Feature Friday: Listening To Antarctica

For this Feature Friday, I want to highlight some amazing work written by our very own Dr Jen Martin in tribute to her journey to Antartica. This venture was part of her involvement with Homeward Bound, an international organisation that aims to build a collection of women in STEMM across the globe to demonstrate leadership towards a healthier planet. Each year, they lead an expedition of their new members to show them where the climate crisis is hitting the hardest: Antarctica.

Jen recently summarised her experience in her stunning article Listening To Antarctica: A Guided Tour With Dr Jen, which was recently featured on Triple R Radio’s magazine The Trip, and is now on their website.

In our classes we highly emphasise the importance of telling stories with science, it’s not at all effective to just blast people with facts and expect them to care. It’s important to paint a picture and tell a story, and this piece does exactly that. Jen vividly recounts the beautiful, surreal and tragic reality of Antarctica, as well as the realisation of how serious the impacts of climate change are.

“The ice in my hand is crackling; it’s sputtering and popping. I’m one of ten people sitting in a small inflatable boat, in the cold waters of the Antarctic Peninsula. We’ve agreed to make it a ‘silent cruise’ so we can be more immersed in the landscape around us. But it’s not silent at all.“

“Another sound: part of the ice cliff breaks off and crashes into the water below. At first it’s like distant rumbling thunder, but it keeps going and going, reverberating all around the bay. As I watch, the ice continues to crumble like icing sugar and soon a section of the glacier has collapsed and disappeared into the water.”

Jen beautifully describes the sheer reality of how dramatically Antarctica is being affected by climate change. She watched as glaciers fell away into the water. She learned about the declining populations of penguins as their ecosystem shifts beneath them. All around her ice melted and air trapped from millions of years ago, from a world that knew no pollution, was audibly released into today’s air.

“The only way I can begin to justify my brief, magical time in Antarctica is to fight for its protection, to become an active contributor to campaigns demanding climate action, and to give priority – every day – to the sustainability of my decisions.”

“I’ve now seen Antarctica with my own eyes and I understand this is just the beginning of global change. For the first time I truly understand what we all stand to lose if we don’t commit to massively reducing the impacts we are having on our planet.”

This poignant article is an eye witness account of the impacts of climate change on our world, one that doesn’t leave you long after you’ve closed the tab.

Click here to read the full article.

– Written by Rosie Arnold