The Antarctic paintings of Edward Seago (1910–1974)

Polar Record ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 33 (186) ◽  
pp. 213-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamunde Codling

AbstractThe professional artist Edward Seago (1910–1974) travelled to the Antarctic Peninsula, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia in the 1956/57 austral summer. Although firmly rooted in the English, and in particular the East Anglian, tradition of landscape painting, Seago was able to portray polar landscapes, which he had not previously experienced, with vigour and delight. He went to Antarctica with a firmly established skill in using oils to capture the essence of a landscape, and, despite being on or near the Antarctic Peninsula for only about three days, he produced about 18 oil paintings, predominantly of landscapes and icescapes. In addition, he painted at least a further 17 works of the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, the whaling industry, and icebergs in the Southern Ocean. Seago had an excellent memory and was able to ‘reproduce’ earlier works, an ability that has caused some confusion. Examples of these counterparts are discussed. A catalogue of his known Antarctic works is given.

Formidable legal and administrative complexities arise from conflicting claims to jurisdiction and the continued absence of generally recognized sovereignty over much of the region. Existing conservation measures fall into three groups: elaborate laws made by governments claiming Antarctic territories, more restricted laws, and simple instructions for particular expeditions. The Antarctic Treaty, 1959, made it possible to begin coordinating all these separate instruments. No claimed jurisdiction has been surrendered or recognized: each government has started to harmonize its own control measures with the ‘Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora’, 1964. This scheme applied only to land areas and has since been evolving in the light of experience. Although not yet formally approved by all the governments concerned, it is working effectively by voluntary agreement. Different approaches are necessary for conservation of Southern Ocean resources, especially krill. A start has been made with the ‘ Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals’, 1972. There are many outstanding problems: all require effective cooperation between scientific and legal advisers, diplomats and politicians. Mention is made of recent British conservation legislation for South Georgia, the Falkland Islands and the Tristan da Cunha group. Some of the next steps are outlined.


1996 ◽  
Vol 74 (8) ◽  
pp. 1485-1496 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. J. McConnell ◽  
M. A. Fedak

Twelve southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) were tracked for an average of 119 days as they left their breeding or moulting beaches on the island of South Georgia between 1990 and 1994. Females travelled either eastward up to 3000 km away to the open Southern Ocean or to the continental shelf on or near the Antarctic Peninsula. Males either stayed close to South Georgia or used South Georgia as a base for shorter trips. The females all left South Georgia in a directed manner at an average rate of 79.4 km/day over at least the first 15 days. Thereafter travel was interrupted by bouts of slower travel or stationary phases. The latter were localized at sites on the continental shelf or along its edge. Three seals that were tracked over more than one season repeated their outward direction of travel and used some of the same sites in subsequent years. The magnitude of the movements makes most of the Southern Ocean potentially available to elephant seals.


2013 ◽  
Vol 109-110 ◽  
pp. 22-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.J. Murphy ◽  
E.E. Hofmann ◽  
J.L. Watkins ◽  
N.M. Johnston ◽  
A. Piñones ◽  
...  

2014 ◽  
Vol 71 (11) ◽  
pp. 4235-4252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingfang Jiang ◽  
Alex Reinecke ◽  
James D. Doyle

Abstract Recent studies suggest that stratospheric wind biases in global and climate models in the Southern Hemisphere may result from insufficient orographic wave drag, particularly over the Southern Ocean in the latitude belt centered near 60°S. In this study, contributions to the stratospheric wave drag along 60°S from three neighboring orographic wave sources are evaluated using a multiple-layer linear wave model with large-scale wind and stratification profiles derived from the Interim ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim) between the years 1991 and 2010. The orographic wave sources include the Patagonian peaks in the southern Andes, the Antarctic Peninsula, and the island of South Georgia. The climatological and dynamical aspects of the wave drag and its dependence on tropospheric winds are investigated. The results suggest that these orographic wave sources may have significant contributions to the stratospheric drag over the Southern Ocean through meridional spreading of the wave momentum flux aloft associated with three-dimensional wave propagation. Among the three locations considered, the wave drag from the Antarctic Peninsula is substantially larger than that from Patagonia and nearly two orders of magnitude larger than that from South Georgia island. The orographic wave drag is in general proportional to the westerly component of the surface winds and becomes virtually zero when the surface winds have an easterly component, associated with critical level absorption between the tropospheric easterlies and prevailing westerlies in the stratosphere. The derived wave drag exhibits substantial temporal variations, including synoptic-scale, month-to-month, and interannual variations.


Atmosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 217
Author(s):  
Jiangping Zhu ◽  
Aihong Xie ◽  
Xiang Qin ◽  
Yetang Wang ◽  
Bing Xu ◽  
...  

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) released its latest reanalysis dataset named ERA5 in 2017. To assess the performance of ERA5 in Antarctica, we compare the near-surface temperature data from ERA5 and ERA-Interim with the measured data from 41 weather stations. ERA5 has a strong linear relationship with monthly observations, and the statistical significant correlation coefficients (p < 0.05) are higher than 0.95 at all stations selected. The performance of ERA5 shows regional differences, and the correlations are high in West Antarctica and low in East Antarctica. Compared with ERA5, ERA-Interim has a slightly higher linear relationship with observations in the Antarctic Peninsula. ERA5 agrees well with the temperature observations in austral spring, with significant correlation coefficients higher than 0.90 and bias lower than 0.70 °C. The temperature trend from ERA5 is consistent with that from observations, in which a cooling trend dominates East Antarctica and West Antarctica, while a warming trend exists in the Antarctic Peninsula except during austral summer. Generally, ERA5 can effectively represent the temperature changes in Antarctica and its three subregions. Although ERA5 has bias, ERA5 can play an important role as a powerful tool to explore the climate change in Antarctica with sparse in situ observations.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Herenz ◽  
Heike Wex ◽  
Alexander Mangold ◽  
Quentin Laffineur ◽  
Irina V. Gorodestkaya ◽  
...  

Abstract. For three austral summer seasons (2013–2016, each from December to February) aerosol particles arriving at the Belgian Antarctic research station Princess Elisabeth (PE), in Dronning Maud Land in East Antarctica were characterized in terms of number concentrations of total aerosol particles (NCN) and cloud condensation nuclei (NCCN), the particle number size distribution (PNSD), the aerosol particle hygroscopicity and the influence of the air mass origin on NCN and NCCN. In general NCN was found to range from 40 to 6700 cm−3 with a median of 333 cm−3, while NCCN was found to cover a range between less than 10 and 1300 cm−3 for supersaturations (SS) between 0.1 and 0.7 %. It is shown that the aerosol is Aitken mode dominated and is characterized by a significant amount of freshly, secondarily formed aerosol particles, with 94 % and 36 % of the aerosol particles are smaller than 90 nm and &amp;approx; 35 nm, respectively. Measurements of the basic meteorological parameters as well as the history of the air masses arriving at the measurement station indicate that the station is influenced by both, continental air masses originating from the Antarctic inland ice sheet (continental events – CE) and marine air masses originating from the Southern Ocean (marine events – ME). CEs came along with rather constant NCN and NCCN values, which we denote to be Antarctic continental background concentrations. MEs however cause large fluctuations in NCN and NCCN caused by scavenging due to precipitation or new particle formation based on marine precursors. The application of Hysplit back trajectories in form of the potential source contribution function (PSCF) analysis indicate, that the region of the Southern Ocean is a potential source of Aitken mode particles. For particles larger than &amp;approx; 110 nm (CCN measured at SS of 0.1 %) the Antarctic ice shelf regions were found to be a potential source region, most likely due to the emission of sea salt aerosol particles, released from snow particles from surface snow layers by sublimation, e.g., during periods of high wind speed, leading to drifting or blowing snow. On the basis of the PNSDs and NCCN, the critical diameter for cloud droplet activation and the aerosol particle hygroscopicity parameter κ were determined to be 110 nm and 1, respectively, for a SS of 0.1 %. The region of the Antarctic inland plateau however was not found to feature a significant source region for CN and CCN measured at the PE station in austral summer.


2020 ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
Judith Allen ◽  
Carole Carlson ◽  
Peter T. Stevick

The Antarctic Humpback Whale Catalogue (AHWC) is an international collaborative project investigating movement patterns of humpback whales in the Southern Ocean and corresponding lower latitude waters. The collection contains records contributed by 261 researchers and opportunistic sources. Photographs come from all of the Antarctic management areas, the feeding grounds in southern Chile and also most of the known or suspected low-latitude breeding areas and span more than two decades. This allows comparisons to be made over all of the major regions used by  Southern Hemisphere humpback whales. The fluke, left dorsal fin/flank and right dorsal fin/flank collections represent 3,655, 413 and 407 individual whales respectively. There were 194 individuals resighted in more than one year, and 82 individuals resighted in more than one region. Resightings document movement along the western coast of South America and movement between the Antarctic Peninsula and western coast of South America and Central America. A single individual from Brazil was resighted off South Georgia, representing the first documented link between the Brazilian breeding ground and any feeding area. A second individual from Brazil was resighted off Madagascar, documenting long distance movement of a female between non-adjacent breeding areas. Resightings also include two matches between American Samoa and the Antarctic Peninsula, documenting the first known feeding site for American Somoa and setting a new long distance seasonal migration record. Three matches between Sector V and eastern Australia support earlier evidence provided by Discovery tags. Multiple resightings of individuals in the Antarctic Peninsula during more than one season indicate that humpback whales in this area show some degree of regional feeding area fidelity. The AHWC provides a powerful non-lethal and non-invasive tool for investigating the movements and population structure of the whales utilising the Southern Ocean Sanctuary. Through this methodical, coordinated comparison and maintenance of collections from across the hemisphere, large-scale movement patterns may be examined, both within the Antarctic, and from the Antarctic to breeding grounds at low latitudes.


Polar Record ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-179
Author(s):  
John Splettstoesser

ABSTRACTA new name for a geographical feature in the Antarctic Peninsula known for many years by its colloquial name of Una's Tits, was formally approved by the Antarctic place names committee of the United Kingdom. It is now known as Una Peaks, named for a former secretary in the governor's office, Stanley, Falkland Islands.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Borrione ◽  
R. Schlitzer

Abstract. South Georgia phytoplankton blooms are amongst the largest of the Southern Ocean and are associated with a rich ecosystem and strong atmospheric carbon drawdown. Both aspects depend on the intensity of blooms, but also on their regularity. Here we use data from 12 yr of SeaWiFS (Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor) ocean colour imagery and calculate the frequency of bloom occurrence (FBO) to re-examine spatial and temporal bloom distributions. We find that upstream of the island and outside the borders of the Georgia Basin, blooms occurred in less than 4 out of the 12 yr (FBO < 4). In contrast, FBO was mostly greater than 8 downstream of the island, i.e., to the north and northwest, and in places equal to 12, indicating that blooms occurred every year. The typical bloom area, defined as the region where blooms occurred in at least 8 out of the 12 yr, covers the entire Georgia Basin and the northern shelf of the island. The time series of surface chlorophyll a (Chl a) concentrations averaged over the typical bloom area shows that phytoplankton blooms occurred in every year between September 1997 and September 2010, and that Chl a values followed a clear seasonal cycle, with concentration peaks around December followed in many years by a second peak during late austral summer or early autumn, suggesting a bi-modal bloom pattern. The bloom regularity we describe here is in contrast with results of Park et al. (2010) who used a significantly different study area including regions that almost never exhibit bloom conditions.


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