Walkthrough

I Lived And Worked In Antarctica For 5 Months Without WiFi Or Running Water. It Didn't Feel As Remote As I Expected.

© Provided by Business Insider Lucy Bruzzone, Clare Ballantyne, Mairi Hilton, and Natalie Corbett were the four women chosen by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust to join the 2022/23 Port Lockroy team. Keirron Tastagh

Lucy Bruzzone is one of several women who spent the last five months working in Antarctica.

The team counted penguins for monitoring purposes and staffed the world's most remote post office.

Bruzzone found it surprisingly easy to adjust to life on the peninsula and said it didn't feel as remote as she expected.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lucy Bruzzone, one of four women chosen by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust to live and work in Port Lockroy, Antarctica, from November 2022 to March 2023. The group's responsibilities included running the world's most remote post office and museum, counting gentoo penguins for monitoring purposes, coordinating ship visits to the island, and educating visitors about the site's history. This has been edited for length and clarity.

I've always been fascinated by ice and the polar regions and I'd been exploring opportunities to visit Antarctica for many years. I was keen to understand these wilderness areas for myself before no ice remains — and to bring a life-changing experience back to my day-to-day work that could help me explain more deeply the reasons we urgently need to take action.

I was also delighted when I met the all-female team I'd be working with. Historically, Antarctica has been an extremely male-dominated place; Port Lockroy didn't have its first female team member until 2001. We were delighted to continue to demonstrate the capabilities of women in Antarctica. 

© Courtesy of UKAHT The team spent five months in Antarctica through the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. Courtesy of UKAHT

As the Base Leader, I was responsible for day-to-day operations and ensuring the safety, well-being, and continuity of the team. We were on a remote, rocky, snow-covered site at least 3 days from full medical assistance, with gas cylinders for heating and cooking, solar power for electricity, and no running water. Our connectivity with the outside world was limited to satellite phones and long-range VHF radio.

Although we were physically remote, we actually rarely felt remote. We enjoyed sending and receiving letters and postcards to friends and family, and we were occasionally able to connect to WiFi on ships and call home. 

It was quite a privilege to switch off from the frequent communication back home and indulge in just focusing on daily living and not thinking very much beyond the week ahead. It was surprisingly simple to adjust to life on the island.

Port Lockroy is the only occupied site that larger vessels visit, so we act as a hub for the industry. We had ships visiting almost every day, and several cargo drops of food, gift shop stock, and fuel during the season. I would contact ships in advance to confirm plans, then check in on the radio when they were close by to share the latest conditions to enable safe landings.

When visitors arrived, we shared the base's rich history with them, ran the gift shop and post office, and monitored their movements to protect the island's penguin colony.

Every other day, one of us would also help with penguin monitoring and we all became rather expert in stamps and how to most efficiently cancel stamps on hundreds of postcards.

We had weekly safety checks across the site and spent a considerable amount of time digging steps in snow, breaking up ice, and rerouting rivers of penguin poop that emerged during periods of heavy rain.

© Provided by Business Insider Lucy Bruzzone was the base leader of a team of women that spent five months living and working in Port Lockroy, Antarctica, through the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust charity. Clare BallantyneUKAHTClare BallantyneUKAHT

If I was on cooking duty I'd get up at 7 a.M. To get the coffee and porridge ready for everyone. Most days we'd have ship visits in the morning and early evening, so we'd liaison, and we'd also go on board most ships to give a presentation about the site.

Between ship visits, we'd grab a quick lunch, restock the shop, cancel stamps on any postcards we'd received, and monitor the penguins on alternate days. After ship visits and before dinner, we'd try to do our daily chores — cleaning, waste management, and writing up the base diary, which continues to be added to the British Antarctic Survey archive each year. We also collected a record of any wildlife we'd seen during the day. 

It was a privilege to visit Antarctica and spend such an extended period really getting to experience the place. It was an amazing opportunity to see history in its original context and get a feel for what life must have been like for people who were there before.

As someone who works in sustainability, being able to talk to guides who have seen change over the years and to experience a season of extreme weather myself really drove home the importance of taking action now to mitigate climate change.

Climate Change Concern: Gentoo Colonies Moving Further South

Tuesday, January 25th 2022 - 09:50 UTC Gentoo penguins usually live in sub-Antarctic areas.

By Laura Geggel – Scientists have discovered a previously unknown colony of gentoo penguins in one of the southernmost spots these waddling birds have ever been spotted. The discovery is a cause for concern, according to the researchers, who say that climate change is expanding the range of this temperate, non-ice-loving species of penguin.

And this isn't the only concerning find. In addition to this gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) colony with 75 nests on Andersson Island, gentoo penguins have also been sighted on an unexplored archipelago off the Antarctic Peninsula's northern tip.

Both are among the first records of the species breeding so far south on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, according to a statement from Greenpeace Canada.

Previously, these areas were too icy for gentoo penguins, which prefer temperate climes where they can raise their chicks. These penguins, the third-largest living penguin species, are native to warmer sub-Antarctic islands, such as the Falkland Islands; and they usually live in ice-free areas, such as flat, rocky beaches and low-lying cliffs where large colonies can gather, according to Oceana, a nonprofit that wasn't involved with the new sightings.

During the expedition, Greenpeace invited independent scientists aboard its icebreaker vessel MV Arctic Sunrise to sail through the Weddell Sea and help count penguins on the southern continent.

"Mapping out these remote archipelagos will give us a better understanding of how the region's penguins are responding to rapid climate change," expedition co-leader Heather J. Lynch, a professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University in New York, said in the statement.

"As expected, we're finding gentoo penguins nearly everywhere we look — more evidence that climate change is drastically changing the mix of species here on the Antarctic Peninsula."

Until now, just one solitary gentoo penguin nest had been spotted this far south. Gentoo penguins don't migrate, so conditions have to be ideal for them to stay in one location year-round.

"They're very opportunistic, so any chance they get, they're going to colonize rock as the glaciers retreat," Lynch told Mongabay. "So they're the thing that we tend to use to see how far climate change has gone in terms of turning the Antarctic Peninsula into a more sub-Antarctic or more temperate climate."

Many penguin populations are in flux due to the rapidly changing climate and increased industrial fishing, according to a Greenpeace statement. For instance, ice loss in Antarctica increased six-fold over the last 30 years, Live Science reported. One of Antarctica's largest glaciers — Thwaites Glacier, also known as the "Doomsday Glacier" — could collapse in just a few years, possibly increasing sea levels worldwide by more than 2 feet (65 centimeters), Live Science reported in December.

To help native animals struggling in a warming Antarctic, scientists and conservationists are pushing for three new marine protected areas around the southern continent, including in East Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula and the Weddell Sea, which would span 1.5 million square miles (4 million square kilometers), Mongabay reported.

"Governments need to agree [to] a new Global Ocean Treaty to deliver protection for at least 30% of the world's oceans by 2030 — and they must get to work by protecting the Antarctic's waters," Louisa Casson, of Greenpeace's Protect the Oceans campaign, who was also aboard the Arctic Sunrise, said in the statement.

(*) Laura Geggel is an editor at Live Science. She edits Life's Little Mysteries and reports on general science, including archaeology and animals. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and an advanced certificate in science writing from NYU.

Falklands Veterinary Officers Report On Gentoo Rookery Penguin Pox

Thursday, February 2nd 2023 - 10:57 UTC Juvenile Gentoo penguin deaths swabs were taken to be tested for avian influenza and have returned a negative result to the N1 gene.

On Tuesday 24 January, Veterinary Officers and Falkland Landholdings representatives visited Berthas Beach following reports of several juvenile Gentoo penguin deaths. The unwell and dead penguins that were reported displayed severe penguin pox lesions.

No other ages or species were seen to be unwell or affected and given the clear pox lesions it was considered unlikely that they were suffering from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI H5N1 – bird flu). However, swabs were taken to be tested for avian influenza and have returned a negative result to the N1 gene.

While avian influenza is not currently a concern penguin pox is an infectious viral condition which can be spread to other colonies causing illness and death in vulnerable birds. FLH have closed Berthas Beach for a short period of time to reduce stress on the Gentoo colony and prevent spread of the pox virus. Penguin pox has been reported several times in the Falkland Islands previously.

The Veterinary Service will continue to investigate any further reports of bird deaths and it is important for all visitors going to areas in the Falklands with bird colonies to practice good bio-security. If you see any unusual wild bird or domestic/commercial poultry behavior please report this to the Veterinary Services on tross@naturalresources@gov.Fk 27366 or out of hours 55366.

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