Melting ice and cold hard cash

Written By Peter Allan

By Chris Hatch

Not so long ago, on Valentines Day 1899, on a planet quite different from our own, the crew of the Belgica finally cut their ship free of Antarctic ice. The ice was seven feet thick and it would take another full month to chop and blast their way to open water. The sailors had been trapped in the ice for 13 months.

Among the crew was a certain Roald Amundsen, as well as the photographer Frederick Cook. As ice gripped the Belgica in 1898, Cook wrote in his diary:

"We are imprisoned in an endless sea of ice... We have told all the tales, real and imaginative, to which we are equal. Time weighs heavily upon us..."

Approaching that same region aboard the research vessel Polarstern on Valentine’s Day 2023, scientist Karsten Gohl described a very different scene: “I have never seen such an extreme, ice-free situation here before.

“The continental shelf, an area the size of Germany, is now completely ice-free. It is troubling to consider how quickly this change has taken place.”

For most of the period since the Belgica’s unhappy voyage, there hadn’t been much change at all. But over the last six years, sea ice around Antarctica has undergone intense melting.

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