Green Options

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has agreed new rules which ban the transportation and use of heavy grade oils by ships in the Antarctic Ocean.

The change was agreed during the 2009 meeting of the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee and is scheduled to come into force in 2011.

In essence it will only allow ships to use only lighter grade oils which, if spilt, evaporate more easily, are easier to clean up and are far less damaging to wildlife.

It’s early Sunday morning at Halley Research Station, Antarctica. The sun is rising quickly on the horizon, the wind is low and the temperature outside is a modest -18 degrees C. Conditions look perfect. As I look across the dining room at my friends and colleagues Niv and Colin I see two smiling faces nodding back at me. Today we are going to head out to the coast and attempt to explore a large crevasse at a point on the Ice shelf known as Creek Five.

Halley Research Station sits on the Brunt Ice Shelf 15km in from the edge of the shelf. It is the British Antarctic Surveys most southerly and remote research station. I am lucky enough to be a member of the eleven strong wintering team working as the chef on Station. With the impending arrival of 24 hour darkness we are all keen to make the most of the remaining daylight, taking every opportunity to make the most of our time in this amazing place.

During the winter months on the Antarctic continent not only do we experience 24 hour darkness but we are privileged to see the aurora australis.  Here at Halley Station we were looking forward to experiencing many a night gazing at the dancing lights as they flitter across the sky.   Reading the small print however, revealed that there is a cycle of activity that revolves around an 11 year period.  It seems that 2009 is a low solar activity year and hence our expectations might have been a bit high.

Large flares or solar explosions from the sun will expel numerous amounts of solar particles which make their way towards Earth.  These particles come into contact with the Earth’s magnetosphere and are directed towards the polar regions.  High energy particles then cascade into the highest parts of the Earth’s atmosphere, ionising gases.  It’s this process that emits the glows that we see on Earth.  The variation of colour is a result of particles with different energies ionising different gases.

VP-FBB on the Antarctic Plateau

As I take off from the ice runway at the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley base, situated on the Brunt Ice Shelf (75o34’S 26o34’W), I finally realise I am living and working at the extreme of human endurance.  I am in one of the Survey’s De Havilland Twin Otters, known as Victor Papa Foxtrot Bravo Bravo (or VP-FBB), heading to the remote automatic weather station known affectionately as Baldrick, located at 83oSouth.

The weather station is hundreds of miles from the nearest living thing (human or otherwise) in the middle of the most inhospitable environment on the planet.  My life is entirely in the hands of the pilot Mark; fortunately they are very skilled hands.

This month, as the results of data analyses come in, climate scientists are getting a more detailed, far clearer picture of the ‘State of the Poles’ and the effects of warming and climate change in these most extreme regions of our planet. Although this project is actually the culmination of two years work (encompassing 160 separate studies and costing 1.2 billion dollars) it has been officially deemed the ‘International Polar Year’ (IPY).

One of the most important findings of this project is a confirmation of what many climate scientists have suspected for a couple of years now–that the impact of climate change on our environment is happening at a much faster rate than previous computer models predicted. This is true even for the four major reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the last of which was released in 2007).

A team of UK scientists have discovered a natural process that could delay, or even end, the threat of global warming.

The researchers, aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Endurance, have found that melting icebergs off the coast of Antarctica are releasing millions of tiny particles of iron into the southern Ocean, helping to create huge ‘blooms’ of algae that absorb carbon emissions. The algae then sinks to the icy depths, effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

According to lead researcher, Prof. Rob Raiswell of Leeds University, “The Earth itself seems to want to save us.”

Anti-whaling activists aboard the Sea Shepherd vessel ‘Steve Irwin’ have covered a whaling ship with a smelly cocktail of rotten butter, methyl cellulose and indelible dye.

The unconventional sliming operation was carried out in a bid to intimidate the Japanese whaler, Kaiko Maru, into moving out of Australian Antarctic territorial waters. According to Peter Hammarstedt, the Sea Shepherd’s second officer, “this is one stinky, slippery ship.”

Icebergs, glaciers and ice caps might soon be endangered species, thanks to climate change, so enjoy them while you can. One of the most extraordinary images of an iceberg I’ve yet to see appears in the U.K.’s Telegraph: a marbled “rainbow” iceberg photographed by a Norwegian sailor in the Antarctic.

There’s nothing quite as nice as a really catchy title that perfectly sums up your story. If you want to leave it at that, then you’ve probably got the whole of the story. However if you want to know just a bit more about how climate change is affecting our planet’s poles, then keep reading.

Speaking in a telephone briefing last Friday, Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that the Arctic and Antarctic are exhibiting opposite effects to the climate change affecting our planet.