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PHOTOGRAPHS BY THOMAS P. PESCHAK
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By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
My last trip before the pandemic was my first to Antarctica. I was part of the “talent” on a National Geographic cruise, and my job was to give a few talks on climate change to a boat-full of smart, interested people, aka National Geographic readers. It was the ultimate in sweet gigs. We saw a mother and baby humpback lolling at dawn in the waters of the Lemaire Channel. We walked over ice-free ground among hundreds of penguins, mostly gentoos.
And we steamed into the ice-free waters off Australia’s Esperanza base, at the northern tip of the peninsula, just days after it had recorded an all-time high temperature of nearly 65 degrees Fahrenheit.
There’s nothing like a trip to the bottom of the world to bring home the reality that climate change is affecting the entire planet and all its creatures. Going to a place so far from human settlement enables you to be amazed by that simple fact again. The sea off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula is ice-free now for three months longer than it used to be, which is great for cruise ships—but a big jolt to the ecosystem.
As writer Helen Scales and photographer Thomas Peschak report in the November issue of National Geographic, climate change is not the only way we’re affecting the Antarctic Peninsula. Commercial whaling ended off Antarctica decades ago, and Japan finally stopped “scientific” whaling there in 2019. But humans are instead fishing at the base of the Antarctic food chain for krill—the tiny crustaceans on which penguins and whales and other animals depend. The loss of sea ice makes it easier to fish.
It makes it easier for humpbacks too, and for now, they’re thriving. So are gentoo penguins: They’re waddling farther south, into areas that once were too icy for them. But the populations of chinstrap penguins and the sleek, black-headed Adélie penguins, which depend on sea ice, are declining. (Pictured above, gentoo penguins at Neko Harbor.)
“Shifts in penguin populations in the waters off Antarctica—the Southern Ocean—are warning signs that the ecosystem is being disrupted,” Scales writes. (Below left, the icy seascape is highly dynamic. “We watched one of these arches collapse,” says Peschak, who's a Nat Geo Explorer. Below right, the shifting elements transform the Southern Ocean’s icebergs.)
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