20140109_IS
Source: BBC Radio 4
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03nt8x8
Date: 09/01/2014
Event: Antarctic expedition used by "deniers" "as a brickbat to beat scientists and the science"
Attribution: BBC Radio 4, Inside Science
People:
- Andrew Luck-Baker: Senior producer, BBC Radio Science Unit
- Greg Mortimer: Geologist and mountaineer
- Dr. Adam Rutherford: Geneticist, author and broadcaster
- Professor John Turner: Leader of Climate Variability and Modelling group, British Antarctic Survey
Adam Rutherford: Regular listeners will know that we've been tracking the story of scientists and their Antarctic adventure since before Christmas. Led by Professor Chris Turney, a team of researchers have been retracing the steps of the intrepid Edwardian pioneer Douglas Mawson, a century after his scientific endeavour around the southern Pole. Well, it hasn't gone entirely according to plan. As you probably heard, the research vessel Academik Shokalskiy was trapped - "beset" in ice, in the jargon - on Christmas Eve, and on the 2nd January, the passengers were dramatically rescued on a helicopter from the Chinese ship Xue Long and flown to the icebreaker Aurora Australis. The Xue Long then became frozen in creeping ice as well. One of the rescued passengers was Radio 4's Andrew Luck-Baker, out on the expedition, making a programme for us. I spoke to him from the deck of the Australis, but first here he is, touching down from the chopper.
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Andrew Luck-Baker: We're now descending, and we can see the Aurora Australis! Look at that! Oh my goodness, what a sight! Huge vessel, compared to the Shokalskiy... And with a very gentle bump, we landed.
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Adam Rutherford: Andrew, that's you being winched onto the deck of the Australis. Where are you now?
Andrew Luck-Baker: I'm on, Adam. I'm on the top deck, I'm holding on for dear life. There's a satellite transmitter, which is allowing me to do this interview, and balanced on my knees is my laptop, and I've got my foot on my rucksack, to stop it being blown over the ship, in these winds that are gusting 40, 50 knots. So, yeah, it's not your regular studio interview, I can tell you that.
Adam Rutherford [laughs]: Well, I shall be brief. Of course, you're part of an expedition which is recreating Douglas Mawson's expedition in the Antarctic a hundred years ago. How is the situation you're in affecting the science schedule?
Andrew Luck-Baker: Well, since we became the - they call it "beset" in ice, the science more or less stopped. There's a little bit of recording temperature and salinity measurements of the water, you know, profiled down to the bottom of the sea. That went on a little bit - but, to be honest, that was about it.
Adam Rutherford: Were you scared?
Andrew Luck-Baker: Er... Well, to be frank, I never thought we were in serious danger. You know, boredom was - on some occasions, became a bit of an issue. But on the whole, I would say that most people tried to make the best of it.
Adam Rutherford: I know the conditions are extremely hostile and unpredictable but - we've been tracking the expedition since the beginning, since before the beginning - we've had Expedition Leader Chris Turney on this show a couple of times, including from the ice. What went wrong?
Andrew Luck-Baker: They're not altogether sure - the scientists aren't altogether sure at the moment. Speaking to Greg Mortimer, who's one of the co-leaders, he said: based on the data that they had, there was absolutely no reason to think that this event should happen, that day. And he's a man who has been down here for more than 20 consecutive Antarctic summers, so he does know his Antarctica.
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Greg Mortimer: It was an extraordinary event. It was unbelievable to watch. And I've spent a lot of time watching ice. And this was simply extraordinary. When we got stuck, we were within a mile or two of open water. A few days later, it was three or four miles of ice, and then, within a week, there was 22 nautical miles of ice between us and open water, closer to 40 kilometres. Now, all of that ice set like a gummy mix of concrete and superglue and - all put together, and, and nothing's going to move it for a long time, I don't think. There's a risk that that ice, that the ship is now trapped in, will become locked fast to the land, and could stay there for a very long time, which could ultimately lead to the ship being squashed and sunk, or for a very long time being beset. So, I think we've just seen a cataclysmic event.
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Adam Rutherford: That was Greg Mortimer, one of the co-leaders of the Mawson expedition. Before him, Andrew Luck-Baker. Great thanks to him - Radio 4's wandering ice-man. We have Professor John Turner with us now, he's from the British Antarctic Survey and he leads a project looking at climate change in the Antarctic. John, Greg just referred to this as a "cataclysmic event". It sounds like it was unprecedented. Can you predict these types of things?
John Turner: Well, we know the Antarctic is a very stormy place. Even in the middle of summer, as we are now, storms constantly go round the Antarctic, and they can cause the movement of ice. I think the problem with this expedition was there was a breakout of fast ice. Fast ice is multi-year ice that is quite thick - two, three, four metres, perhaps, held fast against the edge of the Antarctic continent. And a strong storm moved that out. And that's almost impossible to predict. We can predict the weather several days ahead with some accuracy these days, in the Antarctic. These breakouts are very difficult, and so it was quite an extreme event.
Adam Rutherford: John, you're a veteran of the Antarctic. How difficult is it to monitor ice floes and ice behaviour at the Poles?
John Turner: Well, we now have some quite impressive satellite imagery, with the resolution really of less than a kilometre. That allows ships to navigate through the ice. But it is so dynamic, that's the big problem we have. The winds are constantly changing around the Antarctic, and so an area can open up, and a ship can move into what we call a polynya, an area of ice-free ocean. And then the winds can change, as happened to the Shokalskiy, and they can be closed in and pinned for a length of time.
Adam Rutherford: It has been an exciting and a high-profile expedition, and this event - the ship being beset in ice - it has been used by climate change deniers in the press, as a brickbat to beat scientists and the science. In fact, an interview that we did with Chris Turney before Christmas has been cited in the press. What is - what is the scientific response to these attacks?
John Turner: Well, you have to be very careful to split between weather and climate. What we've had here was a weather event. We've had some storms, they've moved ice around. In another year, you could have fantastic weather. There could be very few storms. You have to be careful to try and look at how the ice is changing in the longer term, over the decades. We only have really quite short records of sea ice around the Antarctic. They start in the late '70s. But they show that we have a slight overall increase in ice - not a huge increase, less than 1%. And that really is quite in contrast to what's happening in the Arctic - in the Arctic, we've had a remarkable loss of sea ice, over the last 34 years or so. But in the Antarctic, this small increase, I think, is so small we can't really say it's caused by human activity - it seems to be within the bounds of natural variability of the Earth system.
Adam Rutherford: A 1% increase in sea ice... You can have some sympathy or some understanding of why climate sceptics might use that to attack the whole concept of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
John Turner: Yes, but a 1% increase in the extent of sea ice is really a very small amount. We don't know how Antarctic sea ice would change without, say, the ozone hole, which we know has had a big impact on the Antarctic, or without increasing greenhouse gases. And that's one of the reasons we look at the Antarctic ice cores. They provide a record of temperature, to an extent the extent of sea ice, before we had an impact on the climate system. People think that really the human impact of increasing greenhouse gases only started in the 19th century, and we can look before that, to try and get an estimate of what the natural variability of the system is. And a 1% increase, I believe, is within the bounds of natural variability. So we can't really infer global change from a measurement like that.
Adam Rutherford: It must be frustrating, having to answer these types of criticism, when the whole point of going out on expeditions like that is to gather data about climate change.
John Turner: Well, no-one questions the data more than scientists. We're constantly trying to find better records. We have incomplete data - the Antarctic is a huge place and we only have a small number of research stations in the coastal area, and we have large areas of the interior, where we have no observations made by humans. And we're only too aware of the sparseness of the data that we have. But as we get longer records, as we get better methods for looking at the longer-term changes, through ice cores or ocean sediment cores, we do start to get a feel for how the system will vary naturally.
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Adam Rutherford: John Turner, from the British Antarctic Survey. And the hopeful news is that there has been some movement of the ice, for the two beset ships. You can hear Andrew Luck-Baker's full tale of the expedition, from the gin and tonics on deck to the science, to the emergency evac, in Frozen in Mawson's Footsteps, a special documentary here on Radio 4, on the 29th January.