Amongst Emperors

Winter trips are one of the most eagerly anticipated events of the winter. A chance to escape the confines of the base, to put the routine, work and responsibility to the sword for a week as you head for the horizon on a ski-doo to explore the wonders that the Brunt Ice Shelf holds. As I was lazy and didn’t start this blog until well after the first trip, I will tell you about the second trip first. My first winter trip with Kev and Al was in March to the Hinge Zone about 50km inland, where the continental ice of the Brunt Glacier meets the sea and buckles upwards as it begins to float, resulting in a paradisic landscape of crevasse systems, ice chasms and cliffs that simply look as if they do not belong on Earth. This time in late September, we decided to head west to the coast to a place called Windy Bay, a horseshoe shaped bay cut out of sheer ice cliffs where, on the sea ice 25m below, is one of only a handful of emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica, and the joint largest.

In contrast to the first trip where we camped on the ice, this time we had the luxury of staying in the Windy Caboose. As the wind chill hit -45 C that week, we were all very glad to be within the four walls of the caboose with the stove on full blast. Windy Bay lived up to its name, with the wind rarely dropping below 20kn in the week that we were there which forced us on more than one occasion to have to escape the caboose using the roof hatch as the door was snowed in by wind blown snow.

The caboose

Sledges and emergency supplies

Sledges and emergency supplies

The throne room

Being outside in those winds and the temperatures they bring is not terribly pleasant, so we spent lots of time enjoying the lack of base routine by sleeping in late and eating our body weight in cheese. Throughout most afternoons, Scrabble, Jenga and Connect-4 competitions raged mercilessly. No game makes you realise quite how stupid you are like Connect-4, how the hell I didn’t see that Kev had three in a row as I unwittingly place my piece elsewhere I don’t quite know, but the final scores stood at 70 games played of which I won maybe 8, Kev won 32, and the other 30 games I don’t count because I lost too quickly for it to be classed as a game.

We did have one beautiful, if not frigidly cold, day with the penguins while we were there which has to be among one of the best days of my life. It started with building ice anchors for the abseil from the top of the ice cliffs down to the sea ice below. Al suggested I go first as I had built the anchors; nothing like trusting in your own work. My stomach definitely went once or twice as I lent back over the lip of the cliffs but once I was over the lip, the descent was smooth and very enjoyable.

By the time Kev and Al had descended onto the sea ice too, a few of the more observant penguins had belly slid over and begun inspecting us. We split up and wandered around, never intruding directly into the colony but remaining on the periphery and letting the penguins approach us. They really are the most bizarre creatures on the face of the Earth. They are born into the most hostile environment that the planet has to offer and so are perfectly adapted to it; consequently looking totally alien compared to any creature I’ve seen before.

Whereas many animals are adapted well to hunt or hide in their environment, virtually all of the penguins’ appearance has to do with keeping their body temperature around 40 C since amazingly, they are warm blooded. They spend their lives either on the sea ice braving the Antarctic winter, or hunting at sea in ocean temperatures rarely above 0 C, so they have many mechanisms for retaining heat. The average adult is the size of a massively obese 8 year old child to give it a low surface area to volume ratio and therefore limit heat loss. Overlapping densely packed feathers make a surface almost impenetrable to wind or water and they have tufts of down on the shafts below the feathers which traps an insulating layer of air. Below the feathers is a layer of fat (one characteristic I seem to share with these penguins) which further insulates the core. And as everyone knows, they huddle together during the coldest months, constantly rotating inwards so that everyone gets a turn in the middle. The centre of the huddle can amazingly be up to 40 C warmer than the outside, absolutely essential in surviving the winter.

Bloody freezing.

Making friends.

Kev makes a new friend

However something that not everyone knows; one of the main problem areas is the feet, which have a large surface area, are always in contact with the ice and cannot be covered in fat or feathers. They have two adaptations to mitigate against this, one is that emperor penguins can tip up on their feet and rest their weight on a tripod of their heels and tail to reduce the surface in contact with the ice, and the other is to regulate blood flow into their feet. The main way they do this is through heat exchangers at the tops of their legs. Arteries carrying warm blood from the body break up into many smaller vessels that essentially inter-twine with vessels carrying cold blood from the feet. Heat passes from body arteries into the feet arteries without exchanging much blood and therefore preventing very cold blood returning to the main body. In winter, this minimises heat loss by keeping the penguins’ feet just above freezing whilst preventing frostbite.

The chicks have yet to develop a lot of these and so, are confined to the warmth of living on top of their parents’ feet, only emerging every now and then to chirp for regurgitated krill. The males emperors on whose feet they sit haven’t eaten for months at this point having just endured the coldest winter season on the planet, but still give the chicks all they can. When the female penguins return from the sea, the males can finally leave the colony and make for the sea .. and food.

I’ve got some really good videos of the chicks but annoyingly, we don’t have the bandwidth to upload it. The closest thing I can describe it as for the moment is birdsong; very high pitched yet melodic. Their bodies are covered in fluffy down feathers, making them the most cuddley looking things ever! Penguins have a very strong parental instinct and it is not uncommon for penguins who have lost their chick to try and take that of another. If a chick leaves the haven of its parents feet for whatever reason, a free-for-all ensues where nearby penguins without chicks will try and steal it, often throwing themselves in front of rivals to prevent them from reaching first.

It is very slapstick funny at first until you realise that the chick is literally running for its life, as sadly many of the chicks that don’t survive to adulthood, are crushed in the confused melees that break out. Without ending this on a downer, as we were preparing to ice climb back up the cliffs, the clouds broke and the sun shone through allowing a last few good pictures.

A group of penguins waddled or slid over on their bellies to watch us put on our harnesses and ice axes in preparation for climbing out. I put my GoPro on the floor and backed away to let them inspect it and clumsily push it around with their beaks. Again, this is footage that I’ll have to upload when I’m back!