Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica
800 miles from South Pole
12th June, 2011

What with the rugged looks, from years of stabbing wind and glacial glare, the iconic Swanddri gear and that thick South Island accent, the Expedition Leader could well have been the archetypal Kiwi -- though few tourists would’ve guessed it. Hearing him speak, most thought he was from South Africa, or maybe Aberwystryth. So to make life easier all round, this season Scobie Black traded his tattered old ‘Spirit of Borchgrevink’ cap for a fresh one with ‘NEW ZEALAND’ emblazoned unashamedly across the front. When they saw it, tourists invariably said one of two things; either “Scobie, are there really more sheep than people in New Zealand?” or, “Scobie, do you live where they shot Lord of the Rings?” to which he’d say something like “yes, I went out with a sheep once – bought myself a pair of Wellington boots first though,” or “yes, in fact I was seated next to Peter Jackson at last year’s Hobbits & Elves bash – you know he looks much younger without the beard.” And then he was well on his way to a nice big tip.

A glaciologist by training, Scobie Black first descended upon the Great White Maw back in 2002, joining an international team studying glacial flows. At the Larsen B ice shelf on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, 3,250 square kilometres of shelf area – about 700 billion tons of ice – had disintegrated in a single month. On the south-western side, another chunk of ice 20 miles wide and 124 miles long, imaginatively named ‘C-19,’ had shattered and separated from the Ross Ice Shelf with equally staggering speed, blocking sea ice from moving out of the Ross Sea region, resulting in unusually high sea ice cover during spring and summer. Because of this, the microscopic phytoplankton plants couldn’t get enough light to bloom and the whole food chain suffered. Scobie’s first assignment was to quantify the effects of C-19’s collapse on the phytoplankton population, using green chlorophyll data collected via NASA satellites.

He’d never forget his first ever flight from Christchurch, New Zealand down to McMurdo Station; ‘MacTown’ as it was known. Bulked up in Extreme Cold Weather gear to ensure their survival in the event of an emergency ice landing, all thirty-five ‘beakers’ (the nickname for scientists down there) were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, knee-to-knee on four twenty-foot benches at the rear of a Hercules transport for what seemed an eternity. Even with the earplugs in, the noise of the engines was deafening and no one could make themselves heard. Worse still, one of the flight crew cranked up the heat to an unbearable 92 degrees Fahrenheit.

Five cramped and sweltering hours passed before the pilot finally came on to say that because of poor visibility the flight had to be aborted. Five hours later, thirty-five sweaty wrecks trudged off the plane - and not for the last time. Eight consecutive times the flight boomeranged. Then on the ninth attempt and with a throb in his heart, he got his first glimpse of the little beauties – those towering masses of crystal, rising like great sapphires from out of the silvery sea. Only then did he understand the fascination that made heroes risk their lives and endure inconceivable hardships - hardships against which his little travel troubles suddenly did pale. The spell of the Great White Maw was upon him.

One day slipped into another and before he knew it, two years had passed by. By then, he’d had his fill of setting out GPS beacons during featureless whiteouts, trying to guess who was under what red parka based solely on their gait, fighting the hidebound rigidities of a government-run operation, and chiselling burnt lasagne pans; not to mention the lousy diet of powdered eggs, dried blueberries and that mysterious ‘gorp.’ MacTown fever had set in.

Scobie’s bid for a transfer to the Brit-run Rothera station, which had a long and glorious rock band tradition, fell through at the eleventh hour, while the options for getting off Planet McMurdo were limited to a flying tank or the Frankensled, a slow-as-molasses toboggan piled high with radar electronics, booms, transmitters and expeditionary supplies. So when in 2004 his brother jokingly sent him a postcard of a gleaming iceberg with a boat full of tourists parked in front of it, Scobie took that as a sign and threw in the towel. It was his destiny to be a tour guide.



Cruising alongside the vast Ross Ice Shelf, seemingly oblivious to the menacing cliffs towering hundreds of feet above her, or the deadly spurs jutting out from low-lying masses just beneath the water line, the Spirit of Borchgrevink began to sing. It was a reverberation in the hull, that was all, but its shifting tones and undertones, pitches and melodies sounded just like a pod of humpback whales. One of the cooks, Olle from Oslo, could mimic it almost perfectly, and sang with the ship as he worked.
Cold columns of air rose up through open cracks in the perpetually moving field of ice, deflecting the sun’s rays, creating a fairyland of colour and light. Kelp gulls and petrels darted and fluttered about in every direction, diving for krill and any small fish churned up by the propellers. Seals slumbered on masses of ice and shot like silver torpedoes beside the hull, adding to the magic and apparent unreality of it all.

High on the bridge where everyone could see him, and leaning casually against a lifeboat, Scobie Black continued the spiel he knew so well he could probably have done it in his sleep.
“Having come this far from civilisation, many an early explorer was so daunted by this sight that they actually turned back – didn’t even go for the pole,” he said, raising his voice so as to be heard over the cries of gulls, the freshening wind and the strange, troublous sound of the bergs. And by the looks of bewildered awe on all their faces, no one had the slightest bit of trouble believing him. “Ice shelves are thick plates of ice that extend from land,” he went on. “Here in Antarctica, they extend from half the continent's coastline, acting as a kind of braking system for the glaciers behind them. Now, any of our American guests here from Texas?”
A couple of hands went up.
“Ah – then you must be used to the temperature – though it's a little warmer here than inside your cars and houses I imagine,” he said with a sheepish grin. “Well, this shelf is larger than the entire State of Texas. We’re talking 600 miles in length and up to 3000 feet thick in certain areas. Here and now, we are taking the exact same route that Captain James Ross took in 1841, though the shelf has changed quite a bit since then. Can anyone tell me why? Anyone want to hazard a guess?”
“Is the ice thicker?” someone shouted from the rear.
“Not down here,” Scobie replied. “It’s changed because of calving. As the ice advances towards the sea, it begins to break apart, or calve. The Antarctic is one great iceberg factory, churning out 250,000 bergs each year. Most of the Ross Ice Shelf has already calved. There’s another large crack, but it’s difficult to predict if and when the next big event will occur. It’s all part of the process of iceberg formation that’s been going on for millions of years.”
A young woman in a fur-lined parka raised a hand. “But isn’t the process speeding up -- I mean as a warming climate produces more melt water, lubricating the ice sheets where they meet the rock, effectively oiling the brakes?”
“Yeah,” said her companion, “I read that when a glacier’s seaward tongue melts, it’s like uncorking a bottle – there’s nothing holding it back.”
Scobie shook his head. “I’m a glaciologist by training and I’ve seen the data first-hand. At first we thought there’d been a sudden increase in the rate of iceberg formation, but it turned out only to be an apparent increase. The real problem was poor iceberg detection – we’d been grossly undercounting because the resolution of the images produced by our satellites was too low to distinguish individual bergs. In fact, there’s nothing out of the norm going on here.” A few eyebrows were raised, but no one said anything. After all, he was the Expedition Leader.
Momentarily, another crew member stepped up on the platform. It was Sven Hassle, one of the logistics guys who had a reputation for being a little bit sticky because of his penchant for what he called “discussions.” On long expeditions, people were always looking for amusement and it didn’t take long before Hassle started to find strange things in his bunk at night. First it was a dead herring. Then a cactus. And then some old grey potatoes, which magically reappeared in Scobie’s bunk the following night.
“Can I add something?” said Hassle with a pronounced Danish accent, gesturing at the microphone. With so many people looking on, Scobie had little choice but to oblige. “Thank you dear leader,” he said facetiously. “I seen same data and you are exactly correct. Number of icebergs, they are constant since 1978 until late 1990s,” he said. Knowing what Hassle was capable of dishing out, Scobie felt quite relieved. “But you know, this study is many years old and everything have changed. Ja, the rate of the ice disintegration, it is accelerating, and the reason is clear. This warming climate, it leaves great pools of the melt water on top, covering hundreds of thousands of miles, until very late in the summer. The water, it fills all the surface cracks and all of the crevasses. Ja – and then, the constant stress of the water, it forces even the very shallowest cracks to—how do you say? –propagate, pushing down through the whole thickness of the shelf, like subway tunnels. Now please imagine what happens when the melt water gets down to the bedrock. Ja, the rate of glacial flow, it speeds up. The Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland, he doubled in speed the last decade – he is now moving 120 feet every single day. More than one cubic mile of water is dumped into the oceans every week, and the rate has doubled in less than a decade. In the Arctic the annual mean air temperature has risen 5 °Fahrenheit in the last thirty years. Unglaublich! Unbelievable! Down here in the Antarctic, the great Pine Island Glacier is one third faster since the 1970s. Research by NASA scientists says the collapse of entire ice sheet is the real danger here. Ja, this is in three stages. Eins: the thinning ice sheet floats free of the submerged bedrock. Zwei: the warmer ocean waters intrude--”
Unbeknownst to him, a fully-grown Skua soaring six hundred feet above the vessel had just dropped the punch line -- a nasty white and silvery job with black go-faster stripes.
“--Drei: the shelf, she erodes underneath, bringing on the collapse.”
Splat! --Went the punch line as it hit Hassle’s inside left lapel, spattering across his neck.
“Ach! Scheisse!” he said to everyone’s amusement. And this would have made Scobie’s day too, had it not been for that his very public humiliation. He knew very well that privately, more than a few of the crewmembers thought of him a ‘has-been’ masquerading as an expert. Now, Herr Hassle had turned that rumour into a fact. And yet, his area of expertise was the endangered Ross seal, not glaciers; the only thing he was qualified to speak about was how to collect and analyse mushy samples of fresh seal guano. That was the problem with the damned Internet - after a day or two of surfing, anyone could become an expert on anything.
But what if they were right? thought Scobie. He had always maintained that global warming would be a net gain for the continent, because the warmer ocean air would cause heavier snowfall inland, building up glacial mass. Of course, he also knew that downplaying the effects of global warming was a surer way to obtain research finding, and that most scientists who stuck their necks out would pay the price one way or another. But if he were wrong, if the odds actually favoured thinning ice sheets, then he’d jumped the scientific ship just at the wrong moment -- just when it was starting to get exciting. Instead of playing the glorified tour guide, he could have been guiding the robotic probes under the ice, searching for clues about how the massive ice sheet responded to past temperature changes. He got a lump in his throat just thinking about it.
Someone else said something, but the words didn’t reach beyond, swallowed up as they were by a sudden noise from above that caught everyone but Scobie by complete surprise. A helicopter operation to the top of the shelf was under way, launched from a much larger vessel, the Kapitan Kolguyev, which was anchored up ahead.
“Friends, don’t be alarmed!” said Scobie reassuringly. “This is our answer to heli-skiing, and the conditions are near perfect today.”
All eyes were on the Sikorsky hovering way above them. "Look how close he's flying to the ice!" marvelled one tourist, clicking away with his puny little disposable camera.
"Yeah – and probably done it a thousand times before," shrugged his half-stoned companion, who was quite right except for one incy wincy little detail: today was June 12th -Russia Day – a day of great celebration invented by Boris Yeltsin, and unofficially sponsored every year by the Stolichnaya vodka company.
Just then it happened. The helicopter, already hovering perilously close to the shelf, suddenly lost control and lunged toward the cliff, its engine reeling.
"׸ðò! Ó íàñ ñî’ñåì íåò òîïëè’à!" (Shit! We're completely out of fuel!), said the pilot, staring wide-eyed at the flashing red light on the dash.
"Âîò ÷¸ðò!" (Damn it, shit!), said the co-pilot as a mug of scalding hot coffee spilled over his crotch, "Ñêîëüêî ðàç ÿ ãî’îðèë ýòîìó êðåòèíó Íèêîëàþ ïåðåñòàòü ïèòü íàêîíåö!" (I told the mechanics to stay off the juice – dumb-assed bastards!)
They struggled to regain control, but without power it was hopeless. The helicopter veered into the shelf, shuddering like a stricken animal as the blades bit the unforgiving ice.
Staring skywards in horror, all the tourists on board the Spirit of Borchgrevink thought the same thing: the helicopter was going nowhere but down. Only it didn’t go down, it scraped down - screeching as it went like fingernails down a blackboard.
"Aaaaaaaggggghhhhh!" (Aaaaaaaggggghhhhh!), screamed the pilot.
"Aaaaaaaggggghhhhh!" (Aaaaaaaggggghhhhh!), screamed the co-pilot.
"Aaaaaaaggggghhhhh!" screamed the six passengers, all of whom just happened to be newly-qualified insurance adjusters.
When the battered wreck finally hit the sea below, everyone on board ship, Scobie included, almost jumped out of their skin with fright. Only it wasn’t the crash that did it - this they’d all been expecting. No, it was that savage crack from up on high, echoing forebodingly across McMurdo Sound.


The ice colossus ripped away from the margin of the Ross Ice Shelf with a hollow, nerve-wracking roar; then thundered down, down into the frigid grey waters below like a just-detonated block of flats. Along its entire length, whole icebergs sailed up and then crashed to pieces. Giant shards of ice tore like heavy shells down a parapet, rooting up the booming sea below, demolishing the lower section of the shelf. Unlike the Weddell seals, which had long since fled the scene, the tourists – all of them scrambling for the far side of the deck, arms thrown wide and faces distorted in terror - didn’t even make it half-way. Out of nowhere it seemed, a dark and monstrous wave piled up, its face spiked with jagged blue-white rubble, and then broke violently over the doomed vessel.
At last the bombardment stopped and it grew quiet. Mists rose from icy craters like secrets from the deep. No one would believe that in the howling waste there would still be life, but sure enough, before long Kelp gulls and Sheathbills popped their heads out of crevices and clefts on all sides, then stretched their wings and took flight.
Except for a newly minted iceberg the size of Sri Lanka, its top fantastically dusted with a layer of pure white snow, and the light from a single blistering flare that set the sky around it faintly aglow, everything was just as it was, strangely beautiful and arresting.