by Cameron Smith

 In one wild summer six years ago, global warming showed its tempestuous side in the Antarctic Peninsula, the snakelike tail of land that meanders from Antarctica up toward the southern tip of South America, where it helps frame Drake Passage.

Its impacts were unpredictable — brutal, lightening quick, and sometimes counterintuitive.

Meredith Hooper was there, an Australian, now living in London, England, and she has written a book, Ferocious Summer (Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver), to record her stay at Palmer Station, a U.S. research outpost mid way on the western side of the peninsula.

A male Adélie penguin seeks a partner

It has taken research and analysis over the intervening six years to confirm that what happened at the peninsula in 2001-2002 was the result of global warming, not a freak atmospheric condition that altered weather patterns.

Her account focuses primarily on Adélie Penguins, named after Adèle Dumont d’Urville, wife of a French explorer. The penguins, distinguished by bright black eyes ringed with white, are doomed to become extinct on the peninsula within the next five to eight years because of global warming. However, there are vast colonies of them farther south on the continent.

Hooper’s book is a chatty, day-by-day recounting of activities at the research station. It gives a vivid sense of what it’s like to live in sardine-tin conditions at the edge of an unruly ocean, in a landscape monumental in its isolating grandeur.

It’s an important book, because Antarctica holds 90 per cent of the world’s ice. How its ice fields melt, and how fast, will determine how sea levels rise.

The current prediction is they will rise between 0.5 and 1.5 metres this century, but global warming has repeatedly overturned predictions. Right now, the western side of the peninsula is warming at a rate ten times greater than the mean rate of global warming — the fastest rate in the world.

The most dramatic, unpredictable event of the summer was disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf on the eastern side of the peninsula in March 2002. The shelf had been 220 metres thick, and two-thirds of it disintegrated almost overnight. A total of 5,820 square kilometres of ice drifted in chunks out to sea.

The breakup of ice shelves doesn’t raise sea levels. What does happen, however, is it increases the speed at which glaciers dump ice into the ocean, and this does raise sea levels.

Ice shelves act as door sills, slowing the progress of glaciers. Once the Larsen B ice shelf was gone, glaciers behind it began shifting ice up to five times faster from the interior to the sea.

With global warming pushing southward along the peninsula, snowfalls increased as warm, moist air from the north met cold, dry, polar air to the south. The snow played havoc with the Adélies breeding season, burying eggs and penguins.

Between eggs that were lost, chicks that hatched late and had no chance at survival, and predation by seabirds, the count of chicks that lived to launch themselves into the sea dropped from 6,531 in 2000-2001 to 1,729 in 2001-2002.

What’s even more troubling is that subsequent research has determined scientists were wrong in thinking that increases in snowfall would balance whatever ice was lost to global warming. Remote sensing has confirmed that the mass of ice in Antarctica is declining.

But Adélie penguins need ice. They are strictly a polar bird. They feed on krill that shelter on the underside of ice shelves. When the shelves go, the Adélies go. They’ll be replaced by Gentoo and Chinstrap penguins. The point, however, is they are an indicator species for global warming. And they’re indicating how swiftly global warming can advance.