Wake up – this is serious

The controverisal Kyoto Protocol becomes law next week, as scientists are all but screaming that the world is on a path to disaster unless we stop global warming. In the first of a three-part series, Melissa Fyfe reports that Australia is especially at risk.
It takes two grinding weeks by ship to reach Heard Island, halfway between Australia and South Africa. It is a wild place where an active volcano smokes, ice cliffs meet the sea and millions of yellow-crested penguins nest. It is incredibly remote, and yet the fingers of progress are here.

Australian scientist Doug Thost spends months at a time on Heard Island, studying a river of ice called Brown Glacier. It once wound down until it met the sea, but it has retreated more than a kilometre since 1947 and, at this rate, will be gone in a few hundred years. Other glaciers are melting all over the island and an area of about 30 square kilometres has been exposed in their wake.

“There was 50 to 60 metres of ice above you only a few decades ago,” says Dr Thost, 42, a glaciologist with the Australian Antarctic Division. “It is humbling, in a way, to think this natural feature has gone, that it has melted. It is even more upsetting to think we had something to do with it.”

The Age, Australia