Category: Polar Times Article

The Powerhouse of the Southern Ocean

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Here is a preview of what is inside The Polar Times latest issue, Autumn/Winter 2024-2025.

Claire Christian, Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC)

Last year, I wrote about Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) in The Polar Times. While krill may be less photogenic than the penguins, whales and seals of the Southern Ocean, they are critically important to Antarctic ecosystems, and is currently one of the main subjects of an important policy discussion happening in the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS): how do we weigh a growing interest in commercial krill fishing against the needs of an ecosystem increasingly under pressure from climate change? This year, there have been some interesting developments in that discussion.

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Penguins and Polar Bears 2024

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We care not just because they are in our logo but because the loss of sea ice due to climate change is rapidly changing the two polar regions. Both the polar bear and emperor penguin are forecasted to lose most of their habitat by 2100! For more information about how the two species are doing, please check out Oceanities annual State of Antarctic Penguins report and Polar Bears International.

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World Penguin Day

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Viking Expeditions

To celebrate World Penguin Day, our Antarctic cruising partner, Viking Expeditions is hosting yours truly on a Live Webcast today at 2pm Eastern.

Wishing you a wonderful World Penguin Day and as always thank you so much for your support.

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Auction: The Polar Library of Otto R. Norland

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Sagen & Delås

Otto Realf Norland was born in 1930 in Oslo. In 1950 he entered NHH (The Commercial University) in Bergen and obtained the university degree in 1953. Already same year he came to Hambros Bank in London as a trainee. After completing London’s Institute of Bankers in just over two years, setting a record in the City, he advanced rapidly to become successively Director, Managing Director and Partner in Hambros. An incredible career in the international financial service. In 2021 his book The Magic of Merchant Banking – My Years in the City of London was published in Oslo.

Norland’s profound passion for Polar exploration, both in the Antarctic and the Arctic, started already in 1938 at the age of eight. From his grandmother he got a nice copy of Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North. For a period Otto’s father Realph Norland had worked for Nansen and shortly before the Polar hero died in 1930, Otto had been sitting on Nansen’s knee during a visit to their home. In 2022 very few people can claim they met Fridtjof Nansen! In 1982 Norland was made a fellow of The Royal Geographic Society by Lord Shackleton.

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Endurance: Shackleton’s lost ship is found in Antarctic

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BBC | March 9, 2022:

The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915, forcing Shackleton and his men to make an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats.

Video of the remains show Endurance to be in remarkable condition. Even though it has been sitting in 3km (10,000ft) of water for over a century, it looks just like it did on the November day it went down.

Its timbers, although disrupted, are still very much together, and the name – Endurance – is clearly visible on the stern.

“Without any exaggeration this is the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen – by far,” said marine archaeologist Mensun Bound, who is on the discovery expedition and has now fulfilled a dream ambition in his near 50-year career. “It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation,” he told BBC News.

To read the complete article on BBC website, click here.

 

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The Oldest Ice on Earth May Be Hiding 1.5 Miles Beneath Antarctica

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LiveScience

European scientists looking for some of the oldest ice on the planet have homed in on a particular spot in Antarctica, where they will drill more than 1.5 miles (2.7 kilometers) below the surface of the ice.

Over the next five years, the “Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice” mission will work at a remote location known as “Little Dome C” to start drilling for ice up to 1.5 million years old, the team announced today (April 9) at the meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria.

“Ice cores are unique for geosciences because they are an archive of the paleo-atmosphere,” said Beyond EPICA’s coordinator Olaf Eisen of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

To read the complete article on LiveScience website, click here.

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