Blubbery 'researchers' lend fin to climate science

 In this Nov. 9, 2007 file photo, a scene of melting icebergs is shown  in Antarctica.  (AP Photo/Roberto Candia, file)



"It would take years and millions and millions of dollars for a research ship to do what they're doing," Norwegian scientist Kim Holmen said of the instrument-equipped seals, whose long-distance swims and 1,000-foot (300-meter) dinnertime dives for squid are giving investigators valuable data about a key piece of southern ocean.



The reason to worry is clear: If all the land ice here melted, it would raise ocean levels 187 feet (57 meters) worldwide.


Even a 1 percent loss of Antarctic ice would raise sea levels 2 feet (65 centimeters), a slow-motion disaster for global coastlines.



–In a new analysis of the sparse data, scientists reported in January that Antarctica warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) between 1957 and 2006, contrary to earlier belief that much of the continent was cooling.



He said the shelf collapses in the west may eventually be replicated here in the east. Computer models show that warming waters would weaken the 7,000-square-mile (18,000-square-kilometer) Fimbul ice shelf, which reaches 60 miles (100 kilometers) to sea from the coastline north of here, fed by one of Antarctica's largest ice streams, the Jutulstraumen glacier.

It's a neighborhood the huge bull elephant seals know well, since they migrate over a 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) stretch of ocean between uninhabited Bouvet Island and the Fimbul shelf.

"It was a stroke of luck that the seals swim in that area," Holmen told a visiting Associated Press reporter – a stroke that put the marine mammal with the protuberant proboscis in a position to do "field research."


The seals were then set free to do their work.




Among others, scientists are mapping, via reconnaissance satellite snapshots, the speed with which Antarctica's ice sheets are moving seaward; drilling 2 miles (3,500 meters) deep into the ice to analyze its chemistry and Antarctic climate reaching back 100,000 years; and sending an unmanned minisubmarine miles (kilometers) under a fringing shelf to check its status.


Because the planet's future may hinge on the future of Antarctica, its least studied continent, "the need for polar research" – human or otherwise – "has never been greater," it said.