Every other January, Deborah Steinberg gears up for freezing temperatures, bids goodbye to her family and embarks on a grueling six-week research cruise at, literally, the end of the Earth.
A marine ecologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, Steinberg and two dozen of her colleagues from ocean institutes around the country have been studying for years how a changing global climate has been changing the West Antarctic Peninsula.
“On the one hand, it’s an incredibly fascinating place to be working, because we have this unprecedented human experiment going on, and we’re looking at the effects of warming on an ecosystem,” Steinberg said. “It’s changing so fast, and we’re able to measure the change.
“But as a citizen of this planet, I’m very concerned.”
Now their research — and what it’s like to live and work with about 45 scientists, students and crew aboard a 230-foot ship in the icy, remote Southern Ocean — is the subject of a new documentary set to be screened for the public at VIMS on Thursday evening.
“Antarctic Edge: 70 Degrees South” was filmed during the 2013 cruise by director Dena Seidel, then director of the Center for Digital Filmmaking at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Seidel partnered on the project with Oscar Schofield, a Rutgers scientist featured in the film.
Both Seidel and Steinberg plan to be at the screening to answer audience questions.
Telling the story
Seidel said she wanted to strike a balance between explaining the science and telling a good, character-driven story.
“It’s just a very, very special group of people,” Seidel said of the researchers she followed. “It takes a certain personality to be able to work that hard. To work that hard together on a small ship in what is clearly an isolated but sometimes perilous environment. And the whole subculture was as fascinating to me as was the science and what they were doing and how they were contributing to this much larger understanding of climate change.”
That change, said Steinberg, is stark.
While she’s only been embarking on research cruises with the Palmer Antarctica Long-Term Ecological Research Project since 2009, others have been collecting satellite data of the peninsula since the 1970s.
And what some 40 years of evidence clearly shows, she said, is that ice covering the ocean has decreased by three months out of the year — meaning it ices over much later than before and melts much earlier. The region is essentially changing from a dry and cold polar environment to a warmer and wetter subpolar one.
Such change has an impact, she said, on native creatures from plankton and penguins to seals and whales that rely on an ice environment to feed, breed and nest.
Race against time
Seidel funded the film with a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. She chose the Antarctic project for its unique subject matter — “nobody had ever gotten on that ship to do a story about what they do” — and to use it as a prototype to rebuild the film program at Rutgers.
She brought back 400 hours of film, and she and her Rutgers students spent the next 2 1/2 years editing it down to 72 minutes. Students even scored it.
Steinberg said VIMS students are a key part of the research, too.
“A big part of what we do is turning on the new generation of scientists to do research down there,” Steinberg said. “Or at least making them more aware citizens for whatever vocation they end up choosing.”
VIMS is associated with the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.
Admirable, dangerous work
According to VIMS, “Antarctic Edge” won in the science and technology category of the Ekotopfilm Festival in the Slovak Republic, was an official selection of the 2015 International Wildlife Film Festival in Montana and a finalist for best documentary feature in the Blue Ocean Film Festival in Monaco.
A New York Post review said “these scientists, and the ship’s crew, are doing admirable and dangerous work.” The Los Angeles Times called the film “stirringly shot, intimately and vividly documented … a moving portrait of individuals who devote their lives to understanding the environmental shifts that all too soon might manifest themselves on our own altered shorelines.”
Seidel said the researchers are in a race against time.
“Because the oceans are really the predictors for climate change,” she said. “Understanding how the oceans are changing helps us understand how our world is going to change. And so they have these very lofty goals and wants that are much bigger than themselves … and that makes them quite heroic.”
Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.
Want to go?
What: Public screening of “Antarctic Edge: 90 degrees South,” a documentary about climate change research.
Where: Watermen’s Hall, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Gloucester Point
When: 7 p.m. Thursday
Cost: Free, but seating is limited so registration is required.
For more information or to register: Call 804-684-7061 or go to www.vims.edu/events
The film is now streaming on Netflix.
