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"Time on Ice"
by Christine Eckstrom
I am walking on the surface of the Southern Ocean. Antarctica is ten miles to the south. The surface is a layer of sea ice, attached to the continent. In winter the ice freezes out from the coast in a slow white wave; in summer it recedes and breaks up. I have come here by helicopter from an icebreaker docked twenty miles north, where the ice meets open sea. I can't stay long. It's late spring, and the surface is starting to melt. Big cracks run through the ice like lightning bolts. Across them meander the tracks of penguins, leading north to the sea. High above, streamers of cirrus arc across the sky, a sign that wind is coming.
The landscape around me looks like a fairy-tale painting of heaven. I am encircled by an archipelago of mountainous ice islands. They rise several hundred feet, some grouped in ranges, others alone. They are blue in shadow, snow-white in sun, with deep crevices in their walls that reveal an interior of denser ice the color of brilliant turquoise. The mountains emerge from a white plain of sea ice that stretches to every horizon, leading to more blue-ice mountains far in the distance. By midday the sun has melted a thin veneer from their walls, and the mountains shine like pearl essence, lustrous and liquid, making them seem even more imaginary and impermanent than the ice under my feet.
This is the real illusion: Everything here looks like land, but it is all made of water. I am walking on the frozen skin of the ocean. The mountains are made entirely of ice. They are icebergs that calved from an ice shelf to the east, drifted west with the coastal current, and grounded here on the continental shelf. They are trapped in the same sea ice that supports me. Each winter the ring of ice that forms around Antarctica grips this archipelago of icebergs in place. When the sea ice melts in summer, the icebergs are freed. They shift and roll, until winter holds them fast again. Every year this world is rearranged in a new geography, as if you could watch earth's tectonic history in fast motion.
Up close, the ice mountains have the geology of landforms, layered like ancient canyon walls, fractured with fault lines, slit with tall needle's-eye clefts. There are tabletop mesas and high spired peaks and deep caves hung with icicle stalactites in neat rows, like whale baleen. Several mountains have thin meltwater falls, and one has, at its base, a small pool where emperor penguins are splashing like children.
The emperors slosh in the pool in excited, bobbing mobs. Others line up at the edge and belly-flop in. Farther out, more emperors approach in loose lines, tobogganing on their bellies down a long canyon that leads to the pool. At the other end of the canyon, a mass of emperor chicks clusters at the base of a blue-ice wall. From a distance they look eerily like people. Most are teenagers, looking awkward and half-dressed as their feathers molt in illogical, artless patterns. Other ones, a little younger, are still precious in puffed coats of fluffy chick down.
This iceberg archipelago is a traditional nesting site, one of only forty known emperor penguin colonies found around the rim of Antarctica. More than twelve thousand breeding pairs gather here each year, and among the blue-ice mountains stretching into the distance are more chicks, perhaps seven thousand in all, scattered in broad gray patches like shadows on the ice.
Being among emperors, watching the smooth regularity of their movements, is mesmerizing and calming. They move with steady composure, stoic and unflustered, with a serene demeanor that belies the extremes of their lives. Their annual cycle is a race against ice and time. Emperors are the largest of penguins, nearly four feet tall, weighing ninety pounds, and they need more time than any others to raise their young. For their chicks to mature before the ice breaks up, emperors must breed in the Antarctic winter. In late autumn, when other penguins and seabirds head north, emperor penguins turn south, facing into the maw of the cruelest season. They trek in from the sea and across the ice to traditional colonies at the edge of the continent. There each female lays a single egg, transfers it to her mate, and leaves for the open sea. The males huddle together, eggs balanced on their feet, incubating through two months of darkness and gales. The chicks hatch in mid-winter. On miraculous cue, the females return to feed them and relieve the males, who have lost nearly half their body weight. For five more months the parents journey like marathon athletes, back and forth across a hundred miles of ice to the sea, shuttling food to their young. The chicks must fledge by mid-summer, when the sea ice literally melts out from under their feet. Otherwise they won't survive.
In full sun, the ice is showing signs of rot. Holes pock the crust like a moth-eaten rug. By late afternoon, I punch through to my knees.
I sit down near the chicks, listening to their chirping soprano whistles as they plead to parents for more food, even as their bellies sag, pear-shaped, to the ground, so full they can hardly waddle. A few older chicks try to make the stuttering nasal trumpet calls of adults, but their voices crack. In the distance, long skeins of adults toboggan across the ice plain to the open sea, still foraging for their young. Without turning to look, I hear them passing behind me. I hear the soft crunch in the ice as each rear foot pushes off, pedaling evenly, rhythmically, over the white plain.
Emperor penguins are birds born of blizzards, progeny of ice. They may be the truest of seabirds, never touching land in their lives. Their fate is tied to ocean, weather, season, ice, to this ephemeral geography.
An ice column falls and booms like a cannon, echoing down the walls of the canyon. The evening air is cold, but the landscape is dissolving. The ice mountains are dripping. The ocean is nearer. In a week or two the young ones will be carried out to liquid sea on floes of sea ice, broken pieces of this old geography. The ocean will lap here where I stand, erasing everything but the memories of the emperors.
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