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Antarctica in 1997

Antarctica , Ice averaging 2,160 m (7,087 ft) in thickness covers 98% of the continent of Antarctica, which has an area of 14 million sq km (5.4 million sq mi). There is no indigenous human population. Human activity consists mainly of scientific research at approximately 40 year-round stations and additional summer-only camps; the population is about 4,100 in summer and 1,000 in winter. In addition, several thousand tourists (most of them ship-based) visit Antarctica annually in summer. The 42-nation Antarctic Treaty, which is the managerial mechanism for the region south of latitude 60° S, reserves the area for peaceful purposes, encourages scientific cooperation, prescribes environmental protection measures, allows inspections to verify adherence, and defers the issue of territorial sovereignty.

The debate over how quickly the Antarctic ice sheet could melt reached beyond the science community in 1997 when a Popular Science cover story in February examined findings by glacial "dynamicists" (researchers who think Antarctica’s ice sheet may have receded as recently as 3 million years ago) and "stablists" (those who believe the ice sheet has been stable for the last 10 million to 15 million years). The scientific debate was important because agreement on a clear picture of the past could help to cast a more accurate vision of Earth’s future. The debate was also significant because 90% of the world’s ice is on Antarctica, and if all this ice were to melt, the worldwide sea level would rise some 60 m (200 ft). The dynamicists, led by Peter Webb of Ohio State University and David Harwood of the University of Nebraska, reported that they had found sediments in the Transantarctic Mountains containing marine microfossils only three million years old, which suggested that the climate at that time may have been warm enough to melt the eastern part of Antarctica’s ice sheet and enable ocean water to flood Antarctica’s subglacial basins. If the eastern ice sheet shrank significantly then, another big thaw would be possible if Antarctica’s temperature rose a similar amount. The stablists collected rock and ash samples from the same sedimentary layer studied by the dynamicists and found no sign of wetting or erosion, which suggested that the layers were not disturbed by a receding ice sheet as recently as three million years ago. The stablists theorized that the fossils might have blown in. It was believed that further research, including a large, six-nation drilling project at Cape Roberts that began in October 1997, might shed light on the answer to one of Antarctica’s most perplexing questions.

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Meanwhile, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would raise sea level 6 m (20 ft) if it were to collapse, was the subject of scrutiny. The ice in West Antarctica is unstable because it is situated on land below sea level; when glaciologists went to Antarctica, they found ice streams in the process of collapse. Climatologist Peter deMenocal told Time magazine in April, "When I began my Ph.D. in 1986, the conventional wisdom was that it took 1,000 years to end an ice age; in ’91 that figure was lowered to 100 years, and then just two years later Richard Alley at Penn State published a paper about climate changing in two to five years." Robert Bindschadler of NASA said he suspected that West Antarctic ice had been collapsing for thousands of years and final collapse might not occur for a couple of thousand more, but there was no guarantee the collapse would be orderly and predictable. In late 1997 a large research camp at Siple Dome in West Antarctica was continuing investigations of the ice sheet’s behaviour.

At sea, ships and oceanographers of seven nations measured the potentially enormous climatic role of carbon and other biogenic elements within the Southern Ocean and between the ocean, the atmosphere, and the seafloor. The region had been deemed a source of carbon dioxide (a gas thought to contribute to the greenhouse effect), which would mean that the Southern Ocean contributed to global warming. The new cruises showed instead that the Southern Ocean seemed to be absorbing about 200 million to 400 million tons of carbon per year. It appeared likely that this represented a change in the behaviour of the ocean and not just a better data set. The oceanographers found that movement of carbon between the Southern Ocean and the atmosphere was highly susceptible to perturbation and was less well understood than fluxes in less-remote areas. The international program, called the Southern Ocean Joint Global Ocean Flux Study, was expected to continue most of the decade.

More evidence was found that Antarctic plants and animals, always thought of as hardy survivors because of the harsh climate, are susceptible to human-caused change. Biologists found the first direct evidence that abnormally high levels of ultraviolet rays, which penetrate the protective ozone layer during the period of Antarctica’s infamous ozone hole, cause damage to the DNA of higher animals. Kirk Malloy and William Detrich, both of Northeastern University, Boston, found extensive DNA lesions in the eggs and larvae of icefish--Antarctic fish that lack hemoglobin. Meanwhile, up to two-thirds of emperor and Adélie penguins in rookeries near Australia’s Mawson research station were found to have a poultry virus, probably caused by human disposal of poultry products. Penguins at a remote site were free of the virus. The virus also could have been spread by movement of people carrying it on footwear, clothing, equipment, and vehicles.

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An estimated 7,322 shipborne tourists visited Antarctica in the 1996-97 summer, down from the 9,212 of the previous year. The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, however, projected that the annual number would exceed 10,000 in 1997-98 and future years. Perhaps 100 tourists landed by airplane, and additional sightseers were aboard commercial flights that did not land in the Antarctic. Forty-eight percent of the shipborne tourists were from the United States. Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and Australia also contributed significant numbers. The Antarctic Peninsula was the most popular destination, with Cuverville Island the most visited spot.

It was reported that a vast iceberg that could supply a fifth of the world’s drinking water for a year had broken off East Antarctica and begun a 10-year drift to the north. Neal Young, an Australian glaciologist, said the berg covered more than 3,000 sq km (1,160 sq mi) when it calved from the West Ice Shelf in May 1996. It broke into five or six bergs, the biggest of which was an estimated 300 m (985 ft) deep and was grounded off the coast north of Australia’s Davis Station. The total amount of ice involved was equivalent to about a third of all the ice Antarctica dumps into the sea each year.

This article updates Antarctica.

This article updates Antarctica.

Antarctica in 1997
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