Photos by Lois Parshley, Antartica
Shifting Ice, Rising Seas
sleeping bags. In the morning we woke with the dawn, the sun turning the cold dark channel into a glowing bridge of light. The white surrounding us was transformed into glowing rose, the shadows streaks of shocking magenta. The tips of the mountains were butter yellow, and the clear old ice in the bergs we passed going back to the ship shone in multicolored prisms. We might have been the first and last people to ever see that island. Two days later, as we were re-crossing Drake Passage, the Wilkins ice bridge broke. The Wilkins ice bridge had connected Charcot Island and Latady Island in the Bellinghausen Sea— the last intact portion of the northern edge of the Wilkins ice shelf. Warmed by increasing sea temperatures, the bridge began to melt rapidly, the warmer water creating runnels, then fissures, and finally crevasses until the whole bridge thunderously caved in on itself. The rush of water and scattered bergs swept away from the ice shelf towards the island where we had slept, in a thunderous and terrifying heralding of what is to come. When we first arrived in Antarctica, the mountains around Bellinghausen had seemed too large to take in. It seemed 56
impossible to comprehend this place where the strangeness of reality surpassed imagination. Out of sight of land in a small vessel on a warming ocean, we heard the news that the ice bridge had broken. It was only then that the trip became real for me, as I realized how easily my own life could have ended on that tenuous ice island, floating in the most rapidly warming place on earth. At that moment, the reality of Antarctica and climate change hit me full force. The harsh landscape we had just left, the innumerable actions taken around the world that warmed the ocean and melted the ice, the complex science and fragile workings of our world: it all seemed so unfathomable. Antarctica seemed like a place that humankind had barely touched, still as mysterious today as it was in 1820. Yet the collapsing of the ice bridge assaulted my illusion and detachment. Antarctica was no longer unreal and far away. The large-scale destruction of warming oceans and the complexity of climate change science and politics no longer seemed abstract. On the boat that night, the air seemed crisper, the outlines of things doubly sharp, and I could see vividly our global peril.