated from the other continents and a current of cold water known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current formed a ring around it forever cutting Antarctica off from warmer seas In just 20 million years Antarctica froze As the massive pieces of Antarctica’s puzzle East and Late Jurassic period 150 million years ago Laurasia Gondwana East Antarctica Late Cretaceous period 90 million years ago Asia Africa West America East Antarctica Antarctica Quaternary period Present day Antarctica South America Drake Passage Antarctic Peninsula What Motion The motion of plates known as plate tectonics is ongoing Millions of years in the future the shapes and sizes of Earth’s continents will have changed again THE UNKNOWN LAND 9

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