SOS

Hi everyone, today is my final post! Blogging about Antarctica has been incredibly insightful and I’ve enjoyed learning about a range of topics and ideas along the way. Also, apologies for the lengthy posts along the way, there was just so much I wanted to say about each topic! The aim of my blog was to shed light on the impacts that humans have had on Antarctica beyond climate (recall my first post). In this post, I’m going to summarise these impacts and come to some final conclusions which I hope my readers will take away from this blog.

Conclusions: Is Antarctica facing an SOS situation?

Recall that I posted up a short evaluation on 23 December where I wanted to take a step back to organise the findings of my blog and reflect on what I had written so far. This post will be an extension of this. Since the ‘Pause for Thought’ post, I introduced two new topics: scientific research stations and waste, and the hole in the ozone layer. In my blog, I have been keeping tabs on which impacts have a negative impact on Antarctica and which have a positive or natural effect. As this is the last post, I can now present the final score, which is 7-5. This means that, of the topics looked at, humans have been responsible for more negative than positive impacts. I know you’re probably reading this thinking, ‘I could have told you so…’ But I wanted to explore these effects in detail to discover what is actually happening and to what extent humans are responsible. In summary, this blog has shown that human intervention in Antarctica is for economic reasons (e.g. krill fishing), scientific reasons (e.g. research stations), leisure (e.g. tourism) and convenience (e.g. the use of CFCs).

A key conclusion I have reached from my blog is that the global system is so complex that often it difficult to distinguish between what is human and what is natural. This makes it hard to allocate blame for a problem that is observed in Antarctica. For example, when I looked at the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf and declining krill population, I also presented natural causes that can be used to explain these events. Also, regarding the ozone hole, the true effect of CFCs on ozone may be hard to distinguish from the effect of climate on ozone (for example changes in the Arctic Oscillation). This means that it is a challenge to understand the extent that climate affects ozone levels and the extent that CFCs affect ozone levels.

Another conclusion I can draw is that even though regulations are trying to limit human impacts, the effect of human actions prior to regulation is on-going and regulations don't change this. This means that long term protection is achieved while in the short term, the environment must face the consequences of our actions. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Well it’s bad that the environment continues to suffer even though we have limited our harmful actions. However, regulation is producing a ‘short term costs over long term benefits’ type of situation. This means that long term benefits could outweigh the negative impacts from human intervention in Antarctica. So in the future, perhaps the score board will look different.

Furthermore, one specific human action doesn’t just have one specific impact on Antarctica. There are many indirect effects that may often be unprecedented and this exaggerates the impact that humans are having on Antarctica. For instance, recall my post about the effect of a whaling ban on the food chain and krill/ penguin populations. Additionally, tourist ships are bringing invasive species into Antarctica, but these invasive species can sometimes bring diseases which can infect native animals like penguins. Tourist ships can also create oil spills. This is an unexpected result because it is not a consequence of the tourists themselves; rather it’s a consequence of bringing the tourism industry into Antarctica. These examples highlight the interconnectedness of Antarctic native animals with the ecosystem.

I hope you can hear the SOS call coming from Antarctica as I have throughout the past three months. I want to end this post with a note about a term I mentioned at the start of my blog. I referred to 'the Anthropocene' as a new geological epoch that describes the way that humans have affected this planet (see my Melting Ice – Larsen B post). By analysing the impact on Antarctica, the most remote, unique and wonderful location in the world, I have discovered that humans are everywhere, not just in population terms, but in aura. The presence of humans is truly felt everywhere and my opinion is that anyone who denies the use of this term should reconsider once they have read this blog!

The Usefulness of Research Stations

Research centres in Antarctica are widespread. Figure 1 shows just how many research centres, permanent or otherwise are present in Antarctica today. In fact, there are approximately 4,000 scientists and technicians living and working in the station during the summer and approximately 1,000 working there during the winter (Gröndahl et al. 2009). Because the research population is in the thousands, human impact on the environment will be significant given the sensitivity of the Antarctic environment. Furthermore, it can be argued that the Antarctic is becoming disturbed due to permanent human residency and man-made construction (ibid).

Figure 1. All the research stations in Antarctica. Adapted from Antarctic Glaciers (2013)

Setting up centres in Antarctica are supposedly justified by their work on measuring:

• The ozone layer and patterns of change
• Atmospheric chemistry
• Global sea level changes
• Information on climate change

…and much more.

Before I explain the impact of these centres directly on the Antarctic environment, I want to give you a few examples that demonstrate the value of research centres.

Vostok

Information on climate change is found by taking ice cores and using them to infer past climate as well as current climate. A Russian station called the Vostok research station was established in 1957. A reasonably famous study undertaken in 1999 by the Vostok station was the use of ice cores to reconstruct the climate in the past 420,000 years (Petit et al., 1999). Ice cores enable the reconstruction of past environments because trapped are in the ice indicate past atmospheric conditions, i.e. concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. These help determine what climate was like. The results from Vostok are shown in figure 2.

Figure 2. Results from the Vostok ice core. Data shows the climate record for the past 420,000 years. Main finding: anthropogenic activity has increased the levels of methane and carbon dioxide. Source: Petit (2007) in Knight (ed) 'Glacier Science and Environmental Change', p. 404.

The findings from this research project were relevant because they showed that carbon dioxide and methane levels now surpass levels in any of the past 400,000 years. Thus, this research presented solid evidence for anthropogenic climate change.

Halley Bay 

Another major finding from research stations in Antarctica was the hole in the ozone layer, found from research undertaken at the Halley Bay (now known as just Halley) research station in 1985 (Farman et al., 1985).

As can be seen, research centres have made significant contributions to climate, climate change and atmospheric conditions. The research conducted is not only for the purpose of human benefit, recall the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer. This shows that Antarctica is benefiting from the research. 

Having said this, in making some of these important discoveries, sometimes the condition of the Antarctic environment has been compromised and this is what I will explain in my next post.

Melting Ice - Larsen B

In my last post, I introduced melting sea ice as one of the major changes occurring to our planet, and one that is certainly affecting Antarctica at the moment. Today I’m going to discuss the melting ice in more depth.

Over the past 200 years or so, the human footprint on the world has become so apparent and so profound that we humans now ‘rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing Earth to a new planetary terra incognita’ (Steffan et al. 2007: 614). This has created to need for a new epoch away from the Holocene to one that is more reflective of human actions. “The Anthropocene” was termed to capture this. Although there is much debate about the precise time that this epoch started, e.g. at the start of the Industrial Revolution, or a few hundred years earlier (Zalasiewics, et al. 2011; Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Gale and Hoare, 2012), this epoch signifies that because of humans, Earth is becoming warmer, less biologically diverse, less forested, wetter and stormier (Steffan et al. 2007). The emission of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere is creating a warming effect, i.e. the greenhouse effect, whereby the Earth will warm by 1.4 to 5.8^oC by the end of the century (Crutzen, 2002). I came across a very insightful TEDx talk in which Steffan Will goes into more depth explaining the origins of the Anthropocene which can be view here if my readers wish to learn more. 

Unsurprisingly, a warmer planet is troublesome for ice. Below is a graphic representation of Antarctica, displaying the continent's ice shelves and glaciers.

Figure 1. Source: Adapted from Rignot and Stanley (2002)

According to Pritchard et al. (2009), some glaciers are thinning at alarming rates. For example, Pine Island glacier is thinning by up to 18 feet per year, while the Smith glacier is thinning by 27 feet per year. This highlights the severity of warming occurring today. Glaciers in Antarctica are at risk of becoming less stable as the planet warms.

The circled ice shelf in Figure 1 is the Larsen B ice shelf. In 2002, it collapsed and fell apart. Cited by Schmidt (2011), this was predicted by Mercer (1968), who wrote that global warming caused by industrial pollution would lead to a collapse West Antarctica’s ice shelves. Figure 1 shows the levels of carbon dioxide emissions from 1850 onwards. The figure agrees with Mercer, showing that emissions have risen due to industrialisation. I have also included a diagrammatic representation of the change in global temperatures, shown in figure 3. Figures 2 and 3 are complementary in that they demonstrate the correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature rises

Figure 2: Total global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion initiated by industrialisation.
Source: Hardy (2003) 'Climate Change: Causes, Effects and Solutions', p. 13.

Figure 3: Variations in Earth's temperature for (a) the past 1,000 years and (b) the past 140 years, gathered from proxy measurements based on tree rings, corals, ice cores and historical records. Source: Hardy (2003) 'Climate Change: Causes, Effects and Solutions', p. 41.

A recent study by Rebesco et al. (2014) showed that the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed because of warmer air, partly by human activities and our effects on warming the planet. Their results show that the Larsen B ice shelf shattered in the following way:

• Warmer temperatures warmed up the air
• Warmer air melted ice during the summer months
• This water flowed into cracks inside the ice shelf
• As winter approached, all the water froze again and expanded in the cracks
• This caused the ice shelf to shatter from the increased pressure in the cracks

Below is a very short video capturing the Larsen B ice shelf collapse from satellite images in 2002, illustrating what happened visually. Unfortunately I can't post the actual video on the blog. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N61EP5zB8uU#t=28

To summarise this post, I’ve presented the view that the Larsen B ice shelf collapse was partly caused by humans because of human induced warmer air in Antarctica. The score for negative human impacts verses positive/ natural impacts is 1-0. In my next post, I will present some of the criticisms of the views presented in this post.