T is for Treaty #AntarcticAlphabet

If the Treaty dies, the continent dies. When treaties are broken, people die. Treaties are agreements between those sovereign figments of our collective imagination, the nation-state. Itself an Enlightenment child, the ‘nation’ is our fundamental global organising principle. For the lucky majority, our nationality is the ground on which we … Continue reading

S is for sight: #antarcticalphabet

Sight, language, reference and memory are contingent, rely on our agreement to shared understandings. Does what I see differ from what you see? You may read that number-plate which is a blur to me, or I think this scarf is green when you insist it’s blue. Yet the interior experience … Continue reading

#penguinrights and habitat corpus: #antarcticalphabet

  Let us sound the battle-cry for #penguinrights. Suppose penguins took us humans to court for destroying their habitat? Suppose they won?  I am not talking only of animal rights, or even land rights, but earth rights. Penguin power is habitat corpus: the battle to protect an ecosystem – a place … Continue reading

#AntarcticAlphabet: O is for oil

Oil drips down the trypots and the rigs. It oozes in tarpits, welling up from the ground, the black gold of fantasy released by water under pressure, the raw hydraulics of fracking. The revolution relies on the stuff; prosperity and peace rise with carbon dioxide released into air and ocean. … Continue reading

St Andrew’s Bay: lots of pictures of #penguincity

  St Andrew’s Bay was a picturefest, so this post is mostly decorative too.I wrote at the time that Jordi warned us of a river crossing and potential weather changes. The morning, though, was spectacular, the hills and glaciers all around the bay standing out against the sky as if unreal. … Continue reading

Ocean Harbour: Bayard and birthdays

We anchored at Ocean Harbour, across the bay from the listing, rusting hulk of the Bayard. There’s a strange continuity for the old whaling ship was scuttled in 1911, the year Europa was launched half a world away in Hamburg. Now Europa visits and her crew crane their necks at … Continue reading

Macaroni and more

There was plenty more of South Georgia to come, not least the exotic Macaroni penguin. On leaving Grytviken we dropped anchor briefly at Cobbler’s Cove. Several crew took off on a there-and-back again hike to see a colony of Macaroni penguins, so named for their spray of yellow feathers. The … Continue reading

Party, party (and a bit of counting and buildings too)

  The night we spent anchored in the bay at Grytviken, Europa had a party. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has an important research base at King Edward Point (about a kilometer away around the bay, rather less than that in a zodiac), and some of the scientists and engineers came … Continue reading

Whaling HQ in Antarctica: whales, steam and solar

Larsen founded Grytviken as a whaling station, the first land-based such factory in the southern hemisphere. The bay, with its rusting industry and neat white buildings, the scattered bones and indolent fur seals, is an integral part of the whaling era when the Americas, Europe and Asia depended on the … Continue reading

Ice sheets in Antarctica: losing or gaining?

A friend recently highlighted last year’s NASA research on Antarctic ice-sheets and asked me to comment. So I’m going slightly away from the journey reprise to take a quick jaunt around some of the latest publications.In short: some ice sheets may be thickening slightly but that does not mean we … Continue reading