The Death March of the Penguins

By Julia Whitty, Mother Jones. Posted August 4, 2008.

If not for the wind, it would be another hot day in Antarctica. But the 20 knots blasting around the shoulders of Penguin Island are stripping us of sweat and what feels like our clothes. I'm shivering hard, and working hard to keep up with Heather Lynch, 5 feet 4 inches of science dynamo, robin's-egg-blue rubber boots pistoning through knee-deep snow with manic determination. She turns 30 this July and is training for a 19-mile wilderness run in Vermont billed as the hardest for its distance anywhere.

We're in the Antarctic Peninsula, that Sistine Chapel of the geologic world, with its godlike finger of mountains reaching across the Drake Passage toward South America's mountains of men. Training helps. We have only a couple of hours ashore to count an expected two or three thousand penguins, with a few cross-country miles to hike to and from the rookery across unknown terrain, orienteering via a hand-drawn map that might as well say here be dragons for all it's worth. Ordinarily, penguin rookeries aren't cryptic places. They advertise through a landscape of jittery, methlike overactivity, a soundscape of braying, buzzing, and honking, and a scentscape reeking of guano and treacly dead things.

Except we can't find this one, and resort to sniffing over sea cliffs 150 feet high. Below, icebergs rear like Mormon temples from the battleship-gray waters of the Bransfield Strait. A few weeks back, a smaller version of one of these white behemoths sank the venerable Antarctic tour ship the Explorer in view from here, stranding 154 passengers and crew in lifeboats for four hours. The first ship to the rescue was the National Geographic Endeavour -- Lynch's and my ride, anchored offshore now.

We power hike until the snowfields give way to desolate, burnt slopes of ejected volcanic boulders. The island has the feel of a tensed muscle overdue for another tectonic release. The last eruption here was estimated by the dating of lichens as 1905 -- the same year French polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot began to amass 32-plus volumes of observations on the Antarctic Peninsula, a treasure chest of data that Lynch and her colleagues still mine today.

In the lee of the island's summit we finally spy a scattering of a few hundred Adélie and chinstrap penguins where we were expecting thousands. They're subdued, with nary an ecstatic display to be seen, that head-craning, chest-pumping, flipper-flapping performance complete with hee-hawing calls. The Adélies are clustered on empty nests, with only 11 chicks among them. A pitiful tally for an entire year's breeding effort.

Hiking back into radio range, we hear from Ron Naveen, counting southern giant petrel nests on the other side of the island. It's terrible here, he reports, just awful. At first I picture him befouled by stomach-oil spit from the bellies of the huge albatrosslike birds the whalers called stinkers. But his concern is that he's found only 75 nests in a colony that once housed more than 600. Worse, it appears all the petrels are sitting on eggs, far too late in the season for the chicks to survive. The whole island is a bust.

Breeding success in Antarctica is highly variable. Local events -- rain, heat, snowfall -- can crash an entire season. In East Antarctica, southern giant petrels have been found dead on their nests, a single egg nestled in the brood patch, the birds having succumbed to enormous, burying snows. Yet what's happening now is indicative of a larger meteorological reality. The western Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than any place on Earth. Wintertime temperatures have risen a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit in 50 years. What was once a cold, dry place has become a warm, wet place. The wildlife is reeling from the chaos, some finding opportunity, others catastrophe. On Penguin Island, Adélie populations have plummeted 75 percent since 1980.

Returning across the high flanks of the island, Lynch and I pass a pair of chinstraps -- chinnies, as they're affectionately known -- waddling toward the distant colony, wings cranked open for balance, lurching from one webbed foot to the other, climbing hard. It's an impressive feat of penguin mountaineering. The pair rests, facing each other, as if conferring on their own adventurous conundrum. We chuckle, though we're puzzled as to why they don't just swim to their front doorstep on the far side of the island.

Of course, there's no telling why penguins make one decision versus another, why they elect a long and difficult path when an easier way is obvious. Any more than we can figure the bizarrely perilous choices of our own kind.

In 1774, after enduring tempests, gales, and fogs, Captain James Cook came up hard against the Antarctic ice sheet and turned back. He never saw the land beyond, land he thought "doomed by nature to everlasting frigidness ... whose horrible and savage aspect I have no words to describe." He predicted another explorer would, though "I shall not envy him the honour of the discovery but I will be bold to say that the world will not be benefited by it."

It's still a hard sell, the notion that this frozen continent and its frozen-ocean partner to the north have much relevance to our temperate world. Naveen and Lynch are here to count dwindling numbers of penguins -- because, Naveen says, doing so is like looking into a crystal ball and seeing our own future beset by climate change. They're censusing three species (Adélies, chinstraps, gentoos), plus two seabirds (blue-eyed shags, southern giant petrels), at 123 sites in a long-term research project known as the Antarctic Site Inventory. It's a daunting undertaking, facilitated in part by Lindblad Expeditions, which donates one cabin, two bunks, and all meals for two researchers aboard the Endeavour for the entirety of the Antarctic season -- a contribution worth a minimum of $200,000 a year. Naveen and Lynch have no control of the ship's itinerary, but are grateful to piggyback on the travels of the tourists.

See more stories tagged with: climate change, penguins, south pole, antarctica, the artic

Julia Whitty is a contributing writer at Mother Jones and the author of "The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific."

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