If you wanted to get to Antarctica’s Palmer Research Station, you would first need to travel to Punta Arenas, Chile. From there, a ship equipped to break through 3-foot thick ice would take you through Drake’s Passage, known for some of the choppiest waters on Earth. Along the way, you’d dodge icebergs and pass through narrow channels carved from rock and ice. You wouldn’t see any vegetation, but wildlife—seals, whales, and all kinds of sea birds—would likely be abundant. When you arrived at Palmer Station, you’d find a small outpost of five buildings, with space to house about 40 people in the summer. By the time you disembarked, you would have been aboard the ship for almost a week.
The trip to Antarctica is one that few people, and even fewer journalists, have made. But Dan Grossman, freelance science journalist and former Ted Scripps fellow, can count himself among that small number. In the past year, Grossman has reported on climate change from two places at almost opposite ends of the Earth—Antarctica and Greenland.
On his first approach to Antarctica, at the end of last year, Grossman said he was awed.
“[It was] stunningly beautiful—craggy mountains falling right to the sea, covered with snow.”
Anvers Island, where Palmer Station is located, sits offshore from the Antarctic Peninsula, which sticks up from the continent like a hitchhiker’s thumb. It’s about 1,700 miles from the South Pole, almost as far north as you can get and still be in Antarctica. And in January—mid-summer in the Southern Hemisphere—temperatures can climb into the 50s. Grossman says there were days that he wore short sleeves. Meanwhile his wife, living in Boston during a cold snap, battled frozen drainpipes and even a frozen dishwasher.
Grossman’s interest in climate change began over a decade ago, when he concluded that “climate change was the most important environmental topic.” In particular, Grossman was interested in paleoclimatology—the study of ancient climates—and both trips were intended to observe ice core research sites. Ice core research involves deep drilling into glacial ice in an attempt to learn what climates were like thousands of years ago. But the National Science Foundation, the governmental body that gives grants for journalists to visit Antarctica, rejected his application two years ago to study ice core drilling there.
Grossman planned to reapply last year, but the only ice core research Americans were doing in Antarctica at the time was on a moving transect of an ice sheet that was simply too difficult for him to reach. In the meantime, he’d read an article in the journal Science that piqued his interest in the impact of climate change on ecosystems. So when he came across the work of Bill Fraser, a researcher who has studied Adélie penguins for 30 years and believes they’re being impacted by global warming, Grossman realized it was a story that should be told. NSF liked Grossman’s new plan, and on Dec. 30, 2002, Grossman found himself aboard the R/V Laurence M. Gould, chugging toward Palmer Station.
Adélies are endemic to Antarctica, and their numbers around Palmer Research Station have declined sharply in recent years. Fraser suspects the decline is due to climate change. The birds are highly evolved for life in Antarctica, and as global warming has led to more snow and less ice, Fraser says the populations around Palmer Station have not adapted well to the new landscape.
Grossman says the Adélies still haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, noting that they could signal what will happen to many other species as climate change continues.
“[The Adélie story] still hasn’t been reported on” by anyone else, Grossman says. “I’m the only journalist who knows about it.”
Grossman’s trip gave him material for several stories about the Adélies. His profile of Fraser will appear in the December issue of Audubon. Two other stories about the penguins have been accepted by Scientific American and Radio Netherlands.
But Adélies weren’t Grossman’s only topic of research in Antarctica. During his five weeks there he met scientists studying penguins, giant petrels, sponges, and krill, a tiny crustacean that’s the base of the food chain in Antarctica’s icy waters. Grossman himself was the subject of interviews for WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate, and The Boston Globe. He also collected interviews, photographs, and natural sound, and kept a journal for a multimedia website he created in collaboration with WBUR.
“[Antarctica was] one of the most fun experiences in my life,” Grossman says. The food was excellent, the people were interesting, and he got to attend weekly lectures and fun classes—including one that inspired him to tie-dye his pajamas. And, perhaps most important for a freelancer, the trip was relatively stress-free because NSF arranged the whole thing for him.
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| Journalist and antarctic explorer Dan Grossman shows off his cold weather gear and recording equipment. |
Greenland, on the other hand, was “a completely different trip.” This time, Grossman wanted to make sure he got to see an ice core drilling site. His plan was to create another multimedia website for WBUR, but to do so he needed to broaden his focus. So he started looking around for other topics that interested him and would appeal to the station’s audience. A biological research base at Zackenberg station in northeast Greenland; a lemming research camp on Traill Island off the Greenland coast; and Tasiilaq, home of an Inuit hunter, rounded out his plans.
Unlike in Antarctica, Grossman had to make all of his own arrangements for the trip, which could hardly be called standard travel agent fare. He had to contact the researchers, set up interviews, and arrange flights to remote locations. In all, he made five or six stops to visit as many research sites—an itinerary that required at least 20 plane flights.
Language problems also made some arrangements difficult. The scientists Grossman wanted to visit hailed from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, France, and Germany. He says that even though English is the international scientific language, and everyone he dealt with spoke it to some degree, it was hard to figure out before he got there exactly what people were doing—not to mention who was in charge. And for their part, Grossman said not everyone could understand exactly why he was coming, or what he intended to do.
But once he arrived, in July of this year, Grossman says everyone he worked with was helpful. He speaks especially warmly of Benoit Sittler, a French scientist who has been studying lemming populations on Traill Island for the past 16 years. Sittler and his tiny staff of four lived in a camp that consisted of a few tents and one closet-like building that functioned as a mess hall. Yet they welcomed Grossman “like they were inviting me into their homes.”
“It felt amazingly open-hearted,” he says. “They were happy to have me there as a guest.”
Grossman also made it to NGRIP (Northern Greenland Ice Core Project) just as scientists prepared to pull up a 120,000-year-old ice core—the oldest ice specimen in the northern hemisphere. There Grossman experienced hospitality of a different sort, as the scientists, along with a group of journalists and other invited guests, celebrated the end of the seven-year project with champagne and caviar in the middle of the ice sheet.
At Zackenberg station, nestled in an arid valley at the foot of the Zackenberg Mountains, Grossman saw another long-term project in the works. The station was founded in 1995 on the belief that tracking the impact of climate change on an ecosystem requires at least 50 years of data. Although scientists there are hesitant to draw conclusions after only eight years, they are making some predictions based on climate change modeling. One researcher says the unique ecosystem of the northern Arctic region might be in jeopardy.
As in Antarctica, Grossman tracked the progress of his Greenland trip—as well as a side trip to Iceland—on WBUR’s multimedia website. He also sent some stories on the ice core project to the BBC and CBC. Since returning to the U.S., he’s continued to use what he’s learned to create more in-depth pieces about his trips. In addition to the stories about the Adélies mentioned above, a story about Zackenberg station will run on the German radio station Deutsche Welle.
Grossman says his experiences have altered the way he thinks about climate change in at least one important way: While his focus was once on ancient climates, he now considers the ecological impacts of climate change as well, and how significant those impacts are.
“A year and a half ago, I had never thought much about that,” he says. “It’s a new focus for me.”
For future reporting, Grossman plans to stay with his theme of human impact on ecosystems. He’s hesitant to say exactly where he plans to travel next—but he does offer a general direction.
“I’m looking at some reporting much closer to the equator,” he says.
Visit the websites tracking Grossman's adventures at www.wbur.org/special/antarctica and www.wbur.org/special/dispatches/greenland.
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