Living on the edge of ice: The haunting reality of top scientist Steven Chown's Antarctic odyssey

If Professor Steven Chown is not a household name in South Africa, it is presumably because this conservation biologist has spent the past 40 years investigating the most important place on the planet most of us never give more than a passing thought. 

And yet, whether an Antarctic science paper charts 50 million years of beetle evolution or recreates a 200-year diorama of human activity, it will not be a surprise to see this biologist’s name on it. 

The Pretoria University-educated scientist has an H-Index of 107 — making him one of the most widely cited researchers working on the Antarctic region and its existential threats today. However, Chown, based at Australia’s Monash University since 2012, is more than just some sort of prodigious human data factory, because he specialises in conservation data that dismantles excuses for apathy among policymakers.

Lemaire Channel, Antarctic Peninsula, West Antarctica. (Photo: Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future / SAEF)

Paper upon paper, his may be the highest form of intellectual advocacy — quiet, dogged attrition through nothing but cold, hard evidence.

The $46-million “Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future” (SAEF) Australian initiative, directed and launched by Chown at Monash University in 2021, has produced a string of papers to forecast a future that “needs helping”. 

The initiative gathers data in tough-to-reach places thanks to resource and logistics support from Australia and White Desert, a Cape Town-based operator specialising in deep-field Antarctic tourism.   

In 2024 alone, SAEF’s findings have revealed that “longer-lasting ozone holes over Antarctica expose seal pups and penguin chicks to much more UV”. Octopus DNA is a crystal ball that can predict future West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse. These papers may not convince preoccupied politicians to redraw the geopolitical map and put the warming bottom of the world at the centre of it. They do, however, take away the excuse of saying, “I did not know penguins and seals could get sunburnt in the coldest place on Earth.” 

Serial scipreneur 

Chown set up the University of Stellenbosch-based Centre for Invasion Biology about 20 years ago — this probes how planetary changes are reshaping daily life in the human world and produces policy CPR to help arrest those changes. Visiting South Africa in June for a keynote lecture at Stellenbosch University, and meetings with SAEF partners White Desert, the University of Cape Town and University of Pretoria, he is, in fact, something of a serial scipreneur. 

Prof Steven Chown @saef_arc visit ?? @Antarcticlegacy @MatiesResearch at the Department of Botany and Zoology
“Antarctica’s Future is a choice. We have not yet made that choice, though seem set on a poor one. Choosing a better one will mean choosing a better life for all of… pic.twitter.com/M6VJf1t7pJ

— [email protected] (@Antarcticlegacy) July 8, 2024

Chown also helped establish the Antarctic Legacy of South Africa (ALSA) at Stellenbosch, an archival project of maps, journals, logbooks, newspaper articles, artworks and personal memories spanning the country’s 60-plus years of polar exploration. It is funded by the National Research Foundation as part of the South African National Antarctic Programme, the country’s executive agency for the region. 

ALSA’s 26,000 records mark the only database to curate the history of Africa’s only polar state — also the continent’s sole decision-making representative at Antarctic Treaty annual meetings. ALSA was also launched, Chown told Daily Maverick, to record “a really embarrassing story in places — no women, no people of colour, no indigenous people, no First Nations. 

“In the early 1980s, and before, South African expeditioners were not encouraged to write diaries. It was in your contract that you shouldn’t do this without government permission. There was really this idea you shouldn’t make things available. 

“It’s a crazy story, but that story needs to come out to show what a microcosm of the oppressive system the national Antarctic programme turned out to be — and how extraordinary the ANC was when it came to power in 1994. Instead of saying, ‘This is just a microcosm of racist South Africa, they recognised the significance of Africa’s presence in the Antarctic and South Africa’s role as ambassador for Africa.’”

Against all advice, a young scientist strikes out 

An entomologist by training, Chown cut his field teeth living on Marion Island in the 1980s, the sub-Antarctic territory in the southern Indian Ocean annexed by South Africa 40 years earlier. For him, it proved a barometer of “extraordinary” ecological value that would shape his career for decades to come. 

“I was offered a six-month position, to go to assist a PhD student working on insects on Marion Island,” Chown told us. “Despite all the advice I shouldn’t do it, that I shouldn’t stop my bachelor’s, I stopped it and went south. 

“I was 19, super young and my time there immediately revealed the difference in setting. It’s an unusual place: it has extraordinary weather, unusual animals and the seabirds and seals are very closely connected to the Antarctic marine system,” he noted of an island that is a refuge to about half the world’s breeding wandering albatrosses. Eastern rockhoppers, gentoos, King and macaroni penguins bray on the island’s lonely shores some 2,000km southeast of Cape Town. Orcas are not an uncommon sight through the large windows of the station canteen. 

“You’re living among the animals — it’s actually one of the few opportunities to live in an ecosystem. In cities we live in ecosystems, we have pigeons and starlings, all sorts of things that live around us. But we see too much of ourselves.

Professor Steven Chown at Marion Island, 2011. (Photo: Tiara Walters)

“When you go to live in the animals’ home, then you see them. It opens your eyes for the first time,” said Chown, today a patron of the “Mouse-Free Marion” project, which aims to exterminate invasive mice eating the island’s seabirds. “And you realise what an extraordinary planet we have — and how important it is that this extraordinary situation continues to exist.”

Obsessed with looking after a really weird place

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Chown would continue his odyssey, expanding to other islands like South Georgia, scene of Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s heroic 1916 survival story. During this time, Chown observed the signs of “climate change just absolutely everywhere — so we collected the data to demonstrate it … I’ve always had a really deep passion for looking after things. I mean, you know, sometimes that’s the way you end up.”  

Chown’s paradoxical plea is to think of the Antarctic, sub-Antarctic and their ecosystems as an alien world that is surprisingly near — as though Uranus, the coldest planet in the solar system, had nestled itself in the nether regions of our own planet, and could now be visited by boat or aircraft. 

“People sometimes say that the Arctic and Antarctic are similar.  Well, you know, if you think all whites and blues are the same in terms of colour, then yes, all icy places are the same, but it’s not true at all,” he said. 

A seabird perches on an iceberg. (Photo: Professor Steven Chown)

Penguins are also weird, very weird. Especially emperor penguins, because they typically raise their chicks on stable landfast ice between May and December — thus, sea ice “fastened” to features such as the coastal shelf or grounded icebergs. 

“What kind of a bird raises its chick in the middle of an Antarctic winter?” he said. “It's just nuts. No other bird does this.”

And then there are the microbial systems in dry parts of Antarctica. “They are away from the coast where there’s no bird guano and a bit of water lying around — and they run off this strange hydrogen economy, which is really rare. Just think of a Taylor Swift concert — a stadium filled with 100,000 people, multiplied by 10. Now you must find your best friend in one of those stadiums. That’s how rare hydrogen is,” Chown mused, referring to a new SAEF study which found that single-celled “archaea” have thrived in deadly environments for billions of years by harvesting energy from hydrogen. They are a more efficient, versatile way of extracting hydrogen than industrial platinum catalysts, the research suggests — thus eliminating the need to mine precious metals.

“These microbes make the building blocks for life — energy and water — without any sunshine. It’s totally bizarre that a system is even driven that way. No photosynthesis, there’s none. It’s called ‘aerotrophy’, it means living off air. It’s really common in those terrestrial systems, and in some other extreme systems.”

What happens if we lose this weird place? 

Spurred by his need to look after things, Chown first co-developed the field of macrophysiology in 2004. This is the study of how the functioning of species, like bursts of speed or tolerance of cold, responds to physical changes in large geographic areas over time, and how such evolution shapes the world and its responses to change. In 2022, he also led the international team who delivered the first climate change report to the Antarctic Treaty in 10 years. As any report of this nature should, it captures eight chapters of concise, classy, old-school science. 

In an introduction to that report, Chown translates its findings into stunningly sobering popular science writing that “leaves little room for doubt” about the Antarctic’s close connections to the rest of the planet.

The Antarctic region is “becoming unruly”, he writes. “Just how much this rowdiness will disrupt us isn’t certain, even though we know the show, or showdown, is on its way.” 

What happens if we lose Antarctica’s quiet era? It is physically possible, and over time the consequences are, among others, the 58m of sea level rise the sleeping behemoth has “kept away from us”.

As it is, business as usual commits the planet to between 44cm and 77cm of sea level rise by the end of this century, Chown writes. A full 2m cannot be ruled out. Even best-case greenhouse gas emissions commit us to 40cm — turning a once-per-century coastal flood into an annual thing. 

A wandering albatross darts among the waves of the Southern Ocean. (Photo: Tiara Walters)

“That’s totally crazy,” Chown told us. “And we’re committed to it.”

He added: “Antarctica is giving us clear signals of what might be coming to change our lives. And I mean everyone’s lives. You can drive around and look at all of these buildings on the foreshore in Gordon’s Bay and Strand and all these other places. And I just say to myself, ‘This infrastructure will be gone soon. I mean, come on, 40cm are well over the beach and past the first set of apartment blocks. Where will those people go? What will happen to the investments? When will the insurance decline to zero? What are we going to do about all that? And that speaks nothing of the situation on the Cape Flats.'

“These are things that percolate through the geopolitical system and into our domestic situation,” he remarked.

Accusations of weak science — and how to respond to them

There is no delicate way to describe the undoing of an entire continent whose annual sea ice cycles serve as the heartbeat of our Pale Blue Dot. And with that landmass of ice threatening to upend itself into the Southern Ocean like some sort of slow-motion geological bomb, it may be nothing short of globally reckless to ignore Chown and co’s advice. 

The US-led West initiated negotiations for the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which devotes the region to science and other peaceful activities like tourism. The Soviet Union was a founding signatory, but in recent years Chinese and Russian “multipolar” ambitions have challenged the traditional power balance in the southern frontier. 

Using a consensus decision system, China and Russia have routinely refused to support the other 27 decision-making states’ conservation plans, claiming the scientific basis for action needs to mature. The 1991 Madrid Protocol to the treaty bans mining, but Russia’s ongoing oil and gas seismic surveys in Antarctica via Cape Town and South America continue unabated, causing significant geopolitical friction. 

Holder of the Madrid Protocol medal and a recent past president of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), Chown responded to accusations of immature science in May with a co-authored paper entitled: Science advice for international governance – An evidence-based perspective on the role of SCAR in the Antarctic Treaty System. 

“If you look through the history of science, when has medical science, for instance, ever been advanced enough? If someone makes a discovery tomorrow about a new way to reduce pain during childbirth, do you turn around and say, ‘Actually, we’re not going to do any more childbirth with pain relief because we think there might be another discovery coming. It’s a totally stupid argument,” Chown said. 

SAEF researchers chiselling in Antarctic snow. (Photo: Dr Richard Jones)

As first reported by Daily Maverick, the Chinese delegation at the 2022 Berlin Antarctic Treaty consultative meeting infamously used a polar bear blog to argue that emperor penguins did not warrant protection.

“Even though there is quite a large uncertainty, there’s enough data to show there’s a decline in emperor penguins,” Chown said. “There’s zero risk to protecting them — we would only be looking after the most iconic species in the Antarctic. Conversely, I have not yet seen an argument saying that the science suggests the species is just fine. Nobody is saying that.

“The treaty, the law that we made for ourselves as Antarctic Treaty nations, compels us to take action. And if you’re doing something else, then you’re doing politics. So, don’t call it science. Be honest and call it politics, and then let’s have a discussion about why you elected not to proceed. Is there something else going on that interests you?”

Emotional impact: ‘We have professional counsellors’

Being among the first humans to observe and calculate Antarctica’s profound changes and their global consequences, and having to break this news to the rest of humanity, is not a standard day at the office.

What does it feel like standing on these solitary frontlines? I also ask the professor if he has any free time. 

Can he ever stop thinking about Antarctica? 

“Science tries to set aside the subjectivity, because it’s trying to get to an answer — it’s a bit like standing around a lighthouse and looking in through the windows. Suddenly you understand it’s a lighthouse and it’s furnished in a certain way.  

“The real problem comes when you realise that all the furnishings are crumbling. A beautiful building is actually just falling apart. You can see the curators and the keepers are inside and they’re not doing anything.”

He concedes that philanthropists make donations, some politicians work for the cause, and there are certainly scientists who are working hard.  

“But on average, we’re not doing anything,” he said. “It makes you emotionally distraught to see some of the results that are coming out. You have to look away.”

SAEF researchers walking back to Edgeworth David, a deep-field camp in the Bunger Hills of East Antarctica. (Photo: Dr Richard Jones)

The value of blue horses and Icelandic rock

When Steven Chown looks away from this haunting reality, he turns to human creativity.

“It could be the Icelandic rocker KALEO singing a cowboy song. Or it could be a piece of classical music, or a piece of art like Franz Marc’s Blue Horses, or Mary Oliver’s poetry about those blue horses. And for me that just says, ‘Wow, that’s just a gorgeous piece of music. There’s such goodness in us that we still need to mobilise.’”

Immobilised actors “might not have any options”, so we’ve got to look into those options to try to solve them. That brings you back out of the kind of demoralised despair you could have. 

“If the despair lasts too long, you’ll stop. For me, seeking solutions and solace in extraordinary human endeavour: that works. For some of the people we work with, we have professional counselling.”  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQL9NiSsSvs

WATCH: SAEF director Professor Steven Chown describes the initiative’s roadmap. This drive investigates conservation science and develops early-career scientists. It is funded by the Australian Research Council and university partners.

‘Slowing, stopping, turning it around … We can do this quite successfully’

Chown, fresh off an international flight, coughed politely throughout our Zoom interview. However, the occupational hazards that might deter others on their best days only seem to invigorate him to find new slogans that can depict Antarctica as an unruly neighbour. 

“Antarctica is coming to a postcode near you,” Chown writes in the introduction to the 2022 Antarctic Treaty climate change report. Or: “Let’s stop issuing Antarctica an annual invitation to come into our homes … Something is happening in Antarctica that we had best understand.”

For Chown’s nine-year SAEF initiative, that understanding has included charting climate and biodiversity responses and making tools for governments to understand, monitor and react to those responses. And it is not simply concerned with the icepocalypse — it has also featured science wondrous and hopeful. 

A colony of chinstrap penguins. (Photo: Professor Steven Chown)

For instance, the Southern Ocean’s honeycomb clouds “generate sporadic but intense rain showers, which seem to ‘wash’ the aerosol particles out of the air”. These mechanisms, the SAEF researchers found, create the cleanest air on Earth. 

And for those worrying that all Antarctic Treaty diplomats were not doing enough, Chown offered a counterpoint. 

“If you look at the large majority of the parties at Antarctic Treaty meetings, they’re implementing change in their own countries. They’re not even waiting for general requirements. They’re looking at carbon emissions down south. They’re looking at renewables instead of hydrocarbons, and so on,” he said. “During climate negotiations, people are talking to their colleagues down the hall saying, ‘If you understand the full effect of the Antarctic ice sheet, you will realise this will be problematic for all of society, and it is starting.’ 

“How will we slow this, stop it and turn it around? And then you have to remember, there is some science saying, ‘We can do this quite successfully.’”

Whether these noble efforts can eventually stop an anti-social ice sheet from knocking on the front door is an open question. One thing is certain: Steven Chown is giving it his best shot. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk