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Hilary Benn's diary February 2009
Environment Secretary Hilary Benn wrote this diary during his trip to Kenya and Antarctica. He attended the Governing Council of the United Nations Environmental Programme in Nairobi and visited a number of schemes and projects; he then went to Antarctica to look at climate change research there.
Sunday 22 February 2009
At last the weather cleared, and so our party of environment and climate change ministers from a number of countries was able to take off for the eight hour flight across the ocean to Troll airfield in Dronning Maud Land in Antarctica.
It was, not surprisingly, extremely cold when we disembarked in the early morning and we were grateful for the arctic clothing supplied by our hosts, the Norwegian Polar Institute. Troll is a year round scientific base, although the summer season is coming to an end. We were briefed by Jan-Gunnar Winther, the Director of the Institute, and his colleagues about the latest scientific research.
Antarctica is basically a desert, albeit one containing 94 per cent of the world’s ice; it is, on average, two km thick. The evidence is that the continent is warming, although the precise extent of this is not fully understood. It is a vast place and there is much yet to discover. This was one reason for the Norwegian/American Traverse Expedition that had just arrived at Troll following a two-month journey from the South Pole that began just before Christmas.
We went outside to meet those who had undertaken the trek. One of the scientists was from Cornwall, and she had been monitoring the depth of the ice using radar trailed behind the vehicles. In the course of this work, they discovered more about the lakes that lie beneath the surface. These exist because the snow cover acts like a blanket and the warmth from the core of the earth melts the ice that is deep down. And all the time the ice is on the move towards the Antarctic seas.
Then we saw some of the work that is being done to measure air pollution, including new research which suggests that biomass particles were carried to Troll on a plume of wind from Latin America. The scientist also told us that mercury has been detected by their equipment, so I was able to tell him that the UN Environment Programme Conference in Nairobi had just agreed to do something about this. He was very pleased to hear the news. It shows that even in this most remote of places, what we do in other parts of the world has an impact, good and bad.
The spirit of scientific co-operation between nations is very strong and I saw a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) experiment which is housed at Troll. It is monitoring the upper atmosphere. It was, of course, BAS scientists who discovered the hole in the ozone layer in 1985. Their work led to the Montreal Protocol which has been one of the most successful international agreements ever, and the problem is on the way to being fixed. I visited the BAS in Cambridge two weeks ago and was tremendously impressed by what I saw, and in particular their work on measuring temperature and carbon dioxide from ice cores which are hundreds of thousands of years old.
Then we went to look around the area. The snow and ice is scoured and blasted by the wind and you get a profound sense of just how remote it is and how far you are from help. We were told that a couple of months ago one of the staff at the base had had a serious fall on the mountain and it took two weeks to arrange an evacuation; thankfully, his badly broken leg was saved. The only other living things we saw were petrels flying high above the giant cliffs and a lone skua which dipped over a snow wall.
Then it was goodbye to our hosts for the day. By this time next month there will only be six people at the base. They will stay there throughout the antarctic winter and, barring emergencies, they won’t see another human being until October! Antarctica is a very special place which has been kept that way by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The UK was the first country to ratify it, and it has protected and preserved this extraordinary continent ever since. In its 50th year, long may that spirit of scientific enquiry and co-operation continue.
And so, with the sun hanging low in the sky, we headed down the ice runway and took off as the figures in red waved farewell.
Hilary Benn
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Page last modified: 25 February 2009
Page published: 25 February 2009