World Cup rugby, global climate marches, and flooding in the Garden Route – a newsy week.
The item that made me prick up my ears was about an iceberg the size of London – 1,636 sq km – that broke off from the Antarctic ice sheet last week. It brought back memories of the time I saw first-hand the crushing effect of this ice sheet.
Like many people I guess, I had thought of the ice sheet as something stationary, but I learned that it is actually moving seawards all the time – so slowly you cannot see it or feel it when you are standing on it – but it is a powerful, unstoppable force. At a certain point, bits of the edge of the moving ice sheet break off and float away – like the massive iceberg did last week. I love Antarctica, a fascinating place that I had always wanted to visit, and in 1997 I was lucky enough to join a press group that sailed there for the official opening of the new research station. It was called SANAE IV, the fourth South African research station to be built in the Antarctic since the 1950s. All three of the others had been abandoned because they had gradually been covered by snow and ice. When SANAE III was built it was on top of the ice sheet. When we visited it, it was totally buried. You had to open a hatch and climb down a ladder through the ice to get to it. It was quite spooky. The electricity was still on so we could see, but it had that eerie feeling of abandoned places. We walked along metal “tunnels” that connected the sections of the base, and all along these tunnels, ice crystals had formed and hung down like a crystal ceiling. I remember putting my hand up to touch them, and they tinkled like glass before they fell to the ground. And we saw what the pressure of the slow-moving ice sheet had done over the years. The floors were buckled so many of the doors could not close, and some of the walls were skew. The whole base had become entombed in the ice and was part of the glacier’s slow move towards the sea. The news about the massive iceberg breaking off made me wonder what that entombed old base looked like now, more than 20 years later. The current base, SANAE IV, is built 200km inland on a rocky outcrop, a design on stilts that hopes to foil the build up of snow and ice. We flew from the ship by helicopter to attend the official opening with VIPs and all the men who had built it. It was a good party. There were lots of speeches, but I can’t remember much about them. What I do remember was the wine flowing, the music thumping and all of us dancing in the midnight sun.
