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A sojourn on the ice continent

Anjali Birla was in Antarctica earlier this year as part of the 2041 Antarctica Expedition.

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Anjali Birla
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Antarctica, the landmass at the Earth’s southern-most tip, is in many ways the last wild frontier. The coldest, driest, and windiest continent, Antarctica is covered in a layer of ice that is, on average, around 1.9 km thick with temperatures going down to -89 degrees centigrade. It’s primal, pristine - a “different world altogether” says Anjali Birla who was in Antarctica earlier this year as part of  the 2041 Antarctica Expedition. “You feel you’ve left civilisation behind. It is monochromatic, just white and blue, like we were on the moon,” says Birla. 

2041 Antarctica Expedition is an initiative by British explorer Robert Swan, famous as the first man to walk to both poles, “to build personal leadership skills among people who choose to embrace the challenge of sustaining all forms of life – in their families, communities, organisations and the planet”. Swan has been mounting these fortnight-long expeditions once every two years since 2003, on which he takes a multi-national bunch of scientists, activists, executives, filmmakers, etc to the icy continent, provided, of course, they are adventurous, fit enough to handle the rigours and sensitive to the environment. 

Birla, a young marketing professional employed with Tata Teleservices, qualified on all three counts. “I had always dreamt of going to Antarctica. Nature and wildlife are my passion and in school and college I had organised environmental campaigns and afforestation drives,” Birla says. 

It was the adventure of a lifetime. “There were 80 of us. We met in Ushuaia in Argentina, the southern-most city in the world,” she describes. From here, the group travelled by ship, sailing past Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of the continent of South America, then crossing the Drake Passage, before hitting the Antarctic Peninsula three days later. “We were sailing through some of the roughest seas, with lots of icebergs on the way. Our ship was an ice-breaking vessel that cuts through floes [floating sheets of ice] and it felt like we were in an earthquake every time we cut through one - so loud is the sound of motors ploughing through ice and so severe the impact.”

In Antarctica, the expedition members had a packed schedule - with lots of sightseeing interspersed with lectures and presentations on the continent’s fragile ecosystem and the damages that global warming was wreaking. Each member was supposed to be working on a project, and had to present it to team members - Birla’s project was a campaign to be done in schools and colleges on Antarctica and why it should be left alone. 

Birla’s most vivid memories of Antarctica have to do with its wildlife - “We saw two-three kinds of whales - the Minke whale, the large hump-backed whales and a large group of 30 or so Orcas [killer whales].” Once, Birla was with a party on a raft when a hump-backed swum past, barely a few metres away. “It was mesmerising. And then, of course, there were the Penguins - three-four kinds of them, the seals and bird species.” One night the expedition camped outside, lying snug inside sleeping bags as they looked up at the sky. “I’ve never seen stars like that - millions and billions in front of you, dancing together.”

Did she find any obvious evidence of the depredations?  

“We saw a large number of whales - an environmental expert who was with us on the expedition said, he’d never seen so many. Clearly, this shows that if the international community does come together and takes steps then some of the damage can be reversed,” says Birla, referring to the 1991 Antarctic Treaty that put a stop to whaling. “But then again the presence of so many whales may not be a good sign - perhaps, the amount of krill in the Antarctic waters has increased. Definitely, we encountered many untimely ice-floes which could be a result of global warming.”

Also Read: What my expedition to Antarctica taught me about climate change

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