Antarctic Cruise Ship Runs Aground; Oil Leak Spreading?

A cruise ship stranded itself on Antarctica's western peninsula on Thursday, and may be leaking unknown amounts of oil into the fragile oceans, one expert said.

All 122 passengers and crew were rescued from the leaking ship, Ushuaia, on Friday by the Chilean Navy. The ship did not appear to be in danger of sinking.
The Chilean vessel Aquiles transported 89 passengers and 33 crew members to the Presidente Frei Naval Base in Antarctica.

Jon Bowermaster, a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee and writer, was on the National Geographic Explorer about 30 miles (48.2 kilometers) from the cruise ship when it ran aground after hitting a rock.
"We were in the same area on Wednesday, when hurricane force winds blew for much of the day, gusting over 100 miles [161 kilometers] per hour," Bowermaster told National Geographic News in an email from the Explorer.

"The Ushuaia reported having been in heavy weather; whether or not this contributed to its [grounding] is speculation, but would make sense."

Bowermaster witnessed the sinking of another Antarctic tourist vessel in November 2007. All 154 passengers of the Canadian M.S. Explorer escaped safely.

Alarm Call

The Panamanian-flagged Ushuaia sent out alarms midday Thursday after it started leaking fuel and taking on water.

A rock damaged the hull as the vessel passed through the Gerlache Strait, Chilean Captain Pedro Ojeda told Argentina's Telam news agency. The crash left the boat adrift in Guillermina Bay.

The Chilean Navy said the cruise ship was carrying 14 Danish passengers, 12 Americans, 11 Australians, 9 Germans, 7 Argentines, 7 British, 6 Chinese, 6 Spaniards, 5 Swiss, 3 Italians, 2 French, 2 Canadians, 2 Irish, a Belgian and a New Zealander. All were in good condition.

The cruise ship, built in 1970, operates from the Port of Ushuaia in southern Argentina, transporting passengers to Antarctica and islands in the icy waters of the South Atlantic.
The navy positioned the ship Lautaro near the abandoned Ushuaia in an attempt to prevent any environmental damage from leaking fuel.
But Bowermaster said it's still unknown how much fuel oil has spilled from the ship.

"A Chilean plane reports seeing no major leak, but it [has] also reported that a fuel leak has spread for half a mile around the ship," he wrote.

"Though containment efforts are being made, it is windy in the area again and the leak is spreading."

Ushuaia may not be able to free itself from the rocks, and has at least one hole, Bowermaster added.

"A sinking ship in this pristine, narrow channel would have long-lasting impact on both the local environment and the future of tourism along the [Antarctic] Peninsula."

"Accident Waiting to Happen"

In addition to the 2007 sinking of the M.S. Explorer, another ship—the Norwegian M.S. Fram—lost engine power during an electrical outage in December 2007 and struck a glacier, smashing a lifeboat but causing no injuries among its 300 passengers.
A boom in Antarctic tourism may be an "accident waiting to happen,"
More than 30,000 tourists were estimated to have made the trek to Antarctica on some 50 different ships during the November 2007 to February 2008 cruise season, according to the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators, a trade group.

"A big question for those who oversee and monitor tourism in Antarctica is [whether] there be limits on who can visit Antarctica, and on what kind of ship?" Bowermaster added.

Bears, Winds Fail to Derail 1st Winter Arctic Foot Trek

The first ever winter trek to the North Pole reached its goal today despite setbacks from weather, equipment failures, and polar bears.

"It's great to finally be standing on the North Pole," South African explorer Mike Horn wrote on his expedition Web site. "This mystical place is all that it is made out to be. It's incredible out here!!"
Horn and Norwegian explorer Børge Ousland conceived the trip because they wanted to see sunrise from the North Pole. And to get there, they wanted to trek overland—or more specifically, over ice.

Although dawn has illuminated the region with pastel light for at least a couple of weeks, official Arctic sunrise happens only once a year: on the vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the equator.

That means that Ousland and Horn had to do something nobody else had ever attempted: ski, drag sleds, and occasionally swim through the heart of the Arctic winter.

Atrocious weather held them back, but they still managed to reach their goal this afternoon 60 days and 5 hours after setting off.

"This is a fantastic thing—a first," said photographer Kjell Ove Storvik.

Storvik, a personal friend of Ousland's, watched the pair's departure on January 22 and then tracked their progress via satellite-phone conversations.

Thinking Like Polar Bears

Winter travel in the far north poses a host of problems not encountered by prior expeditions.

To the uninitiated, the worst of these might seem to be the cold. And that has indeed been an enemy, dropping the mercury as far as -40°F (-40°C) and frostbiting Horn's fingertips.

But the extreme cold is also a friend, because it freezes the ice more solidly and reduces the number of open-water gaps, or leads, between ice floes that the travelers had to navigate.

To cross these leads Ousland and Horn used a bold but simple method: swimming.

After all, Ousland reasoned when he came up with the idea, that's how polar bears get across.

When they came to open water, the adventurers donned insulated drysuits and swam across stretches as wide as an eighth of a mile (about 200 meters).

In the water the trekkers towed their equipment sleds behind them, or when necessary, pushed a sled in front to break through thin skins of ice.

Once across they took another hint from polar bears and rolled in the snow to dry the moisture off their suits before taking them off and packing them away.

Loss of Perspective

But leads weren't the only problem: Until approaching spring brought endless dawn, the pair also had to contend with darkness that ate their headlamp beams and made it difficult to figure out the best way around obstacles.

That forced them to use a tactic Horn developed during a previous trek through the trackless Amazon jungle.

If you can't see well enough to pick the best route, go as close as possible to straight ahead and bull through whatever lies in your way.

Traveling in the dark is worse than simply not being able to see where you're going, said Gary Dunkley, a mountaineer, arctic traveler, and spelunker.

The explorer once spent 12 consecutive days underground on a National Geographic Expedition in Belize.

When you're working by headlamp, he said, there's no light directly beneath your feet. That forces you to remember what you're about to step on.

The straight-ahead illumination of the headlamp also appears to "flatten" the landscape, robbing you of perspective and making it hard to recognize bumps and dips.

Ousland and Horn traveled on skis, which made it a bit easier not to trip over things, but the same problems still applied.

"Sometimes we feel that we're skiing to the North Pole inside a tunnel," Ousland wrote in the expedition's blog.

Moving Backward

Wind is also an obstacle, because it not only increases the risk of frostbite, it causes the ice to move.

"You can drift [backward] five kilometers [about three miles] at 'night' while sleeping, then have to walk that five kilometers again in the morning," Storvik said.

"Their first month was an endless story of walking and drifting back."

Wind also delayed the expedition's start from Siberia's Cape Arktichesky by nearly two weeks. Strong gusts blew the pack ice out to sea, creating an uncrossable expanse of open water between the shore and the ice.

During that time Ousland and Horn's camp was twice raided by polar bears, including one that attempted to break into their tent while they were sleeping.

Luckily, they were able to scare the bear away with a flare gun.

From then on the delays continued to mount: frigid headwinds, Horn's frostbite, broken tent poles, broken skis, and ultimately a mysterious illness that robbed Horn of much of his energy.

But conditions improved and the expedition got back on track to reach the pole today—its initial target date.

As of yesterday the trekkers were a mere 13 miles (21 kilometers) shy of their goal.

"I am really looking forward to finishing this journey while enjoying the light of the midnight sun," Ousland wrote in his blog.

In addition to their record-breaking voyage, Storvik says, Ousland and Horn's journey represents the triumph of two explorers from different cultures who are each accustomed to working alone.

"Everyone doomed them in the beginning," Storvik said. "But it turns out they've become really good friends."

And the triumph of that "human factor," he says, is at least as important as the completion of their expedition.

Life-Forms "Resurrected" After Millennia in Ice

Imagine sticking some bacteria in the freezer and taking them out millions of years later to find that they are still alive.

That would be similar to what happened recently, when scientists brought eight-million-year-old microbes back to life—simply by thawing them.

The ancient bacteria were found frozen in the world's oldest known tracts of ice, the debris-covered glaciers of Antarctica.

"We think that they were pretty much locked in a frozen, inanimate state for that period of time," said lead study author Kay Bidle, a marine microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

It's also possible that some of the microbes were capable of maintaining their metabolism within tiny droplets of water suspended in the ice, Bidle said.

Bidle and colleagues retrieved and revived two samples of bacteria from the glacial ice. The first was a hundred thousand years old, and the second was around eight million years old.

The eight-million-year-old bacteria were alive, but barely.

Their genes were severely damaged from long exposure to cosmic radiation, which is higher at Earth's poles.

The radiation bombarded the bacteria's DNA with high-energy particles, which broke apart the DNA's chemical bonds and hacked it into shorter pieces.

Big Bacterial Thaw

Most of the bacteria in the samples probably blew over from African deserts, said study co-author Paul Falkowski, a biochemist at Rutgers.

Once the bacteria landed on the glacier's snowy surface, they were compressed with the snow to form ice.

"These ices are literally gene banks," he added.

That's because bacteria are able to incorporate foreign DNA into their own genetic makeup in a process called horizontal gene transfer.

This gives bacteria a way to pick up new advantageous traits, which in turn speeds up their evolution.

Falkowski likens the Antarctic ice to a "genetic popsicle."

As glaciers and ice caps melt as a result of the current trend of global warming, vast amounts of bacterial genetic material might be flushed into the ocean.

"You basically have this mechanism by which you're freeing up encased DNA and microbes that may be viable," lead author Bidle said.

Scraps of bacterial DNA might get incorporated into today's marine microbes, or viable bacteria released from the ice might also grow and impact the ecosystem.

"How that's going to play out, we don't know," Bidle said. He and Falkowski plan to focus future work on how current ice melting impacts modern microbes' genetic diversity.

The study appears in this week's journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Meaning for Mars?
The finding also lends hope to the possibility that microbes could lie in a similar suspended state in ancient Martian ice.

But it also nixes the idea that life could hitch a ride on comets between solar systems.

"Each solar system is an island of life," Falkowski said. Microbes on comets would be exposed to lethal doses of cosmic radiation for millions of years during their journey, he said.

"Under those conditions you would be sterilizing comets."

Antarctic Ice Breakups Reveal New Species

A potentially new species of shrimplike crustacean in the genus Epimeria was found near Elephant Island in Antarctica, scientists announced on Sunday.

The 1-inch-long (2.5-centimeter-long) creature was among nearly a thousand species collected during the first biological survey of a 3,860-square-mile (10,000-square-kilometer) section of the sea that was once covered by thick polar ice.

A 500-billion-ton ice shelf known as Larsen B disintegrated into the Weddell Sea in 2002—seven years after the nearby Larsen A ice shelf broke apart.Experts believe global warming triggered both events.

"The breakup of these ice shelves opened up huge, near pristine portions of the ocean floor, sealed off from above for at least 5,000 years—and possibly up to 12,000 years in the case of Larsen B," Julian Gutt, a marine ecologist at Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and chief expedition scientist, said in a media release.

"The results of our efforts," Gutt added, "will advance our ability to predict the future of our biosphere in a changing environment."

Animals From Antarctica's Deep Seas

Hundreds of new species of deep-sea animals, such as the baby isopod Ceratoserolis above, have been discovered during expeditions in the waters off Antarctica.

Ceratoserolis is just one of 585 new species of isopod—a type of marine crustacean related to wood lice—found during the Antarctic Benthic Deep-Sea Biodiversity Project, or ANDEEP, trips between 2002 and 2005.

Researchers aboard the German research vessel Polarstern in the Weddell Sea also brought up heart-shaped sea urchins, carnivorous sponges, and giant sea spiders the size of dinner plates.

"We were astonished by the enormous biodiversity we found in many groups of species," said Angelika Brandt, a marine biologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany.

The project has made a major contribution to the Census of Marine Life (CoML) program, a global collaboration among thousands of researchers who aim to make a detailed record of all ocean life by 2010.