



Antarctic chief scientist retires in climate of deep upheaval


Jo Chandler

Bowing out: Retiring scientist Michael Stoddart.

Bowing out: Retiring scientist Michael Stoddart. Photo: Rebecca Hallas

AS A zoology student in Aberdeen a little over 40 years ago, Michael Stoddart was taught that the one habitat on Earth that had not changed for 500 million years was the deep ocean abyss  the furthest, darkest, coldest reaches of the planet.

Then he watched as even this truth sank in the turbulence of environmental upheaval. As the chief scientist of the Australian Antarctic Division for the past decade, a position from which he is retiring, Professor Stoddart has observed the disintegration of the Larsen ice shelves and the shrinking of sea ice, developments that have profoundly changed the chemistry and the physics of the marine world.

The release of fresh water from ice not only dilutes the saltiness of the sea, he explains, but alters the mechanics of the oceans' movements by leavening the heavy, hyper-saline water that sinks into the depths and pumps currents, creatures and, ultimately, weather around the globe. Meanwhile at the surface, ice loss reverberates through the ecosystem: this is the ice that hosts the algae; that nurtures the krill; that feeds the fish; that sustains penguins and whales.

"Antarctica came in from the cold in the past couple of decades," Professor Stoddart observes. It was once a place for adventurers seeking excitement, challenge and conquest. "A curious, fascinating place but a long way from the real world.

"Now Antarctica has come to be seen as the driving point of so many global phenomena, and with changing climate having burst onto the scene, and our growing awareness of it, we see now Antarctica is a key to explaining what is going on."

It will also be crucial to anticipating what might happen next, he says. The deep ice holds a time capsule of atmospheric history. "Analysis of the composition of tiny bubbles of air in ice cores explains what was going on in the atmosphere at times when temperature changes were occurring on Earth."

Arriving at the division in Hobart in 1998, he found himself at the forefront of shaping Australia's Antarctic science program through a scientific peak hour  rather a surprise for a zoologist who in an earlier incarnation produced a book exploring how delicate odour cues sexual behaviour in man and beast. Encountering elephant seals in Antarctica, rolling in their own ripe, rank muck, was something else again.

"I'm a zoologist who has also had to understand upper-atmosphere physics and climate change and geology  you name it. That has been one of the most stimulating aspects of the job."

His first voyage down through the wild 40s and 50s latitudes, past the first icebergs  "the transition from the temperate world into something else"  stays vividly with him. The feeling of the sea stilling as thickening ice gripped the ship; the biting blast of katabatic wind off the continent. "You are sort of delivered onto Antarctica. The experience of getting there was something very powerful."

Today as the atmosphere changes with increasing carbon dioxide, that history holds clues to what that might mean for temperature. Professor Stoddart's regret in leaving now is that he will not be part of the next great Antarctic quest  the hunt for the million-year-old ice core. "That will be for someone else," he says.

HuffPost Australia

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