|
Superlatives in Antarctica
Antarctica is quite simply the biggest, highest, driest, emptiest, windiest, coldest, continent on Earth.
Being best – and worst – doesn’t necessarily make it attractive. What is fascinating about Antarctica is ‘that thing’; that special element of the universe.
But lets deal with its superlatives first.
Biggest. It is twice the size of Australia, which doesn’t sound so big until you realise that the Antarctic’s circumference is the length of a walk from the planet’s North to South Pole..
Highest. Most of its land is above 2,000 metres, which is higher than Johannesburg, among the notable high-altitude cities in the world. But Antarctic’s land is under ice which piles up to about 3,500 metres. Thus, at an average height of 11,500 feet above sea-level, its boundless flatlands are higher than most countries’ mountains.
Driest. Average rainfall is less than 12cm these days! However, in eons past – long before the biblical Flood - it gathered in lots of rain, and two-thirds of the world’s fresh water remains locked up in its icefields. (So:- there lies water just waiting to be towed in iceberg-fulls down the cold Benguela and Humboldt currents and siphoned into West Coast deserts.)
Emptiest. It’s a helluva lot emptier than Greenland or Patagonia, which are helluva empty. In fact life itself stops short of Antarctica.
Cleanest. Regular life gets no further than onto the ice at its edges. Which makes upcountry a nice clean, perfect place.
Windiest. Wind reaches 200km per hour, with no trees or office blocks to stop it. The air goes up the pole in the late Sixties latitudes and goes hurtling round the world westwards on the Southern Ocean among the ‘Roaring Forties’ and the “Furious Fifties’. However. . . these westerlies are met with a stubborn Eastward Drift along the continental coastline, and the clash creates interesting and unmatched turbulence. Too much for rubbish-strewing beach picnickers, fortunately..
Coldest. The temperature is always ‘minus’, and in winter it averages minus 50 degC. What more can one say?
The above is an interpretation of facts which I culled from a travel book by Tony Soper, “Antarctica – a guide to wildlife’, found in the ship’s library while we were in Patagonia. None of this gives any good reason for going to Antarctica. The reason, I believe, for getting obsessed with the place is bound up in remoteness, solitude, primeval forces, and all that jazz. After doing much research, I tried to explain it for a recent book of mine.
“The reach of Antarctica's brooding presence is as much metaphysical as it is geographical.
It is a vast emptiness - a mirror reflecting to the solar system our pinpoint place in the universe. It is a fog-shrouded, ice-hidden circular continent with a circumference half that of the globe. The Superintendent of the US Naval Observatory and Hydrographic Office described it in 1855 as "a sixth part of the entire land surface of our planet (which is) as unknown to the inhabitants of earth as is the interior of one of Jupiter's satellites". The analogy has hardly altered, despite a century and a half of exploration and technological progress, and despite the declaration of the International Geophysical Year when 30,000 scientists in 66 nations took part in multinational explorations of the ice-bed of Antarctica.
The enormous silence of the ice reaches into the mind. It is a silence broken only by the thin rare cry of a bird, and the wild sounds of winds and waves. For it is here that the global oceans mix in a cauldron of cyclones, blizzards and storms; where much of the world's weather is brewed. Unlike the Arctic, which is a sea covered in ice where the mean temperature is a "relatively comfortable" minus 18°c, the Antarctic is a continent on which is dumped 96 percent of the world's ice, and where the average winter minimum temperature is a numbing minus 50°c. . .
. . .As the polar night approaches, pack-ice expands at an average rate of 4,2 km a day, covering 100,000 square kilometres every 24 hours. By September, at its maximum, the pack-ice has increased the "solid" surface of the Antarctic by 20,000,000 sq km - an addition that is the equivalent of a seventh continent nearly as big as Africa itself.. .
The Antarctic is so weighed down by its cliffs of ice, it deforms the planet. Africa, America and Australasia droop down towards this heavy end of the globe which has become very slightly pear-shaped from Antarctica's weight. Its pack-ice, reaching within 1,600 sea miles of Cape Town - much closer than Mauritius - marks the limits of life on Earth.”
(Have Wings Will Fly- Harvey Tyson, Horizon Books,1998)
The question is:
Is it worth going there?
At my age?
In a second-hand Siberian ice-breaker with only vodka aboard?
We shall need something more spiritual than that.
Postscript. Newspapers around the world reported recently that if global warming were to continue at its present rate, the Antarctic would become the only continent worth living on after 2050. I doubt if the report will prove true, but I’m glad I shan’t be here. . . just in case it is true . . . because it won’t be a pretty sight watching mankind crowding and polluting the last decently empty space on Earth.
[Try Travel - Cape Horn]
|
