Six hundred and fifty million years ago, a giant amalgamated
southern supercontinent — Gondwana — did indeed exist, centred
roughly around the present-day Antarctica. Things were quite
different then: humans hadn't arrived on the global scene, and the climate was much warmer, hosting a huge variety of flora and fauna. For 500 million years Gondwana thrived, but around the time when the dinosaurs were wiped out and the age of the mammals got under way, the landmass was forced to separate into countries, shaping the globe much as we know it today.
To visit Antarctica now is to be a part of
that history; to get a grasp of where we've come from and where we could possibly be heading.
It's to understand the significance of Cordilleran folds and pre-Cambrian granite shields; ozone and carbon; evolution and extinction. When you think about all that can happen in a million years, it can get pretty mind-boggling. Imagine: India pushing northwards, jamming against Asia to buckle its crust and form the Himalayas; South America drifting off to join North America,
opening up the Drake Passage to create a cold circumpolar current, keeping Antarctica frigid, desolate, and at the bottom of theworld.
For a sun-worshipping South Indian like myself, two weeks in a place where 90 per cent of the Earth's total ice volumes are stored is a chilling prospect (not just for circulatory and metabolic functions,
but also for the imagination). It's like walking into a giant ping-pong
ball devoid of any human markers — no trees, billboards, buildings.
You lose all earthly sense of perspective and time here. The visual
scale ranges from the microscopic to the mighty: midges and mites
to blue whales and icebergs as big as countries (the largest recordedwas the size of Belgium). Days go on and on and on in surreal
24-hour austral summer light, and a ubiquitous silence, interrupted
only by the occasional avalanche or calving ice sheet, consecrates
the place. It's an immersion that will force you to place yourself in
the context of the earth's geological history. And for humans, the
prognosis isn't good.
Human impact
Human civilisations have been around for a paltry 12,000
years — barely a few seconds on the geological clock. In that
short amount of time, we've managed to create quite a ruckus,
etching our dominance over Nature with our villages, towns, cities,
megacities. The rapid increase of human populations has left us
battling with other species for limited resources,
and the unmitigated burning of fossil fuels has
now created a blanket of carbon dioxide around
the world, which is slowly but surely increasing
the average global temperature.
Climate change is one of the most hotly
contested environmental debates of our time. Will
the West Antarctic ice sheet melt entirely? Will
the Gulf Stream ocean current be disrupted? Will
it be the end of the world as we know it? Maybe.
Maybe not. Either way, Antarctica is a crucial
element in this debate — not just because it's
the only place in the world, which has never sustained a human
population and therefore remains relatively 'pristine' in this respect;
but more importantly, because it holds in its ice-cores half-million-
year-old carbon records trapped in its layers of ice. If we want to
study and examine the Earth's past, present and future, Antarctica
is the place to go.
Students on Ice, the programme I was working with on the
Shokalskiy, aims to do exactly this by taking high school students to
the ends of the world and providing them with inspiring educational
opportunities which will help them foster a new understanding
and respect for our planet. It's been in operation for six years now,
headed by Canadian Geoff Green, who got tired of carting celebrities and retired, rich, curiosity-seekers who could only 'give' back in a
limited way. With Students on Ice, he offers the future generation
of policy-makers a life-changing experience at an age when they're
ready to absorb, learn, and most importantly, act.
The reason the programme has been so successful is because
it's impossible to go anywhere near the South Pole and not be
affected by it. It's easy to be blasé about polar ice-caps melting
while sitting in the comfort zone of our respective latitude and
longitude, but when you can visibly see glaciers retreating and ice
shelves collapsing, you begin to realise that the threat of global
warming is very real.
Antarctica, because of her simple ecosystem and lack of
biodiversity, is the perfect place to study how little changes in the
environment can have big repercussions. Take the microscopic
phytoplankton — those grasses of the sea that nourish and sustain
the entire Southern Ocean's food chain. These single-celled plants
use the sun's energy to assimilate carbon and synthesise organic
compounds in that wondrous and most important of processes
called photosynthesis. Scientists warn that a further depletion in
the ozone layer will affect the activities of phytoplankton, which
in turn will affect the lives of all the marine animals and birds
of the region, and the global carbon cycle. In the parable of the
phytoplankton, there is a great metaphor for existence: take care of the small things and the big things will fall into place.
My Antarctic experience was full of such epiphanies, but the
best occurred just short of the Antarctic Circle at 65.55 degrees
south. The Shokalskiy had managed to wedge herself into a thick
white stretch of ice between the peninsula and Tadpole Island which
was preventing us from going any further. The Captain decided we
were going to turn around and head back north, but before we did,
we were all instructed to climb down the gangplank and walk on
the ocean. So there we were, all 52 of us, kitted out in Gore-Tex
and glares, walking on a stark whiteness that seemed to spread
out forever. Underneath our feet was a metre-thick ice pack, and
underneath that, 180 metres of living, breathing, salt water. In the
periphery Crabeater seals were stretching and sunning themselves
on ice floes much like stray dogs will do under the shade of a
banyan tree. It was nothing short of a revelation: everything does
indeed connect.
Nine time zones, six checkpoints, three bodies of water and
many ecospheres later, I was still wondering about the beauty of
balance in play on our planet. How would it be if Antarctica were to
become the warm place that it once used to be? Will we be around to
see it, or would we have gone the way of the dinosaurs, mammoths
and woolly rhinos? Who's to say? But after spending two weeks with
a bunch of teenagers who still have the idealism to save the world,
all I can say is that a lot can happen in a million years, but what
a difference a day makes!
Thankyou