Penguins and Polar Plunges: Inside Indre Rockefeller's Antarctic Excursion

Indre Rockefeller's Antarctica Travel Diary

I recently had the opportunity to take part in the trip of a lifetime onboard a polar expedition to Antarctica.  The trip began with a short stop in Buenos Aires for some alfresco dining and quick visits to the San Telmo market, La Recoleta Cemetery, and Casa Cavia.  From BA, we took a straight shot south to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, where mountaintop glaciers began popping up along the horizon on our afternoon hikes.  In the port of Ushuaia, we boarded our Quark Expedition boat, headed through the Drake Passage, toward the Antarctic Peninsula.

The Drake Passage, having earned a “rock and roll” (the other kind) reputation for some of the roughest seas in the world, didn’t disappoint.  The “Drake Shake,” as our captain described the 25-foot swells rocking our boat, felt something akin to a 48-hour amusement park ride.  Day three on the water, we were woken up on a still, quiet boat by a pre-dawn call, instructing us to gear up for landfall.  I pulled aside the curtains in our cabin, still groggy from a heavy dose of motion sickness medication, to find a spectacular, otherworldly scene.  Outside our window, softly reflected in the pre-dawn light, lay a stunning, sculptural world of ice, with sweeping snow-covered mountains on the horizon and small groups of penguins swimming alongside the boat.  And that was just the tip of the iceberg (quite literally!) of what lay in store for us once we changed out of our pajamas into layers upon layers of long underwear.

The trip was organized in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.  So, not only were we given the opportunity to walk with penguins, swim with whales (if you count a 30-second, heart-stopping plunge into freezing arctic waters “swimming”), and hike glaciers, but we were on board with climate scientists, marine biologists, and glaciologists who were able to show us how the Antarctic ecosystem is being affected by rising temperatures.

The long and short of what we learned? There is serious change happening.  Warmer oceans are leading to everything from drastic shifts in the Antarctic food chain to the destabilization of ice shelves, which are melting at unprecedented speed.  While these changes have big implications for our fan favorite penguins, we also learned how these seemingly small shifts in an ecosystem at the end of the earth can impact the rest of the globe.  If all of the ice melted in Antarctica, sea levels would rise over 200 feet. For perspective, given a sea level rise of just 3 feet, Hudson River Park, in my home island of Manhattan, would be best enjoyed by fish instead of people.

While this seems dire, our climate scientists onboard didn’t leave us without hope.  We are still in a (albeit rapidly closing) window in which it’s possible to forestall some pretty dramatic climate “weirding.”  It is the next 10 years that are the most critical to the next 10,000 years. So for the sake of those who live on the ice and those of us who only occasionally contend with it during freak “bomb cyclones,” let’s be the generation that does something about it.