Local community group The Sedona Women wrapped up their spring meeting schedule at the Sedona Public Library on Wednesday, May 9, with a presentation by geologist, author and Colorado River guide Wayne Ranney, who shared photos of his experiences around the globe during his career and his recent tour as a Smithsonian guide, which included captures of Machu Picchu, Peru, Easter Island, the Great Barrier Reef, Ankor Wat, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids at Giza and other sites.
A major focus of the program was Ranney’s time in Antarctica. While his most recent adventure to the remote seventh continent took place earlier this year, his first trip was a four month stay in 1986 when working for the United States Antarctic Research Program.
“A lot of people go to Antarctica to see these cute little penguins,” Ranney said. “Sometimes we go to places where there are literally 40,000 penguins squawking on the beach and there’s something about it that is magical. Although I will tell you there are no restrooms for the penguins nearby. I have seen some people’s love of penguins get put down a notch. And it has an aerosol quality to you, so when you get back to the ship and you take your coat off, you go, ‘Oh, I’m still at the colony.’”
One of the major sights that Ranney said drew him back to the Antarctic was watching icebergs. “The glacier ice breaks off of the continent, flows out into the water … it’s really a stunning thing to see.”
He subsequently noted that the experience was also a sign of a warming planet.
“On this very last trip that I did … it was the first day of March, I saw for the first time a waterfall coming out of the base of an Antarctic glacier,” Ranney said. “And I had never seen the bottom of a glacier be so warm that running water was coming out of the bottom … There are some places where the ice has retreated a mile or more. And bays that used to be covered with glacial ice are now open.”
Ranney noted that rising global temperatures are not as visible in Antarctica as they are in Greenland, but many of the bays have opened up as glaciers retreated.
“For example, I showed some slides of Palmer Station,” Ranney said of the research station, which was built in 1968. “If they were to establish Palmer Station today, they would probably go back another mile from where it is located today.”
“Back in the 1980s, I got to have a chance to go to the South Pole,” Ranney said. “I was working at McMurdo Station, took a year off from graduate school. And I went to the head guy and I said, ‘I’m a geologist, I’d love to go to the South Pole. If there’s any chance, I could just hop on a flight and snap a picture and come back.’ And a week later, somebody came to me, I was having breakfast at McMurdo, and they said, ‘Wayne, your name is on the manifest, you’re leaving in an hour.’ I have no idea. And I packed up and I was going to the South Pole for a month to work on a project.”
One of the major research functions of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is to measure baseline pollution that makes its way to the southern ocean across the polar plateau. Ranney noted that the geologic record preserved in ice cores from Antarctica goes back much farther because the ice also traps much of that same information.
“I’m mostly talking about volcanic ash,” Ranney said. “When they drill down into the ice cores … they’re going through what is essentially tree rings getting older and older … When a volcano erupts, the material that comes out has a chemical signature that can often be referred back to a specific volcano … The ice evidence is so detailed that they can see when lead was first added to gasoline. That happened in [1922], there’s a signature in the ice. When the first atomic bomb went off in New Mexico, in July of 1945, there’s a signature of that made it to the Antarctic ice. Antarctica is a continent of science.”
