Antarctica can be described in a series of superlatives.
It is, on average, the coldest, driest, windiest place on Earth. It has the highest average elevation of the seven continents and it is the least populated with no permanent human residents.
On March 14, 61-year-old North Vancouver resident Abby Antal will board the Ocean Endeavour in Ushuaia at the southern tip of Argentina. The ice-class ship will spend two days crossing the legendary Drake Passage, where large waves and gale force winds prevail, before reaching the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.
“It’s the trip of a lifetime,” says Antal, sitting in her Lynn Valley living room just days before her departure. “I’m like a little kid at Christmas time, you know, I can’t wait.”
Due to its hostile environment and remote location, Antarctica is not the first vacation choice for most people. But for Antal, who has always felt at home in the great outdoors, the icy landmass at the bottom of the world, sometimes referred to as the world’s last great wilderness, has an almost magical quality.
She’s making her two-week trip down south with the 2041 Foundation – an organization dedicated to preserving Antarctica by promoting recycling, renewable energy and sustainability to combat the effects of climate change – and will join more than 100 other people from around the globe who were hand-picked from thousands of applicants.
The expedition is being led by 2041 founder Robert Swan, an explorer and environmentalist from the U.K. who became the first person in history to walk unassisted to both the North and South poles in the 1980s. His foundation is named for the year the current moratorium on mining and drilling in Antarctica is up for renegotiation.
Antal subscribes to Ted Talks and Swan’s lecture, Let’s Save the Last Pristine Continent, showed up in her inbox one day last year.
“He’s quite an amazing speaker and when I listened to his story it just grabbed my heart,” she says. “I didn’t even think twice. I went to the website after I listened to the talk and found out that he does the expeditions on a yearly basis, so I just clicked on ‘apply’ and wrote from my heart.”
Antal was accepted to join last year’s expedition, but participants must pay their own way and there just wasn’t enough time to find the money. So, she deferred to this year and has spent the last several months raising the $12,000 (U.S.) needed to make the trip a reality. That has meant selling off possessions, renting out her basement suite, crowdfunding online, and securing two corporate sponsors, Conergy and BrainTest, to help cover her expenses.
Fortunately, Antal already owns most of the cold-weather gear needed to survive the frigid Antarctic temperatures thanks to her previous travels up North. Now, with everything in place, she’s looking forward to a packed itinerary that includes shore landings in inflatable boats, visits to penguin rookeries, glacier hikes and pitching tents on the ice.
“I’ve been looking at so many pictures and videos and the landscape, to me, it’s awe inspiring,” she says. “There’s so few wildernesses left out there and to be able to witness that is totally amazing.”
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Antal’s relationship with the outdoors began in the Toronto neighbourhood where she was raised.
“I guess I was fortunate enough to be brought up in the age where parents would let their kids out and they’d say, ‘Don’t come home until the lights come on.’ So, I pretty well was sent outside in the morning as a young girl and I just explored all around me. My parents gave me a microscope one year for Christmas and I hauled it around to the local pond to try and see if I could find any swamp creatures,” she recalls.
Her father was a nature-lover and the two of them would often go fishing together. He encouraged her to participate in sports and sent her to summer camp, “which I just loved immensely because I was able to go outside and be free.”
In her adult years, her passion for sports and recreation continued to grow.
“I became a long-distance runner. I’ve run seven marathons, did one ultra (marathon),” she says.
Her outdoor adventures include sea kayaking and camping in the High Arctic, Baja Peninsula and West Coast of B.C., and ice climbing in the Rocky Mountains. For a time, she operated a dog sled touring business in Edmonton where she would wake up every morning and feed 65 dogs (and chip their poop off the ice) in -25 C temperatures.
“Just the exhilaration of working with the dog teams was pretty exciting.”
Antal lived in the Lower Mainland 30 years ago and raised her children here. She resided in Calgary until recently, but returned to the West Coast just last September and settled on the North Shore.
“It’s great to be back because I’m close to the mountains, I’m close to the water. It’s just perfect.”
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Robert Swan and the 2041 Foundation lead an expedition to Antarctica every year around this time, which is late summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
“This year’s our biggest one so far and we have about 160 people coming from all over the world,” says Sarah Sperber, development specialist with the Truckee, Calif.-based organization. “You get people from these desert climates who’ve never seen snow before.”
The average age of participants is 33, but Sperber notes there will be an 11-year-old and a 72-year-old on board. Regardless of age, everyone will be getting a crash course on Antarctica thanks to the educational mandate of the 2041 Foundation. Expert lecturers will be on board the Ocean Endeavour to teach the travellers about the unique wildlife, geology, history and geography of the Antarctic Peninsula.
“It’s largely focused on sustainability, conservation of resources and climate change ... but the other big piece of it is about leadership development,” Sperber says. “It’s, for many people, extremely life-changing and for a lot of them it propels them into all of these other projects and eco-initiatives that they then start in their communities.”
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Antarctica covers a vast area and there are huge regional variations in topography, ice coverage and weather patterns. While some areas, particularly in the east, are actually experiencing cooling and seeing a net gain in sea ice, the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the spots on the continent most profoundly affected by climate change, says Capilano University geography instructor Cheryl Schreader.
“That western area, as far as I know, is the area that’s experiencing more changes in weather and long-term climate than any other area of Antarctica,” she says, pointing to an increase in westerly winds as one of the major change-makers. “Those west winds would bring a lot of warm, moist air from the oceans to the area of the peninsula.”
Those conditions lead to sea ice melt, retreating glaciers, an upwelling of CO2 enriched waters, and a change in surface reflectivity, which means more heat energy is absorbed, she explains. And all of these environmental changes impact local plants and animals.
“With the loss of sea ice, researchers have found that krill stocks are declining in some areas and krill are sort of the foundation of the food chain in that area,” Schreader says. “Some species would be able to adapt to some of these changes over time, and some species, if their limits are exceeded, could face a real downturn in their population and possible extinction in the years to come.”
As to what we can do to mitigate or possibly reverse the effects of global warming, Schreader encourages people to support climate science and be aware of their carbon footprint.
“It’s hard because a lot of these impacts we’re seeing would have been triggered decades ago, but I think that if we continue to move forward and really consider our reliance on fossil fuels and what a transition to more renewable, less CO2 fuels would be, I think that’s really important.”
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Tapping into renewable energy sources is something Antal supports wholeheartedly. She has two granddaughters, ages six and nine. They call her Mountain Grandma and they are a huge part of the reason she wanted to join this expedition in the first place: to share the story of Antarctica with the younger generation.
When she returns home, Antal hopes to set up speaking engagements in schools to talk about her experience on the fragile continent, to teach youth the importance of global sustainability, and to encourage them to go outdoors and learn from nature.
“You protect something that you love, and so if kids get outside and really appreciate nature and love it, then they will hopefully do things that will keep it that way.”
