A reflection on being on the continent of Antarctica, January 2022 by Katrin Oddleifson Robertson

Reflections on Being in Antartica

On the surface of things, the wildlife lives as freely today as it has for millions of years. Leopard, Weddell, Elephant and Fur seals splay themselves on floating slabs of ice or on rock strewn shores, blithely unimpressed by the humans observing them from Zodiacs just a few feet away.&nbsp;

I am hopeful that the promise and spirit of the Antarctic Treaty will travel with me when I return to my spot on the planet thousands of miles away from this magnificent place. As the sensory experiences of being on the continent begin to fade, I want to hold onto the reverence, wonder, and sense of connectivity that I felt so poignantly while in Antarctica.&nbsp;

Of the many spectacular natural environments on Earth, few are completely free from the human desire to possess them. Once they are discovered, we humans build roads and trails, construct gas stations, hotels, restaurants, and towns, open gift shops, create guided tours with headphones, man ranger stations, post informational plaques, and construct visitor centers staffed by experts - all as emblems of human ingenuity, access, and progress.&nbsp;

Whether grounded in a commitment to education, conservation, or consumerism, humans want to be the ones to claim and tame Earth’s territories, to do most of the talking about them, and proudly declare,

“I am here!”

The treaty stipulates that human engagement with Antarctica should be exclusively for peaceful purposes. It promotes international scientific cooperation and requires that the results of research be made freely available to the global scientific community.

And trill with one another, ignoring the humans standing nearby as if they were invisible.

I want to continue the most important journey I can be on at this point in our Earth’s environmental history - making the moral shift from “I am here!”, possessor of a tiny part of this planet, to “here, I am” doing my part to be a keeper of its wholeness.

The diversity of life existing here for millions of years speak for themselves, needing no human audience or translation. Each new encounter with Antarctica weakens my impulse to declare “I am here!” - I am here to consume the beauty of this environment; I am here to capture stories of my experience on the continent to bring back home.&nbsp;

Here, I am left in a state of reverent stillness that silences the cacophony of thoughts typically competing for my attention, calling forth a quiet "re-membering" that everything on our planet is somehow interconnected and interdependent; that this continent is more than just a resource containing 90% of the planet’s cooling ice and 70% of the fresh water necessary to sustain human life. The Antarctic is a dignified form of life in its own right, worthy of the fierce protection we give to the people we love.

Whales dive and breach, gracefully unaware of who might be watching.

Antarctica has only permitted a vague human presence across time.&nbsp;Scientific base stations have been established by a multitude of countries around the world. They appear transitory, like rectangular shipping containers sitting on the landscape, easily constructed and as easily removed. Most stations are fully operational only a few months a year because they are too expensive to maintain or because the cold, dark winters of isolation have chased out even the most rugged individuals.

Icebergs, sculpted into fantastical shapes by the elements for over five-hundred-million years, along with the spontaneously shifting ice floes filling inlets and coves, give or deny permission to those who want to set foot on the continent.

Arriving in Antarctica we meet its generals, colonels, and sentinels keeping watch over the continent. Mountainous peaks of Metamorphic, Paleozoic, Sedimentary and Volcanic rocks stand, forcefully still, across the skyline, displaying a majesty earned millennia before humans ever existed.&nbsp;

Some buildings have been deserted altogether. The piles of sun-bleached, weather-beaten scraps of wood from abandoned huts scattered along the beaches of Antarctica’s archipelagos, and the remnants of dories disappearing into the gravelly sand, tell another story of humans who tried, long ago, to lay claim to this continent.

The effort required to get to Antarctica is the first hint that the continent plays by its own rules. It requires embarking on a three-day rite of passage through the Drake Channel – the place where the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern seas converge, creating one of the roughest and most unpredictable waters in the world. The nearly six-hundred nautical miles of the journey often subjects its passengers to thirty-foot plus waves that challenge even the most seasoned mariners.

Instead “I am here!” begins to molt away like seal’s skin or penguin’s feathers, gradually transforming into “Here, I am” - here, I am full of wonder not merely about the physical beauty overwhelming my senses, but about the fact that this immaculate content has existed for billions of years yet feels as fresh and new as if it had just been born.

Iridescent white and aquamarine glaciers touch the sea and command the shoreline with their reach. 

I wonder if the explorers from the original twelve countries who signed the Antarctic Treaty in 1961, and that now includes over fifty-eight national signatories, felt a similar shift from "I am here" to "here, I am"?

Reflections on Being in Antarctica Katrin O. Robertson January, 2022

It has been recognized as one of the most successful international agreements ever written. It continues to evolve, in perpetuity, as an example of humanity’s collective ability to create systems that put aside aggressive and politicized agendas to own or control pieces of the world (and each other), in an effort to protect an environment that affects everyone and everything that belongs on this incredible planet, whether we realize it or not. 

Being in the presence of the immense scale of Antarctica, its independence from civilization as I know it, and its will to survive on its own terms, is humbling.

Except in Antarctica. This continent has no interest in the human battle to possess and tame it.

Name

Safari may block some audio or video from playing automatically and ‘read to me’ will skip these. You can configure this in Safari’s preferences.