Environment Forum

Brad Pitt, Matt Damon give krill a star turn

There are no small parts, only small actors, or so the old show-biz saying goes. Now there are big stars — Matt Damon and Brad Pitt — playing two of the smallest parts ever. In a far cry from “Ocean’s Eleven” (and 12 and 13) they’re lending their voices to a pair of krill, small shrimp-like creatures that form the base of the Antarctic food web.

Pitt and Damon play Will and Bill, the krill, in “Happy Feet Two,” the sequel to the 2006 dancing-penguins animated feature. Both films have conservation themes. The latest movie  opens  in mid-November.

These Hollywood names might help shine a spotlight on krill at a time when the species is under pressure, according to the Pew Environment Group. An international meeting under way now in Hobart, Tasmania, is expected to consider more protection for these tiny animals, which penguins, seals and whales depend on to survive.

Increasing demand for krill as feed for industrially farmed fish and for nutritional supplements has pushed the krill fishery beyond a sustainable level, the conservation group said in a statement. Krill fishing in some areas could outpace efforts to protect the well-known animals that rely on it.

“Existing efforts to regulate krill catch must be sustained and enforced, so that animals such as penguins and seals are not competing against industrial fishing vessels just to survive,” said Gerry Leape, a senior officer at the Pew group.

New fishing technologies enable fleets from multiple countries process krill continuously, bringing in much higher catches than a decade ago. An accelerating loss of sea ice that provides essential habitat for krill adds to the problem and threatens to deplete stocks in key feeding areas for penguins, seals and whales.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources is meeting in Tasmania from October 24 through November 4, and the Pew Environment Group is asking delegates to the commission to require observers on all krill-fishing vessels, set up a dedicated fund to monitor krill predators, and maintain smaller divisions of the ocean to manage krill to prevent local depletion that will harm penguins and other animals.

Life in a blizzard

It was a cold night with the wind chill reaching -18.4 degrees Celsius. By 5.00 a.m. I’d had enough of being cold and weather beaten by the Katabatic wind smashing the side of my tent and bouncing off my head so I decided to make my way to our base, the Sorensen Hut, for a warm cup of tea and read a couple of pages of my book.

I should have known we were in for bad weather as my neighbours the Adelie penguin colony were no where to be seen or heard this morning.

Before I could walk the five minutes to the hut I had to get dressed for the journey.

The thought flashed across my mind to make a dash across the rocks in my pyjamas, but being dressed inappropriately could be life threatening in Antarctica.

Dressing for polar conditions takes a considerable amount of time as there are so many layers to put on before stepping outside your tent.

New Zealand Merino thermal underwear is considered the base lining as it serves as a neck-to-knee protection. After that comes either fleece top and pants or industrial duty shirt and pants.

A final lining of padded overalls, woollen knee length socks, a pair of polar lined boots, a Canada goose down coat, sun glasses, a pair of gloves, a balaclava and a woollen hat and a splash of sunscreen to protect against the harmful UV rays.

Penguin chatter heralds Antarctica’s ‘White Christmas’

Penguins’ chatter outside my tent woke me to Christmas Day in Antarctica, but instead of Santa’s sleigh there was just the usual run to ensure our human waste doesn’t permanently become part of this frozen wilderness.

With 24 hours of daylight it was, needless to say, very different from the traditional Christmas most of the ten members of the Mawson’s Huts Foundation living in East Antarctica are familiar with.

It was probably not the ‘White Christmas’. I would have imagined as a child growing up in Ireland and very different to the hot Australian festive season I have become used to, marked  by barbecues and often bushfires.

However, it was a fairly typical day for Antarctica, and for this icy plateau.

Here we are about 3,000 kilometres from the nearest part of the Australian mainland, working with a team who are trying to preserve the relics of the legendary 1911-1914 expedition of Antarctic pioneer Sir Douglas Mawson.

Mawson was lucky to survive that expedition, and basic though our living conditions may seem, they are a far cry from what he and his men endured.

On Christmas Eve we had smoked oysters on crackers washed down with a choice of red or white wine followed by lasagne. Some of us went out to the veranda and danced our way through 80s music to keep warm while watching penguins march in every direction under us and snow petrels glide in the sky above us.

On Darwin anniversary: tourist limits to Galapagos, Antarctica?

Should the world celebrate the 200th anniversary today of the birth of English naturalist Charles Darwin by working to limit the number of tourists visiting the Galapagos Islands or Antarctica to protect their spectacular wildlife?

Would that help elephant seals like this one above on the Antarctic Peninsula slumber more peacefully? And would it cause less disruption for marine iguanas, below right, on Santa Cruz island in the Galapagos?

The Galapagos in the Pacific Ocean gave Darwin insights into evolution on his famed voyage around the world aboard The Beagle. Many species — from mockingbirds to tortoises – differ from those on the South American mainland. For a story, click here.

And Antarctica, which wasn’t even discovered when Darwin was born on Feb. 12, 1809, is the world’s last big wilderness.

About 39,000 tourists are likely to visit Antarctica this current summer season, down from a record 46,000 a year ago and interrupting a fast-rising trend in the past couple of decades, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. For a story, click here. Recession has hit bookings of trips that cost thousands of dollars.

On Antarctic safaris, remember to bring a microscope

Many people hope to come back from a wildlife safari with close-up pictures of lions or elephants – this picture below is my best attempt from a search for the largest land animals in Antarctica.

If you look hard you can see a reddish blob at the tip of the thumb — it’s Antarctica’s most aggressive land predator, an eight-legged mite known as Rhagidia.

Pete Convey, a biologist at the British Antarctic Survey (that’s his thumb), says that such tiny creatures evolved in Antarctica over tens of millions of years — they can freeze their bodies in winter in an extreme form of hibernation.

Penguins, seals and whales are the best known animals in Antarctica, but none live year-round on land, where the biggest creature is a flightless midge whose name is ”Belgica antarctica” and who’s about 0.5 cm long.

Global warming could mean problems for some of these tiny creatures if it keeps going — the Antarctic Peninsula where Pete showed us the creatures has warmed by about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) over the past 50 years, the fastest rate in the southern hemisphere.

Some other creatures might be able to survive in a warmer climate and threaten mites like Rhagidia.

Landing in Antarctica — first icebergs

A buzz of excitement went around the plane (left) when a scientist spotted the first mountains of Antarctica through the window on a flight from the southern tip of Chile.

Even veteran Antarctic visitors say there’s something special every time they see the continent — after all, Antarctica was only first spotted in 1820 — Fabian von Bellingshausen, a Estonian who was a captain in the Russian navy, usually gets the credit.

Stuart Mc Dill of Reuters Television and I flew in with about a dozen scientists and other staff to the Rothera Base, run by the British Antarctic Survey, on the Antarctic Peninsula in a tiny Dash-7 plane from the southern tip of Chile.

You expect to need lots of warm clothing but temperatures on arrival have been above freezing — they can reach a balmy 7 Celsius in summertime. There has even been a spot of rain. But scientists say rain has probably been falling here every now and then in summers long before anyone started thinking about global warming.

We’ll be staying at the base (the area is pictured above through the plane window) until Jan. 26 and will file regular blogs as well as stories and television reports after we complete compulsory training into everything from how to cross the runway (‘look left, look right, look up in the sky’) to how to climb out of a crevasse.

And many visitors cherish the first sight of icebergs — like the blurry ones in the picture above.

Yellow submarine to explore Antarctic glaciers

A yellow robot submarine will dive under an ice shelf in Antarctica to seek clues to world ocean level rises in one of the most inaccessible places on earth, reports our environment correspondent Alister Doyle. You can see his story here.

The 7-meter (22 ft) submarine, to be launched from a U.S. research vessel, will probe the underside of the ice at the end of the Pine Island glacier, which is moving faster than any other in Antarctica and already brings more water to the oceans than Europe’s Rhine River.

Scientists have long observed vast icebergs breaking off Antarctica’s ice shelves – extensions of glaciers floating on the sea – but have been unable to get beneath them to see how deep currents may be driving the melt from below.

 At Pine Island, the thinning of the shelf seems to be linked to a shift in deep ocean currents that are bringing warmer water from the depths; further north, several ice shelves have disintegrated in recent years apparently because of a warming of air temperatures that may be linked to global warming.

Scientists are going to the ends of the earth to monitor the possible effects of climate change. Watch this space for more reporting and discussion of their efforts.

(Photo: The yellow sub is readied for action. REUTERS/Alister Doyle, Jan 6, 2009)

Antarctica warms; scientists say we’re to blame

New research shows that both Antarctica and the Arctic are getting less icy – and the best explanation is mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases.

But will that convert anyone who doubts that global warming is caused by human activities, led by burning fossil fuels?

The scientists, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, say that a study of temperature records from Antarctica (there aren’t many of them) shows a slight rising trend over recent decades that can be best explained by a build-up of greenhouse gases led by carbon dioxide.

Antarctica had until now been the only continent where a human fingerprint of warming had not been detected by scientists — that meant some sceptics said it might not be global at all.

Ice around the frozen continent has tended to expand in recent years — some climate experts have theories to explain that that could be a side-effect of warming linked to shifting ocean currents or changes in snow and rainfall.

But more ice obviously doesn’t sound a convincing argument for global warming when a runaway melt of the summer sea ice in the Arctic — to a record low in September 2007 – is often held up as Exhibit A in the evidence for climate change.

The U.N. Climate Panel said last year that it was at least 90 percent certain that most of the global warming in the past half century was caused by human activities. Ten percent is room for doubt, but it seems to be shrinking.

Antarctic ice expands — global warming at work?

Ice getting bigger hardly sounds like a sign of global warming but that’s apparently what is happening in the seas around Antarctica.

Leading climate scientists say that a tiny trend towards bigger ice in winter floating on the oceans around the frozen continent since the late 1970s — the maximum extent is around now, in September — is consistent with models of climate change that predict harsher winds and less warmer water at the surface.

It may even be that there’s more snow and rain falling onto the southern oceans because of climate change — that can raise the amount of fresh water on the surface and, hey presto, fresh water freezes at a higher temperature than salt water.

At Reuters News my colleagues and I often write stories about the shrinking of summer ice at the other end of the world, in the Arctic, as one of the clearest signs of global warming that is blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel on human use of fossil fuels.

In response to those stories, I often get e-mails from people sceptical about climate change who say that ice at the other end of the earth, around Antarctica, is expanding.

But it turns out that leading scientists at NASA, the British Antarctic Survey and Norway’s Nansen Center say the two things are not contradictory — the world reacts to greenhouse gases in different ways.

Antarctica is a gigantic frozen continent and winds sweep around it in the southern oceans, without drawing in much warmer air from further north. The Arctic is an open ocean ringed by continents, and more vulnerable to currents and winds blowing up from the south.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

It’s almost creepy watching this video of a colossal squid slowly thawing out in a giant tub at the Museum of New Zealand. If this were a horror movie, after all, it would suddenly start flailing around with its monstrous tentacles.

Researchers say that the squid, weighing 495 kg (1,090 lb) and caught off Antarctica in 2007, will be unfolded for study on Wednesday after it is defrosted. It is expected to be 6-8 metres long.

That could tell scientists more about colossal squid, rare creatures that are the world’s biggest invertebrates. Sometimes someone wanders into the video frame and you get a sense of how enormous the squid is.

So the video above is not just a curiosity that looks like a poorly stocked fish section in a supermarket with a broken freezer full of water.

“This squid is a really nasty agressive sort of squid…a gelatinous blob with seriously evil arms on it,” the New Zealand Press Association quoted Steve O’Shea, a squid expert at the University of Auckland, as saying of a previous colossal squid in 2003.

“Without any doubt if you fell in the water, you could be shredded to bits by a colossal squid. It is the T-Rex of the oceans,” he said.