![]() It was mid-January, the peak of the Antarctic summer, and I had joined a broader 10-month, pole-to-pole expedition by scientists and campaigners on two Greenpeace ships, the Arctic Sunrise and the Esperanza. Chapter 2: King George Island Measuring the melt And as the planet heats, the sound is getting louder. Though we humans never hear it above the surface, this is the sound the Antarctic makes every summer. We were so close to the ice that this ancient fizz was surprisingly loud. Rather than water dripping down through air, we were listening to air escaping up through water. “What you can hear are the pops as they are released,” he said. When snow falls, he explained, pockets of air get trapped and then compressed inside glaciers over years, centuries, even millennia. “That’s the sound of the iceberg melting,” Lewis informed us. Photograph: Abbie Trayler-Smith/Greenpeace Not, it seemed, below the ocean, but into a vast cavern, where it sounded as if water was cascading from a high ceiling, each drip echoing through the emptiness. My turn came, and I, too, was transported. “Rainfall on city streets,” said the camera operator. “Drips in a drain,” said one of the activists. Everyone listened with a similar expression of concentration and offered their own interpretation of these strange sounds. The earphones were passed from person to person. “It sounds like dripping, like the inside of a gorge.”. (Is the equipment working properly?) Then a look of bemusement. We watched his face for clues as to what he was hearing. After playing out 20 metres of cable, Lewis took off his woolly hat, put on the headphones, closed his eyes and let his ears take him down to the depths. Mapīut it was the underwater soundscape that we had come to hear. Further off, we could hear the intermittent rumbles of avalanches as mountain snow warmed and collapsed in the pale southern summer sun. Dozens of gentoo penguins swished in and out of the water. We sat quietly as the boat bobbed and drifted to within a few metres of an iceberg the size of a church. The pilot cut the outboard engine to reduce noise while the scientist, Tim Lewis, dropped the hydrophone – essentially a waterproof microphone on a long cable – into the ocean. All around us were jagged, brilliant white peaks, piercing blue glaciers and water flecked with such a constellation of ice fragments that you could imagine a sky-sized mirror had shattered on to the surface of the ocean. Our small motor dinghy was carrying seven passengers – a polar guide, two Greenpeace activists, two journalists, a camera operator and a scientist specialising in marine acoustics. We set out across the ice-filled Antarctic bay to listen for whales, but first we heard something altogether different: an upside-down sound below the Southern Ocean, something like the sound of climate crisis itself. ![]() Chapter 1: Paradise Harbour An ancient fizz
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