Some like it cold

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.

Today, we don’t hear much about the ozone hole and that is good news. International action has been effective. Global attention has shifted to man-made climate change, in particular to what the experts refer to as anthropogenic global warming. Massive research programmes are under way to determine to what extent the rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has led, or may lead, to rises in temperature on the Earth. As it happens, the Antarctic peninsula (where BAS did that crucial research on the ozone hole) is now warming up six times more than the average for the planet, even more than Siberia and Alaska.

What Meredith Hooper does so brilliantly is illustrate the impact of this warming on Antarctic wildlife, notably the Adélie penguins to be found at Palmer, the US research station on Anvers Island, which lies just off the northern Antarctic peninsula.