Raise a glass for old Frank Wild

Today there's a bit the great Age of Exploration being laid to rest anew, as Frank Wild is being buried at Grytviken next to his travel companion of old, Sir Ernest Shackleton. Those of us headed south this season can look forward to toasting them both in January! Great story, eh?

http://www.wanderlust.co.uk/magazine/news/antarctic-explorer-gets-polar-burial-frank-wild
Antarctic explorer gets polar burial (full story below)


Also, here's the most recent South Georgia Association newsletter
http://www.sgisland.gs/index.php/(h)South_Georgia_News_and_Events --- highlight being a story about glacier retreat and one about fur seals. Glaciers: "...smaller glaciers are also experiencing huge collapses. An example is the Harker Glacier, at the head of Moraine Fjord, which is estimated to have lost a half kilometre of glacial tongue in the past year alone."

And fur seals: "Research conducted at Bird Island has shown the remarkable ability of female fur seals to return to breed in almost exactly the same spot where they were born.....most of them get within 12-metres of their birth place. Researchers do not know how the seals find their way back."

Happy holidays all,
Ted



http://www.wanderlust.co.uk/magazine/news/antarctic-explorer-gets-polar-burial-frank-wild
Antarctic explorer gets polar burial
27th November 2011

Today, Antarctic explorer Frank Wild will finally have his last wish granted 72 years after his death, as his ashes will be laid to rest in a polar graveyard

A commemorative polar expedition is under-way to grant Antarctic explorer Frank Wild his final wish, to be buried on South Georgia Island alongside fellow pioneer Sir Ernest Shackleton. His ashes will be buried on the 27 November, 72 years after his death.

Wild was one of the great, yet unsung, Antarctic explorers and the right-hand man to Sir Ernest Shackleton. He had more experience in Antarctica than any of the other famed explorers, and although he came close to death many times on polar expeditions, his peaceful death may be the reason he did not get the same glorification as the others.

He met his death in 1939 in South Africa, and his final wish to be buried on South Georgia Island was never fulfilled because of the out-break of World War II. His body was presumed lost, and his name disappeared from the pages of history.

However, his adventurous lifestyle and relationship with South Africa caught the attention of polar historian and author Angie Butler, who became fascinated with his life, and made it her duty to find his ashes and commemorate his wish.

Angie told Wanderlust, “The story was that he was buried in Brixton cemetery in Johannesburg. There was hardly anyone at the funeral and a lone sea cadet playedThe Last Post. It sounded like this awful desultory affair.”

But early in her research Angie discovered that his funeral actually took place at Braamfontein cemetery, and that his wife had him cremated, not buried, so that his ashes could go to South Georgia. It was at this point that the trail went cold.

“I kept going though, for several years. Then I found an old paper cutting that had been written in 1966 that said Frank Wild's ashes were kept in an old chapel. It didn't say which chapel, but I just knew that it was the chapel in Braamfontein cemetery,” Angie continued.

“And they were there, in a wooden box, quite banged and scraped, so it looks like it has travelled around a bit. It hasn’t just been sitting on the shelf. It’s a greeny-gold colour that has been stippled and a little bronze plaque with his name and date of birth and death. So it’s definitely him."

The commemorative expedition set out on the 20 November, and will take his remains back to South Georgia, where his ashes will be buried today, on the 27 November, in a small intimate graveyard on Grytviken hill.....

Birth of a huge Antarctic iceberg (video)

There's a news story that's made many newspapers about this New York City-sized iceberg that is being formed by the Pine Island Glacier. Here's a link to what I think is the best article so far on the subject:

http://bit.ly/vxaJnv

Yet somehow, I think all the articles missed what is the most significant about this story, that it takes place on the face of the Pine Island Glacier, which is the focus point for one of this coming century's biggest question: how much will the sea rise with global warming? The flow of the Pine Island Glacier has been accelerating, and given that it is the central drainage point for a vast stretch of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the difference between it's flow rate remaining stable and it pouring out rapidly speak to a difference of something like 1 foot in global sea level rise vs 6 feet of global sea level rise over the coming 100 years.

Meanwhile, news from the north:
Summer 2011: Arctic sea ice near record lows
The summer sea ice melt season has ended in the Arctic. Arctic sea ice extent reached its low for the year, the second lowest in the satellite record, on September 9. The minimum extent was only slightly above 2007, the record low year, even though weather conditions this year were not as conducive to ice loss as in 2007. Both the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route were open for a period during September.
More information: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaice-news/

Orcas migrate 10000 kilometers

Is anyone really surprised that whales go places we did not know? After a summer getting fat on toothfish around the ice in Antarctica, the waters off Brazil might be looking positively lovely to me as well. And consider, if you are the size of an Orca, swimming 50 miles in a day is virtually nothing, a casual stroll. The theory of shedding skin to lose a parasite load probably has merit; among Humpbacks we see a substantial parasite load on their summer feeding grounds, but when they travel to warmer waters in the winter they shed and lose the great majority of cridders that feed directly on them and/or hang around for the free ride.

Have a whale of a day,
Ted

Killer whales migrate, study finds, but why?
http://bit.ly/spwMBS
By Marlowe Hood (AFP) – 19 hours ago

PARIS — Some killer whales, a study published Wednesday shows for the first time, wander nearly 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) from Antarctica's Southern Ocean into tropical waters -- but not to feed or breed.

Rather, these fearsome predators at the apex of the marine food chain traverse the sea at top speed -- slowing as they reach warmer climes -- to exfoliate, the study speculates.

They are driven, in other words, by the urge or need to make their skin all shiny and new.

Despite our intense fascination with seal-chomping orcas, next to nothing was known about their long-haul movements, or whether they migrate at all.

To find out more, John Durban and Robert Pitman of the US National Marine Fisheries Service fitted a dozen so-called "type B" killer whales off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula with satellite transmitters.

In January 2009, the scientists used bolt-shooting crossbows to attached tags to the five-tonne mammals' dorsal fins from a distance of five to 15 metres (15 to 50 feet).

"Type B" orcas inhabit the inshore waters of Antarctica near pack ice, the better to feed on seals and penguins. Type A killer whales prefer open water and a diet of minke whales, and the smaller, fish-eating type C is most common in the eastern Antarctic.

Half the satellite tags stopped working after three weeks, but the remaining six revealed a remarkable and unexpected wanderlust over the following two years.

"Our tagged whales followed the most direct path to the nearest warm waters north of the subtropical convergence, with a gradual slowing of swim speed in progressively warmer water," the authors note.

The whales made a beeline, cruising at up to 10 km/hr (six mph), across the southwest Atlantic east of the Falkland Islands to the subtropical waters off the coasts of Uruguay and southern Brazil.

The study, published in the British Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, provides the first direct evidence of long-distance migration by killer whales.

But why they do it remains something of a mystery.

The speed and duration of the voyages, undertaken individually, did not leave enough time for prolonged foraging, and would have been too demanding for a new-born calf.

"Remarkably, one whale returned to Antarctica after completing a 9,400 kilometre (5,840 mile) trip in just 42 days," the study said.

The varied departure dates, between early February and late April, also suggested these expeditions were not annual migrations for feeding or breeding.

Which is where skin comes into the picture.

Durban and Pitman suspect that killer whales move into warmer waters in order to shed a layer -- along with an encrustation of single-celled algae called diatoms -- without freezing to death.

Orcas are the smallest cetaceans -- a group including whales and dolphins -- which live for extended periods in subzero Antarctic waters. Replacing and repairing outer skin in waters where the surface temperature is minus 1.9 degree Celsius (28.6 degree Fahrenheit) may be dangerous, even lethal.

Surface temperatures at the killer whales' tropical destinations, by contrast, were a balmy 20.9 to 24.2 C (69.6 to 75.6 F).

"We hypothesise that these migrations were thermally motivated," the authors conclude.

Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are the most widely distributed cetacean -- and perhaps mammal species -- in the world.

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

Antarctic ice flow mapped

There's a new map of Antarctic glaciers that has been around in the news lately, a map compiled from a vast trove of data that documents flow rates of all of Antarctica's glaciers. I hadn't posted about it because I found the coverage quite mundane. But here's a nice little video that tells the story with pretty pictures:

http://www.reuters.com/video/2011/08/25/antarctic-ice-flow-map-reveals-clues-to?videoId=218738420&videoChannel=6

Survival in Limbo, and Frank Wild to be buried next to Shackleton at Grytviken

I've **always** wanted to hear this story and never knew that there was a documentary about it:

From the South Georgia Newsletter:
Explorer and broadcaster Duncan Carse made several expeditions and visits to South Georgia between the 1950s and 1980. His first three expeditions were to map the Island with small teams of men man-hauling equipment the length of the Island on sledges. His fourth expedition was very different indeed. It was to be an 18 month experiment in living alone in an extremely remote cove on the south coast of the Island at South Undine Harbour. He was landed there by a whaling vessel in 1961 with all his stores and equipment and materials to erect a hut to live in. He told the whalers not to return before the 18 months were up. Three months into the experiment, he and his hut were washed away by huge waves. Somehow he survived and had to salvage what he could to survive for months until a concerned whaling manger decided to ignore Carse's instructions and sent a vessel to check and see how he was faring. In 1976 Duncan Carse returned to make a documentary about the experience.

Here's a link to this documentary, in 7 short parts on YouTube:

http://bit.ly/ncoILS

AND in a most intensely interesting bit of Age of Exploration history, Frank Wild is to be buried next to Shackleton in the Grytviken cemetery. Full story: http://bit.ly/nm7Niz

Texan Antarctica, and the Japanese tsunami caused ice shelf calving

Two bits here of Antarctic interest from a geological perspective. First, a good friend, Dr. Ian Dalziel, of the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues has recently worked out that 1.1 billion years ago Texas and Antarctica were neighbors. Full article below.

Secondly, it appears that the Japanese tsunami caused a major calving on an Antarctic ice shelf. A short video from Nasa tells the story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPDuTzhNxvU&feature=player_embedded



http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/11-48.htm
A Billion Year Old Piece of North America Traced Back to Antarctica

Boulder, CO, USA - An international team of researchers has found the strongest evidence yet that parts of North America and Antarctica were connected 1.1 billion years ago, long before the supercontinent Pangaea formed.

"I can go to the Franklin Mountains in West Texas and stand next to what was once part of Coats Land in Antarctica," said Staci Loewy, a geochemist at California State University, Bakersfield, who led the study. "That's so amazing."

Loewy and her colleagues discovered that rocks collected from both locations have the exact same composition of lead isotopes. Earlier analyses showed the rocks to be the exact same age and have the same chemical and geologic properties. The work, published online (ahead of print) in the September issue of the journal Geology, strengthens support for the so-called SWEAT hypothesis, which posits that ancestral North America and East Antarctica were joined in an earlier supercontinent called Rodinia.

The approximately 1.1 billion year old North American Mid-continent Rift System extends across the continent from the Great Lakes to Texas. Volcanic rocks associated with the rift, which appears to represent an aborted tectonic attempt to split the ancestral North American continent of Laurentia, are well exposed in the Keweenaw Peninsula of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from which they take their name, the Keweenawan large igneous province. The rift extends in the subsurface beneath Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to the Franklin Mountains near El Paso, Texas where related rocks are exposed. In this latest report, Loewy, Ian Dalziel, research professor at The University of Texas at Austin, Richard Hanson of Texas Christian University and colleagues from several overseas institutions, find that rocks barely peeking through the ice in Coats Land, a remote part of the Antarctic continent south of the Atlantic Ocean basin, reflect a former continuation of the North American rift system. Loewy began her collaboration with Dalziel several years ago as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Loewy et al. use new lead (Pb) isotopic data from the 1.1-billion-year-old rocks from Coats Land, to constrain the positions of Laurentia (ancestral North America) and Kalahari (ancestral southern Africa) in the 1-billion-year-old supercontinent, Rodinia. The Coats Land rocks are identical in age to both the Keweenawan large igneous province of the North American mid-continent rift and the contemporaneous Umkondo large igneous province of southern Africa. Comparison of the isotopic compositions, however, unequivocally links the Coats Land rocks with the Keweenawan province. Together with paleomagnetic data this suggests that the Coats Land block was a piece of Laurentia near west Texas 1.1 billion years ago. Furthermore, the Coats Land block collided with the Kalahari Precambrian craton of Africa during a 1-billion-year-old collision. Based on this reconstruction, Laurentia collided with Kalahari along Antarctica’s Maud mountain belt, which would represent a continuation of the 1-billion-year-old Grenville mountain belt of eastern and southern North America.

Thus the tiny Coats Land block of Antarctica is a ‘tectonic tracer’ providing critical clues to the geographic relationships between three of the major continents of the planet in the time interval 1.1 – 1.0 billion years ago, just prior to the opening of the Pacific Ocean basin, the hypothesized ‘Snowball Earth’ glaciations, and the rise of multi-cellular life.

Sex on the High Seas!

Fellow elephant seal lovers,

Isn't it wonderfully rare to be a biologist and get to use a catchy subject line like that?

I find this very interesting, that in one instance at one site at least many females are avoiding the big bull squashing scene. It surely sounds more romantic to find a Valentino bull in the waves than to mate with and be smothered by Brutus on the beach. But what do we really know? Does this happen everywhere and often? If a female mates with a smaller bull in the waves instead of big bad Brutus on the beach, is she as successful pupping the following season?

Let's not forget the value of the "double-mother-sucker-superweaner", the absolute best biological term on the planet. I'm sure you are dying to know what a 'double-mother-sucker-superweaner' is. First, a dominant, territory holding elephant seal bull is almost always a superweaner as a pup, which is to say a very large weaner. To be that very large weaner, one probably will have to be a double-mother-sucker, which is a pup that is both bold and stealthy enough to suckle from multiple mothers, both his own and parasitizing other mothers. So there you have the double-mother-sucker-superweaner :)

I hope I've put a smile on your face.


Seals Mating at Sea Give Beachmaster the Slip
Some female elephant seals won't play opt to mate offshore instead of beachside
http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2011/07/29/seals-mating-at-sea-give-beachmaster-the-slip


By Joel N. Shurkin, ISNS Contributor

(ISNS)—Life for elephant seals is nasty and brutish—but their sex lives are legendary.

Only the biggest and most brutish males are believed to reproduce. During the annual breeding season, huge males, called beachmasters, rule harems of much smaller females. The beachmaster drives off all male competitors until another big, aggressive male comes along and dethrones him. It is believed to be one of nature's purest examples of polygyny.


In this case, evolution favors the strongest and biggest.

It turns out those helpless females may not be so helpless, at least in one colony. Large numbers of female Southern elephant seals at the edge of Antarctica are ignoring the polygyny system in favor of sex in the high seas.

But evolution may also favor the wisest.

Researchers from Australia and South Africa have found that large numbers of female seals skip the yearly breeding interval at Marion Island, approximately located between the two continents of Africa and Antarctica. When they finally do show up, they are pregnant, and the beachmaster had nothing to do with it. Almost three-fourths of the males skip the violence and frustration as well.

955 miles off the African coast, Marion Island is a wildlife preserve full of seals, penguins and seabirds that is administered by South Africa. According to Nico de Bruyn, a marine mammal ecologist at the University of Pretoria, the seals come to land twice a year: once to molt, the other to reproduce. Both tasks are much easier to do on solid land than in the tossing ocean.

Male bull elephant seals are enormous, some measuring 16 feet long and weighing more than 3 short tons.They have a proboscis, or trunk, almost a foot long, hence the elephant in their name. They are loud, smelly and mean-tempered.

Female elephant seals are one-fourth the weight and up to 6 feet shorter than males.

The seals employ delayed implantation, meaning the fertilized egg does not implant itself and begin development until the timing is exactly correct for the pup to be born on land, a 12-month gestation period including the delay. On Marion Island, that is in October, de Bruyn said. All the pups are born within days of each other.

Females nurse the young for only about three weeks and are then ready to reproduce again. The bulls, alpha males, are so large many females and pups are killed when an amorous or bellicose bull lands on them. On the crowded beach there is no place to escape.

But the researchers, reporting in Animal Behaviour, have found that as many as half the females refuse to play along, staying in the ocean and mating with whom they chose rather than joining the chaos on the beach.

"For a male, even if he is huge in comparison to the female—which they are—coercing a female is so much more difficult in the water because she has more options," de Bruyn said.

The researchers began their work of marking and capturing animals because of concern about a dramatic decline in Southern elephant seals noted in the 1980s. The population at Marion Island was down 80 percent for reasons unknown, although de Bruyn said that it has stabilized now and is even showing a slight increase.

De Bruyn does not think this evasion of is new behavior.

Oddly, that behavior is not seen in other elephant seal colonies. Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studies the Northern elephant seals that breed at Ano Nuevo on the California coast.He doesn't think that behavior is common.

"We have no evidence that it occurs in Northern elephant seals.I'm not even sure how prevalent the observation is for Southern elephant seals," Costa said. "We know that our females do not hang out in the water. I can say this because we track them onto the beach from sea, or at least the 300-plus females we have tracked don't spend a lot of time offshore. They just come in and land on the beach."

And then end up in some beachmaster's harem.