"Mr. Guo, who obtained his pilot’s license at 17, was aiming to become the first person to fly solo in a small aircraft to all seven continents...."

"Antarctica was the only continent where he had yet to land, he said. On Saturday at about 5:30 a.m., he took off from Punta Arenas, a city near the southern tip of Chile, with a flight plan indicating that he was going to fly over the city and land again in Punta Arenas, prosecutors said. But without notifying aviation authorities, Mr. Guo flew his Cessna 182Q across the Southern Ocean and landed at a Chilean airstrip on King George Island at about 11:30 a.m., prosecutors said. Prosecutors said that Mr. Guo had submitted 'false flight plan data' and that when he deviated from that plan, aviation officials declared that his Cessna had been 'lost.'..."

From "Teenage Aviator Detained After Landing in Antarctica, Chile Says/Ethan Guo, 19, had been documenting his attempt to fly solo to all seven continents on social media. He is no longer in custody but has no easy way to leave an island off Antarctica’s coast" (NYT).

"There are basically only two major continents. Antarctica and everything else..."

"... since South America is connected to North America through Panama, North America is connected to Asia through the Bering Strait, and Asia is connected to Europe, Africa and Australia through the Urals, the Sinai and Indonesia, respectively."

From "How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers" (NYT)(free-access link so you can read the definitions and so forth).

I've quoted the position of one geologist, but another says that there could be a third continent, Zealandia, which might not be sufficiently connected to Australia to deserve inclusion in the everything-but-Antarctica continent. There are also geologists who say 6 or 5 or 8 or 9. Just don't say 7.

How many people should be traveling to Antarctica every year? Was that "rogue wave" a wake up call?

I've already blogged about the rogue wave that killed one cruise passenger, but I want to take up the question whether Antarctica ought to be visited at all anymore — or at least not routinely by bucket-listers on cruise ships.

I'm reading "Rogue Wave Strikes Cruise Ship, Killing a Passenger and Injuring 4 Others/The passengers were hurt after a large, unpredictable wave hit the ship, which was traveling toward the Antarctic, Viking Cruises said" (NYT):

Tourism to the Antarctic has steadily increased in the last 30 years, with 74,401 people traveling there in the 2019-20 season, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. Roughly 6,700 people traveled there in the 1992-93 season, according to the association....

"One cruise passenger died and four others were injured during an Antarctica voyage this week when a 'rogue wave' slammed into the Viking Polaris..."

WaPo reports.

"The Endurance22 Expedition has located the wreck of Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship which has not been seen since it was crushed by the ice and sank in the Weddell Sea in 1915."

The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust annnounces.

Clear video of the wreck (in what the leader of the expedition calls "a brilliant state of preservation"):

Here's the NYT article, "At the Bottom of an Icy Sea, One of History’s Great Wrecks Is Found/Explorers and researchers, battling freezing temperatures, have located Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s ship that sank in the Antarctic in 1915." 

Under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, the six-decade-old pact intended to protect the region, the wreck is considered a historical monument. The submersibles did not touch it; the images and scans will be used as the basis for educational materials and museum exhibits...

Shackleton left England aboard Endurance with a crew of 27 in 1914, bound for a bay on the Weddell Sea that was meant to be the starting point for an attempt by him and a small party to be the first to cross Antarctica....

And let me recommend the excellent New Yorker article, "The White Darkness/A solitary journey across Antarctica" by David Grann (available at Amazon in book form). Excerpt: 

He had studied with devotion the decision-making of Shackleton, whose ability to escape mortal danger was legendary, and who had famously saved the life of his entire crew when an expedition went awry. Whenever Worsley faced a perilous situation—and he was now in more peril than he’d ever been—he asked himself one question: What would Shacks do?

"Amid a record hot summer in large parts of the Northern Hemisphere, beset by devastating fires, floods and hurricanes, Antarctica was mired in a deep, deep freeze...."

"The average temperature at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station between April and September, a frigid minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius), was the coldest on record, dating back to 1957. This was 4.5 degrees lower than the most recent 30-year average at this remote station.... The extreme cold over Antarctica helped push sea ice levels surrounding the continent to their fifth-highest level on record in August.... Matthew Lazzara, an expert on the meteorology of Antarctica and scientist at the University of Wisconsin, monitored the South Pole temperatures in recent months from his office in Madison with awe. In an interview, he said it was around minus-100 degrees on numerous occasions.... Scientists stressed that the record cold over the South Pole in no way refutes or lessens the seriousness of global warming. Antarctica is notorious for its wild swings in weather and climate, which can run counter to global trends." 

From "South Pole posts most severe cold season on record, a surprise in a warming world/While the rest of the world sizzled, the South Pole shivered with an average temperature of minus-78 degrees over the past six months" (WaPo).

"Down at the base, the dome of the endless sky is its own prison. To look up at it is to see just how far away from God one can be."

"It's not quite hell, a place in which God has a unique, almost competitive interest. It's just a place he would never think to look — a place he ignores, a place where, left to our own devices, we become exactly who we are."

The novelist Gary Shteyngart imagined how it really unfolded, down in Antarctica, where a Russian scientist, Sergey Savitsky, stabbed a co-worker, the welder Oleg Beloguzov, purportedly because Beloguzov was spoiling the ending to the novels Savitsky was reading.

I strongly recommend that you listen to the audio reading (by Shteyngart, who is Russian). It's one of the best things I've ever heard on "The American Life." Transcript here.

I listened once, then listened again, then went to Amazon and bought the Kindle and Audiobook versions of his Shteyngart's novel "Lake Success."

For a journalistic version of the real-life story Shteyngart imagined, here's "Antarctica scientist stabbed colleague for spoiling book endings" (from last October in the NY Post).

"When I packed my suitcase, it was as if I were doing the bidding of the money I’d paid."

Writes Jonathan Franzen, describing his feeling as he got ready for a cruise to Antarctica on a luxury ship that he'd chosen to make his girlfriend — who wasn't going after all — comfortable.

I love the whole story — in The New Yorker — but that sentence jumped out at me as the one to blog because it so quickly and precisely expresses a classic anti-travel feeling. And it goes beyond travel. Perhaps it would help in many situations as you are about to spend money to buy an experience — "Buy Experiences, Not Things" — to contemplate whether that experience, as it approaches, is going to feel as if you are doing the bidding of the money you paid.

How about reducing rising ocean levels by pumping seawater up onto Antarctica where it can freeze?

The difficulty is you'd have to pump 360 billion tons of water for each millimeter of seawater, and the oceans are said to be rising 3 millimeters per year. The energy it would take to shoot the water inland and up 2 miles would be 7 percent the energy generated worldwide. You could use wind turbines — and it is very windy in Antarctica — but you'd need 850,000 of them. And it would be screwing with the ecosystem of Antarctica, in violation of the Antarctic treaty.

Russia has built an Orthodox church in Antarctica....

... built from logs from Siberia, which you can see in a photo that illustrates a NYT article called "Countries Rush for Upper Hand in Antarctica."

It made me think of the old Bob Dylan song "I Shall Be Free No. 10":

Well, I don’t know, but I’ve been told
The streets in heaven are lined with gold
I ask you how things could get much worse
If the Russians happen to get up there first
Wowee! pretty scary!

That song is from 1964 and the reference is to the race to get to the moon. We'd been led to feel that it would be a disaster if the Russians got there first:

[I]f we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny... Now it is time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise....

Make America great again. I think President Kennedy said that.

"Back in London, enjoying my photos of ethereal icescapes and brilliantly comic penguins, I wonder again whether I should feel guilty for having been in Antarctica?"

Asks Juliet Rix at the end of a BBC.com piece titled with another question: "Should tourists be banned from Antarctica?" The article is peppered with similar questions: "Should I be here? Am I, just by setting foot on this extraordinary continent, disturbing a pristine environment and polluting the last great wilderness on earth?

She supplies the answer from a "polar expert" named Jane Rumble: "No, just do what you can to preserve it." Well, that's ambiguous! It's apparently the answer to the "should I feel guilty?" question, and the answer to that could be: No, because that's just self-absorbed obsessing within your own mind. It's not doing a damned thing to preserve Antarctica. But should you stay away and guilt-trip others into not going? That would be something you could do to preserve it.

I'm just trying to understand the wit and wisdom of polar expert Jane Rumble.

"A scientific mission ship, trapped in dense pack ice off East Antarctica, is still awaiting rescue after a Chinese icebreaker failed to reach it."

"The Snow Dragon icebreaker was itself stalled by heavy ice, officials say."

Although trapped for the moment, the scientists are continuing their experiments. They have been measuring temperature and salinity through cracks in the surrounding ice.....

The goal of the modern day Australasian Antarctic Expedition is to repeat many of the original measurements and studies of the Mawson expedition to see how facets of the environment have changed over the past century.

Here's the Spirit of Mawson page about the current expedition.

Picturing Antarctica.

From the Tumblr Maps on the Web (via Business Insider)...

Antarctica without all the ice:



Antarctica and the U.S.A.:

Does anyone really care, or are we just following the rules?

It's terrible that China, forbidden to use lead in children's jewelry, may have switched to cadmium, which is more toxic than lead.

But do we notice when our own morality works the same way? For example, here's a section from a NYT article called "The 31 Places to Go in 2010":

9. Antarctica
This may be the last year that Antarctica is open to mass tourism — not because the ice is melting too fast (though it is), but because of restrictions that would severely curtail travel around the fragile continent.

Until recently, most vessels passing through Antarctica were limited to scientific expeditions, but an exploding number of tourists now flock to what is arguably the world’s last great wilderness. The tourism boom, scientists argue, poses a major environmental threat. Indeed, several passenger ships have run aground in recent years.

Countries that manage Antarctica are calling for limits on the number of tourist ships, for fortified hulls that can withstand sea ice and for a ban on the use of so-called heavy oils. A ban on heavy oil, which is expected to be adopted by the International Maritime Organization later this year, would effectively block big cruise ships.

With the new rules taking effect within two years, tour operators are promoting 2010 as the last year to visit Antarctica, while, at the same time, procuring lighter vessels that would be permitted. Abercrombie & Kent, for example, is introducing a new ship, Le Boreal (www.abercrombiekent.com), which its public relations firm argues “meets all the environmental regulations, so access to Antarctica via A&K will not be affected.”

Launching this year, the compact luxury ship holds 199 passengers and features an outdoor heated pool, steam rooms and private balconies that offer intimate views of some of the world’s remaining glaciers.

So, go now, because it's not banned yet? If you actually cared, you wouldn't go at all! But the NYT passes along — in quotes — the PR from one ship company, whose ship purportedly meets the new standards. Just meet the standards, and you — as opposed to that "flock" of tourists — can cruise right into that fragile environment. You can snuggle up with your "intimate views" of the frigid continent that you imagine you love so much.

But that's not all. The NYT is tipping us off right now: There are only 2 years left to scoot down there in one of the big non-luxury ships. Why put Antarctica on the list of places to go in 2010 unless you mean to get out the message to the people who aren't going to be able to afford the "compact luxury ship"? Connect the dots! You're supposed to scoot down there while it's still affordable, before the rules kick in.

***

Now, I know there is this kind of morality that says that voluntary individual action has too little effect. We need rules to control what the hordes of people do. We were just discussing that here a month ago in connection with an environmentalist's op-ed that said "Stop 'going green.'" What we want are rules, and then we will follow them?

So China makes kids' jewelry with cadmium, and tourists flock to Antarctica, and we do all manner of selfish, harmful things, because it's not against the rules yet.