Antarctica (11 page)

The whole thing begins in April, just after the sea has hardened for the winter, when males and females reconvene at the colony—a patch of sea ice usually in the lee of some cliffs or other nearby landmark. They quickly meet, woo and mate. Emperors are deeply loyal for the season, but like the Adélies they are serial monogamists. If last year's mate doesn't show up on time, they will quickly find someone else. They have to. Time is too short to tarry. Those that have paired will stand slightly out of the crowd, billing and cooing a little to make sure they are fully imprinted on each other.

A few weeks later, the female will lay a single egg, which drains much of her body's remaining reserves. In a delicate operation, she carefully shifts it on to her mate's feet. Even here, which is one of the most northerly colonies in Antarctica, temperatures can by now be as low as -4°F, and if an egg touches the ice for more than a few minutes, the chick inside will perish.

The female will now disappear; she will walk until she finds open water, and then feed herself furiously to make up for the weight she has lost. The male will be left holding the egg, for two months, sometimes more. He can't eat. He can only wait, and hope. The nights will grow darker and longer, the temperature colder, storms and winds will whip up into a frenzy. But he must shut down and carry on. He has a special silhouette, hunched and quiet. Only if he stands up and stretches can you see the flash of white that is the egg, before he settles down again, draping his stomach, keeping his infant warm.

Caroline's research was about what happens during that long dark winter after the females have left and before the eggs have hatched. She became fascinated by how the males can survive the cold, the hunger and the wind. So four years ago she chose five males that had successfully mated and would therefore be incubating eggs, caught and instrumented them before the females left, and then watched them throughout the winter.

The instruments were complicated. Working with the doctor in a specially adapted operating theatre, wearing blue hospital gowns, hair nets, sterile rubber gloves and using sterile green sheets, she surgically implanted a data logger to record the temperature just under the skin and the bird's core temperature.
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On its back, she glued another logger measuring temperature and light levels. She painted a number on its white breast using a homemade preparation of a black waterproof liquid, and stuck a piece of coloured tape under the feathers on its back. That way she could use binoculars to see either the colour or the number, depending on whether the bird was facing inwards or out.
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Didn't the operation and the instruments bother the penguins? ‘No. We followed them closely and they behaved completely naturally. They still had eggs, chicks, went out to sea. We really do care about not disturbing them. They need to live their life. If not we don't get good data.'

And then her professional detachment left her for a moment. ‘I went almost mad with them,' she says. ‘I had to know everything. They're so human-like you really get attached. If they're not marked you can't follow them, you don't recognise them. But for the marked males I watched everything. If you spend three hours every day watching, taking notes, by the end you need it. When the weather was too bad with snow and wind and I had to stay here it was frustrating. It's like a drug. I needed to see them. You get addicted, you want to know what they're doing, is the female back? Does he still have the egg? Is everything OK? In some ways they were my experiment. In some ways they were my friends.'

Unlike virtually all other seabirds, emperors are not at all territorial. They don't even have their own nest sites, unless you count their feet. Instead, charmingly, they actually huddle together to stay warm.
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And it works. Caroline's experiments show that temperatures within the huddle can be searing. In a lab, the magic numbers for an emperor penguin are between 14°F and 68°F. Above that range the penguins start to sweat. Below, they have to expend extra energy to lift their temperatures upwards. In between, they're happy.

But the sensors Caroline implanted showed that inside the huddle, the temperature of the penguins' skin often shot up above the magic 68°F mark and sometimes got as high as 98.6°F. They ought to have overheated, but they didn't. The core temperature stayed absolutely set at 96.8°F, the optimum value to incubate the eggs.

Caroline thinks that the birds selectively shut down their metabolism depending on how warm they get. From the outside the temperature is bitter, the winds biting. But inside the huddle, the birds are drowsy and warm. It's as if they're in a deep sleep, hibernating vertically, with an occasional shuffle to shift whose turn it is to take the outside slot, and turn their broad black backs against the wind and snow.
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Now the emperors' achievement sounded less like a heroic struggle against the odds, and more like a warm bath or a long lie-in. When I said this to Caroline, she shrugged. ‘Emperors are Zen. They know how to be here in the winter. We can learn a lot from them.

‘A plumber who wintered with me said that Adélies are like the summer people, frantic, all over the place, so much to do! Emperors are like winterers. They're quiet, calm and focused. The winterers here leave car, home, France, everything behind. To survive here in the winter you have to cooperate, just like the penguins.'

That afternoon I went back out on to the sea ice, this time on my own. Already the mood had changed; the sky was darkening and the wind was rising. Though the chicks came back up to me, they now had chunks of hard wet snow lodged in their downy fur. I tried to imagine how it would feel to spend a winter out here on the ice. That morning, lying in the pleasant sunshine, I had been halfjoking when I talked to Caroline about long lie-ins and warm baths. But now that every bit of my exposed skin was being whipped by the growing wind, I felt a proper respect for the emperors.

Their story was certainly a romantic one. Caroline had described the scene when the long-awaited females return from their foraging. Each will pause on the edge of the vast huddles of males, sing, stop, listen for an answer, and walk on. Three or four times she will sing, then—among the calls of thousands—she hears the answer she has been waiting for. She brightens, lifts her head. The male shuffles eagerly towards her, balancing the egg or perhaps even the chick. And the two birds hug. They really do. They press their chests up against each other and stroke each other's heads.

I saw now that this wasn't anthropomorphising the birds so much as putting affection in its proper place in nature. The emperors hug for more or less the same reason that we humans do. Evolution insists on that level of connection and commitment for all of us, as a necessary counter to the harshness of the world outside.

I also thought of what Caroline said at the end. ‘To survive here in the winter you have to cooperate, just like the penguins.' That's how Apsley Cherry-Garrard and his two companions made it out of their appalling winter journey. They huddled together in their makeshift igloo. They said ‘please' and ‘thank you' and kept each other's hopes alive.

That evening the wind picked up even more. As we ate in the dining room we heard it tuning up outside and then launching into a full-blooded symphony. It started with a rumbling bass, then a throaty roar, with a high-pitched whistling and whining around the windows. As the intensity increased, the middle register came in and I could feel the building swaying slightly. Someone said that it had reached 100 knots.

After the dessert plates were cleared by today's band of waiters, everyone else gathered around the large TV screen for a showing of
Braveheart,
but I pulled on my parka and slipped outside. The blast of the wind in my face took my breath away. Imagine riding full tilt on a motorbike without a helmet. Imagine sticking your head out of the window of a speeding intercity train. I hung on to the railing helplessly for a moment until I could steady my feet against the onslaught. I pulled on my goggles and, bowing my head and shoulders, I dragged my way up the steel walkway and on to one of the paths that has a rope strung alongside—I now knew why.

The Adélies lay impassively on their nests. They were hunkered down, drawn into themselves so that they had become the shape and size of rugby balls; they were facing into the wind, their eyes closed, their feathers caked in snow. Unobserved by them, or indeed by anyone else, I dragged my way round to the lee of the hill that tops the island. This felt crazy. Already my shoulders were starting to ache.

Once in the wind shadow of the hill, I could stand more or less upright; there were still strong gusts but I was free of that relentless onslaught. I made my way carefully down to the water. The wind was coming from behind, from the continent. It was born up on the domes that marked the high points of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The still, cold air spilled down the sides of these domes, gathering momentum as it fell, Niagara-like, until it reached the coast with the force of a hurricane. From where I sat, wedged up against a rock at the water's edge, I could actually see the wind arriving around the sides of the hill. It sent the snow on the ground curling upwards like smoke, and skimmed across the surface of the water leaving stippled waves and spray in its wake.

I decided to try to climb up the hill, but soon I was on hands and knees, and then lying almost flat and inching upwards, while the gusts threatened to pull me away from the rocks I was clinging to. I hadn't even reached the top when, raising my head slightly, I felt the full force of the wind like a water cannon and I was shaken. This wasn't fun any more. Spooked now, I stumbled and tripped back down to the nearest walkway where I dragged myself back to the dorm building. I was out for only two hours. Habitations and help were always at hand. I couldn't begin to imagine how the early explorers coped with those conditions out on the ice, on their own.

The next morning the wind had abated just enough for me to fight my way out to inspect the damage. I rounded the hill and stared south in astonishment. Between us and the mainland there was now nothing but clear blue water. The solid sea ice that I had walked on the previous day had blown clean away, taking the emperors and chicks with it.

The penguins wouldn't especially care. They would be used to it. Now they would be off somewhere in the sea, huddled together on the floating ice floes beloved of cartoonists. But even though I'd been out last night in the wind's full fury, I still couldn't believe that it could pick up an entire stretch of solid sea ice and whisk it all away.

 

When Australian geologist Douglas Mawson hatched his plan to explore the newly discovered Adélie Land, west of Cape Adare, he had no idea that he was choosing one of the windiest spots on the windiest continent on Earth. Perhaps he would have come here anyway. He was, above all, a scientist. He had no interest in stunts such as a dash to the geographic South Pole, a random point in a featureless landscape that is the notional axis around which the Earth spins but has otherwise little to recommend it. Instead, as part of Shackleton's
Nimrod
expedition, Mawson had travelled to the south magnetic pole, a much more scientifically satisfying spot that marked the place where all the Earth's magnetic field lines gather together—and could help explain the behaviour of compasses the world over.

Now Mawson wanted more. Adélie Land offered the dual prospect of exploring further the strange magnetic fields around the south geomagnetic pole, as well as performing geological studies that could connect this unknown terrain with previous explorations to the east.

Mawson would have been a valuable member of anyone's team. He was six feet three, physically strong, relentlessly determined and an intellectual powerhouse. And he had Antarctic form. Scott had already tried to persuade Mawson on to his latest expedition, even offering him a guaranteed place in the sledging team that would make the latest attempt on the Pole. Not a chance. Mawson had his own scientific agenda and he was sticking to it.

So on 8 January 1912, just a week before Scott's team would be trudging wearily to the geographic pole, Mawson's own Australasian Antarctic Expedition steamed into a bay just to the east of what is now Dumont d'Urville. Even while they were unloading their equipment and building their huts, Mawson and his men began to realise what they might be up against. The winds were extraordinary. The invisible air picked up materials and equipment weighing hundreds of pounds and flung them around like matchsticks, before shattering them on the rocks. Mawson and his expeditionary team learned the art of ‘hurricane walking', leaning so far into the wind that it seemed they were perpetually on the point of crashing face first into the ground (and when, on occasion, the mischievous wind dropped for a moment, so did the hurricane walkers).

Describing the experience drove the pragmatic Mawson to poetic heights: ‘The climate proved to be little more than one continuous blizzard the year round; a hurricane of wind roaring for weeks together, pausing for breath only at odd hours,' he wrote.
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‘A plunge into the writhing storm-whirl stamps upon the senses an indelible and awful impression, seldom equalled in the whole gamut of natural experience. The world a void, grisly, fierce and appalling. We stumble and struggle through the Stygian gloom; the merciless blast—an incubus of vengeance—stabs, buffets and freezes; the stinging drift blinds and chokes.'
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One of Mawson's colleagues, a young lieutenant named Belgrave Ninnis, who had been passed on to Mawson from Shackleton, took a more whimsical approach to his description. ‘It really looks as if there must have been a large surplus of bad weather left over after all the land had been formed at the Creation, a surplus that appears to have been dumped down in this small area of Antarctica.'
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