JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE EARTH

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE EARTH

Human impact........

Human civilizations have been around for a paltry 12,000 years- barely a few seconds on the geological clock. In that short time, we've managed to create quite a ruckus, etching our dominance over Nature with our villages, towns, cities, mega-cities. The rapid increase of human populations has left us battling with other specious for limited resources, and the unmitigated burring of fossil fuels has now created a blanket of carbon dioxide around the world, which is slowly but surely increasing the average global temperature.

Climate change is one of the most hotly contested environment debates of our time. Will the West Antarctic ice sheet melt entirely? Will the Gulf Stream Ocean current be disrupted? Will it be the end of the world as we know it? Maybe.Maybe not. Either way, Antarctica is a crucial element in this debate-not just because it's the only place in the world, which has never sustained a human population and therefore remains relatively 'pristine' in this respect: but more importantly, because it holds in its ice-cores half-million-year-old carbon records trapped in its layers of ice. If we want to study and examine the Earth's past, present and future, Antarctica is the place to go.

Students on Ice, the programmer I was working with on lie Shockley's, aims to do exactly this by taking high school students to the ends of the world and providing them With Umpiring educational opportunities which well help them foster a new understanding and respect for our planet. It's been in operation for six years now, headed by Canadian Goff Green, who got tired of carting celebrities and retired, rich curiosity-seekers who could only 'give' back in a limited way. With Students on Ice, he offers the future generation of policy-makers a life-changing experience at an age when they're ready to absorb, learn and most importantly, act.

The programmer  has been so successful is because it's impossible to go anywhere near the South Pole and not be affected by it. It's easy to be blase about polar ice-caps melting while sitting in the comfort zone of our respective latitude and longitude but whey you can visibly see glaciers retreating and ice shelves collapsing, you begin to realize that the threat of global warming is very real.

Antarctica, because of her simple ecosystem and lack of biodiversity, is the perfect place to study how little changes in the environment can have big repercussions. Take the microscopic phytoplankton-those grasses of the sea that sea that nourish and sustain the

Entire Southern Ocean's food chain. These single-celled plants use the sun's energy to assimilate carbon and synthesize organic compounds in that wondrous and most important of process called photosynthesis. Scientists warm that a further depletion in the zone layer will affect the activities of Phytoplankton, which in turn will affect the lives of all the marine animals and birds of the region, and the global carbon cycle. In the parable of the phytoplankton, there is a great metaphor for existence: take care of the small things and the big things will fall into place.