My favourite story of the week

This week, I am mostly laughing at the Japanese whaling ship that may need to be towed away from the Antarctic coast. The ship, from the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, was presumably doing a valuable scientific investigation into how many protected mammals it is possible to harvest from a region covered by several international treaties, when its engine caught fire. Thankfully there are several vessels in the region that could rescue the crew and tow the ship to safety - the closest of which is a Greenpeace vessel.

The Japanese captain is unamused though, and is honouring the Samurai spirit by refusing the offer of such help, whilst environmentalists are wringing their hands in case she starts hemorrhaging fuel into Ross Sea. Well, environmentalists always are wringing their hands, aren't they?

For once, and in a break with their finest traditions, Greenpeace has actually got it right this time. They're mostly worried about penguin colonies, but a significant oil spill into the Ross Sea region would have major
consequences for the entire west Antarctic. The Ross Sea is one of the major Southern Hemisphere perennial ice sheets (the other is the Weddell Sea - that would be a fisheries disaster of hemispheric
proportions). A major reason why ice can exist there throughout the Antarctic summer is that being highly reflective, it bounces most of the sun's radiation back, so that only heating by air or the ocean (which
doesn't really happen here) can melt it. However, a fuel spill would taint a significant portion of that ice with a black liquid - you get the picture.

Major ice loss from that shelf (which has so far been relatively stable) has far reaching consequences. Firstly, the Ross ice shelf holds back land-based ice sheets, so we could expect an acceleration of glaciers in the Vinson Massif. Secondly, (and this is my area of knowledge by the way) that area is key in modulated the air and ocean flow to the Antarctic Peninsula, the region which has shown a higher rate of warming over the last forty years than almost anywhere else in the world. How this modulation works exactly nobody yet fully understands (I'll tell you in about 18 months time, maybe). However, we do know that because the ice acts as a thermal insulator between the ocean and atmosphere, removing the ice sheet will release a lot of thermal energy into the atmosphere, which will disrupt the air currents that are warming the west Antarctic ice sheet in (as yet) unpredictable ways.

So what's my point? At the risk of advocating gunboat-diplomacy, the international community needs to stop fannying around trying to be diplomatic with these people. If the Japanese continue to endanger the whole region on a stupid point of cultural pride, then either the Australian, New Zealand or Chilean Navy needs to get in there and drag them out, kicking and screaming if necessary. The Treaties that protect Antarctica from damage by commercial exploitation have not yet been fully tested - this seems to be as good a time as any.