by Matt Kelemen
The bottom of the world is white. Blindingly white. And it’s black. And grey. And blue. Many shades of blue. Cobalt blue. Cornflower blue. Sapphire. Periwinkle. There’s not much red or yellow or orange, unless you count the sunsets and sunrises. But you should count the sunsets and sunrises because they last a long, long time and they cast the most amazing array of oranges and yellows and reds across the sky. Oh and they paint all the white pink, too. It’s quite nice to see.
But most of all, it’s white. Because of the ice. There is a lot of ice at the bottom of the world, that is to say, on the Antarctic ice shelf.
— Ice that covers 5.4 million square miles, which is bigger than the area of Canada and Alaska put together.
— 6.4 million cubic miles of ice. And if you can’t picture how big that it is, perhaps it is helpful to know that all the human beings on the planet can, standing together and on top of one another, just about fit inside one cubic mile.
— Ice so thick in places that it pushes the landmass underneath it far below sea level.
— Ice that traps 61% of the world’s fresh water. If it all melted, DC would be underwater (there’s a thought), along with Philly, New York, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Shanghai, Bangkok, Amsterdam, Denmark (yup, the whole country), Venice (of course), Cairo, the Amazon basin, and the whole Central Valley of California. San Francisco would be an island, but our house would be safe. (Here’s a cool tool for simulating sea level rise.)
With ice floating all around you, and with the benefit of some instruction from Antarctic experts, you start to note the differences in the ice. The big bits are either glaciers — which are actually layers of snow that frozen together over time, sitting on top of land and advancing or receding through valleys — or ice shelves — which are the extensions of glaciers over the ocean. The expedition leaders on Antarctic ships don’t let you get within a half-kilometer of glaciers or ice shelves because of the whole falling-ice-can-crush-you thing.
Icebergs, the kind that sink ships, are pieces of glaciers that have been set free to float along, melt, and tip over again and again as their melting shifts their center of gravity. Jeannette and Adela were in kayaks not far from a cruise-ship-sized iceberg when it started to tip, drawing a calm, measured response from the kayak leader (let’s just say she used her outdoor voice) because of that whole iceberg-tipping-causing-a-tsunami thing.
Just to confuse you, if an iceberg falls off an ice shelf (rather than a glacier), then it’s called a tabular iceberg rather than just an iceberg. These are the ones that look like floating buildings. Big buildings. Or cities. Or Delaware in the case of the gi-normous one that’s poised to break off of the Larsen Ice Shelf any day now.
My favorite scientific terms are reserved for the smaller bits of ice. Anything between 5 and 15 meters in size is no longer an iceberg, but rather a bergy bit, while the babies of the Antarctic, the 1-5 meter ice bobs, are known as growlers. Anything smaller than that is brash ice and you’re allowed to bump your kayak into it. (Fuller description of types of ice here.)
There’s also fast ice, which is ice that is attached to the coast and extends out into the sea. On our furthest-south day, below the Antarctic circle, Captain Beluga (real name of our Russian captain) was kind enough to set us into some fast ice so that we could actually walk on it. Man, was I begging for a pair of cross country skis… and a team of dogs… and a month’s supply of pemmican… and a seal-skin parka… oh, sorry, been reading too much about the heroic insane era of polar exploration.
Editorial note on that: If you’re ever considering exploring uncharted lands, I recommend the Norwegian model, where you study your predecessors, prepare well, adapt to the circumstances, and especially see wisdom in the ways of people who have lived in similar climates. Definitely preferable to the British model, where you take pride in doing things the hard way, assume there’s no important knowledge outside of your own culture, and generally improvise your way through the experience. Roald Amundsen embodied the Norwegian model, got to the South Pole first, and came back alive. Robert Scott epitomized the British approach; he got to the pole second and died on the return (and was considered a hero for it rather than the more appropriate term, “bungler”).
Anyway, it turns out that fast ice is particularly helpful to a number of flightless animals, like seals and penguins, because it’s easy to hop up onto for a nap or a warming break from krill-fishing. Glaciers, pretty as they are, often stick out of the water without easy on-ramps. And they flip, which is not helpful to said seals and penguins. As a result, most of our seal viewing consisted of watching the beasts nap, yawn, and loll around on bits of flat sea ice. (The penguins are much more entertaining, but I’ll leave Adela to describe that in a later post.)
The whiteness of Antarctica is important in lots of ways. The white of a penguin’s front gives it camouflage while swimming, since it looks like the sky from below. If our ship was any indication, the people who get to Antarctica are overwhelmingly white, which is a shame (though the only humans born on Antarctica are Latinos from Argentina and Chile). But perhaps most importantly, the white ice reflects sunlight back into space, keeping the planet cool. We need the white and we should all be deeply concerned that there’s too little of it left.