If ever anyone was going to reinvent Antarctica, it would be New Zealand scientist Simon Cox. Few New Zealanders will make the trip to the icy continent in their lifetimes. But Cox ticks off on his fingers five visits in person.
As project leader of the mind-boggling new geological database GeoMAP Antarctica, Cox, a GNS Science principal scientist and geologist, says he has been to Antarctica “at least 735 times” for GeoMAP and another 500 times for an earlier mapping project.
“That’s if you count being there as flying through the landscape on my computer. Certainly, if you were to give me a picture of a mountain, I would know it like a child and be able to say, ‘That’s Mt Huggins, and that’s Mt Rucker.’ I can pretty much always tell you which mountain range it is in, if not the actual name of the mountain. The maunga become like friends in the landscape.”
GeoMAP Antarctica is a world-first free and open-access database combining all the existing geological information on the frozen continent. It ranges from the magnificently coloured and hand-drawn maps of rock formations from the early-20th century to up-to-date imagery and data captured several times a day by polar-orbiting satellites.
The project has been described by other scientists as a paradigm shift for studying the biology of Antarctica, and a timely tool for understanding climate change in the region. It is also a catalyst for interdisciplinary sciences, which can provide vital information, based on rock types, about vegetation distribution in Antarctica, climate change and the Antarctic’s contribution to global sea level rise. “In many ways, GeoMAP is like a Wikipedia of Antarctic geology,” Cox says.
GeoMAP co-creator Belinda Smith Lyttle, a cartographer and retired GNS Science analyst, has never made it to the Antarctic. But like her colleague, she has flown virtually across plateau and glacier, mountain and icefield. The number of trips, she says, “would be hard to count”.
“Each trip lasted for months at a time. I have always loved maps and virtual travel, and working on GeoMAP, I had access to imagery, topographic data and geographic data.”
On Hillary’s tail
GNS Science’s leadership of the project through the International Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research is not all that surprising, given Antarctica is so deeply embedded in the New Zealand psyche.
It’s the next stop heading south from our already windswept southern land. It’s been the destination of courageous historical voyages from New Zealand ports, and also of intrepid local explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, whose team reached the South Pole by tractor in January 1958.
New Zealand has been an important presence on the ice since the mid- to late-1950s, with its contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY), the construction of Scott Base, and the start of the United States’ Operation Deep Freeze out of Christchurch Airport.
During the decades since, many hundreds of Kiwi researchers, students, journalists, base staff and dignitaries have taken the 3920km flight from Christchurch to land on ice or snow runways near Scott Base. It’s a 5-7 hour one-way flight, depending on whether you travel on a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III or a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. There’s also a good chance you might not get there on your first attempt and have to turn back to Christchurch, because of adverse weather on the ice.
Cox is one of the lucky ones who has spent valuable time on the ground in Antarctica and says he knows it. Now GeoMAP allows its many secrets to be shared with all those who have an interest in the last great wilderness on Earth.
Turning points
Ahead of the Listener’s visit, Cox has been at work not online but on the whiteboard in his Dunedin office, listing the key moments and turning points in the exploration and science history of Antarctica. “Antarctica – not just ice!” is the headline. Below it is listed:
1700 – Terra Incognita (discovery)
1900 – Scott, Ferrar and fossils (worst journeys)
1950 – Hillary/G&W (Gunn and Warren) (tractors and sleds)
1970 – Plate tectonics (jigsaw puzzle)
1980 – Climate history (sensitivity and change)
1990 – Anthropocene’s future
2000 – Interdisciplinary/systems (GeoMAP)
“That’s the history of the science, about 300 years of it. But that’s looking backwards. And what I haven’t done is look forwards, when we probably need to add on to that.” He picks up a pen and scribbles as he talks. “Google Earth Engine plus AI plus GeoMAP, which takes us out to about 2030.”
Cox’s connection to the Antarctic and the mountains is personal. It reaches back through his parents into his Dunedin childhood, a fascination with an adventure book for boys and a social night with his Scout pack.
“I can remember going to a fancy-dress night dressed up as Edmund Hillary and carrying Dad’s ice-axe with a rope around my shoulders. I remember reading in that big blue book about the ascent of Everest, but also the trip to the South Pole and driving the tractors to the pole. And that was formative as a kid.”
His father, Brian, met his mother, Judith, on an Otago University Tramping Club snowcraft course at Arthur’s Pass. (Years later, Cox met his own wife, Anna, at an Otago tramping club party.) His father was a keen mountaineer and introduced his son to the Southern Alps. “We climbed the Remarkables when I was pretty young, with the same rope that I’d taken to the Scouts’ fancy dress.”
Cox studied geology at the University of Otago and continued his love of climbing. On a climb in the Himalayas in the mid-80s, he learnt he had been accepted into the Antarctic programme. He was approved to conduct his master’s study of gneissic rocks in the Wright Valley as part of a research team led by then-junior University of Otago lecturer Dave Craw.
“Andrew Allibone, Rob Smillie and I became the first of a series of Otago geology postgraduate students who ventured south on expeditions. It was quite controversial to have students in Antarctica at that time. I think they thought it wasn’t a place to train people; that it was a place for experts because of the costs of getting people there.”
The three each had a field assistant and were flown to locations and “just left in a tent with boxes of food for about a month at each site”. The work was in the Dry Valleys, making geological maps.
“My job was to go and look at the formation and development of a strengthening fabric in the rock. But the problem was I’d landed right in the middle of a granite body, and as far as I could walk in a day, it was much the same. And when you walked back there was always a 60-knot headwind. But it was a fantastic experience.”
After his doctorate, Cox was employed as a field assistant on another Antarctic expedition, and on his second trip he experienced climbing on the ice. “This time, we were further south and camped higher. We had a couple of days off and climbed the second ascent of one of the peaks on the Royal Society Range. We climbed up this new route, a big long ridge, to the top of Mt Huggins [3736m].
“When we got to the top, we could see that the Transantarctic Mountains we were standing on act like a huge dam holding back the polar plateau from flowing down to the coast. There’s this huge thickness of ice, 3000m or so.
“As we looked across, that was the first time I really understood what Antarctica was. It is so scary – white and flat and cold. And it goes on and on and on. There are crevasses big enough to fit cities into. That’s where I developed a whole new respect for [British explorer Robert Falcon] Scott and Hillary and others who wanted to walk across there to get to the pole.”
Science and fine art meet
Hand-drawn, hand-coloured geological maps are where science and fine art meet. Cox unfolds GNS Science’s beautiful 1:250,000 geological map of southern Victoria Land. Swatches of bright colour slashed along the left mark the rocks of the Transantarctic Mountains, which split Antarctica into east and west. McMurdo Sound lies dead centre, with the volcanic Ross Island and Mt Erebus centre right and, on a small peninsula, Scott Base and McMurdo Base butted up against the ice shelf. This 2012 map, of which Cox is lead author, replaces the seminal map and survey of that part of Antarctica compiled by geologists Bernie Gunn and Guyon Warren on a 1500km dog-sled journey in the spring and summer of 1957-58. The duo are credited in the new edition for their “remarkable contribution to Antarctic science”.
Their work in this one corner of Antarctica itself built on that of young Irish geologist Hartley Ferrar, a member of Scott’s 1901-04 Discovery expedition. The painstakingly drawn and coloured geological maps of Ferrar – who worked for the New Zealand Geological Survey – are still revered today, as is his characterisation of the important Beacon Sandstone Formation and the role he played in collecting rocks that revealed the fossil leaves of the Gondwanan tree Glossopteris.
Cox emphasises that as definitive as they may seem when spread in front of you, geological maps are not a capturing of absolute certainty. They are instead a mixture of what is known and the best interpretation, based on interpolation and extrapolation, of which rocks lie on the surface.
The GeoMAP collaboration involved more than 14 countries and the help of 11 student volunteers, several of whom spent some time in Dunedin working with Cox and Smith Lyttle. The dataset can be illustrated with high-resolution, three-dimensional fly-through videos and amazing photos of the ice and mountains, or show the evolution from historical mapping science to science using modern-day digital technology.
The cost of creating the GeoMAP is hard to quantify. It has taken a mixture of cash grants and funds – about $1.5 million – from GNS Science and the government’s Strategic Science Investment Fund, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), the New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute, and the Witter Family Fund from Colorado College in the US. Added to that hundreds of volunteer hours and more than just a bit of Kiwi ingenuity.
“It has actually been built on the sniff of an oily rag, in that it has been incredibly efficient and economic with resources,” says Cox. “To me, it exemplifies what a Kiwi can-do attitude can achieve with limited resources when there is scope and the need – an approach utilised by New Zealanders in the past and, in many ways, how we have always operated in Antarctica.
“It is certainly as close as I will ever come to driving a tractor to the South Pole.”
Rock stars
Rocks play an important role in telling us about the complex interactions of land, atmosphere and climate.
“Despite Antarctica’s reputation as an icy expanse,” Cox says, “more than 52,000sq km of exposed rock make up the mountains and surfaces of the continent. Understanding the geosphere is important for Antarctica’s future and our future.
“Gravel left behind from waxing and waning ice sheets helps researchers understand Antarctica’s glaciers. The composition and colour of exposed rock can drastically affect ice-melt patterns and delicate food webs. And volcanoes, fault systems and geological history can illuminate the origins, and future movement, of the Antarctic.”
Old maps were scanned and georeferenced to allow the computer to place them at the correct latitude and longitude. Rocks shown on the old maps were then compared for sense with up-to-date satellite photographs and given a code, along with the names of the map author and lots of other data, and placed as a polygon on the new map.
“Each polygon is like the property boundary of your house on the council website, which has information such as the owners’ name and a valuation. Likewise, the geological polygons are linked to 46 different fields of attached information such as whether they are ‘rock’, ‘ice’ or a ‘sedimentary deposit’ [such as a glacial moraine], who mapped them, what rock type they are, what age they are, and so on.
“In the same way you might run a search of the council maps to show you which properties a particular organisation owns, you can also ask questions of the geological map data. You can ask the computer to show us all the polygon areas of land where, say, granites have been mapped.”
Students working on the project were each given a region of responsibility to check the accuracy of the computer outlines of rock areas against satellite photos, and the rock-ice boundaries. They also had to compare these against geological maps, add bibliographic information and build a separate description of various rock types.
“Most of the students also took on the challenge of creating local geological maps of their regions, writing a summary abstract on the geology and then presenting this as a scientific poster at a local geological or Antarctic conference.
“That left Belinda and me the job of translating the information into a systematic continent-wide classification and data structure, completing a number of areas ourselves, and overlaying an interpretation of the glacial cover sediments, such as tills and moraines that had not always been mapped in previous work.”
A beta version of the map dataset was released in 2019 for international peer review but it took until late last year for the official version to be finalised, due in part to delays caused by Covid-19.
Getting global agreement on such an undertaking wasn’t easy, Cox says. “We have tried to show the best possible geology that people would agree with, but there is always some degree of differing scientific views. I would be disappointed if there wasn’t some controversy at some level.
“The dataset was passed around available peers who are experts in their own area. But very few people are experts over all of Antarctica, so a collective is needed. In many ways, it was relatively easy in the current day and age, as the geological community has got smaller and smaller as geologists have retired or died, and there has been less of a focus on geology as a stand-alone discipline in Antarctica.”
The map allows for crucial cross-disciplinary Antarctic research on climate change and other sciences, such as biology and ecology, which wasn’t possible before. With 99,080 polygons, each with 46 different fields of information, the user can generate hundreds, if not thousands, of maps relating to a question they might have. “So, a biologist overlaying their information on the distribution of various species could ask, ‘Do some species prefer living on granite?’, whereas a policy person may ask, ‘Do we need to protect areas of granite because this is where we expect a certain ecology?’
“People tend to think geology is all old rocks and it doesn’t have any bearing on what else is going on. But rocks produce the heat that melts the base of the ice sheet, and you get mosses that grow only on rocks of a certain chemistry, or lichens that grow only on a certain coarseness of grain size and a certain aspect towards the sun. But they also need water, and because the rock is dark it absorbs more heat and the ice melts and provides enough water for the moss or lichen to colonise.
“These are fundamental links between the biological process and the cryogenic process, which is really important for the whole ecology of life in Antarctica, which is changing rapidly.”
There are also important climate change-related applications for this work, says Neil Gilbert, who serves on the Antarctica New Zealand board and is an Antarctic policy expert. “Understanding and appropriately responding to the implications of changing climate conditions in Antarctica is a key focus of the Committee for Environmental Protection [the primary advisory body to the Antarctic Treaty parties].
“GeoMAP provides us with a comprehensive, continent-wide understanding of the underlying geology of ice-free Antarctica, which has wider scientific and operational applications. Less than 1% of Antarctica is ice-free, but these ice-free areas are where most of Antarctica’s biology lives.
“Ice-free areas are also hot spots for human activity, including for the construction of Antarctic bases and stations, as well as for supporting tourist visits. It is crucially important that we understand these locations and manage our activities there to avoid impacts.”
A “huge paradigm shift” is how microbial ecologist Craig Cary, a professor at Waikato University, describes GeoMAP and what it will do for biological research in the Antarctic. Cary, the convener of the 13th Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research Biology Symposium in Christchurch last month, says the work of Cox, Smith Lyttle and others throws a spotlight on the connectedness of rocks, soils and microbial plant life in Antarctica.
“There’s so much more we can do now. All the data for that is now in one place, and it provides way more questions than it does answers.
“This is the most significant review article ever for the continent. Simon brought it all together.”
As massive a leap forward as GeoMAP is, Smith Lyttle and Cox recognise its limitations and that it is not a comprehensive encyclopaedia of the entire continent. “Somebody will look at this data at some point and say, ‘I think we need to know more about this area,’” Smith Lyttle says. “They can see where the holes in the information are. And that will hopefully provide somebody with a format for work they want to continue with.”
Cox welcomes suggestions from users and thoughts on the next stage of the project. “It requires a champion and some funding to keep it alive.”
Perhaps its biggest contribution is to give a more accurate glimpse of the Earth’s future. “We’ve got a better overview of where all the tills are and what they look like. A better understanding of the flow of ice and the history of the flow of ice, and changes in the ice, will ultimately make much better models of how Antarctica is going to respond to climate change.
“There are massive questions around sea level rise, and just what is the contribution of the ice from the Antarctic continent. Are we looking at a metre of contribution from Antarctica, or are we looking at five?
“That is just so important in terms of how humanity is going to live on the planet.”