The abnormal new normal: confronted by a cluster of threats this summer, is Antarctica at a tipping point?

A pair of humpback whales has been inspecting the expedition cruise ship Roald Amundsen, lying a notch below 65 degrees south in the mirrored waters of the Lemaire Channel. But they’ve had a change of mind. It’s our tiny Zodiac boat, little more than a high-tech tyre, that now intrigues them.

“Last-chance tourism” is how travel operators describe
 the urge of some to get to Antarctica “before it melts”.

The driver cuts the engine as the humpbacks draw closer. Every few minutes they surface to spout. The temperature today in the Antarctic Peninsula, a 1300-kilometre-long tendril of ice, snow and bedrock reaching towards the tip of South America, is close to freezing. Each blast from a humpback blowhole is followed by a plume of steam.

Suddenly a barnacle-encrusted tail slices through the still black water, just out of reach. For the fearful, it’s too close for comfort; for the intrepid, it’s too good to be true. The leviathans slide beneath us, descending as steadily as elevators, and disappear. I study the depths, looking one way, then another. Nothing. Then, a scant few metres below, the larger of the two reappears, turning its immense white belly upwards like an outsized puppy begging for a scratch.

Read the story from The Age by Luke Slattery - “The abnormal new normal: confronted by a cluster of threats this summer, is Antarctica at a tipping point?”