We are creating ghost stories in real time as climate change poses a danger to the stability of the icy kingdom.

A tempest raged as THE WHALING ship Hope reached Chile's Cape Horn in September 1840. The ship was driven by winds toward a sizable sea ice field. As night fell, a tangled labyrinth of frozen castles rising from the Southern Ocean encircled the Hope. Thick ice islands slammed into the ship's hull, posing a risk of trapping it in a frigid hold and suffocating it like a boa constrictor around a mouse.

A complete description of the night's horrors couldn't be given until daylight the following day, when the harsh winds had subsided. Amazingly, the Hope had made it through. The castles that had once ringed it had vanished, leaving just ice slabs that were crumbling.

A cry from the crow's nest informed the crew that a schooner had been observed anchored up against an iceberg while the ship was navigating through the ice. It appeared as though the ship had been overrun by ice via the spyglass. The Hope made a cautious approach. The crew assumed the abandoned schooner had been left behind. The Hope's captain, a man by the name of Brighton, lowered a boat and sailed with three sailors toward the ship headed for the berg. Jenny was written in fading lettering as they around the aft. Each step they took to board was accompanied by an agonising groan. In search of signs of life, the sailors called down into its interior but got no response. Later, they went down.


They were surprised to see a corpse when they entered the cabin. a frozen, rigid man. He was sitting at a table, still holding a pen in his blackened fingers. A journal detailing the events of the Jenny's final days was in front of him. It was learned that the schooner had been stuck in ice in November 1822, a fate that the Hope had nearly escaped. The Jenny's crew had been struggling valiantly to break free of the ice as they drifted across the ocean. As fruitless as sending a ship to the moon is this quest. The cabin's fire had been maintained for 72 days by the captain of the Jenny.

But the logs revealed that the fire had died out on day 73.

THERE IS A FIRE.

Sydney Harbour Bridge is covered in an ochre muck curtain in December 2019. The city is covered in smoke coming from out-of-control bushfires blazing tens of kilometres away. Although it's a striking sight, the smoke affects each sensation differently. I can now actually taste climate change. It's heat, soot, ash, and disease. As I take a breath, I can feel it settling in my lungs. On the train home, as I cough up the ash into a balled fist, I experience it once more.

Throughout the summer, I had a hard time getting the thought of the "This is fine" dog out of my thoughts. The animated dog, the subject of innumerable online memes, is sitting in a burning room. Smoke starts to fill the space. The world starts to dissolve. It won't take any action against it. The dog simply says, "This is fine," takes a cup of coffee, and vanishes. Its eyeballs start to protrude from its head.

Two years later, a few miles to the east of Australia's Casey Station in Antarctica, I'm lounging on a moss-free rock near the extreme tip of the world. I can hear Adelie penguins squawking in the distance, as well as the occasional splash they create when they porpoise across the water's surface. When the wind changes, a slight guano odour drifts in and out of my nostrils. That is preferable to ash any day.

The Adelies' music finally gives way to a constant, repetitive dripping. I can hear the continent gently vanishing into the ocean from my perch on a rocky outcrop in Newcomb Bay. Drip. I later learn from a station employee that this is a typical sound made throughout the Antarctic summer. If you wait around and listen for a while, you will hear the ice melting and see hills covered in rocks emerging from the snow when the sun shines. You are not hearing or seeing climate change. Drip. Is it not?

With the exception of a few foreign outposts, the East Antarctic ice sheet is largely undisturbed farther inland from Casey. Drip. According to Matt King, an ice sheet expert at the University of Tasmania, the ice sheet is storing "tens of metres" of sea level rise. The consequences of the entire thing melting would be catastrophic. Drip. Some of the most well-known cities on earth would perish. Drip. Although there is no imminent threat of that occurring, the East Antarctic ice sheet has gotten much less attention than the West. How fragile it might be is something we are only now starting to understand. Many "unknown unknowns" still exist, according to King. Drip.

My thoughts return to the "This is fine" dog and the burned air of a burning country as I listen to the steady melt. I zip my jacket up over my chin, pull my hood over my head, and doze asleep.

As far as I can determine, THE DRIFT OF THE JENNY IN THE ANTARCTIC ICE is a ghost story. In the early and middle of the 19th century, unfounded reports received a lot of coverage in the German press. The account could not be confirmed by Lloyd's, a renowned maritime shipping record-keeper, according to an unnamed article that was published for the first time in an 1862 edition of Globus. The Jenny was therefore probably not a real ship. It was a rumour spread by sailors who had successfully navigated the dangerous swells of the Drake Passage.

The ice ship's tale provides a window into the difficulties faced by explorers heading for the planet's core in the early days of Antarctic exploration. Even while the continent was first observed in 1820, just a few years before the Jenny is said to have vanished, men (and it was always males because women were not permitted on excursions) did not really set foot on the continent until decades later. Before they travelled farther interior and before they raised flags at the South Pole, it took them several more decades.

The Heroic Age of exploration in Antarctica began in the latter half of the 19th century. In addition to serving as inspiration for spectacular tales of courageous warriors triumphing against insurmountable obstacles, it was a time that was shrouded in a mythology of suffering and death. The hardships faced by the fictional Jenny were also experienced by the real expeditioners who gained fame at the end of the globe, including Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Robert Falcon Scott.

These were tenacious bands of Davids battling a resolute glacial Goliath. The latter frequently won out. During the Heroic Age, which ran from 1898 to 1922, a total of 22 men perished. On a few rare occasions, expedition members trudged back without a coffin for a fallen friend, skeleton and frostbitten.

The most well-known instance is Shackleton's Endurance mission from 1914. Shackleton's ship was trapped in the ice for months until it was finally demolished, its masts slowly lowering beneath the ice in the Weddell Sea with numerous loud booms. It went undiscovered for more than a century. Another spooky tale


We have entirely turned this relationship around in the last century. We have complete control over the lowest reaches of the globe, like Goliath. Under the guise of science, we've polluted the edges of the continent by constructing bases that guzzle a special diesel blend, our tourist ships and science expeditions darken the continent's snow, causing it to melt more quickly, and barrels of hazardous oil remain buried beneath the snow not far from Casey Station, leaking metals into the soil.

In real time, we are creating ghost stories. Watching. anticipating collapse

A SHELF OF ICE is tumbling.

An ice shelf the size of Rome will vanish in front of our eyes on March 15, 2022. Satellite images are starting to arrive. The ocean is covered in a white sheet one day and then shatters into a million pieces the next. Within a few days, a ghost.

The most intense heat ever recorded in East Antarctica occurred in the weeks before this ice shelf collapsed. Temperatures at Concordia Station were about 40 degrees Celsius higher than the March norm. The temperature was suitable for scientists to put on their togs and beach attire. At the time, Monash University's Andrew Mackintosh, a climate scientist, told me that although it was impossible to know for sure, the timing of the warming event and the collapse of the Conger shelf looked to coincide. He added: "The warming may have been the final nail in the coffin for the ice shelf, which may have been gradually diminishing over time.

Before carbon dioxide concentrations tipped over 420 parts per million, I had never needed to understand the term "atmospheric river," which Antarctic scientists blamed for the extreme heat. However, they were quick to point out that the glaciers and ice sheet in the East would not suffer any significant short-term damage. This was an unusual occurrence.

To fully comprehend the long-term effects in some sectors, however, would require months or years. Glaciologist Felicity McCormack of Monash University researches the Vanderford glacier, which is adjacent to Casey Station in Australia. She acknowledged that it would be difficult to foresee what the long-term effects on that glacier would be, but said that given the region's extensive snowfall, we might anticipate "dynamical implications" in the years to come.

Temperatures are rising on the other side of the continent, across the Antarctic Peninsula, more quickly than anyplace else in the Southern Hemisphere. This area of the Antarctic will begin to experience permanent changes after the world average temperature has increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times, which it will undoubtedly occur in the upcoming decades. Ice sheets will recede. In reality, they have already begun to withdraw. Temperatures will make it possible for non-native species to colonise, upsetting special ecosystems. The sea ice, a crucial source of food for important animals like Antarctic krill, will have drastically decreased. The Antarctic Peninsula might no longer exist by 2100.

We're transforming the earth totally in the course of one human lifetime.

Can ghosts that haven't even materialised yet frighten you?

Drip.

Human bodies instantly freeze up when submerged in ice-cold water. The skin's receptors detect the sudden temperature shift, which causes the lungs to gasp for air and quickly fill with water. Blood pressure and heart rate both rise almost instantaneously. These id reactions might quickly render the body helpless.

Clive Strauss, a doctor from South Africa who wore glasses, gave me a presentation on this phenomena known as the "cold-shock response." I had been chosen to travel to Antarctica in December 2021 on the new $529 million icebreaker RSV Nuyina for the Australian Antarctic Division. I had to endure 15 days of quarantine and gruelling online training to board the ship. Typically, this involved spending over an hour in slowly buffering Microsoft Teams calls as PowerPoint presentations joylessly flipped from one slide to the next outlining the strict rules, regulations, and duties of an Antarctic expeditioner.

The presentation by Strauss was unusual. It scrolled through my monitor in low-resolution Bad Internet mode, presenting a terrifying list of potential ailments that could befall an explorer. He transitioned from frostbite (with pictures of blackened, tangled fingers) to snow blindness and what to do if you have an icepick stuck in your thigh in a matter-of-fact manner. One slide had the caution, "DO NOT pull it out!" Naturally, he also provided a brutally honest explanation for cold shock: If you fell into the Southern Ocean, you would perish in less than 30 minutes.

Every time I look over the side of the Nuyina and look into its wake, I can still hear Strauss' voice. In those instances, I am aware of how unprepared my body is for the icy Southern Ocean. However, the sea is warming. While it will never warm to a point where people may swim in it or enjoy themselves, even a small amount of warmth will permanently change the kingdom below the waves.

The tiny Antarctic krill are in charge, despite the fact that the blue whale, the biggest animal on Earth, calls the Southern Ocean home. Although they are tiny individually, these six-centimeter-long crustaceans that resemble translucent prawns may swarm in the billions. The Southern Ocean is thought to be home to more than 300 trillion krill, and their dominion covers an area five times bigger than the US. As the primary food source for Antarctic megafauna like whales, seals, and penguins, they are a keystone species of the south.


There are two issues with climate change for these animals. They have developed a response to the two seasons of the Antarctic over millennia. They increase their fat reserves during the summer by consuming microscopic algae blooms. By winter, they have used all those resources and are getting smaller. All of this is timed by a metabolic clock inside of us that has evolved over time. Rob King, a krill biologist at the Australian Antarctic Division, claims that they are "ideally adapted to the boom and bust of the Antarctic ecology."

The sea ice is disappearing early as the ocean warms. Algal blooms are thriving earlier. King observes that the krill's metabolism does not appear to be able to respond to these modifications. Additionally, as the ocean absorbs the extra carbon dioxide humans have blasted into the atmosphere, it becomes more acidic. High carbon dioxide concentrations, matching the highest levels predicted by the IPCC, proved lethal for krill larvae in laboratory settings.

The whale also perishes if the krill do. The same goes for seals and penguins. The entire food chain disintegrates. A vast sea of ghosts

HOW DID IT GO?\

Upon your return from Antarctica, this is the inquiry that everyone has. It appears over coffee, over the clanging of forks against plates, in Slack messages, or during Zoom meetings that you've grown accustomed to skipping. Don't get me wrong, it's a valid question, but there is no real way to respond to it.

Do I explain to them that my trip to Antarctica sparked a global existential crisis? Is it accurate to say that I'm concerned about what we'll lose and the ghosts we'll make? Do I confess to them that I frequently ponder what it truly means to sail to Antarctica aboard a diesel-electric icebreaker carrying a million gallons of fuel? Do I describe how the very ship that got me where I needed to go will, in some tiny way, contribute to the destruction of that place?

I think about these questions at night while the Nuyina rocks and I slouch down my bunk. I stay up late on some nights trying to write stories about ghosts that don't even yet exist. My mind's eye immediately sees the Jenny and the Endurance. I witness a billion dying krill swarming through an acidic ocean. I envision unnamed glaciers melting away over the course of months, the ice dissipating — drip Drip. Drip. — and then crumbling

"How did it go?"

Well, that was.

I'm sitting at my laptop that evening, open to the blank page of a Google Doc, as the Nuyina cruises home. taunted by the cursor's sporadic flashing. These ghosts will be on the page in their entirety. I've been standing there since 1:30 a.m. when I hear someone squeaking down the hallway outside my cabin. They must be wearing large, muddy boots. They walk back and forth between the two ends of the ship. I walk groggily over to my cabin door and open it.

The rooms are deserted. Against the waves, the ship trembles. Nobody is present. I put my laptop away and get into my bunk, where I fall asleep to the rocking of the ship.

They inquire, "How was it?"

I want to say that it was haunting. I think I just heard a ghost,