Polar Regions: Crystal Deserts

Remote and inaccessible, mountains tower above the valleys and plateaus where most of humanity seeks shelter, their rocky peaks emerging out of the mist like islands floating above the clouds. For early travellers, mountains’ brooding and daunting profile made them places to be avoided rather than embraced, the setting for harsh winters, violent winds and lashing rainfall, home to avalanches, floods and rockfalls. Yet there is a benevolent aspect to these most imposing of natural monuments that symbolises eternity, evoking the stillness and solitude that religious practitioners have always sought, witnessed by the temples and places of worship erected along their stark facades, somewhere pilgrims trek to pay their respects, the site of revelations and miracles, staircase to the gods.

A World Beyond Reality

Antarctica’s visible face is unlike anything else on Earth: a continent covered with ice surrounded by ocean, while the Arctic is an ice-covered ocean almost completely surrounded by land. Antarctica is a frozen desert: the coldest, driest, highest and windiest continent on the planet with snowfall less than 5 centimetres a year in the interior and air drier than the Sahara. Yet the profusion of Antarctica’s wildlife and the grandeur of its scenery glimpsed on a summer’s day are unrivalled: an artist’s canvas run wild with broad sweeps of whites and blues and greens, icebergs tinged with turquoise, snow of a dazzling brightness amid a swirling ocean of the deepest blue. Add to the mix the spectacle of millions of penguins and seals, creatures with aquiline contours who spend most of their time at sea in the Southern Ocean, venturing onto land only to breed during the brief Antarctic summer when the ice melts around the fringes of the Peninsula – the continent’s wiggly tail of bare rock. There may be fewer species here than in the Serengeti and less variety of habitat than in East Africa, but the sheer volume is overwhelming. 

South Georgia

Adding a pilgrimage to the rugged island of South Georgia is a must if you can afford it when planning a trip to Antartica. During summer, the island is host to four million Antarctic fur seals and 400,000 southern elephant seals. Smaller colonies of Weddell and crabeater seals haul out on the rocky beaches while sinuous leopard seals patrol just offshore in the kelp, ready to pick off gentoo, macaroni, chinstrap and rockhopper penguins as they move back and forth from colony to sea. Taking centre stage are tens of thousands of pairs of king penguins, which clog the bays and coves with their eye-catching presence. Intermingling with the black and white adults are their comically attired chicks, fat as butter in russet down coats, huddling together for warmth and protection in the world’s largest creche. 

Lessons from our Past

Witnessing this profusion of animal and bird life today, one is mindful of the slaughter that occurred here within living memory; humanity’s tendency to exploit other forms of life balanced against nature’s ability to recover. The discovery of South Georgia in the 18th century by Captain James Cook unleashed a gold rush of sealers and whalers. By 1825 around 1.2 million fur seals had been slaughtered to satisfy the hunger for sealskin coats and boots, principally in the UK and China. Whalers soon followed, killing the slower swimmers first: right whales, humpbacks and sperm whales; their oil and blubber provided lighting, margarine, soap, fertiliser and food supplements for farm animals. With the invention of fast, steam-powered catcher boats and explosive harpoons in the early 1900s, South Georgia became home to whaling stations such as Grytviken and Stromness that targeted the big, fast baleen species, the fin and blue whales. From the opening of Grytviken in 1904 until the time it closed its doors some 60 years later, 175,250 whales were processed. Today it is the whaling stations that are extinct and whales are a common sight around South Georgia again, while both fur and elephant seals have made spectacular recoveries. 

Emperors of the South

Most people who visit Antarctica will travel there in summer for just a week or two. The thought of experiencing the continent in winter chills the heart. It’s a time of bitter darkness, an alien world to humans. Yet this is breeding season for the most remarkable bird on the continent – the emperor penguin, standing 1 metre tall and with the highest feather density of any bird –15 feathers per square centimetre of skin. The emperors arrive at their rookery in March or April, by which time the sea ice has frozen solid for the winter season, providing the stable platform the birds depend on for breeding, feeding, moulting and as a refuge from predators. Both parents take turns feeding and protecting their chick through September and October, then in November chicks begin to grow their protective feathers, and the parents stop feeding them. In December adults and chicks (now fully fledged in waterproof feathers) abandon the colony and return to the ocean. 

Signs of Trouble

Penguins act as indicator species of climate change. With some hundred emperor breeding colonies scattered around the Antarctic continent, in recent times their ability to breed successfully has been hindered in some of these locations by the fast ice melting before the chicks are ready to enter the ocean. Scientists warn that emperors could go extinct by 2100 unless the world delivers on limiting global temperature rises to 1.5° Celsius. But it isn’t just the emperors that are feeling the effect of global warming. Populations of Adélie and chinstrap penguins are in decline on the Antarctic Peninsula, which has warmed by 5° Celsius in the past 60 years. The ice of Antarctica, like that of Greenland – but unlike Arctic ice – rests on land. Ice is slippery when wet and the more widespread the water beneath it, the greater the chance that the ice will become unstable and slide into the sea, something that is thought to have happened dozens of times over the past six million years. If it happened again, sea levels could rise by as much as 60 metres. Though this is unlikely, West Antarctica, which is divided from the rest of the continent by the Transantarctic mountain range, is already witnessing a significant retreat, with the potential to raise sea levels by between 1 and 3 metres by the end of this century. 

The importance of Antarctica

Thanks to analysis of ice cores, Antarctica is providing us with a unique record of what our climate has been like over the past one million years. While the last continent to be discovered is among the most vulnerable to climate change, it is also one of the greatest natural assets to mitigate it, with the Southern Ocean playing a vital role in the planet’s atmospheric pressure, humidity, air temperatures and wind patterns. Antarctica represents the largest surface area of snow and ice with the greatest albedo effect, a measure of the amount of solar heat bounced back into space that would otherwise become trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. The current retreat of ice and snow makes it inevitable that more heat will accumulate over time, causing ever more reflective sea ice to melt and potentially leading to a catastrophic runaway greenhouse effect. 

A Continent Dedicated to Science

Antarctica is the only continent on Earth without indigenous human inhabitants. For the moment it is a potent symbol of our good intentions towards the planet, a grand experiment in restraint, a place dedicated to science where no nation is permitted a military presence, it is a land of peace, a global laboratory with an obligation to protect the environment. If ever there was a case for establishing Antarctica as the planet’s first World Park, as envisioned by Greenpeace back in 1987, surely this must be it. 

Poles Apart: The Arctic Ocean

At the other end of the world the Arctic is drowning. Even as the ice melts beneath the giant fur-covered feet of the north’s iconic polar bears, nations are scrambling to lay claim to its watery depths, with a quarter of the planet’s oil and gas at stake. World powers such as Russia, Canada and the USA have an unprecedented chance to win navigation rights and resources in the Arctic seabed, untouched since its emergence during the twilight of the dinosaurs – with little concern for its original human or animal inhabitants. Unlike in the Antarctic, which is protected by international treaties, there are a host of issues that remain dangerously unresolved in one of the world’s most fragile and life-sustaining regions. On 2 August 2007, in a record-breaking dive, two Russian mini- submarines reached the seabed more than 4 kilometres beneath the North Pole. They planted a 1-metre-high titanium Russian flag on the underwater Lomonosov ridge, which Moscow claims is directly connected to its continental shelf. Andrei Ionin, a Russian military expert, commented, ‘This race shows that intellect is not the main thing but that resources still rule the day.’ As legendary physicist Stephen Hawking noted, pollution coupled with human greed and stupidity are still the biggest threats to humankind. 

 There could be no more powerful symbol of the state of the planet than the fate of the last 20,000 polar bears, a wild creature immortalised by the ancient Greeks, who named the bright shining northern constellation Arktos, the Bear. By this century’s end, polar bears could vanish as a result of the shrinking sea ice that they depend on as a platform to hunt seals, a direct consequence of global warming and our part in it. The life force of the great bear is dimming and flickering towards extinction at the hand of humankind. 

How you can help

People often ask us “how can we help?” It is easy to believe that as individuals our voices will never be heard; that we are powerless to make a difference, that we must wait for someone else to make the changes we believe are needed, that the government can and will fix it. But reconnecting people to nature and protecting our natural environment is an urgent mission of global proportions that needs a global response. That is why we created the SNI, to amplify our message of “inspire and educate if we are to conserve.” And it starts with you. Each of us must choose to be better informed about the environment. Knowledge gives us power. Only by knowing and understanding the issues and challenges we now face can we hope to conserve the things that are important. And what could be more important than a healthy natural environment for all? It starts at home by changing our way of doing things, Step by Step the Sacred Nature Way.

Donations

Many people tell us they would like to donate to an organisation that reflects their interests and has the ability to effect change. One of the key functions of the SNI is to inform you about what we believe is working in the field of conservation and what isn’t. It might be a particular species that interests you - lions, elephants, tiger, gorillas, pangolins or penguins. Or you may want to support an organisation that focuses on a particular ecosystem that you have visited such as the Mara-Serengeti or one that you feel mirrors your concerns. For each ecosystem highlighted in our Sacred Nature books and on the SNI Website we have identified organisations that we believe are making a difference and reflect the SNI ethos of Inspire-Educate-Conserve. And of course the SNI cannot fulfil its mission without both the emotional and financial support of sponsors and donors. If you would like to support our work please reach out to us at:

hello@sacrednatureinitiative.com

Additional resources: The Poles

We have included here additional resources such as books, articles, videos, podcasts and websites of organisations making a significant contribution to Reconnecting People to Our Planet and pioneering change.

The Arctic and Antarctic – natural realms at the poles

The Worst Journey in The World: Apsley Cherry-Garrard; with an introduction by Paul Theroux: The Lyon's Press, 2004.
Described as the best travel book ever written, The Worst Journey in the World is a 1922 memoir by Apsley Cherry-Garrard of Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in 1910–1913. 

Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica: Sara Wheeler: Modern Library, 1999

Antarctica: Exploring a Fragile Eden: Jonathan & Angela Scott: Collins, 2007

Arctic Dreams: Barry Lopez: Vintage, 1986.
Winner of the National Book Award. This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing.

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