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The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica

Some like it cold

Meredith Hooper
Profile Books, 320pp, £20,

Stanley Johnson

Wednesday, 7th November 2007

Stanley Johnson

I first went to Antarctica in the (Antarctic) summer of 1984 on board the John Biscoe, a research and supply ship belonging to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Over a period of several weeks we visited various BAS stations on the Antarctic peninsula, including a small station known as Faraday at which vital measurements of the Earth’s ozone layer were being conducted. I remember climbing up into the loft with my fellow-passenger and now good friend Adrian Berry, science correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, past piles of cornflake packets, Bovril jars and tins of Horlicks which were stored for convenience in the roof, to see the Dobson’s photo-spectrometer at work. A few months later Jo Farman, a BAS scientist working at Faraday, produced incontrovertible evidence of the ‘ozone hole’, a dramatic thinning of the layer of gases protecting us all from the sun’s ultra-violet radiation. Alarm bells ringing, the UN sprang into action. International treaties were signed under which the production of CFCs, the chief culprit, would be drastically curtailed.

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