The
BBC Frozen Planet series has already shown lots of amazing images on our
TV screens (in the UK at least) – and I’m sure there are many more to come over
the next few weeks. Never one to ignore
a passing band-wagon – I thought I’d fall in step with David Attenborough and Co. and talk a bit about my version of the Frozen Planet. I’ve picked four places that represent My
Frozen Planet – two from the far North and two from the far South.
Port Lockroy, Goudier Island, Antarctic Peninsula (64.8S,63.5W)
I visited Port Lockroy as part of a short trip to the
Antarctic Peninsula crossing the Drake Passage from Ushuaia. We visited a number of stations and camps as
we stopped off at various places around the peninsula, but only one was flying
the Union Jack. Port Lockroy (named for
a French politician!) was initially a whaling station, then a military base and
finally a research base for about 50 years up until 1962, when it was
abandoned. It was restored in 1996 by
the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust and is now a small museum plus post office and
shop. It’s one of the few places on the
Antarctica Peninsula were tourists can do tourist things like send postcards,
buy souvenir T-shirts and get their passport stamped.
As well as a small group of summer residents
looking after the base, there are lots of gentoo penguins on Goudier Island. The penguins have been taking part in a long
running experiment into the impact of tourists on penguin life. The island is
divided into two parts; one open to tourists and the other not. It appears that any negative impact that
tourists might have on the penguins is countered by the fact that the presence
of people deters the scavenging skuas.
Original blog entry.
Sea Lion Island, Falkland Islands (52.4S, 59.1W)
This might not strictly meet the BBC definitions to be
included in Frozen Planet – but it makes my list. Sea Lion Island is the southern-most
inhabited island in the Falkland Islands.
It makes my list because it was where I was first able to get up close
and personal with gentoo penguins.
Gentoos are creatures of habit – they follow regular paths from their
roosts down to the sea and they do this at pretty regular times morning and
evening. These regular patterns mean
that they get to know their bit of the beach pretty well so they can spot
changes. If you just stop on one of
their ‘highways’ they will look pretty disgruntled and either stop and wait for
you to get out of their way (and they can be very patient) or they’ll head off
elsewhere. In either case you are
disturbing their routine behaviour and you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Much better is to find a quiet area on the
beach, at first light, and just sit down as low as you get (ideally to penguin height) and wait and watch. If you get lucky and sit still enough the
penguins will come and investigate the strange new rock on their beach.
Original blog entry.
Ikateq, Eastern Greenland (65.6N, 37.9W)
Eastern Greenland is usually described in the guide books as
being the ‘traditional’ or ‘undeveloped’ side of Greenland and by Greenlanders
as ‘Tunu’ (the Back Side). I think this
is to make the distinction between the more modern parts of Greenland around
Nuuk on the west coast. The main town on
the east coast is Tasiilaq – you can tell it’s a town by the fact that there
are roads. All the roads stop at the
edge of town, but there are roads in the town, and a few very rundown cars that
are only really of use in the summer. This
part of Greenland would be pretty much unreachable by visitors (other than by
summer supply boats) were it not for the Americans and the Cold War. There is an airport in Kulusuk with a full
size runway, built by the US military to supply their one-time radar station on
the island. This is just a short, but spectacular,
helicopter hop from Tasiilaq. The other
means of transport that comes into its own in summer are boats.
The boats get frozen in during the winter,
but in the long summer days they provide ways to reach some of the other smaller
settlements around the coast. I was able
to take a small boat from Tasiilaq round the southern coast of Ammassalik
Island to the almost abandoned settlement at Ikateq. This gave the chance to see some of the
coastline, and to get dramatically close to some of the icebergs that drift
slowly south down the Greenland coast each summer.
Original blog entry.
Holmiabukta, Svalbard (79.8N, 11.4E)
My final frozen rendezvous is the highest latitude stop –
this is a largely unremarkable little inlet near the northern edge of Svalbard.
However, in summer 2010 it was a magnet for both polar bears and tourists. The bears were there to pick scraps from a
whale carcass that had been washed ashore, and the tourists were there to watch
the bears. Both sorts of visitors were
drawn from a big area – the bears by scent, and the tourists by expedition boat
rumour mill. I wrote (and enthused
endlessly) about this trip at the time, but I still look at the photographs to
remind myself how good the experience was.
We were able to spend many hours sitting in Zodiacs watching bears haul
scraps from the submerged carcass which completely disappeared at high tide and
was revealed as row of huge still-connected vertebrae when the tide went out.
Original blog entry.
And next
I’m just about to head back to the Falkland Islands,
including Sea Lion Island again, and to South Georgia (described recently
by one of the Frozen Planet team as ‘Antarctica with the volume turned up’). I can feel my passport and camera twitching. More blog entries to come as and when internet access allows.
I little while ago I realised that there were going to be 27 Saturdays during my temporary escape from daily routine - and since I know that I'll be doing quite a lot of travelling on Saturdays (at least up to Christmas) I thought I'd set up an extra blog site for my six months away to report what I'm doing on each of the Saturdays.
I visited Port Lockroy as part of a short trip to the
Antarctic Peninsula crossing the Drake Passage from Ushuaia. We visited a number of stations and camps as
we stopped off at various places around the peninsula, but only one was flying
the Union Jack. Port Lockroy (named for
a French politician!) was initially a whaling station, then a military base and
finally a research base for about 50 years up until 1962, when it was
abandoned. It was restored in 1996 by
the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust and is now a small museum plus post office and
shop. It’s one of the few places on the
Antarctica Peninsula were tourists can do tourist things like send postcards,
buy souvenir T-shirts and get their passport stamped. 
