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| ISBN-13: | 9781927249277 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Awa Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The ocean that doesn't exist 43°38'S
In 1953, with the stroke of a pen, the most important ocean on the planet disappeared.
The truth is the Southern Ocean had been shrinking for some time, retreating south and being eroded in increments. As gales roared over its waters and legions of albatrosses wheeled across its skies, bureaucrats and policymakers were busy plotting its demise.
It all started back in 1914, when the newly formed International Hydrographic Bureau attempted to agree on borders and names for the world's oceans and seas. Although this sounds like the basis of a Monty Python skit, it was a serious attempt at defining ownership of the unownable. Ten years later the bureau produced a publication entitled Limits of Oceans and Seas.
The Southern Ocean, one of the bureau's targets, had a venerable history. Captain James Cook had been one of the first to prove that the planet's deep south consisted of a single great body of water. This came as a disappointment: he had been hoping to find the fabled continent Terra Australis. When his voyages of the late 1770s produced nothing but endless sea dotted with tiny islands, the ocean was given over to whalers, sealers and sailors. These men gave it a multitude of names, among them Great Southern Ocean, Grand Ocean and Southern Icy Ocean.
Things remained that way until 1919, when the bureau officially named it the Southern Ocean; its northern boundary was drawn to neatly touch the coasts of South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The naming of the ocean gave formal recognition to what every sailor had known all along – that this was a singular, distinctive and significant body of water – but the bureau was never to reach such heights of common sense again. At each subsequent meeting it pushed the boundaries of its neighbouring oceans south, until in 1953 the Southern Ocean disappeared altogether.
A later edition of Limits of Oceans and Seas explained: 'The Antarctic or Southern Ocean has been omitted from this publication as the majority of opinions received since the issue of the 2nd Edition in 1937 are to the effect that there exists no real justification for applying the term Ocean to this body of water, the northern limits of which are difficult to lay down owing to their seasonal change. The limits of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans have therefore been extended South to the Antarctic Continent.'
Since then there have been attempts by the International Hydrographic Organization – as the bureau was renamed in 1970 – to reinstate the Southern Ocean but disagreement has always broken out among the delegates. Today such disparate parties as Encyclopaedia Britannica and the CIA recognise the Southern Ocean while the National Geographic Society chooses to ignore it.
As you may have concluded, the drawing of boundaries was always wishful thinking. The limits of this ocean move north and south with the seasons. Its howling west winds can reach as far north as latitude 35° South in the southern winter and retreat as far as 50° South in summer. For those who sail there, the ocean is felt as an unnerving and almighty power, a tightening somewhere deep in the gut.
The sailors who frequented these waters in the era of sailing ships gave the latitudes names: the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, the Screaming Sixties. They were describing the only thing that matters in the Southern Ocean – wind. Theirs were not yarns, dreamed up to scare the pants off landlubbers. The winds were real. They made this ocean the most feared on the planet. Even today, to say among sailors that you have sailed the Southern Ocean is like saying you have descended into hell. Their eyes brighten. They take you aside and ask tremulously, 'What was it like?'
That the Southern Ocean is one of the most consistently windy stretches of water on Earth is largely due to heat and pressure. The equatorial regions receive the vertical blaze of the sun and so have an excess of heat. The polar regions have a deficit of heat. Wind is the atmosphere's attempt to even out the difference, like the thermostat of an air-conditioning system. Where the air is cool it descends, causing high pressure; where it is hot it rises, causing low pressure. The fact the planet is rotating means that big masses of air and water do not follow a straight line but rather a spiral, which whirls towards the left in the southern hemisphere and toward the right in the northern hemisphere. This gets complicated very quickly and is the reason meteorologists earn their money.
Over the interior of Antarctica the air is cold, which means it can do only one thing – descend. On the edges of this large polar high, low-pressure systems drag warm air south and shunt cold air north, at the same time sending the relatively warm sea air upwards. Seen from a satellite the land mass looks like an icy kingdom surrounded by a marauding pack of spinning hounds, which encircle it as though at the perimeter fence of a drug lord's mansion.
It is the northernmost edges of this pack of hounds, known to meteorologists as 'deep low-pressure systems', which force a continuous flow of wind from west to east. As each low-pressure system passes, the flow goes from the warmer north-west to the cooler south-west and back again.
The waves these westerly winds generate are among the largest on the planet. The strength of a wind and the distance it has travelled – a combination known as 'fetch' – determine the height of waves. A small lake has a short fetch so it is capable of generating only a sharp chop, even in strong winds. An ocean such as the Atlantic has a few thousand nautical miles of fetch so it can generate a sizeable swell. When the Drake Passage opened up thirty million years ago it gifted the Southern Ocean an infinite fetch. This is the one ocean that has no land to break up the sea's endless circuit. Even on the calmest days, it has a constant heave from the west. On the worst days the size of the swell can make your heart stop.
Like the wind, the surface water of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which flows around the continent, is in a constant drift eastward. Eleven thousand three hundred and thirty-two nautical miles long, the current is a continuous loop moving over 130 million cubic metres of water a second – over a hundred times the flow of every river, stream and creek on Earth combined. It is a major redistributor of energy, a giant flywheel at the bottom of the world keeping the planet's air-conditioning system going. It also drives the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Ocean gyres, large swirling masses of water that reach as far north as the equator.
Below the surface currents of the Southern Ocean there are other currents, driven not by wind but by differences in water density. Antarctica is one of only two places that produce something known as deep water, the other being Greenland. Deep water is the densest sea water on the planet. It forms as sea ice leaches its salt into cold water. The density of the resulting water means it sinks to the bottom. For most of the Southern Ocean this is a drop of 4,000 to 5,000 metres.
This process sets in motion the entire world oceanic system. While the circulation of the oceans is an endless conveyor belt, scientists believe deep-water formation is critical to kick-starting and maintaining this immense transfer of energy.
You don't have to sail the Southern Ocean to guess that with all this water moving about there will be some spectacular collisions. The most impressive is the Antarctic Convergence zone, where cool dense Antarctic water moving north meets the relatively warmer water of the Subantarctic and creates an undulating ring of confusion up to twenty-six nautical miles wide around the Antarctic continent between latitudes 48° and 61° South. As the Antarctic water drives under the subantarctic water the vigorous mixing that results brings bottom nutrients to the surface, making the place one of the most productive zones in all the world's oceans and a bonanza for marine life.
For those who venture across it, the convergence zone denotes a change in the soul of the Southern Ocean. South of it the sea temperature drops, the fog rolls in and all hope of the north is lost. Things get serious with little chance of rescue: there is now a vast distance between you and the rest of humanity.
Further south you encounter the first sea ice. At about minus 1.8° Celsius sea water freezes and forms pancakes of ice, which then congeal into a solid frozen surface up to 120 centimetres thick. As winter approaches, vast swathes of the Southern Ocean freeze over, expanding the footprint of the Antarctic continent by up to twenty million square kilometres. By late January the ice begins to break up and is flushed north to dissolve into the wider reaches of the Southern Ocean. This expansion and contraction creates one of the largest annual events by mass on the planet.
If you speed up satellite images of the growth and disintegration of sea ice on a computer, what you see has a remarkable resemblance to a beating heart. This could be dismissed as the pure fancy of a Gaia theorist were it not for the fact that, beneath the vast structure of winter sea ice, a miniature upside-down forest of marine growth forms each spring as sun penetrates the ice, injecting large quantities of biota into the Southern Ocean.
Despite the physical enormity of the Southern Ocean, we still know very little about it. It circles Antarctica. It acts as a violent mixer of the Earth's air and water. It is the one ocean that links all the others. It is feared by sailors. Yet it remains firmly incognito.
While we could blame the International Hydrographic Organization for this, there's also another reason. On this ocean, humans can exist only in transition. The idea of real settlement is absurd: staying put is hard to achieve in an ocean hell-bent on picking you up and tumbling you east. So the ocean sits well out of sight at the bottom of the world, and any eyes drawn its way are blinded by the gleaming white of its glamorous companion, Antarctica.
CHAPTER 2
Bounty 47°45'S
It was my first voyage south: I was now a lecturer and Zodiac driver on a Russian icebreaker full of English birders. As dawn broke, the grey sea undulated with the remains of a small westerly swell. The usual cloud of birds was following the ship, but as the sky lightened I noticed their numbers were being bolstered by more and more Salvin's albatrosses, swooping in from all directions to look at the ship.
The Bounties, a small collection of rocky islands, appeared on the horizon. Places with a reputation for being intimidating can seem less so when you visit them. This was not so here: the islands turned out to be grimmer than any written description had revealed. The desolate cluster sat barely fifty metres above sea level and was being swept by massive seas and relentless gales.
With little protection from the south and nothing resembling a harbour, our ship couldn't anchor. Two Zodiacs filled with birders were lowered over the side and left heaving in the swell as the ship headed off over the horizon on an hour's loop.
As the feeling of isolation increased, the complement on my Zodiac talked in high-pitched voices and laughed nervously. I fixed the islands firmly in my sight and kept my dark thoughts to myself. On the south-western faces I could see a distinct horizontal line on the granite. It obviously marked the extreme limit of the waves that sometimes overwhelmed the islands during passing storms: below the line there were no more birds' nests.
As we bashed our way towards one of the islands, Proclamation, I felt both fearful and exhilarated. We passed through an opening in a rock into a tall thin alleyway between Proclamation and its neighbour Depot Island. The Zodiacs' motors were cut and we tilted our heads skyward. The sky was black with the comings and goings of Bounty Island shags, Salvin's albatrosses and fulmar prions. Erect-crested penguins swam around the boat and large smelly dollops of guano floated by.
Every few seconds the swell lifted us halfway up the granite walls and brought us eye-to-eye with the nesting birds. The helmsman on the other Zodiac boomed theatrically, 'Welcome to Shitter's Ditch.' His voice, echoing off the vertical granite walls, could barely be heard over the din of thousands of birds.
The English birders, normally loquacious, had fallen completely silent. As the guano showered down on to our clothes and into our hair, some seemed caught between the desire to get a photo and the need to protect their expensive camera gear. Others sat stupefied as their precious bird lists and guidebooks floated around in the bilge.
These unwelcoming islands were discovered in 1788 by Lieutenant William Bligh, who named them after his dependable ship. It was just months before the infamous mutiny. Bligh described their terrain as 'bare and desolate, with the inability to afford any vegetable production'. Later he noted, 'I could not see any verdure on any of the islands. There were white spots like patches of snow but, as Captain Cook in describing the land of New Zealand near South Cape says in many places there are patches of white marble, it is probable that what we saw might be of the same kind he observed.'
The white spots were not marble. The islands are composed entirely of granite and have a proliferation of birds, so what Bligh saw would have been glistening guano, hard-polished by the weather.
During the sealing boom of the early nineteenth century, several voyages were mounted to the Bounties to harvest skins. In 1808 a Captain Moody of the Santa Anna deposited a fourteen-strong gang on the islands. After the ship sailed off it got into strife somewhere near Norfolk Island. Some time later another sealing ship, the King George, happened upon the miserable remains of the gang. 'The sealers had been greatly distressed for want of water and provisions,' the captain reported. They had been living on a diet of rainwater, seals and albatrosses. Three had died due to 'hardships' and the rest were in a sorry state. Their nine awful months ashore at the Bounties remains the standing record for human habitation on the islands.
In 1888 a New Zealand government ship, the Stella, visited. One of the passengers was William Dougall, an amateur photographer. Dougall's experience seems to have been less than pleasant. 'You can smell the Bounties before you can see them,' he later wrote. 'You feel particularly good-humoured when you slip, and putting your hand to save yourself your arm is buried to the elbow in a pool of semi-solid guano. ... When we got back to the Stella the steward blocked our way and demanded that we should discard our unsavoury garments before entering the saloon.'
Comments such as these aroused the interest of fortune hunters. Guano was a vital ingredient in soil fertilisers, and a mint could be made mining and shipping it to the growing agricultural lands of the British Empire. The belief there was a vast quantity on the islands sparked interest as to who might own them. The thought the treasure-laden Bounties could be swiped from under its nose jolted the colonial government of New Zealand, the islands' nearest neighbour, into formally taking possession in 1870 and ushering the place into the sacred realm of the British Empire.
The windfall turned out to be an illusion. To be profitable, guano has to be deposited in thick layers. While the surface of the Bounties looked guano-rich, steady erosion by wind and water had left only a thin layer of the stuff.
After this the Bounties remained firmly out of sight and out of mind. Wilful ignorance of their bleak nature extended to New Zealand's Department of Lands and Survey. Despite numerous reports from sailors about the islands' unwelcoming geography and lack of vegetation, in 1894 the department advertised a twenty-one-year lease on a pastoral run for one pound a year. There were no takers.
CHAPTER 3
Birdman 49°42'S
I had not been on many journeys south before I realised any conversation about the Southern Ocean would eventually arrive at the topic of Gerry Clark, the fearless sailor, amateur birder and master of understatement who once said. 'One has always to accept a certain amount of risk or nothing is accomplished.'
Clark, a legend of the Southern Ocean, began his affair with the sea on his fourteenth birthday by enlisting in the British Merchant Navy. His training took place on an old battleship, HMS Worcester, which was permanently anchored in the Thames Estuary. During shore leave he engaged in his other great interest, birdwatching, on the estuary and nearby rivers. By seventeen he was in Singapore, working for the Union-Castle Steamship Company. His sharp mind and unflappable demeanour got him noticed. Within a few years he was assistant marine superintendent and studying for the rank of captain.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ocean Notorius"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Matt Vance.
Excerpted by permission of Awa Press.
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Table of Contents
Front Cover,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Preface,
The ocean that doesn't exist,
Islands,
Bounty,
Birdman,
Coastwatchers,
Ornithology,
Lonely tree,
Extinctions great and small,
Macquarie Island scone,
Island of kings,
Ocean,
Alone,
First aid,
B-15A,
Breaking the ice,
Ice,
Magnetic south,
A dead lion,
Trick of the light,
Scott's dream,
Symmes' hole,
Message from the living world,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgements,
Illustration credits,
Index,