SBS Blog > Antarctica expedition: climate food for thought by Wendy Pring

Antarctica expedition: climate food for thought

By Wendy Pring - Posted on 15 February 2024

Enterprise Fellow Wendy Pring recently travelled to Antarctica as part of a group of 100 women with STEMM backgrounds. Here, she talks about what the experience taught her.

Climate change is affecting everything… but not yet everyone. The importance of our polar regions in regulating global temperature is scientifically demonstrated. If we are not touched by this yet, consider the impact when we are - whether this is flooding, droughts, or collapse of our food systems.

Homeward Bound is a ground-breaking, global leadership initiative, set against the backdrop of Antarctica, which aims to heighten the influence and impact of women in making decisions that shape our planet and I was honoured to be part of the latest cohort. During our expedition, we were supported on learning about the changes to Antarctica’s ecosystem by the Homeward Bound onboard expedition team, demonstrating years of evidence as well as being the researchers behind David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet II.

There was a stark reminder of the importance of the interconnectedness of our activities - we were informed that Antarctica warming is already at 2 degrees Celsius and this is seen in the melting of vast areas already of the western sea ice shelves and massive moving icebergs. The rise in ocean temperatures is also adding to the increasing melt rate.

An excursion to Cuverville Island demonstrated the climate adaptation of Gentoo penguins and the fragility of the ice and the subsequent impact this has on all of us. We witnessed a ‘calving’ - an avalanche and breaking of ice caused by warming and crevasses being put under additional stresses. It was small in size but, collectively, along each glacier there are multiple areas where this can occur. We are witnessing daily signs of climate breakdown - the questions we should be asking are clearer than ever around our own adaptation and mitigations required to species survival.

I cannot remove the imagery of the Adelie penguins from my mind and the correlation with our Just Transition. As a marker for climate change, penguins demonstrate how and what species loss looks like. Adelie are equipped with eating habits that cannot support a changing diet; they have coats that do not support a changing climate so they cannot keep warm, and they cannot adapt to this changing environment. Their nest building means that the way they live cannot be readily replicated in the format they need. They find themselves always moving, changing, becoming more vulnerable to death either by prey or by the changing climate.

This resonated so much with me; the whole trip and my knowledge was increased via lectures while our daily landings showed us direct impacts. I kept returning to our human species and recognition that - to make the changes to our society; to maintain global warming at levels that will support a wider variation of humans to exist - we need to make significant change. In our case it is the cost of keeping warm – or cooling down; the ability to access our systems through digital transformation; accessibility of food that also supports our life support system; the fact that those who travel extensively may be just ‘offsetting’ their footprint but not necessarily changing behaviours.

Water was the factor in many of our conversations there. The clarity in the seawater is astounding and reinforces the level of pollution in our waters that has become almost acceptable. We were able to watch the power of the sea move and ground large icebergs - the speed at which they move creating a very dynamic situation.

Crossing the Antarctic Convergence was our official notice that we had completely left Antarctica. This boundary is completely natural and varies seasonally as it is where the cold waters of Antarctica sink below the warmer waters of the southern oceans. The main identifier is the change in sea temperature which was noted at 58 degrees latitude: it is typically noted as a change of 2.8 degrees. It’s also known as the Polar Front. The polar front jet stream generally flows from west to east and core winds speeds of 250mph. This can be around 14km above sea level and has strong links to surface weather systems globally. Changes in pressure are key to the effect these winds have on Antarctic temperature increases.

Our global weather patterns are directly linked to this change and bring conditions that will restrict the human species from living within the changing environment. Changes to how we consume and live are possible but to do this first we must accept we can and then create new opportunities to live within our finite resources.

We found ourselves discussing how, as a wicked problem, can we approach climate change across our respective businesses? There are many issues we need to overcome when we come together to work on complex, global challenges. Often there is no definite solution - circumstances and our understanding of the problem changes - and we cannot solve it alone but need to rely on each other and contribute to a solution together.