Each winter, alone in the pitiless ice deserts of Antarctica, deep in the most inhospitable terrain on Earth, a truly remarkable journey takes place as it has done for millennia. Emperor penguins in their thousands abandon the deep blue security of their ocean home and clamber onto the frozen ice to begin their long journey into a region so bleak, so extreme, it supports no other wildlife at this time of year. In single file, the penguins march blinded by blizzards, buffeted by gale force winds. Resolute, indomitable, driven by the overpowering urge to reproduce, to assure the survival of the species.
Guided by instinct, by the otherworldly radiance of the Southern Cross, they head unerringly for their traditional breeding ground where - after a ritual courtship of intricate dances and delicate maneuvering, accompanied by a cacophony of ecstatic song - they will pair off into monogamous couples and mate.
The days grow shorter, the weather ever more bitter. The females remain long enough only to lay a single egg. Once this is accomplished, exhausted by weeks without nourishment, they begin their return journey across the ice-field to the fish-filled seas. The journey is hazardous, and rapacious leopard seals a predatory threat. The male emperors are left behind to guard and hatch the precious eggs, which they cradle at all times on top of their feet. Subjected to subzero temperatures and the terrible trials of the polar winter, they too face great dangers.
After two long months during which the males eat nothing, the eggs begin to hatch. Once they have emerged into their ghostly white new world, the chicks can not survive for long on their fathers' limited food reserves. If their mothers are late returning from the ocean with food, the newly-hatched young will die.
Once the families are reunited, the roles reverse, the mothers remaining with their new young while their mates head, exhausted and starved, for the sea, and food. While the adults fish, the chicks face the ever-present threat of attack by prowling giant petrels. As the weather grows warmer and the ice floes finally begin to crack and melt, the adults will repeat their arduous journey countless times, marching many hundreds of miles over some of the most treacherous territory on Earth, until the chicks are ready to take their first faltering dive into the deep blue waters of the Antarctic.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
With short steps, bent under the pitiless burden of a driving snowstorm, the emperor penguin labours through a vast labyrinth of ice. Around him, all is white, all is in violent flux. Yet the valiant bird never falters, undaunted by seemingly insurmountable obstacles. He keeps going. In this land where no other creature ventures, the emperor continues on to his romantic rendezvous. As it follows the winter migration of the emperor penguin, "March of the Penguins" tells a tale of legendary proportions, portraying the strange, spectacular destiny of powerful and emotionally-involving characters, rich in courage and humour, mystery and manifest drama.
My goal is to dig from the ice a story which has never seen the light of day for want of a teller. A true story, however extraordinary. A story repeated every winter, as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years. But there has never been a generation of men to witness and shape it, to pass it down, for man has never colonized the Antarctic. The emperor penguin had never encountered man before the first polar explorers arrived barely a century ago. In 1950, when tentative, makeshift bases were established here, scientific observation had replaced legend as Man's preferred narrative.
The emperor penguin and man have not lived together long enough for folktales or myths to develop. They remain strangers, crossing on rare occasions in the vast desert expanses of the Antarctic.
With this in mind, my desire is to tell a real story: through the extraordinary images of the emperor penguin during the austral winter, images that have always fascinated me; and with words worthy of both the Antarctic's excessive nature, and the emperor's epic destiny. It is time for the emperor's legend to be told.
LUC JACQUET
THE EMPEROR PENGUIN
A PARAGON OF THE ANIMAL WORLD
A Model of Energy Conservation
The penguin is an animal that has the capacity to thermo-regulate its own body temperature. It is warm-blooded and can maintain a constant body temperature even in the most extreme conditions. It does this thanks to the oil it secretes to water-proof its feathers (it is able to spread out this oil with its beak and lock in great quantities of air between the oil and the body, which serves as an insulator), thanks to a layer of body fat (which allows it to retain body heat), and also thanks to a high fat content in its food. The penguin is also able to regulate its body heat by having two different internal temperature levels: its core temperature at the center of its body is warm, while the extremities of its body are nearly as cold as the outside air. The temperature at the extremities is regulated by a system of exchange of heat between the arteries and the veins. The blood coming from the heart heats up the cold blood coming from the feet, which in turns cools down the blood flowing towards the extremities. In addition, the blood flow in the limbs can be reduced when it is cold. Other anatomical, physiological and behavioral characteristics have developed as the penguin has evolved, to ensure this thermo-regulation. Penguins have to deal with both the constraints of sea life and of life on the ice. While marine environments are stable, terrestrial environments are subject to seasonal climate changes. So it is not surprising that the penguin's life revolves around a constant struggle to adjust to cooling or warming. To better fight against the cold of the Austral winter, the emperor penguins have adopted social behavior patterns which allow them to save a lot of energy. The most striking adaptation is the huddle formation in which the individuals huddle against each other and form a very dense group. Only their backs are exposed to the wind, and they take turns so that the ones at the edge of the huddle formation gradually move towards the center where they will be more protected for a while, until they find themselves out on the edge again.
A Model of Sobriety and Endurance
One of the most surprising characteristics of the emperor penguin, which is its aptitude to survive on its food reserves when fasting. During this period of fasting, which lasts about 115 days for the male, covers the whole span of the breeding cycle - the courtship dances, the coupling, the laying of the egg, the incubation period, and the hatching of the chicks - each bird can lose up to a third of its body weight.
An Extraordinary Breeding Mode
The coupling produces a single egg which is incubated outside a nest, during the coldest period of the year - the Austral winter - imposing weeks of fasting and effort on the parents. This egg is fragile and cannot come into contact with the ice. It has to be kept in the incubating pocket or else it might freeze, break or be exposed to predators on the look-out. On average, only about two-thirds of the eggs will hatch. But the number of lost eggs varies enormously, from one year to the next.
A Model of Unique Coding
Another surprising characteristic of the emperor penguin, is its capacity for vocal identification and recognition. Not only can a chick recognize its parent from just 2/10th of a second of song, but it is able to do so when six other parents are singing around it at up to 6dB louder than its own parent.
(As noted by Pierre Jouventin, Centre d'éducation fonctionnelle et évolutive (CNRS) of Montpellier)
A Model of Faithfulness
The couples remain faithful for the whole breeding season. They do not, however, mate for life. Only a handful of pairs will reunite from one year to the next.
A Model of Tolerance
The notion of territory is virtually unheard of among the emperor penguins during the breeding season. This is not the case with the Adélie or King Penguins. The huddle formation, which requires that the penguins pack tightly together in a group, would be impossible if they were defending a nest or a territory against other birds.
SELECTIVE BIOGRAPHY
ADDRESS
Today, they are spread around the edges of the Antarctic continent, in particular in Terre Adélie. The ancestors of modern-day penguins lived in the southern seas long before the sea ice was formed, more than 50 million years ago.
TYPE and FAMILY
Branch: Vertebrate
Type: Bird
Order: Sphenisiformes
Family: Spheniscidae
Genus: Aptenodytes
Species: Forsteri
There are many different cousins - 17 species of penguins in the Southern hemisphere. Most live in the sub-Antarctic islands, on the Southern coasts of Australia, New Zealand, Southern Africa, and Southern America. They are spread from Antarctica to the Galapagos.
Population: approximately 400,000 individuals distributed over 44 known colonies, the largest one encompassing some 80,000 individuals in Cape Washington.
Average life span: twenty years.
HEIGHT and WEIGHT
Adults can grow from three to four feet in height. Adult male emperors weighs between 75 and 90 pounds. Female emperors' weight ranges from 60 to 70 pounds. Both lose considerable amounts of weight during the winter, with males losing over a third of their weight.
FEEDING HABITS
The emperor penguin is a predator of the high seas. It eats krill (small, shrimp-like crustaceans), fish and squid.
DISTINCTIVE SIGNS and GENERAL BIOLOGY
The emperor penguin, despite being a very poor walker, has enormous endurance, and is a magnificent swimmer. With rigid wings - quasi flattened swimming oars, which it uses as flippers, and a spindle-shaped body that is extremely hydrodynamic, the emperor penguin is a champion diver, with a known record of over 1700 feet! In addition to these two means of transportation, thanks to webbed feet, the emperor penguin is also able to slide or "toboggan" on the ice at speeds which can reach 4 to 5 miles per hour.
ENEMY PREDATORS
Orca, leopard seals, and on the ground, giant petrels and Antarctic skuas which attack the chicks.
AS TOLD BY
Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman became known nationally when he created the popular character, "Easy Reader", on CTW's highly praised children's show, "The Electric Company". He then won the Drama Desk Award, the Clarence Derwent Award and received a Tony Award Nomination for his outstanding performance in "The Mighty Gents" in 1978, and received more acclaim and an Obie Award for his appearance as the Shakespearean anti-hero, 'Coriolanus', at the New York Shakespeare Festival.
In 1984, Morgan won an additional Obie for his role as 'The Messenger' in the acclaimed Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Lee Breuer's "Gospel at Colonus". In 1985, he was awarded the Dramalogue Award for the same role. Then the role of 'Hoke Coleburn' in Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Driving Miss Daisy" won him his third Obie Award. His last stage appearance was as 'Petruchio' in "The Taming of the Shrew" at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Delacorte Theater with Tracey Ullman. Freeman's numerous television credits include, "The Atlanta Child Murders" and "The Execution of Raymond Graham". In 1993, Freeman made his film directorial debut with "Bopha!", starring Danny Glover and Alfre Woodard, and soon after formed Revelations Entertainment, a production company developing entertainment product in all existing and emerging media that "enlightens, inspires and glorifies the human experience."
Other film acting credits include: "Brubaker"; "Eyewitness"; "Harry & Sons"; "Teachers"; "Marie"; "That Was Then, This Is Now"; "Street Smart"; (for which won the LA, N.Y., and National Society of Film Critics Awards for best supporting actor of 1987, and was nominated for a Golden Globe award and an Academy Award); "Clean & Sober"; "Johnny Handsome"; "Glory"; "Driving Miss Daisy" (for which Mr. Freeman won his second Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe Award, and The Silver Bear for best actor at the Berlin Film Festival); as well as "Chain Reaction", "Kiss the Girls", the Steven Spielberg production, "Amistad" ; Paramount productions "Hard Rain", "Deep Impact " , "Nurse Betty", "Along Came a Spider", "Kiss the Girls" , "High Crimes", "The Sum of All Fears" and Warner Bros' "Dreamcatcher" and 'The Big Boune'.
Morgan's latest success, the Warner Brothers Clint Eastwood-directed hit, 'Million Dollar Baby' has earned him a Golden Globe nomination, a SAG award and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Currently, with Bob Hoskins and Jet Li, Morgan stars in the action-drama 'Unleased'. Morgan's turn with producer/actor Robert Redford, and Jennifer Lopez , "An Unfinished Life" will be released in the fall of 2005, along with "Edison" starring LLCool J, Kevin Spacey and Justin Timberlake.
And then of course, there's Morgan as Lucious Fox in 'Batman Begins', due in theaters in June 2005.
ORIGINAL MUSIC
Alex Wurman
ALEX WURMAN credits his facility and wide range of styles in composition to his early classical training, a lifelong love of jazz, and an expert knowledge of the most advanced technology. His is a talent that can be attributed to both genetics and environmental circumstance as he hails from a family that has spent generations devoted to the study and performance of music.
Alex can trace his desire to work in the field of film scoring to afternoons spent at his father's workplace. Hans Wurman is an arranger composer who not only pioneered the world of electronic music by recording intricate works on the first Moog synthesizer, but also was the owner of a thriving business recording radio plays featuring such well-known actors as Richard Burton, James Earl Jones and Woody Allen.
Alex then attended the Academy of Performing Arts high school in Chicago and went on to study composition at the University of Miami in Coral Gables and the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. While in Chicago, Alex performed with such artist as Stanley Turrentine and Bobby Broom.
Film scoring seemed to be the natural evolution for Alex's talent, and after a stint in the commercial/ad world, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue this new career path. He immediately got work scoring AFI student films. During this time, Alex met Hans Zimmer and began working with the esteemed composer by providing composition and arranging services. Alex had the opportunity to contribute to the blockbuster hits "A League of Their Own", "The Lion King" and "Armageddon." This proved to be the launching pad for his independent career. Soon, assignments came his way from the indie world as directors discovered a fresh and versatile composer who gave their films depth with his music.
Alex made the leap to major studio releases with the scores to "Confessions of A Dangerous Mind" (Miramax) and "Hollywood Homicide" (Sony/Revolution). The two scores couldn't be farther apart stylistically. The eerie, spare piano melodies of "Confessions..." are miles away from the lush 85 piece orchestral chases of "Hollywood Homicide," however diversity has been one of the hallmarks of what is becoming an exceptional career. If one considers his avant-heartland score to the emmy nominated HBO film "Normal" (Jessica Lange, Tom Wilkinson, coupled with the outrageous comedy "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," (Dreamworks, Will Ferrell) it becomes even more difficult to categorize his work.
BETWEEN REALITY AND FANTASY
The story of the emperor penguin and of its breeding habits is unique. It combines elements of love, drama, courage and adventure - all in the heart of Antarctica, the most isolated and rigorous region on earth.
This script offered to us by nature has been replaying itself for thousands of years, but was only discovered by man at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Story of a Species Ready to Make Every Sacrifice to Give Love
February is the end of summer in Antarctica, the sea ice is melted and the sea has become accessible.
A huge school of penguins is swimming in a deep blue sea towards the radiant light on the surface. Giant icebergs gave off an opalescent light as they sink into the depths of the ocean.
Emperors are at home here, in this smooth, temperate kingdom teaming with calamari and fish. In March, emperors jump out of a grey and vicious water between the ice floes, like torpedoes. They fall back heavily onto the snow-covered ice which covers the sea all the way to a blurry horizon.
Soon, lost in the torment of a white universe, the penguins are gathering in small, scattered and gloomy groups. From the extreme edge of the sea ice, they start marching inland, in file, taking small steps as if in a procession leading them to an imaginary holy place. Thousands of individuals will now have to battle the coldest of temperatures.
The orange spots on their heads appear fluorescent in this slight grim light. The snow flakes land on these colorful spots and do not melt.
Around Antarctica, the ocean is starting to freeze...
An interminable caravan of hundreds of emperor penguins is progressing in step, and in silence. No other living creature can endure the climate of the place towards which they are heading. But the emperors do not have a choice. They need weeks to accomplish their mating rituals, and then months to raise their progeny. And the three short summer months would not suffice. So each year, to breed, this long line of penguins has a date with one of the worst winters on the planet.
In early April, after walking for days on end, trekking over dozens of miles, and overcoming numerous perils, the moving procession finally finds its bearings.
In the Pointe Géologie archipelago, the penguins are gathered on the oamok, and their time has now come to sing, lure and mate.
For Better or for Worse
Seen from the sky, the emperor colony seems huddled up in a small enclave surrounded by an immense white void. The colony is protected to the North by an archipelago of dark islets, to the South by the cliffs of the continent, and to the East by a long glacier tongue spreading out over the Antarctic ice shelf. At the end of this glacier, there are hundreds of almost-calved icebergs forming a long ice jetty. This gigantic barrier, over one hundred feet high, protects the rookery from the dominant Southeasterly winds which constantly sweep the area. Beyond, everything is desperately flat and white as far as the eye can see.
In the morning, the ice is frozen. It will cover the sea for over 100 miles to the North, surrounding the whole Antarctic continent for the duration of the winter.
An individual is walking through the crowd. Once in a while, he stops, folds his neck down and trumpets a loud and violent song. His head comes back up, he growls and is on his way again, until one of his fellow penguins finally answers him.
What ensues then is a succession of dancing duos. The quasi-geometric lines of the penguins' upper bodies fold and unfold, repeatedly. After the singing, they adopt an ecstatic position, oblivious to the crowds surrounding them, and remain immobile for several minutes, as if fascinated by the sight of their new partner.
The saying goes that timeliness is the politeness of kings. In the case of the emperor penguins, it is absolutely vital.
Breeding for them is a race against the clock and each step is timed. If a glitch occurs as the process unfolds, then the year is lost, and mating and breeding will only be able to occur the following winter.
Very soon, there are deafening and formidable duos everywhere in the rookery. The courtship dances enable the formation of extremely strong links formed between the partners.
This is for two reasons: first of all, so they can identify their partners - with such a huge crowd and no territories, it would not be a good idea for the male to lose the female companion he has just chosen to start a family.
Despite the unthinkable brouhaha of the mating songs, each penguin has recorded with great precision the "vocal signature" of his or her partner, and will be able to recognize this signature among thousands. By singing, a penguin gives his or her personal recognition "code," as well as his or her sexual desire to reproduce. Also, a singing bird prevents his immediate neighbors from singing at the same time. This protocol provides that each penguin take turns singing and thus avoid a total cacophony in the immediate vicinity.
After the mating dance, and the actual coupling, several small groups take off marching towards the horizon.
These are made up of females who have not found partners this season and are heading back towards the ocean before the dead of winter.
The Most Extraordinary Combat
April and May will not be a honeymoon.
The nights last close to fourteen hours, and the young couple survives only with love and fresh snow, without any food, slowly eating up the reserves of fat accumulated since December.
At the end of May, the female has lost almost a third of her weight when she lays her only egg. She is standing to lay this egg, and it is a critical time. Under no circumstance can the egg roll onto the ice, because in just a few seconds, it would freeze. So the female immediately slides the egg onto her feet and makes it disappear in her incubating pocket, under her belly.
The male who has lost less weight than his partner, will soon take over the fruit of their union. He will then commit to an extraordinary feat of courage and endurance: to sit on the egg for more than 60 days almost without moving, without eating, and exposed to the worst weather conditions on earth.
His only consolation is that all the males of the colony will be doing the same thing.
But before this can happen, just one day after laying the egg, the couple will face its first challenge, a very delicate and coordinated effort: transferring the egg from the feet of the female to the feet of the male. Neither of them can fail because the egg is fragile, the terrain uneven, and the exercise can be fatal in case of a mistake. After many songs and dances, the female moves back, pushes the egg out onto the ice, while the male takes his beak to push the egg immediately onto his own feet. Again, there is the danger the egg will freeze. There are dozens of lost eggs on the edge of the colony, which are a testament to how difficult this transfer actually is, and to the fact that it requires total harmony between the parents.
With this challenge behind her, the female is now free to set out for the sea. She is considerably weaker than forty days prior when she started this journey, and must now reach the ocean to feed again.
Before leaving, to ensure that she, her partner, and their chick recognize each other's vocal signature when she returns two months hence, they sing one final song before they separate.
Once again, this will be a long, difficult and dangerous walk.
Blizzard? Did You Say Blizzard?
For the males, this is a hellish period. They have not eaten in two months, and they have two more months to wait until their next meal. In the meantime, they'll have to walk on their heels, with their egg on their feet, and will have to huddle up together in order to fight the cold. The demons of winter are upon the rookery. There are no more than two hours of weak sun per day, and the cold is unfathomable -71°F (-57°C), with wild winds, despite the protection of the glacier.
<BR>In Antarctica, there are catabatic winds. These winds are masses of air that literally roll throughout the continent, gathering strength over thousands of miles. When they reach the coast, they are at their most forceful. The winds hit the ice, they soar, and in less then fifteen minutes, they can reach speeds of 100 to 150 miles per hour (161-241 kmph). The snow starts to fly all over, and the result is a "white-out," where you loose all sense of depth, all references. The colony becomes a shapeless mass, invisible from 15 feet away.
In order to resist the blizzard, the emperor penguins regroup in a turtle formation. They bunch up together, head to head. These big penguins are compressed against each other, and the formation undulates slowly: to avoid having the same individuals fighting against the wind all the time, the formation swirls around like a snail. Imperceptibly, the ones at the center find themselves on the edges, and vice versa. All this is done very gently, because in addition to the dealing with the violence of the winds and the uneven ice, they need to keep their balance, holding their egg on their feet, while walking on their heels.
Journey to the End of Hell
In the meantime, the females are walking on the ice in the night, searching for the sea. Their trek is not easy. The sea ice does not have a smooth surface. They have to walk over hummocks, pressure ridges of ice between two frozen floes. They fight their way through the sastrugis, waves formed by the wind, which make their procession look like a boat riding the waves. But the worst are the "leads" or "fractures" that run through the sea ice. These fractures separate two large floes, and are covered with very thin ice called "grease" ice that is very young. Grease ice can sometimes be completely melted in the center where a thin rivulet may run. Before crossing each fracture, the females hesitate and then one finally throws herself on her belly and slides through the danger zone, followed by a second and then a third.
Too exhausted, some of the females will not survive the storms, and the many traps of the ice. Once they have covered this stretch, when they arrive to the edge of the water, they then have to avoid being attacked by leopard seals who are also looking to feed.
Once they reach the polynya - an area of open water in the sea ice, the female emperor penguins will need just a few weeks to gather new strength and stock up on enough food to nourish their chicks. In the polynya, the emperors become once again the extraordinary swimmers that can dive as deep as 1,500 feet.
The female emperors will remain at the edge of the ocean until they have built up enough fat and filled their stomachs with food. Then, they will need to return in haste to the colony to find their chick and feed him.
At the End of their Rope
At the rookery, the males are still fasting, with their egg resting on their feet. Winter is at its coldest. The single males are resisting with great courage to the incredibly tough weather conditions, with blizzards and winds which can bring the temperature down to -150°F (-101°C) with the windchill factor.
By mid-July, the stoic male emperor penguin has been fasting for close to 120 days. He has been holding the constant incubation temperature for the egg entrusted to him by his companion at 95°F (35°C) for 64 days.
Finally, the egg is hatching. In addition to needing protection from the cold and the wind, the small emperor chick is hungry. And the secretions that his father is able to regurgitate will not be enough. He will only survive a handful of days like this, and all this effort may be in vain unless his mother shows up. If she is late, the father will abandon the chick and leave the colony before he reaches a critical stage of starvation beyond which he would not have the strength to get back to the sea in time to feed.
When the female finally arrives and finds her mate among the thousands of others thanks to the vocal signature agreed upon at her departure, the first thing she will do is to regurgitate for her chick some of the precious food she has stocked up during her journey.
After the chick has eaten, he will have to be transferred once again from one parent to the other, with as much care as the egg: just like the egg, if the chick is exposed to the cold for too long, he will freeze and die.
Family Resemblance
Finally free from any obligation, the male emperor penguin can worry about himself and embark on his journey to get back into shape: he has lost between 25 and 35 pounds. But before he leaves, he has one last task: to teach his own song to his child. His chick must memorize this pitch because when the father returns, the chick will be alone, left at the nursery among hundreds of chicks who look just like him. He and his father will have to recognize each other, because chicks can only be fed by their own parents, who take turns one after the other, so this lesson has to be effective.
The male's journey towards the sea will seem endless. The males will encouter the same dangers that the females confronted. If the bad weather persists, the journey will last even longer and many will die. This is a journey that many males do not survive, which explains the discrepancy in numbers between the male and the female population of emperor penguins.
When he returns at the end of August (the male will only be gone for about 20 days), it will be the mother's turn again to leave in order to collect food for her chick, who is now at the nursery - a sort of miniature turtle formation where small penguins keep each other warm.
Until their young ones are autonomous enough to feed themselves, males and females will take turns walking to the sea and back, and feeding their chicks.
By mid-December, it is ablation season, and the sea ice melts back to water.
At the rookery, the chicks are starting to venture farther and farther afield. They only return to their parents to ask for food.
A giant petrel takes up residence near the penguins for a few weeks, to levy his share of isolated chicks every day. To add insult to injury, this bird of prey is only attacking live chicks, because the dozens of small corpses of chicks that are scattered on the ice are too deeply frozen for the predator to be able to eat them.
In less than three weeks, baby emperor penguins will be bigger (20 to 25 pounds) and able to dive and fish on their own. But it will be another four years before they are able to take the road of the rookery to breed.
February. Now it is summer and the start of peaceful days... In March, the whole cycle will begin all over again...
ANTARCTICA
The coldest, windiest, driest and darkest continent on the planet. (Ernest Shackleton, explorer)
The words "Antarctic" and "Arctic" come from Arktos, which means bear in Greek. Arktos is the name of the Big Dipper, the bear or pan shaped constellation which can easily be seen in the skies of the Northern hemisphere. It has given its name to the "Arctic," the North Pole.
Antarctic is made up anti (opposed to) and arktos (The Big Dipper); so in effect, Antarctic is the name of the Southern continent in the South Pole.
Made up of sea ice over the ocean, and of an ice cap covering almost all of the landmass, the Antarctic continent is about 1,250 miles from New Zealand and 600 miles from South America.
With its 5.5 million square miles, including the sea ice, the southern continent is the fifth largest in the world.
Its ice and snow cover can vary from 1.5 miles deep to as much as three miles.
Antarctica is considered one of the most rigorous environments on earth, with temperatures as low as -128.6°F (-89.2°C) (recorded on July 21, 1983), and the strongest winds on the planet. In January (Austral summer), the average temperature is 32°F (0°C) along the coast, and -22°F (-30°C) inside the continent. In July (Austral winter), temperatures reach -4°F (-20°C) near the coast, and -85°F (-65°C) inland.
In Antarctica, the windchill factor can multiply the effects of the temperature many times over.
THE DUMONT D'URVILLE STATION
66°40'S - 140°01' E
Funny Place for a Meeting
The Antarctic continent belongs to no one and in 1959, it was designated a special conservation area devoted exclusively to peaceful purposes and to scientific research. As a result, the continent has only one industry: science.
Larger than Europe, about 25 times the size of France, one and a half time the size of Canada, with an ice cap as deep as the Alps are high, with more than 80% of the fresh water reserves of the planet, Antarctica is both gigantic and inhospitable.
In this climate that is drier than the Sahara desert, where winds can blow at more than 150 miles per hour, storms can last days or even weeks. And there is total night for several months a year. At the Dumont d'Urville station, on June 21, there are only three hours or daylight.
Terre Adélie (167.000 square miles) is an extraordinary territory on an extraordinary continent, with a population that ranges from 30 people in winter to about 100 in the Austral summer.
The Frenchman Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville, gave his wife's first name - Adèle - to this frozen land on January 20th 1840.
To reach this far away part of the globe, more than 30 hours of plane travel are necessary. From Paris to Hong Kong in China, on to Melbourne in Australia, then to Hobart in Tasmania.
From there, there is another week to be spent on a ship. Five times a year, the French Polar Institute's* ship, the Astrolabe, braves the most dangerous seas on earth, with wild storms and giant icebergs, to reach the Base Scientifique Dumont d'Urville. The only permanent French research station on the Antarctic continent is located on the Ile des Pétrels, part of the Pointe Géologie archipelago.
Established since 1956, DDU, as it is called by the locals, welcomes a continuous flow of French scientific research teams.
But the French research is not limited geographically to Dumont d'Urville, and the Polar Institute also works on other scientific programs elsewhere on the continent. These programs are usually international in scope, such as the deep ice coring program taking place in Vostok (the Russian station) and EPICA (a European consortium).
Another permanent station, Concordia, is under construction on Dome C, more than 600 miles from the coast. This Franco-Italian station which was launched in 1996, will open in 2005. In the meantime, a summer field camp is set up on the site.
*The Institut Polaire Français Paul-Emile Victor is an agency which allocates means for polar research. It supports national research laboratories attached to institutions whose mission is scientific research: universities, the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) the CEA (Atomic Energy Agency), the INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research), etc.
HOT/COLD
REMINDER AND WARNING
The global warming that affects our planet, and in particular the polar regions, triggers changes that affect primarily the species inhabiting these regions.
Whether in the North or South polar regions, species suffer from the shrinking of the sea ice and its consequences.
In the more or less short term, polar bears and penguins will have no other choice but to change their way of life if they want to survive these changes.
Penguins: The First Victims of Antarctica
In 2001, in Antarctica's Ross Sea, two giant icebergs calved, blocking colonies of Adélie penguins in their quest for food, forcing them to a detour of more than 30 miles.
The same year, numerous emperor penguin chicks died drowning, because the sea ice melted too early in the season, not giving them enough time to learn to swim.
However natural these phenomena, if the temperature continues to rise, they will become recurrent...
Scientific research being undertaken at the Dumont d'Urville French station (on the Eastern coast of the continent) has shown that the Pointe Géologie emperor penguin colony has lost 3,000 couples in 50 years; the highest mortality rates, in the years 1976 and 1980, correspond to the sea ice's biggest recess.
Similarly, at the Western end of the continent, because of the rise in air temperatures (4.5°F to 5.5°F/-15.3°C to -14.7°C in 50 years), part of the Antarctic Peninsula has started to become green with of the appearance of algae and mosses.
