{"id":1787,"date":"2018-12-05T00:50:01","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T00:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2018\/12\/05\/braving-the-drake-passage-swimming-with-the-lion-seals-and-interviewing-a-non-talker\/"},"modified":"2024-10-23T14:28:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T14:28:50","slug":"braving-the-drake-passage-swimming-with-the-lion-seals-and-interviewing-a-non-talker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2018\/12\/05\/braving-the-drake-passage-swimming-with-the-lion-seals-and-interviewing-a-non-talker\/","title":{"rendered":"Braving the Drake Passage, swimming with leopard seals and interviewing a non-talker"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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EDITOR\u2019S NOTE<\/strong>: The report released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a> does not equivocate: Global warming is real, human-caused, catastrophic \u2014 and leaves a narrowing window to address it. In light of that, Storyboard is republishing select posts about stories that focused on the history or impacts. <\/em>Crossing the Southern Ocean\u2019s infamous Drake Passage on the way back from a reporting trip to Antarctica became four of the most miserable days of Craig Welch\u2019s life. He and a team of National Geographic photographers and videographers \u2013 along with a taciturn captain whom Welch hoped to make his main character \u2013 had finished a month-long cruise around the Antarctic Peninsula to report the dramatic impacts of climate change on Earth\u2019s southernmost continent. It was one of the roughest crossings the 87-foot boat had ever made. But for Welch, a Pulitzer-winner who had traveled widely and reported from every other continent, it was the route to the missing piece he needed to tell the difficult story of climate change.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cThe Big Meltdown\u201d<\/a> was posted online in late October and then published in the November 2018 print issue of National Geographic Magazine. The 3,500-word story, wrapped around spectacular photographs and videos, paints a picture of change and loss \u2013 dwindling penguin colonies, vanishing ice, a dying way of life \u2013 in one of the planet\u2019s fastest-warming regions. But it also shows distant readers the beauty and wonder of the remote reaches once marked on maps as \u201cTerra Australis Incognita.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Welch was the sole writer on a storytelling team that included four still photographers, two videographers and two 360-degree video photographers. In keeping with National Geographic\u2019s emphasis on iconic visuals, the cameras ran the show. The team spent February and March of 2017 sailing around the spiny peninsula that reaches towards South America from the western side of Antarctica, which Welch describes as \u201cthe tail on a horseshoe crab.\u201d They visit penguin colonies, dive with leopard seals, zip around icebergs in Zodiacs. And, in a highlight of his trip, Welch helps a renowned whale researcher attach suction-cup cameras to humpback whales.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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But this is not a travelogue or adventure tale. Welch\u2019s reporting centers on a half-dozen scenes ranging from whales to krill that he identified, in pre-trip research, as indicative of the big changes threatening the Antarctic Peninsula. Along the way, he weaves in judicious threads of science, and the sordid history of humans who exploited the White Continent in the not-so-distant days of unregulated seal hunting and whaling.The narrative nominally hangs on the boat\u2019s captain, Dion Poncet, who grew up in Antarctica, where his untypical boyhood was chronicled in a 1990 National Geographic documentary. This proves to be one of the biggest challenges for Welch: Poncet was great as an illustration of the story\u2019s theme, but he also was a man of extremely few words. Welch also dealt with seasickness. He snorkeled in freezing waters. He spent long hours waiting as photographers did their work.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It was all worth it, Welch says, to experience one of the world\u2019s most exquisite, awe-inspiring and elemental places: \u201cI feel like all the climate reporting I\u2019d done before seeing Antarctica is just a tad off, because I just hadn\u2019t seen the world as it is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Craig Welch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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A senior staff writer at National Geographic, Welch travels the world<\/a> to report on climate change and natural resource issues. He\u2019s written about monkeys in Ethiopia, sea turtles in the Middle East, permafrost thaw in the Russian Far East. For a story on ocean conservation, he went to Midway Island in the Pacific, where he interviewed then-President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Before joining the magazine, he spent 15 years as an environment reporter at The Seattle Times, where he spearheaded a groundbreaking seven-part multimedia series on acidification<\/a>. He and photographer Steve Ringman<\/a> dove with scientists in Papua New Guinea, fished with Indonesia\u2019s reef-dependent villagers and explored seafood operations from Hawaii to the Bering Sea. Welch was part of a team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of the deadliest landslide in U.S. history<\/a>, and has won top journalism honors from the National Academy of Sciences, the Online News Association, and the Sidney Hillman Foundation, as well as international reporting awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Associated Press Media Editors. He is a three-time winner of the national Society of Environmental Journalists top prize for beat-reporting. He spent several years early in his career at newspapers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, writing about wolves and grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park. He lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter. He is a 2007 Nieman Fellow.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cThe natural world interests me, and I want to be out among it with people who are understanding it,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s the only way I know how to tell stories well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I talked to Welch to find out more about the challenges and wonders of reporting in Antarctica, and being the writer on a large multi-media team.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The annotation:<\/strong>\u00a0Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Welch\u2019s responses in blue. <\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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T<\/strong>ell me about the background of the story and where the idea came from.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This is a little different than but also has echoes of, a typical National Geographic story, in that the idea was not mine. It was a photographer\u2019s. Paul Nicklen had been going to Antarctica for a dozen years<\/a>, photographing wildlife there\u2026 He\u2019d been wanting to lead an expedition and spend quality time photograph this place that\u2019s changing. He wanted to do it big, with video and 360-degree video and a team of photographers, and got grant money. At the last minute, I think he realized that he was so visually focused that he didn\u2019t have a writer yet. He and I had worked on another story a year before and hit it off. So I got lucky. He called me and said, \u2018Would you want to go to Antarctica in about six weeks?\u2019 I said, \u201cYeah, sure.\u201d His premise was Antarctica is changing dramatically and we need to tell a story about it. I had free reign to write about anything that showed Antarctica\u2019s transition, but also was limited by what I would see. I spent six weeks on the phone reporting everything I could think of in the ways the peninsula was changing. Then we were there for 30-plus days. Some of what I saw was relevant. Some of it was not.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What are your thoughts on how to communicate climate change, especially when you\u2019re going to faraway places that to most readers have little immediacy? What are some of the ways you tried to bring Antarctica home to readers, and show why they should care?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The two pieces of that story that resonated with me were Dion (Poncet) as a character, but also the leopard seal. The scene with the leopard seal (where Welch sees a group of the usually solitary animals feeding while he is snorkeling) were so bizarre. One of the things I\u2019ve always been attracted to is weirdness \u2013 things that are a little strange. I think that\u2019s a way to pull people through stories: Define the most unusual elements, put people in strange places. The fact that I\u2019m neither brave nor particularly adventuresome helps: I see things not like some mountaineer in the Himalayas but like some suburban kid from Kansas City getting to see Antarctica for the first time. That\u2019s where I\u2019m from and it\u2019s how I view the world. I work hard to keep that \u2013 just be a representative for Everyman, Everywoman.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What were some of the biggest challenges you encountered in reporting this story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In order to show how Antarctica is changing, I needed to show things that are no longer there. Penguin colonies, for example. It is very difficult to talk about penguin colonies declining with a team of photographers who need to show photographs of masses of penguins in order to show people what\u2019s being lost. So where they needed to go and what I would have preferred to see was almost 180 degrees opposite. We went to Paulet Island, which is one of the places that\u2019s closest to the western side of the peninsula that still has massive healthy Ad\u00e9lie penguin colleagues. And there\u2019s a reason that the opening of the story starts talking about penguin declines as seen from a place where there are lots of penguins. We didn\u2019t go to any of the places where there are dramatic penguin declines because there would not have been anything visually to shoot in the style that National Geographic prefers.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The photographers ran the show and you just had to try to do what you could?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I don\u2019t want to make it sound like that was a bad thing. I mean, there\u2019s one of me and a range of them. All of those people had a mission that was somewhat different than mine. And worst case scenario, I could find some way later to report something. But they had one shot. So I totally understood why that was the situation, but it didn\u2019t make it any easier at the time.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How do you see the difference between your storytelling roles?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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They\u2019re trying to show Antarctica as it should be, and the amazing way the world works. And I\u2019m trying to talk about the Antarctica that is no more. They couldn\u2019t be more different.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A damp Ade\u0301lie fledgling struggles to shake the moisture from its muddy down. Warming has increased precipitation so much along the western Antarctic Peninsula that many penguin chicks\u2014 whose moisture-repelling feathers haven\u2019t yet come in\u2014 get soaked and then freeze to death in polar winds. Cristina Mittermeier, National Geographic, with permission<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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THE BIG MELTDOWN<\/a><\/h3>\nBy Craig Welch<\/em>
\nPhotographs by Paul Nicklen, Cristina Mittermeier & Keith Ladzinski<\/em>
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\nNational Geographic, November 2018<\/em>

\n\nDion Poncet came of age<\/strong>\u00a0in a place almost no one calls home.
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\n<\/a>Stunning opening. As spare and elegant as Antarctica itself. You can almost hear the echoes of ice crackling across the vast emptiness.<\/span><\/span>
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\nHe was born on a sailboat in Leith Harbour, an abandoned whaling station on South Georgia island. His father, a French adventurer, had met his mother, an Australian zoologist, on a jetty in Tasmania while sailing his boat around the world. The couple started a family in the South Atlantic. For years they traversed the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, surveying wildlife in uncharted bays\u2014seals, flowering plants, seabirds\u2014with three boys in tow. Dion was the first.
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\nThe Antarctic Peninsula is an 800-mile string of mountains and volcanoes that juts north from the White Continent like the tail on a horseshoe crab. It was Poncet\u2019s playground. Young Dion and his brothers read, drew, and played with Legos\u2014but also chased penguins, lifted chocolate from derelict research stations, and sledded down hills that might never have seen a human footprint. Other kids face schoolyard bullies; Dion was tormented by dive-bombing skuas, which whacked his head hard enough to make him cry. Other kids star in wobbly home movies; the Poncet boys were featured in a 1990 National Geographic film about growing up in the Antarctic. Sometimes, during breaks from homeschooling, Dion\u2019s mom had him count penguins. \u201cIt got pretty boring pretty quickly,\u201d he says.
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\n<\/a>You’re in the past until the fourth paragraph. Why did you choose that approach?<\/span> This is where I have to admit the thing that writers like to admit least. I had written two versions of the story. And in the one I turned in, that was not my lead; what I turned in opened with the leopard seal scene. This is where having an editor as smart as Rob (Kunzig)<\/a> was really helpful. I chose the leopard seal scene for several reasons: One, it’s dramatic; two, I’m in the scene naturally, so it allows me to have a narrative voice without having jump in a weird way, because I’m actually interacting with the animal. It seemed like the perfect scene \u2013 except something about it troubled me when I was writing it and I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was my wife who first said, \u2018What if you don’t care about leopard seals?\u2019\u00a0 And when I turned it in to Rob, that’s exactly what he said: \u2018This is great if you’re an animal lover, but what if you don’t care? How are you going to make people care? \u2026 I want you to go back and start with Poncet.\u2019 So I did, starting with Poncet\u2019s history. Rob and I actually went round and round about it a little bit because I was afraid that too much history too soon was too much, and he thought it was essential. I wanted to have that history later in the same section. Confession over.<\/span><\/span>

\nOn a frigid evening nearly 30 years later, Poncet and I stood in the wheelhouse of his 87-foot boat, the\u00a0Hans Hansson,\u00a0scanning the ice for Ad\u00e9lie penguins. At 39, Poncet is blond, block-jawed, and quiet, with enormous hands. He has spent much of his adult life ferrying scientists and other visitors in charter boats through the waters around South Georgia and Antarctica from his base in the Falklands. Along with a team of photographers led by Paul Nicklen, I had joined him for a voyage along the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. We wanted to see how things were changing in a region he\u2019d known his whole life.
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\n<\/a>How, as a writer, do you decide which scenic details to include? Is it harder when you’re working with photographers and knowing they’re going to capture everything in these astonishing images?<\/span>Honestly, I don’t think so because I think you’re often after something different. I never felt like I had any chance of competing with the visuals. So just dismissing that outright, I put myself under a lot less pressure.<\/span><\/span>


\nHere at the bottom of the world, a place all but free of human settlement, humanity is scrambling one of the ocean\u2019s richest wildernesses. Fossil-fuel burning thousands of miles away is heating up the western peninsula faster than almost anywhere else. (Only the Arctic compares.) The warming is yanking apart the gears of a complex ecological machine, changing what animals eat, where they rest, how they raise their young, even how they interact. At the same time, the shrimplike krill upon which almost all animals here depend for food are being swept up by trawlers from distant nations. They\u2019re being processed into dietary supplements and pharmaceuticals, and fed to salmon in Norwegian fjords and to tropical fish in aquariums.
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\nSo much here is changing so fast that scientists can\u2019t predict where it\u2019s all headed. \u201cSomething dramatic is under way,\u201d says Heather Lynch, a penguin biologist at Stony Brook University. \u201cIt should bother us that we don\u2019t really know what\u2019s going on.\u201d
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\nWhat we can see is troubling enough. On the western peninsula, Ad\u00e9lie penguin populations have collapsed, some by 90 percent or more. Records of great hordes of the birds in one bay date back to 1904; today in that spot \u201cthere are only about six nests left,\u201d Poncet says. That day in the wheelhouse, when Poncet and I spotted our first massive colony, we had left the west for the peninsula\u2019s northeast tip.
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\nOn tiny Paulet Island, thousands of penguins were perched in rows up a rocky slope, evenly spaced, like an audience at an opera house. We could see some wandering the remains of an old stone hut built in 1903 by shipwrecked Swedish explorers, who survived a long Antarctic winter by eating penguins. On an iceberg off our starboard beam, a noisy cluster of penguins slipped and knocked about like wobbly bowling pins. When I saw one glissade down polished ice, its flippers pulled back in a skier\u2019s tuck, then tumble into a trio of fellow birds, I laughed out loud. Poncet just nodded.
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\n<\/a>How did you decide to make Poncet the main character? He seems pretty taciturn.<\/span> He is a terrific guy and I really like him. But he just does not like talking.<\/span><\/span>
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\n<\/a>Was it hard to draw him out? What things did you find that helped open him up?<\/span> It was terribly difficult. He was definitely not hostile. He’s very thoughtful and he’s got very strong opinions. He just likes to melt into the shadows. He’s not comfortable being front-and-center. He’s witnessed more change than almost any human alive, and he had to care. But it was some of the hardest interviewing I’ve ever done. It was common for us to be up in the wheelhouse and I would ask him a question and he would give me a one- or two-word answer. I’m pretty good at waiting people out; this is the first time in a long time I met somebody who’s better at it than me. I have recordings that have just endless, endless, blank spaces with silence. The amount of time I spent with him versus what I actually got was staggering. But when he did offer something, it was poignant. It\u2019s one of those things where I wish I had lessons that I could impart. I tried everything. I tried just joking around with him. I tried being formal. I tried being informal. I tried having other people around throwing out questions. He talked when he was ready to talk.<\/span><\/span>

\nAntarctica is not all death and chaos: Millions of Ad\u00e9lies still thrive around the continent, performing their unintentional comedy. But the western peninsula\u2019s transformation is profound, and few have seen more of it unfold than Poncet. The world he once knew is unraveling. He speaks of the loss like a farm kid who has watched suburbia gobble the family homestead.
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\n\u201cAll the things you used to experience, the places I went when I was a child\u2014I took it for granted then,\u201d Poncet says. \u201cNow you realize it\u2019s not ever going to be possible again.\u201d
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\n<\/a>What overall mood were you going for in this story?<\/span> I was trying to toggle back and forth between wonder\/amazement and sorrow. Perhaps a love and loss thing. Everywhere I looked I was blown away \u2013 the crazy circling and rakish grin of the leopard seal, the icebergs appearing in every shape imaginable, the penguins stacked like theater-goers on the hillside. It was all just amazing. But then when I tried to see it through Dion’s eyes, I could feel his … disappointment. This place still holds reverence for him, which I think is impressive after that much time and for someone who is also trying to make a living off the landscape. I think it can be easy to lose sight of why he fell in love. But he had not.<\/span><\/span>


\nMuch of Antarctica\u00a0is a vast plateau<\/strong>, a high desolate desert of blowing snow where temperatures can plunge to minus 140\u00b0F. Poncet\u2019s Antarctica isn\u2019t like that at all.
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\nThe Antarctic Peninsula is longer than Italy and curls north toward the temperate zone. Its climate\u2014for Antarctica\u2014has always been mild. Summer temperatures often rise above freezing. Isolated patches of vegetation dot exposed granite and basalt. Ad\u00e9lie penguins live all along the coast of Antarctica, but the peninsula also supports species the harsh mainland can\u2019t: fur seals, elephant seals, gentoo and chinstrap penguins. Petrels and sheathbills flit about the skies. All this life relies on the sea.
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\nOn the rugged peninsula, Antarctica\u2019s stillness is punctuated by squawking and chattering and concentrated motion. It\u2019s a place of bizarre angles: Blue-white glaciers flow to the ocean and calve into icebergs that assume every form imaginable. Bergs the size of small towns reach into the clouds. Even dozens of miles away, you hear them crack and explode like cannons.
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\n<\/a>I love this description: \u201cplace of bizarre angles.\u201d To me that really encapsulates Antarctica. Nothing is linear. It’s just all jumbled.<\/span> I wasted many hours coming up with really cool descriptions for all the crazy icebergs I saw. Like alligator jaws and elephants riding motorcycles \u2013 all these amazing things that I would take notes on because everything just looks so weird all the time. Every time I tried to write that it always felt over the top, and nobody could tell what I was talking about. In the end, I just felt it was much more valuable to be simpler.<\/span><\/span>

\nIt looks like wilderness, and it is, but it is not untouched. People began altering life in this region decades before anyone had even seen Antarctica. Not long after Capt. James Cook first cut through Antarctic waters in the 1770s, hunters started slaughtering fur seals by the millions, mostly for hats and coats. They also killed elephant seals for oil, to be used in paint and soap. The first to set foot on the continent were probably Connecticut seal hunters who came ashore briefly on the western peninsula in 1821.
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\nIn time whalers began harpooning sei whales, blues, fins, and humpbacks. They stripped baleen, or whalebone, from their mouths to make whips, umbrella ribs, corsets, and carriage springs and used the whale oil for heat, lamps, and margarine. In the early 20th century South Georgia became a whaling mecca. Leith Harbour was the last of its stations to close, in 1966.
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\n<\/a>You\u2019ve stopped the forward momentum to take us into the past with whaling and the history of human impacts on Antarctica. Why did you think it was important to include this history, and give reminders that this isn’t an untouched place \u2013 it’s not this pristine wilderness? And why here?<\/span> It’s an echo of what we’re doing now. Nobody lives in Antarctica and yet we’re still managing to mess it up. Even before we were there, we were managing to mess it up. I like the parallel. We’d been taking out fur seals before anybody actually set foot on the continent. To have some of that context early on seemed really important.<\/span><\/span>

\nClimate change has since left an unmistakable mark. Winter air on the western peninsula has warmed more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s. Winds drive changes in ocean circulation that bring warmer deep water toward the surface, helping to reduce sea ice\u2014the broken crust that forms when the ocean\u2019s briny surface freezes. Sea ice now appears later and disappears faster: The ice-free season on the western peninsula lasts a full 90 days longer than in 1979. For a Northern Hemisphere equivalent, imagine summer suddenly stretching to Christmas. Nice analogy.
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\nThe winter before Poncet was born, his parents spent weeks camping and exploring frozen Marguerite Bay, hauling gear by sledge across its solid surface. \u201cNowadays,\u201d Poncet says, \u201cthat\u2019s finished. Sea ice barely even forms.\u201d
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\nThe loss of ice exposes warm water to the cold air, increasing evaporation, which returns to the world\u2019s driest continent as snow\u2014even rain. On a 2016 trip to Marguerite Bay, halfway down the west coast, Poncet faced a deluge that lasted almost a week. \u201cThirty years ago I don\u2019t think anyone had ever seen a drop of water fall from the sky down there,\u201d he says.
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\nThe balmier water pulled from the deep even affects ice on land, by attacking glaciers where they meet the sea as floating shelves. At least 596 of the western peninsula\u2019s 674 glaciers are in retreat, according to a British survey. Elsewhere in Antarctica, far larger ice shelves are thawing and crumbling, threatening a rapid rise in global sea levels. On the east coast of the peninsula itself, ice has been failing spectacularly too\u2014a Delaware-size piece broke off the Larsen C Ice Shelf just last year. But the east coast can still be five degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the west. Prevailing winds often push sea ice from the west around the tip of the peninsula to the east, where a gyre traps it against land.
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\n<\/a>I like the way you interweave science and facts with narrative so that you don’t break up the flow.<\/span> I felt so lucky that I got to spend as much time there as I did because it gave me the opportunity to take the data stuff and spool it out compactly. And then air the story out more with the wildlife. The hard part is figuring out how to show the physical science accurately, because it’s so complicated. I can’t tell you how many times I would rewrite those paragraphs, and then I would call a scientist up and bounce things off them, and rewrite it again.<\/span><\/span>

\nThe western peninsula is Antarctica\u2019s hot spot. Often depicted on maps in white, it\u2019s now so warm that tufts of the continent\u2019s only native flowering plants, hair grass and yellow-flowered pearlwort, are spreading. So are invasive grasses and lichens. Green moss is growing three times as fast as it did in the past. Island peaks once cloaked in snow are now wet and melting, exposing mud or yawning crevasses.
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\n\u201cThe landscape is shriveling,\u201d Poncet says.
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\nHiking recently on the south shore of Elephant Island, off the tip of the peninsula, Poncet was flabbergasted by how temperate things seemed. The weather was humid, the landscape ice free, and enough grass had sprouted that it brought to mind a meadow.
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\n\u201cIt didn\u2019t feel like Antarctica at all,\u201d he says.
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\n<\/a>A powerful example of the love\/loss contrast you were talking about.<\/span> I think the paragraph\/quote, paragraph\/quote, paragraph\/quote and building momentum that ends with that \u2013 “It doesn’t feel like Antarctica at all.” \u2013 is the one place where I was consciously trying to hammer the love-and-loss thing home. But looking at it now, most sections do the same thing. I\u2019m not sure that structure was conscious, but it is a sort-of showing off of the beauty and wonder of the place, and then pulling the rug out to show that what you see is actually a sign of decay ….<\/span><\/span>


\nA heavy rain is falling<\/strong> as we depart the\u00a0Hans Hansson<\/em>\u00a0one morning on black rubber rafts, bound for a pebbly shore near the Antarctic Sound, at the northern tip of the peninsula. On a rocky shelf colored like a sunset by streaks of guano, we spy several muddy Ad\u00e9lie penguins. One is a fledgling, whose gray, pillowy down is damp and matted.
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\n<\/a>Nice scene. Are there any special challenges being a writer on a largely visual piece? Did you shape your text around the images?<\/span> No. I mean, yes and no. About halfway through I saw what (the visual journalists) were going to choose. That helped me choose some of the spots that I described. I changed the location of that scene because I’d seen penguins in the rain in three or four places and I didn’t know that they actually had a really terrific photograph of a damp, muddy penguin. But I always knew that story was going to be about five or six different types of change.<\/span><\/span>

\nAd\u00e9lies are the peninsula\u2019s only truly Antarctic penguin species. (Chinstraps also live in South America; red-beaked gentoos range from there to Africa.) They build nests of pebbles and return to the same site each year at the same time, even if it\u2019s raining or snowing or ice is melting. They prefer dry rock or soil but now are often forced to build on light snow\u2014only to have nests collapse when the snow melts or fill like ponds when it rains. Ad\u00e9lie eggs are drowning in flooded nests. Drenched and windblown chicks are freezing to death; they lack the moisture-repelling feathers that protect adults.
\n
\nAdults, meanwhile, struggle with lost sea ice. Ad\u00e9lies molt on floes far at sea and use ice as way stations to avoid predators between hunts. They can swim for days but tend to dive only in the upper few hundred feet of sea. As waters warm, more adaptable penguins are pushing in. Gentoos\u2014fat, tall generalists\u2014are more flexible about when and where they build nests and are more apt to lay new eggs if nesting fails. They hunt closer to land and eat whatever is available. From 1982 to 2017, the number of breeding pairs of Ad\u00e9lies along the western peninsula and South Shetland Islands dropped by more than 70 percent, from 105,000 to 30,000. Gentoo pairs saw a sixfold increase, from 25,000 to 173,000.
\n
\nIce is essential to more than just Ad\u00e9lies. It\u2019s as central to this region as grass is to the savanna. When it disappears, relationships can shift unpredictably. One morning near the Antarctic Sound, Nicklen, photographer Keith Ladzinski, and I zip into dry suits and go snorkeling near shore. We watch a skittish Ad\u00e9lie survey the waves from a crumbling raft of ice. The bird seems hesitant to plunge in\u2014with good reason. A leopard seal is circling and occasionally nosing onto the ice.
\n
\n<\/a>Clever transition from penguins to leopard seals.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nA leopard seal can weigh half as much as a small car. Its toothy jaws open wider than a grizzly bear\u2019s. When closed, its mouth curves in a mischievous smile. That\u2019s how the predator looks as it corkscrews around us\u2014rakish, impatient, the king of its domain.
\n
\nSuddenly, two more leopard seals appear. They turn in lazy laps, spiraling one after the other. Soon there are two more, their eyes locked on other penguins. One by one, the birds slip into the water, and the seals give chase. Some penguins turn and scamper back to ice and safety. Others aren\u2019t so lucky. In an area not much bigger than two suburban backyards, five seals are soon feasting on penguins, shaking and shredding their bloody prey.
\n
\n<\/a>I love the use of mundane images (small car, suburban backyards) to orient readers and make them feel a little comfortable in such alien surroundings. It also sets up the dramatic contrast in the seals\u2019 altered behavior.<\/span> When I was in the water, there was always more than one nearby and sometimes as many as five or six. So I\u00a0 sent emails from the boat to two scientists who are leopard seal experts and said, \u2018Is this is as unusual as I’m hoping it is because it’s fascinating.\u2019 And they said, \u2018Yeah, that’s crazy. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.\u2019 That was a signal that backed up my reporting and the research that these guys had done. That was my happiest moment in the entire trip!<\/span><\/span>

\nThe show is mesmerizing\u2014and \u201chighly unusual,\u201d Tracey Rogers, a leopard seal expert at the University of New South Wales, later tells me. Leopard seals, like grizzlies, are solitary creatures that usually stake out vast territories offshore. They need ice floes to rest on between hunts. Loss of ice from climate change is leading them to congregate near land, shifting how, where, and even what they hunt.
\n
\nLeopard seals used to be rarely seen near fur seal breeding grounds. \u201cSome sealers in the 1800s kept meticulous logs and records,\u201d says Doug Krause, a wildlife biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. \u201cNone of them reported seeing leopard seals hanging around.\u201d Now, 60 to 80 leopard seals wriggle ashore every year at Cape Shirreff, in the South Shetlands. At the region\u2019s largest fur-seal breeding ground, they kill more than half the newborn pups.
\n
\nAfter commercial sealing stopped in Antarctica in the 1950s, fur seals started making a triumphant comeback. Scientists thought they would adapt well to a warming climate. Now their numbers at Cape Shirreff are declining 10 percent each year. \u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing is extraordinary,\u201d Krause says. \u201cNo one saw this coming.\u201d
\n
\n<\/a>\u00a0Here’s a place where you show wonder\/amazement turning to sorrow. How did you think through that?<\/span> You start off with this amazing scene of multiple, enormous predators circling around and doing their thing, then you find out they’re not really supposed to, then you find out they are also killing some of the wrong things, then you have this quote from Doug saying “No one saw this coming.”<\/span> <\/span>


\nNo one foresaw the\u00a0good news either<\/strong>\u2014the boom in humpback whales.
\n
\nStarting in the early 20th century, industrial whalers drove most of Antarctica\u2019s cetaceans nearly to extinction, and many species are still struggling. Blue whales, for example, are thought to have numbered about a quarter of a million around 1900; the population today is 5 percent of that.
\n
\nBut Antarctic humpbacks are roaring back: Their population is rising by 7 to 10 percent a year. \u201cThey\u2019re going bonkers!\u201d Ari Friedlaender shouts as we dart across the water in an open skiff in the Palmer Archipelago, where we rendezvoused with him.
\n
\nFriedlaender, a marine ecologist with the University of California at Santa Cruz and a National Geographic explorer, has been studying humpbacks off Antarctica since 2001, tracking how and where they move and feed. He has recorded them rolling and playing with one another and diving deeper than anyone expected. He\u2019s seen them opening gashes in ice with their blowholes. For animals that can weigh up to 40 tons, all this requires a lot of energy\u2014and for now, he says, climate change is making more fuel available.
\n
\nFriedlaender saw his first sign of that on a cruise in May 2009. It was late fall, so he and his colleagues assumed the humpbacks would have long since left for their wintering grounds near Ecuador and Panama. Then an echo-sounder detected a blob of krill that spread for miles below the ship. \u201cWe woke the next day, and there were more whales than any of us had ever seen at any time, at any place on the planet,\u201d says Friedlaender, who has also studied them off Alaska, California, and New England. They counted 306 humpbacks in a 10-mile stretch. \u201cThey were here because there was no ice.\u201d
\n
\nHumpbacks, he explains, used to leave Antarctica in late March or early April, when sea ice closed in. Now they have many more ice-free weeks with more open water in which to roam widely and feed on krill. Those beady-eyed, translucent creatures are the size of a child\u2019s pinkie, but they travel in thick swarms that can stretch for miles, with 78,000 or more in a single cubic yard. Humpbacks are sticking around and fattening up on krill, and that\u2019s fueling a population boom. Female whales are producing calves every year. Lactating mothers have so much strength they\u2019re feeding newborns while pregnant. \u201cThat\u2019s insane for an animal that big,\u201d Friedlaender says.
\n
\nHe pulls alongside a humpback and her calf, resting in brash ice. The skiff bobs as Friedlaender, like some ponytailed modern harpooner, raises a long shaft above his head. The business end holds a waterproof camera fitted with suction cups. Friedlaender steadies his quivering weapon, takes aim, then slaps the camera on the leviathan\u2019s back. The surprised whale makes a sound like a wet snore. Both mother and calf dive.
\n
\n\u201cFelt like a great stick!\u201d Friedlaender yells. For a day or two, until it falls off and floats to the surface to be retrieved, the camera will record a whale\u2019s-eye view of the sea. Humpbacks fare far and deep with few natural competitors. How well they fare now depends on us.
\n
\n<\/a>As someone who is trying to communicate climate change, I find that one of the most challenging things is dealing with the uncertainties and the unknowns \u2013 the ambiguities and seeming contradictions of an evolving science. Something I really admire in your writing is how you handle this. Like you do here, where you talk about humpbacks roaring back while so many other aspects of Antarctica are in decline. But you end with uncertainty about their future.<\/span> That’s one of the luckiest parts of working for a publication like National Geographic. I have to write things in ways that people can understand it, but there is no pressure to simplify or make things more clear than they are. They’re not afraid of \u2018I don’t know.\u2019 You still have to make \u2018I don’t know\u2019 relevant and interesting. There are a lot of complexities and there are a lot of things that seem to be counter to one another.<\/span><\/span>


\nA few years ago, an icebreaker dragged <\/strong>research nets around the Palmer Archipelago, looking for Antarctic silverfish\u2014oily, sardinelike creatures that spawn beneath sea ice. They used to be the dominant fish off the western peninsula, composing half of what some Ad\u00e9lie penguins ate. But the team, led by Joseph Torres of the University of South Florida, towed day and night around Anvers and Renaud Islands and never caught a single silverfish. In waters that have experienced some of the greatest sea-ice declines, the fish had all but disappeared. Meanwhile scientists noticed penguins gulping more krill\u2014even though it can take 20 krill to match the caloric value of one silverfish.
\n
\nWill there be enough krill to go around? It\u2019s not an easy question. Penguins and humpbacks eat krill, but so do skuas, squid, fur seals, and crabeater seals. Leopard seals sometimes eat krill. A blue whale eats millions a day. Animals that don\u2019t eat krill often feed on prey that does. Antarctica loves fatty krill. So do we.
\n
\nIn the 1960s, seeing a potential new seafood source, Soviet fleets began circling the continent. Today about 10 ships a year catch krill, led by Norway, South Korea, China, Chile, and Ukraine. The catch turns up in omega-3 pills and chewable krill-oil gummies and farmed salmon. In Ukraine peeled krill is sold in tins, like sardines. Sometimes krill gets processed at sea, boiled and dried into powder on huge trawlers.
\n
\nAfter almost a month at sea we finally see one, in the Bransfield Strait, off the South Shetlands. A storm rocks the 333-foot\u00a0Long Da,<\/em>\u00a0a Chinese mid-water factory trawler, as we pull along her stern. The boat\u2019s net courses through the water like a gape-mouthed whale shark. As the crew haul it in, the net\u2019s green mesh curls over itself, cocooning millions of krill.
\n
\nFor now, krill around Antarctica remain abundant. Trawlers net only a tiny fraction of the continent\u2019s krill. Fishing is tightly managed by 24 countries and the European Union, organized as the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). But krill populations are cyclical, and researchers can\u2019t say how quickly or severely warming and loss of ice may affect them. \u201cWe measure krill and may think we understand it, but we don\u2019t, really,\u201d says Christian Reiss of NOAA Fisheries.
\n
\nMany experts worry that krill boats could target and deplete krill on feeding grounds important for other wildlife. A team of U.S. government scientists in 2017 put it bluntly: \u201cIf predators and the fishery use the same population of krill, it follows that removal of krill by one group may limit the availability to the other.\u201d Most fishing takes place where climate change has stressed animals the most\u2014near the western peninsula. \u201cWhere is there also one of the greatest densities of predators?\u201d Friedlaender asks. \u201cSame place.\u201d
\n
\nIn 2017 Chile and Argentina proposed that CCAMLR place thousands of square miles west and north of the peninsula off-limits to krill fishing. Just this summer, environmental groups and Norway\u2019s AkerBioMarine, the largest krill-fishing company in the world, helped persuade most others in the krill industry to avoid fishing near penguin colonies during breeding periods next year. Starting in 2020, the companies say, they will stay at least 30 kilometers, or 19 miles, from penguin colonies year-round.
\n
\n\nMany scientists and wildlife advocates maintain that permanent no-fishing zones regulated by CCAMLR are the safest solution. Otherwise, says Kim Bernard, an Oregon State University oceanographer who studies krill, \u201cthings could go very badly here. That really scares me.\u201d
\n
\n<\/a>With so many changes going on around Antarctica, how did you pick the ones you decided to focus on?<\/span> There are a few things I do the same every time I have a big story. I don’t feel good unless I feel like I know everything there is to know. I will spend days collecting and reading and pulling out little tidbits. In a story like this that’s going to cover a lot of ground. I think it gives it more weight to have just a little bit of a lot of things, in addition to a few that you go into deeply, because it just shows how universal those changes are.<\/span><\/span>


\nOne evening on the\u00a0Hans Hansson,<\/em>\u00a0after<\/strong> a dinner of lamb and potatoes, Poncet traces a map in the galley, pointing out places he once chased krill with a butterfly net. It was common when he was a child to see massive swarms at the surface, he says. \u201cSometimes the engine would overheat because the water intakes were blocked with krill,\u201d Poncet recalls. Today \u201cyou almost never see them\u201d in those places.
\n
\nScientists take Poncet\u2019s long experience seriously. \u201cIn a way, it\u2019s traditional knowledge,\u201d Bernard says. As Antarctica hurtles toward the unknown, scientific knowledge is still sparse.
\n
\nThis year Poncet abruptly sold the\u00a0Hans Hansson.<\/em>\u00a0He says he and his companion, Juliet Hennequin\u2014also an accomplished boat captain\u2014were exhausted. But he also felt that too many visitors took the region\u2019s bounty for granted, just as it was changing into a place he barely recognized. \u201cWhen I take stock of the current situation, the Antarctic Peninsula I knew as a child has already largely gone,\u201d he says. \u201cI do wonder a lot what it will become.”
\n
\n<\/a>The ending is kind of abrupt. Why did you choose to end it that way?<\/span> I struggled with the best way to do it. I always knew that I was going to end with Poncet, and he said something to that effect a couple of different ways. There’s something I just liked about the lamb and the potatoes and the map and him talking about the past. It seemed like the only way I could end it. I agree that it kind of wraps up quickly. But anytime I tried to spool it out a little longer it felt flabby. And in some ways, it felt a little bit like Dion. I mean the abruptness is certainly reflective of his character.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n<\/a>I guess the abruptness of coming back to Poncet \u2013 suddenly he’s had enough, he’s leaving \u2013 reminds me of the \u2018tipping point\u2019 that we hear a lot about in talking about climate change. Was that on your mind when you wrote this?<\/span> No, but that’s beautiful. We’re going to go through these changes and then things can literally drop off a cliff. Everything with climate change is like that. We get gradual change, then suddenly speedy change and then potentially a flip. And that is exactly what is happening in Dion’s life.<\/span><\/span>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the archives: National Geographic writer Craig Welch turns silent subjects into the compelling voices of climate change<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7518,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[288],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-cheryl-katz"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBraving the Drake Passage, swimming with leopard seals and interviewing a non-talker - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2018\/12\/05\/braving-the-drake-passage-swimming-with-the-lion-seals-and-interviewing-a-non-talker\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Braving the Drake Passage, swimming with leopard seals and interviewing a non-talker - 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