I saw it before I heard it.
It sounded like thunder, a rumble that shook the still air and my kayak rolled in the water like a kite in a blizzard. The sea surged towards me and I paddled furiously to face the wave and rolled off its crest. The source of this sudden tide was not far away.
A thousand tonnes of ice had collapsed off a glacier’s edge into the ink-black ocean below, like a weary giant falling off a precipice. It was beautiful, and frightening. This was Antarctica — the last continent, and it reminded me of how close we are to the point of no return.
My journey to Antarctica ironically began in the place farthest to it — the Arctic. In July 2017, I had flown to Svalbard (“cold shores” in old Norse), the last piece of land before the ice pack of the North Pole. I was only a few months out of my UN assignment in Iraq, and the deep Arctic seemed to me a logical place to recuperate. Svalbard is administered by Norway, but it is an international territory whose exploitation is governed by a multilateral treaty. India is incidentally one of 25 countries with treaty rights to the resources of this remote Arctic island. So remote that despite finds of gold and other precious metals, it still has more polar bears than people.
Off to Svalbard
I took a fishing boat to the far north of Svalbard, to a tiny settlement called Ny-Ålesund (whose population varies by season from 30 and 150 people), the last human habitation before the Arctic ice pack. As I explored the settlement, I heard a Hindi song and walked up to a small yellow house and knocked. The two scientists inside were surprised to see me. I had just arrived at India’s Arctic research base, Dhruv.
What was India doing in the Arctic? As I spoke to the scientists, it set me thinking about the stakes at play for Indians in the most serious challenge of our generation: climate change. And it seemed to figure at the very heart of my work as a civilian peacekeeper.
I reflected on my work monitoring and mediating conflicts in two war-zones: Afghanistan and Iraq. Beyond the headlines of terrorism, civil war, and insurgency, I had observed simmering disputes between communities there that could trigger brutal violence. They were resource disputes — over land, pasture rights, water. But they had a common cause now: climate change. Recent changes in climate patterns have created new political problems by polarising communities and increasing conflict.
A genesis in each
From the rapid expansion of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan to violent cattle raids in South Sudan, from illegal immigration from West Africa to Europe to inter-tribal blood feuds in southern Iraq — each had its genesis in climate change. Whether conflict worsens the effect of climate change on populations or whether it is vice-versa, one thing is clear: climate change is no longer just an environmental issue, it’s a political and security challenge.
The frozen expanses at both ends of the planet — the Arctic and the Antarctic — literally act as thermometers for global warming. I decided to go to Antarctica within one seasonal cycle to compare and contrast the impact of climate change first hand. I joined renowned British explorer Sir Robert Swan on the International Antarctic Expedition 2018. On February 27, the expedition sailed from Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, the southern-most part of South America. After crossing a turbulent Drake Passage, we sighted our first iceberg, and soon after, the white earth of Antarctica. After crossing the Antarctic Circle on March 3, we sailed through the littoral of the Antarctic peninsula, with frequent forays into the islands along the shore, and the continent itself.
The omnipresent feature of Antarctica is, of course, ice... and in many more colours than white. There was Green Ice (layered by lichen), Red Ice (stained by pink lichen or even by penguin droppings from a krill-based diet), Blue Ice (from extremely dense packing of ice crystals in icebergs that calved off from glaciers), and Sky Blue or Aquamarine Ice (usually in ice sheets that are leftovers of sea ice).
The most fascinating as well as the most troubling of all was Black Ice — thick but clear, glass-like chunks that reflected the dark waters beneath. Some of these chunks were remnants of the pre-historic ice that underlies glaciers, and their very presence on the surface was a warning of how deeply global warming had affected the region.
Antarctica: Frozen in time
The tell-tale signs of mankind’s long struggle with the Antarctic were soon evident. Shattered hulls of seal-hunting boats from the 19th century. Abandoned bases. Bones of whales stripped of blubber a hundred years ago; Argentina, Chile, and the U.K. have bases in this part of the continent. Entering an abandoned British station, Base ‘W’, on Detaille island, I felt time had frozen in the 1950s. The base was hastily abandoned in 1959 when the ice made supplies impossible. Military tunics hung on hooks, papers were strewn about on desks, there was even a can of figs opened 60 years ago — tell-tale signs of the last human presence on the island. They also told me that Antarctica was as unpredictable as it was alluring. The entire continent was a siren made of ice.
Many shades of ice in Antarctica.
Its unpredictability has only grown in our era. Last year, the temperature on the Antarctic peninsula dipped from 17.5 degrees C to minus 15 degrees C in just 20 minutes. The only permanent shapers and movers here are ice and wind. It is hard to comprehend the beauty of the barrenness they’ve sculpted. Antarctica’s blue icebergs floating in small indigo bays give you a disquieting sense of how modest a creation we are.
A threat we cannot ignore
For all our achievements, we are nowhere near close to understanding or controlling water — in all its forms from the sea to ice. And in posing a threat to the fragile balance of this ecosystem — whether through unbridled fishing for krill (a shrimp-like species of plankton priced for its antioxidant-rich oil) in the Antarctic ocean, which is threatening the survival of penguins and whales, or through our contribution to global warming that has increased the rate of glaciers breaking off from the continent, we are threatening our own future.
Penguins in Antarctica.
Towards the end of the voyage, we landed on Deception Island — the gigantic crater of a sunken volcano that keeps the island’s soil steaming even in the Antarctic weather. Standing at an edge of the crater, I reflected on the two ends of the world I had set foot on in a span of eight months. It struck me that barring the commonality of barrenness, the Arctic and the Antarctic stand in contrast to each other.
Svalbard’s fragile tundra, a soft carpet of greenish-yellow lichen and moss in the summer, and layers of fine ice in the winter is home to an astonishing variety of wildlife — from polar bears to Arctic foxes to Arctic terns and swallows. The Antarctic, on the other hand, is stark and its wildlife, from penguins to seals to whales, is dependent on the sea around it.
The Arctic is losing ice much faster than the Antarctic. Both ice sheets are in exponential decline, and if the trends continue, the effects will become irreversible. Which is not good news because every chunk of ice lost in these regions is a few more feet of land lost to the sea, a lot more unpredictability in the ocean currents, and thus in the monsoon for us here in India.
Hotter summers and unpredictable cyclonic rains mean more difficult agriculture, higher food prices, and quite simply greater friction in society. Inter-state displacement, increased migration into India, and even violent conflict is not a far threat from thereon. Climate change isn’t a challenge for tomorrow, but a risk to our very generation. Every bit we do to address it, from reforestation to changing our food habits and adopting renewable energy, is a step towards not just protecting the polar regions but towards saving our own species.
The Hyderabad-based writer works with the United Nations. He was part of the 2018 International Antarctic Expedition. The views in the article are personal.
