Where global warming is claiming its first victims

Climate Change:A rainbow is a thing of delight. Colourful, bright, often accompanied by sunshine, it is a welcome sight in our latitudes. In Antarctica its appearance spells disaster, writes Dick Ahlstrom.

Writer Meredith Hooper was present to witness just such an omen when it appeared over Palmer Station, one of the few dozen research stations clinging to the stony, frozen edges of Antarctica. The warning arrived during what has become known as the southern hemisphere's "ferocious summer" of September 2001 through March 2002.

Hooper had won grants from the US National Science Foundation under its writers and artists programme to live at Palmer and to observe and participate in the scientific research being undertaken there. Principal among the tasks was an intensive study of the birdlife that is abundant along the long hook of the Antarctic peninsula which thrusts northward towards the southern tip of South America.

The peninsula provides feeding and nesting sites for many species including giant petrels and skuas, but also a variety of penguins such as the chinstrap, gentoo and particularly the Adélie, a creature whose struggle to survive becomes the focus of Hooper's book. Like the rainbow, the Adélie also serves as a harbinger, an early victim of global warming as the penguin is ground under by the blind but implacable power of climate change.

Hooper couldn't have arrived on the peninsula at a better - or worse - time. She knew what to expect at Palmer, having spent an Antarctic summer there in 1998-99, but as she tells us in her wonderfully detailed and carefully wrought prose, 2001-2002 was going to be very different.

She details her journey south and her transit across the harsh Drake Passage on board the research vessel Gould from Punta Arenas, Chile, to Palmer. She settles into the claustrophobic research station, built at the foot of a huge ice sheet on the edge of Anvers Island. She moves into her share of the limited space and begins to tell us about the people there, how they live, what they eat and how they entertain themselves in the bleakness of Antarctica.

TWO HEROES EMERGE over time, the chief scientist at Palmer Station, Bill Fraser, and his partner and member of the seabird ecology team, Donna Patterson. Hooper describes the work undertaken by these two dedicated scientists as they struggle to understand how the changing environment on the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula is affecting the species that live on it.

Hooper has a superb eye for detail and she describes the daily comings and goings at Palmer in a highly entertaining style. She points out early on that she is not a scientist, describing herself as an "outsider" to the way scientists think and work. And yet this is one of the most important popular science books to be written in years. It is highly readable and fully accessible. No reader will be left behind as Hooper describes the scientific work underway at Palmer.

She gives us the detail, telling us that Antarctica holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and 70 per cent of its fresh water in ice sheets that range up to four kilometres thick. She also describes the methods used by the scientists to gauge how the gradually changing Antarctic environment is affecting the species living there, with the focus always on the struggling Adélies. In the ferocious summer of 2001-2002, Adélie breeding success was halved. The numbers of adult penguins returning to nesting colonies used year after year were seriously down and the skuas and giant petrels feasted on the abandoned Adélie hatchlings.

"A penguin thrashed out of its skin lies on the snow, red meat on a white tablecloth. The stony plain, currently a snow plain, is littered with the season's reality: broken eggs, carcasses, dead chicks . . . On top of a single high rock I see an unbearably poignant tableau. A medieval dance of death. One fluffy chick is standing, very still, on its pebble nest, with one adult. A skua stands almost next to them. Waiting. Death openly in attendance," Hooper writes movingly of the scenes she observed during those summer months.

She explains in always understandable terms what has changed to damage the Adélie colonies. Weather patterns altered in that year, bringing warm, moisture-laden air up against the peninsula. Rather than the usual bitingly cold dry conditions suited to Adélie breeding, persistent storms dumped metres of snow and buckets of rain, alternately covering up pebbly nesting sites or soaking the downy chicks leaving them depleted and weakened.

Even as death stalked the Adélie nesting sites, another drama was unfolding on the eastern side of the peninsula in that ferocious summer. The massive Larsen B ice shelf projecting from the peninsula out into the ocean broke up, releasing 5,800sq km of the shelf, 500 billion tonnes of ancient ice that detached and floated away because of our warming climate.

Hooper captures the reader with the doomed efforts of the Adélies, but skilfully builds in the reality of climate change. Her book is so important because she makes this complex subject understandable and compelling.

"The Antarctic Penninsula is unstitching," she concludes. "Glaciers shrink and thin, discharge rates accelerating. Ice shelves are at risk, melt water penetrating consistently, deeply, into ancient structures." That is why the appearance of a rainbow over Palmer represented such a "potent symbol" for Hooper and for those who read her wonderful book.

Dick Ahlstrom is Science Editor of The Irish Times. His book, Flashes of Brilliance, is published by the Royal Irish Academy

The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica By Meredith Hooper Profile Books, 299pp. £20